Claim: EAs should spend a lot of energy and time trying to end the American culture war.
America, for all its terrible problems, is the world’s leading producer of new technology. Most of the benefits of the new technology actually accrue to people who are far removed from America in both time and space. Most computer technology was invented in America, and that technology has already done worlds of good for people in places like China, India, and Africa; and it’s going to continue help people all over the world in the centuries and millennia to come. Likewise for medical technology. If an American company discovers a cure for cancer, that will benefit people all over the globe… and it will also benefit the citizens of Muskington, the capitol of the Mars colony, in the year 4514.
It should be obvious to any student of history that most societies, in most historical eras, are not very innovative. Europe in the 1000s was not very innovative. China in the 1300s was not very innovative, India in the 1500s was not very innovative, etc etc. France was innovative in the 1700s and 1800s but not so much today. So the fact that the US is innovative today is pretty special: the ability to innovate is a relatively rare property of human societies.
So the US is innovative, and that innovation is enormously beneficial to humanity, but it’s naive to expect that the current phase of American innovation will last forever. And in fact there are a lot of signs that it is about to die out. Certainly if there were some large scale social turmoil in the US, like revolution, civil war, or government collapse, it would pose a serious threat to America’s ability to innovate.
That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper. There’s a first-order rationale: Americans are humans, and helping humans prosper is good. But more important is the second-order rationale: Americans are producing technology that will benefit all humanity for all time.
Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war: the intense partisan political hatred that characterizes our political discourse. EAs could have a big impact by trying to reduce partisanship and tribalism in America, thereby helping to lengthen and preserve the era of American innovation.
I think it’s an interesting point about innovation actually being very rare, and I agree. It takes a special combination of things for to happen and that combination doesn’t come around much. Britain was extremely innovative a few hundred years ago. In fact, they started the industrial revolution, literally revolutionising humanity. But today they do not strike me as particularly innovative even with that history behind them.
I don’t think America’s ability to innovate is coming to end all that soon. But even if America continues to prosper, will that mean it continues to innovate? It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands. It takes a particular culture, a particular legal system, and much more.
It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands.
I don’t know about that. People have been discussing how does an innovation hub (like Silicon Valley) appear and how one might create one—that is a difficult problem, partially because starting a virtuous circle is hard.
But general innovation in a society? Lemme throw in some factors off the top of my mind:
Low barriers to entry (to experimentation, to starting up businesses, etc.). That includes a permissive legal environment and a light regulatory hand.
A properly Darwinian environment where you live or die (quickly) by market success and not by whether you managed to bribe the right bureaucrat.
Relatively low stigma attached to failure
Sufficient numbers of high-IQ people who are secure enough to take risks
Enough money floating around to fund high-risk ventures
For basic science, enough money coupled with the willingness to throw it at very high-IQ people and say “Make something interesting with it”
That’s a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you’ve got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It’s easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it’s much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
very few societies have ever been particularly innovative
This implies that there are good reasons for it. You can look at it in the exploit/explore framework and going full explore is rarely a good choice. Notably, betting on innovation produces a large variance of outcomes and you need to be sure you can survive that variance.
The Mojave Spaceport private space project is coming together, with lots of innovation and high-tech machine tooling driving a small seed of development, and that could enable lots of support and design help for the high profile private space projects.
France is at place 18 in the global innovation index with a score of 54.04 while the US is at place 4 with a score of 61.40.
Given that you live in Berkely US innovation is more visible to you than French innovation. You don’t see the French trains that are much better than anything that the US has at present.
The US is a bit more innovative then France but if you say that France isn’t innovating at all today while the US does, that produces a flawed view.
America, for all its terrible problems, is the world’s leading producer of new technology.
True.
That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper.
Not true. There’s rationale to help America continue be inventive, but that’s not the same thing at all as “continue to prosper” since the US looks at the moment like an empire in decline—one that will continue to prosper for a while, but will be too ossified and sclerotic to continue innovating.
Note that it’s received wisdom in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) that you need to innovate in the world of bits because the world of atoms is too locked-down. There are some exceptions (see e.g. Musk), but overall the difference between innovations in bits and innovations in atoms is huge and stark.
Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war
Not true at all. Even in Berkeley what you have is young males playing political-violence LARP games (that’s how you get laid, amirite?) and that’s about it.
We can agree to disagree, but my view is that the US has dozens or hundreds of problems we can’t solve—education, criminal justice, the deficit, the military-industrial complex—because the government is paralyzed because of partisan hatred.
the US has dozens or hundreds of problems we can’t solve
True
because the government is paralyzed because of partisan hatred.
Not true. The government is paralyzed (see the grandparent: “ossified and sclerotic”) because people and institutions which find the status quo convenient and profitable are powerful and able to block changes.
And if you want a dominant active government, well, be careful of what you wish for.
because the government is paralyzed because of partisan hatred.
Eh, no. Not in the case of USA. Republicans have locked the Congress, and they have a (theoretically) Republican president. It should be smooth sailing if it were only for partisan hatred.
First you will have to fight against the current trend of rationalists avoiding even discussing culture-war topics. SSC is currently edging towards more limitations on what can be discussed, where culture-war topics can be banned and are at least siloed into separate discussion areas. I think we should try to keep LessWrong an area where there are no limitations on topics that can be discussed—although we might try to enforce the level and quality of discussion to a certain standard. Politics is the mind-killer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid being mind-killed when you talk about it.
SSC is currently edging towards more limitations on what can be discussed, where culture-war topics can be banned and are at least siloed into separate discussion areas.
That’s not really true. The culture war in the US is not about HBD. Most people in the US don’t even know what HBD stands for. The fight over it is a relatively small internet debate.
SSC get’s a lot of traffic from discussing culture-war topics to the point that he complains that posts he write about feminism get more traffic than other posts he considers more important.
HBD is not the whole culture war, and it’s not the most important piece of it overall, but it does make up a big portion of the debate within academia and among intellectuals (among which rationalists are an important subset of intellectuals). Scott would not have singled out that topic if it wasn’t especially good at inciting internet fights. The reason it’s such an important topic in the culture war is because the truth or falsity of it has enormous consequences on how we might politically and economically approach the issue of inequality.
The reason it’s such an important topic in the culture war is because the truth or falsity of it has enormous consequences on how we might politically and economically approach the issue of inequality.
‘HBD’ is not the kind of thing you can usefully describe as “true or false” (which incidentally is why the terms ‘HBD’ and ‘human biodiversity’ are quite unhelpful except as a source of controversy). There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical. The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs, which people will inevitably blame on ‘structural racism’ when the underlying cause for this imbalance is in fact rather different.” But this is hardly a significant problem; it might even go entirely unnoticed, were it not for the underlying political contentiousness that’s the natural product of ethnic diversity in a modern mass society!
There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical.
This seems to actually be the main source of contention, in that there are many claims of the sort such as “genetic differences are too small to really matter”, “the environment a person is raised in is the main, if not the only, causal determiner of life outcomes”, etc.
The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs
Except that some ethnic groups are already far less represented in high-skill jobs, and our economy continues to transform into one with higher need for high-skill workers and a disappearing number of low-skill jobs. This is not just a problem due to differences in intelligence between ethic groups but also a problem due to the high variation in intelligence in general, and the fact that it is highly heritable. Low-skill, blue-collar jobs just aren’t going to exist forever and that’s something that has to be dealt with at some point if we don’t want people to suffer because of it.
All human jobs become redundant when AGI takes off, but before that, narrow AIs will take many. But that doesn’t mean there will be no “blue-collar” jobs left, nor does it mean that “white-collar” jobs are safe.
For example, radiology is traditionally white-collar, but image recognition AIs can be trained to be more accurate than any human. In the near future, I expect the demand for radiologists to plummet as these take over. You’ll still need a handful to help train the AIs, but that’s not nearly as many as we’re employing now.
On the other hand, something like a maid service is a traditionally blue-collar job, but I do not expect robots to replace them any time soon. Something we humans might consider a simple job, like “clean your room” is an extremely difficult AI/robotics problem. You have to safely navigate small spaces without breaking things. You have to classify a broad range of objects to decide what can be thrown away. But even this is easy compared to more human-service-oriented jobs, where an AI would basically have to pass the Turing Test before it could replace a human. If you want a blue-collar job safe from AI, look no further than “Task Rabbit handyman”.
“The McKinsey Global Institute analyzed the work activities of more than 800 occupations in the U.S. to determine what percentage of a job could be automated using current technology. It turns out, a small fraction of jobs are either entirely automatable or entirely robot-proof.”
I don’t agree with their conclusions, but at least they put their views down..
Moravec’s paradox doesn’t actually tell us very much. All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect. This is not very surprising—we know extremely little about how intelligence works, and we have a long history of underestimating / overestimating the difficulty of various problems which goes far back into the history of mathematics. Our brains evolved to solve some pretty specific tasks, which made some tasks (like playing Chess) seem very difficult although they could easily be solved by a computer program, because we simply had no need for Chess playing abilities in order to survive. This doesn’t mean that the low-level tasks aren’t difficult in an absolute sense, it just means we shouldn’t extrapolate this observation to other tasks we currently consider very difficult. Note that computer-vision was usually thought to be one of the low-level tasks AI researchers thought was too difficult to be solved very soon, and then deep-learning changed that pretty quickly.
The way that I read your argument (and I may be reading it wrong) is that we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs. This assertion I think is probably true in the specific way it is stated, but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out. This claim does not follow from the argument you gave, except in the specific case in which AI tends to replace jobs in an evenly-distributed way across the intelligence spectrum, or in the case in which we find other economically useful jobs for humans as quickly as AI replaces them. Both of those situations I think are unlikely.
All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect.
What it tells us is that the nervous system is doing a lot of processing subconsciously. The kind of cognition we’re most aware of, the linguistic, step-by-step, system 2, frontal lobe stuff, is what we can program a computer to do by thinking through the steps and constraints. I think we need to be careful about using the word “difficulty” in this context. We figured out the system 2 stuff first not because it was easier, but because we knew more about it. The algorithms structuring the human brain are encoded in the genome, which is way simpler than the connectome it eventually builds. I don’t expect building general intelligence to be particularly difficult. I expect figuring out how it works to be the hard part. The question isn’t “How hard?”, but “How obscure?”.
we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs.
That’s not quite what I meant. But what a typical human considers difficult isn’t aligned with what an AI programmer considers difficult to teach robots. They are separate axes, though there is probably some correlation. I wasn’t suggesting a perfectly even distribution would magically emerge. We should expect some of both blue- and white-collar jobs to be lost to AI early on, and some of both to hold out for a long time, right up until the singularity.
but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out.
Oh we should be worried. Mass automation has already been disruptive. Those factory jobs are never coming back. But the disruption might not go the way you expect.
Yes, those with high IQs will be better able to retrain to do other high-IQ jobs. But that can take years! I agree that expecting low-IQ people to retrain for high-IQ jobs is not realistic. (Unless some kind of brain-computer interface is developed soon enough to change the playing field.)
But studies indicate a significant inverse correlation between g and conscientiousness. The kind of people you want for Turing-test-complete service, or intimate, in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people. Your so-called “cognitive elite” aren’t that. The blue collar workers might actually be more flexible.
(Those who are both lower-IQ, and not conscientious don’t make good employees even now. Robots are not going to make this problem go away.)
I’m honestly not sure which group will get hit hardest. But let’s consider base rates. Are there more blue- or white-collar workers? Narrow AIs will probably have to be trained for each task. Is there more diversity of tasks in blue- or white-collar work?
in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people.
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent. Electrical systems, plumbing systems, etc. are both complex and require reasoning to work with. A lot of fix-it stuff is a mix of puzzles, and figuring out how to do things on the fly.
I myself am a nanny (if you do a SAT to IQ conversion, my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you). Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence, and if I were to think of the most common trait it’s that they were pioneering enough to either immigrate or leave their entire family behind to come to America to work.
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent.
Let’s decide what the truth is before we go calling it harmful. First, “dutiful”/”vigilant”, etc. are just synonyms with “conscientious”. That’s by definition, not stereotype. As for the “low-IQ” part, I only claimed that
studies found an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and the general intelligence factor, and
you want conscientious people for in-home and human-service jobs. (regardless of IQ)
It’s only an inverse correlation, and nowhere near a perfect −1. (Maybe −0.25) As I mentioned, there exist some who have both low-IQ and are not conscientious (who don’t make good employees), I thought that also implied the existence of the reverse.
If you want to claim we’re being inaccurate, we need data, not anecdotes. Stereotypes often have some statistical truth.
The chart michaelkeenan linked to is instructive. There is considerable overlap in these curves. Average-IQ (~100) people can get most jobs on that chart, but would find it difficult to get the high-IQ jobs near the bottom, and probably can’t get a medical doctor job at all. An IQ-85 person could realistically get an electrician job, but not an electrical engineering job.
If we believe the chart, then we should also expect a significant number of above-average-IQ people working blue collar jobs. I do not dispute this. You claim to be an example of that. But they can retrain and even get merit scholarships. I pointed out that this process would still be disruptive, since the training process could take years.
But they (and you) are part of the “cognitive elite” that tristanm isn’t worried about becoming perpetually unemployed. It’s the other side, precisely the low-IQ people who can’t retrain for high-IQ jobs that were cause for concern. I pointed out they may have other advantages (conscientiousness) that could mitigate that somewhat, and furthermore, what is easy for humans is not the same as what is easy for robots anyway.
my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you
Who, me? Why are you so surprised I’m talking about it when this is the direct topic of the thread? The g factor is real, and significant to life outcomes. This is settled science.
This is google-able—I found this chart. It’s probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I’d trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
Even in your chart, the top 25% of janitors (the lowest IQ occupation) are smarter than the bottom 25% of college professors (the second highest IQ occupation). IQ ranges within an occupation are MUCH bigger than IQ ranges between occupations.
All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent.
That is not true for me. But I am curious—if you think that this type of service/blue-collar jobs are occupied by highly intelligent people, where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence
Again, not according to my observations (though I admit we may have different baselines). I agree that immigrant nannies—like other immigrants—have to demonstrate a certain level of capability and independence to get to where they are. But I don’t think this level is very high.
On the other hand, for some intelligent people becoming a nanny in the US is the easiest way to improve their condition. So there is a lot of variance—some nannies are very bright and some are not. Just like most people, really :-)
But low-IQ people won’t do well in a large corporation. They are not that good at covering their asses and are not very valuable as minions. A large corp will probably have difficulties getting rid of them (for a variety of reasons), but it’s not their natural habitat.
Good point. I imagine many are in prison, homeless, or perpetually unemployed on welfare or supported by family, but no way that accounts for half of the working-age population at present. The rest must be working, and not as rocket surgeons.
The New York Times which serves intellectuals who want to inform themselves about the world has used the term “human biodiversity” 5 times according to Google. Neither of those 5 times happened in this decade.
If I search for HBD there are more hits but most are not about human biodiversity. I find ’The case is listed by the highway patrol as ″HBD,″ its shorthand for ″Had Been Drinking but not drunk.‴
Some of Scott’s readers didn’t even know what HBD was and Googling told them that it’s an abbreviation for “happy birthday”.
Scott would not have singled out that topic if it wasn’t especially good at inciting internet fights.
Internet fights are about conflicts between subcultures. The fact that something is infuriating people in a tiny bubble doesn’t mean that it’s central for the core social debate.
That’s not a term Scott banned. If it’s a synonym than nobody should have any problem with Scott’s ban because they can simply exchange on term with another without losing the ability to communicate anything.
If one denies the heritability of IQ, one is obligated to provide another explanation for the differences in educational attainment, income, crime, etc. between races. Thus, one minds oneself seeking out ever subtler forms of “racism” to explain the difference. It’s slightly more complicated than this in that signaling spirals also get involved.
If one denies the heritability of IQ, one is obligated to provide another explanation for the differences in educational attainment, income, crime, etc. between races.
You got that the wrong way around. A person who sees the social conflict as the oppressor vs. the oppressed doesn’t need any motivation to “explain the differences in educational attainment etc” to motivate himself.
Trying to understand demographic statistics is important for us nerds but it’s not what drives the main social conflict.
You got that the wrong way around. A person who sees the social conflict as the oppressor vs. the oppressed doesn’t need any motivation to “explain the differences in educational attainment etc” to motivate himself.
Once someone is already a volk-Marxist fanatic that is true. However, to convince others to give them power, not to mention to recruit more fanatics they need a semi-plausible argument for their position.
Trying to understand demographic statistics is important for us nerds but it’s not what drives the main social conflict.
Whether someone is interested in demographic statistics or not, demographic statistics are real and hence have real effects. The need to deal with those effects drives a lot of the social conflicts.
The New York Times which serves intellectuals who want to inform themselves about the world
It doesn’t serve people who are interested in debates going on online, within academia, or within the scientific community. Not very well at least.
The term “HBD” I think has popped up mostly recently to refer to a collection of ideas, mostly surrounding the idea of genetic determinism or related issues. I am not sure if it has ever referred to anything else or if there used to be other terms to describe those issues. From the way I understand most of the conversations about it, it’s usually used in the context of the heritability of intelligence or IQ.
This is an important topic, and definitely not something that will always be constrained to “tiny internet bubbles” like Scott’s blog. It has huge repercussions for how we discuss things like education, income inequality, employment, etc. If the fights over this topic really were constrained to internet subcultures, you wouldn’t see violent riots popping up at various universities throughout America in response to speakers wanting to present their case for it, or the SPLC claiming that people like Charles Murray are white nationalists when that’s not really the case.
The fact that this issue is so core to social debate is precisely why it incites negative emotions and why people tend to immediately move to absolute certainty over it one way or the other.
It doesn’t serve people who are interested in debates going on online,
Online debates are driven by filter bubbles. It’s a mistake to assume that the conflict in your own filter bubble reflects the core underlying social conflict of the US.
Especially if it isn’t newsworthy enough for a New York Times journalist to explain to his readers what the conflict is even about, so that his readers understand what the phrase is supposed to mean.
The term “HBD” I think has popped up mostly recently to refer to a collection of ideas, mostly surrounding the idea of genetic determinism or related issues.
Scott didn’t ban any of the collection of ideas but the term itself: “I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” – this doesn’t necessarily mean banning all discussion of those topics, but it should force people to concentrate on particular claims rather than make sweeping culture-war-ish declarations about the philosophy as a whole. ”
You can discuss specific claims in that field on this blog.
you wouldn’t see violent riots popping up at various universities throughout America in response to speakers wanting to present their case for it
There’s a conflict but the conflict isn’t about “human biodiversity” and some of the protestors might not even know what the phrase means.
Peter Singer got his speech squelched for ableism even when we agree that disabled people are per definition biologically different. People on the left don’t deny human biodiversity on that point.
It doesn’t serve people who are interested in debates going on online, within academia, or within the scientific community. Not very well at least.
Which specific debates within the scientific community are held under the label of human biodiversity?
If I type “human biodiversity” into Google Scholar most of the papers aren’t recent. The first recent paper I find is “Human Biodiversity Conservation: A Consensual Ethical Principle”. It’s about the case for conserving human disability.
That’s not the kind of writing that was found at Scott’s comment section.
Especially if it isn’t newsworthy enough for a New York Times journalist to explain to his readers what the conflict is even about, so that his readers understand what the phrase is supposed to mean.
There has been a lot of important events that New York Times journalists didn’t see fit to explain to their readers. The failure of Soviet collective agriculture is probably the most infamous historical example.
Scott didn’t ban any of the collection of ideas but the term itself: “I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” – this doesn’t necessarily mean banning all discussion of those topics, but it should force people to concentrate on particular claims rather than make sweeping culture-war-ish declarations about the philosophy as a whole. ”
Imagine trying to discuss the history of life on a forum that bans the term “evolution”.
There has been a lot of important events that New York Times journalists didn’t see fit to explain to their readers. The failure of Soviet collective agriculture is probably the most infamous historical example.
The failure of Soviet agriculture wasn’t very salient to Americans. If a topic would be the center of a culture war in the US they would notice and in today’s traffic driven times feel like it’s a good idea to write an article that ranks decently on the keyword.
The US culture war isn’t secular in nature. Many people on the right care about issues like the War on Christmas even when the kind of people in online discussions like Scott’s log don’t.
In other matters, was there a single time Trump uttered the words human biodiversity? He did have some pollsters who tried to understand what the US Republican public cares about.
Imagine trying to discuss the history of life on a forum that bans the term “evolution”.
Getting people to say natural selection instead of evolution has its benefits given that plenty of people think the terms are interchangeable and use the term wrongly.
Additionally, Scott blog isn’t a forum for discussing US culture wars. It isn’t even forum in the first place but the blog of a person who wants to be employed in an industry that doesn’t happen to be anti-fragile.
The failure of Soviet agriculture wasn’t very salient to Americans.
Yes it was. The “success” of Soviet collectivization compared to the apparent failure of capitalism was being used as an argument to justify leftwing/collectivist economic policies.
If a topic would be the center of a culture war in the US they would notice and in today’s traffic driven times feel like it’s a good idea to write an article that ranks decently on the keyword.
The NYT isn’t going to publish an article that would offend the world view of it’s liberal readers. Any description of HBD that conceptualizes it as an empirical scientific hypothesis that could be tested and potentially confirmed would certainly fit the bill.
So in the space of two comments you’ve gone from arguing:
Scott didn’t ban any of the collection of ideas but the term itself: “I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” – this doesn’t necessarily mean banning all discussion of those topics, but it should force people to concentrate on particular claims rather than make sweeping culture-war-ish declarations about the philosophy as a whole. ”
to justifying Scott’s decision by saying:
Additionally, Scott blog isn’t a forum for discussing US culture wars.
This looks like a straightforward example of what Eliezer calls logical rudeness.
Please expand on “Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war”, and provide some reasoning for “stability” being a driver of producing beneficial technology.
I dispute (or perhaps just don’t understand) both premises. I also am not sure if you mean “end the culture war” or “win the culture war for my side”. Is surrendering your recommended course of action?
I live in Berkeley, where there are literally armed gangs fighting each other in the streets.
Stability isn’t intrinsically valuable. The point is that we know our current civilizational formula is a pretty good one for innovation and most others aren’t, so we should stick to the current formula more or less.
My recommendation is a political ceasefire. Even if we could just decrease the volume of partisan hate speech, without solving any actual problems, that seems like it would have a lot of benefits.
Claim: EAs should spend a lot of energy and time trying to end the American culture war.
America, for all its terrible problems, is the world’s leading producer of new technology. Most of the benefits of the new technology actually accrue to people who are far removed from America in both time and space. Most computer technology was invented in America, and that technology has already done worlds of good for people in places like China, India, and Africa; and it’s going to continue help people all over the world in the centuries and millennia to come. Likewise for medical technology. If an American company discovers a cure for cancer, that will benefit people all over the globe… and it will also benefit the citizens of Muskington, the capitol of the Mars colony, in the year 4514.
It should be obvious to any student of history that most societies, in most historical eras, are not very innovative. Europe in the 1000s was not very innovative. China in the 1300s was not very innovative, India in the 1500s was not very innovative, etc etc. France was innovative in the 1700s and 1800s but not so much today. So the fact that the US is innovative today is pretty special: the ability to innovate is a relatively rare property of human societies.
So the US is innovative, and that innovation is enormously beneficial to humanity, but it’s naive to expect that the current phase of American innovation will last forever. And in fact there are a lot of signs that it is about to die out. Certainly if there were some large scale social turmoil in the US, like revolution, civil war, or government collapse, it would pose a serious threat to America’s ability to innovate.
That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper. There’s a first-order rationale: Americans are humans, and helping humans prosper is good. But more important is the second-order rationale: Americans are producing technology that will benefit all humanity for all time.
Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war: the intense partisan political hatred that characterizes our political discourse. EAs could have a big impact by trying to reduce partisanship and tribalism in America, thereby helping to lengthen and preserve the era of American innovation.
I think it’s an interesting point about innovation actually being very rare, and I agree. It takes a special combination of things for to happen and that combination doesn’t come around much. Britain was extremely innovative a few hundred years ago. In fact, they started the industrial revolution, literally revolutionising humanity. But today they do not strike me as particularly innovative even with that history behind them.
I don’t think America’s ability to innovate is coming to end all that soon. But even if America continues to prosper, will that mean it continues to innovate? It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands. It takes a particular culture, a particular legal system, and much more.
I don’t know about that. People have been discussing how does an innovation hub (like Silicon Valley) appear and how one might create one—that is a difficult problem, partially because starting a virtuous circle is hard.
But general innovation in a society? Lemme throw in some factors off the top of my mind:
Low barriers to entry (to experimentation, to starting up businesses, etc.). That includes a permissive legal environment and a light regulatory hand.
A properly Darwinian environment where you live or die (quickly) by market success and not by whether you managed to bribe the right bureaucrat.
Relatively low stigma attached to failure
Sufficient numbers of high-IQ people who are secure enough to take risks
Enough money floating around to fund high-risk ventures
For basic science, enough money coupled with the willingness to throw it at very high-IQ people and say “Make something interesting with it”
That’s a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you’ve got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It’s easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it’s much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
Yes, of course.
This implies that there are good reasons for it. You can look at it in the exploit/explore framework and going full explore is rarely a good choice. Notably, betting on innovation produces a large variance of outcomes and you need to be sure you can survive that variance.
yes, to those.
The Mojave Spaceport private space project is coming together, with lots of innovation and high-tech machine tooling driving a small seed of development, and that could enable lots of support and design help for the high profile private space projects.
You write about its importance, yet I suspect EAs mostly avoid it due to doubts about tractability and neglectedness.
France is at place 18 in the global innovation index with a score of 54.04 while the US is at place 4 with a score of 61.40.
Given that you live in Berkely US innovation is more visible to you than French innovation. You don’t see the French trains that are much better than anything that the US has at present.
The US is a bit more innovative then France but if you say that France isn’t innovating at all today while the US does, that produces a flawed view.
True.
Not true. There’s rationale to help America continue be inventive, but that’s not the same thing at all as “continue to prosper” since the US looks at the moment like an empire in decline—one that will continue to prosper for a while, but will be too ossified and sclerotic to continue innovating.
Note that it’s received wisdom in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) that you need to innovate in the world of bits because the world of atoms is too locked-down. There are some exceptions (see e.g. Musk), but overall the difference between innovations in bits and innovations in atoms is huge and stark.
Not true at all. Even in Berkeley what you have is young males playing political-violence LARP games (that’s how you get laid, amirite?) and that’s about it.
Read less media—it optimizes for outrage.
We can agree to disagree, but my view is that the US has dozens or hundreds of problems we can’t solve—education, criminal justice, the deficit, the military-industrial complex—because the government is paralyzed because of partisan hatred.
True
Not true. The government is paralyzed (see the grandparent: “ossified and sclerotic”) because people and institutions which find the status quo convenient and profitable are powerful and able to block changes.
And if you want a dominant active government, well, be careful of what you wish for.
Eh, no. Not in the case of USA. Republicans have locked the Congress, and they have a (theoretically) Republican president. It should be smooth sailing if it were only for partisan hatred.
First you will have to fight against the current trend of rationalists avoiding even discussing culture-war topics. SSC is currently edging towards more limitations on what can be discussed, where culture-war topics can be banned and are at least siloed into separate discussion areas. I think we should try to keep LessWrong an area where there are no limitations on topics that can be discussed—although we might try to enforce the level and quality of discussion to a certain standard. Politics is the mind-killer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid being mind-killed when you talk about it.
That’s not really true. The culture war in the US is not about HBD. Most people in the US don’t even know what HBD stands for. The fight over it is a relatively small internet debate.
SSC get’s a lot of traffic from discussing culture-war topics to the point that he complains that posts he write about feminism get more traffic than other posts he considers more important.
HBD is not the whole culture war, and it’s not the most important piece of it overall, but it does make up a big portion of the debate within academia and among intellectuals (among which rationalists are an important subset of intellectuals). Scott would not have singled out that topic if it wasn’t especially good at inciting internet fights. The reason it’s such an important topic in the culture war is because the truth or falsity of it has enormous consequences on how we might politically and economically approach the issue of inequality.
‘HBD’ is not the kind of thing you can usefully describe as “true or false” (which incidentally is why the terms ‘HBD’ and ‘human biodiversity’ are quite unhelpful except as a source of controversy). There clearly is some biodiversity among members of the human species; we are not biologically identical. The question is how important that biodiversity is for practical issues (such as inequality), and the most likely answer seems to be “not very, except inasmuch as it will probably cause some especially salient ethnic/racial groups to be somewhat less represented in very high-skill jobs, which people will inevitably blame on ‘structural racism’ when the underlying cause for this imbalance is in fact rather different.” But this is hardly a significant problem; it might even go entirely unnoticed, were it not for the underlying political contentiousness that’s the natural product of ethnic diversity in a modern mass society!
Au contraire, the most likely answer seems to be “very”. And it is a significant problem.
This seems to actually be the main source of contention, in that there are many claims of the sort such as “genetic differences are too small to really matter”, “the environment a person is raised in is the main, if not the only, causal determiner of life outcomes”, etc.
Except that some ethnic groups are already far less represented in high-skill jobs, and our economy continues to transform into one with higher need for high-skill workers and a disappearing number of low-skill jobs. This is not just a problem due to differences in intelligence between ethic groups but also a problem due to the high variation in intelligence in general, and the fact that it is highly heritable. Low-skill, blue-collar jobs just aren’t going to exist forever and that’s something that has to be dealt with at some point if we don’t want people to suffer because of it.
All human jobs become redundant when AGI takes off, but before that, narrow AIs will take many. But that doesn’t mean there will be no “blue-collar” jobs left, nor does it mean that “white-collar” jobs are safe.
For example, radiology is traditionally white-collar, but image recognition AIs can be trained to be more accurate than any human. In the near future, I expect the demand for radiologists to plummet as these take over. You’ll still need a handful to help train the AIs, but that’s not nearly as many as we’re employing now.
On the other hand, something like a maid service is a traditionally blue-collar job, but I do not expect robots to replace them any time soon. Something we humans might consider a simple job, like “clean your room” is an extremely difficult AI/robotics problem. You have to safely navigate small spaces without breaking things. You have to classify a broad range of objects to decide what can be thrown away. But even this is easy compared to more human-service-oriented jobs, where an AI would basically have to pass the Turing Test before it could replace a human. If you want a blue-collar job safe from AI, look no further than “Task Rabbit handyman”.
See also Moravec’s paradox.
Robot-Proof Jobs
https://features.marketplace.org/robotproof/
“The McKinsey Global Institute analyzed the work activities of more than 800 occupations in the U.S. to determine what percentage of a job could be automated using current technology. It turns out, a small fraction of jobs are either entirely automatable or entirely robot-proof.”
I don’t agree with their conclusions, but at least they put their views down..
Moravec’s paradox doesn’t actually tell us very much. All it tells us is that our intuitions about the relative difficulty of specific problems were incorrect. This is not very surprising—we know extremely little about how intelligence works, and we have a long history of underestimating / overestimating the difficulty of various problems which goes far back into the history of mathematics. Our brains evolved to solve some pretty specific tasks, which made some tasks (like playing Chess) seem very difficult although they could easily be solved by a computer program, because we simply had no need for Chess playing abilities in order to survive. This doesn’t mean that the low-level tasks aren’t difficult in an absolute sense, it just means we shouldn’t extrapolate this observation to other tasks we currently consider very difficult. Note that computer-vision was usually thought to be one of the low-level tasks AI researchers thought was too difficult to be solved very soon, and then deep-learning changed that pretty quickly.
The way that I read your argument (and I may be reading it wrong) is that we shouldn’t expect all blue-collar jobs to be taken by robots before all white-color jobs. This assertion I think is probably true in the specific way it is stated, but I think you imply that we won’t need to worry about human jobs eventually only being available to a cognitive elite, where people who have lower cognitive ability find themselves unemployed and their jobs being automated out. This claim does not follow from the argument you gave, except in the specific case in which AI tends to replace jobs in an evenly-distributed way across the intelligence spectrum, or in the case in which we find other economically useful jobs for humans as quickly as AI replaces them. Both of those situations I think are unlikely.
What it tells us is that the nervous system is doing a lot of processing subconsciously. The kind of cognition we’re most aware of, the linguistic, step-by-step, system 2, frontal lobe stuff, is what we can program a computer to do by thinking through the steps and constraints. I think we need to be careful about using the word “difficulty” in this context. We figured out the system 2 stuff first not because it was easier, but because we knew more about it. The algorithms structuring the human brain are encoded in the genome, which is way simpler than the connectome it eventually builds. I don’t expect building general intelligence to be particularly difficult. I expect figuring out how it works to be the hard part. The question isn’t “How hard?”, but “How obscure?”.
That’s not quite what I meant. But what a typical human considers difficult isn’t aligned with what an AI programmer considers difficult to teach robots. They are separate axes, though there is probably some correlation. I wasn’t suggesting a perfectly even distribution would magically emerge. We should expect some of both blue- and white-collar jobs to be lost to AI early on, and some of both to hold out for a long time, right up until the singularity.
Oh we should be worried. Mass automation has already been disruptive. Those factory jobs are never coming back. But the disruption might not go the way you expect.
Yes, those with high IQs will be better able to retrain to do other high-IQ jobs. But that can take years! I agree that expecting low-IQ people to retrain for high-IQ jobs is not realistic. (Unless some kind of brain-computer interface is developed soon enough to change the playing field.)
But studies indicate a significant inverse correlation between g and conscientiousness. The kind of people you want for Turing-test-complete service, or intimate, in-home maid/handyman/nanny jobs are exactly the obedient, dutiful, vigilant, lower-IQ, blue-collar, conscientious-type people. Your so-called “cognitive elite” aren’t that. The blue collar workers might actually be more flexible.
(Those who are both lower-IQ, and not conscientious don’t make good employees even now. Robots are not going to make this problem go away.)
I’m honestly not sure which group will get hit hardest. But let’s consider base rates. Are there more blue- or white-collar workers? Narrow AIs will probably have to be trained for each task. Is there more diversity of tasks in blue- or white-collar work?
Your stereotypes are both inaccurate and harmful. All the handymen I know are extremely intelligent. Electrical systems, plumbing systems, etc. are both complex and require reasoning to work with. A lot of fix-it stuff is a mix of puzzles, and figuring out how to do things on the fly.
I myself am a nanny (if you do a SAT to IQ conversion, my IQ is 144, which I am only saying because that seems to be of particular importance to you). Nannies tend to be of about average intelligence, and if I were to think of the most common trait it’s that they were pioneering enough to either immigrate or leave their entire family behind to come to America to work.
Let’s decide what the truth is before we go calling it harmful. First, “dutiful”/”vigilant”, etc. are just synonyms with “conscientious”. That’s by definition, not stereotype. As for the “low-IQ” part, I only claimed that
studies found an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and the general intelligence factor, and
you want conscientious people for in-home and human-service jobs. (regardless of IQ)
It’s only an inverse correlation, and nowhere near a perfect −1. (Maybe −0.25) As I mentioned, there exist some who have both low-IQ and are not conscientious (who don’t make good employees), I thought that also implied the existence of the reverse.
If you want to claim we’re being inaccurate, we need data, not anecdotes. Stereotypes often have some statistical truth.
The chart michaelkeenan linked to is instructive. There is considerable overlap in these curves. Average-IQ (~100) people can get most jobs on that chart, but would find it difficult to get the high-IQ jobs near the bottom, and probably can’t get a medical doctor job at all. An IQ-85 person could realistically get an electrician job, but not an electrical engineering job.
If we believe the chart, then we should also expect a significant number of above-average-IQ people working blue collar jobs. I do not dispute this. You claim to be an example of that. But they can retrain and even get merit scholarships. I pointed out that this process would still be disruptive, since the training process could take years.
But they (and you) are part of the “cognitive elite” that tristanm isn’t worried about becoming perpetually unemployed. It’s the other side, precisely the low-IQ people who can’t retrain for high-IQ jobs that were cause for concern. I pointed out they may have other advantages (conscientiousness) that could mitigate that somewhat, and furthermore, what is easy for humans is not the same as what is easy for robots anyway.
Who, me? Why are you so surprised I’m talking about it when this is the direct topic of the thread? The g factor is real, and significant to life outcomes. This is settled science.
This is google-able—I found this chart. It’s probably imperfect, but from a brief glance at the source I’d trust it more than anecdote or my own experience.
Even in your chart, the top 25% of janitors (the lowest IQ occupation) are smarter than the bottom 25% of college professors (the second highest IQ occupation). IQ ranges within an occupation are MUCH bigger than IQ ranges between occupations.
That is not true for me. But I am curious—if you think that this type of service/blue-collar jobs are occupied by highly intelligent people, where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Again, not according to my observations (though I admit we may have different baselines). I agree that immigrant nannies—like other immigrants—have to demonstrate a certain level of capability and independence to get to where they are. But I don’t think this level is very high.
On the other hand, for some intelligent people becoming a nanny in the US is the easiest way to improve their condition. So there is a lot of variance—some nannies are very bright and some are not. Just like most people, really :-)
Clearly you’ve never worked at a big corporation.
Your username is delicious :-)
But low-IQ people won’t do well in a large corporation. They are not that good at covering their asses and are not very valuable as minions. A large corp will probably have difficulties getting rid of them (for a variety of reasons), but it’s not their natural habitat.
Good point. I imagine many are in prison, homeless, or perpetually unemployed on welfare or supported by family, but no way that accounts for half of the working-age population at present. The rest must be working, and not as rocket surgeons.
The New York Times which serves intellectuals who want to inform themselves about the world has used the term “human biodiversity” 5 times according to Google. Neither of those 5 times happened in this decade.
If I search for HBD there are more hits but most are not about human biodiversity. I find ’The case is listed by the highway patrol as ″HBD,″ its shorthand for ″Had Been Drinking but not drunk.‴ Some of Scott’s readers didn’t even know what HBD was and Googling told them that it’s an abbreviation for “happy birthday”.
Internet fights are about conflicts between subcultures. The fact that something is infuriating people in a tiny bubble doesn’t mean that it’s central for the core social debate.
That may have been true a while ago. Nowadays NYT mostly serves intellectuals who prefer to not peek out of their bubble.
Try the common synonym: “racism”.
That’s not a term Scott banned. If it’s a synonym than nobody should have any problem with Scott’s ban because they can simply exchange on term with another without losing the ability to communicate anything.
If I take a look at a story like http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/20/oberlin-students-cafeteria-food-is-racist.html?via=desktop&source=twitter , I also think it’s heavily misleading to say that it’s about the heritability of IQ.
If one denies the heritability of IQ, one is obligated to provide another explanation for the differences in educational attainment, income, crime, etc. between races. Thus, one minds oneself seeking out ever subtler forms of “racism” to explain the difference. It’s slightly more complicated than this in that signaling spirals also get involved.
You got that the wrong way around. A person who sees the social conflict as the oppressor vs. the oppressed doesn’t need any motivation to “explain the differences in educational attainment etc” to motivate himself.
Trying to understand demographic statistics is important for us nerds but it’s not what drives the main social conflict.
Once someone is already a volk-Marxist fanatic that is true. However, to convince others to give them power, not to mention to recruit more fanatics they need a semi-plausible argument for their position.
Whether someone is interested in demographic statistics or not, demographic statistics are real and hence have real effects. The need to deal with those effects drives a lot of the social conflicts.
It doesn’t serve people who are interested in debates going on online, within academia, or within the scientific community. Not very well at least.
The term “HBD” I think has popped up mostly recently to refer to a collection of ideas, mostly surrounding the idea of genetic determinism or related issues. I am not sure if it has ever referred to anything else or if there used to be other terms to describe those issues. From the way I understand most of the conversations about it, it’s usually used in the context of the heritability of intelligence or IQ.
This is an important topic, and definitely not something that will always be constrained to “tiny internet bubbles” like Scott’s blog. It has huge repercussions for how we discuss things like education, income inequality, employment, etc. If the fights over this topic really were constrained to internet subcultures, you wouldn’t see violent riots popping up at various universities throughout America in response to speakers wanting to present their case for it, or the SPLC claiming that people like Charles Murray are white nationalists when that’s not really the case.
The fact that this issue is so core to social debate is precisely why it incites negative emotions and why people tend to immediately move to absolute certainty over it one way or the other.
Online debates are driven by filter bubbles. It’s a mistake to assume that the conflict in your own filter bubble reflects the core underlying social conflict of the US.
Especially if it isn’t newsworthy enough for a New York Times journalist to explain to his readers what the conflict is even about, so that his readers understand what the phrase is supposed to mean.
Scott didn’t ban any of the collection of ideas but the term itself: “I am banning the terms “human biodiversity” and “hbd” – this doesn’t necessarily mean banning all discussion of those topics, but it should force people to concentrate on particular claims rather than make sweeping culture-war-ish declarations about the philosophy as a whole. ”
You can discuss specific claims in that field on this blog.
There’s a conflict but the conflict isn’t about “human biodiversity” and some of the protestors might not even know what the phrase means.
Peter Singer got his speech squelched for ableism even when we agree that disabled people are per definition biologically different. People on the left don’t deny human biodiversity on that point.
Which specific debates within the scientific community are held under the label of human biodiversity? If I type “human biodiversity” into Google Scholar most of the papers aren’t recent. The first recent paper I find is “Human Biodiversity Conservation: A Consensual Ethical Principle”. It’s about the case for conserving human disability. That’s not the kind of writing that was found at Scott’s comment section.
There has been a lot of important events that New York Times journalists didn’t see fit to explain to their readers. The failure of Soviet collective agriculture is probably the most infamous historical example.
Imagine trying to discuss the history of life on a forum that bans the term “evolution”.
The failure of Soviet agriculture wasn’t very salient to Americans. If a topic would be the center of a culture war in the US they would notice and in today’s traffic driven times feel like it’s a good idea to write an article that ranks decently on the keyword.
The US culture war isn’t secular in nature. Many people on the right care about issues like the War on Christmas even when the kind of people in online discussions like Scott’s log don’t.
In other matters, was there a single time Trump uttered the words human biodiversity? He did have some pollsters who tried to understand what the US Republican public cares about.
Getting people to say natural selection instead of evolution has its benefits given that plenty of people think the terms are interchangeable and use the term wrongly. Additionally, Scott blog isn’t a forum for discussing US culture wars. It isn’t even forum in the first place but the blog of a person who wants to be employed in an industry that doesn’t happen to be anti-fragile.
Yes it was. The “success” of Soviet collectivization compared to the apparent failure of capitalism was being used as an argument to justify leftwing/collectivist economic policies.
The NYT isn’t going to publish an article that would offend the world view of it’s liberal readers. Any description of HBD that conceptualizes it as an empirical scientific hypothesis that could be tested and potentially confirmed would certainly fit the bill.
So in the space of two comments you’ve gone from arguing:
to justifying Scott’s decision by saying:
This looks like a straightforward example of what Eliezer calls logical rudeness.
Please expand on “Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war”, and provide some reasoning for “stability” being a driver of producing beneficial technology.
I dispute (or perhaps just don’t understand) both premises. I also am not sure if you mean “end the culture war” or “win the culture war for my side”. Is surrendering your recommended course of action?
I live in Berkeley, where there are literally armed gangs fighting each other in the streets.
Stability isn’t intrinsically valuable. The point is that we know our current civilizational formula is a pretty good one for innovation and most others aren’t, so we should stick to the current formula more or less.
My recommendation is a political ceasefire. Even if we could just decrease the volume of partisan hate speech, without solving any actual problems, that seems like it would have a lot of benefits.
More like one armed gang, and a group of people who have finally had enough and decided to stand up for themselves.