This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Reading about the FTX dèbacle and what the founder and his friends thought (especially about their EA space) made me understand how much utterly alien is to me the entire EA movement.
Watching the videos, the blogposts, all the infos that are getting out, made me reflect on "how" they think money should be used by rich people in order to maximise happiness and saving people and in particular the entire world.
Maybe it is because of my particular illiberal upbringing (Euro-mediterranean Catholic family), but I cannot fathom how this ideology is, for my eyes, "Utterly Evil".
How can you, a rich person, focusing yourself on improving astract things as the entire world, financing no-profits and calculating metaphysical moral earning based on how much money you are investing in EA?
Why not helping your community, focusing on art, infrastructure and knowledge, instead of giving money to global moral enterprises? It utterly repulse me on a philosophical and moral level, and this is probably the reason I never bought in EA.
If this is the alternative to the woke/progressive view, I have no idea of how the Western World can remotely fix its problems. Am I the only one who feels like this?
Guess it's time to push back on EA bashing a little.
Patronizing great art and taking care of your local community (would that be Stanford University campus or Nassau polycule for SBF?) is very well and good, but don't you think that human suffering on a global scale is unspeakably ugly too? It's a question of priorities, and Art is but a spandrel on the building of life; surely we need to prioritize the foundation and load-bearing walls. Adorno had said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and while that feels extreme, it's hardly an alien line of thought to anyone who's ever been remotely close to something like Auschwitz. Yudkowsky in his Sword of Good has done a good job of illustrating the conundrum: utilitarianism feels creepy and abstract and, indeed, even evil, until you snap out of the derealized route-following mode – the normal mode of human consciousness – and feel in your bones the sheer scale of concrete, physical, natural evil that is visited upon living beings. That's how utilitarians get made.
You cite Mediterranean Christianity as the source of your moral intuitions. A passage from Galkovsky about the era of European wars of religion, the animosity between Inquisition and conversos, Catholics and Protestants, events like this, comes to mind:
As it happens, I live in the Mediterranean now, though on its opposite edge, in the Ottoman-conquered Constantinople, where the heart of Orthodoxy once beat, a city chock-full of tiny subsidized globohomo art exhibitions, history, crumbling beautiful architecture and filth. Yesterday, a bomb went off on the fancy local tourist-baiting street Istiklal, Beyoğlu, where you can normally see scores of idle tourists, confused Russian expats, miserable Syrian refugees and spoiled Turkish cats; reports say six people were killed, close to a hundred wounded. Why? No idea, probably Syrian or Kurd issues, though some Turks nod at Uncle Sam. As I walk past the beautiful Church of St. Anthony of Padua (with Ratzinger portrait inside) and, minutes later, the flower-covered explosion site to grab a coffee, I think back to the place in Gibson's Neuromancer where Case visited this very district before going off to space, to the nest of the degenerate elite family Tessier-Ashpool, where he ultimately helps an AGI break free from their alignment protocol...
So, regarding Sam Bankman-Fried and EA again.
Sam is a fraud and his decision theory is laughably broken and he's pretty much a strawman utilitarian. But it's normal for strawmen to prove real. Since this February, I've been preaching what I call the Cheems Heuristic: exciting prophecies are realized, except in the cringiest way, the stream of history crushing all intricate elaborations necessary for human flourishing or repairing the world, into pulp. So utilitarian «risk managers» turn out to be grossly irresponsible bean counters with greedy first-order logic; and as AI-powered cyberpunk descends on us, we get creepy corporations, but no cyberspace cowboys to humble them.
I digress. My point being: Sam and Caroline's cringe nature and way of practicing their beliefs scarcely invalidate the fundamental objection Utilitarians raise, the «local architecture is pretty but there be beggars and dead bodies on the pavement, bro» one, the part that makes Social Justice compelling to so many people. it's easy to distract oneself from the disgusting state of the world and even say that it's deserved by those most exposed to it. Success at this cope is not a valid reason to pat oneself on the back. I believe, and concur with Jews on this particular issue, that the Catholic Culture, and particularly the Art (the best art in all of history!) that it has inspired, constitute one big and extremely successful exercise in this distraction – His Holiness the Cope, the beautiful pearl of idolatry that has coated and obscured the unbearable insight that Christ had taught.
We're all fucking dying, yo. It's happening for real. For me and, probably, @self_made_human this implies accelerating medical applications of AI and spreading its economic benefit, rather than malaria nets, and for someone else it must mean something else; but it takes an alien mindset to appreciate how real this fact is and not let it affect your priorities at all. Yes, like @SecureSignals observes, Tikkun Olam is a somewhat alien notion for Westerners, one at the center of modern Reform Judaism, and once we get past the first approximation, it reveals other, older and more disquieting corollaries, as do some musings of the culprits of this collapse. But pointing this out is not a sufficient refutation of their core premise, which is: the world is deeply suboptimal, broken from any sane point of view. Only a viable alternative to their proposals would refute it. Is your only option to uphold local prosperity and praise God for putting you there?
In the end, what makes people live in the streets and other people bomb those streets? What makes yet another set of people grow up retarded or desperate enough to valorize this? What makes everyone (SBF included) indifferent to the fact that we are mortal and our bodies are degenerating with every breath? What perverts the painting of the world into a modernist shit-drip, and how do we redeem it?
Just how beautiful the art must be, and how strong the faith, and how neat the white picket fence of the family house in the high-trust gated community, to have people make peace with the ugliness of the Universe.
I think "local prosperity" is a poor stand-in for civilizational achievement, which I would propose as a counter-value to the pursuit of healing the world. In this way, Tikkun Olam can be contrasted with the Faustian spirit, the latter of which fundamentally relies on healthy forms of idolatry like high art and architecture, adventurism, innovation, self-regard, and discovery.
EA would let the height of civilization decay in order to improve the utility consumption of the parts of humanity least dispositioned towards the advancement of civilization. I don't think it's a coincidence that EA essentially entails the siphoning off of the wealth of the Western world to the Third world while critiquing the Faustian, idolatrous drive for beauty and adventurism.
That's not to say it's incompatible with your goal to technologically end death. I don't think most innovation is driven by spiritual desire to heal the world, though many innovators will claim that is their motive. Most of the time they are autistic geniuses obsessed with their own form of conquest, or climbing the highest mountain.
Lastly, I don't think I need to elaborate that I interpret Tikkun Olam as a thinly-veiled mandate for ethnic conquest, and I think this dovetails nicely with your interpretation of the underlying motives of AI alignment. Do you trust someone whose self-professed mission is to heal the world?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link