Thanks for making a well-thought out comment. It’s really helpful for me to have an outside perspective from another intelligent mind.
I’m hoping to learn more from you, so I’m going to descend into a way of writing that assumes we have a lot of the same beliefs/understandings about the world. So if it gets confusing, I apologize for not being able to communicate myself more clearly.
Your 1st point: This is an interesting perspective shift. The concept that by endeavoring to help people understand suffering, I would be causing suffering itself, since I’d be creating an expectation/ideal that virtually no one in society has met. I agree with this point, and I have a lot of perspectives on this. I’m curious about what you think of them.
My 1st perspective: The marketing perspective.
Since I want people to change, I want them to be in pain or suffer. Since without pain, the motivation to change is typically weak or non-existent. As cruel an non-idealistic as it may be, I don’t endeavor to be an idealist. I endeavor to be realist and rationalist. People have to feel pain in order to take actions necessary to better their lives. No one would imply that a farmer shouldn’t put in the work to plant crops. The village’s desire to eat, is of greater importance than the farmer’s desire to feel physically comfortable.
I think that if I were trying to cater to idealist perspectives, I would need to emphasize suffering being bearable when in pursuit of reward. On some level, I understand how this process works in my own psychology and have been able to manipulate it, but my ability to help other people do the same thing remains uncertain. I think that there are multiple other sources of reward that can be used for this purpose other than goal-progress oriented reward, (Such as food, media entertainment, or social) but I agree that showing people that they are making clear progress will be very beneficial for increasing the acceptability of a person’s suffering in this context.
My 2nd perspective: Which subsets of people will experience increased suffering as a result of the implementation of the ideas expressed in this document?
I don’t think this would negatively impact people who are currently already unsatisfied with their life. Since it would just shift their focus from their current ideals/unfulfilled desires to the new one that’s being presented.
(Except this time, since they understand the systems at play in their mind and in their environment, they will actually have the power to change things)
So people won’t need to rely on a large set of trial & error + heuristics to perceive that they’ve reached their ideal.
I could be wrong on the aforementioned point. If instead of shifting focuses, a person adds this to a long subconscious list of things they should be that they are not, it could increase suffering even in people who are already dissatisfied with life. If testing reveals that this is the case, I think that unraveling sets of beliefs about what a person should be will help alleviate this suffering. (This would be done by utilizing marketing tactics such as storytelling)
but for subsets of people who are currently satisfied with their life, I don’t think that introducing new ideals will increase suffering. There are lots of current societal ideals/expectations that re near-impossible to live up to. If this subset of people are satisfied even in spite of the external ideals/expectations they are unable to embody, I see no reason to believe that introducing a new ideal would cause this subset of people to suffer.
Although It could be argued that the reason these people are satisfied is because they’ve fooled themselves into believing they are meeting those impossible societal ideals/expectations. Even if this is argued, I think they would just continue to fool themselves by using the mental processes that have reduced their suffering in the past.
My 3rd perspective: Worst case scenario:
I have some critically inaccurate belief about the world/other people. And in reality, the only thing I’ll be able to do is show people how life could be better without actually being able to get anyone to change in this way.
Your 2nd point
Completely agree. It’s good that you caught me on this point, because in reflection, if I don’t clarify the core of the problem more clearly, the problem could easily be mispercieved as something far more simple than is necessary to actually improve people’s lives. I almost fell into the”One man’s utopia is another man’s hell” archetype. I think I’m just unaware about how to implement this without getting too deep into psychology and a lot of interrelated concepts.
If I was solely speaking to an audience that had your level of understanding of human psychology as it relates to suffering, then I could immediately begin clarifying my position on deeper concepts related to suffering.
But since the average person doesn’t have a concept of suffering as an isolated concept from pain, I think that it could be difficult to help people make that conceptual jump.
I do intend to make a few separate versions intended for different target audience levels of intellect, so I might be able to solve this problem with my implementation here.
Your 3rd point In retrospect, I realize that I was very liberal with my usage of the term “EA”, and I made no effort to clarify what I meant by my usage of the term. Just to be sure we’re on the same page, When I say “We” in “we are products of EA”, I’m referring to a hypothetical group of people who want to prevent human extinction. (The target audience of this post). I definitely don’t mean to imply that another person or group’s altruistic deliberations had anything to do with our current beliefs or abilities. I’m also not referring to any organization or group of people when I say “EA”, What I mean is the broader state of altruistic tendencies among intellectuals/rational people as a movement.
I realize now that I made an unjustified assumption that efforts for the prevention of human extinction would have altruistic motivations. And as you’ve pointed out, I may be wrong.
”Would reducing suffering really be a good thing?”
I’m thinking about this question. And I realize I’m not actually qualified to answer it.
From a humanitarian or idealist perspective, obviously we should reduce pointless suffering and help people gain the tools necessary to deal with or accept suffering. But from a complexity or future-prediction perspective, it is difficult to know what the far-reaching consequences of this hypothetical world would be. If people know how to consciously reduce their own suffering and engineer their environments in a way that makes life more satisfactory for them, the results could be akin to a sort of malignant idea virus. As we’ve both said, without suffering, there is no change, By democratizing these tools, we could be erasing a core and crucial element of human change. Since choosing suffering as opposed to satisfaction is completely contradictory to human nature, once a person receives the information, they could be forever changed for the worse.
I also grew because of my suffering. And In this post, I meant to say that I was the most productive when I didn’t eat. Not eating only significantly reduced my productivity when how much I ate was outside of my conscious control.
Suffering has made me into the person I am, and I am an avid believer in the pro-social benefits of personal suffering. But it is still true that unacceptable suffering outside of an individual’s control is what causes the scarcity mindset. (Eradicating the scarcity mindset & increasing the prevalence of altruistic perspectives is the whole point of reducing human suffering in the context of preventing human extinction.)
Additionally, there are certain important aspects of human psychology that I’m still unsure about. For example, to what degree does pain as a stimulus cause change? To what degree does suffering cause change? To what degree does an individual’s acceptability of suffering affect change?
And to the 3 aforementioned questions, in what way?
Your 4th point
My fault for not better clarifying my perspective here.
I’m claiming that even if scarcity mindsets fade and altruism spreads, we will still go extinct if the average person is as dumb as I am. “Create a community”, and “Spread logical decisionmaking” are complementary to the concept of reducing human suffering, but their ultimate purpose is the continued existence of the human species. They are 2 of 3 points aimed at managing humanity’s likelihood of destroying itself with some form of technology.
I personally think that intellect past a certain level gives humans the ability to deliberately manipulate their suffering, but I think that on the spectrum with which every human I’m aware of exists lies, intellect does not seem to make suffering controllable in any non-proxy way. In other words, I don’t think that tech or intellect are strong predictors relative to suffering at our current capabilities for tech and intellect.
To respond to your point on anything other than survival & reproduction being a fabricated problem, I would agree. I feel like you can always meta-contradict the concept of meaning, since human meaning is constructed by our psychological systems, rather than by any universal truth. We can argue that pain is bad, and pleasure is good. Only to realize that those two concepts are only proxies for what we actually optimize for, suffering and satisfaction. So then we can argue that suffering is bad, and satisfaction is good. Only to gain perspective on the concept of agency, and to realize that suffering and satisfaction are just mesa-optimizers for evolution. I believe this process can go on an on, but the reality is that we are still mesa-optimizers, and so we have a natural inclination towards certain things and an intuition to call it meaningful. Anyone can take a nihilistic perspective an argue that nothing is meaningful, but if nothing is meaningful, then there is also no point in doing nothing, and we can do whatever we want. So I think the concept of meaning is a sort of recursive argument that we don’t have the intellectual tools to solve. So rather than do nothing, I think we should do what we can.
Your 5th point (Bureaucracy) I don’t know anything about how decentralization can help with the problem of bureaucracy. Maybe you can point me to a source of information that will help me see your perspective on this?
I’m also interested in your perspective on a few entities within a bureaucracy hogging all the resources. I presume you’re referring to management claiming credit or capital distributions received by the owner class?
I look at bureaucracy from a business perspective. They call it operational complexity, and it refers to the reduced level of control of the founder over a business as the organization/tasks get more complex.
As the founder loses control over incentive structures, hiring practices, and training, the impact of the founder’s competence dilutes and regresses towards the mean of the average human.
It also refers to increases in tasks that are not the actual revenue-producing activity. An example would be salesman filling out excel sheets instead of talking with prospects.
Another example would be the increased training time required for adding an additional task to a specific role, and the increased training time for the people who are training those people, and the butterfly effect that has on the entirety of the business.
Also, the increased need for competent problem-solving as old systems break, and new systems (Or slight variations of old systems) become necessary.
My shortest definition on how I see Bureaucracy = reduced efficiency in multiple ways for multiple reasons as organizations grow larger.
Your 6th point (Moloch) From my understanding, Moloch = a more complex representation of the prisoner’s dilemma.
The state of everything growing worse as a result of competition & a lack of control resulting from the fact that you either pool resources in a locally helpful but globally harmful way, or you seize to exist.
Your take: “Caused by too much information and optimization, and therefore unlikely to be solved with information and optimization. My take here is the same as with intelligence and tech.”
I wonder about what basis/set of information you’re using to make these 3 claims? I am currently unable to respond in a productive way without further context.
“Why hasn’t moloch killed us sooner? I believe it’s because the conditions for moloch weren’t yet reached (optimal strategies weren’t visible, as the world wasn’t legible and transparent enough), in which case, going back might be better than going forwards.”
And I may have misunderstood your point here, but from my understanding you’re arguing something like: “Why aren’t we in a state of perfect Moloch in present society?” (I’m not sure what you mean by “optimal strategies weren’t visible”.) And when you say going back instead of forwards, you seem to be implying that the solution to preventing human extinction as it relates to tech is simply to remove technology.
Which in my opinion, will inevitably lead future generations back to this exact point in technological capabilities, and they might not also decide to regress technological capabilities since their society would be vastly different than our own in terms of culture-based differences such as values & identity. I don’t see the reasoning behind pushing the problem forward onto later generations as opposed to attempting to solve the problem for good.
It’d also be great if you could point me to a piece of writing on world legibility and transparency. Since I don’t currently have the context with which to understand what those two things mean.
Your final point
What’s leading humanity to extinction in my opinion: 1. Increased technological capabilities 2. Our lack of ability to control the impacts of these capabilities
3. our lack of incentive to manage those capabilities.
4. Our lack of control over the first 3 points.
I agree that my proposed solutions for the problems we face are reliant on systems currently driving humanity towards extinction.
But I don’t agree with the implied understanding that every system associated with our current path to extinction needs to be removed in order for human extinction to be prevented. I believe that certain aspects within the system can be changed, while larger high-level systems can remain the same. And we can still solve the problem of human extinction this way. For example, Elon Musk trying to get humans to mars is reliant on technology, but it is also a hedge against human-extinction at the same time.
I know I wrote a lot, but I love that you’re making me question assumptions I’ve made that I’ve never even thought to question.
Maybe I don’t currently have the base-knowledge necessary to create helpful high-level plans. But I’m not sure how I can better use my time relative to helping prevent human extinction.
I’ll edit this document with what we’ve talked about here in mind and see what I can do to improve this post.
Thank you! Writing is not my strong suit, but I’m quite confident about the ideas. I’ve written a lot, so it’s alright if you don’t want to engage with all of it. No pressure!
I should explain the thing about suffering better: We don’t suffer from the state of the world, but from how we think about it. This is crucial. When people try to improve other peoples happiness, they talk about making changes to reality, but that’s the least effective way they could go about it. I believe this is even sufficient. That we can enjoy life as it is now, without making any changes to it, by simply adopting a better perspective on things.
For example, inequality is a part of life, likely an unavoidable one (The Pareto principle seems to apply in every society no matter its type). And even under inequality, people have been happy, so it’s not even an issue in itself. But now we’re teaching people in lower positions that they’re suffering from injustice, that they’re pitiful, that they’re victims, and we’re teaching everyone else that life could be a paradise, if only evil and immoral influences weren’t preventing it. But this is a sure way to make people unhappy with their existence. To make them imagine how much better things could be, and make comparisons between a naive ideal and reality. Comparison is the thief of joy, and most people are happy with their lot unless you teach them not to be. Teaching people about suffering doesn’t cause it per se, but if you make people look for suffering, they will find it. If you condition your perception to notice something unpleasant, you will see it everywhere. Training yourself to notice suffering may have side-effects. I have a bit of tinnitus, and I got over it by not paying it any attention. It’s only like this that my mind will start to filter it away, so that I can forget about it.
The marketing perspective
I don’t think you need pain to motivate people to change, the carrot is as good at the stick. But you need one of the two at minimum (curiousity and other such drives make you act naturally, but do so by making it uncomfortable not to act and rewarding to act) I don’t think that suffering is bearable because of reward itself, but because of perceived value and meaning. Birth is really painful, but the event is so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Same for people who compete in the olympics, they have found something meaningful enough that a bit of physical pain is a non-issue. You can teach this to people, but it’s hard to apply. It’s better to help them avoid the sort of nihilism which makes them question whether things are worth it. I think one of the causes of modern nihilism is a lack of aesthetics.
My 2nd perspective
I don’t think understanding translates directly into power. It’s a common problem to think “I know what I should be doing, but I can’t bring myself to do it”. If understanding something granted you power over it, I’d practically be a wizard by now. You can shift the problem that people attack, but if they have actual problems which put them in danger, I think their focus should remain on these. You can always create dissatisfaction by luring them towards better futures, in a way which benefits both them and others at the same time.
I’m never motivated by moral arguments, but some self-help books are alluring to me because they prey on my selfishness in a healthy manner which also demands responsibility and hard work.
As for the third possibility, that sounds a bit pessimistic. But I don’t think it would be a worthless outcome as long as the image of what could be isn’t a dangerous delusion. Other proposed roads to happiness include “Destroy your ego”, “Be content with nothing”, “Eat SSRIs forever”, and various self-help which asks you to “hustle” and overwork.
who want to prevent human extinction
I see! That something deeper than preventing suffering. I even think that there’s some conflicts between the two goals. But motivating people towards this should be easier since they’re preventing their own destruction as well, and not just helping other people.
it is difficult to know what the far-reaching consequences of this hypothetical world would be
It really is. But it’s interesting to me how both of us haven’t used this information to decrease our own suffering. It’s like I can’t value things if they come too easy, and like I want to find something which is worth my suffering. But we can agree that wasted suffering is a thing. That state of indecision, being unable to either die or live, yield or fight back, fix the cause of suffering or come to terms with it. The scarcity mindset is definitely a problem, but many resources are limited. I think a more complex problem would be that people tend to look for bad actions to avoid, rather than positive actions to adopt. It’s all “we need to stop doing X” and “Y is bad” and “Z is evil”. It’s all about reduction, restrictions, avoidance. It simply chokes us. Many good people trap themselves with excessive limitations and become unable to move freely. To simply use positives likes “You should be brave”, “You should stand up for what you believe in”, “You should accept people for who they are” would likely help improve this problem.
there are certain important aspects of human psychology that I’m still unsure about
I think pain and such are thresholds between competing things. If I’m tired and hungry, whether or not I will cook some food depends on which of the two cause the greatest discomfort. When procrastinating I’ve also found that deadlines helped me. Once I was backed into a corner and had to take action, I suddenly did. I ran away for as long as I could. The stress from deadlines might also result in dopamine and adrenaline, which help in the short term. ”Acceptance of suffering” is a bit ambigious. Accepting something usually reduces the suffering it causes, and accepting suffering lessens it too. But one can get too used to suffering, which makes them wait too long before they change anything, like the “This is fine” meme or the boiling frog that I mentioned earlier
Spread logical decisionmaking
Logic can defend against mistakes caused by logic, but we did not destroy ourselves in the past when we were less logical than now. I also don’t think that logic reduces suffering. Many philosophers have been unhappy, and many people with down syndrome are all smiles. Less intelligent people often have a sort of wisdom about them, often called “street smarts” when observed, but I think that the lack of knowledge leads them to make less map-territory errors. They’re nearer to reality because they have less knowledge which can mislead them.
I personally think that intellect past a certain level gives humans the ability to deliberately manipulate their suffering
I don’t think any human being is intelligent enough to do this (Buddha managed, but the method was crude, reducing not only suffering). What we can do, is manipulate our reward systems. But this leaves us feeling empty, as we cannot fake meaning. Religion basically tells us to live a good life according to a fixed structure, and while most people don’t like this lack of freedom, it probably leads to more happiness in the long run (for the same reason that neuroticism and conscientiousness are inversely correlated)
since human meaning is constructed by our psychological systems
Yes, the philosophical question of meaning, and the psychology of meaning are different. To solve meaninglessness by proving external meaning (this is impossible, but lets assume you could), is like curing depression by arguing that one should be happy. Meaning is basically investment, engagement, and involvement in something which feels like it has substance.
I recommend just considering humanity as a set of axioms. Like with mathematical axioms, this gives us a foundation. Like with mathematics, it doesn’t matter that this foundation is arbitrary, for no “absolute” foundation can exist (in other words, no set of axioms are more correct than any other. Objectivity does not exist, even in mathematics, everything is inherently relative). Since attemping to prove axioms is silly, considering human nature (or yourself) as sets of axioms allows you not to worry about meaning and values anymore. If you want humanity to survive, you no longer have to justify this preference.
Maybe you can point me to a source of information that will help me see your perspective on this?
That would be difficult as it’s my own conclusion. But do you know this quote by Taleb? ”I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.” The smaller the scope, the better. The reason stupid people are happier than smart people is because their scope of consideration is smaller. Being a big fish in a small pond feels good, but increase your scope of comparison to an entire country, and you become a nobody. Politics makes people miserable because the scope is too big, it’s feeding your brain with problems that you have no possibility of solving by yourself. “Community” is essential to human well-being because it’s cohersion on a local level. “family values” are important for the same reason. Theres more crime in bigger cities than smaller ones. Smaller communities have less crazy behaviour, they’re more down-to-earth. A lot of terrible things emerge when you increase the scale of things. Multiple things on a smaller scale does not seem to have a cost. One family can have great coherence. You can have 100 families living side by side, still great. But force them all to live together in one big house, and you will notice the cost of centralization. You will need hierarchies, coordination, and more rules. This is similar to urbanization. It’s also similar to how the internet went from being millions of websites, to becoming a few 100 popular websites. It’s even similar to companies merging into giants that most people consider evil. An important antidote is isolation (gatekeeping, borders, personal boundaries, independence, seperation of powers, the single-responsibility-principle, live and let live philosophies, privacy and other rights, preservation). I wish it was just “reduced efficiency” which was the problem. And sadly, it seems that they optimal way to increase the efficiency between many things is simply to force them towards similarity. For society, this means the destruction of different cultures, the destruction of different ways of thinking, the destruction of different moralities and different social norms.
I presume you’re referring to management claiming credit
It’s much more abstract than that. The amount of countries, brands, languages, accents, standards, websites, communities, religious, animals, etc. are all decreasing in numbers. All slowly tending towards 1 thing having monopoly, with this 1 thing being the average of what was merged.
Don’t worry if you don’t get last few points. I’ve tried to explain them before, but I have yet to be understood.
I wonder about what basis/set of information you’re using to make these 3 claims?
Once a moloch problem has been started, you “either join or die”, like you said. But we can prevent moloch problems from occuring in the first place, by preventing the world from becoming legible enough. For this idea, I was inspired by “Seeing like a state” and this
There’s many prisoners-dilemma like situations in society, which do not cause problems simply because people don’t have enough information to see them. If enough people cannot see them, then the games are only played by a few people. But that’s the only solution to Moloch: Collectively agree not to play (or, I suppose, never stop playing in the first place). The amount of moloch-like problems has increased as a side-effect of the increased accessibility of information. Dating apps ruined dating by making it more legible. As information became more visible, and people had more choices and could make more informed decisions, they became less happy. The hidden information in traditional dating made it more “human”, and less materialistic as well. Since rationalists, academics and intellectuals in general want to increase the openness of information and seem rather naive about the consequences, I don’t want to become either.
I agree with the factors leading to human extinction. My solution is “go back”. This may not be possible, and like you say, we need to use intelligence and technology to go forwards instead. But like the alignment problem, this is rather difficult. I haven’t even taught myself high-level mathematics, I’ve noticed all this through intuition alone. I think letting small disasters happen naturally could help us prevent black-swan like events. Just like burning small patches of trees can prevent large forest fires. Humanity is doing the opposite. By putting all its eggs in one basket and making things “too big to fail”, we make sure that once a disaster happens, it hits hard.
Related to all of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ (the page mentions black swan risks, Taleb, Ribbonfarms, legibility and centralization). I actually had most of these thought before I knew about this page, so that gives me some confidence that I’m not just connecting unrelated concepts like a schizophrenic.
My argumentation is a little messy, but I don’t want to invest my life in understanding this issue or anything. Kaczynski’s books have a few overlapping arguments with me, and the other books I know are even more crazy, so I can’t recommend them.
But maybe I’m just worrying over nothing. I’m extrapolating things as linear or exponential, but they may be s-shaped or self-correcting cycles. And any partial collapse of society will probably go back to normal or even bring improvements with it in the long run. A lot of people have ruined themselves worrying over things which turned out just fine in the end.
Thanks for making a well-thought out comment. It’s really helpful for me to have an outside perspective from another intelligent mind.
I’m hoping to learn more from you, so I’m going to descend into a way of writing that assumes we have a lot of the same beliefs/understandings about the world. So if it gets confusing, I apologize for not being able to communicate myself more clearly.
Your 1st point:
This is an interesting perspective shift. The concept that by endeavoring to help people understand suffering, I would be causing suffering itself, since I’d be creating an expectation/ideal that virtually no one in society has met. I agree with this point, and I have a lot of perspectives on this. I’m curious about what you think of them.
My 1st perspective: The marketing perspective.
Since I want people to change, I want them to be in pain or suffer. Since without pain, the motivation to change is typically weak or non-existent. As cruel an non-idealistic as it may be, I don’t endeavor to be an idealist. I endeavor to be realist and rationalist. People have to feel pain in order to take actions necessary to better their lives. No one would imply that a farmer shouldn’t put in the work to plant crops. The village’s desire to eat, is of greater importance than the farmer’s desire to feel physically comfortable.
I think that if I were trying to cater to idealist perspectives, I would need to emphasize suffering being bearable when in pursuit of reward. On some level, I understand how this process works in my own psychology and have been able to manipulate it, but my ability to help other people do the same thing remains uncertain. I think that there are multiple other sources of reward that can be used for this purpose other than goal-progress oriented reward, (Such as food, media entertainment, or social) but I agree that showing people that they are making clear progress will be very beneficial for increasing the acceptability of a person’s suffering in this context.
My 2nd perspective: Which subsets of people will experience increased suffering as a result of the implementation of the ideas expressed in this document?
I don’t think this would negatively impact people who are currently already unsatisfied with their life. Since it would just shift their focus from their current ideals/unfulfilled desires to the new one that’s being presented.
(Except this time, since they understand the systems at play in their mind and in their environment, they will actually have the power to change things)
So people won’t need to rely on a large set of trial & error + heuristics to perceive that they’ve reached their ideal.
I could be wrong on the aforementioned point. If instead of shifting focuses, a person adds this to a long subconscious list of things they should be that they are not, it could increase suffering even in people who are already dissatisfied with life. If testing reveals that this is the case, I think that unraveling sets of beliefs about what a person should be will help alleviate this suffering. (This would be done by utilizing marketing tactics such as storytelling)
but for subsets of people who are currently satisfied with their life, I don’t think that introducing new ideals will increase suffering. There are lots of current societal ideals/expectations that re near-impossible to live up to. If this subset of people are satisfied even in spite of the external ideals/expectations they are unable to embody, I see no reason to believe that introducing a new ideal would cause this subset of people to suffer.
Although It could be argued that the reason these people are satisfied is because they’ve fooled themselves into believing they are meeting those impossible societal ideals/expectations. Even if this is argued, I think they would just continue to fool themselves by using the mental processes that have reduced their suffering in the past.
My 3rd perspective: Worst case scenario:
I have some critically inaccurate belief about the world/other people. And in reality, the only thing I’ll be able to do is show people how life could be better without actually being able to get anyone to change in this way.
Your 2nd point
Completely agree. It’s good that you caught me on this point, because in reflection, if I don’t clarify the core of the problem more clearly, the problem could easily be mispercieved as something far more simple than is necessary to actually improve people’s lives. I almost fell into the”One man’s utopia is another man’s hell” archetype. I think I’m just unaware about how to implement this without getting too deep into psychology and a lot of interrelated concepts.
If I was solely speaking to an audience that had your level of understanding of human psychology as it relates to suffering, then I could immediately begin clarifying my position on deeper concepts related to suffering.
But since the average person doesn’t have a concept of suffering as an isolated concept from pain, I think that it could be difficult to help people make that conceptual jump.
I do intend to make a few separate versions intended for different target audience levels of intellect, so I might be able to solve this problem with my implementation here.
Your 3rd point
In retrospect, I realize that I was very liberal with my usage of the term “EA”, and I made no effort to clarify what I meant by my usage of the term. Just to be sure we’re on the same page, When I say “We” in “we are products of EA”, I’m referring to a hypothetical group of people who want to prevent human extinction. (The target audience of this post). I definitely don’t mean to imply that another person or group’s altruistic deliberations had anything to do with our current beliefs or abilities. I’m also not referring to any organization or group of people when I say “EA”, What I mean is the broader state of altruistic tendencies among intellectuals/rational people as a movement.
I realize now that I made an unjustified assumption that efforts for the prevention of human extinction would have altruistic motivations. And as you’ve pointed out, I may be wrong.
”Would reducing suffering really be a good thing?”
I’m thinking about this question. And I realize I’m not actually qualified to answer it.
From a humanitarian or idealist perspective, obviously we should reduce pointless suffering and help people gain the tools necessary to deal with or accept suffering. But from a complexity or future-prediction perspective, it is difficult to know what the far-reaching consequences of this hypothetical world would be. If people know how to consciously reduce their own suffering and engineer their environments in a way that makes life more satisfactory for them, the results could be akin to a sort of malignant idea virus. As we’ve both said, without suffering, there is no change, By democratizing these tools, we could be erasing a core and crucial element of human change. Since choosing suffering as opposed to satisfaction is completely contradictory to human nature, once a person receives the information, they could be forever changed for the worse.
I also grew because of my suffering. And In this post, I meant to say that I was the most productive when I didn’t eat. Not eating only significantly reduced my productivity when how much I ate was outside of my conscious control.
Suffering has made me into the person I am, and I am an avid believer in the pro-social benefits of personal suffering. But it is still true that unacceptable suffering outside of an individual’s control is what causes the scarcity mindset. (Eradicating the scarcity mindset & increasing the prevalence of altruistic perspectives is the whole point of reducing human suffering in the context of preventing human extinction.)
Additionally, there are certain important aspects of human psychology that I’m still unsure about. For example, to what degree does pain as a stimulus cause change? To what degree does suffering cause change? To what degree does an individual’s acceptability of suffering affect change?
And to the 3 aforementioned questions, in what way?
Your 4th point
My fault for not better clarifying my perspective here.
I’m claiming that even if scarcity mindsets fade and altruism spreads, we will still go extinct if the average person is as dumb as I am. “Create a community”, and “Spread logical decisionmaking” are complementary to the concept of reducing human suffering, but their ultimate purpose is the continued existence of the human species. They are 2 of 3 points aimed at managing humanity’s likelihood of destroying itself with some form of technology.
I personally think that intellect past a certain level gives humans the ability to deliberately manipulate their suffering, but I think that on the spectrum with which every human I’m aware of exists lies, intellect does not seem to make suffering controllable in any non-proxy way. In other words, I don’t think that tech or intellect are strong predictors relative to suffering at our current capabilities for tech and intellect.
To respond to your point on anything other than survival & reproduction being a fabricated problem, I would agree. I feel like you can always meta-contradict the concept of meaning, since human meaning is constructed by our psychological systems, rather than by any universal truth. We can argue that pain is bad, and pleasure is good. Only to realize that those two concepts are only proxies for what we actually optimize for, suffering and satisfaction. So then we can argue that suffering is bad, and satisfaction is good. Only to gain perspective on the concept of agency, and to realize that suffering and satisfaction are just mesa-optimizers for evolution. I believe this process can go on an on, but the reality is that we are still mesa-optimizers, and so we have a natural inclination towards certain things and an intuition to call it meaningful. Anyone can take a nihilistic perspective an argue that nothing is meaningful, but if nothing is meaningful, then there is also no point in doing nothing, and we can do whatever we want. So I think the concept of meaning is a sort of recursive argument that we don’t have the intellectual tools to solve. So rather than do nothing, I think we should do what we can.
Your 5th point (Bureaucracy)
I don’t know anything about how decentralization can help with the problem of bureaucracy. Maybe you can point me to a source of information that will help me see your perspective on this?
I’m also interested in your perspective on a few entities within a bureaucracy hogging all the resources. I presume you’re referring to management claiming credit or capital distributions received by the owner class?
I look at bureaucracy from a business perspective. They call it operational complexity, and it refers to the reduced level of control of the founder over a business as the organization/tasks get more complex.
As the founder loses control over incentive structures, hiring practices, and training, the impact of the founder’s competence dilutes and regresses towards the mean of the average human.
It also refers to increases in tasks that are not the actual revenue-producing activity. An example would be salesman filling out excel sheets instead of talking with prospects.
Another example would be the increased training time required for adding an additional task to a specific role, and the increased training time for the people who are training those people, and the butterfly effect that has on the entirety of the business.
Also, the increased need for competent problem-solving as old systems break, and new systems (Or slight variations of old systems) become necessary.
My shortest definition on how I see Bureaucracy = reduced efficiency in multiple ways for multiple reasons as organizations grow larger.
Your 6th point (Moloch)
From my understanding, Moloch = a more complex representation of the prisoner’s dilemma.
The state of everything growing worse as a result of competition & a lack of control resulting from the fact that you either pool resources in a locally helpful but globally harmful way, or you seize to exist.
Your take: “Caused by too much information and optimization, and therefore unlikely to be solved with information and optimization. My take here is the same as with intelligence and tech.”
I wonder about what basis/set of information you’re using to make these 3 claims? I am currently unable to respond in a productive way without further context.
“Why hasn’t moloch killed us sooner? I believe it’s because the conditions for moloch weren’t yet reached (optimal strategies weren’t visible, as the world wasn’t legible and transparent enough), in which case, going back might be better than going forwards.”
And I may have misunderstood your point here, but from my understanding you’re arguing something like: “Why aren’t we in a state of perfect Moloch in present society?” (I’m not sure what you mean by “optimal strategies weren’t visible”.) And when you say going back instead of forwards, you seem to be implying that the solution to preventing human extinction as it relates to tech is simply to remove technology.
Which in my opinion, will inevitably lead future generations back to this exact point in technological capabilities, and they might not also decide to regress technological capabilities since their society would be vastly different than our own in terms of culture-based differences such as values & identity. I don’t see the reasoning behind pushing the problem forward onto later generations as opposed to attempting to solve the problem for good.
It’d also be great if you could point me to a piece of writing on world legibility and transparency. Since I don’t currently have the context with which to understand what those two things mean.
Your final point
What’s leading humanity to extinction in my opinion:
1. Increased technological capabilities
2. Our lack of ability to control the impacts of these capabilities
3. our lack of incentive to manage those capabilities.
4. Our lack of control over the first 3 points.
I agree that my proposed solutions for the problems we face are reliant on systems currently driving humanity towards extinction.
But I don’t agree with the implied understanding that every system associated with our current path to extinction needs to be removed in order for human extinction to be prevented. I believe that certain aspects within the system can be changed, while larger high-level systems can remain the same. And we can still solve the problem of human extinction this way. For example, Elon Musk trying to get humans to mars is reliant on technology, but it is also a hedge against human-extinction at the same time.
I know I wrote a lot, but I love that you’re making me question assumptions I’ve made that I’ve never even thought to question.
Maybe I don’t currently have the base-knowledge necessary to create helpful high-level plans. But I’m not sure how I can better use my time relative to helping prevent human extinction.
I’ll edit this document with what we’ve talked about here in mind and see what I can do to improve this post.
Thank you! Writing is not my strong suit, but I’m quite confident about the ideas. I’ve written a lot, so it’s alright if you don’t want to engage with all of it. No pressure!
I should explain the thing about suffering better:
We don’t suffer from the state of the world, but from how we think about it. This is crucial. When people try to improve other peoples happiness, they talk about making changes to reality, but that’s the least effective way they could go about it.
I believe this is even sufficient. That we can enjoy life as it is now, without making any changes to it, by simply adopting a better perspective on things.
For example, inequality is a part of life, likely an unavoidable one (The Pareto principle seems to apply in every society no matter its type). And even under inequality, people have been happy, so it’s not even an issue in itself. But now we’re teaching people in lower positions that they’re suffering from injustice, that they’re pitiful, that they’re victims, and we’re teaching everyone else that life could be a paradise, if only evil and immoral influences weren’t preventing it. But this is a sure way to make people unhappy with their existence. To make them imagine how much better things could be, and make comparisons between a naive ideal and reality. Comparison is the thief of joy, and most people are happy with their lot unless you teach them not to be.
Teaching people about suffering doesn’t cause it per se, but if you make people look for suffering, they will find it. If you condition your perception to notice something unpleasant, you will see it everywhere. Training yourself to notice suffering may have side-effects. I have a bit of tinnitus, and I got over it by not paying it any attention. It’s only like this that my mind will start to filter it away, so that I can forget about it.
I don’t think you need pain to motivate people to change, the carrot is as good at the stick. But you need one of the two at minimum (curiousity and other such drives make you act naturally, but do so by making it uncomfortable not to act and rewarding to act)
I don’t think that suffering is bearable because of reward itself, but because of perceived value and meaning. Birth is really painful, but the event is so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Same for people who compete in the olympics, they have found something meaningful enough that a bit of physical pain is a non-issue.
You can teach this to people, but it’s hard to apply. It’s better to help them avoid the sort of nihilism which makes them question whether things are worth it. I think one of the causes of modern nihilism is a lack of aesthetics.
I don’t think understanding translates directly into power. It’s a common problem to think “I know what I should be doing, but I can’t bring myself to do it”. If understanding something granted you power over it, I’d practically be a wizard by now.
You can shift the problem that people attack, but if they have actual problems which put them in danger, I think their focus should remain on these. You can always create dissatisfaction by luring them towards better futures, in a way which benefits both them and others at the same time.
I’m never motivated by moral arguments, but some self-help books are alluring to me because they prey on my selfishness in a healthy manner which also demands responsibility and hard work.
As for the third possibility, that sounds a bit pessimistic. But I don’t think it would be a worthless outcome as long as the image of what could be isn’t a dangerous delusion. Other proposed roads to happiness include “Destroy your ego”, “Be content with nothing”, “Eat SSRIs forever”, and various self-help which asks you to “hustle” and overwork.
I see! That something deeper than preventing suffering. I even think that there’s some conflicts between the two goals. But motivating people towards this should be easier since they’re preventing their own destruction as well, and not just helping other people.
It really is. But it’s interesting to me how both of us haven’t used this information to decrease our own suffering. It’s like I can’t value things if they come too easy, and like I want to find something which is worth my suffering.
But we can agree that wasted suffering is a thing. That state of indecision, being unable to either die or live, yield or fight back, fix the cause of suffering or come to terms with it.
The scarcity mindset is definitely a problem, but many resources are limited. I think a more complex problem would be that people tend to look for bad actions to avoid, rather than positive actions to adopt. It’s all “we need to stop doing X” and “Y is bad” and “Z is evil”. It’s all about reduction, restrictions, avoidance. It simply chokes us. Many good people trap themselves with excessive limitations and become unable to move freely. To simply use positives likes “You should be brave”, “You should stand up for what you believe in”, “You should accept people for who they are” would likely help improve this problem.
I think pain and such are thresholds between competing things. If I’m tired and hungry, whether or not I will cook some food depends on which of the two cause the greatest discomfort.
When procrastinating I’ve also found that deadlines helped me. Once I was backed into a corner and had to take action, I suddenly did. I ran away for as long as I could. The stress from deadlines might also result in dopamine and adrenaline, which help in the short term.
”Acceptance of suffering” is a bit ambigious. Accepting something usually reduces the suffering it causes, and accepting suffering lessens it too. But one can get too used to suffering, which makes them wait too long before they change anything, like the “This is fine” meme or the boiling frog that I mentioned earlier
Logic can defend against mistakes caused by logic, but we did not destroy ourselves in the past when we were less logical than now. I also don’t think that logic reduces suffering. Many philosophers have been unhappy, and many people with down syndrome are all smiles. Less intelligent people often have a sort of wisdom about them, often called “street smarts” when observed, but I think that the lack of knowledge leads them to make less map-territory errors. They’re nearer to reality because they have less knowledge which can mislead them.
I don’t think any human being is intelligent enough to do this (Buddha managed, but the method was crude, reducing not only suffering). What we can do, is manipulate our reward systems. But this leaves us feeling empty, as we cannot fake meaning. Religion basically tells us to live a good life according to a fixed structure, and while most people don’t like this lack of freedom, it probably leads to more happiness in the long run (for the same reason that neuroticism and conscientiousness are inversely correlated)
Yes, the philosophical question of meaning, and the psychology of meaning are different. To solve meaninglessness by proving external meaning (this is impossible, but lets assume you could), is like curing depression by arguing that one should be happy. Meaning is basically investment, engagement, and involvement in something which feels like it has substance.
I recommend just considering humanity as a set of axioms. Like with mathematical axioms, this gives us a foundation. Like with mathematics, it doesn’t matter that this foundation is arbitrary, for no “absolute” foundation can exist (in other words, no set of axioms are more correct than any other. Objectivity does not exist, even in mathematics, everything is inherently relative).
Since attemping to prove axioms is silly, considering human nature (or yourself) as sets of axioms allows you not to worry about meaning and values anymore. If you want humanity to survive, you no longer have to justify this preference.
That would be difficult as it’s my own conclusion. But do you know this quote by Taleb?
”I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”
The smaller the scope, the better. The reason stupid people are happier than smart people is because their scope of consideration is smaller. Being a big fish in a small pond feels good, but increase your scope of comparison to an entire country, and you become a nobody. Politics makes people miserable because the scope is too big, it’s feeding your brain with problems that you have no possibility of solving by yourself. “Community” is essential to human well-being because it’s cohersion on a local level. “family values” are important for the same reason. Theres more crime in bigger cities than smaller ones. Smaller communities have less crazy behaviour, they’re more down-to-earth. A lot of terrible things emerge when you increase the scale of things.
Multiple things on a smaller scale does not seem to have a cost. One family can have great coherence. You can have 100 families living side by side, still great. But force them all to live together in one big house, and you will notice the cost of centralization. You will need hierarchies, coordination, and more rules. This is similar to urbanization. It’s also similar to how the internet went from being millions of websites, to becoming a few 100 popular websites. It’s even similar to companies merging into giants that most people consider evil.
An important antidote is isolation (gatekeeping, borders, personal boundaries, independence, seperation of powers, the single-responsibility-principle, live and let live philosophies, privacy and other rights, preservation).
I wish it was just “reduced efficiency” which was the problem. And sadly, it seems that they optimal way to increase the efficiency between many things is simply to force them towards similarity. For society, this means the destruction of different cultures, the destruction of different ways of thinking, the destruction of different moralities and different social norms.
It’s much more abstract than that. The amount of countries, brands, languages, accents, standards, websites, communities, religious, animals, etc. are all decreasing in numbers. All slowly tending towards 1 thing having monopoly, with this 1 thing being the average of what was merged.
Don’t worry if you don’t get last few points. I’ve tried to explain them before, but I have yet to be understood.
Once a moloch problem has been started, you “either join or die”, like you said. But we can prevent moloch problems from occuring in the first place, by preventing the world from becoming legible enough. For this idea, I was inspired by “Seeing like a state” and this
There’s many prisoners-dilemma like situations in society, which do not cause problems simply because people don’t have enough information to see them. If enough people cannot see them, then the games are only played by a few people. But that’s the only solution to Moloch: Collectively agree not to play (or, I suppose, never stop playing in the first place). The amount of moloch-like problems has increased as a side-effect of the increased accessibility of information. Dating apps ruined dating by making it more legible. As information became more visible, and people had more choices and could make more informed decisions, they became less happy. The hidden information in traditional dating made it more “human”, and less materialistic as well. Since rationalists, academics and intellectuals in general want to increase the openness of information and seem rather naive about the consequences, I don’t want to become either.
I agree with the factors leading to human extinction. My solution is “go back”. This may not be possible, and like you say, we need to use intelligence and technology to go forwards instead. But like the alignment problem, this is rather difficult. I haven’t even taught myself high-level mathematics, I’ve noticed all this through intuition alone.
I think letting small disasters happen naturally could help us prevent black-swan like events. Just like burning small patches of trees can prevent large forest fires. Humanity is doing the opposite. By putting all its eggs in one basket and making things “too big to fail”, we make sure that once a disaster happens, it hits hard.
Related to all of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ (the page mentions black swan risks, Taleb, Ribbonfarms, legibility and centralization). I actually had most of these thought before I knew about this page, so that gives me some confidence that I’m not just connecting unrelated concepts like a schizophrenic.
My argumentation is a little messy, but I don’t want to invest my life in understanding this issue or anything. Kaczynski’s books have a few overlapping arguments with me, and the other books I know are even more crazy, so I can’t recommend them.
But maybe I’m just worrying over nothing. I’m extrapolating things as linear or exponential, but they may be s-shaped or self-correcting cycles. And any partial collapse of society will probably go back to normal or even bring improvements with it in the long run. A lot of people have ruined themselves worrying over things which turned out just fine in the end.