One flaw in this argument could be the assumption that “Clinton will maintain the Level B status quo” implicitly means “everything is fine now and therefor will continue to be fine for much the same reasons”.
Eliezer views a Trump election as accepting a higher% risk of annihilation for essentially no reason. What if it’s not no reason? What if all the Level B players are just wrong, irrationally buying into a status quo where we need to be engaging in brinksmanship with Russia and China and fighting ground battles in the Middle East in order to defend ourselves? You have to admit it’s possible, right? “Smart people can converge en mass on a stupid conclusion” is practically a tenet of our community.
Hillary’s campaign strategy has already shown this in principle. The obviously intelligent party elite all converged on a losing strategy, and repeatedly doubled down on it. It is reminiscent of our foreign policy.
Saying “we haven’t had a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, therefor our foreign policy and diplomatic strategy is good” is an obvious fallacy. Maybe we’ve just been lucky. Shit, maybe we’ve been unlucky and we’re having this conversation due to anthropic miracles.
The last countless elections have seen candidates running on “more humble foreign policy” and then changing their stance once in office. There a semi-joke that the new president is taken into a smoke filled room and told what is really going on. Maybe so, but in that case, we’re putting a lot of unexamined faith in the assessments of the people in that smoke filled room.
None of this is so much my strongly held beliefs as my attempt to find flaw with the “nuclear blackmail” argument.
The argument rests on that assumption, mostly clearly shown in the quote:
“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists, thinking that civilization is robust, the current state is bad, …”
If we are stuck in a locally optimal valley, then a high-variance candidate is more likely to push us out of it and into another valley. Whether that’s a good idea depends on if our current state is overall good or bad.
Personally I think we should be taking more chances and trying to find a better equilibrium. That means occasionally rocking the boat, but if you never do it you’re condemning yourself to stagnation.
Whether that’s a good idea depends on if our current state is overall good or bad.
No, it depends on whether random changes to our current state are an improvement or aren’t.
If you would make a change that requires all high level government burocrates to be superforcasters in their domains of expertise, it would likely be a huge improvement and you could speak of the resulting government as being good and the present one as bad.
That doesn’t mean that randomly breaking things and creating change improves the bad current state.
A lot of possible changes lead to WW3 or otherwise end civilisation.
I think you are missing the point. If I have a random variable between 0 and 10, than “random” changes will cause a regression to the mean. Thus, if the current state is bad, say 1, a many “random” changes are likely to be an improvement.
More simply, if our state is bad, we should take more risks.
The model of a scalar between 0 and 10 is bad because it doesn’t show the high dimensional nature with many different scenario that real world society has.
We have a huge decline in violence in the post-WWII are. The mean of history has a lot more violence as Steven Pinker lays out in “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.
None of this is a much my strongly held beliefs as my attempt to find flaw with the “nuclear blackmail” argument.
I don’t understand. Could you correct the grammar mistakes or rephrase that?
The way I understand the argument isn’t that the status quo in the level B game is perfect. It isn’t that Trump is a bad choice because his level B strategy is taking too much risk and therefore bad. I understand the argument as saying: “Trump doesn’t even realize that there is a level B game going on and even when he finds out he will be unfit to play in that game”.
This is a really good comment, and I would love to hear responses to objections of this flavour from Eliezer etc.
Saying “we haven’t had a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, therefor our foreign policy and diplomatic strategy is good” is an obvious fallacy. Maybe we’ve just been lucky.
I mean it’s less about whether or not it’s good as much as it is trying to work out the likelihood of whether policies resulting from Trump’s election are going to be worse. You can presuppose that current policies are awful and still think that Trump is likely to make things much worse.
One flaw in this argument could be the assumption that “Clinton will maintain the Level B status quo” implicitly means “everything is fine now and therefor will continue to be fine for much the same reasons”.
Eliezer views a Trump election as accepting a higher% risk of annihilation for essentially no reason. What if it’s not no reason? What if all the Level B players are just wrong, irrationally buying into a status quo where we need to be engaging in brinksmanship with Russia and China and fighting ground battles in the Middle East in order to defend ourselves? You have to admit it’s possible, right? “Smart people can converge en mass on a stupid conclusion” is practically a tenet of our community.
Hillary’s campaign strategy has already shown this in principle. The obviously intelligent party elite all converged on a losing strategy, and repeatedly doubled down on it. It is reminiscent of our foreign policy.
Saying “we haven’t had a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, therefor our foreign policy and diplomatic strategy is good” is an obvious fallacy. Maybe we’ve just been lucky. Shit, maybe we’ve been unlucky and we’re having this conversation due to anthropic miracles.
The last countless elections have seen candidates running on “more humble foreign policy” and then changing their stance once in office. There a semi-joke that the new president is taken into a smoke filled room and told what is really going on. Maybe so, but in that case, we’re putting a lot of unexamined faith in the assessments of the people in that smoke filled room.
None of this is so much my strongly held beliefs as my attempt to find flaw with the “nuclear blackmail” argument.
That’s a strawman. EY isn’t saying that our foreign policy is good.
The argument rests on that assumption, mostly clearly shown in the quote:
If we are stuck in a locally optimal valley, then a high-variance candidate is more likely to push us out of it and into another valley. Whether that’s a good idea depends on if our current state is overall good or bad.
Personally I think we should be taking more chances and trying to find a better equilibrium. That means occasionally rocking the boat, but if you never do it you’re condemning yourself to stagnation.
No, it depends on whether random changes to our current state are an improvement or aren’t.
If you would make a change that requires all high level government burocrates to be superforcasters in their domains of expertise, it would likely be a huge improvement and you could speak of the resulting government as being good and the present one as bad.
That doesn’t mean that randomly breaking things and creating change improves the bad current state.
A lot of possible changes lead to WW3 or otherwise end civilisation.
I think you are missing the point. If I have a random variable between 0 and 10, than “random” changes will cause a regression to the mean. Thus, if the current state is bad, say 1, a many “random” changes are likely to be an improvement.
More simply, if our state is bad, we should take more risks.
The model of a scalar between 0 and 10 is bad because it doesn’t show the high dimensional nature with many different scenario that real world society has.
We have a huge decline in violence in the post-WWII are. The mean of history has a lot more violence as Steven Pinker lays out in “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.
I don’t understand. Could you correct the grammar mistakes or rephrase that?
The way I understand the argument isn’t that the status quo in the level B game is perfect. It isn’t that Trump is a bad choice because his level B strategy is taking too much risk and therefore bad. I understand the argument as saying: “Trump doesn’t even realize that there is a level B game going on and even when he finds out he will be unfit to play in that game”.
This is a really good comment, and I would love to hear responses to objections of this flavour from Eliezer etc.
I mean it’s less about whether or not it’s good as much as it is trying to work out the likelihood of whether policies resulting from Trump’s election are going to be worse. You can presuppose that current policies are awful and still think that Trump is likely to make things much worse.