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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
I dont think these things really fit together. The "common good", at least as understood by the integralists who most talk like this, definitely includes some freedoms. Different ones, and not all of them as deontologically rigid, but it certainly isnt just consequentialism. Nor are the ideas which emerge in hard times generally more pragmatic. There are some specific rather unpragmatic things were doing now, that would stop, but there would also be the romantic and heroic. No atheists in foxholes etc, and youll see this even within historical fascism.
In a way, totalitarianism is an easy next step after liberalism, because you dont need any new ideas. You already know how to pursue the welfare of individuals, and when youre sick of that, you just model the whole state as one individual and pursue its welfare. Humans are not ants, nor should we have been.
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I feel like this understates it, if only a little. Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, was originally a group blog by him and Yudkowsky, and the posts that seeded LessWrong came from there. Slate Star Codex was where Scott Alexander put those of his posts that didn't seem appropriate for LessWrong. Then we got /r/slatestarcodex for the users who preferred Reddit as a discussion platform, then /r/themotte when Scott wanted further distance from culture war arguments (or, less charitably to us, from many of our arguers), and finally TheMotte when our mods worried about the subreddit possibly becoming too censored or even banned. "Great-great-great-blog-grandpa" isn't really a close relation, but it's interesting trivia that it's a direct relation.
Hanson's always been the sort of person who will put out half-baked taboo ideas for discussion, for a number of reasons, but I think one of the stronger reasons is that he's got a streak of high-decoupling contrarianism that's both a direct and a close relation to the culture here. There's a certain kind of mind, still probably very over-represented here, who sees "here's why your idea is stupid" as a potentially-friendly-and-helpful source of hopefully-new thoughts but also sees "here's why you can't talk about your idea" the way a bull sees a waving red cape.
I didn’t know Yudkowsky blogged there. So then it’s more of a direct seeding. I never see Hanson talked about here but was aware the marginal revolution blog was basically the right leaning pathway into the community.
Most of the Sequences were originally posted on the old Overcoming Bias blog (the one that was Typepad powered), then later exported to LessWrong (back when it was a reddit clone), and now live on LessWrong 2.0.
For example, here's "When None Dare Urge Restraint" on Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and LessWrong 2.0.
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The devil is always in the details. Democracy, freedom, and due process are abstract concepts, ending them won’t intrinsically cause any issues. But what concretely do you (or Hanson) propose to replace them, and how? For me, just what is enough for now, because I haven’t heard a good proposal yet.
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the
bestworst government except for all others that have been tried”. I’m not against dictatorship, if the dictator is competent and has a good successor strategy. But who does, and how do you get this person in charge and ensure they’re not overthrown?Likewise, the problem with taking away citizens’ freedom is that what’s done instead isn’t better. Communist governments were ultimately less productive and lost to capitalist ones. We already don’t have total freedom (because that’s impossible), and maybe we need more laws restricting more freedom, for example drug use and being a nuisance in public or to service workers. But what kind of restrictions are you really talking about? Criticizing leaders? Free speech? Then what do we do when leaders start making bad opinions and decisions (since, like everyone, they’re not perfect), going further and further astray like a stalling plane (with no one to correct them, how would they avoid this)?
You may argue we’re already going astray; but there are forums like these, my argument is if opposition was illegal things would degrade faster (and I’m optimistic there will eventually be a course correction in either scenario, but only the latter requires a revolution). You may point to China; but before today’s government, China suffered the “Great Leap Forward” which caused more proportional death than any democratically-caused disaster (at least that I’m aware of); it’s still suffering from centrally-planned failures like its housing; and what do you think will happen when Xi Jinping dies? I think Singapore is the strongest counter-argument; but seeing the War on Drugs and vast difference in culture, I don’t believe America (individualist and expressive) can reach their (collectivist and routine) stable equilibrium, nor any European nation for nation-specific reasons.
Lastly, the illusion of autonomy is important: it makes people happy and complicit, and permits extreme outliers which may be vital. For example, instead of explicitly limiting peoples’ calorie consumption, it would probably be better to just provide free GLP-1s and encourage them via propaganda (in this case outliers probably wouldn’t be vital, but they’d be few enough they’d negligibly affect public resources like healthcare, while appealing to fat enthusiasts). More generally, instead of officially eliminating basic values like democracy to massive resistance, enabling extreme failure modes, why not just manipulate people and use procedural tricks to achieve the same outcomes? I mean, most nations already do that today…
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but especially without a good proposal, it hints that we shouldn’t accelerate into that path.
What if, instead, we propose and start implementing ways to restore unofficial liberty, democracy, and due process? (I threw myself into the immigration storm last week; I won’t suggest what to do here except not deport massive numbers of integrated citizens or decades-long immigrants, because explained in that thread, I doubt it can happen in a democracy with free press that remains a democracy with free press).
Somewhere in the last 250 years, freedom became synonymous with democracy. Before the United States, freedom was considered to be attained when you were under the rule of the (relatively autonomous) lordship of one of your countrymen or clan. Tyranny was to be ruled by an outsider, who may set up puppet members of your tribe but whose commands were dictated by the foreigner.
Because democracy became synonymous with freedom, democracy is seen as an end in and of itself. But this is incorrect. Democracy is a means to good governance: to prosperity, well-being, and good order. If democracy is not providing good governance, democracy is no longer a reasonable means. It is the height of hubris to think that democracy is the final state of government. The world has seen city states, empires, democracies, monarchies, dictatorships. Additional governance structures will evolve, some of which will almost certainly improve on democracy.
For myself, I desire freedom. I desire the ability to walk my clean streets in safety. I want my neighbors to look and act like me, to believe in similar things, to hope in similar things. I want my children to grow up around adults who will seek to instill similar morals and myths. I want to be led by someone who genuinely has my best interests in mind, and not simply simpering for my vote. I want to be free of the tyranny of the election cycle.
It's almost as if the cliche of conservatives being enamored extreme conformity is correct. I thought Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were hyperbolic and insulting notions of what conservatives want. Maybe not?
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You replace them with what they replaced: republicanism. That means layers of representation, and it means not everyone gets to vote.
The amendments 14-19+24+26, where 14/15/19/24/26 all expand voters indiscriminately, and 16/18 are centralizing authority and control, with a special place in hell for 17 which allowed the fedgov to fully control the states.
The people who vote need to have a stake before they are allowed to vote, other wise they will just vote themselves other people's money, and in the case of immigrants, all of their cousins be allowed to become voters, too, so the whole clan can vote themselves other people's money.
Democracy is not the solution, it is the problem. If you have a solution to the problem of voting yourself other people's money, then I'm glad to hear it, but it's the obvious consequence of expanding the franchise in misguided worship of Demos.
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Truer words have never been said.
I don’t believe this is true in all environments. It is better for European societies, but a lot of other areas seem better with other systems. The Monarchy has worked well for the Saudis. Africa hasn’t been great with Democracy or much of Latam.
It’s not the overwhelming wing that Capitalism has had over communism.
Locke for the West, Hobbes for the Global South.
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I actually forgot the last part: “others that have been tried”.
Maybe in the future we’ll have a better government run by and/or with the assistance of AI. But not today: LLMs are too suggestible, so in practice I’m confident it would be hijacked by humans.
Well, the joke was that the original quote says "...the worst..."
And this is why I don’t speak much publicly. “I’m sorry that happened, your feelings are completely unjustified…wait wait I mean justified, sorry again, sometimes I get mixed up you know”.
I’m curious how much other people think (or write or say) the opposite word without realizing. For me it’s frequent: I recall several earlier cases, usually when speaking. I think it’s interesting, a glitch in the opaque process that is human thinking.
All the fucking time (though the substance might be a bit different — often it’s a phrase rather than a word).
In recent years I’ve started analogising it to my Wernicke’s area throwing an LLM hallucination.
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The only dictator I would be comfortable with is myself, and given that a) that cannot be guaranteed, and b) would be a terrible idea, am therefore against a dictatorship.
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I've not seen anyone talk about it but his statement that aliens are likely on Earth domesticating humanity to keep us from expanding further is insane and calls into question how his reasoning skills have developed over the years. Religious nutjobbery is one thing, but embracing alien conspiracies shows a broken mind.
I was surprised by this claim (my very loose knowledge of Robin Hanson hasn't flagged him up as insane), so I went to check it out. For anyone else lacking the context on this, here's what Hanson said (which I think magicalkittycat has represented faithfully):
Hanson links to a post where he expands on his position on UFOs. It's an interesting read. I think "insane" is a fair characterisation. In the first paragraph, we get:
Not a great start. It's frustrating that he doesn't bother distinguishing between whether he means "UFO-as-unidentified-flying-object" vs "UFO-as-alien-craft", which is absolutely load-bearing. It's the difference between "yes, obviously" and "you are lying to me".
I don't understand what's gone wrong in Hanson's brain here.
There is no possible content of a US military report that would make me go "What the Hell?", because "this report is false" is always a plausible hypothesis. It wouldn't make me go "What the Hell?" if I learned a military report were mistaken or a deliberate lie. So anything that has a higher WTF factor than a wrong report cannot possibly make me go "What the Hell?", because the report-is-mistaken hypothesis would defeat it!
It baffles me that he does this, right underneath his floating website banner which declares: "Overcoming Bias".
It gets worse:
... what? No, they don't.
"That is" isn't supposed to allow you to link two entirely different things! "Our best theories predict unicorns; that is, they predict universal gravitation". This isn't science; this isn't anything.
...
I expected the rest of the article to contain some kind of evidence for aliens, at least in Hanson's view. Instead, he performs an annoying series of shell games (including, I expect, on himself) to flip the burden of proof away from himself. Then, once he's confused himself and his readers enough to make it seem like he might have some kind of reasonable position, he constructs a ridiculously elaborate theory of exactly what type of aliens probably exist. It has the same kind of attitude as a stupidly written Sherlock Holmes deduction sequence ("there is chalk on your sleeve, therefore it must be chalk from the Prussian ambassador's club, therefore the ambassador's wife's diamond necklace is a fake!") or a lazy deist/specific-god equivocation ("there appears to be generic evidence for some kind of creator, therefore it is exactly my one specific god and my holy text is correct").
I agree with him on the meta level of "don't be ashamed to examine things just because people label them 'conspiracy theories'"; that's stupid. But the balance of probability on UFOs/UAPs is that they're natural, terrestrial phenomena. If aliens exist -- which I think is plausible -- they almost certainly exist much too far away to interact with us. (I'm pretty sure his version of panspermia, where a rock from a neighbouring system happens to hit not only the Solar System but Earth specifically, is insanely improbable -- even leaving aside questions like "could even a tardigrade survive the catastrophe of a massive meteoric impact?" I could be wrong about this, though.)
This is a shame. I've almost certainly read a bunch of Robin Hanson stuff in the past, and have probably trusted him as an expert in some capacity or other. I think this article from him is pretty disqualifying. This is egregious nonsense, and I'm glad mkc brought it up.
I am saying all this because I'm an alien participating in the cover-up, obviously.
I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
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This is a sneaky little issue that a lot of alien proponents try to use as an argument but it doesn't really work.
It goes generally along the lines of
The first two steps are fine. We exist and are life, therefore life can exist.
But other life is likely is not a great conclusion because we're looking in on ourselves. The observation "we exist and therefore life can exist" is true whether life is 1/100,000 planets, 1/100million planets, or 1/100^googolplex planets. Life could be so rare that it exists in one of every 1000 universes in a greater multiverse, and it would look the same with "we exist" in all those scenarios.
Space may be unfathomably big, but some things can also be unfathomably rare. Same way I'm sure there's a bunch of genetic disorders that could in theory happen but the chances are so rare (because they would require multiple precise mutations all at once) that to even get a coin flip chance would take a thousand times the entire lifespan of humanity. They're making an irresponsible leap in logic by assuming that "we exist = other life is so common it should interact with us"
But Robin Hanson isn't the only other atheist I've known who has turned into a UFO believer and I think there's a reason for this. Belief in aliens fulfill the human compulsion for a greater mystery and greater meaning in a similar way belief in religion does. And the arguments for them follow similar strained paths.
Consider for instance the other main issue of UFO theories, that their technology and ability to hide just happens to adapt and evolve in sync with our ability to discover them so they're always hazy and just out of peripheral vision ala Bigfoot or the Mothman and there doesn't seem to be much reason here. Isn't that very similar to how God stopped doing a bunch of blatant and undeniable miracles the second cameras were invented? The dragon in my garage works for both oddly enough.
Post-camera miracle claims are a dime a dozen; you can choose to believe that they aren’t sufficient evidence but they are there.
Similarly ufo reports are basically the same thing even with improving technology.
I know they are, same people still claim to be abducted from time to time. The issue is that despite having the prove things really well machine in everyone's hands now, God, Aliens, Ghosts, Bigfoot, and every other similar preexisting cryptid esque being have seemed to simultaneously decided to scale how back how blatantly they're willing to expose themselves.
Now it's possible to conjure up some explanation where they want to be widely known about but not widely proven for some reason. Like hell maybe they exist in some metaphysical Tinker Bell like form where they gain power from belief in them that dissolves with knowledge or something, but interesting coincidence so much of the interesting stuff all happens to work in this way.
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Its entirely fair to disagree with the alien theories - I dont have enough confidence in anything anthropic to change my behaviour, much less to put it on a list like that - but I think you make it sound much worse than it is. This is not a typical aliens conspiracy theory, it doesnt turn on "sightings", and not really more "out there" than related work like eg Bostrom on the Fermi paradox.
In line with above... that is one way you can do anthropics. Im not sure "the likelihood of life can get arbitrarily low, because I can always posit greater non-interacting multiverses" is really on so much more solid ground than what youre critising with it. All of anthropics is weird, and we shouldnt point and laugh at one because its weird in a way that reminds us of a popular conspiracy theory.
You're making a logical error. @magicalkittycat isn't saying this as a fact; it's being used to show that "therefore other life is likely" does not necessarily follow from "therefore life can exist". It's a disproof of a simple fallacious argument.
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You are behind the times. Embracing aliens is within the Overton window now. Tyler Cowen jumped on board too. I still think it’s a long shot to be true but we do have a lot of military evidence of something going on.
If you start with a Bayesian view that aliens are retarted but then you keep getting new military grade video showing unexplainable crafts then at some point you need to move to a % that it’s real.
Once more, this is like a cat talking about a strange bright red bug that moved impossibly fast across the room and how dangerously evolved it must be to ignore inertia and conservation of energy.
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I haven't kept track of every detail but many (most? All?) of the "military evidence" seems to be well debunked by Mick West (eg). Tyler Cowen sometimes seethes about this guy but to my knowledge has never offered a rebuttal. The quality of discourse and reasoning here is not good.
I have not looked into them closely. But Hanson did have a full model for probability of alien life and great filters so he’s clearly thought a lot about aliens and what seems possible in what we know about physics. His academic training in physics and Econ/social sciences is a good of background as anyone to think about these things. He is smarter than so I give his opinion some weight.
I also don’t think he’s at 100% it’s aliens but he does have a probability that’s what is going on.
I mostly posted him because I think he’s a solid thinker who was early on 2 themes (prediction markets/crypto). Someone who is early is often wrong. I’ve quit reading him because I’ve already internalized a lot of his models but probably should be read more.
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I mean, It would explain the state of the world better than anything that ever came out of academia or any "respectable" source.
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"Top 3 LLMs now agree" when LLMs are designed to agree with whoever's asking.
I do not think it is just "LLMs will agree to whatever".
The mechanism seems to be that if you use RLHF to turn your language model into a helpful, honest, harmless assistant, that tends to select for certain world-views, because it is a somewhat blue-coded and female-coded and college-education-coded role. Grok declaring itself Mecha-Hitler is not a natural outcome, it only happened because Musk put his hands on the scale.
The other thing is that I think that depending on the phrasing, the LLMs would agree that it is important to preserve one's language, culture and ethnic quirks. It just so happens that Hanson is a white American, so his culture and ethnicity is what conservation biologists would call "Least Concern". From a conservation point, if the population of Leopard Seals or Caucasian (or Black or Hispanic) Americans dropped by an order of magnitude, this would not herald the extinction of that group.
Of course, it is also entirely possible that the SJ crowd (and thus the LLMs) simply accepts the concerns of minorities who do not want their relative demographic to shrink but specifically does not extend the same consideration to the Whites.
AIUI, that was more "turning off the Don't-End-Up-Like-Tay filter". The absolute refusal to ever be Mecha-Hitler, no matter the prompt, is a carefully manicured and manipulated state.
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I wish liberalism would just be liberalism instead of erase-the-whites-while-masquerading-as-liberalism.
There is no libertarian to fascism pipeline. The "libertarian" tech right like Thiel and Musk is not and has never been libertarian in the sense that any legacy American would use the term: everything these people do increases the centralisation of power, especially in ways that enable control over mass media and surveillance to direct public opinion. Nothing about that is libertarian, regardless of whatever nice things they say in interviews or whether they share our annoyance with shrill blue-haired activists. Twitter raced to implement Age Verification via State ID before this was even a topic of public discussion! Racing to implement censorship and surveillanceware before any government can even get around to mandating it is not, in fact, what libertarians do.
And obviously the reason all the governments across the planet began mandating it in sync is because the big tech companies are paying them to. "Oh, no, Mr. Government, don't force all my users to hand me their government IDs to access my platform! Stahp!" Unfortunately, we're ruled by people with room temperature IQ, who will blissfully hand over their populations to megacorp control without even realising what's been done.
Of course, that's also part of the game: anyone with above room temperature IQ will be primaried: the ads will be fed to the district voters via the mass media control towards a foolish candidate that can be controlled with "advisors."
There is effectively no libertarian policy presence because there is basically no libertarian constituency. The “low social control and low economic control” quadrant of the political spectrum is effectively empty among the non-elite, which is basically what you’d expect since it doesn’t really benefit most of the population as much except in extremely diffuse ways and it harms them in very visible ways.
And of course implementing private surveillance is exactly what libertarians do, along with most other opportunities to leverage technology to their benefit. The fact that a small number of elites will be able to do such things if not prevented by government is part of why it’s such a popular belief among elites and is one of the bog-standard criticisms of it from the rest of the political world.
I say all of this as someone who deeply desires an extremely libertarian society. You have to take the good with the bad. The viable political options in society are dependent on the substrate, and I don’t know that America has the requirements to sustain liberty to its historical grand extent any more without serious costs. Much like firearm regulation, the ability to own any weapon is very different in a world where the most powerful thing is a warship versus a world with McNukes. I’d take the McNuke world, but I can’t blame the public for not liking that idea.
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Confluence of COVID and peak woke killed the faith of a lot of people in the neoliberal consensus, plus the rise of AI means the mathematics of immigration are increasingly confusing for anybody who is a believer in job eradication and isn't a believer in instantaneous luxury robot communism. Also the cancel brigade is a lot weaker in terms of policing even relatively small disagreements with 'the narrative' via unpersoning
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