I do indeed think that during World War 2 it would have been reasonable for many people on LessWrong to participate in the war effort, and think the same is true in this case.
It feels to me like there are three reasons this could be the case:
Counterfactual impact on the war; if the LWers of the time chose to act instead of not act, they shift the probabilities of who ends up winning / what collateral damage happens over the course of the resolution.
Social obligation; if LW conscientiously objected from doing its part, or thought other things were more important, this would be terrible PR / weaken LW’s position after the fact. (Or maybe the reason to be an EA and the reason to sign up to fight in the war have a common cause that’s hard to turn off.)
Ability to impact other things that happen as a result of war participation; sign up, be excellent, get promoted, and then set up good systems that last after the crisis. (This looks like the standard argument for being in public service, except argues it’s an unusually good time to enter it.)
Is this basically what you had in mind, or is there something else I’m missing?
Yep, I think these three perspectives roughly cover why I think it might have been a good idea. I also think that a good number of people we now think of as having had a large impact on x-risk and who were kind of similar to rationalists (e.g. some of the Manhattan Project scientists) had that impact because they participated in that effort (and the followup cold-war period) for roughly the three reasons you cite.
It seems important to note that, from my reading of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, the biggest motivator for most of the physicists was the fear that the Nazis would get to the bomb first. This is technically under Vaniver’s first point above, but it has a different tenor: it wasn’t a dispassionate assessment of counterfactual impact, it was visceral fear.
Relevant quote:
Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism. The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression. The race was therefore not merely against Germany. As Roosevelt apparently sensed, the race was against time. (Rhodes, Chapter 12)
I’m not sure what the relevance to the current corona situation is.
It feels to me like there are three reasons this could be the case:
Counterfactual impact on the war; if the LWers of the time chose to act instead of not act, they shift the probabilities of who ends up winning / what collateral damage happens over the course of the resolution.
Social obligation; if LW conscientiously objected from doing its part, or thought other things were more important, this would be terrible PR / weaken LW’s position after the fact. (Or maybe the reason to be an EA and the reason to sign up to fight in the war have a common cause that’s hard to turn off.)
Ability to impact other things that happen as a result of war participation; sign up, be excellent, get promoted, and then set up good systems that last after the crisis. (This looks like the standard argument for being in public service, except argues it’s an unusually good time to enter it.)
Is this basically what you had in mind, or is there something else I’m missing?
Yep, I think these three perspectives roughly cover why I think it might have been a good idea. I also think that a good number of people we now think of as having had a large impact on x-risk and who were kind of similar to rationalists (e.g. some of the Manhattan Project scientists) had that impact because they participated in that effort (and the followup cold-war period) for roughly the three reasons you cite.
It seems important to note that, from my reading of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, the biggest motivator for most of the physicists was the fear that the Nazis would get to the bomb first. This is technically under Vaniver’s first point above, but it has a different tenor: it wasn’t a dispassionate assessment of counterfactual impact, it was visceral fear.
Relevant quote:
I’m not sure what the relevance to the current corona situation is.