My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.
“Greetings, Comrade Acty. Today the Collective has decreed that you...” Do these words make your heart skip a beat in joyous anticipation, no matter how they continue?
Have you read “Brave New World”? “1984″? “With Folded Hands”? Do those depict societies you find attractive?
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in.
Exinanition is an attractive fantasy for some, but personal fantasies are not a foundation to build a society on.
What I can do is think: a lot of aspects of the current world (war, poverty, disease etc) make me really angry and seem like they also hurt other people other than me, and if I were to absolutely annihilate those things, the world would look like a better place to me and would also better satisfy others’ preferences. So I’m going to do that.
You are clearly intelligent, but do you think? You have described the rich intellectual life at your school, but how much of that activity is of the sort that can solve a problem in the real world, rather than a facility at making complex patterns out of ideas? The visions that you have laid out here merely imagine problems solved. People will not do as you would want? Then they will be made to. How? “On pain of death.” How can the executioners be trusted? They will be tested to ensure they use the power well.
How will they be tested? Who tests them? How does this system ever come into existence? I’m sure your imagination can come up with answers to all these questions, that you can slot into a larger and larger story. But it would be an exercise in creative fiction, an exercise in invisible dragonology.
And all springing from “My intuitions say that specialism increases output.”
I’m going to pursue the elimination of suffering until the suffering stops.
Exterminate all life, then. That will stop the suffering.
I’m sure you’re really smart, and will go far. I’m concerned about the direction, though. Right now, I’m looking at an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.
That’s why I don’t want to make such a society. I don’t want to do it. It is a crazy idea that I dreamed up by imagining all the things that I want, scaled up to 11. It is merely a demonstration of why I feel very strongly that I should not rely on the things I want
Wait a minute. You don’t want them, or you do want them but shouldn’t rely on what you want?
And I’m not just nitpicking here. This is why people are having bad reactions. On one level, you don’t want those things, and on another you do. Seriously mixed messages.
Also, if you are physically there with your foot on someone’s toe, that triggers your emotional instincts that say that you shouldn’t cause pain. If you are doing things which cause some person to get hurt in some faraway place where you can’t see it, that doesn’t. I’m sure that many of the people who decided to use terrorism as an excuse for NSA surveillance won’t step on people’s toes or hurt any cats. If anything, their desire not to hurt people makes it worse. “We have to do these things for everyone’s own good, that way nobody gets hurt!”
Currently my thought processes go something more like: “When I think about the things that make me happy, I come up with a list like meritocracy and unity and productivity and strong central authority. I don’t come up with things like freedom. Taking those things to their logical conclusion, I should propose a society designed like so… wait… Oh my god that’s terrifying, I’ve just come up with a society that the mere description of causes other people to want to run screaming, this is bad, RED ALERT, SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY BRAIN. I should distrust my moral intuitions. I should place increased trust in ideas like doing science to see what makes people happiest and then doing that, because clearly just listening to my moral intuitions is a terrible way to figure out what will make other people happy. In fact, before I do anything likely to significantly change anyone else’s life, I should do some research or test it on a small scale in order to check whether or not it will make them happy, because clearly just listening to what I want/like is a terrible idea.”
I’m not so sure you should distrust your intuitions here. I mean, let’s be frank, the same people who will rave about how every left-wing idea from liberal feminism to state socialism is absolutely terrible, evil, and tyrannical will, themselves, manage to reconstruct most of the same moral intuitions if left alone on their own blogs. I mean, sure, they’ll call it “neoreaction”, but it’s not actually that fundamentally different from Stalinism. On the more moderate end of the scale, you should take account of the fact that anti-state right-wing ideologies in Anglo countries right now are unusually opposed to state and hierarchy across the space of all human societies ever, including present-day ones.
POINT BEING, sometimes you should distrust your distrust of certain intuitions, and ask simply, “How far is this intuition from the mean human across history?” If it’s close, actually, then you shouldn’t treat it as, “Something [UNUSUAL] is wrong with my brain.” The intuition is often still wrong, but it’s wrong in the way most human intuitions are wrong rather than because you have some particular moral defect.
So if the “motivate yourself by thinking about a great world and working towards it” is a terrible option for me because my brain’s imagine-great-worlds function is messed up, then clearly I need to look for an alternative motivation. And “motivate yourself by thinking about clearly evil things like death and disease and suffering and then trying to eliminate them” is a good alternative.
See, the funny thing is, I can understand this sentiment, because my imagine-great-worlds function is messed-up in exactly the opposite way. When I try to imagine great worlds, I don’t imagine worlds full of disciplined workers marching boldly forth under the command of strong, wise, meritorious leadership for the Greater Good—that’s my “boring parts of Shinji and Warhammer 40k” memories.
Instead, my “sample great worlds” function outputs largely equal societies in which people relate to each-other as friends and comrades, the need to march boldly forth for anything when you don’t really want to has been long-since abolished, and people spend their time coming up with new and original ways to have fun in the happy sunlight, while also re-terraforming the Earth, colonizing the rest of the Solar System, and figuring out ways to build interstellar travel (even for digitized uploads) that can genuinely survive the interstellar void to establish colonies further-out.
I am deeply disturbed to find that a great portion of “the masses” or “the real people, outside the internet” seem to, on some level, actually feel that being oppressed and exploited makes their lives meaningful, and that freedom and happiness is value-destroying, and that this is what’s at the root of all that reactionary rhetoric about “our values” and “our traditions”… but I can’t actually bring myself to say that they ought to be destroyed for being wired that way.
I just kinda want some corner of the world to have your and my kinds of wiring, where Progress is supposed to achieve greater freedom, happiness, and entanglement over time, and we can come up with our own damn fates rather than getting terminally depressed because nobody forced one on us.
Likewise, I can imagine that a lot of these goddamn Americans are wired in such a way that “being made to do anything by anyone else, ever” seems terminally evil to them. Meh, give them a planetoid.
On some level, you do need a motivation, so it would be foolish to say that anger is a bad reason to do things. I would certainly never tell you to do only things you are indifferent about.
On another level, though, doing things out of strong anger causes you to ignore evidence, think short term, ignore collateral damage, etc. just as much as doing things because they make you happy does. You think that describing the society that will make you feel happy makes people run screaming? Describing the society that would alleviate your anger will make people run screaming too—in fact it already has made people run screaming in this very thread.
Or at least, it has a bad track record in the real world. Look at the things that people have done because they are really angry about terrorism.
My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.
I think there’s an implicit premise or two that you may have mentally included but failed to express, running along the lines of:
The all-controlling state is run by completely benevolent beings who are devoted to their duty and never make errors.
Sans such a premise, one lazy bureaucrat cribbing his cubicle neighbor’s allocations, or a sloppy one switching the numbers on two careers, can cause a hell of a lot of pain by assigning an inappropriate set of tasks for people to do. Zero say and the death penalty for disobedience then makes the pain practically irremediable. A lot of the reason for weak and ineffective government is trying to mitigate and limit government’s ability to do terribly terribly wicked things, because governments are often highly skilled at doing terribly terribly wicked things, and in unique positions to do so, and can do so by minor accident. You seem to have ignored the possibility of anything going wrong when following your intuition.
Moreover, there’s a second possible implicit premise:
These angels hold exactly and only the values shared by all mankind, and correct knowledge about everything.
Imagine someone with different values or beliefs in charge of that all-controlling state with the death penalty. For instance, I have previously observed that Boko Haram has a sliver of a valid point in their criticism of Western education when noting that it appears to have been a major driver in causing Western fertility rates to drop below replacement and show no sign of recovery. Obviously you can’t have a wonderful future full of happy people if humans have gone extinct, therefore the Boko Haram state bans Western education on pain of death. For those already poisoned by it, such as you, you will spend your next ten years remedially bearing and rearing children and you are henceforth forbidden access to any and all reading material beyond instructions on diaper packaging. Boko Haram is confident that this is the optimal career for you and that they’re maximizing the integral of human happiness over time, despite how much you may scream in the short term at the idea.
With such premises spelled out, I predict people wouldn’t object to your ideal world so much as they’d object to the grossly unrealistic prospect. But without such, you’re proposing a totalitarian dictatorship and triggering a hell of a lot of warning signs and heuristics and pattern-matching to slavery, tyranny, the Soviet Union, and various other terrible bad things where one party holds absolute power to tell other people how to live their life.
“But it’s a benevolent dictatorship”, I imagine you saying. Pull the other one, it has bells on. The neoreactionaries at least have a proposed incentive structure to encourage the dictator to be benevolent in their proposal to bring back monarchy. (TL;DR taxes go into the king’s purse giving the king a long planning horizon) What have you got? Remember, you are one in seven billion people, you will almost certainly not be in charge of this all-powerful state if it’s ever implemented, and when you do your safety design you should imagine it being in the hands of randoms at the least, and of enemies if you want to display caution.
If you are “procrastinate-y” you wouldn’t be able to survive this state yourself. Following a set schedule every moment for the rest of your life is very, very difficult and it is unlikely that you would be able to do it, so you would soon be dead yourself in this state.
An ideology would just bias my science and make me worse.
I don’t know you well enough to say, but it’s quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology.
For clear thinking it’s very useful to understand one’s own ideological positions.
There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.
Oh, I definitely have some kind of inbuilt ideology—it’s just that right now, I’m consciously trying to suppress/ignore it. It doesn’t seem to converge with what most other humans want. I’d rather treat it as a bias, and try and compensate for it, in order to serve my higher level goals of satisfying people’s preferences and increasing happiness and decreasing suffering and doing correct true science.
we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say. Nobody would have property, you would just contribute towards the state of human happiness when the state told you to and then you would be assigned the goods you needed by the state. To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in
Why do you call inhabitants of such a state “citizens”? They are slaves.
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in
Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.
Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.
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“Greetings, Comrade Acty. Today the Collective has decreed that you...” Do these words make your heart skip a beat in joyous anticipation, no matter how they continue?
Have you read “Brave New World”? “1984″? “With Folded Hands”? Do those depict societies you find attractive?
Exinanition is an attractive fantasy for some, but personal fantasies are not a foundation to build a society on.
You are clearly intelligent, but do you think? You have described the rich intellectual life at your school, but how much of that activity is of the sort that can solve a problem in the real world, rather than a facility at making complex patterns out of ideas? The visions that you have laid out here merely imagine problems solved. People will not do as you would want? Then they will be made to. How? “On pain of death.” How can the executioners be trusted? They will be tested to ensure they use the power well.
How will they be tested? Who tests them? How does this system ever come into existence? I’m sure your imagination can come up with answers to all these questions, that you can slot into a larger and larger story. But it would be an exercise in creative fiction, an exercise in invisible dragonology.
And all springing from “My intuitions say that specialism increases output.”
Exterminate all life, then. That will stop the suffering.
I’m sure you’re really smart, and will go far. I’m concerned about the direction, though. Right now, I’m looking at an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.
--
Wait a minute. You don’t want them, or you do want them but shouldn’t rely on what you want?
And I’m not just nitpicking here. This is why people are having bad reactions. On one level, you don’t want those things, and on another you do. Seriously mixed messages.
Also, if you are physically there with your foot on someone’s toe, that triggers your emotional instincts that say that you shouldn’t cause pain. If you are doing things which cause some person to get hurt in some faraway place where you can’t see it, that doesn’t. I’m sure that many of the people who decided to use terrorism as an excuse for NSA surveillance won’t step on people’s toes or hurt any cats. If anything, their desire not to hurt people makes it worse. “We have to do these things for everyone’s own good, that way nobody gets hurt!”
--
I’m not so sure you should distrust your intuitions here. I mean, let’s be frank, the same people who will rave about how every left-wing idea from liberal feminism to state socialism is absolutely terrible, evil, and tyrannical will, themselves, manage to reconstruct most of the same moral intuitions if left alone on their own blogs. I mean, sure, they’ll call it “neoreaction”, but it’s not actually that fundamentally different from Stalinism. On the more moderate end of the scale, you should take account of the fact that anti-state right-wing ideologies in Anglo countries right now are unusually opposed to state and hierarchy across the space of all human societies ever, including present-day ones.
POINT BEING, sometimes you should distrust your distrust of certain intuitions, and ask simply, “How far is this intuition from the mean human across history?” If it’s close, actually, then you shouldn’t treat it as, “Something [UNUSUAL] is wrong with my brain.” The intuition is often still wrong, but it’s wrong in the way most human intuitions are wrong rather than because you have some particular moral defect.
See, the funny thing is, I can understand this sentiment, because my imagine-great-worlds function is messed-up in exactly the opposite way. When I try to imagine great worlds, I don’t imagine worlds full of disciplined workers marching boldly forth under the command of strong, wise, meritorious leadership for the Greater Good—that’s my “boring parts of Shinji and Warhammer 40k” memories.
Instead, my “sample great worlds” function outputs largely equal societies in which people relate to each-other as friends and comrades, the need to march boldly forth for anything when you don’t really want to has been long-since abolished, and people spend their time coming up with new and original ways to have fun in the happy sunlight, while also re-terraforming the Earth, colonizing the rest of the Solar System, and figuring out ways to build interstellar travel (even for digitized uploads) that can genuinely survive the interstellar void to establish colonies further-out.
I consider this deeply messed-up because everyone always tells me that their lives would be meaningless if not for the drudgery (which is actually what the linked post is trying to refute).
I am deeply disturbed to find that a great portion of “the masses” or “the real people, outside the internet” seem to, on some level, actually feel that being oppressed and exploited makes their lives meaningful, and that freedom and happiness is value-destroying, and that this is what’s at the root of all that reactionary rhetoric about “our values” and “our traditions”… but I can’t actually bring myself to say that they ought to be destroyed for being wired that way.
I just kinda want some corner of the world to have your and my kinds of wiring, where Progress is supposed to achieve greater freedom, happiness, and entanglement over time, and we can come up with our own damn fates rather than getting terminally depressed because nobody forced one on us.
Likewise, I can imagine that a lot of these goddamn Americans are wired in such a way that “being made to do anything by anyone else, ever” seems terminally evil to them. Meh, give them a planetoid.
On some level, you do need a motivation, so it would be foolish to say that anger is a bad reason to do things. I would certainly never tell you to do only things you are indifferent about.
On another level, though, doing things out of strong anger causes you to ignore evidence, think short term, ignore collateral damage, etc. just as much as doing things because they make you happy does. You think that describing the society that will make you feel happy makes people run screaming? Describing the society that would alleviate your anger will make people run screaming too—in fact it already has made people run screaming in this very thread.
Or at least, it has a bad track record in the real world. Look at the things that people have done because they are really angry about terrorism.
And for one level less meta, look at the terrorism that people have done because they are so angry about something.
Of course, while most people would not want to live in BNW, most characters in BNW would not want to live in our society.
I think there’s an implicit premise or two that you may have mentally included but failed to express, running along the lines of:
The all-controlling state is run by completely benevolent beings who are devoted to their duty and never make errors.
Sans such a premise, one lazy bureaucrat cribbing his cubicle neighbor’s allocations, or a sloppy one switching the numbers on two careers, can cause a hell of a lot of pain by assigning an inappropriate set of tasks for people to do. Zero say and the death penalty for disobedience then makes the pain practically irremediable. A lot of the reason for weak and ineffective government is trying to mitigate and limit government’s ability to do terribly terribly wicked things, because governments are often highly skilled at doing terribly terribly wicked things, and in unique positions to do so, and can do so by minor accident. You seem to have ignored the possibility of anything going wrong when following your intuition.
Moreover, there’s a second possible implicit premise:
These angels hold exactly and only the values shared by all mankind, and correct knowledge about everything.
Imagine someone with different values or beliefs in charge of that all-controlling state with the death penalty. For instance, I have previously observed that Boko Haram has a sliver of a valid point in their criticism of Western education when noting that it appears to have been a major driver in causing Western fertility rates to drop below replacement and show no sign of recovery. Obviously you can’t have a wonderful future full of happy people if humans have gone extinct, therefore the Boko Haram state bans Western education on pain of death. For those already poisoned by it, such as you, you will spend your next ten years remedially bearing and rearing children and you are henceforth forbidden access to any and all reading material beyond instructions on diaper packaging. Boko Haram is confident that this is the optimal career for you and that they’re maximizing the integral of human happiness over time, despite how much you may scream in the short term at the idea.
With such premises spelled out, I predict people wouldn’t object to your ideal world so much as they’d object to the grossly unrealistic prospect. But without such, you’re proposing a totalitarian dictatorship and triggering a hell of a lot of warning signs and heuristics and pattern-matching to slavery, tyranny, the Soviet Union, and various other terrible bad things where one party holds absolute power to tell other people how to live their life.
“But it’s a benevolent dictatorship”, I imagine you saying. Pull the other one, it has bells on. The neoreactionaries at least have a proposed incentive structure to encourage the dictator to be benevolent in their proposal to bring back monarchy. (TL;DR taxes go into the king’s purse giving the king a long planning horizon) What have you got? Remember, you are one in seven billion people, you will almost certainly not be in charge of this all-powerful state if it’s ever implemented, and when you do your safety design you should imagine it being in the hands of randoms at the least, and of enemies if you want to display caution.
--
There are reasons to suspect the tests would not work. “It would be nice to think that you can trust powerful people who are aware that power corrupts. But this turns out not to be the case.” (Content Note: killing, mild racism.)
If you are “procrastinate-y” you wouldn’t be able to survive this state yourself. Following a set schedule every moment for the rest of your life is very, very difficult and it is unlikely that you would be able to do it, so you would soon be dead yourself in this state.
I don’t know you well enough to say, but it’s quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology. For clear thinking it’s very useful to understand one’s own ideological positions.
There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.
Oh, I definitely have some kind of inbuilt ideology—it’s just that right now, I’m consciously trying to suppress/ignore it. It doesn’t seem to converge with what most other humans want. I’d rather treat it as a bias, and try and compensate for it, in order to serve my higher level goals of satisfying people’s preferences and increasing happiness and decreasing suffering and doing correct true science.
Ignoring something and working around a bias are two different things.
Why do you call inhabitants of such a state “citizens”? They are slaves.
Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.
...and do you understand why?
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