“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,”
I don’t think that’s really a fair charge.
Like, reading through Yudkowsky’s stuff, his LW writings and HPMOR, there is the persistent sense that he is 2 guys.
One guy is like “Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented”. I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like “Here are my values!” That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff is not sarcastic.
It is the second guy who writes his facebook posts.
So when he is accusing us of not paying sufficient attention to the consequences of a Trump victory, I’m more inclined to say that we paid attention, but we don’t value those consequences the way he does.
To spell it out: I don’t share (and I don’t think my side shares), Yudkowsky’s fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I’ve got a duty to preserve every pulse.
That belief, the idea that any beating heart means we have a responsibility to keep it that way, leads to the insane situations where the bad guys can basically take themselves hostage. It is silly.
The whole “most variations from the equilibria are disasters”, only really works if you share my guy’s mania about valuing the other team’s welfare. In terms of America’s interests, Trump is a much safer choice than Hillary. Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia). Hillary → Putin is a chilly, fraught relationship, with potential flashpoints in Crimea / Syria. Trump → Putin is less likely to involve conflict. Putin will thug around his neighbors, Trump will (probably not) build a wall between us and Mexico.
I didn’t reply to Yudkowsky’s facebook post. I don’t know him, and it wouldn’t be my place. But he is making a typical leftist mistake, which is dismissing the right as a defective left.
You’ve seen it everywhere. The left can’t grok the idea that the right values different things, and just can’t stop proving that the left’s means lead to the left’s ends way better than the right’s means lead to the left’s ends. “What’s the Matter With Kansas”, if you want a perfect example. The Home School wars if you want it rubbed in your face.
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity. We’d like to replace our interventionist foreign policy with an isolationist one.
LW isn’t a place to argue about politics, so I’m not going to go into why we have the values that we have here. I just want to point out that Yudkowsky is making the factual mistake of modeling us as being shitty at achieving his goals, when in truth we are canny at achieving our own.
I’m a right winger and I totally disagree with this comment.
For me, conservatism is about willingness to face up to the hard facts about reality. I’m just as cosmopolitan in my values as liberals are—but I’m not naive about how to go about achieving them. My goal is to actually help people, not show all my friends how progressive I am.
In practice I think US stability is extremely important for the entire world. Which means I’m against giving impulsive people the nuclear codes, and I’m also against Hillary Clinton’s “invade the world, invite the world” foreign policy.
Also: I don’t like Yudkowsky, but I would like him and the people in his circle to take criticism seriously, so… could we maybe start spelling his name correctly? It ends in a y. (I think Yudkowsky himself is probably a lost cause, but there are a lot of smart, rational people in his thrall who should not be. And many of them will take the time to read and seriously evaluate critical arguments if they’re well-presented.)
Very well—the reason I asked is because it seems to be not at all obvious with how accepting hard truths about race and immigration should be made to align with being
It’s puzzling that you’ve termed these risks “long term” when America is currently being rocked with race riots and Europe has an ongoing refugee crisis.
Well, you could see the issues America is facing as being a long-term effect of importing slaves from Africa and liberalization of immigration laws in the 1960s. But racial tension is not the only thing I’m worried about.
While I’m horrified by your values, I thank you for the clear exposition. And I think you made, although implicitly, an interesting point: outside of our stable equilibrium, things are a generally a net negative if you factor in the welfare of all humanity. But if you consider only US’ well being, things might be a net positive. This I believe is so far from Yudkowsky’s set of values that it was impossible for him to envision.
LW isn’t a place to argue about politics, so I’m not going to go into why we have the values that we have here.
Well, an easy guess would be that you believe the world to be a zero-sum game: if that’s the case, then better have your team win big at the expense of everyone else than having everybody live on the scraps.
But if you consider only US’ well being, things might be a net positive.
If actions can be traced down to cause a whole lot of suffering, then it might be less certain to get a net positive outcome (for example due to empathic people revolting against these actions or feelings of guilt harming education and innovation; exodus of professionals to metropolitan regions in Europe, Asia etc.).
Like, reading through Yudkowsky’s stuff, his LW writings and HPMOR, there is the persistent sense that he is 2 guys.
One guy is like “Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented”. I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like “Here are my values!” That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff is not sarcastic.
It is the second guy who writes his facebook posts.
Yes, I agree with this sentiment and am relieved someone else communicated it so I didn’t have to work out how to phrase it.
I don’t share (and I don’t think my side shares), Yudkowsky’s fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I’ve got a duty to preserve every pulse.
I don’t think Yudkowsky think malaria nets are the best use of money anyway, even if they are in the short term the current clearest estimate as to where to put your money in in order to maximise lives saved. In that sense I don’t think you disagree with him, he doesn’t fetishize preserving pulses in the same way that you don’t. Or at least, that’s what I remember reading. First thing I could find corroborating that model of his viewpoint is his interview with Horgan.
There is a conceivable world where there is no intelligence explosion and no superintelligence. Or where, a related but logically distinct proposition, the tricks that machine learning experts will inevitably build up for controlling infrahuman AIs carry over pretty well to the human-equivalent and superhuman regime. Or where moral internalism is true and therefore all sufficiently advanced AIs are inevitably nice. In conceivable worlds like that, all the work and worry of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute comes to nothing and was never necessary in the first place, representing some lost number of mosquito nets that could otherwise have been bought by the Against Malaria Foundation.
There’s also a conceivable world where you work hard and fight malaria, where you work hard and keep the carbon emissions to not much worse than they are already (or use geoengineering to mitigate mistakes already made). And then it ends up making no difference because your civilization failed to solve the AI alignment problem, and all the children you saved with those malaria nets grew up only to be killed by nanomachines in their sleep. (Vivid detail warning! I don’t actually know what the final hours will be like and whether nanomachines will be involved. But if we’re happy to visualize what it’s like to put a mosquito net over a bed, and then we refuse to ever visualize in concrete detail what it’s like for our civilization to fail AI alignment, that can also lead us astray.)
I think that people who try to do thought-out philanthropy, e.g., Holden Karnofsky of Givewell, would unhesitatingly agree that these are both conceivable worlds we prefer not to enter. The question is just which of these two worlds is more probable as the one we should avoid. And again, the central principle of rationality is not to disbelieve in goblins because goblins are foolish and low-prestige, or to believe in goblins because they are exciting or beautiful. The central principle of rationality is to figure out which observational signs and logical validities can distinguish which of these two conceivable worlds is the metaphorical equivalent of believing in goblins.
I think it’s the first world that’s improbable and the second one that’s probable. I’m aware that in trying to convince people of that, I’m swimming uphill against a sense of eternal normality – the sense that this transient and temporary civilization of ours that has existed for only a few decades, that this species of ours that has existed for only an eyeblink of evolutionary and geological time, is all that makes sense and shall surely last forever. But given that I do think the first conceivable world is just a fond dream, it should be clear why I don’t think we should ignore a problem we’ll predictably have to panic about later. The mission of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is to do today that research which, 30 years from now, people will desperately wish had begun 30 years earlier.
Also, on this:
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity.
Especially here, I’m pretty sure Eliezer is more concerned about general civilisational collapse and other globally negative outcomes which he sees as non-trivially more likely with Trump as president. I don’t think this is as much of a difference in values and specifically differences with regards to how much you each value each level of the concentric circles of the proximal groups around you. At the very least, I don’t think he would agree that a Trump presidency would be likely to result in improved American prosperity over Clinton.
I just want to point out that Yudkowsky is making the factual mistake of modeling us as being shitty at achieving his goals, when in truth we are canny at achieving our own.
I think this is probably not what’s going on, I honestly think Eliezer is being more big picture about this, in the sense that he is concerned more about increased probability of doomsday scenarios and other outcomes unambiguously bad for most human goals. That’s the message I got from his facebook posts anyway.
Indeed, the “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff, as you put it, isn’t sarcastic. He really is trying to make saving every single living human mind he can his life’s work...
Hey, I stumbled on this comment and I’m wondering if you’ve updated on whether you consider Trump/Republicans a threat to America’s interests in light of the January 6th insurrection.
With Trump/Republicans I meant the full range of questions from from just Trump, through participants in the storming of congress, to all Republican voters.
It seems quite easy for a large fraction of a population to be a threat to the population’s interests if they share a particular dangerous behavior. I’m confused why you would think that would be difficult. Threat isn’t complete or total. If you don’t get a vaccine or wear a mask, you’re a threat to immune-compromissd people but you can still do good work professionally. If you vote for someone attempting to overthrow democracy, you’re a danger to the nation while in the voting booth but you can still do good work volunteering. As for how the nation can survive such a large fraction working against its interests—it wouldn’t, in equilibrium, but there’s a lot of inertia.
It seems weird that people storming the halls of Congress, building gallows for a person certifying the transition of power, and killing and getting killed attempting to reach that person, would lead to no update at all on who is a threat to America. I suppose you could have factored this sort of thing in from the start, but in that case I’m curious how you would have updated on potential threats to America if the insurrection didn’t take place.
Ultimately the definition of ‘threat’ feels like a red herring compared to the updates in the world model. So perhaps more concretely: what’s the minimum level of violence at the insurrection that would make you have preferred Hillary over Trump? How many Democratic congresspeople would have to die? How many Republican congresspeople? How many members of the presidential chain of command (old or new)?
You should probably reexamine the chain of logic that leads you to the idea that the most important consequence of the electorate’s decision in 2016 was the events of Jan 6th, 2021. It isn’t remotely true.
To entertain the hypothetical, where what we care about when doing elections is how many terrorist assaults they produce, would be to compare the actual record of Trump to an imaginary record of President Clinton’s 4 years in office. How would you recommend I generate the latter? Does the QAnon Shaman of the alternate timeline launch 0, 1, or 10 assaults on the capital if his totem is defeated 4 years earlier?
A more serious reappraisal of the Trump/Clinton fork would focus on COVID, supreme court picks, laws that a democratic president would have veto’d vs. those Trump signed (are we giving Clinton a democratic congress, or is this alt history only a change in presidency?), international decisions where Trump’s isolationist instincts would have been replaced by Clinton’s interventionist ones, etc. It is a serious and complicated question, but the events of Jan 6th play a minimal role in it.
That’s a bit of a straw man, though to be fair it appears my question didn’t fit into your world model as it does in mine.
For me, the insurrection was in the top 5 most informative/surprising US political events in 2017-2021. On account of its failure it didn’t have as major consequences as others, but it caused me to update my world model more. For me, it was a sudden confrontation with the size and influence of anti-democratic movements within the Republican party, which I consider Trump to be sufficiently associated with to cringe from the notion of voting for him.
The core of my question is whether your world model has updated from
Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia).
For me, the January insurrection was a big update away from that statement, so I was curious how it fit in your world model, but I suppose the insurrection is not necessarily the key. Did your probability of (a subset of) Republicans ending American democracy increase over the Trump presidency?
Noting that a Republican terrorist might still have attempted to commit acts of terror with Clinton in office does not mitigate the threat posed by (a subset of) Republicans. Between self-identified Democrats pissing off a nuclear power enough to start a world war and self-identified Republicans causing the US to no longer have functional elections, my money is on the latter.
If I had to use a counterfactual, I would propose imagining a world where the political opinions of all US citizens as projected on a left-right axis were 0.2 standard deviations further to the Left (or Right).
I’d agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I’m not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn’t substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I’m not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car while I drive it home. I plainly didn’t expect that particular lie, since I fell for it, but the basic trend of ‘this man will lie for his own profit’ is baked into the persona from the get go.
My model of American voters ending American democracy remains extremely low. For better or for worse, that’s just not in any real way how we roll. Take a look at every anti democratic movement presently going, and you will see endless rhetoric about how they are really double secret truly democratic. The clowns who want to pack the supreme court/senate are just trying to compensate for the framers not jock riding cities hard enough. The stooges who want the VP to be able to throw out electors not for his party invent gibberish about how the framers intended this. The people kicking folks off voter rolls chant about how they are preventing imaginary voter fraud. That kind of movement, unwilling to speak its own name, has a ceiling on how hard it can go. I believe that ceiling is lower than the bar they’d need to clear to seize power, and I think the last few years have borne this sentiment out.
I’m not sure I exactly get your point re: how to measure Trump’s time vs. hypothetical Clinton’s time. I will just repeat my sentiment that we can’t know how they would have compared to one another, because Clinton’s time will remain hypothetical. It might have had more or less terrorism. I will reiterate that the odds of terrorism being the key point to compare those points is miniscule. If we’d picked Clinton instead of Trump in 2016, things would be wildly different today. For 3 likely differences, we’d probably have a Republican president instead of Biden right now, we’d have had a technocrat beloved of the media instead of a maniac loathed by them when Covid hit, and we’d probably be fighting wars in Syria and Afghanistan, with Russia unlikely to have invaded the Ukraine. It would be a substantially different place in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with whether or not the capital was occupied for an afternoon.
As far as putting money down, I will bet on ‘the US continues to be a functioning democracy’ long before I bet on what kind of calamity might befall us. I think that a successful insurrection is less likely to be the end of our democratic experiment than a nuclear war, but both remain comfortably in ‘far mode’, so to speak.
I do buy the idea that citizens are moving left/right and a middle ground is becoming harder to find. I think anyone as online as our generation is would have to see that much. I just don’t think that results in a civil war of the kind you envision. Before being ideologues, left and right alike, these voters are lazy and selfish. We will sit tight, clutching our votes and bemoaning the failures of our political masters/servants, as the world rolls along.
One guy is like “Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented”. I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like “Here are my values!” That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff is not sarcastic.
It’s almost like epistemic and instrumental rationality are two different things.....
As I understand it you are criticizing Yudkowski’s ideology. But MrMind wants to hear our opinion on whether or not Scott and Yudkowski’s reasoning was sound, given their ideologies.
I’m not trying to criticize Yudkowki’s ideology. It seems to be basically Sailor Moon’s. I wish him the best, and will benefit vastly if it works out for him.
I’m saying that when he talks about the people who supported Trump, (“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,”) he is making a factual error.
His comment could be read as “people who voted for D. Trump and share my values are excessively optimistic about his chances of implementing them ”. I think that’s credible, given that he context was P. Thiel’s support.
The whole “most variations from the equilibria are disasters”, only really works if you share my guy’s mania about valuing the other team’s welfare
You know , there was one other guy who wasn’t preoccupied at all about the other team’s welfare , that guy was John Von Neumann and were he able to have it his way he would have cold bloodedly killed 600 millions people between USSR and China in 1955 when US had B52s and thermonuclear bombs ironed out , while he could have used his intelligence and technical wisdom to deescalate tension with the ultimate goal of getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether . Irony of the ironies he died relatively young because of a cancer probably developed working on the bomb , exactly like his soviets counterparts...he’d have had more chances of surviving if american , soviet and chinese researchers would have been able to talk to each other and exchange informations on potential life saving treatments . Besides that I don’t even mention the damage that wiping out 600 millions people would have done to the world’s economy , the world would have been a very different place if Von Neumann succeeded in acting his personal version of the final solution
There is only one team and that’s team humanity , the prostate cancer which kills a russian citizen is the same identical disease which would take your life if you’re unlucky enough to develop one , so given that ever since we (almost) stopped killing each other over land we enjoyed a prosperity which has no precedent in the history of our specie and it is mostly correlated with the fact that there are more humans around to solve our common problems , so how about we keep it that way? Also how about we increase the number of humans around and we lift them from poverty so they’d be able to contribute to the economy and together find a solution to our common problems (energy crisis , diseases , aging , AI) ?
Also I agree with you that the “preserve every pulse” kind of thinking could lead to an impractical situation , but I also think that the correct approach for this issue is the “in medio stat virtus” approach being something like “If you create damages to society which are greater than your contribution to it for a continued period of e.g. 5 years” your life would not be worth preserving
the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia)
Such danger only exists because Russian people are possibly even worse than americans at spotting con-artists and calling them out on their BS (europeans seems to be better than anyone else at doing this , maybe because they suffered so much in the past when they failed to do it) , so they praise and elevate Putin as a modern day czar because their life conditions sensibly improved with respect to the Yeltsin years , but they fail to see how much power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of their president who is able to casually steal 1 billion dollars from the State budget to build a private palace on the Black Sea . It is the support of Russian people which enables Putin to threaten the world with the apocalyptic scenario of a nuclear war , but as the Arab Spring proved such support is not destined to go on forever , dictators get only deposed when the people of that country collectively think that their lives would be better without him....if all the westerners who waste time every day watching Netflix or playing video games dedicated that time to talk with their Russian counterparts through the internet , provide them information which would not be otherwise available given the regime’s propaganda and yes , even send them 0.5BTC whenever they can to show support and compassion a dictator like Putin would be deposed and hanged within 6 months , much to the relief of people living in adjacent countries (whose suffering you seem to ignore and perhaps more importantly role in the world’s economy you seem to ignore) and the rest of the world
Given our invincible military
This honestly seems a phrase straight off a propaganda poster , are you even aware of the costs in terms of brainpower and capital which are wasted every year on the military? Think of what could be accomplished if such resources were redirected towards research and basic research ( AI , FAI , WBE , nuclear fusion , brain understanding , consciousness understanding..)
To spell it out: I don’t share (and I don’t think my side shares), Yudkowski’s fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I’ve got a duty to preserve every pulse.
So are you seriously claiming that you can’t see the correlation between number of humans alive on the Earth and average quality of life and progress achieved by our specie?
Putin will thug around his neighbors
Yeah right , because Putin putting his hands on the mineral rich and fertile soils of Ukraine is a totally desirable outcome for the world’s economy
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity
And that , my friend is the line of thinking which caused the outbreak of every war in the history of our specie , also electing a guy who spent 5 millions dollars to have his bathroom completely gold plated seems the best way to ensure american prosperity /s , also you continuously mention Putin , Trump is the presidential candidate who resembles him the most , except for maybe one thing that would sure impress the donald the first time he’ll meet him , Putin speaks a fluent english with a marked BBC accent , you could almost say that between the 2 , the Russian from St. Petersburg has the better words
Trump will (probably not) build a wall between us and Mexico
Mark my words he will , and he will channel public money through his companies in order to build it , he’ll try to pull it off in the 2 years before the midterm elections...that would be something very Putinesque of him (see the similarities between the two are recurrent )
Just want to say I didn’t downvote you man. It is actually really good for my argument that no sooner do I say:
“We want different things from Yudkowsky and he is wrong that we want the same things and are stupid”, than someone shows up to say “Actually you just need me to contempt at you until you start wanting the same things as me.”
Libs, this happens literally all the time. We can’t go anywhere without the John Oliver / Ernestdezoe’s of the world appearing to sneer at us. Do the experiment if you like. Make any conservative argument, in any context, and someone will be along to tell you that you are a nazi who wants to kill 600 million people.
These disdain elementals are not on your side. They lost you this election. They have never persuaded anyone, and they never will. Contempt is absolutely anti-persuasive.
I’m not going to engage with his arguments. I’ll reiterate that this is lesswrong, and we don’t talk politics here. Examine them for a few seconds with an open mind and you’ll see how persuasive they are.
The point of my post was that Yudkowsky’s model of his difficulties was flawed. He isn’t playing Dance Dance Revolution with a drunken partner who can’t help messing up. He is playing Street Fighter vs. a skilled opponent.
The point of this response is that the ernestdezoe school of persuasion is a loser, and should be forsaken. Don’t be like this person, and you might change some minds.
Make any conservative argument, in any context, and someone will be along to tell you that you are a nazi who wants to kill 600 million people.
You didn’t make just any conservative argument , you clearly claimed that you don’t care about other people (non american) welfare! It has been proved time and time again that throughout the history of our specie more humans alive and capable of contributing to the economy meant greater progress , improved quality of life , longer average lifespan...
Also this is not about politics , this can be discussed on LW , in fact we’re discussing about x-risks , altruism , best paths for human prosperity and so forth
Also I agree with you that the “preserve every pulse” kind of thinking could lead to an impractical situation , but I also think that the correct approach for this issue is the “in medio stat virtus” approach being something like “If you create damages to society which are greater than your contribution to it for a continued period of e.g. 5 years” your life would not be worth preserving
Do you realize that under such guidelines, one could easily make the case for most of the unemployed people to be eradicated? I’m pretty sure that’s not your goal here.
So are you seriously claiming that you can’t see the correlation between number of humans alive on the Earth and average quality of life and progress achieved by our specie?
I can see the correlation, but I think you have the causation backwards. The case for progress and quality of life leading to increases in human population seems much more straightforward to me. In my simplified model, progress is increased production. Quality of life is production per capita. But when quality of life raises, so does natality and death drops, until human population has absorbed most of the additional production and people are just slightly better off than before.
“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,”
I don’t think that’s really a fair charge.
Like, reading through Yudkowsky’s stuff, his LW writings and HPMOR, there is the persistent sense that he is 2 guys.
One guy is like “Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented”. I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like “Here are my values!” That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff is not sarcastic.
It is the second guy who writes his facebook posts.
So when he is accusing us of not paying sufficient attention to the consequences of a Trump victory, I’m more inclined to say that we paid attention, but we don’t value those consequences the way he does.
To spell it out: I don’t share (and I don’t think my side shares), Yudkowsky’s fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I’ve got a duty to preserve every pulse.
That belief, the idea that any beating heart means we have a responsibility to keep it that way, leads to the insane situations where the bad guys can basically take themselves hostage. It is silly.
The whole “most variations from the equilibria are disasters”, only really works if you share my guy’s mania about valuing the other team’s welfare. In terms of America’s interests, Trump is a much safer choice than Hillary. Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia). Hillary → Putin is a chilly, fraught relationship, with potential flashpoints in Crimea / Syria. Trump → Putin is less likely to involve conflict. Putin will thug around his neighbors, Trump will (probably not) build a wall between us and Mexico.
I didn’t reply to Yudkowsky’s facebook post. I don’t know him, and it wouldn’t be my place. But he is making a typical leftist mistake, which is dismissing the right as a defective left.
You’ve seen it everywhere. The left can’t grok the idea that the right values different things, and just can’t stop proving that the left’s means lead to the left’s ends way better than the right’s means lead to the left’s ends. “What’s the Matter With Kansas”, if you want a perfect example. The Home School wars if you want it rubbed in your face.
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity. We’d like to replace our interventionist foreign policy with an isolationist one.
LW isn’t a place to argue about politics, so I’m not going to go into why we have the values that we have here. I just want to point out that Yudkowsky is making the factual mistake of modeling us as being shitty at achieving his goals, when in truth we are canny at achieving our own.
I’m a right winger and I totally disagree with this comment.
For me, conservatism is about willingness to face up to the hard facts about reality. I’m just as cosmopolitan in my values as liberals are—but I’m not naive about how to go about achieving them. My goal is to actually help people, not show all my friends how progressive I am.
In practice I think US stability is extremely important for the entire world. Which means I’m against giving impulsive people the nuclear codes, and I’m also against Hillary Clinton’s “invade the world, invite the world” foreign policy.
Also: I don’t like Yudkowsky, but I would like him and the people in his circle to take criticism seriously, so… could we maybe start spelling his name correctly? It ends in a y. (I think Yudkowsky himself is probably a lost cause, but there are a lot of smart, rational people in his thrall who should not be. And many of them will take the time to read and seriously evaluate critical arguments if they’re well-presented.)
Sorry about misspelling his name. Egg on my face.
Which in particular?
Lots of “politically incorrect” claims are true, and this matters for policy. E.g. for immigration.
Very well—the reason I asked is because it seems to be not at all obvious with how accepting hard truths about race and immigration should be made to align with being
Yeah, my current view is that long-term risks of high immigration outweigh near-term benefits.
It’s puzzling that you’ve termed these risks “long term” when America is currently being rocked with race riots and Europe has an ongoing refugee crisis.
Well, you could see the issues America is facing as being a long-term effect of importing slaves from Africa and liberalization of immigration laws in the 1960s. But racial tension is not the only thing I’m worried about.
I’m a left-libertarian and i mostly disagree with this comment, but i upvoted it because it’s very clear and respectful.
I agree that politics discussions are better suited for other rationality-sphere sites, not LW.
As a bonus, those other sites may be free from sockpuppet accounts consistently downvoting one side of the debate.
While I’m horrified by your values, I thank you for the clear exposition. And I think you made, although implicitly, an interesting point: outside of our stable equilibrium, things are a generally a net negative if you factor in the welfare of all humanity. But if you consider only US’ well being, things might be a net positive.
This I believe is so far from Yudkowsky’s set of values that it was impossible for him to envision.
Well, an easy guess would be that you believe the world to be a zero-sum game: if that’s the case, then better have your team win big at the expense of everyone else than having everybody live on the scraps.
If actions can be traced down to cause a whole lot of suffering, then it might be less certain to get a net positive outcome (for example due to empathic people revolting against these actions or feelings of guilt harming education and innovation; exodus of professionals to metropolitan regions in Europe, Asia etc.).
Yes, I agree with this sentiment and am relieved someone else communicated it so I didn’t have to work out how to phrase it.
I don’t think Yudkowsky think malaria nets are the best use of money anyway, even if they are in the short term the current clearest estimate as to where to put your money in in order to maximise lives saved. In that sense I don’t think you disagree with him, he doesn’t fetishize preserving pulses in the same way that you don’t. Or at least, that’s what I remember reading. First thing I could find corroborating that model of his viewpoint is his interview with Horgan.
Also, on this:
Especially here, I’m pretty sure Eliezer is more concerned about general civilisational collapse and other globally negative outcomes which he sees as non-trivially more likely with Trump as president. I don’t think this is as much of a difference in values and specifically differences with regards to how much you each value each level of the concentric circles of the proximal groups around you. At the very least, I don’t think he would agree that a Trump presidency would be likely to result in improved American prosperity over Clinton.
I think this is probably not what’s going on, I honestly think Eliezer is being more big picture about this, in the sense that he is concerned more about increased probability of doomsday scenarios and other outcomes unambiguously bad for most human goals. That’s the message I got from his facebook posts anyway.
Indeed, the “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff, as you put it, isn’t sarcastic. He really is trying to make saving every single living human mind he can his life’s work...
Hey, I stumbled on this comment and I’m wondering if you’ve updated on whether you consider Trump/Republicans a threat to America’s interests in light of the January 6th insurrection.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean, like, how would it work for like 1⁄3 of Americans to be a threat to America’s interests?
I think, roughly speaking, the answer you are looking for is ‘no’, but it is possible I’m misunderstanding your question.
With Trump/Republicans I meant the full range of questions from from just Trump, through participants in the storming of congress, to all Republican voters.
It seems quite easy for a large fraction of a population to be a threat to the population’s interests if they share a particular dangerous behavior. I’m confused why you would think that would be difficult. Threat isn’t complete or total. If you don’t get a vaccine or wear a mask, you’re a threat to immune-compromissd people but you can still do good work professionally. If you vote for someone attempting to overthrow democracy, you’re a danger to the nation while in the voting booth but you can still do good work volunteering. As for how the nation can survive such a large fraction working against its interests—it wouldn’t, in equilibrium, but there’s a lot of inertia.
It seems weird that people storming the halls of Congress, building gallows for a person certifying the transition of power, and killing and getting killed attempting to reach that person, would lead to no update at all on who is a threat to America. I suppose you could have factored this sort of thing in from the start, but in that case I’m curious how you would have updated on potential threats to America if the insurrection didn’t take place.
Ultimately the definition of ‘threat’ feels like a red herring compared to the updates in the world model. So perhaps more concretely: what’s the minimum level of violence at the insurrection that would make you have preferred Hillary over Trump? How many Democratic congresspeople would have to die? How many Republican congresspeople? How many members of the presidential chain of command (old or new)?
You should probably reexamine the chain of logic that leads you to the idea that the most important consequence of the electorate’s decision in 2016 was the events of Jan 6th, 2021. It isn’t remotely true.
To entertain the hypothetical, where what we care about when doing elections is how many terrorist assaults they produce, would be to compare the actual record of Trump to an imaginary record of President Clinton’s 4 years in office. How would you recommend I generate the latter? Does the QAnon Shaman of the alternate timeline launch 0, 1, or 10 assaults on the capital if his totem is defeated 4 years earlier?
A more serious reappraisal of the Trump/Clinton fork would focus on COVID, supreme court picks, laws that a democratic president would have veto’d vs. those Trump signed (are we giving Clinton a democratic congress, or is this alt history only a change in presidency?), international decisions where Trump’s isolationist instincts would have been replaced by Clinton’s interventionist ones, etc. It is a serious and complicated question, but the events of Jan 6th play a minimal role in it.
That’s a bit of a straw man, though to be fair it appears my question didn’t fit into your world model as it does in mine.
For me, the insurrection was in the top 5 most informative/surprising US political events in 2017-2021. On account of its failure it didn’t have as major consequences as others, but it caused me to update my world model more. For me, it was a sudden confrontation with the size and influence of anti-democratic movements within the Republican party, which I consider Trump to be sufficiently associated with to cringe from the notion of voting for him.
The core of my question is whether your world model has updated from
For me, the January insurrection was a big update away from that statement, so I was curious how it fit in your world model, but I suppose the insurrection is not necessarily the key. Did your probability of (a subset of) Republicans ending American democracy increase over the Trump presidency?
Noting that a Republican terrorist might still have attempted to commit acts of terror with Clinton in office does not mitigate the threat posed by (a subset of) Republicans. Between self-identified Democrats pissing off a nuclear power enough to start a world war and self-identified Republicans causing the US to no longer have functional elections, my money is on the latter.
If I had to use a counterfactual, I would propose imagining a world where the political opinions of all US citizens as projected on a left-right axis were 0.2 standard deviations further to the Left (or Right).
I’d agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I’m not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn’t substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I’m not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car while I drive it home. I plainly didn’t expect that particular lie, since I fell for it, but the basic trend of ‘this man will lie for his own profit’ is baked into the persona from the get go.
My model of American voters ending American democracy remains extremely low. For better or for worse, that’s just not in any real way how we roll. Take a look at every anti democratic movement presently going, and you will see endless rhetoric about how they are really double secret truly democratic. The clowns who want to pack the supreme court/senate are just trying to compensate for the framers not jock riding cities hard enough. The stooges who want the VP to be able to throw out electors not for his party invent gibberish about how the framers intended this. The people kicking folks off voter rolls chant about how they are preventing imaginary voter fraud. That kind of movement, unwilling to speak its own name, has a ceiling on how hard it can go. I believe that ceiling is lower than the bar they’d need to clear to seize power, and I think the last few years have borne this sentiment out.
I’m not sure I exactly get your point re: how to measure Trump’s time vs. hypothetical Clinton’s time. I will just repeat my sentiment that we can’t know how they would have compared to one another, because Clinton’s time will remain hypothetical. It might have had more or less terrorism. I will reiterate that the odds of terrorism being the key point to compare those points is miniscule. If we’d picked Clinton instead of Trump in 2016, things would be wildly different today. For 3 likely differences, we’d probably have a Republican president instead of Biden right now, we’d have had a technocrat beloved of the media instead of a maniac loathed by them when Covid hit, and we’d probably be fighting wars in Syria and Afghanistan, with Russia unlikely to have invaded the Ukraine. It would be a substantially different place in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with whether or not the capital was occupied for an afternoon.
As far as putting money down, I will bet on ‘the US continues to be a functioning democracy’ long before I bet on what kind of calamity might befall us. I think that a successful insurrection is less likely to be the end of our democratic experiment than a nuclear war, but both remain comfortably in ‘far mode’, so to speak.
I do buy the idea that citizens are moving left/right and a middle ground is becoming harder to find. I think anyone as online as our generation is would have to see that much. I just don’t think that results in a civil war of the kind you envision. Before being ideologues, left and right alike, these voters are lazy and selfish. We will sit tight, clutching our votes and bemoaning the failures of our political masters/servants, as the world rolls along.
It’s almost like epistemic and instrumental rationality are two different things.....
As I understand it you are criticizing Yudkowski’s ideology. But MrMind wants to hear our opinion on whether or not Scott and Yudkowski’s reasoning was sound, given their ideologies.
I’m not trying to criticize Yudkowki’s ideology. It seems to be basically Sailor Moon’s. I wish him the best, and will benefit vastly if it works out for him.
I’m saying that when he talks about the people who supported Trump, (“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,”) he is making a factual error.
His comment could be read as “people who voted for D. Trump and share my values are excessively optimistic about his chances of implementing them ”. I think that’s credible, given that he context was P. Thiel’s support.
You know , there was one other guy who wasn’t preoccupied at all about the other team’s welfare , that guy was John Von Neumann and were he able to have it his way he would have cold bloodedly killed 600 millions people between USSR and China in 1955 when US had B52s and thermonuclear bombs ironed out , while he could have used his intelligence and technical wisdom to deescalate tension with the ultimate goal of getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether . Irony of the ironies he died relatively young because of a cancer probably developed working on the bomb , exactly like his soviets counterparts...he’d have had more chances of surviving if american , soviet and chinese researchers would have been able to talk to each other and exchange informations on potential life saving treatments . Besides that I don’t even mention the damage that wiping out 600 millions people would have done to the world’s economy , the world would have been a very different place if Von Neumann succeeded in acting his personal version of the final solution
There is only one team and that’s team humanity , the prostate cancer which kills a russian citizen is the same identical disease which would take your life if you’re unlucky enough to develop one , so given that ever since we (almost) stopped killing each other over land we enjoyed a prosperity which has no precedent in the history of our specie and it is mostly correlated with the fact that there are more humans around to solve our common problems , so how about we keep it that way? Also how about we increase the number of humans around and we lift them from poverty so they’d be able to contribute to the economy and together find a solution to our common problems (energy crisis , diseases , aging , AI) ?
Also I agree with you that the “preserve every pulse” kind of thinking could lead to an impractical situation , but I also think that the correct approach for this issue is the “in medio stat virtus” approach being something like “If you create damages to society which are greater than your contribution to it for a continued period of e.g. 5 years” your life would not be worth preserving
Such danger only exists because Russian people are possibly even worse than americans at spotting con-artists and calling them out on their BS (europeans seems to be better than anyone else at doing this , maybe because they suffered so much in the past when they failed to do it) , so they praise and elevate Putin as a modern day czar because their life conditions sensibly improved with respect to the Yeltsin years , but they fail to see how much power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of their president who is able to casually steal 1 billion dollars from the State budget to build a private palace on the Black Sea . It is the support of Russian people which enables Putin to threaten the world with the apocalyptic scenario of a nuclear war , but as the Arab Spring proved such support is not destined to go on forever , dictators get only deposed when the people of that country collectively think that their lives would be better without him....if all the westerners who waste time every day watching Netflix or playing video games dedicated that time to talk with their Russian counterparts through the internet , provide them information which would not be otherwise available given the regime’s propaganda and yes , even send them 0.5BTC whenever they can to show support and compassion a dictator like Putin would be deposed and hanged within 6 months , much to the relief of people living in adjacent countries (whose suffering you seem to ignore and perhaps more importantly role in the world’s economy you seem to ignore) and the rest of the world
This honestly seems a phrase straight off a propaganda poster , are you even aware of the costs in terms of brainpower and capital which are wasted every year on the military? Think of what could be accomplished if such resources were redirected towards research and basic research ( AI , FAI , WBE , nuclear fusion , brain understanding , consciousness understanding..)
So are you seriously claiming that you can’t see the correlation between number of humans alive on the Earth and average quality of life and progress achieved by our specie?
Yeah right , because Putin putting his hands on the mineral rich and fertile soils of Ukraine is a totally desirable outcome for the world’s economy
And that , my friend is the line of thinking which caused the outbreak of every war in the history of our specie , also electing a guy who spent 5 millions dollars to have his bathroom completely gold plated seems the best way to ensure american prosperity /s , also you continuously mention Putin , Trump is the presidential candidate who resembles him the most , except for maybe one thing that would sure impress the donald the first time he’ll meet him , Putin speaks a fluent english with a marked BBC accent , you could almost say that between the 2 , the Russian from St. Petersburg has the better words
Mark my words he will , and he will channel public money through his companies in order to build it , he’ll try to pull it off in the 2 years before the midterm elections...that would be something very Putinesque of him (see the similarities between the two are recurrent )
Just want to say I didn’t downvote you man. It is actually really good for my argument that no sooner do I say:
“We want different things from Yudkowsky and he is wrong that we want the same things and are stupid”, than someone shows up to say “Actually you just need me to contempt at you until you start wanting the same things as me.”
Libs, this happens literally all the time. We can’t go anywhere without the John Oliver / Ernestdezoe’s of the world appearing to sneer at us. Do the experiment if you like. Make any conservative argument, in any context, and someone will be along to tell you that you are a nazi who wants to kill 600 million people.
These disdain elementals are not on your side. They lost you this election. They have never persuaded anyone, and they never will. Contempt is absolutely anti-persuasive.
I’m not going to engage with his arguments. I’ll reiterate that this is lesswrong, and we don’t talk politics here. Examine them for a few seconds with an open mind and you’ll see how persuasive they are.
The point of my post was that Yudkowsky’s model of his difficulties was flawed. He isn’t playing Dance Dance Revolution with a drunken partner who can’t help messing up. He is playing Street Fighter vs. a skilled opponent.
The point of this response is that the ernestdezoe school of persuasion is a loser, and should be forsaken. Don’t be like this person, and you might change some minds.
You didn’t make just any conservative argument , you clearly claimed that you don’t care about other people (non american) welfare! It has been proved time and time again that throughout the history of our specie more humans alive and capable of contributing to the economy meant greater progress , improved quality of life , longer average lifespan...
Also this is not about politics , this can be discussed on LW , in fact we’re discussing about x-risks , altruism , best paths for human prosperity and so forth
Do you realize that under such guidelines, one could easily make the case for most of the unemployed people to be eradicated? I’m pretty sure that’s not your goal here.
I can see the correlation, but I think you have the causation backwards. The case for progress and quality of life leading to increases in human population seems much more straightforward to me. In my simplified model, progress is increased production. Quality of life is production per capita. But when quality of life raises, so does natality and death drops, until human population has absorbed most of the additional production and people are just slightly better off than before.