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Future technology puts us outside the distribution of past societies, we can't count on anything.
The Soviet Union lasted for quiet a while.
Cool, glad we're on the same page then.
North Korea has lasted for decades without advanced social science.
Future tech might put us outside the distribution of past societies. It hasn't actually done that in the last two thousand years of future, though. There's some reasons to think it might not be able to, starting with the observation that tech places additional power in the individual's hands, and it's possible that once individuals have access to a sufficient level of power, further scaling of our social structures is precluded by the realities of stochastic dissent.
In any case, the original claim was about WWII, not the future.
It did. And most of that time, it was dreary rather than actively mass-murderous. Most of the killing happened in the first twenty to thirty years. Then the killers died or were themselves killed off, and the people who replaced them distanced themselves from the whole miserable business. I don't think it significantly altered the trajectory of humanity; us periodically killing each other in large numbers is the trajectory of humanity.
And social science is how they did it. "Advanced" social science will make the dystopias more pernicious, not prevent them, but I am highly skeptical that it will ever make them permanent or anything approaching it. If such an outcome began to look plausible, I would expect an uptick in general violence sufficient to remove the degree of social structure that would serve as its prerequisite.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I have, actually. Have you?
We still covet, steal, hate, murder, love, couple, build, form hierarchies, have children and raise them, form communities, societies, governments, trade, and so on and on, as we have since recorded history began, despite specific predictions and even explicit, forcefully-implemented plans backed by millions of man-years of human effort to alter these specific things. Technology has changed surface details. Sometimes it has, temporarily, changed how these basic drives express themselves. What hasn't happened is fundamental changes in how humans live. Whether it's the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, or the Meditations, analysis of the human condition written thousands of years ago remain immediately relevant today, because nothing substantive has changed. Better weapons change how we fight wars, but they don't change the fact that we fight.
It bears emphasizing the degree to which this reality directly contradicts the explicit, detailed predictions of many of our society's most influential minds. We were not supposed to have crime, ignorance, poverty, war, addiction, or the other ills at this point. One whole branch claimed we wouldn't have families, and made considerable effort to eradicate them. All their schemes failed, because their structures, mercifully, collapsed.
Human society is fractal, and the seed is human nature. As society grows more complex, the fundamental patterns express themselves with increasing elaboration, but their nature remains constant. Our ability to alter the form of that pattern remains shockingly limited.
Yes, you do have to argue that. How did Stalin winning WII make the planet significantly more likely to be dominated by anti-human values? His ideology was incompatible with fundamental aspects of human nature, and so for all its ruthlessness and barbarity, it crumbled.
The planet is not, in fact, dominated by US values. The US just spent 20 years attempting to impose its values on a handful of middle-eastern shitholes, and completely failed. US values are visibly crumbling within the US itself. US values conflict with human nature less than Soviet values did, so they crumble slower, but they still crumble.
I do not believe that social change is random instead of self-reinforcing. I believe that social change is cyclical. There's a sort of low-energy state, and moving off that low-energy state, whether to the positive or the negative, requires exponentially-increasing energy. Once the energy is expended, society reverts back to the low-energy state in fairly short order. Societies tend toward being livable, not "benevolent". Social change is not self-reinforcing, but rather self-negating. The "massive" social changes we've seen lately have resulted in the people who've embraced the changes not having any kids. What do you think the long-term result of that is going to be?
The current society is comfortable, in the way a heroin addict with a steady supply is comfortable. I do not agree that it is "benevolent", and I am not particularly interested in preserving it, since it seems to me that it is both unsustainable, unhealthy and unjust. War and other forms of violence happen for a variety of reasons, not all of them evil; most of the plausible mechanisms where the current peace break down seem, at a minimum, necessary.
This is the core of our disagreement. You think that Stalin's successor was determined by a random roll of the dice. I think Stalin's successor was determined by the sum wills of his underlings, and the sum of those wills was decidedly against continuing the slaughter. People can be convinced, temporarily, to commit heinous atrocities for some greater good. When the greater good stubbornly refuses to materialize, they grow disillusioned and quit. North Korea is repressive by our standards, but not terribly repressive by historical standards. They aren't running extermination camps. They aren't waging aggressive wars. And so, with a great deal of outside support, they'll maintain for a little while longer, and then they too will revert to the mean.
And now all you have to do is maintain it. Did Pinker cite the decrease in murder post 1990s? Do you believe, looking at the world around you, that "victory" over violence is a realistic possibility? If so, I must respectfully disagree.
Those sacrifices were indeed brave and noble. It's just that their effect is temporary, not eternal. Evil re-emerges, and must again be fought, but conversely even when Evil is victorious, its victories do not last forever. The mongols swept across a fair portion of the world in a tide of destruction, but a thousand years later, their impact is imperceptible. The Aztecs cemented a monstrous regime based on pervasive slavery and ritualized mass-murder... and then they were no more, and again left no permanent stamp on humanity.
I haven't read the book, but this claim definately contradicts my own understanding. The south was in a bad position both economically and politically, which is why they attempted to force a favorable resolution, and why their attempt was doomed. If the outlook was favorable to them long-term, why not simply play the long game?
No, I claim that "social science" is technology for manipulating a society, in the same way that materials science is technology for manipulating materials. The better your social science, the better your ability to temporarily deform society away from the core tendencies of human nature. Energy cost of maintaining such deformations increases exponentially over time. I see little evidence that the ways tech advances alter society can be reliably predicted at all, beyond the observation that human nature itself prevails.
North Korea is a pretty weak dystopia. It's fairly poor and somewhat hungry, and generally drab, not particularly murderous. It's also not self-sustaining or capable of expanding beyond its borders. Its imposition required starting conditions that do not exist elsewhere. It is not a persuasive model for what can be imposed on the rest of the world, nor for how the long-term trajectory of humanity can be altered.
That's unfortunate, but it's a conclusion you're free to draw. Have a good one, sir.
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I agree with your points - there's no fixed human nature that isn't coextensive with human society and action, which are changing - and said human nature were purposeful, complex adaptations that, like the adaptations of our monkey and mammal ancestors, will evolve with time - and we'll be able to modify genes and bypass it all with AI soon enough.
I don't think he's 'not arguing in good faith', though. It's very easy to be very wrong (see: history of philosophy or religion) without attempting to be misleading or distracting. If you mean 'the conversation won't be productive' that may be true (and is much worse than mere bad faith), but that's different!
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