Voting for Hitler does nothing for you personally unless you actually want a Nazi government. If you have investments in say NVIDIA then presumably you expect them to make you more money than whatever else you’re proposing to invest in instead. I am suggesting that the first-order effects of having more money are likely to outweigh the second-order (or whatever higher order they actually are) where you sell what in the big picture is a rather small number of NVIDIA shares, this has a probably imperceptible effect on NVIDIA’s stock price, this makes them an imperceptibly more favourable company to lend money to, they borrow more money on better terms and make imperceptibly better GPUs, and all the AI research happens a tiny bit faster.
To be clear, I warmly endorse getting out of NVIDIA if owning shares of a company that might contribute to AI development makes you feel terrible. That’s a first-order effect too. But it still looks to me as if the effects are likely negligible, and I don’t think I buy any superrationality-style arguments along the lines of “whatever you do, other similar people are also likely to do, so you should multiply your estimate of the effect severalfold”.
Voting for Hitler does nothing for you personally unless you actually want a Nazi government. If you have investments in say NVIDIA then presumably you expect them to make you more money than whatever else you’re proposing to invest in instead. I am suggesting that the first-order effects of having more money are likely to outweigh the second-order (or whatever higher order they actually are) where you sell what in the big picture is a rather small number of NVIDIA shares, this has a probably imperceptible effect on NVIDIA’s stock price, this makes them an imperceptibly more favourable company to lend money to, they borrow more money on better terms and make imperceptibly better GPUs, and all the AI research happens a tiny bit faster.
To be clear, I warmly endorse getting out of NVIDIA if owning shares of a company that might contribute to AI development makes you feel terrible. That’s a first-order effect too. But it still looks to me as if the effects are likely negligible, and I don’t think I buy any superrationality-style arguments along the lines of “whatever you do, other similar people are also likely to do, so you should multiply your estimate of the effect severalfold”.