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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Does the Sam Bankman-Fried transformation into Bankrupt Fraud tell us something about the failures of effective altruism?

I saw Bankman mentioned on themotte a number of times over the past two years. I’m pretty sure he was mentioned over on SSC, too. After Scott, he was the person who immediately came to mind when I thought of figures associated with EA. Many normies and finance types will only think of Bankman when EA is brought up. (I refuse to use the “SBF” acronym because it was consciously chosen as imitation of HSBC and other institutions, and despite his name the man is not a bank.)

I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience. Traditional moral systems usually try to maximize moral salience. (Stoicism was short-lived and immersed in a Hellenistic culture that emphasized honor through salient stories, and while “mindfulness” is emotional neutral, traditional Buddhism emphasizes benevolence through stories.)

Consider Christianity. Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point. Mankind’s Hero was born in a manger to a lowly family, faced persecution from the very people who claimed moral superiority, took on followers who were poor and irrelevant, and died the death of a painful criminal for the purpose of saving all of humanity. The paradoxes and surprises are meant to enhance the emotional experience, and thus the effect, of the moral point. Within the Gospel narrative, we have parables, also emphasizing salience. You have the wealthy and high status patrician who looks down on his lower class sinful neighbor, and the latter is announced as just and not the former. We have metaphors involving specks in the eye, wheat cultivation, farm animals, and storing grain, all of which would be immediately understood by the target audience. The parable form itself can be construed as the most expedient way of expressing a moral point to the largest possible audience.

While Effective Altruism may be logically sound, in the sense that the optimal actions are clearly delineated and argued, it may also not be very effective in obtaining an end result. There is an ocean of difference between a logical assessment of morality and the effectively-felt transformation of an individual into a moral actor who follows the moral commandments. To walk over this ocean of difference or to part its waters requires a moral system (if not a religion, close to it) that is focused on making morality felt. Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought. This conflict over Ought and Will is, of course, explored throughout the New Testament, with the inability to perfectly follow moral commandments (the law) being solved in the Person of Christ, who makes morality possible to follow through his being born (a human) and through his friendship (fellowship), which effects the salience necessary to turn the follower moral.

They are effective alright, and that's the problem.

There's a tremendous amount of really wild commentary of this story emerging on Twitter (1; 2; 3 etc). I expect most of the dirt currently descending on Sam and his roommates to be revealed as nonsense and flake off, but on the other hand, the worst parts never to surface. (After all, the guy who could stun Matt Levine with his savage cynicism, and invent this Madoff-tier bullshit, is bound to have more hidden depths).

Emad's speculation is probably in the former class, but directionally might be in the latter:

Thinking about FTX and why blow up a business doing $1bn a year revenue / $200m profits answer may actually be AI alignment.

Short timelines equals pressure to deploy as much cash as possible to anthropic and others before a rogue AI turns us into paperclips.

Expected utility.

[...] Altruistic evil

I agree with this bottom line. Red flags should have been enough: from Singer's flirtation with infanticide, to weird sex stuff in group houses and cult patterns around MIRI/CFAR, to the Bostromian Vulnerable World, to hushed discussions of «pivotal act outside the Overton Window» and collapsing alternative chip supply chains to ease «global governance», to the general «policy wonk» regulatory hard-on, – those people are not good no matter how they present themselves in affiliated outlets and what nice words they say. This is how evil looks historically. Not generic cruelty, callousness, petty narcissism and even psychopathy we are used to, not mere weakness of will or intellect, but well-functioning people with actually hazardous moral convictions.

Sam is a consistent effective altruist, deserving of his poster boy status, just like his go-gooder advisor William MacAskill (and like another bean counter from philosophy, Toby Ord) is a poster boy for Utilitarian Intellectuals; and I do hope this causes people to downgrade their faith in that community in general.

Despite what Joshua Achiam says and you do too, the issue is exactly that they are rather effective, while their means and goals are suspect – they are displaying generic instrumental power-seeking behavior, and the nihilistic absence of scruples, typical of people with messiah delusions, like Bolsheviks. The effect of Bankman's stunt doesn't end with burning crypto ecosystem after directly financing EAs and some Dems. Consider that HackerNews sheep, representative of the gainfully employed mid-career SV techie Outer Party zeitgeist, are bleating the expected lines:

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west.

Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions.

This is in line with weapons race against (speculative) China AGI threat, and leads us straight into the Singleton's maw. Buh-but it'll be a good Singleton, amirite comrade? Maybe, comrade, sit tight and watch. In its embryonic stage it's nothing more than a larva…

I have one additional thing to say. People like @TheDag and many others seem to be under the impression that EA is a vague grey tribe moral movement that supports every tenet of the essentially Yudkowskian and Extropianist LessWrong thought. This is not so. They have arrived at a coherent and convenient philosophy with peculiar alien priorities, allegedly through shutting up and calculating. E.g. MacAskill is very cold towards cryonics and focuses on perpetuating replicator dynamics, just on a cosmic scale, but without regard for individual kin lines (because utility is utility). And his advisee Bankman-Fried has the following to say:

COWEN: As I understand your views, you’re a fairly pure Benthamite utilitarian. Is that correct?

BANKMAN-FRIED: That’s correct.

COWEN: Given that that’s the case, as I see it, the replacement costs of human life are pretty low, so you could spend a modest amount of money and get people to have more kids. So why then should we ever spend a whole lot of money on life extension since we can just replace people pretty cheaply? We can grow utils more easily than save them, is another way to put it.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, I agree. […] Speaking for myself here, I will say that I find that I’m not very compelled by life extension research for the exact reason you’ve said. I think that it is really cool, really f-cking cool, but I’m not sure it’s the most pressing problem for the world. As you said, we’ve been getting on okay without it. There are real human costs to it. It would be great to have, but I don’t think it’s necessary for the flourishing of the world.

Benthamism is incompatible with my Russian Cosmist moral imperatives. I trust Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel a million times more than I trust those people. And speaking of Thiel, he has just recently delivered an excellent and very brave, if rambling, speech:

I found another article from Nick Bostrom who's sort of an Oxford academic and, you know, most of these people are sort of… There's somehow… They're interesting because they have nothing to say, they're interesting because they're just mouthpieces – like the mouth of Sauron. Just sort of cogs and machines, but they're useful because they tell us exactly where the zeitgeist is in some ways, and this was from 2019, pre-COVID, «The vulnerable world hypothesis». And that goes through a whole litany of these different ways where science and technology are creating all these dangers for the world, and what do we do about them.

And it's the precautionary principle, whatever that means, but then he has a four-part program for achieving stabilization and I will just read off the four things you need to do to make our world less vulnerable and achieve stabilization. We have this exponentiating technology where maybe it's not progressing that quickly, but still progressing quickly enough that there are a lot of dangerous corner cases.

You only need to do these four things to stabilize the world. Number one: restrict technological development. Number two, ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives. So that sounds somewhat incompatible with the DEI at least in the ideas form of diversity. Number three, establish extremely effective preventive policing. And number four, establish effective global governance, since you can't let, you know, even if there's like one little island somewhere where this doesn't apply, it's no good.

And so it is basic and this is, you know, this is the zeitgeist on the other side. It is the precautionary principle. It is, we're not going to make it for another century on this planet and therefore we need to embrace a one-world totalitarian state right now.

And so, yeah…. First counterargument is, science is great it's [unclear]. Counterargument: no it's not. Third main counterargument: well science is too dangerous we have to slow it down so it's good that it's not so great – we're slowing it down, we just slow it down even more. And then the counter-counterargument is where we return to classical liberalism, it's that however dangerous science and technology are, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous. And that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future – we need to never underestimate the danger of one-world totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard to see what it ends.

There's always the frame where… I think, it's in the first Thessalonians 5 chapter 3. The political slogan of the Antichrist is: peace and safety. What I want to suggest is that you get it when you have a homogenized one-world totalitarian state. and I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon thank you very much.

Amen to that. @TheDag, do not ask for Messiah. You'll get a false one.

to hushed discussions of «pivotal act outside the Overton Window»

What is this referring to?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/06/13/on-a-list-of-lethalities/

Those are official sources; there have been more blatant leaks and rumors.

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