I am fascinated by this conversation/disagreement about Ender’s Game. I think it might be really important. I am upvoting both comments.
Some things it makes me consider:
a) When is violence / attacking the outgroup justified?
b) Would it have been abusive if the children hadn’t been lied to? (I lean no. But given that they were lied to, I lean yes.)
c) Is it OK to sometimes frame “the default ways of the universe” as a kind of outgroup, in order to motivate action ‘against’ them? Ender’s Game was about another sentient lifeform. But in ways, the universe has “something vaguely resembling” anthropomorphizable demons that tend to work against human interests. (We, as a community, have already solidified Moloch as one. And there are others.) In a way, we ARE trying to mobilize ourselves ‘against the outgroup’—with that outgroup being kind of nebulous and made-up, but still trying to point at real forces that threaten our existence/happiness.
Q for benquo:
How do you feel about sports (or laser tag leagues)?
To clarify, I’m not saying that forming an army is always the wrong choice; I’m just saying that it’s one that makes sense when you want to attack the outgroup. Often attacking the outgroup is the correct move! That’s why biological and cultural evolution equipped us with that ability. On (c), I don’t like the “OK vs not OK” framing. It’s more that any particular mode of organization is going to capture some cognitive and coordination efficiencies at the price of limiting the kinds of things it can do somehow. Militaries are optimized to randomize* the target, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’d like to do with the future of humanity, unless we’re up against an utility-minimizer.
Play-fighting like laser tag and sports seems basically good; I haven’t prioritized it in my life and I’m probably paying some cognitive cost for not getting much of that.
* This is more literally true of weapons than of militaries, but militaries are optimized for the ability to credibly promise to randomize arbitrary targets, sometimes subject to particular rules of engagement, sometimes optimizing directly for “credibly” in social reality via intimidation tactics rather than actual force-projection capacity.
I don’t see you as having come close to establishing, beyond the (I claim weak) argument from the single-word framing, that the actual amount or parts of structure or framing that Dragon Army has inherited from militaries are optimized for attacking the outgroup to a degree that makes worrying justified.
This definitely doesn’t establish that. And this seems like a terrible context in which to continue to elaborate on all my criticisms of Duncan’s projects, so I’m not going to do that.
My main criticisms of Dragon Army are on the Dragon Army thread, albeit worded conservatively in a way that may not make it clear how these things are related to the “army” framing. If you want to discuss that, some other venue seems right at this point, this discussion is already way too broad in scope.
Since Benquo says he thinks sports are good, I’d be curious whether he is also worried about sports teams with names that suggest violence. Many teams are named after parties in a violent historical conflict or violent animals: Patriots, Braves, Panthers, Raptors, Bulls, Sharks, Warriors, Cavaliers, Rangers, Raiders, Blackhawks, Predators, Tigers, Pirates, Timberwolves...
I have a vague and unspecified concern (which might be unfair, and which I hope you will call out if you find it to be unfair) that this might be the beginnings of a drift across the line into scoring points, or the start of a snowball rolling downhill.
Like, you’re almost certainly just genuinely curious about the gears of benquo’s model. The word “army” raised a flag … does the word “warriors” raise a similar flag? This is an entirely valid question for finding the boundaries of benquo’s beliefs.
But I would be sad if other people piled on after this comment with a whole bunch of “do you think [innocuous thing] is bad or not?” comments. I fear something like, the conversation turning into an inquisition? A sense that the crowd gets to demand that benquo’s model defend itself, but the crowd isn’t symmetrically required to defend its model?
I want to firmly reiterate that I think there’s literally zero to object to in the above comment, both in content and tone; it’s more about a (very weak) gut-level intuition about what comes after it. I also note the possibility that these four paragraphs may not be worth the space I’ve spent on them—that this concern is too trivial to have taken up this much time. But since (boy howdy) this has been quite the week for things spiraling out of control, I am more motivated than usual to raise the ghost-of-a-concern before it becomes an actual concern. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.
I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.
To be honest, I think Eliezer’s “Rationality Dojo” framing was somewhat unfortunate in hindsight. Some sorts of adversarial intelligence are going to be part of a well-rounded human mind, but framing that as coextensive with rationality seems … bad.
Sports is a zero-sum contest, so names that suggest adversarial players seem appropriate.
I am fascinated by this conversation/disagreement about Ender’s Game. I think it might be really important. I am upvoting both comments.
Some things it makes me consider:
a) When is violence / attacking the outgroup justified?
b) Would it have been abusive if the children hadn’t been lied to? (I lean no. But given that they were lied to, I lean yes.)
c) Is it OK to sometimes frame “the default ways of the universe” as a kind of outgroup, in order to motivate action ‘against’ them? Ender’s Game was about another sentient lifeform. But in ways, the universe has “something vaguely resembling” anthropomorphizable demons that tend to work against human interests. (We, as a community, have already solidified Moloch as one. And there are others.) In a way, we ARE trying to mobilize ourselves ‘against the outgroup’—with that outgroup being kind of nebulous and made-up, but still trying to point at real forces that threaten our existence/happiness.
Q for benquo:
How do you feel about sports (or laser tag leagues)?
To clarify, I’m not saying that forming an army is always the wrong choice; I’m just saying that it’s one that makes sense when you want to attack the outgroup. Often attacking the outgroup is the correct move! That’s why biological and cultural evolution equipped us with that ability. On (c), I don’t like the “OK vs not OK” framing. It’s more that any particular mode of organization is going to capture some cognitive and coordination efficiencies at the price of limiting the kinds of things it can do somehow. Militaries are optimized to randomize* the target, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’d like to do with the future of humanity, unless we’re up against an utility-minimizer.
Play-fighting like laser tag and sports seems basically good; I haven’t prioritized it in my life and I’m probably paying some cognitive cost for not getting much of that.
* This is more literally true of weapons than of militaries, but militaries are optimized for the ability to credibly promise to randomize arbitrary targets, sometimes subject to particular rules of engagement, sometimes optimizing directly for “credibly” in social reality via intimidation tactics rather than actual force-projection capacity.
I don’t see you as having come close to establishing, beyond the (I claim weak) argument from the single-word framing, that the actual amount or parts of structure or framing that Dragon Army has inherited from militaries are optimized for attacking the outgroup to a degree that makes worrying justified.
This definitely doesn’t establish that. And this seems like a terrible context in which to continue to elaborate on all my criticisms of Duncan’s projects, so I’m not going to do that.
My main criticisms of Dragon Army are on the Dragon Army thread, albeit worded conservatively in a way that may not make it clear how these things are related to the “army” framing. If you want to discuss that, some other venue seems right at this point, this discussion is already way too broad in scope.
Since Benquo says he thinks sports are good, I’d be curious whether he is also worried about sports teams with names that suggest violence. Many teams are named after parties in a violent historical conflict or violent animals: Patriots, Braves, Panthers, Raptors, Bulls, Sharks, Warriors, Cavaliers, Rangers, Raiders, Blackhawks, Predators, Tigers, Pirates, Timberwolves...
I have a vague and unspecified concern (which might be unfair, and which I hope you will call out if you find it to be unfair) that this might be the beginnings of a drift across the line into scoring points, or the start of a snowball rolling downhill.
Like, you’re almost certainly just genuinely curious about the gears of benquo’s model. The word “army” raised a flag … does the word “warriors” raise a similar flag? This is an entirely valid question for finding the boundaries of benquo’s beliefs.
But I would be sad if other people piled on after this comment with a whole bunch of “do you think [innocuous thing] is bad or not?” comments. I fear something like, the conversation turning into an inquisition? A sense that the crowd gets to demand that benquo’s model defend itself, but the crowd isn’t symmetrically required to defend its model?
I want to firmly reiterate that I think there’s literally zero to object to in the above comment, both in content and tone; it’s more about a (very weak) gut-level intuition about what comes after it. I also note the possibility that these four paragraphs may not be worth the space I’ve spent on them—that this concern is too trivial to have taken up this much time. But since (boy howdy) this has been quite the week for things spiraling out of control, I am more motivated than usual to raise the ghost-of-a-concern before it becomes an actual concern. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Just wanted to say I appreciate the above comment a lot – the comment here is exactly the sort of thing I struggle the most with how to respond to (either when wearing a mod hat or just as a conversational participant), since there’s nothing wrong (either technically or in spirit), and yet it’s (at least sometimes, often enough to notice) the spark of something beginning to spiral.
And if we weren’t already knee deep in a thread that’s done some spiralling, I often feel the most helpless when I see the first such comment in a thread, and saying anything about it feels likely to do more harm than good.
[noticing that me responding to this in this way could also be the beginnings of some kind of spiral, but I’m hoping it’s the good kind]
This is the sort of thing that motivated the Demon Thread concept, and part of my goal there was to get the concept enough in the zeitgeist that there’s a critical mass of people who, early on in a thread, see a comment like that, or notice themselves about to make a comment like that, and just… shift their tone a little to ensure it goes well without having to draw attention to it.
Writing this out is leading me to notice that a particular flaw in the term “Demon Seed” that I used there, which is in itself a bit of an inflammatory term, which makes it a poor handle to use to refer to the sort of comment that’s first in the chain, that’s perfectly fine except for being slightly shaped in a way that might build into a pattern.
I think part of what’s going on here is that “armies are for organized violence” feels very similar to “armies are the outgroup and people associated with them should be scapegoated,” especially to people in the actor mode. I don’t actually think the latter, though, just the former.
I liked Ender’s Game a lot, and I’m enjoying Orson Scott Card’s new Fleet School series, which has a really good treatment of friendship and trust. The fictional Dragon Army wasn’t inherently bad, it was just a military unit of elite child-soldiers. That’s a very specific sort of thing, and one should be pretty careful in generalizing leadership lessons from it to nonabusive peacetime conditions like the ones Duncan set up for his group house.
To be honest, I think Eliezer’s “Rationality Dojo” framing was somewhat unfortunate in hindsight. Some sorts of adversarial intelligence are going to be part of a well-rounded human mind, but framing that as coextensive with rationality seems … bad.
Sports is a zero-sum contest, so names that suggest adversarial players seem appropriate.