Absolute top quality sneer worthy quote though “I recount how in
2019, I heard a podcast where Esther Perel says to a client about his
partner who has PTSD flashbacks, “you can tell him ‘you’re safe now’”
and I found myself thinking “that’s not okay. I can’t feel that I’m safe
in this moment. AI could eat the world, and I’m not doing enough about
it. I can’t feel safe until we’ve figured it out.”
Like Jesus Christ it’s the height of arrogance to compare your dweeby
little nerd anxiety to actual ptsd
I'd like to think about this a bit. Some clinicians are assaying the term "religious trauma syndrome" for people who, among other things, worry that they're going to hell for leaving their religious community. They can have night terrors, panic attacks, etc.
The mechanism isn't the same as PTSD, but it does seem possible to work yourself into a state of chronic anxiety on the basis of a vague future threat. So, this would be a case of rationalism recreating one of the worse features of religion.
Let’s them LARP as sci-fi genius heroes.
Same reason none of them will ever *act* on any of their AI fears. Actually engaging with the real world punctures their fantasy. Yud is too old and too sick, you see, etc forever.
Strange how LessWrong never thought of the solution to utility indifference: myopically maximizing the attainable utility under the utility function you want used
Are we not commenting that one of their major points of “evidence”
being Les Mis?
edit- Holy shit in the comments someone points out that “measures of
trust” as collected globally don’t map to the model presented by the OP,
and the response is a single anecdote and an ink cloud about the metric
used in the global study! Literally countering a empirical statistical
study with a single anecdote as all good scientists do!
edit2- Holier Shit, someone lines up a perfectly good argument with
the exact opposite conclusion as OP, and it’s just sitting their
unaddressed.
>edit2- Holier Shit, someone lines up a perfectly good argument with the exact opposite conclusion as OP, and it's just sitting their unaddressed.
Are you referring to this pretty based take
> Where we see wrongdoing without punishment, our faith in the entire social order collapses because coercion is the foundation of our social order.
I figured it was someone from here posting
This post will make the HBD people very excited. (iirc the HBD people
solve the problem with of reported higher asian IQ compared to western
IQ with mumbling about how white people have better intergroup trust
genes or something (So you can still end up with ‘whites rule, colors
drool’ conclusion even if the reported IQ data points to something else.
My dad will always beat up your dad)).
Actually their current schtick is to say that the bell curve for whites is flatter, and thus that geniuses are all going to be European. Basically same argument people use with male vs female IQ.
Also creativity arguments.
If you bring that up I think that is either the moment the HBD person either gets nervous, just starts ignoring you, brings up immigration, or blames {{th
These guys: west is best cuz we respect muh personal freedoms and understand individualism while asians are authoritarian and collective
Also these guys: muh whites have better inter group trust genes
working with about a dozen different Asian people over the course of two decades, mostly from China but also from Korea and Japan. I'm using Asian in the sense of East Asian, since South Asia is very different culturally and much more similar to the West
Got any research on that?
Cause my personal experience is the literal opposite! This involves working with far more than a dozen people from Asia, including extensive experience living in Hong Kong and India, and more work with the Nepali diaspora and Japanese nationals.
People from those countries have their own dynamics that are unique in different ways, but they are all more collectivist than Americans/Western Europeans/Canadians.
[My personal experience also lines up with the research](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Country-scores-for-individualism-index_tbl1_334509709).
I'm not interested in research. I'm interested in my own personal experience. And collectivist behavior can easily be coerced or compelled, which makes it a social habit rather than any kind of natural trait
I don't think collectivism is particularly influenced by genetics, but the idea that the cultures you mentioned aren't collectivist, or at least more collectivist than USA/Canada and Western Europe, is nonsense.
The line is literally big brain but small dick.
[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/the-pseudoscience-race-differences-in-penis-size](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/the-pseudoscience-race-differences-in-penis-size)
>Rushton, the author of Race, Evolution and Behaviour, was givenprominence by Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve. According toRosen and Lane in The Bell Curve Wars, Rushton summarised his views onblack/white differences thus: “Even if you take things like athleticability or sexuality – not to reinforce stereotypes – but it’s a tradeoff, more brains or more penis. You can’t have everything.” For theMartians among readers, supposedly, whites have the former, blacks thelatter. Rushton takes 334 pages to consider racial differences between“Mongoloids”, “Caucasoids” and “Negroids”. He is aware that his beliefsare controversial but, “persuaded by data that the races do differ,genetically, in the mechanism underlying their behaviour”, is compelledto pursue this in aid of “the Darwinian revolution”.
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14719874-800-race-is-a-four-letter-word/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14719874-800-race-is-a-four-letter-word/)
There are a number of arguments they trot out for this. Ultimately it always boils down to:
\- Asians, despite higher average IQs, are not the "right" kind of smart. They are the kind of smart that makes them useful, but their \[insert stereotypical trait\] makes them unsuitable for leadership. This means Asians, though smart, rightfully should follow whites, who are preternaturally more qualified to lead for \[insert reasons\]. The "low creativity" thing is just one variation of this argument.
\- Now I will make some absurdly racist statement about Blacks. But that's ok, because I've already acknowledged the IQ-superiority of Asians, which means I'm not a racist. Of course, I immediately disclaimed such IQ-superiority by making up a bunch of reasons why that kind of smart is not the \*right\* kind of smart, but simply by allowing Asians to exist in the same sentence as whites I've proven by bona-fide non-racist-ness.
as an anthropologist i have the absolute worst time with
rationalists. when i used to teach i had to teach into classes. those
kids were always the absolute worst.
anyway, point is, the myth of progress is second only to social
evolutionary theory in terms of things that irk me in discussions of
anthropology, and some people are so blinded by their beliefs that they
will discard (or rewrite) anything to keep their beliefs.
The assumption that trust is borne out of abundance is… wow. This is
some real ivory tower detached from the world bullshit. Many of the
nicest, kindest people you’ll meet are dirt poor.
It’s a modern capitalist just-so story repackaged as “rationalism” because it flatters these idiots. “Unlike those cruel ooga boogas of the past, we enlighten EA rationalists can afford to give away our resources to such important causes as Yudkowsky’s fedora and sexual exploitation habits.”
Western societies are incredibly abundant in many ways. As a citizen,
you face almost zero risk of starvation, dying in a war, or exile from
your country; meanwhile deaths from most diseases and accidents are
dramatically lower than in the past.
Smellin’ that good ol’ Pinker stink.
For example, another major source of scarcity is crime
Ok, so like, neo-colonialism or general hoarding of capital or even
wage theft?
Criminals can still hurt us or kill us no matter how wealthy we are
in other ways.
What? Like the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents? A lucky punk with a
gun is scarcity cause number #1? Holy cryptofascism, Batman! I sure hope
you have some AGI repellant paper-clipped to that utility belt.
The character of the Bishop in Les Miserables is perhaps the platonic
ideal of extending trust to criminals—responding to Vajean’s theft by
giving him even more valuables (as pictured below), which is the crucial
act that leads Valjean to redemption.
Oh yeah, ok, double down on this idea that low-level crimes are the
real threat to society and not a symptom of the broader artificial
scarcities in society. Joe Chill is the big bad, not Luthor.
Can someone tell this superstitious and cowardly lot of cranks that
they don’t have to wrap their conservative crap in verbose wrapping
paper? It’s so many extra steps.
Isn't the consensus generally that scarcity causes crime?
I mean, sure, crime causes temporary scarcity if you lose your wallet or your TV. But the scarcity that causes crime is significantly more pronounced.
Scarcity, maybe, but especially inequality -- and as a couple of people have pointed out, inequality is possible only when there's at least some wealth somewhere.
Yes, exactly. I’m probably being a little too generous by volunteering examples of some (white collar) crimes that contribute to some vague sense of “scarcity”, a more correct(/less wrong) sneer would directly say what you’ve pointed out, that (blue collar) crime is caused by “scarcity”. I just wanted to make Batman references, ok???
What? Where is there anything endorsing violence or even criticizing any group of people in that (admittedly rather trite) post about how we should coerce people less because we live in a land of plenty?
Indeed. The blog post is typical reductive pseudo-insight with right-wing flavor, but the "everything bad is incipient genocide" moral panic is increasingly common and seriously inappropriate.
I don’t even see it as right wing, given that it argues for light-on-crime policies and is an argument against appeals to scarcity, which are the main right-wing arguments against a welfare state. It’s not woke or anything, but “we can all afford to trust each other more rather than using punishment” is more left-wing to me, at least in a U.S. context. It does criticize responding harshly to people who disagree with you, which is not advice either woke or MAGA people would take kindly.
There are no "right-wing"/" conservative " arguments: Its all contradictory nonsense that means do whatever you want, whenever.
For example, the "welfare state" is precisely what " conservatives " want, because what else is going to help make them better than everyone else? It's not like Kansas could ever stand on it's own two feet....
I base it on tens of thousands of conversations with people self-described as such, and decades of listening to them "talk and vite".
Feel free to identify a single American " conservative " that isn't raking taxpayer dollars towards their mouth, by purpose and design.
Does “peaceful cooperation in materially poor societies” necessarily
go against the idea that there is some relation between scarcity and
coercive/hierarchical social structures? After all there is the thesis
of the “original affluent society” which says that at least a
significant proportion of hunter-gatherer societies can satisfy all
their material needs with relatively large amount of leisure time
compared to later agricultural societies. From what I understand later
work has shown this doesn’t work as a blanket assertion about all
hunter-gatherer societies but a more nuanced version may be defensible,
see the piece by anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman here
along with his twitter thread here.
I also came across this
paper on education in hunter-gatherer societies which distinguishes
between “immediate-return” societies that it says tend to be more
egalitarian, and “delayed return” societies that are more dependent on a
single resource, and which tend to have “high population densities, food
storage, resource ownership and defense, hierarchical social structures,
inherited status, and relatively high rates of violence and acceptance
of violence as legitimate”.
IMO yes, the existence of trust and cooperation in materially poor societies necessarily goes against the idea that trust is a consequence of material plenty and coercion a consequence of material scarcity.
People with little tend towards cooperation to minimize risk and ensure survival. In contrast, materially abundant societies like ours are obscenely coercive.
This isn’t to say the causal relationship is the reverse of Ngo’s claim, just that Ngo’s claim is bullshit, which would have been trivially obvious to him if he learned anything about materially poor societies rather than trying to reverse engineer our capitalist hellscape back to some first principles.
I don't know how Richard Ngo is defining "scarcity" vs. "abundance", but I think these terms can be defined in a relative way, in terms of perceptions of whether there's "enough to go around" of what resources do exist so that all people have similar amounts of leisure, as opposed to a more hierarchical distribution of resources where the upper class gets a lot of leisure and the productive class has to spend most of their time toiling. And the idea that we might be heading for a "post-scarcity" society with different characteristic values than those of industrial/agricultural society didn't originate with the Rationalists, it was often discussed among members of the New Left in the 60s and 70s for example--this was influenced both by the postwar economic boom and by Marx's ideas about the [greater free time](https://www.jstor.org/stable/191731) workers would have after capitalism, along with his general ideas about values being strongly shaped by material conditions (in Marxist thought one also [finds the idea](https://www.marxist.com/the-origins-of-class-society.htm) that hunter-gatherer societies had greater free time because they did not need to produce a surplus to be consumed by the ruling class, and thus lived in a state of 'primitive communism' whose egalitarian values might parallel those of a technologically advanced communist future).
These sorts of ideas about post-scarcity values may have filtered into the Rationalist sphere via the California Ideology (which always had a mix of libertarian and New Left influences, as seen for example in the old *Whole Earth Review*) and through science fiction, but I think it's an interesting stream of ideas so I'd argue against wholly dismissing it just because Rationalists have glommed on to it and presented a sort of naive and capitalist-friendly version of it (their version of a 'post-scarcity society' is usually something like everyone having a decent universal basic income while tech lords still get rich off intellectual property).
Incidentally, I'd bet that Richard Ngo was influenced by [Slate Star Codex 2013 'thrive/survive' post](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/), and doing a quick keyword search, I see that in a comment Scott did endorse something like the "original affluence" idea about hunter-gatherers:
>Some of this I hope to get to later, but I’ll point out that I think most hunter-gatherer cultures developed under conditions of abundance, and the fact that they’re so traditional means we would expect even their subsistence-level modern descendants to still be somewhat adapted for conditions of abundance.
And searching his blog for other mentions of thrive/survive and hunter-gatherers, he also had [this review of the book Against the Grain](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/) which talked about the idea as well:
>Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; during the Paleolithic, the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.
Absolute top quality sneer worthy quote though “I recount how in 2019, I heard a podcast where Esther Perel says to a client about his partner who has PTSD flashbacks, “you can tell him ‘you’re safe now’” and I found myself thinking “that’s not okay. I can’t feel that I’m safe in this moment. AI could eat the world, and I’m not doing enough about it. I can’t feel safe until we’ve figured it out.”
Like Jesus Christ it’s the height of arrogance to compare your dweeby little nerd anxiety to actual ptsd
Are we not commenting that one of their major points of “evidence” being Les Mis?
edit- Holy shit in the comments someone points out that “measures of trust” as collected globally don’t map to the model presented by the OP, and the response is a single anecdote and an ink cloud about the metric used in the global study! Literally countering a empirical statistical study with a single anecdote as all good scientists do!
edit2- Holier Shit, someone lines up a perfectly good argument with the exact opposite conclusion as OP, and it’s just sitting their unaddressed.
This post will make the HBD people very excited. (iirc the HBD people solve the problem with of reported higher asian IQ compared to western IQ with mumbling about how white people have better intergroup trust genes or something (So you can still end up with ‘whites rule, colors drool’ conclusion even if the reported IQ data points to something else. My dad will always beat up your dad)).
as an anthropologist i have the absolute worst time with rationalists. when i used to teach i had to teach into classes. those kids were always the absolute worst.
anyway, point is, the myth of progress is second only to social evolutionary theory in terms of things that irk me in discussions of anthropology, and some people are so blinded by their beliefs that they will discard (or rewrite) anything to keep their beliefs.
The assumption that trust is borne out of abundance is… wow. This is some real ivory tower detached from the world bullshit. Many of the nicest, kindest people you’ll meet are dirt poor.
Smellin’ that good ol’ Pinker stink.
Ok, so like, neo-colonialism or general hoarding of capital or even wage theft?
What? Like the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents? A lucky punk with a gun is scarcity cause number #1? Holy cryptofascism, Batman! I sure hope you have some AGI repellant paper-clipped to that utility belt.
Oh yeah, ok, double down on this idea that low-level crimes are the real threat to society and not a symptom of the broader artificial scarcities in society. Joe Chill is the big bad, not Luthor.
Can someone tell this superstitious and cowardly lot of cranks that they don’t have to wrap their conservative crap in verbose wrapping paper? It’s so many extra steps.
This is so evil dude it’s groundwork for genocide
Does “peaceful cooperation in materially poor societies” necessarily go against the idea that there is some relation between scarcity and coercive/hierarchical social structures? After all there is the thesis of the “original affluent society” which says that at least a significant proportion of hunter-gatherer societies can satisfy all their material needs with relatively large amount of leisure time compared to later agricultural societies. From what I understand later work has shown this doesn’t work as a blanket assertion about all hunter-gatherer societies but a more nuanced version may be defensible, see the piece by anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman here along with his twitter thread here. I also came across this paper on education in hunter-gatherer societies which distinguishes between “immediate-return” societies that it says tend to be more egalitarian, and “delayed return” societies that are more dependent on a single resource, and which tend to have “high population densities, food storage, resource ownership and defense, hierarchical social structures, inherited status, and relatively high rates of violence and acceptance of violence as legitimate”.