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Notes -
A response to Freddie deBoer on AI hype
Bulverism is a waste of everyone's time
Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here. Freddie’s AI article always consists of two discordant components inelegantly and incongruously kludged together:
sober-minded appeals to AI maximalists to temper their most breathless claims about the capabilities of this technology by carefully pointing out shortcomings therein
childish, juvenile insults directed at anyone who is even marginally more excited about the potential of this technology than he is, coupled with armchair psychoanalysis of the neuroses undergirding said excitement
What I find most frustrating about each repetition of Freddie’s AI article is that I agree with him on many of the particulars. While Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence is, without exception, the most frightening book I’ve ever read in my life, and I do believe that our species will eventually invent artificial general intelligence — I nevertheless think the timeline for that event is quite a bit further out than the AI utopians and doomers would have us believe, and I think a lot of the hype around large language models (LLMs) in particular is unwarranted. And to lay my credentials on the table: I’m saying this as someone doesn’t work in the tech industry, who doesn’t have a backgrond in computer science, who hasn’t been following the developments in the AI space as closely as many have (presumably including Freddie), and who (contrary to the occasional accusation my commenters have fielded at me) has never used generative AI to compose text for this newsletter and never intends to.
I’m not here to take Freddie to task on his needlessly confrontational demeanour (something he rather hypocritically decries in his interlocutors), or attempt to put manners on him. If he can’t resist the temptation to pepper his well-articulated criticisms of reckless AI hypemongering with spiteful schoolyard zingers, that’s his business. But his article (just like every instance in the series preceding it) contains many examples of a particular species of fallacious reasoning I find incredibly irksome, regardless of the context in which it is used. I believe his arguments would have a vastly better reception among the AI maximalists he claims to want to persuade if he could only exercise a modicum of discipline and refrain from engaging in this specific category of argument.
Quick question: what’s the balance in your checking account?
If you’re a remotely sensible individual, it should be immediately obvious that there are a very limited number of ways in which you can find the information to answer this question accurately:
Dropping into the nearest branch of your bank and asking them to confirm your balance (or phoning them).
Logging into your bank account on your browser and checking the balance (or doing so via your banking app).
Perhaps you did either #1 or #2 a few minutes before I asked the question, and can recite the balance from memory.
Now, supposing that you answered the question to the best of your knowledge, claiming that the balance of your checking account is, say, €2,000. Imagine that, in response, I rolled my eyes and scoffed that there’s no way your bank balance could possibly be €2,000, and the only reason that you’re claiming that that’s the real figure is because you’re embarrassed about your reckless spending habits. You would presumably retort that it’s very rude for me to accuse you of lying, that you were accurately reciting your bank balance to the best of your knowledge, and furthermore how dare I suggest that you’re bad with money when in fact you’re one of the most fiscally responsible people in your entire social circle—
Wait. Stop. Can you see what a tremendous waste of time this line of discussion is for both of us?
Either your bank balance is €2,000, or it isn’t. The only ways to find out what it is are the three methods outlined above. If I have good reason to believe that the claimed figure is inaccurate (say, because I was looking over your shoulder when you were checking your banking app; or because you recently claimed to be short of money and asked me for financial assistance), then I should come out and argue that. But as amusing as it might be for me to practise armchair psychoanalysis about how the only reason you’re claiming that the balance is €2,000 is because of this or that complex or neurosis, it won’t bring me one iota closer to finding out what the real figure is. It accomplishes nothing.
This particular species of fallacious argument is called Bulverism, and refers to any instance in which, rather than debating the truth or falsity of a specific claim, an interlocutor assumes that the claim is false and expounds on the underlying motivations of the person who advanced it. The checking accout balance example above is not original to me, but from C.S. Lewis, who coined the term:
As Lewis notes, if I have definitively demonstrated that the claim is wrong — that there’s no possible way your bank balance really is €2,000 — it may be of interest to consider the psychological factors that resulted in you claiming otherwise. Maybe you really were lying to me because you’re embarrassed about your fiscal irresponsibility; maybe you were mistakenly looking at the balance of your savings account rather than your checking account; maybe you have undiagnosed myopia and you misread a 3 as a 2. But until I’ve established that you are wrong, it’s a colossal waste of my time and yours to expound at length on the state of mind that led you to erroneously conclude that the balance is €2,000 when it’s really something else.
In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?
But it’s also, ultimately, a waste of time. The only way to find out the balance of your checking account is to check the balance on your checking account — idle speculation on the psychological factors that caused you to claim that the balance was X when it was really Y are futile until it has been established that it really is Y rather than X. And so it goes with all claims of truth or falsity. Hypothetically, it could be literally true that 100% of the people who endorse evolution have fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and so on and so forth. Even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether evolution is literally true.
To give Freddie credit where it’s due, the various iterations of his AI article do not consist solely of him assuming that AI maximalists are wrong and speculating on the psychological factors that caused them to be so. He does attempt, with no small amount of rigour, to demonstrate that they are wrong on the facts: pointing out major shortcomings in the current state of the LLM art; citing specific examples of AI predictions which conspicuously failed to come to pass; comparing the recent impact of LLMs on human society with other hugely influential technologies (electricity, indoor plumbing, antibiotics etc.) in order to make the case that LLMs have been nowhere near as influential on our society as the maximalists would like to believe. This is what a sensible debate about the merits of LLMs and projections about their future capabilities should look like.
But poor Freddie just can’t help himself, so in addition to all of this sensible sober-minded analysis, he insists on wasting his readers’ time with endless interminable paragraphs of armchair psychoanalysis about how the AI maximalists came to arrive at their deluded worldviews:
Am I disagreeing with any of the above? Not at all: whenever anyone is making breathless claims about the potential near-future impacts of some new technology, I have to assume there’s some amount of wishful thinking or motivated reasoning at play.
No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.
Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. Resist the temptation to psychoanalyse people you disagree with, something you’ve complained about people doing to you (in the form of suggesting that your latest article is so off the wall that it could only be the product of a manic episode) on many occasions. The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone’s time.
Your post is overall good, but I think you take this part too far. There are questions, indeed including on issues you've listed here, where a genuine issue of material fact exists, and is not and likely cannot be resolved in the near term.
My example would be climate change. I have slight confidence, approximately 65%ish that the climate is warming faster than it would without human CO2 emissions. This is hardly the sort of confidence level one should have if you are deciding major issues. It gets even lower when I ask the question, "assuming it is true the climate is warming because of human CO2 emissions, is that bad?" On even that question we are at 50% max, most credible people I have looked at seem to indicate slight warming is probably good for the earth and humanity. And then there is the next question of, will the policy proposed by this politician/advocate meaningfully change the outcome, and there I estimate abysmal results in the 1-5% range.
So I am left with a confidence chart of(when being favorable to environmentalists): A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 70% B) That is bad: 50% C) The proposed policies can fix it: 5%
For a composite confidence level of 1.75% that environmentalist proposals will solve the problem they are purporting to solve.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.
The environmentalist would say that:
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.
That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.
Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.
The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.
I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.
True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them. Though to be fair I am also seeing some who do hate cars, mostly due to hating parking lots.
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The hairshirt environmentalist is not at all uncommon. Just because something is uncomplimentary to the outgroup does not mean it is not true.
I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
With the caveat Rasmussen and N=1000.
Interesting. I do think Rasmussen is biased, but biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong. So I am genuinely trying to see if my mental model needs to be updated. I expect my mental model for the number of people who think that is too low but probably for many here theirs is too high.
I was having trouble finding other sources about wanting to ban AC. Thoughts on banning cars yielded far more results. Based on this thread, the steelman version of this argument is that many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them. Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership. Though I think they'd still count it as a win if cars are driven less.
or partial bans rather than full bans (and there is already partial ban on cars in Old Towns of many European cities)
in ideal world (according to me) people would have cars but they would be utterly not necessary for travel within city center (or maybe within city in general), and used for travel outside it to what extend it is doable and worth doing is a separate issue
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Perhaps not, but they want YOU to give up your car, your air travel, your air conditioning, your single-family home and yard, your meat, etc.
But how much do they want that?
Saying “I think St. Thomas was pretty admirable” isn’t the same as putting on the hairshirt yourself.
Enough to support politicians and policies which will result in people being forced to do it.
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The comment I've heard several times from middle class environmentalist friends is, "Of course, people are going to have to stop doing [thing I don't do]". Biking and recycling make them feel that they've made their sacrifices and they can happily start requiring things from other people.
Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.
My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?
My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:
I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.
I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.
As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).
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The Puritan impulse that is driven by "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" is not limited to guys in funny hats and capes
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