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Notes -
https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/criticizing-bostrom-stifles-honest
Criticizing Bostrom Stifles Honest Discussions and Encourages More Attacks - Those who dig up old messages with offensive content to expose to millions of people want to ruin reputations. We cannot empower these people to influence conversations about the future of humanity.
More discussion of the email incident with Bostrom. I make the case that Bostrom should not have to apologize and that philosophical discussions are an appropriate place to discuss offensive ideas. I argue that many Effective Altruists shouldn't be surprised that other Effective Altruists believe in cognitive differences between populations. I argue that the real purpose of the discussion around Bostrom is enforcing taboos. And that taboos around controversial topics can be very harmful. Being myself, I couldn't help but discuss cognitive enhancement and the taboos around it which are probably incredibly harmful.
I agree with your observations on the puritanism of Critical Social Justice and think the cancellation of Bostrom is ridiculous, but I want to comment on this:
It does need stating that genetic modification leads us into a multipolar trap the ramifications of which are possibly quite large. For one, the optimal cognitive structure might not be anything like human neural architecture. Human cognition is a hodgepodge of simplistic drives and instincts that have slowly accreted over time despite the fact that these preferences often conflict with each other. A huge portion of the activities we view as imbuing life with meaning (art, music, etc) are actually inefficient reward-hacking behaviour and are a product of poor optimisation, and the probability that humans are the apotheosis of evolution, that we exist on the global optimum, is very low. At best, we exist on a local optimum which we can’t move off because the extremely gradual nature of evolution prevents us from moving past a “valley” in the fitness landscape where intermediate forms would have low fitness.
Technologies like genetic modification solve this failure of evolution to optimise, and that leads us into a situation wherein people and societies that fail to modify themselves in the “right” way will slowly disappear. It doesn’t matter how much we want to maintain our human minds and values or how instinctually repugnant we find abandoning them to be, we don't get to decide how we develop, there are many incentive structures baked into the fabric of reality that we just can’t escape. As Scott Alexander puts it, human agency in such a situation is a mere formality.
And once this technology is out there, there is no way to have a worldwide moratorium on it. The benefit of defection is too high, and any country which legalises modification and in fact makes it maximally available to its citizens will spread at the expense of others and at the expense of human-like cognition. Consider also that the people who optimise themselves for breeding and spreading many copies of their genes are going to be most successful, and this might accelerate population growth immensely and lead to a Malthusian situation wherein population bumps up against the limits of carrying capacity.
Of course because of the aforementioned issue regarding multipolar traps and arms races I don't think it is possible to stifle the creation of genetic technology in the first place, it's pretty much an inevitability, and if it's going to happen anyway it is reasonable for any given society to want to be at its forefront.
I've long accepted that any kids I have will seem at least slightly alien to me. I'm somewhat baffled that any reasonably intelligent person has had children within the last 50 years without expecting the same. Have you ever wondered what your twenty-times-great grandparents would think of your modern ways? Values change over time, even the most conservative RETVRN poasters are ideologically very different from medieval farmers -- and happily so. I don't want to dictate to future generations, any more than I'd want the ghosts of my ancestors dictating to me.
Maybe this goes wrong? Say economic doubling times continue to accelerate and the disconnect between generations grows larger than we can bear. Or maybe Aubrey de Grey wins and it goes the other way, with 200-year-old fogeys clogging up politics? It's all very uncertain to me, I'm worried about one or the other on alternate days of the week.
I agree that my kids will be somewhat alien. I guess I just want to make sure that this trajectory seems right to me? I don't know I find the whole framing a little stifling. We don't actually operate in a system when each generation takes a turn and then hands it off to the next generation. I don't want to dictate anything to the next generation, I just think I've actually figured some of all this complex living stuff out. It didn't come easy and some of it even came from the lessons of previous generations, part of each generation's process is to distill all of this understanding and pass it on. It's like the corporate speak concept of institutional knowledge. If they refused to take on that generation gift I think bad things might happen.
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