I think you’re misunderstanding the notion of responsibility that consequentialist reasoning theories such as Utilitarianism argue for. The nuance here is that responsibility does not entail that you must control everything. That is fundamentally unrealistic and goes against the practical nature of consequentialism. Rather, the notion of responsibility would be better expressed as:
An agent is personally responsible for everything that is reasonably within their power to control.
This coincides with the notion of there being a locus of control, which is to say that there are some thing we can directly affect in the universe, and other things (most things) that are beyond our capacity to influence, and therefore beyond our personal responsibility.
Secondly, I take issue with the idea that this notion of responsibility is somehow inherently adversarial. On the contrary, I think it encourages agents to cooperate and form alliances for the purposes of achieving common goals such as the greatest good. This naturally tends to be associated with granting other agents as much autonomy as possible because this usually enables them to maximize their happiness, because a rational Utilitarian will understand that individuals tend to understand their own preferences and what makes them happy, better than anyone else. This is arguably why John Stuart Mill and many modern day Utilitarians are also principled liberals.
Only someone suffering from delusions of grandeur would be so paternalistic as to assume they know better than the people themselves what is good for them and try to take away their control and resources in the way that you describe. I personally tend towards something I call Non-Interference Code, as a heuristic for practical ethical decision making.
Benquo isn’t saying that these attitudes necessarily follow, but that in practice he’s seen it happen. There is a lot of unspoken LessWrong / SIAI history here. Eliezer Yudkowsky and many others “at the top” of SIAI felt personally responsible for the fate of the human race. EY believed he needed to develop an AI to save humanity, but for many years he would only discuss his thoughts on AI with one other person, not trusting even the other people in SIAI, and requiring them to leave the area when the two of them talked about AI. (For all I know, he still does that.) And his plans basically involve creating an AI to become world dictator and stop anybody else from making an AI. All of that is reducing the agency of others “for their own good.”
This secrecy was endemic at SIAI; when I’ve walked around NYC with their senior members, sometimes 2 or 3 people would gather together and whisper, and would ask anyone who got too close to please walk further away, because the ideas they were discussing were “too dangerous” to share with the rest of the group.
Well, that’s… unfortunate. I apparently don’t hang around in the same circles, because I have not seen this kind of behaviour among the Effective Altruists I know.
I think you’re misunderstanding the notion of responsibility that consequentialist reasoning theories such as Utilitarianism argue for. The nuance here is that responsibility does not entail that you must control everything. That is fundamentally unrealistic and goes against the practical nature of consequentialism. Rather, the notion of responsibility would be better expressed as:
An agent is personally responsible for everything that is reasonably within their power to control.
This coincides with the notion of there being a locus of control, which is to say that there are some thing we can directly affect in the universe, and other things (most things) that are beyond our capacity to influence, and therefore beyond our personal responsibility.
Secondly, I take issue with the idea that this notion of responsibility is somehow inherently adversarial. On the contrary, I think it encourages agents to cooperate and form alliances for the purposes of achieving common goals such as the greatest good. This naturally tends to be associated with granting other agents as much autonomy as possible because this usually enables them to maximize their happiness, because a rational Utilitarian will understand that individuals tend to understand their own preferences and what makes them happy, better than anyone else. This is arguably why John Stuart Mill and many modern day Utilitarians are also principled liberals.
Only someone suffering from delusions of grandeur would be so paternalistic as to assume they know better than the people themselves what is good for them and try to take away their control and resources in the way that you describe. I personally tend towards something I call Non-Interference Code, as a heuristic for practical ethical decision making.
Benquo isn’t saying that these attitudes necessarily follow, but that in practice he’s seen it happen. There is a lot of unspoken LessWrong / SIAI history here. Eliezer Yudkowsky and many others “at the top” of SIAI felt personally responsible for the fate of the human race. EY believed he needed to develop an AI to save humanity, but for many years he would only discuss his thoughts on AI with one other person, not trusting even the other people in SIAI, and requiring them to leave the area when the two of them talked about AI. (For all I know, he still does that.) And his plans basically involve creating an AI to become world dictator and stop anybody else from making an AI. All of that is reducing the agency of others “for their own good.”
This secrecy was endemic at SIAI; when I’ve walked around NYC with their senior members, sometimes 2 or 3 people would gather together and whisper, and would ask anyone who got too close to please walk further away, because the ideas they were discussing were “too dangerous” to share with the rest of the group.
Well, that’s… unfortunate. I apparently don’t hang around in the same circles, because I have not seen this kind of behaviour among the Effective Altruists I know.