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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I'm not a mind-reader, but with a lot of reasonable parameters I'd be in favour of #2, so I see no particular reason to disbelieve other people saying they'd prefer #2.

Framework #1: people dying is bad.

Global Thermonuclear War would kill a lot of people - indeed, with Russia's arsenal against both the West and China, it'd probably be 1-1.5 billion. AI apocalypse would kill all humans, which is roughly 8 billion. If we want to minimise mean humans killed, then a 100% chance of GTW is still worth it if we predict greater than a 12-20% chance of AI apocalypse in the alternative. To quote EY himself: "shut up and multiply".

Framework #2: existential risk and categorical imperative.

This is not necessarily a one-off. It may be repeated. Consider the results of pursuing either policy consistently in a series of similar situations.

  • If we always do #1, then (without some means of solving AI alignment) the final outcome is that humanity gets destroyed by AI.

  • If we always do #2, then we have a GTW every 50-200 years, but we don't get destroyed by AI.

If you think, as I do, that the existence of humanity and the birth of new humans are very good things, then in the long run it is clearly better to always do #2 than to always do #1. Kant's categorical imperative says, among other things, that we should do the things that we would prefer for everyone to do in our place. So we should do #2.

I mean, obviously I'd be in favour of telling Russia "knock it off" on multiple occasions before escalating to war, but if it comes down to "start GTW or take significant X-risk", I'd push the button.

To quote EY himself: "shut up and multiply".

Given that he is a crank who beclowns himself in a variety of ways, and given his "shutting up and multiplying" results in hypothetical advocacy of extreme torture to prevent motes of dust in eyes, etc: I accept this as weak evidence that the opposite is true.