Okay, I may turn this into a top-level post, but more thoughts here for now?
I feel a lot of latent grief and frustration and also resignation about a lot of tradeoffs presented in the story. I have some sense of where I’ll end up when I’m done processing all of it, but alas, I can’t just skip to the “done” part.
...
I’ve hardened myself into the sort of person who is willing to turn away people who need help. In the past, I’ve helped people and been burned by it badly enough that it’s clear I need to defend my own personal boundaries and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I also help manage many resources now that need to be triaged, and I’ve had to turn away people who are perfectly good people, who wouldn’t take advantage of me, because I think the world needs those resources for something else. Many times, the resources I’m managing (such as, say, newcomer access to LW, or to some meetups I’ve run), are something that feels like it should be something community-like that doesn’t turn people away.
Often, the people I’m turning away really won’t find another place that’ll be as good a home for them as LW. But, the reason LW is a good place is specifically because of gatekeeping. I’ve felt many similar things about the Berkeley community, which is extra complicated because it’s actually multiple overlapping communities with different needs/goals and porous boundaries.
I’m bitter and sad about it. But, also, have grieved it enough to make do.
When I see new young naive ants freely giving, because they’ve never been burned and haven’t yet come to terms with their beckoning responsibilities, I feel a whiff of jealously, but, at this point, mostly a cynical “oh you sweet summer child” feeling.
...
A second tier of confusion/frustration is about “when do we actually get to cash in our victory points and do nice things?”
A significant update for me, when chatting with @Zvi awhile ago, was the note that a nation like the US might have the choice between distributing money more equitably, or having a slightly higher percent GDP growth per year. And it may look like we have so much money, and so many people who could use help. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
But, Zvi pointed out (I think, this was awhile ago), if the US had done that 100 years ago, their growth would have been more similar to Mexico, and then today the US would be significantly less wealthy. Would I trade that way for somewhat-more-equitably-distributed money in the past? Would I make the equivalent trade for the future?
And that kicked me pretty hard in the moral-theory. Compound interest is really good.
It left me with a nagging sense that… surely at some point we’d just have so much stuff that we’d get to just spend it on nice things instead of investing it in the future?
It seems like the answer is a weird mix of “Well, in the near future… generating more wealth comes alongside providing lots of object-level-good-stuff. Billions are being lifted out of poverty, and along the way lots of people are making cool art, having fun, loving each other. The mechanism of the compound interest yields utility. That utility could be locally be distributed more fairly or evenly, maybe, but it’s not like the process of generating Even More Utility Tomorrow isn’t producing genuine nice things.”
But, also, maybe:
“On a cosmic scale, maybe it turns out that the people who concede most to moloch end up winning the universe”
Or, somehow more horrifying:
“Maybe it actually is wasteful and wrong, by my current extrapolated values, to spend our post-singularity victory points on living lavish rich lives in the solar system, rather than saving our energy for winter.” Something something, computronium will run more efficiently when the universe is colder (I vaguely recall hearing an argument about that). Will the platonic spirit of goodness begrudge me/us saving a solar system or galaxy for inefficient biological humans to live out parochial lives? In the end of days, when fades at last the last-lit sun, will trillions of poor but efficient beings curse my name and say “man we could have utilitized that energy so much better than those guys? Why were they so selfish?”
The figure-ground inversion of “Do I identify more with the grasshopper or the ant?” is disorienting.
...
I don’t like living exponentially.
I wanna live in a simple little village, making small-scale projects and feeling good about it.
A lot of rationalists are pretty excited to have galaxy-sized brains doing amazing galaxy sized things at galaxy-brained speeds. I feel a grudging “eh, I guess, if that’s what my friends end up doing?”. I come along into the glorious transhuman future kinda grudgingly. (As I hang out with people who orient their lives more around the GTF, I slowly self-modify into someone who’s a bit more excited about it, and I don’t resist that transition, but I don’t hurry it along)
For now, the notion of having to grow exponentially and move faster and faster feels horrifying. I wanna stay here and smell the roses.
I like playing Village-Building videogames for the first 1-3 phases, when things are slow and simple. I don’t like the latter phases of those games where you’re managing vast civilizational industries.
...
Sometimes, I’ve dwelt upon the dream of “someday the singularity will be here, and instead of feeling an obligation to help steer the world through the narrow needle of fate, I can chillax and do whatever nice things I want.”
And then I reread Meditations on Moloch, and look around at the world around me and think about some of the things Robin Hanson is on about, and imagine multipolar futures wondering:
“What if… the precariousness of human value never grows up into something strong and resilient? What if we pass the singularity but there are just always forces threatening to snuff out human value, forcing it to self-modify into monotonous colonizers?” This fear sometimes manifests as “what if I never get to rest?”, which is fairly silly. I think the parts of humanity that’d need defending in Multipolar Hellworld don’t especially need help from a Raemon-descended being. By that point it’d be cheap to engineer AIs optimized for doing the defending. The parts of me I care about are probably either dead, or getting to live out whatever future me thinks of as living the good life.
But, still, what if things are precarious forever? Maybe we send out colonizers to try and secure the Long Future but those colonizers drift, lightspeed delays + very fast civilizations make longterm alignment impossible and endless wars are happening.
...
All I want is to enjoy summer for awhile before winter comes.
A thing that I found reassuring was realizing that, while I think the longterm future will put all kinds of crazy pressures on humanity to evolve into something weird and alien… the human soul that I want to get a chance to flourish doesn’t feel a need for billions or even millions of years to do so. I feel like the parochial humanity that I want to get to see utopia with only really needs, like, I dunno a few hundred thousand years of getting to live out parochial human utopia together before we’re like “okay, that was cool. What next?”
But I’m not even sure what any of this means.
As I said at the beginning, I have a rough sense of where this moral tradeoff grappling is all going, but I dunno, I’m stuck here at the moment, not ready to give up on grieving it yet.
It seems to me that the optimal schedule by which to use up your slack / resources is based on risk. When planning for the future, there’s always the possibility that some unknown unknown interferes. When maximizing the total Intrinsically Good Stuff you get to do, you have to take into account timelines where all the ants’ planning is for nought and the grasshopper actually has the right idea. It doesn’t seem right to ever have zero credence of this (as that means being totally certain that the project of saving up resources for cosmic winter will go perfectly smoothly, and we can’t be certain of something that will literally take trillions of years), therefore it is actually optimal to always put some of your resources into living for right now, proportional to that uncertainty about the success of the project.
I remember reading something about the Great Leap Forward in China (it may have been the Cultural Revolution, but I think it was the Great Leap Forward) where some communist party official recognised that the policy had killed a lot of people and ruined the lives of nearly an entire generation, but they argued it was still a net good because it would enrich future generations of people in China.
For individuals you weigh up the risk/rewards of differing your resource for the future. But, as a society asking individuals to give up a lot of potential utility for unborn future generations is a harder sell. It requires coercion.
The math doesn’t necessarily work out that way. If you value the good stuff linearly, the optimal course of action will either be to spend all your resources right away (because the high discount rate makes the future too risky) or to save everything for later (because you can get such a high return on investment that spending any now would be wasteful). Even in a more realistic case where utility is logarithmic with, for example, computation, anticipation of much higher efficiency in the far future could lead to the optimal choice being to use essentially the bare minimum right now.
I think there are reasonable arguments for putting some resources toward a good life in the present, but they mostly involve not being able to realistically pull off total self-deprivation for an extended period of time. So finding the right balance is difficult, because our thinking is naturally biased to want to enjoy ourselves right now. How do you “cancel out” this bias while still accounting for the limits of your ability to maintain motivation? Seems like a tall order to achieve just by introspection.
I agree, finding the right balance is definitely difficult.
However, the different versions of this parable of the grasshopper and the ant may not yet go far enough in subtlety.
Indeed, the ants are presented as champions of productivity, but what exactly are they producing? An extreme overabundance of food that they store endlessly. This completely disproportionate and non-circulating hoarding constitutes an obvious economic aberration. Due to the lack of significant consumption and circulation of wealth, the ants’ economy—primarily based on the primary sector, to a lesser extent the secondary sector, and excessive saving—while highly resilient, is far from optimal. GDP is low and grows only sluggishly.
The grasshoppers, on the other hand, seem to rely on a society centered around entertainment, culture, and perhaps also education or personal services. They store little, just what they need, which can prove insufficient in the event of a catastrophe. Their economy, based on the tertiary sector and massive consumption, is highly dynamic because the wealth created circulates to the maximum, leading to exponential GDP growth. However, this flourishing economy is also very fragile and vulnerable to disasters due to the lack of sufficient reserves—no insurance mechanism, so to speak.
In reality, neither the grasshoppers nor the ants behave in a rational manner. Both present two diametrically opposed and extreme economic models. Neither is desirable. Any economist or actuary would undoubtedly recommend an intermediate economy between these two extremes.
The trap, stemming from a long tradition since Aesop, is to see a model in the hardworking ant and a cautionary tale in the idle cicada. If we try to set aside this bias and look at things more objectively, it actually stems from the fact that until the advent of the modern economy, societies struggled to conceive that wealth creation could be anything other than the production of goods. In other words, the tertiary sector, although it existed, was not well understood and was therefore undervalued. Certainly, the wealthy paid to attend performances or organized lavish festivities, but this type of production was not fully recognized as such. It was just seen as an expense. Services were not easily perceived as work, which was often associated with toil, suffering, and hardship (e.g. “Labour” etymology).
Today, it is almost the opposite. The tertiary sector is highly valued, with the best salaries often found there, and jobs in this sector are considered more intellectual, more prestigious, and more rewarding. In today’s reality, a cicada or grasshopper would more likely be a famous and wealthy dancer in a international opera, while an ant would be an anonymous laborer toiling away in a mine or a massive factory in an underdeveloped country (admittedly, I am exaggerating a bit, but the point stands).
In any case, it would be an illusion for most readers of this forum to identify with the ants in the parable. We are probably all more on the side of the cicadas, or at least a mix of both—and that’s a good thing, because neither of these models constitutes an ideal.
The optimum clearly lies in a balanced, reasonable path between these two extremes.
Another point I would like to highlight is that the question of not spending resources today and instead accumulating them for a future date is far from trivial to grasp at the level of an entire society—for example, humanity as a whole. GDP is a measure of flows over a given period, somewhat like an income statement. However, when considering wealth transfers to future generations, we would need an equivalent tool to a balance sheet. But there is no proper tool for this. There is no consensus on how to measure patrimonial wealth at the scale of humanity.
Natural resources should certainly be valued. Extracting oil today increases GDP, but what about the depletion of oil reserves? And what about the valuation of the oceans, the air, or solar energy? Not to mention other extraterrestrial resources. We plunge into an abyss of complexity when considering all these aspects.
Ultimately, the problem lies in the difficulty of defining what wealth actually is. For ants, it is food. For cicadas, it is more about culture and entertainment. And for us? And for our children? And for human civilization in a thousand years, or for an extraterrestrial or AI civilization?
Many will likely be tempted to say that available work energy constitutes a common denominator. As a generic, intermediate resource—somewhat like a universal currency—perhaps, but not necessarily as a form of wealth with inherent value. Knowledge and information are also likely universal resources.
But in the end, wealth exists in the eye of the beholder—and, by extension, in the mind of an ant, a cicada, a human, an extraterrestrial, and so on. Without falling into radical relativism, I believe we must remain quite humble in this type of discussion.
Ooh! I don’t know much about the theory of reinforcement learning, could you explain that more / point me to references? (Also, this feels like it relates to the real reason for the time-value of money: money you supposedly will get in the future always has a less than 100% chance of actually reaching you, and is thus less valuable than money you have now.)
I’m surprised this quote is not more common around here, in discussions of turning far-mode values into near-mode actions, with the accompanying denial that the long run is strictly the sum of short runs.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
The mechanism of the compound interest yields utility.
Depends on what you mean by “utility.” If “happiness” the evidence is very much unclear: though Life Satisfaction (LS) is correlated with income/GDP when we make cross-sectional measurement, LS is not correlated with income/GDP when we make time-series measurements. This is the Easterlin Paradox. Good overview of a recent paper on it, presented by its author. Full paper here. Good discussion of the paper on the EA forum here (responses from author as well Michael Plant in the comments).
Okay, I may turn this into a top-level post, but more thoughts here for now?
I feel a lot of latent grief and frustration and also resignation about a lot of tradeoffs presented in the story. I have some sense of where I’ll end up when I’m done processing all of it, but alas, I can’t just skip to the “done” part.
...
I’ve hardened myself into the sort of person who is willing to turn away people who need help. In the past, I’ve helped people and been burned by it badly enough that it’s clear I need to defend my own personal boundaries and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I also help manage many resources now that need to be triaged, and I’ve had to turn away people who are perfectly good people, who wouldn’t take advantage of me, because I think the world needs those resources for something else. Many times, the resources I’m managing (such as, say, newcomer access to LW, or to some meetups I’ve run), are something that feels like it should be something community-like that doesn’t turn people away.
Often, the people I’m turning away really won’t find another place that’ll be as good a home for them as LW. But, the reason LW is a good place is specifically because of gatekeeping. I’ve felt many similar things about the Berkeley community, which is extra complicated because it’s actually multiple overlapping communities with different needs/goals and porous boundaries.
I’m bitter and sad about it. But, also, have grieved it enough to make do.
When I see new young naive ants freely giving, because they’ve never been burned and haven’t yet come to terms with their beckoning responsibilities, I feel a whiff of jealously, but, at this point, mostly a cynical “oh you sweet summer child” feeling.
...
A second tier of confusion/frustration is about “when do we actually get to cash in our victory points and do nice things?”
A significant update for me, when chatting with @Zvi awhile ago, was the note that a nation like the US might have the choice between distributing money more equitably, or having a slightly higher percent GDP growth per year. And it may look like we have so much money, and so many people who could use help. The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
But, Zvi pointed out (I think, this was awhile ago), if the US had done that 100 years ago, their growth would have been more similar to Mexico, and then today the US would be significantly less wealthy. Would I trade that way for somewhat-more-equitably-distributed money in the past? Would I make the equivalent trade for the future?
And that kicked me pretty hard in the moral-theory. Compound interest is really good.
It left me with a nagging sense that… surely at some point we’d just have so much stuff that we’d get to just spend it on nice things instead of investing it in the future?
It seems like the answer is a weird mix of “Well, in the near future… generating more wealth comes alongside providing lots of object-level-good-stuff. Billions are being lifted out of poverty, and along the way lots of people are making cool art, having fun, loving each other. The mechanism of the compound interest yields utility. That utility could be locally be distributed more fairly or evenly, maybe, but it’s not like the process of generating Even More Utility Tomorrow isn’t producing genuine nice things.”
But, also, maybe:
“On a cosmic scale, maybe it turns out that the people who concede most to moloch end up winning the universe”
Or, somehow more horrifying:
“Maybe it actually is wasteful and wrong, by my current extrapolated values, to spend our post-singularity victory points on living lavish rich lives in the solar system, rather than saving our energy for winter.” Something something, computronium will run more efficiently when the universe is colder (I vaguely recall hearing an argument about that). Will the platonic spirit of goodness begrudge me/us saving a solar system or galaxy for inefficient biological humans to live out parochial lives? In the end of days, when fades at last the last-lit sun, will trillions of poor but efficient beings curse my name and say “man we could have utilitized that energy so much better than those guys? Why were they so selfish?”
The figure-ground inversion of “Do I identify more with the grasshopper or the ant?” is disorienting.
...
I don’t like living exponentially.
I wanna live in a simple little village, making small-scale projects and feeling good about it.
A lot of rationalists are pretty excited to have galaxy-sized brains doing amazing galaxy sized things at galaxy-brained speeds. I feel a grudging “eh, I guess, if that’s what my friends end up doing?”. I come along into the glorious transhuman future kinda grudgingly. (As I hang out with people who orient their lives more around the GTF, I slowly self-modify into someone who’s a bit more excited about it, and I don’t resist that transition, but I don’t hurry it along)
For now, the notion of having to grow exponentially and move faster and faster feels horrifying. I wanna stay here and smell the roses.
I like playing Village-Building videogames for the first 1-3 phases, when things are slow and simple. I don’t like the latter phases of those games where you’re managing vast civilizational industries.
...
Sometimes, I’ve dwelt upon the dream of “someday the singularity will be here, and instead of feeling an obligation to help steer the world through the narrow needle of fate, I can chillax and do whatever nice things I want.”
And then I reread Meditations on Moloch, and look around at the world around me and think about some of the things Robin Hanson is on about, and imagine multipolar futures wondering:
“What if… the precariousness of human value never grows up into something strong and resilient? What if we pass the singularity but there are just always forces threatening to snuff out human value, forcing it to self-modify into monotonous colonizers?” This fear sometimes manifests as “what if I never get to rest?”, which is fairly silly. I think the parts of humanity that’d need defending in Multipolar Hellworld don’t especially need help from a Raemon-descended being. By that point it’d be cheap to engineer AIs optimized for doing the defending. The parts of me I care about are probably either dead, or getting to live out whatever future me thinks of as living the good life.
But, still, what if things are precarious forever? Maybe we send out colonizers to try and secure the Long Future but those colonizers drift, lightspeed delays + very fast civilizations make longterm alignment impossible and endless wars are happening.
...
All I want is to enjoy summer for awhile before winter comes.
A thing that I found reassuring was realizing that, while I think the longterm future will put all kinds of crazy pressures on humanity to evolve into something weird and alien… the human soul that I want to get a chance to flourish doesn’t feel a need for billions or even millions of years to do so. I feel like the parochial humanity that I want to get to see utopia with only really needs, like, I dunno a few hundred thousand years of getting to live out parochial human utopia together before we’re like “okay, that was cool. What next?”
But I’m not even sure what any of this means.
As I said at the beginning, I have a rough sense of where this moral tradeoff grappling is all going, but I dunno, I’m stuck here at the moment, not ready to give up on grieving it yet.
It seems to me that the optimal schedule by which to use up your slack / resources is based on risk. When planning for the future, there’s always the possibility that some unknown unknown interferes. When maximizing the total Intrinsically Good Stuff you get to do, you have to take into account timelines where all the ants’ planning is for nought and the grasshopper actually has the right idea. It doesn’t seem right to ever have zero credence of this (as that means being totally certain that the project of saving up resources for cosmic winter will go perfectly smoothly, and we can’t be certain of something that will literally take trillions of years), therefore it is actually optimal to always put some of your resources into living for right now, proportional to that uncertainty about the success of the project.
I remember reading something about the Great Leap Forward in China (it may have been the Cultural Revolution, but I think it was the Great Leap Forward) where some communist party official recognised that the policy had killed a lot of people and ruined the lives of nearly an entire generation, but they argued it was still a net good because it would enrich future generations of people in China.
For individuals you weigh up the risk/rewards of differing your resource for the future. But, as a society asking individuals to give up a lot of potential utility for unborn future generations is a harder sell. It requires coercion.
The math doesn’t necessarily work out that way. If you value the good stuff linearly, the optimal course of action will either be to spend all your resources right away (because the high discount rate makes the future too risky) or to save everything for later (because you can get such a high return on investment that spending any now would be wasteful). Even in a more realistic case where utility is logarithmic with, for example, computation, anticipation of much higher efficiency in the far future could lead to the optimal choice being to use essentially the bare minimum right now.
I think there are reasonable arguments for putting some resources toward a good life in the present, but they mostly involve not being able to realistically pull off total self-deprivation for an extended period of time. So finding the right balance is difficult, because our thinking is naturally biased to want to enjoy ourselves right now. How do you “cancel out” this bias while still accounting for the limits of your ability to maintain motivation? Seems like a tall order to achieve just by introspection.
I agree, finding the right balance is definitely difficult.
However, the different versions of this parable of the grasshopper and the ant may not yet go far enough in subtlety.
Indeed, the ants are presented as champions of productivity, but what exactly are they producing? An extreme overabundance of food that they store endlessly. This completely disproportionate and non-circulating hoarding constitutes an obvious economic aberration. Due to the lack of significant consumption and circulation of wealth, the ants’ economy—primarily based on the primary sector, to a lesser extent the secondary sector, and excessive saving—while highly resilient, is far from optimal. GDP is low and grows only sluggishly.
The grasshoppers, on the other hand, seem to rely on a society centered around entertainment, culture, and perhaps also education or personal services. They store little, just what they need, which can prove insufficient in the event of a catastrophe. Their economy, based on the tertiary sector and massive consumption, is highly dynamic because the wealth created circulates to the maximum, leading to exponential GDP growth. However, this flourishing economy is also very fragile and vulnerable to disasters due to the lack of sufficient reserves—no insurance mechanism, so to speak.
In reality, neither the grasshoppers nor the ants behave in a rational manner. Both present two diametrically opposed and extreme economic models. Neither is desirable. Any economist or actuary would undoubtedly recommend an intermediate economy between these two extremes.
The trap, stemming from a long tradition since Aesop, is to see a model in the hardworking ant and a cautionary tale in the idle cicada. If we try to set aside this bias and look at things more objectively, it actually stems from the fact that until the advent of the modern economy, societies struggled to conceive that wealth creation could be anything other than the production of goods. In other words, the tertiary sector, although it existed, was not well understood and was therefore undervalued. Certainly, the wealthy paid to attend performances or organized lavish festivities, but this type of production was not fully recognized as such. It was just seen as an expense. Services were not easily perceived as work, which was often associated with toil, suffering, and hardship (e.g. “Labour” etymology).
Today, it is almost the opposite. The tertiary sector is highly valued, with the best salaries often found there, and jobs in this sector are considered more intellectual, more prestigious, and more rewarding. In today’s reality, a cicada or grasshopper would more likely be a famous and wealthy dancer in a international opera, while an ant would be an anonymous laborer toiling away in a mine or a massive factory in an underdeveloped country (admittedly, I am exaggerating a bit, but the point stands).
In any case, it would be an illusion for most readers of this forum to identify with the ants in the parable. We are probably all more on the side of the cicadas, or at least a mix of both—and that’s a good thing, because neither of these models constitutes an ideal.
The optimum clearly lies in a balanced, reasonable path between these two extremes.
Another point I would like to highlight is that the question of not spending resources today and instead accumulating them for a future date is far from trivial to grasp at the level of an entire society—for example, humanity as a whole. GDP is a measure of flows over a given period, somewhat like an income statement. However, when considering wealth transfers to future generations, we would need an equivalent tool to a balance sheet. But there is no proper tool for this. There is no consensus on how to measure patrimonial wealth at the scale of humanity.
Natural resources should certainly be valued. Extracting oil today increases GDP, but what about the depletion of oil reserves? And what about the valuation of the oceans, the air, or solar energy? Not to mention other extraterrestrial resources. We plunge into an abyss of complexity when considering all these aspects.
Ultimately, the problem lies in the difficulty of defining what wealth actually is. For ants, it is food. For cicadas, it is more about culture and entertainment. And for us? And for our children? And for human civilization in a thousand years, or for an extraterrestrial or AI civilization?
Many will likely be tempted to say that available work energy constitutes a common denominator. As a generic, intermediate resource—somewhat like a universal currency—perhaps, but not necessarily as a form of wealth with inherent value. Knowledge and information are also likely universal resources.
But in the end, wealth exists in the eye of the beholder—and, by extension, in the mind of an ant, a cicada, a human, an extraterrestrial, and so on. Without falling into radical relativism, I believe we must remain quite humble in this type of discussion.
Exactly this. This is the relationship in RL between the discount factor and the probability of transitioning into an absorbing state (death)
Ooh! I don’t know much about the theory of reinforcement learning, could you explain that more / point me to references? (Also, this feels like it relates to the real reason for the time-value of money: money you supposedly will get in the future always has a less than 100% chance of actually reaching you, and is thus less valuable than money you have now.)
I’m surprised this quote is not more common around here, in discussions of turning far-mode values into near-mode actions, with the accompanying denial that the long run is strictly the sum of short runs.
Depends on what you mean by “utility.” If “happiness” the evidence is very much unclear: though Life Satisfaction (LS) is correlated with income/GDP when we make cross-sectional measurement, LS is not correlated with income/GDP when we make time-series measurements. This is the Easterlin Paradox. Good overview of a recent paper on it, presented by its author. Full paper here. Good discussion of the paper on the EA forum here (responses from author as well Michael Plant in the comments).
I’m reminded of The Last Paperclip