shredlefiddle
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User ID: 1727
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Are you okay?
This seems like a clear violation of the "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" rule, and yet this comment is the most upvoted in the thread.
I used to think this forum was interesting and special, but it's increasingly clear to me that it's not substantially different from any other online community, with the tendency for a single view to predominate and write itself blank checks for whatever behavior it wants.
(Note: I think your argument has numerous weaknesses, I just don't care to engage at this point)
It hasn't actually done that in the last two thousand years of future, though.
Uh, have you been paying attention? In the past 20 years there have been massive social changes due to technology. As Noah Smith puts it: "Online was once a way to escape from offline; now offline is a way to escape from online." Social changes due to technology go way back -- writing enabled bureaucracy enabled monarchy, the printing press enabled the Reformation, iron working enabled cheaper and more widespread weapons enabled more egalitarian governance, cheap airfare enabled widespread tourism, etc. Human society is vastly different now than it was in the Paleolithic. Pretty much all of the social changes which have occurred since that time have been due to technology.
In any case, the original claim was about WWII, not the future.
Do I really have to argue that if Hitler had won WWII, the planet would be significantly more likely to be dominated by anti-human values? This is getting kind of tiresome tbh. Please use your common sense.
The US was a winner of WW2. The US won the cold war. And the planet is dominated by US values. Am I supposed to believe this is a coincidence?
Even if you believe that social change is random instead of self-reinforcing, the initial conditions matter a great deal. For your argument to hold, you'd have to show that benevolent societies are such a strong attractor in the space of societies that regardless of initial conditions, you always end up at a benevolent society. You haven't remotely shown that, and in fact you yourself have argued the opposite: "us periodically killing each other in large numbers is the trajectory of humanity". The current benevolent society is rare, valuable, and needs to be preserved.
Then the killers died or were themselves killed off, and the people who replaced them distanced themselves from the whole miserable business.
Not historically inevitable. Things could've been different if the dice came up differently and Khrushchev was a Stalin devotee instead of a Stalin denouncer. Recall that Stalin was focused on creating a cult of personality, so this counterfactual isn't at all implausible.
us periodically killing each other in large numbers is the trajectory of humanity.
Not so much recently. We are increasingly achieving victory over violence (cc Steven Pinker). This wasn't inevitable. It's a result of brave and noble sacrifices made by e.g. the soldiers who defeated the Confederacy and the soldiers who defeated Hitler. (The US Civil War is especially instructive -- if you read the history of the time, it's clear that the North only went to war once the historical determinism view, "slavery will inevitably fade", was refuted decisively and repeatedly by how things were developing. The book Team of Rivals has details on this.)
And social science is how they did it.
You claimed that to create a stable dystopia, we'd need social science advanced enough to make accurate predictions about how future technology might radically transform societies. It's clear to me that North Korea doesn't have such advanced social science. Yet it has managed to be a stable dystopia over multiple generations, despite your claim that tyranny is inherently unstable.
I'm not going to reply to you further because it's increasingly clear to me that you are not arguing in good faith.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Consider telling the slaveowner who's having doubts about slavery that "well, you own slaves, so"?
So to be consistent with their doubts, they'll want to liberate their slaves. Pointing out inconsistency is valuable.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
FWIW, I (long-time EA) downvoted your comments because non-diplomatic comments on the forum just make things worse, regardless of which side they come from.
Lying to you about whether you look fat has differences other than just magnitude to lying about whether the parachute you're about to jump with can handle your weight.
If white lies can be correct at small magnitude, why can't they be correct at large magnitude? The point of the dress example is to illustrate direction, not magnitude. Scaling the magnitude of a vector by a positive factor doesn't change its direction.
That is the lie that you want to tell.
Not what I said. I'm advocating a "muddle through" approach of providing evidence against oppression-related hypotheses as can be done appropriately & inoffensively (e.g. mentioning widespread existence of ethnic gaps probably not due to oppression, like the White-Asian IQ gap), and doing what we can to address factors that are addressable (environmental factors, cultural factors, that discrimination which actually exists). As a concrete point, I favor Supreme Court limitations on affirmative action, because I think at this point affirmative action is kind of just creating a class of people who are paid to argue for affirmative action.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
I think we more or less can, actually. Every previous social and political structure has collapsed, usually in surprisingly short order. Those that have lasted have also tended to be fairly livable for those within them. Then too, some of the absolute worst societies have been those explicitly designed to maximize welfare and stability. Human frailty can be a blessing: those who attempt to build monuments to their own reason often live to see their structures, mercifully, collapse.
Future technology puts us outside the distribution of past societies, we can't count on anything.
The Soviet Union lasted for quiet a while.
If such people begin gaining significant control, we fight them.
Cool, glad we're on the same page then.
Social Science is pretty clearly the prerequisite for imposing a permanent dystopia.
North Korea has lasted for decades without advanced social science.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
The crusade to find and eradicate this force has not been without costs and those costs only rise as the desperation to find a cause is frustrated by the most likely candidates, culture and genetics are not allowed to be examined.
I agree, but talking about race & IQ just strengthens this crusade in practice. Talking about race & IQ causes people to correctly worry about a Nazi resurgence for the reasons I stated, which strengthens the left, which strengthens the crusade.
Emphasizing constructive responses based on culture and environmental factors is a way to redirect left-wing energy in a productive direction, and should be considered preferable to race & IQ talk.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Well, as you age, your intelligence will fade. So if you believe you will be worth less morally when you're elderly, has that caused you to save less for retirement than you would otherwise?
Do you believe that you have less moral worth when you are sick, sleep-deprived, intoxicated, distracted, or otherwise cognitively impaired? And if so by how much?
Moral worth is about capacity for suffering. Most people have the intuition that the welfare of children should be prioritized over that of adults, even though children are often less intelligent than adults, have less experience, few life specifics, and take few actions. That's because kids suffer more easily. Since people with Downs, and different human races, have equal capacity for suffering, they also have equal moral worth.
Once you start condemning the "discussion of ideas" for reasons other than obvious falsity or existential risk
I think there is a good case to be made that race/IQ discussions are an existential risk.
Many people on this forum probably like to think of themselves as "high decouplers" -- I used to think of myself as the same way -- but to be quite honest, it is very difficult to let "racial IQ differences" in through my perceptual door without some darker thoughts following it. Even on this forum, I don't often see people mentioning that IQ differences shouldn't imply differences in moral worth -- which suggests to me that many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case.
Furthemore, even if everyone here, and everyone in EA, is a high decoupler, it's clear that the world is full of low decouplers. Just observe your nearest political debate. So from a consequentialist perspective, spreading race/IQ discussions could be incredibly damaging.
Back to x-risk. In the terminology of Bostrom's paper, Hitler winning World War II would most likely count as a "shriek" or a "whimper" at the very least: https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks If not an "s-risk" (worse than an x-risk): https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/s-risks/
And while wokes discount the possibility that Hitler being a hater caused him to endorse eugenics, it's possibility that causality flows in the other direction as well. We can't rule it out, and the chance it is true should be a major update for how we discuss race & IQ.
If you've heard the term existential risk, you've likely also heard the term infohazard. It seems possibly to me that race/IQ information is in fact an infohazard.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
No, I don't, because they don't last. They aren't sustainable. In the absolute worst-case, the people running them grow old and die or are killed, and the next generation doesn't generally have the stomach for it. Alternatively, they actually kill everyone they were trying to kill, and then have to get on with an existence made no easier by the slaughter. Either way, no permanent deflection in the course of humanity results. We go on.
We can't count on things working out that way. If we're talking posthumanity, the old generation might not die out, due to immortality tech. Laborers could be kept alive using the same tech. Furthermore in this very thread you can see someone making the claim "those of the least moral worth are people we want to suffer". Social science just isn't advanced enough for us to rule out the possibility of permanent dystopia, unfortunately.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
I'm skeptical that illegal immigration will lead to Brazilification.
There are no trusted, effective, and non-corrupt public institutions to speak of.
Illegal immigrants can't vote and thus won't affect institutions much? They're incentivized to keep their head down to avoid deportation.
Whilst the poor end up living in densely packed favelas/apartment blocks/ghettos and while they are generally able to get by their chances at economic mobility are virtually nil so a large criminal element ends up taking root and providing an alternate, highly risky means of achieving the opulent lifestyle that simply cannot be ignored, and as violence becomes prevalent policing becomes more dangerous and cops end up becoming more violent which further sours the relationship between the underclass and the ruling class.
See The Myth of Hispanic Crime https://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-hispanic-crime/ by noted leftist Ron Unz
a strong affinity for their neighbors regardless of race, class, religion, culture, etc.
Then imagine whatever the exact opposite of that ideal looks like in your head. THAT is Brazilification.
A Brazilian I know claims that Brazil is one of the least racist countries he's been to, and he's traveled a lot. (He's not a Brazil booster, either -- I remember him being very cynical about Brazil's prospects, but it seemed like more of an underdevelopment thing -- poor education system etc.)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Seems like illegal immigration won't affect state capacity since non-citizens can't vote?
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Should this really be reassuring though? Suppose you could order a science kit in the mail that allowed you to grow a brain in a vat. Imagine someone was worried about crime in their neighborhood. You respond by reassuring them: "Criminal brains are just human brains, made of neurons. Order the brain-in-a-vat kit and play with one yourself. Once you do, you'll recognize the various ways that brains can veer off track and get weird."
There's nothing inherent about token prediction which prevents Bing from doing scary stuff like talking to a mentally ill person, convincing the mentally ill person they have a deep relationship, and hallucinating instructions for a terrorist attack.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
it's all just clockwork and springs
Sure, and humans are just neurons firing...
Microsoft has displayed it cares more about the potential profits of a search engine than fulfilling a commitment to unplug any AI that is acting erratically. If we cannot trust them to turn off a model that is making NO profit and cannot act on its threats, how can we trust them to turn off a model drawing billions in revenue and with the ability to retaliate?
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
The overwhelming sentiment of NYT readers (say 80%) will be "Oh no not my poor little African Americinos, don't you dare end AA!", but there will be so many comments to this effect that the upboats are diluted across all of them, yielding a mediocre average score for a pro-AA comment.
I don't think dilution works this way -- hardly anyone reads all the comments, mostly they're going to look at "most recent" comments or "most upvoted" comments. Neither of those are going to push towards dilution.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
That may be, but I think we still prioritize child welfare in other ways -- even ways that don't impact their chance of survival to adulthood.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
All of the other experiences in life are worth causing, and 'preventing a death' causes all of them to continue.
Agreed, assuming an individual's life has more experiences to celebrate than experiences to mourn. E.g. I'm pro-choice because my guess is that on expectation, an unwanted child will have more experiences to mourn than experiences to celebrate
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
You acknowledge it's possible for something to be true, but for people to poorly acknowledge it, right?
Challenging people on the implications of their beliefs is a standard argumentative technique. If you're not acting on the implications, maybe there's a part of you that doesn't actually buy into the belief.
wait, what moral worth does a person who's braindead, or in a permanent, unrecoverable coma have? In the normal case, that person will be alert and intelligent in at most a dozen hours, but if that isn't true ...
I agree that if there's a braindead person in a permanent unrecoverable coma, we should probably pull the plug on them and use the resources to help others. (Well, under ideal circumstances cryogenically freeze them first, in case future tech can help them recover from the coma)
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
If that were true, there wouldn't be things like Make a Wish to help kids who are about to die be happy.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Um... in the context of the EA movement at least, we don't want anyone to suffer.
You don't see people pointing out that IQ does not equate to moral worth because, for most of us, it is too obvious to require further repetition.
You can see people in this very thread arguing against it. I'm not sure it is as universally held a belief as you claim here.
Not for Stalin or Ghengis Khan either or any other tyrant.
You don't think Nazi/Stalinist labor camps represent a meaningful curtailing of our potential for a flourishing future as a species? I really don't know what to say. If you have no strong preference between being in a labor camp, and being in a flourishing posthuman society where everyone lives way better than a present-day billlionaire, your preferences are... highly unusual.
How do you find people trustworthy enough to be granted adjudication of which information the rest of us may be permitted to know?
This is a problem for infohazards in general. I'm not proposing any such trustworthy group. But spreading infohazards is antisocial behavior. It's like deliberately posting a meme online that triggers people prone to seizures -- kind of a dick move.
The secretary of the department of homeland security is facing impeachment: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-travels-southern-border-republicans-call-impeachment
In any case, I favor charter cities as a solution. America has a labor shortage. Surely there's a way to pair up immigrants with greedy capitalists in a way that doesn't harm public safety, and also generates enough tax revenue to pay off uninvolved parties.
shredlefiddle
1yr ago
Okay, but plants and fish can suffer just like we can. Yeah, plants! Plants have coordinated physical responses to harmful stimuli. What makes this not 'suffering'?
This is definitely a legitimate perspective that EAs consider. Shrimp welfare is big in the EA movement for example. I don't know if plants have qualia though.
What do you mean, exactly?
I mean if you take the exact same negative event, and consider its impact on you as an adult vs as a kid, its impact is gonna be lower on you as an adult. E.g. getting a shot at the doctor's office -- it is gonna cause a lot more distress to kid-you than adult-you.
It seems like a possibility, is all. And it's not a noble lie so much as a noble silence.
Citation needed. If your girlfriend asks you if her cherished dress makes her look fat, what do you tell her?
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