I agree, and yet it does seem to me that self-identified EAs are better people, on average. If only there was a way to harness that goodness without skirting Wolf-Insanity quite this close...
xpym
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Offsetting makes no sense in terms of utility maximisation.
Donating less than 100% of your non-essential income also makes no sense in terms of utility maximization, and yet pretty much everybody is guilty of it, what’s up with that?
As it happens, people just aren’t particularly good at this utility maximization thing, so they need various crutches (like the GWWC pledge) to do at least better than most, and offsetting seems like a not-obviously-terrible crutch.
Yeah, but this doesn’t have much to do with conscription. Getting the moribund industrial capacity up to speed does make sense on the other hand.
It’s endlessly amusing that the terrible Russian threat is purported to be taken seriously by anybody not immediately bordering it. As usual, only Trump is there to call a spade a spade and Russia a paper tiger. It has been mired for years in dirt-poor Ukraine half-heartedly supported by the West for chrissake, a state of affairs set to continue for many more years, by all appearances.
Sure, it has nukes, which would be a problem if the leadership decides to go out with a bang, but nothing could be done about that in the medium term militarily speaking, so all the EU fussing, taken reasonably, could only be a pretext for internal power struggles, with generous propaganda helpings.
a remotely realistic-seeming story for how things will be OK, without something that looks like coordination to not build ASI for quite a while
My mainline scenario is something like:
LLM scaling and tinkering peters out in the next few years without reaching capacity for autonomous R&D. LLMs end up being good enough to displace some entry-level jobs, but the hype bubble bursts and we enter a new AI winter for at least a couple of decades.
The “intelligence” thingie turns out to be actually hard and not amenable to a bag of simple tricks with a mountain of compute, for reasons gestured at in Realism about rationality. Never mind ASI, we’re likely very far from being able to instantiate an AGI worthy of the name, which won’t happen while we remain essentially clueless about this stuff.
I also expect that each subsequent metaphorical AI “IQ point” will be harder to achieve, not easier, so no foom or swift takeover. Of course, even assuming all that, it still doesn’t guarantee that “things will be OK”, but I’m sufficiently uncertain either way.
There are many people in Iceland, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore &c, who do not feel this oppressive ennui. Instead, things work quite well, the government is sane and in control, and public discourse is by-and-large rational.
Do they believe that they have a say in civilization’s direction? It’s all well and good to have cozy little enclaves under the wing of the US hegemony while it lasts, but if it falters, something relevant beyond local political obstacles may just emerge. Of course, all in all, their position is still more enviable than most.
Often those people are innocent. The blinking-innocently isn’t a pretense. But it’s grounded in naïveté.
Or in neurodivergence. It seems to me that certain mind architectures just really struggle with these dynamics, and reliably delving even one layer deep, never mind multiple, is far beyond their abilities. If so, it would make sense to me that there should be some cultural spaces where this limitation is accommodated. Whether any particular space needs to be that is another question, but one that should be explicitly addressed.
I’m still not sure what Zack or Said think of the Royal Society example; Zack talks about it a bit in another comment on that page but not in a way that feels connected to the question of how to balance virtues against each other, and what virtues cultures should strive towards. (Said, in an email, strongly rejects my claim that there’s a difference between his culture of commenting and the Royal Society culture of commenting that I describe.)
This seems to be by far the most important crux, nothing else could’ve substantially changed attitudes on either side. Do environments widely recognized for excellence and intellectual progress generally have cultures of harsh and blunt criticism, and to what degree its presence/absence is a load-bearing part? This question also looks pretty important on its own, and the apparent lack of interest/attention is confusing.
awakening is more valuable than ~all kinds of material wealth
This general sort of claim has never made sense to me. Is there an accessible to outsiders attempt to justify it in a way not obviously contradictory with the materialist scientific understanding of the world? In particular, I’m confused about why we would evolve with a capacity for extremely valuable “awakening”, when presumably not a single of our distant enough ancestors had ever “awoke”, and very few contemporaries ostensibly do.
There are a few, but it doesn’t seem to be the consensus? In any case, I agree with you that it’s “more egalitarian”, but probably not to a large extent due to the aforementioned unreasonable effort.
Do they disagree in principle, or just think that it would take an unreasonable amount of effort that most genetically lucky but still “normal” women couldn’t be expected to spend? I can understand their resentment that men get constantly bombarded with those superstimuli and go on to have unrealistic expectations in their daily lives.
A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states.
I’m not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of “enlightenment” came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There’s also the issue of “not-self”, “non-duality”, “impermanence” etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.
in the case of string theory, the fact that it predicts
Hmm, my outsider impression is that there’s in fact a myriad “string theories”, all of them predicting everything we observe, but with no way to experimentally discern the correct one among them for the foreseeable future, which I have understood to be the main criticism. Is this broad-strokes picture fundamentally mistaken?
“just want to want stuff” does not seem actionable to me
I mean, you already do want all sorts of stuff I imagine. The non-trick is to just figure out which you want more and how capable are you of achieving it.
Duh, but what are some candidate* concrete steps* for constructing these temporary assemblages that aren’t trivial? Isn’t that begging the original question?
Like I said, I don’t think I’ll be able to help. I’m seemingly lucky enough to never having had significant problems of this sort, and I’ve been reading him mostly for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. He’s active on Substack these days though, so you can try contacting him there for pointers.
And yet Trump-like figures have obtained power outside of the United States as well. I think the demand for Trumpism goes beyond just the personal allure of the man himself, even though that has also been a critical part of uplifting the Republicans’ electoral success.
I’m claiming that Trump mainly channels the protest against the “respectable” elite consensus, and sure, people are fed up with it not only in the US.
Trump has remade the Republican party in his image.
Yep, because it was brain dead already, he pushed and the corpse toppled over. This is a blessing and a curse for the Dems—neither Trump nor anybody else on the right seems likely to offer any positive vision any time soon, so all the Dems have to do is to just be slightly less repulsive, something they impressively managed to bungle twice already!
Has any of this happened?
Yes. They aren’t in (complete) power, therefore some of the agenda has been slowed down.
It seems to me the wokeness craze of 2019-2022 was in large part caused by Trump
And Trump in 2016 was in large part caused by what was then called the SJW craze of 2008-2015. So it goes.
Trump obtaining political power doesn’t seem to have made the left or the elites any more sane, in my estimation. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, I’m not optimistic. Maybe benevolent robot overlords will swoop in to the rescue against all odds after all?
please feel free to describe the process how you’ve figured out your current priorities and tradeoffs while banning the word “meaning”
By thinking about what I want and what I’m capable of doing, and reconciling that to the best of my ability. Humans are entities that tend to want stuff, and take actions to achieve some degree of it, and the word “meaning” refers to that general sort of thing.
the gap is in my soul
Well, I probably can’t help with that, but I know of somebody who plausibly can. Have you heard of David Chapman’s Meaningness? What he writes largely makes sense to me, and he claims that a few people told him they were helped by it, so maybe give it a try?
what am I missing such that I don’t have it?
Probably a model of this stuff compatible with your general outlook. The sordid truth that various mystics and spiritualists don’t want you to know is that there’s nothing particularly cryptic or profound about “meaning”. If you have anything worthwhile to get out of bed for—that’s meaning. If you ever decide to do anything at all—that’s meaning. If you’d prefer doing something, but find yourself doing another thing—that’s meaning too. Of course, figuring out all those priorities and tradeoffs can be complex and confusing, but introducing the word “meaning” into the mix couldn’t and shouldn’t create any additional complexity.
You haven’t addressed by far the most important pro-Trump point—the left is worse and much more dangerous. Yes, Trump is a short-sighted clueless evil bumbling buffoon—therefore only psychopaths and fools could wholeheartedly endorse his vision, and so, unless they could somehow come to dominate the country, Trumpism isn’t a long-term concern. Whereas basically the entire “blue tribe” elite endorses wokeness as being the-right-side-of-history continuation of liberal ideals. To the extent that Trump frustrates their “progress” and provides the opportunity for the elite to come to its senses (or be replaced by a not insane one) I say that he’s the lesser evil.
This feels like a major sticking point, though. If it does dissipate, then the fact that meditation has a profound effect on your values in a way you likely wouldn’t endorse in advance seems like something its promoters should be upfront about.
If it doesn’t dissipate, then we’re back to the conundrum that the various significant improvements ostensibly acquired through meditation don’t appear to translate into unusual efficiency at accomplishing real-world tasks. Money is the unit of caring, after all, so becoming a billionaire is instrumentally convergent even to somebody free of status-seeking and ladder climbing motivational systems. Or, alternatively, becoming a prominent scientist that cures cancer seems like the sort of thing that can cause people to get famous.
Yes Requires the Possibility of No. Do you think that such a study would be published if it happened to come to the opposite conclusion?
Well, there does seem to be no shortage of trans girls at any rate, so these issues are only going to become more salient.