The problem with loyalty is that it’s only as good as the decision process by which loyalty is assigned and revoked. The in-story context in which Eddie Willers stands by the railroad is one in which the remaining technological and industrial base is being cannibalized for extractive purposes at an accelerating rate. If you can’t, under some circumstances, revoke loyalty, then you’re cooperatebot. If I’m in a zero-sum conflict with another agent, and I have the chance to cheaply destroy a cooperatebot that’s robustly under its control, it’s often decision-theoretically correct for me to do so. Scorched-earth tactics work on similar principles.
A heuristic of serving the best thing available doesn’t fully solve this problem—sometimes there’s nothing you can practically offer loyalty to that’s not actively destructive. If you’re not able to withdraw your labor in such circumstances, then you’re stuck causing harm.
During WWII, someone like this living in Germany ends up helping the Axis war effort, unless they’re ready to actually rebel against their government (which they usually won’t be, it’s dangerous and not for most people). It’s much better if such a person is willing to slack off, when the alternative is to cause harm. Certainly keeping the trains running on time under such circumstances would not generically be a friendly move towards people like me.
On the other hand, someone like this living in an Allied country during WWII would have been helping the Allies win, and someone like this living in a truly robustly good society is of tremendous value to everyone around them.
I seriously do think that a large portion of what our society is doing constitutes a pointless war against nothing in particular, and some of it is specifically a war against minds, so this isn’t just a nitpick, it’s a core objection to keeping loyalty in your core identity.
No objection to identifying with being the sort of person who is loyal and dutiful when it’s the right thing to do, if you make sure to cultivate the moral courage to do otherwise when that’s better.
I’m glad you made this comment (even though I confess it’s a bit triggering, but I’m going to try my best to respond calmly). I think it’s useful for clarifying what I mean, which I hadn’t disclaimered very much because this post was pretty low-effort.
I agree that Eddie-as-written is very unstrategic, and also unreflective, in that he doesn’t show the capacity to question his own drives. He doesn’t attempt to model the world around him and the actual impacts of his actions at all (e.g. I don’t think we ever see him thinking in a consequentialist way.) Loyalty as a trait + not trying to question your decision process does seem very dangerous, but I’m not convinced it’s dangerous in a fundamentally different way from, say, intelligence or strength or social savvy combined with not questioning one’s decision process. Any capacity-to-do-stuff applied in a random or not-well-thought-out direction, or especially in a direction manipulated by an adversarial agent, is likely to be harmful.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by keeping loyalty “in your core identity”. The thing Imean to convey is that a) I want to recognize that I have a significant drive towards loyalty, and b) I don’t have a moral obligation to rip that part out of my soul and rebuild my motivation system from scratch. Which is different from saying I don’t have a moral duty to check whether I’m actually doing the right things. My higher-level ethical framework isn’t one where loyalty is fundamental, I do try to check, and I’ve in fact broken loyalty bonds multiple times after reassessing.
I think I’m not an “obligate-loyal” person, I in fact have other drives and can function to a reasonable capacity through other sources of motivation; this is arguably what I’m doing right now, and I can’t claim that it was always deliberate but I think I’ve ended up “slacking” when my S1 wasn’t sure if a leader or institution was worth being loyal to. (I’m leaning towards thinking that loyalty-to-modern-institutions is almost always a misfiring of the drive, and have the start of a post on that.) Embracing my desire-to-be-loyal as part of me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be an important driver in the near term; it may be that the current world doesn’t offer actually-good avenues for this, for the reasons you pointed out, and I’m better off being slightly-less-fully-alive in exchange for not being loyalty-bound to an institution that might be harmful. But, just...yeah, I guess I like the framing in your subsequent comment. Maybe there’s a thing wrong with the world, but I’m no longer willing to let people tell me that this is something fundamentally wrong with me.
Thanks for engaging with this difficult subject seriously and carefully. When I talk about keeping loyalty in your core identity, part of what I’m trying to point to is a tendency to interpret criticism of particular loyalty behaviors (e.g. the depiction of Eddie Willers) as an attack on your essence as a person. Sometimes that kind of criticism really is just an attempt to lower the prestige of the loyalty drive, other times the content of the critique is just a claim that some loyalties are misplaced, and very often things are going to contain some mixture of the two, and you have some choice about what part to focus on.
It’s possible that unconditionally accepting your preference for justified-loyalty as a part of you might make it easier to accept such critiques. I expect that to work best if you’re also willing to believe in an integrated way that they also serve who only stand and wait, i.e. able to go a while without external validation of the loyalty trait.
Another way to say this is that sometimes the world doesn’t deserve Eddie Willers because it can’t make the proper use of him. This is very unfair—it is literally abuse, in the original meaning of the term—I’m very sad about it, and consider it a morally urgent problem.
More on the pressure to be loyal to something. The things that seem actively helpful now are either actively leading the effort to refactor our civilization into something more value-aligned or claiming territory for a local value-aligned agent, or participating in efforts to do one or the other. But a lot of people might not be in a position to do either, and I wish I knew how to make them feel OK just holding off on all action except what they need to do to get by. I think the best case for cults like Hari Krishna is that they help obligate-loyal people do exactly that—just hang out, for the duration. Unfortunately, it seems like the conversion is permanent, not temporary, and I’d like to have the obligate-loyal people online again once it’s safe for them.
The problem with loyalty is that it’s only as good as the decision process by which loyalty is assigned and revoked. The in-story context in which Eddie Willers stands by the railroad is one in which the remaining technological and industrial base is being cannibalized for extractive purposes at an accelerating rate. If you can’t, under some circumstances, revoke loyalty, then you’re cooperatebot. If I’m in a zero-sum conflict with another agent, and I have the chance to cheaply destroy a cooperatebot that’s robustly under its control, it’s often decision-theoretically correct for me to do so. Scorched-earth tactics work on similar principles.
A heuristic of serving the best thing available doesn’t fully solve this problem—sometimes there’s nothing you can practically offer loyalty to that’s not actively destructive. If you’re not able to withdraw your labor in such circumstances, then you’re stuck causing harm.
During WWII, someone like this living in Germany ends up helping the Axis war effort, unless they’re ready to actually rebel against their government (which they usually won’t be, it’s dangerous and not for most people). It’s much better if such a person is willing to slack off, when the alternative is to cause harm. Certainly keeping the trains running on time under such circumstances would not generically be a friendly move towards people like me.
On the other hand, someone like this living in an Allied country during WWII would have been helping the Allies win, and someone like this living in a truly robustly good society is of tremendous value to everyone around them.
I seriously do think that a large portion of what our society is doing constitutes a pointless war against nothing in particular, and some of it is specifically a war against minds, so this isn’t just a nitpick, it’s a core objection to keeping loyalty in your core identity.
No objection to identifying with being the sort of person who is loyal and dutiful when it’s the right thing to do, if you make sure to cultivate the moral courage to do otherwise when that’s better.
I’m glad you made this comment (even though I confess it’s a bit triggering, but I’m going to try my best to respond calmly). I think it’s useful for clarifying what I mean, which I hadn’t disclaimered very much because this post was pretty low-effort.
I agree that Eddie-as-written is very unstrategic, and also unreflective, in that he doesn’t show the capacity to question his own drives. He doesn’t attempt to model the world around him and the actual impacts of his actions at all (e.g. I don’t think we ever see him thinking in a consequentialist way.) Loyalty as a trait + not trying to question your decision process does seem very dangerous, but I’m not convinced it’s dangerous in a fundamentally different way from, say, intelligence or strength or social savvy combined with not questioning one’s decision process. Any capacity-to-do-stuff applied in a random or not-well-thought-out direction, or especially in a direction manipulated by an adversarial agent, is likely to be harmful.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by keeping loyalty “in your core identity”. The thing I mean to convey is that a) I want to recognize that I have a significant drive towards loyalty, and b) I don’t have a moral obligation to rip that part out of my soul and rebuild my motivation system from scratch. Which is different from saying I don’t have a moral duty to check whether I’m actually doing the right things. My higher-level ethical framework isn’t one where loyalty is fundamental, I do try to check, and I’ve in fact broken loyalty bonds multiple times after reassessing.
I think I’m not an “obligate-loyal” person, I in fact have other drives and can function to a reasonable capacity through other sources of motivation; this is arguably what I’m doing right now, and I can’t claim that it was always deliberate but I think I’ve ended up “slacking” when my S1 wasn’t sure if a leader or institution was worth being loyal to. (I’m leaning towards thinking that loyalty-to-modern-institutions is almost always a misfiring of the drive, and have the start of a post on that.) Embracing my desire-to-be-loyal as part of me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be an important driver in the near term; it may be that the current world doesn’t offer actually-good avenues for this, for the reasons you pointed out, and I’m better off being slightly-less-fully-alive in exchange for not being loyalty-bound to an institution that might be harmful. But, just...yeah, I guess I like the framing in your subsequent comment. Maybe there’s a thing wrong with the world, but I’m no longer willing to let people tell me that this is something fundamentally wrong with me.
Thanks for engaging with this difficult subject seriously and carefully. When I talk about keeping loyalty in your core identity, part of what I’m trying to point to is a tendency to interpret criticism of particular loyalty behaviors (e.g. the depiction of Eddie Willers) as an attack on your essence as a person. Sometimes that kind of criticism really is just an attempt to lower the prestige of the loyalty drive, other times the content of the critique is just a claim that some loyalties are misplaced, and very often things are going to contain some mixture of the two, and you have some choice about what part to focus on.
It’s possible that unconditionally accepting your preference for justified-loyalty as a part of you might make it easier to accept such critiques. I expect that to work best if you’re also willing to believe in an integrated way that they also serve who only stand and wait, i.e. able to go a while without external validation of the loyalty trait.
Another way to say this is that sometimes the world doesn’t deserve Eddie Willers because it can’t make the proper use of him. This is very unfair—it is literally abuse, in the original meaning of the term—I’m very sad about it, and consider it a morally urgent problem.
More on the pressure to be loyal to something. The things that seem actively helpful now are either actively leading the effort to refactor our civilization into something more value-aligned or claiming territory for a local value-aligned agent, or participating in efforts to do one or the other. But a lot of people might not be in a position to do either, and I wish I knew how to make them feel OK just holding off on all action except what they need to do to get by. I think the best case for cults like Hari Krishna is that they help obligate-loyal people do exactly that—just hang out, for the duration. Unfortunately, it seems like the conversion is permanent, not temporary, and I’d like to have the obligate-loyal people online again once it’s safe for them.