A related game is to think of ways you could accomplish maximal harm not as some kind of puppetmaster who choses educational, philosophical, or political ways-people-do-things, but as who you actually are in real life. I have a few terrible ideas, I’m not going to share them though.
I think it’s a lot easier to break things in real life than to protect or fix them. I don’t think it would take that many effective anti-altruists to destroy the world. In fact, I bet one could do it.
I think it’s a lot easier to break things in real life than to protect or fix them. I don’t think it would take that many effective anti-altruists to destroy the world. In fact, I bet one could do it.
That’s actually my primary objection to “people are crazy, the world is mad, PCs beat NPCs at everything—” if this were the case, I would expect that we would all be dead by now. The fact that we aren’t seems to indicate that either:
PCs never want to destroy the world (this seems dubious)
The superhero movies were right—there are battles in the shadows between good and evil PCs for the fate of the world, and thanks to luck/fate/divine intervention/anthropics the good guys win all the time. (this seems absurd)
PCs aren’t as powerful as we might initially believe (this seems plausible)
For anyone who believes that, I recommend playing a computer game under conditions that they can’t save the game and they have only one attempt. And the game is chosen by someone else, and there is no manual or online walkthrough. And it’s the only game they can play, ever.
Now let’s see how often PCs would beat all the NPCs.
Actually I think I could do this for a lot of video games, if I exercised caution on a level that would make the game unfun. (if it’s an RPG for example, farming up on monsters way lower level than me until the limit of when I stop getting XP, always being the highest level allowed at that part of the storyline, etc). I bet I could even do it for a lot of dangerous puzzle games with no leveling up. I almost made it through Portal 2 without dying, and I was only playing at a level of caution that was fun.
Wait, what? I’d love to see a post describing some beliefs (especially quantity/probability and operational expected results) related to a PC/NPC split among humans (and other beings?)
I fully understand a me/not-me split. And gradiations or even quanta of multiple dimensions of effectiveness make sense. But a statement like “PCs beat NPCs at everything” doesn’t fit my model of the world at all—it’s purely a concept from fiction.
But a statement like “PCs beat NPCs at everything” doesn’t fit my model of the world at all—it’s purely a concept from fiction.
It doesn’t even hold in fiction. Many NPCs are effectively unbeatable by design. They just don’t happen to be fully engaged on achieving the goals of the protagonist.
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None have ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)? Even among those who are creative and convinced enough that the world should be destroyed, I think there is squeamishness and lingering deontological rules restricting most of a large sample of them, which may be all of the very small number that actually exists. It is not sociopaths who want to watch the world burn enough to actually burn it. There’re religious people who think it’s God’s will, but believing that basically disqualifies you from being strategic enough. There’re antinatalists and negative utilitarians, but they seem to be rare and not nearly committed enough to their ideas.
Basically there’s wanting to destroy the world, and there’s wanting it with every fiber of your being, such that you do not flinch away from any method of carrying it out. Some of the antinatalists I linked, balk at the idea of even forced sterilization.
How many PCs (of that caliber, for it is not the average effective altruist who could pull it off even if they turned to the dark side in my opinion), in general (whether desirous of world-destruction or not) do you think exist?
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)?
I don’t think PCs of sufficient caliber do exist, which is my point.
That’s not what I asked. I’m arguing that there aren’t enough PCs of the caliber that you think can’t destroy the world, and I think can, for the world not being destroyed to serve as strong evidence that this class of PCs can’t, when you consider how rare it is to desperately want to (as I described in my last post) destroy the world.
So I asked how many PCs of the highest caliber you think exist there are, not how many are there that can actually destroy the world, and I also asked:
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)?
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)?
Not many. I’d be surprised if there were more than one or two. But if they’re powerful enough, it would only take one or two throughout the course of recent history (and maybe earlier).
I think it might be more useful to instead look at world political order rather than the world itself. It is uncontroversially the case that there are a great many people who consider themselves enemies of the United States and wish to destroy or destabilize it, for instance. Has there never been a true PC among this group?
You have convinced me that destroying America, but not the rest of the world is hard. But I think destroying the world is now a lot easier than it ever was, and it is easier than destroying a particular power and leaving your own country intact. I think there are (or have been) some true PCs that wanted to destroy The US, but failed. I don’t think any of them (at least in recent enough history) wanted to destroy humankind though.
Usually I am very wary of arguments that spit in the face of large numbers. But I seriously think 10B humans is not enough to find such a person among them.
A related game is to think of ways you could accomplish maximal harm not as some kind of puppetmaster who choses educational, philosophical, or political ways-people-do-things, but as who you actually are in real life. I have a few terrible ideas, I’m not going to share them though.
I think it’s a lot easier to break things in real life than to protect or fix them. I don’t think it would take that many effective anti-altruists to destroy the world. In fact, I bet one could do it.
That’s actually my primary objection to “people are crazy, the world is mad, PCs beat NPCs at everything—” if this were the case, I would expect that we would all be dead by now. The fact that we aren’t seems to indicate that either:
PCs never want to destroy the world (this seems dubious)
The superhero movies were right—there are battles in the shadows between good and evil PCs for the fate of the world, and thanks to luck/fate/divine intervention/anthropics the good guys win all the time. (this seems absurd)
PCs aren’t as powerful as we might initially believe (this seems plausible)
For anyone who believes that, I recommend playing a computer game under conditions that they can’t save the game and they have only one attempt. And the game is chosen by someone else, and there is no manual or online walkthrough. And it’s the only game they can play, ever.
Now let’s see how often PCs would beat all the NPCs.
Actually I think I could do this for a lot of video games, if I exercised caution on a level that would make the game unfun. (if it’s an RPG for example, farming up on monsters way lower level than me until the limit of when I stop getting XP, always being the highest level allowed at that part of the storyline, etc). I bet I could even do it for a lot of dangerous puzzle games with no leveling up. I almost made it through Portal 2 without dying, and I was only playing at a level of caution that was fun.
Wait, what? I’d love to see a post describing some beliefs (especially quantity/probability and operational expected results) related to a PC/NPC split among humans (and other beings?)
I fully understand a me/not-me split. And gradiations or even quanta of multiple dimensions of effectiveness make sense. But a statement like “PCs beat NPCs at everything” doesn’t fit my model of the world at all—it’s purely a concept from fiction.
It doesn’t even hold in fiction. Many NPCs are effectively unbeatable by design. They just don’t happen to be fully engaged on achieving the goals of the protagonist.
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None have ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master
Unfortunately, a number of people on LW have this distinction.
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)? Even among those who are creative and convinced enough that the world should be destroyed, I think there is squeamishness and lingering deontological rules restricting most of a large sample of them, which may be all of the very small number that actually exists. It is not sociopaths who want to watch the world burn enough to actually burn it. There’re religious people who think it’s God’s will, but believing that basically disqualifies you from being strategic enough. There’re antinatalists and negative utilitarians, but they seem to be rare and not nearly committed enough to their ideas.
Basically there’s wanting to destroy the world, and there’s wanting it with every fiber of your being, such that you do not flinch away from any method of carrying it out. Some of the antinatalists I linked, balk at the idea of even forced sterilization.
How many PCs (of that caliber, for it is not the average effective altruist who could pull it off even if they turned to the dark side in my opinion), in general (whether desirous of world-destruction or not) do you think exist?
I don’t think PCs of sufficient caliber do exist, which is my point.
That’s not what I asked. I’m arguing that there aren’t enough PCs of the caliber that you think can’t destroy the world, and I think can, for the world not being destroyed to serve as strong evidence that this class of PCs can’t, when you consider how rare it is to desperately want to (as I described in my last post) destroy the world.
So I asked how many PCs of the highest caliber you think exist there are, not how many are there that can actually destroy the world, and I also asked:
Would you mind tabooing “PCs”.
Not many. I’d be surprised if there were more than one or two. But if they’re powerful enough, it would only take one or two throughout the course of recent history (and maybe earlier).
I think it might be more useful to instead look at world political order rather than the world itself. It is uncontroversially the case that there are a great many people who consider themselves enemies of the United States and wish to destroy or destabilize it, for instance. Has there never been a true PC among this group?
You have convinced me that destroying America, but not the rest of the world is hard. But I think destroying the world is now a lot easier than it ever was, and it is easier than destroying a particular power and leaving your own country intact. I think there are (or have been) some true PCs that wanted to destroy The US, but failed. I don’t think any of them (at least in recent enough history) wanted to destroy humankind though.
Usually I am very wary of arguments that spit in the face of large numbers. But I seriously think 10B humans is not enough to find such a person among them.