The Nazis often justified their actions by appealing to a God of Natural Selection. They alternatively suggested that victory of the superior races over the inferior was inevitable, and that opposing such a victory was an eternal sin. This is a contradiction—how can you oppose something if it’s an iron law of nature anyways—but the rhetorical flourish accomplishes two things:
First, it absolves the Nazis of any crimes they commit. They didn’t start the race war; they were just acting according to the will of Nature. Leaving the Polish alone would just be tolerating the existence of free energy that someone else will eventually pick up and use against them. The nazis are just the smart ones who made the first move instead of waiting around for others to do it.
Second, it uses a naturalism fallacy to redefine “good” as “following the Nazis’ local incentives”. If you say that acting according to your local incentives, i.e. crushing your weaker neighbors, is the Natural Thing and therefore Good, then that gives you permission to start a fight with whomever you want. You can do no wrong except lose, because the Gods will always ensure that the stronger and therefore better population will win.
In this sense, the “Thermodynamic God” stuff is kind of generalized Nazism. I’m not saying that people who believe it are Nazis—they’re not consistent enough in their application of that ideology to go that far—but apply the “free energy” justification to both obviously antisocial games in addition to prosocial ones and you see that it justifies both war and trade.
Man, I keep preventing myself from saying “parts of e/acc are at least somewhat fascist”, because that’s not a very useful thing to say in discourse, and prevents Thermodynamic-God-ism (or e/acc in general) from developing into a more sophisticated & fleshed out system of thought. I think this kind of post works if it’s phrased in a way that encourages more cooperation in the future (with the risk of this running a “cooperate with defection-rock” situation), but it only works if it encourages such cooperation.
I prefer the term “fascist” to “national socialist” because nazism was a really specific thing, bound to German conceptions of race at the time. Although—”fascism” is also really associated with Italy at that specific time.
I think the more general problem is violation of Hume’s guillotine. You can’t take a fact about natural selection (or really about anything) and go from that to moral reasoning without some pre-existing morals.
However, it seems the actual reasoning with the Thermodynamic God is just post-hoc reasoning. Some people just really want to accelerate and then make up philosophical reasons to believe what they believe. It’s important to be careful to criticize actual reasoning and not post-hoc reasoning. I don’t think the Thermodynamic God was invented and then people invented accelerationism to fulfill it. It was precisely the other way around. One should not critique the made up stuff (besides just critiquing that it is made up) because that is not charitable (very uncertain on this). Instead, one should look for the actual motivation to accelerate and then criticize that (or find flaws in it).
The “thermodynamic god” is a very weak force, as evidenced by the approximate age of the universe and no AI foom in Sol or in reach of our telescopes. It’s technically correct but who’s to say it won’t take 140 billion more years to AI foom?
It’s a terrible argument.
What bothers me is if you talk about competing human groups, whether at the individual, company level or country level or superpower block level, all the arrows point to acceleration.
(0) Individual level : nature sabotaged your genes. You can hope for AI advances leading to biotech advances and substantial life extension for yourself or your direct family. (Children, grandchildren—humans you will directly live to see). Death is otherwise your fate.
(1) Company level : accelerate AI (either as an AI lab or end user adopter) and get mountains of investment capital and money you saved via using AI tooling, or go broke
(2) Country level : get strapped with AI weapons (like drones with onboard intelligence manufactured by intelligent robots) or your enemies can annihilate you at low cost on the battlefield.
(3) Power bloc level. Fall behind enough, and you or your allies nuclear weapons may no longer be a sufficient deterrent. MAD ends if a side uses AI driven robots to make anti ballistic missile and air defense weapons in the quantities needed to win a nuclear war.
These forces seem shockingly strong and we know from the recent financial activity for Nvidia stock it’s trillions in favor of acceleration.
Thermodynamics is by comparison negligible.
I currently suspect due to 0 through 3 we are locked into a race for AI and have no alternatives, but it’s really weird the e/acc makes such an overtly bad argument when they are likely overall correct.
Thus Nietzsche thinks utilitarians are committed to ensuring the survival and happiness of human beings, yet they fail to grasp the unsavory consequences which that commitment may entail. In particular, utilitarians tend to ignore the fact that effective long-run utility promotion might require the forcible destruction of people who either enfeeble the gene pool or who have trouble converting resources into utility—incurable depressives, the severely handicapped, and exceptionally fastidious people all seem potential targets.
Why wouldn’t utilitarianism just weigh the human costs of those measures against proposed benefit of “improving the gene pool” and alternative possible remedies, like anything else?
Probably because from the outset, only one sort of answer is inside the realm of acceptable answers. Anything else would be far outside the Overton window. If they already know what sort of answer they have to produce, doing the actual calculations has no benefit. It’s like a theologian evaluating arguments about the existence of God.
Ok, then that sounds like a criticism of utilitarians, or maybe people, and not utilitarianism. Also, my point didn’t even mention utilitarianism, so what does that have to do with the above?
The Nazis often justified their actions by appealing to a God of Natural Selection. They alternatively suggested that victory of the superior races over the inferior was inevitable, and that opposing such a victory was an eternal sin. This is a contradiction—how can you oppose something if it’s an iron law of nature anyways—but the rhetorical flourish accomplishes two things:
First, it absolves the Nazis of any crimes they commit. They didn’t start the race war; they were just acting according to the will of Nature. Leaving the Polish alone would just be tolerating the existence of free energy that someone else will eventually pick up and use against them. The nazis are just the smart ones who made the first move instead of waiting around for others to do it.
Second, it uses a naturalism fallacy to redefine “good” as “following the Nazis’ local incentives”. If you say that acting according to your local incentives, i.e. crushing your weaker neighbors, is the Natural Thing and therefore Good, then that gives you permission to start a fight with whomever you want. You can do no wrong except lose, because the Gods will always ensure that the stronger and therefore better population will win.
In this sense, the “Thermodynamic God” stuff is kind of generalized Nazism. I’m not saying that people who believe it are Nazis—they’re not consistent enough in their application of that ideology to go that far—but apply the “free energy” justification to both obviously antisocial games in addition to prosocial ones and you see that it justifies both war and trade.
Man, I keep preventing myself from saying “parts of e/acc are at least somewhat fascist”, because that’s not a very useful thing to say in discourse, and prevents Thermodynamic-God-ism (or e/acc in general) from developing into a more sophisticated & fleshed out system of thought. I think this kind of post works if it’s phrased in a way that encourages more cooperation in the future (with the risk of this running a “cooperate with defection-rock” situation), but it only works if it encourages such cooperation.
I prefer the term “fascist” to “national socialist” because nazism was a really specific thing, bound to German conceptions of race at the time. Although—”fascism” is also really associated with Italy at that specific time.
I think the more general problem is violation of Hume’s guillotine. You can’t take a fact about natural selection (or really about anything) and go from that to moral reasoning without some pre-existing morals.
However, it seems the actual reasoning with the Thermodynamic God is just post-hoc reasoning. Some people just really want to accelerate and then make up philosophical reasons to believe what they believe. It’s important to be careful to criticize actual reasoning and not post-hoc reasoning. I don’t think the Thermodynamic God was invented and then people invented accelerationism to fulfill it. It was precisely the other way around. One should not critique the made up stuff (besides just critiquing that it is made up) because that is not charitable (very uncertain on this). Instead, one should look for the actual motivation to accelerate and then criticize that (or find flaws in it).
The “thermodynamic god” is a very weak force, as evidenced by the approximate age of the universe and no AI foom in Sol or in reach of our telescopes. It’s technically correct but who’s to say it won’t take 140 billion more years to AI foom?
It’s a terrible argument.
What bothers me is if you talk about competing human groups, whether at the individual, company level or country level or superpower block level, all the arrows point to acceleration.
(0) Individual level : nature sabotaged your genes. You can hope for AI advances leading to biotech advances and substantial life extension for yourself or your direct family. (Children, grandchildren—humans you will directly live to see). Death is otherwise your fate.
(1) Company level : accelerate AI (either as an AI lab or end user adopter) and get mountains of investment capital and money you saved via using AI tooling, or go broke
(2) Country level : get strapped with AI weapons (like drones with onboard intelligence manufactured by intelligent robots) or your enemies can annihilate you at low cost on the battlefield.
(3) Power bloc level. Fall behind enough, and you or your allies nuclear weapons may no longer be a sufficient deterrent. MAD ends if a side uses AI driven robots to make anti ballistic missile and air defense weapons in the quantities needed to win a nuclear war.
These forces seem shockingly strong and we know from the recent financial activity for Nvidia stock it’s trillions in favor of acceleration.
Thermodynamics is by comparison negligible.
I currently suspect due to 0 through 3 we are locked into a race for AI and have no alternatives, but it’s really weird the e/acc makes such an overtly bad argument when they are likely overall correct.
The above seems like a strawman or weakman argument. Consider instead Nietzsche’s Critique of Utilitarianism:
Why wouldn’t utilitarianism just weigh the human costs of those measures against proposed benefit of “improving the gene pool” and alternative possible remedies, like anything else?
Probably because from the outset, only one sort of answer is inside the realm of acceptable answers. Anything else would be far outside the Overton window. If they already know what sort of answer they have to produce, doing the actual calculations has no benefit. It’s like a theologian evaluating arguments about the existence of God.
Ok, then that sounds like a criticism of utilitarians, or maybe people, and not utilitarianism. Also, my point didn’t even mention utilitarianism, so what does that have to do with the above?
You mentioned positions I described as straw men or weak men. Darwinist utilitarianism would be more like a steel man.