posted on March 30, 2018 09:29 PM by
u/TheHiveMindSpeaketh
53
…and they’re all capitalists?
Aren’t we kind of already being ground into dust by an unfeeling
machine ceaselessly optimizing for something other than human
flourishing? Namely, profit?
u/_vec_57 pointsat 1522448755.000000
I’m not exactly sure why this is, but capital-R Rationalists seem to
have an unusually difficult time making connections or applying
analytical tools across different subjects. You’ve nailed one of the
more glaring examples, but also off the top of my head:
“Humans don’t worry nearly enough about the risk of extinction level
catastrophies, which is why we never talk about climate change or
nuclear nonproliferation”
“The libertarian ideal of letting groups try whatever they like and
expecting whatever works best to wind up winning out eventually is both
the most efficient and the most humane approach to managing collective
action, and also a private company voluntarily choosing to prioritize
diversity in its hiring practices is a travesty.”
“We’re not white supremacists because we believe that Caucasians
trail behind East Asians in a lot of important metrics, so we should
fiercely oppose China challenging the US as a global hegemon.”
If I was being uncharitable, I might suggest that the whole project
has devolved into finding increasingly elaborate justifications in
support of the social and economic heirarchies that its members happen
to find themselves at or near the top of. Y’know, if I was being
uncharitable that is.
I mean...that's true. That's not to say those aren't worth worrying about (as you say, people *are* worried about those) but they're not extinction-level events the way a large asteroid impact is.
"which is why we never talk about climate change or nuclear nonproliferation"
Back on LW climate change was considered a non issue because obviously either we would all be killed/raptured by the singularity in the next 30 years or we would be so unbelievably rich in 100 years we wouldn't need no pesky planetary biosphere. As for nukes, a popular opinion was that the US made a grave mistake by not nuking the Soviets and Europeans and falling to conquer the whole world after WWII before the Soviets got the bomb.
That last one is gold and bridges a gap I didn't realize I had. Like I knew about white supremacy leading to empire and I knew about "positive" (Barf) discrimination against Asians but I never 2+2=4'd it and made that link so thank you
Eh, wait for the current tech bubble to burst and there'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth and boots applied to necks all around.
edit: I've got nothing better to do right now, so let's expand on that:
1. In general, we've been through 9 years of bull market now, and the sentiment on the stock markets is slowly turning to "wait, this can't go on forever". Sooner or later this will turn into "where the fuck did all my money go", as it inevitably does.
2. Silicon Valley companies in general are stupidly overvalued. Tesla is ranked among the most valuable car manufacturers despite having maybe 10% their revenue. I think Teslas are pretty cool cars, but that's a ridiculous hype. Uber is apparently worth $68 billion. It's bleeding money trying to undercut the taxi companies, which by now have copied the only reason Uber is useful, the smartphone app, and their entire business could be regulated out of existence tomorrow (and it's already been, e.g. in Germany.). Twitter might possibly post a profit this year, which certainly validates its $20 billion market cap, and so on and so on. In general, so many of the overvalued Silicon Valley companies follow the pattern of "get all the users first, then figure out how to monetize them". Well, they're already well and truly monetized by Google and Facebook, so you might be fucked.
3. In addition to the general stock market bubble from 1) and the overvaluation of tech companies from 2), there's another, separate startup bubble going on. There's so much venture capital floating around with no sensible place to go. Theranos got three quarters of a billion in investment and they were pretty much a scam. Fucking Juicero got $120 million for their stupid fucking fruit press. That's not a sustainable environment, and it's balancing on the edge right now.
1+2+3 means that sooner rather than later, a lot of rationalists will end up on the wrong side of their Randian power fantasies and oh, the sneer will be glorious.
Totally agreed with this analysis. Uber's value already came down a bit in the recent Softbank deal I think. The craziest Theranos thing is that they got like 100 million dollars in debt financing late last year, well *after* they were revealed to be a scam. Closing the barn door after the horse is gone? Trying to put toothpaste back in the tube? Which english idiom works best here.
There was a really funny post on r/ssc recently about how everyone naysaying Tesla was just jealous, I'll try to find it. Yeah I'm sure all the Wall Street dudes shorting the stock are just envious and wish they could lose 2 billion dollars falling far behind manufacturing schedules.
edit: ["Uber and Tesla are successful and revolutionary tech companies"](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/85l35i/selfdriving_uber_car_hits_kills_pedestrian_in/dvy7w1r/?context=3)
Actually the only part I'm not sure I agree with is how much wailing and gnashing will be going on even if the bursting bubble hits rationalist fanboys hard. Someone here posted an old article Yud wrote during the GFC and it was kissing ass about how rich people are our superiors and really do deserve their status. A lot of these people are bootlickers through and through.
> an old article Yud wrote during the GFC and it was kissing ass about how rich people are our superiors and really do deserve their status.
I looked that one up and Jesus fucking Christ how this man manages to simultaneously bootlick and self-aggrandize is a sight to behold.
Well, Silicon Valley wasn't hit that hard in the 2008 crisis, it just sort of followed the general downturn, shit wasn't as badly overvalued back then and the fundamentals didn't explode into their faces. I can't recall a big SV name going bankrupt back then, for instance.
This one will be a lot more like the dot-com crash, and it's long overdue.
> Someone here posted an old article Yud wrote during the GFC and it was kissing ass about how rich people are our superiors and really do deserve their status. A lot of these people are bootlickers through and through.
[Sparkly Elites](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites) is so totally peak LessWrong.
Surprisingly, someone had the presence of mind to leave this one out of the book version of the Sequences.
Investors will also knowingly invest in bubbles if their risk model says there's a good chance of getting out on the right side of them.
And you can recognize manias and bad valuations (I'll agree it's extremely difficult to get the timing right, which is why you're not seeing any of that in my post), and much investment is driven by stupid emotions like everything else.
Otherwise you need to explain the Theranos and Juicero nonsense to me.
Honestly the trick to investing is not going nuts with greed, from what I can tell as a complete amateur. Invest on an upswing if you can, pick a pre-determined bail point, and sell it once you've hit a return you can live with.
Not flashy, but takes a lot of human error out of it, I think.
There's no good way to short bitcoin. Any exchange that would let you, will also go bust when the bottom drops out of bitcoin. That's not the case for real stocks traded on regulated public exchanges.
And it's not my dumb statement: You're the one claiming all these silicon valley companies are *obviously* overvalued. Maybe you're right, and you really are smarter than all the VCs and Wall Street investors. But talk is cheap, and if you're not confident enough to put any amount of money where your mouth is, it's hard to take you that seriously.
no, that's a terrible epistemic standard, and presumes I'm vastly more profligate with my money than almost any sensible person.
I submit that you are picking a spurious standard of evidence, which is "you must be financially secure enough to argue with me." I *really shouldn't* need to elaborate on why this is the argument of a shithead rather than someone claiming to win through arguments.
You're being a dumb rationalist trope. Stop being the dumb rationalist trope.
You can't win. If you are shorting SV companies people will say "you're just so heavily *invested* in the idea of failure that you gotta spread negativity everywhere! you're trying to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy". If you aren't putting these bets up it's "oh why don't you put your money where your mouth is huh smart guy?"
It's not a terrible epistemic standard to consider a person's behavior in addition to their words. If the head of the Flint Water Board repeatedly reassured you that the tap water was safe to drink, but you noticed he and and his family only drank bottled water, wouldn't that affect your impression of his credibility?
> You're being a dumb rationalist trope. Stop being the dumb rationalist trope.
Oops, I forgot that rationalist nerds like SV, so by the transitive property of /r/sneerclub, we're obligated to hate it.
But that's the infuriating thing about markets, that you can have a bunch of highly intelligent, highly educated people making perfectly reasonable decisions and still end up with a crash. I mean, this is not a new or revolutionary thought in any way, this exact shit happened 17 years ago. Investors haven't become smarter or dumber since then.
For the purposes of this point it doesn't matter what method they use. The emergent outcome of lots of short-term individual incentives can be a collectively suboptimal one. That's not a remarkable idea.
I have no strong opinion on the actual claim but I don't see why it is ridiculous. It seems no more wild than any other prediction about stuff they can't control that people make. (Maybe he should have given probabilities?) Re: 2), in any case, from my personal experience with City people in London, I don't think investors have any special powers other mortals don't. In my experience they are rather smart people who pay attention to financial details and market trends and - in the case of the traders I've known - are good at writing finance algorithms. But I don't think it's a priori the case that investors know more than anyone else. If investors were perfectly rational in the economic sense, capital would be distributed precisely maximally efficiently, no endogenous shocks would happen, and no arbitrage would be possible, which is manifestly not the case.
Pretty sure Tesla is currently the most shorted stock in the US. A lot of investors and automotive industry types have been pointing out the problems for years. So they're not all being stupid in unison. It's still risky to short because who knows how long the Musk cult will run on fumes.
"well see it's not exactly the same, therefore it has no relevance to the future god-king fantasy uber-computer that is so obviously more likely and relevant."
Frankly, a lot of rationalists are detached from reality and probably
get most of their ideas of how capitalism works from fiction which is
validated by the cultural bubble they inhabit. They see guys like Elon
Musk as a Tony Stark, a nice guy capitalist overlord whos supposed
benevolence means that the standard problems with corporations need not
apply.
Because they kind of have this attitude that suffering is caused by
either stupidity or malice, instead of the cold hard logic corporations
work under.
>Because they kind of have this attitude that suffering is caused by either stupidity or malice, instead of the cold hard logic corporations work under.
I think you mean [failing to optimize political algorithms.](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/)
> Because they kind of have this attitude that suffering is caused by either stupidity or malice, instead of the cold hard logic corporations work under.
Better yet, the "Meditations on Moloch" post on SSC a few years back spots a bunch of problems just caused by incentives rather than ill intent. Alexander still doesn't get quite as far as actually rejecting capitalism, though. It's kinda amusing to look at the logical contortions necessary to absolve capitalism, to be honest.
that’s incidentally also the reason the best thing they can come up
with as a solution in the face of the definitely 100% real and not at
all made-up risk of a rogue general intelligence is writing fanfiction
and policy papers about how to align its preferences to ours, rather
than, say, doing anything
Yeah that's an argument against replacing the 'profit for wealthy people' maximizer with a 'interests of powerful voting groups' maximizer, but he doesn't have an argument against 'diffusal of power so that no maximizer controls my life'
Yeah, that fucking sucks. But hey, capitalism leaves me alive, which
is nice. Keeping a gratitude journal felt weird at first - why thank the
world for not being maximally terrible - but, I gotta say, I’m alive,
and that’s good. Nothing’s killed me. Capitalism hasn’t ripped my body
to shreds - literally - and turned it into something I don’t value at
all - again, literally. But yeah, you’re right, markets don’t have my
goals in mind, and they don’t really care about my wellbeing.
Maybe if there were some way to get around capitalism, then. Some way
to coordinate a whole economy? Of course, a human-level intelligence, or
even an organisation, would have trouble doing this. They’ve tried.
They’ve tried, with passion in their souls and the best of plans, and it
should have worked, and it didn’t, and a lot of people died. Don’t ask
me how it failed, because I don’t know. I just read it did in a history
book.
You’d need some kind of super-intelligent thing to achieve this task.
And, well, wouldn’t it just fucking suck if that
wanted us dead?
That's all well and good, and I too look forward to the day when our robot overlords implement what one of my co-workers refers to as Fully Automated Space Communism. In the meantime, though, I'd like to set the bar a bit higher than "didn't kill me".
See, we actually already have this big toolkit full of gizmos designed to keep most of the efficient allocation goodness by forcing the profitable thing to also be the humane thing. Things like Pigovian taxes, regulatory frameworks, audits, fines. Basically the whole big government nanny state agenda is an attempt to solve the alignment issues in raw capitalism.
> See, we actually already have this big toolkit full of gizmos designed to keep most of the efficient allocation goodness by forcing the profitable thing to also be the humane thing. Things like Pigovian taxes, regulatory frameworks, audits, fines. Basically the whole big government nanny state agenda is an attempt to solve the alignment issues in raw capitalism.
I think most LessWrongers support those things. There are more liberals and social democrats than libertarians in the LW community.
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I’m not exactly sure why this is, but capital-R Rationalists seem to have an unusually difficult time making connections or applying analytical tools across different subjects. You’ve nailed one of the more glaring examples, but also off the top of my head:
If I was being uncharitable, I might suggest that the whole project has devolved into finding increasingly elaborate justifications in support of the social and economic heirarchies that its members happen to find themselves at or near the top of. Y’know, if I was being uncharitable that is.
[deleted]
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/01/ai-has-already-taken-over-its-called-the-corporation/
Frankly, a lot of rationalists are detached from reality and probably get most of their ideas of how capitalism works from fiction which is validated by the cultural bubble they inhabit. They see guys like Elon Musk as a Tony Stark, a nice guy capitalist overlord whos supposed benevolence means that the standard problems with corporations need not apply.
Because they kind of have this attitude that suffering is caused by either stupidity or malice, instead of the cold hard logic corporations work under.
that’s incidentally also the reason the best thing they can come up with as a solution in the face of the definitely 100% real and not at all made-up risk of a rogue general intelligence is writing fanfiction and policy papers about how to align its preferences to ours, rather than, say, doing anything
[deleted]
Yeah, that fucking sucks. But hey, capitalism leaves me alive, which is nice. Keeping a gratitude journal felt weird at first - why thank the world for not being maximally terrible - but, I gotta say, I’m alive, and that’s good. Nothing’s killed me. Capitalism hasn’t ripped my body to shreds - literally - and turned it into something I don’t value at all - again, literally. But yeah, you’re right, markets don’t have my goals in mind, and they don’t really care about my wellbeing.
Maybe if there were some way to get around capitalism, then. Some way to coordinate a whole economy? Of course, a human-level intelligence, or even an organisation, would have trouble doing this. They’ve tried. They’ve tried, with passion in their souls and the best of plans, and it should have worked, and it didn’t, and a lot of people died. Don’t ask me how it failed, because I don’t know. I just read it did in a history book.
You’d need some kind of super-intelligent thing to achieve this task. And, well, wouldn’t it just fucking suck if that wanted us dead?