In the comments of Ray’s post, Zvi asked the following question (about a variant where a cake gets destroyed):
I still don’t understand, in the context of the ceremony, what would cause anyone to push the button. Whether or not it would incinerate a cake, which would pretty much make you history’s greatest monster.
There are several obvious reasons why someone might push the button.
Reason one: spite. Pure, simple spite, nothing more. A very compelling reason, I assure you. (See also: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”)
Reason two: desire for infamy. “History’s greatest monster” is much better (for many people) than being a nobody.
Reason three: personal antipathy for people who would be harmed.
I could think of more potential reasons, I suppose, but I think three examples are enough. Remember that being incapable of imagining why someone would do a bad thing, is a weakness and a failure. Strive to do better.
All your reasons look like People Are Bad. I think it suffices that The World is Complex and Coordination is Hard.
Consider, for example:
Someone thinks Petrov day is not actually a good ritual and wants to make a statement about this
Someone thinks the reasoning exhibited in OP/comments is naïve and wouldn’t stand up to the real test, and so wants to punish people/teach them a lesson about this
Someone comes up with a clever argument involving logical decision theories and Everett branches meaning they should push… but they made a mistake and the argument is wrong
Someone thinks promising but unstable person X is about to press the button, and that this would be really bad for X’s community position, and so instead they take it upon themselves to press the button to enable the promising but unstable person to be redeemed and flourish
Someone accidentally gives away/loses their launch codes (e.g. just keeps their gmail inbox open at work)
A group of people tries to set up a scheme to reliable prevent a launch, however this grows increasingly hard and confusing and eventually escalates into one of the above failure modes
Several people try to set up precommitments that will guarantee a stable equilibrium; however, one of them makes a mistake and interpret the result as launching being the only way for them to follow-through on it
Someone who feels that “this is trivial if there’s no incentive to press the button” tries to “make things more interesting” and sets off a chain of events that culmninates in a failure mode like the above
...
Generating this list only took a few minutes and wasn’t that high effort. Lots of the examples have a lot of ways of being realised.
So overall, adding karma bounty for launching could be cool, but I don’t think it’s as necessary as some people think.
I disagree, FWIW. It seems to me that “desire for infamy” may be rolled into “people are bad”, but not the other two. I do not consider either personal antipathy nor spite to be necessarily negative qualities.
Well, I could note that reactive spite is game-theoretically correct; this is well-documented and surely familiar to everyone here.
But that would not be the important reason. In fact I take spitefulness to be a terminal value, and as a shard of godshatter which is absolutely critical to what humans are (and, importantly, what I take to be the ideal of what humans are and should be).
It is not always appropriate, of course; nor even usually, no. Someone who is spiteful all or most of the time, who is largely driven by spite in their lives—this is not a pleasant person to be around, and nor would I wish to be like this. But someone who is entirely devoid of spite—who does not even understand it, who has never felt it nor can imagine feeling spite—I must wonder whether such a one is fully human.
There is an old Soviet animated short, called “Baba Yaga Is Opposed” (which you may watch in its entirety on YouTube; link to first of three episodes; each is ~10 minutes).
The plot is: it’s the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Misha the bear has been chosen as the event’s mascot. Baba Yaga—the legendary witch-crone of Russian folklore—is watching the announcement on TV. “Why him!” she exclaims; “why him and not me!” “The entire world is in favor!” proclaims the television announcer; whereupon the witch declares: “But Baba Yaga is opposed!”—and embarks on a mad scheme to kidnap Misha and … well, it’s not clear what her plan is, exactly; but hijinks predictably ensue.
After “Baba Yaga Is Opposed” was aired in the Soviet Union, the cartoon’s title passed into the vernacular, referring to someone who opposes something, or refuses something, for no reason but a contrarian nature; a refusal to conform, on general principles; in short—spite.
I think we need such people. I think that “Baba Yaga is opposed” is, at times, all that stands between humanity and utter catastrophe and horror; and, much more often, all that stands in the way of plans and schemes that threaten to make our lives more dull and grey. We need there to be, always, people who will simply not go along with our grand plans, no matter how well-intentioned; who refuse to conform, to participate, not from any specific principles, but simply because they don’t want to. We need to know that however reasonable our arguments, some people won’t agree with us, and nothing we can say will make them agree. We need to know that we will never be able to convince everyone or to get everyone to go along.
I fear to imagine what will happen on the day when there is no Baba Yaga to stubbornly and spitefully oppose our best-laid plans; and I can only hope that the stories are true, that say she is immortal.
Indeed, Eliezer has written extensively about this very phenomenon. No argument is universally compelling—there is no sequence of propositions so self evident that it will cause our opponents to either agree or spontaneously combust.
Side note, I occasionally make a joke that I’m sent from another part of the multiverse (colloquially, “the future”) to help fix this broken fucked up instance of the universe.
The joke goes — it’s not a stupid teleportation thing like Terminator, it’s a really expensive process two-step process to edit even a tiny bit of information in another universe. So with right CTC relays you can edit a tiny bit of information, creating some high-variance people in a dense area, and then the only people who get their orders are people who reach a sufficient level of maturity, competence, and duty. Not everyone who we give the evolved post-sapien genetics gets their orders; the overwhelming majority fail actually.
Now, the reason we at the Agency — in the joke, I’m on the Solar Task Force — are trying to fix this universe is because it effects other parts of the multiverse. There’s a lot of stuff, but here’s a simple one — the coordinates of Earth are similar in many branches. Setting off tons of nukes and beaming random stuff into space calls attention to Earth’s location. I believe a game theoretic solution to the Fermi Pardox was proposed recently in SciFi and no one was paying attention. I mean, did anyone check that out? Right? Don’t let Earth’s coordinates get out. Jeez guys. This isn’t complicatd. C’mon.
Now normally things work correctly, but this particular universe came about because you idiots — I mean, not you since you weren’t alive — but collectively, this idiot branch of humans took a homeless bohemian artist who was a kinda-brave messenger solider in World War One (already a disaster but then the error compounds) and they took this loser with a bad attitude and put him in charge of a major industrial power at one of the most leveraged moments in human history. He wasn’t even German! He was Austrian! And he took over the Nazi Party as only the 55th member after he was sent in as a police officer to watch the group. (Look it up on Wikipedia, is true.) Then, he tries a putsch — a coup — and it fails, and the state semi-prosecutes him, making him famous, but then lets him off easily. He turns that fame (infamy, really) into wealth, that into political power, and takes over. Then he does a ton of damage, including invading and destroying the most important city in the world at the time. Right, where are all those physicists and mathematicians from? Starts with a “B”? Used to be a monarchy? Destroyed by the Nazis? And after those people aged out and had completed their work, we went through a stagnation period for quite a while? Right? Isn’t that what happened?
What a comedy of fucking errors. So much emotionalism. This branch of the universe is so incredibly fucked, I hate being here, but I’m doing my best. I like you humans, some of you are marvelous and all of you I want to succeed but man I fucking hate it here. Anyway, the first time I made this joke I was worried my CO would be pissed at me since I’m breaking rule#1, but it’s actually so bad here that I didn’t even get paradox warnings. (A true paradox crashes the universe, which we actually do when things are sufficiently bad and the rot is liable to spread.)
Anyway, this is just a joke. But yes, “desire for infamy” — fucking homo sapien sapiens. Evolve faster, please.
Just kidding.
(If I wanted to continue the joke, I’d say I am going certainly to get in trouble sooner or later, but this amuses the hell out of me and this is a really high stress unpleasant job. Anyway, not joking, now I’ll go back to building my peak performance tech company that prompts clear thinking, intentional action, and generally more eustress and joy while eliminating distress. I’ll build that into one of the largest companies on Earth while also producing subtly-but-not-subtly producing useful media with a lot of subtext lessons and building an elite team that does a mix of internal inventing like Bell Labs as well diffusion PayPal Mafia style, those people also going on to also start large important prosocial institutions. After the first few billion, I’ll fund better sensors for asteroid defense and bring down the cost of regular testing/monitoring bloodwork and simple “already known best practices” in biochemical regulation. Anyway, I’m just joking around cuz this amuses me and working 90-110 hours per week while in a mostly human body is very tiring. I like this whole button thing btw, this is really good. It gives me a little bit of hope. I guess hope is dangerous too though. Anyway, back to work, I’m going to teach my brilliant junior team that “there is value in writing a clear agenda of what we want to accomplish in a meeting”. I’d rather be developing new branches of mathematics — I already developed one for real, it blows people’s minds when I show it to them (ask me in person whenever a whiteboard is around), and I’ll write it up when I have some spare time — but yeah, “we shouldn’t just fuck around for no purpose in meetings” is the current level of the job. So be it. Anyway, this button thing is good, I needed this. Thanks.)
Oh in case you missed the subtext, it’s a SciFi joke.
It’s funny cuz it’s sort of almost plausibly true and gets people thinking about what if their life had higher stakes and their decisions mattered, eh?
Obviously, it’s just a silly amusing joke. And it’s obviously going to look really counterproductively weird if analyzed or discussed among normal people, since they don’t get nerd humor. I recommend against doing that.
There are several obvious reasons why someone might push the button.
Reason one: spite. Pure, simple spite, nothing more. A very compelling reason, I assure you. (See also: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”)
Reason two: desire for infamy. “History’s greatest monster” is much better (for many people) than being a nobody.
Reason three: personal antipathy for people who would be harmed.
I could think of more potential reasons, I suppose, but I think three examples are enough. Remember that being incapable of imagining why someone would do a bad thing, is a weakness and a failure. Strive to do better.
All your reasons look like People Are Bad. I think it suffices that The World is Complex and Coordination is Hard.
Consider, for example:
Someone thinks Petrov day is not actually a good ritual and wants to make a statement about this
Someone thinks the reasoning exhibited in OP/comments is naïve and wouldn’t stand up to the real test, and so wants to punish people/teach them a lesson about this
Someone comes up with a clever argument involving logical decision theories and Everett branches meaning they should push… but they made a mistake and the argument is wrong
Someone thinks promising but unstable person X is about to press the button, and that this would be really bad for X’s community position, and so instead they take it upon themselves to press the button to enable the promising but unstable person to be redeemed and flourish
Someone accidentally gives away/loses their launch codes (e.g. just keeps their gmail inbox open at work)
A group of people tries to set up a scheme to reliable prevent a launch, however this grows increasingly hard and confusing and eventually escalates into one of the above failure modes
Several people try to set up precommitments that will guarantee a stable equilibrium; however, one of them makes a mistake and interpret the result as launching being the only way for them to follow-through on it
Someone who feels that “this is trivial if there’s no incentive to press the button” tries to “make things more interesting” and sets off a chain of events that culmninates in a failure mode like the above
...
Generating this list only took a few minutes and wasn’t that high effort. Lots of the examples have a lot of ways of being realised.
So overall, adding karma bounty for launching could be cool, but I don’t think it’s as necessary as some people think.
I disagree, FWIW. It seems to me that “desire for infamy” may be rolled into “people are bad”, but not the other two. I do not consider either personal antipathy nor spite to be necessarily negative qualities.
I would be interested to know how you see spite as “not necessarily negative”.
Well, I could note that reactive spite is game-theoretically correct; this is well-documented and surely familiar to everyone here.
But that would not be the important reason. In fact I take spitefulness to be a terminal value, and as a shard of godshatter which is absolutely critical to what humans are (and, importantly, what I take to be the ideal of what humans are and should be).
It is not always appropriate, of course; nor even usually, no. Someone who is spiteful all or most of the time, who is largely driven by spite in their lives—this is not a pleasant person to be around, and nor would I wish to be like this. But someone who is entirely devoid of spite—who does not even understand it, who has never felt it nor can imagine feeling spite—I must wonder whether such a one is fully human.
There is an old Soviet animated short, called “Baba Yaga Is Opposed” (which you may watch in its entirety on YouTube; link to first of three episodes; each is ~10 minutes).
The plot is: it’s the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Misha the bear has been chosen as the event’s mascot. Baba Yaga—the legendary witch-crone of Russian folklore—is watching the announcement on TV. “Why him!” she exclaims; “why him and not me!” “The entire world is in favor!” proclaims the television announcer; whereupon the witch declares: “But Baba Yaga is opposed!”—and embarks on a mad scheme to kidnap Misha and … well, it’s not clear what her plan is, exactly; but hijinks predictably ensue.
After “Baba Yaga Is Opposed” was aired in the Soviet Union, the cartoon’s title passed into the vernacular, referring to someone who opposes something, or refuses something, for no reason but a contrarian nature; a refusal to conform, on general principles; in short—spite.
I think we need such people. I think that “Baba Yaga is opposed” is, at times, all that stands between humanity and utter catastrophe and horror; and, much more often, all that stands in the way of plans and schemes that threaten to make our lives more dull and grey. We need there to be, always, people who will simply not go along with our grand plans, no matter how well-intentioned; who refuse to conform, to participate, not from any specific principles, but simply because they don’t want to. We need to know that however reasonable our arguments, some people won’t agree with us, and nothing we can say will make them agree. We need to know that we will never be able to convince everyone or to get everyone to go along.
I fear to imagine what will happen on the day when there is no Baba Yaga to stubbornly and spitefully oppose our best-laid plans; and I can only hope that the stories are true, that say she is immortal.
Indeed, Eliezer has written extensively about this very phenomenon. No argument is universally compelling—there is no sequence of propositions so self evident that it will cause our opponents to either agree or spontaneously combust.
Great comment.
Side note, I occasionally make a joke that I’m sent from another part of the multiverse (colloquially, “the future”) to help fix this broken fucked up instance of the universe.
The joke goes — it’s not a stupid teleportation thing like Terminator, it’s a really expensive process two-step process to edit even a tiny bit of information in another universe. So with right CTC relays you can edit a tiny bit of information, creating some high-variance people in a dense area, and then the only people who get their orders are people who reach a sufficient level of maturity, competence, and duty. Not everyone who we give the evolved post-sapien genetics gets their orders; the overwhelming majority fail actually.
Now, the reason we at the Agency — in the joke, I’m on the Solar Task Force — are trying to fix this universe is because it effects other parts of the multiverse. There’s a lot of stuff, but here’s a simple one — the coordinates of Earth are similar in many branches. Setting off tons of nukes and beaming random stuff into space calls attention to Earth’s location. I believe a game theoretic solution to the Fermi Pardox was proposed recently in SciFi and no one was paying attention. I mean, did anyone check that out? Right? Don’t let Earth’s coordinates get out. Jeez guys. This isn’t complicatd. C’mon.
Now normally things work correctly, but this particular universe came about because you idiots — I mean, not you since you weren’t alive — but collectively, this idiot branch of humans took a homeless bohemian artist who was a kinda-brave messenger solider in World War One (already a disaster but then the error compounds) and they took this loser with a bad attitude and put him in charge of a major industrial power at one of the most leveraged moments in human history. He wasn’t even German! He was Austrian! And he took over the Nazi Party as only the 55th member after he was sent in as a police officer to watch the group. (Look it up on Wikipedia, is true.) Then, he tries a putsch — a coup — and it fails, and the state semi-prosecutes him, making him famous, but then lets him off easily. He turns that fame (infamy, really) into wealth, that into political power, and takes over. Then he does a ton of damage, including invading and destroying the most important city in the world at the time. Right, where are all those physicists and mathematicians from? Starts with a “B”? Used to be a monarchy? Destroyed by the Nazis? And after those people aged out and had completed their work, we went through a stagnation period for quite a while? Right? Isn’t that what happened?
What a comedy of fucking errors. So much emotionalism. This branch of the universe is so incredibly fucked, I hate being here, but I’m doing my best. I like you humans, some of you are marvelous and all of you I want to succeed but man I fucking hate it here. Anyway, the first time I made this joke I was worried my CO would be pissed at me since I’m breaking rule#1, but it’s actually so bad here that I didn’t even get paradox warnings. (A true paradox crashes the universe, which we actually do when things are sufficiently bad and the rot is liable to spread.)
Anyway, this is just a joke. But yes, “desire for infamy” — fucking homo sapien sapiens. Evolve faster, please.
Just kidding.
(If I wanted to continue the joke, I’d say I am going certainly to get in trouble sooner or later, but this amuses the hell out of me and this is a really high stress unpleasant job. Anyway, not joking, now I’ll go back to building my peak performance tech company that prompts clear thinking, intentional action, and generally more eustress and joy while eliminating distress. I’ll build that into one of the largest companies on Earth while also producing subtly-but-not-subtly producing useful media with a lot of subtext lessons and building an elite team that does a mix of internal inventing like Bell Labs as well diffusion PayPal Mafia style, those people also going on to also start large important prosocial institutions. After the first few billion, I’ll fund better sensors for asteroid defense and bring down the cost of regular testing/monitoring bloodwork and simple “already known best practices” in biochemical regulation. Anyway, I’m just joking around cuz this amuses me and working 90-110 hours per week while in a mostly human body is very tiring. I like this whole button thing btw, this is really good. It gives me a little bit of hope. I guess hope is dangerous too though. Anyway, back to work, I’m going to teach my brilliant junior team that “there is value in writing a clear agenda of what we want to accomplish in a meeting”. I’d rather be developing new branches of mathematics — I already developed one for real, it blows people’s minds when I show it to them (ask me in person whenever a whiteboard is around), and I’ll write it up when I have some spare time — but yeah, “we shouldn’t just fuck around for no purpose in meetings” is the current level of the job. So be it. Anyway, this button thing is good, I needed this. Thanks.)
Oh in case you missed the subtext, it’s a SciFi joke.
It’s funny cuz it’s sort of almost plausibly true and gets people thinking about what if their life had higher stakes and their decisions mattered, eh?
Obviously, it’s just a silly amusing joke. And it’s obviously going to look really counterproductively weird if analyzed or discussed among normal people, since they don’t get nerd humor. I recommend against doing that.
Just laugh and maybe learn something.
Don’t be stupid and overthink it.
I’m confused why you got downvoted so much over a joke.… sorry.
The fact that it’s a joke is non-important; the fact that it’s a bad joke is.
Maybe don’t make a bad joke and think that people cannot take it, consider that maybe it’s just bad.