This article got me thinking, has anyone tried to put forward the
“EA” case that the EA movement itself is a potential X-risk?
For example, if climate change long tail effects actually were big
enough to end civilisation, a sufficiently powerful long-termist EA
movement could divert enough funds from climate change to inadvertently
cause the apocalypse.
Or say super-AI is possible, but prohibitively expensive, so the only
reason it gets built and kills everyone is that Yudkowsky persuades
enough billionaires that he’s solved friendly AI.
Or perhaps a future EA president does a calculation that nuclear
brinksmanship will raise the odds of future super-utopia by 0.0001%, and
inadvertently starts a nuclear war that kills everyone
> Or say super-AI is possible, but prohibitively expensive, so the only reason it gets built and kills everyone is that Yudkowsky persuades enough billionaires that he's solved friendly AI.
Givewell made this exact criticism back in 2012. Actually, this was only one of several criticisms. Among their other criticisms were that that the whole singularity giving a vast payoff at low odds was a form of pascal’s mugging and that MIRI (then the SI) had basic organizational problems that left them incapable.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6SGqkCgHuNr7d4yJm/thoughts-on-the-singularity-institute-si
> I have been pointed to Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil as examples of impressive SI supporters
Two impressively different flavors of "nope" right there.
To be fair to the EAers, with *some* there’s a lot of self-crit about the outsize presence of X-risk stuff. Unfortunately with a lot of others there’s outright denial (I had one EAer deny to my face that X-risk exists in EA, which was just a lie because he admitted an interest in it on another occasion), or blind apologetics of the “I’m not a fan of Yudkowsky but he’s got a few interesting ideas” kind. So they’re fully aware that there’s a problem, but by and large in my experience they don’t want to admit it.
What's curious to me is how the wingnut faction expressly argue against the methodology of EA, so that to the extent that they take over EA this amounts to EA abandoning the principles that made it EA, yet the wingnuts continue to call what they're doing EA even while expressly arguing that we shouldn't follow EA principles. It's like when Dave Rubin said no one should be allowed to be critical of his book, because criticisms of it violate his free speech -- the infiltration, tacit or self-conscious, of a concept or institution to turn it into its opposite.
Viz., a fundamental point of EA was that we're supposed to use broadly utilitarian assessments of the effectiveness of charities in order to select which charities to donate our money to, i.e. so that that money gets effectively used for charitable purposes. But these assessments of charity effectiveness inevitably strongly recommend *against* giving to institutions the wingnuts like. When, say, GiveWell ignores MIRI until pressured into investigating it, and then gives a scathing report strongly recommending against its effectiveness as a charity, what we'd expect -- naives that we are -- is that the EA people would take this as a clear sign they shouldn't donate to MIRI. Instead, they -- or at least a rather considerable proportion of them -- took it as a clear sign that this whole "assessing the effectiveness of charities" thing was misguided. In the internal survey, MIRI was the fourth most common recipient of EA donations and CFAR was the sixth. This really should be scandalous to anyone who actually cared about the principles originally laid out by EA.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity
It’s a trite thing to quote, but I think it applies
We’ve been saying for years about how Yud and environs nakedly sell their product only to boost their personal income without having anything else to say for it. It helps that to the typical Silicon Valley mogul, pie-in-the-sky moonshots are much more exciting than handing out aid to black children in South Africa with AIDS inherited from their mothers: it also helps that a not-insignificant number of the worst people in the EA orbit actively don’t give a shit about black people with AIDS. The moonshot thing is related to X-risks because look: everyone knows a lot of these kids read a lot of sci-fi, whether it turned them into enthusiastic advocates for a better world on Mars through terraforming or turned them into apocalypse fanatics who wanted to make a better world on Mars through terraforming.
That’s the only way I see the draw to MIRI and associates: sheer privilege and a lack of interest in real world problems.
It’s just a tarted up version of climate denial that fits into the existing Silicon Valley nerd ideology. EA is essentially an affirmation for those who have some tinge of awareness that they’re very shitty people and it gives them an out for their harmful behaviours.
The post-earth types are also incredibly delusional individuals who fear death and cannot fathom the that universe refuses to conform to their wacko ideology. If such civilisations were possible the universe would be a dump and you would have clear signs of occupation (waste heat, detritus, etc). Look at the footprint we’ve created over 150 years and then imagine what an expansionist space faring civ would do over 1-250M years or more. The promise is nonsense.
> Look at the footprint we’ve created over 150 years and then imagine what an expansionist space faring civ would do over 1-250M years or more.
I have no fucking idea, and neither do you. Like, yeah, maybe they'd do all that stuff extropians are on about with Dyson Swarms and stellar engineering we could see from hundreds of light years away. Or maybe they'd do something completely different based on physics we don't understand yet. 99% of speculation about alien civilizations is the equivalent of some ancient Greek philosopher theorizing about how you could never have a city of ten million people because it'd be chest-deep in shit all the time because he's never heard of indoor plumbing.
Even putting aside the possibility of physics we don't understand yet, the Fermi Paradox argument requires that either all aliens end up expansionist like we have been in our history, or that there be enough alien civilizations in the galaxy that you're guaranteed at least one ends up expansionist. If the Drake Equation parameters are such that you end up with, like, 5 intelligent civilizations in the galaxy instead, it's easy to see how simple luck could remove the paradox (like, one species are ocean-dwellers who were never able to develop our kind of technology, one sticks to a small number of systems for cultural reasons, one went extinct a billion years ago, one are just uploads inside computers buried in nondescript asteroids, and one are expansionist but constant infighting keeps them from expanding too far).
Like the mind-uploading and super-intelligent AI, this stuff is mostly better as the science fiction it started as, before would-be thought leaders tried to make it their jobs.
>If such civilisations were possible the universe would be a dump
I'm guessing they think we're the first space-faring civilization in the observable universe.
Or that it's extremely unlikely for a civilization to make it off-planet in any significant way before it runs out of resources and/or is destroyed by itself or by natural causes.
Is it evidence towards that, or just evidence that there hasn't been any other waves of civilizations?
I've always felt that the best explanation for why we don't see alien civilizations is that it's simply impossible to leave one's solar system. There could be lots of alien civilizations, but they'd have to be pretty close to detect via radio signals.
How would it be impossible to leave a solar system? Voyager is currently on its way out. Seems more likely it simply wouldn't be *desirable* to leave your solar system.
Not impossible to send a hunk of metal out there, but impossible to send a piece of complicated machinery, like a self-replicating machine or generation ship, out there and have it *work* however many hundreds of years later.
Most human technology tends to fail within a few decades, even if it remains in one piece. It's entirely possible that this is simply a given for any large complicated piece of technology capable of jump-starting extrasolar colonization, and the problem can't be engineered away.
Why would that be though? It's just a question of maintenance, use, and shielding. Most technology is not designed to live longer than a few decades due to cost, but if it's turned off and not in use wear and tear practically drops to zero.
As for self replicating machines, trees have no trouble living thousands of years and seeds can last since the ice ages if properly stored. All you need is sufficient shielding (ie meters of rock) and you've got the perfect environment for long term stasis.
Trees are actively metabolizing for that entire period. The seeds will assuredly die if they reach the ambient temperature of space, so you have to have a working heater for the entire travel time. Parts break down.
As far as potential sources of breakdown: Random cosmic rays, metal whiskers, outgassing, cracking of rubber sealant, corrosion, micrometeorite impacts, whatever it is that makes batteries stop working over time... It's a whole bunch of little things, and you have to basically get rid of all of them in order to have complicated tech work when it tends up in another star system. That's a tall order, and people tend to brush over it (as you did).
I've seen estimates of bacteria surviving for anywhere from hundreds of thousands of years to hundreds of millions. The hundreds of millions estimates are controversial; they're for dormant sporulated bacteria, and it may be that DNA damage acquired over that time period would make survival impossible. If the estimates are accurate, however, I believe a dormant sporulated bacteria would not care about being frozen to any temperature; they're desiccated.
Another paper I looked at suggested that some bacteria survived for 600,000 years in an anaerobic environment in a chunk of frozen permafrost, metabolizing just enough to repair their DNA. These bacteria might need a supply of frozen chemicals to feed on, and a heater to keep them above a certain temperature, but the heater could take the form of some slow-decaying isotopes; the starship could be a solid ball of rock and ice, not a machine like a laptop. The shorter timespan would still be within the travel time to Alpha Centauri of something like Voyager.
Regardless, I've seen a SETI estimate that the Arecibo radio telescope could communicate with another Arecibo telescope to a distance of 10,000 ly, so I don't think an inability to send machines to other stars necessarily answers the Fermi Paradox. I don't think we can draw even tentative conclusions about any of this stuff.
People tend to "brush over it" because detailing the results of a 10 billion dollar research program involving thousands of highly paid engineers performing greenfield research into a completely novel scenario is not possible. You're never going to get an answer that satisfies you for why it's possible until someone actually does it. There's no magic space curse that causes our technology to rot to dust outside of our solar system, so people just *don't worry about it* because they're literally not being paid to do the painstaking detail work you're asking for. People have provided mitigation strategies for the stuff you've brought up, which starts with shielding and goes into material selection, power selection, and so on.
Of course, it doesn't even *matter* because you *don't* actually need to survive even one light year to hop to the next star system. [Wandering stars](https://astronomy.com/news/2020/05/wandering-stars-brush-past-our-solar-system-surprisingly-often) pass by every 50k years, and that means that material between stars gets shared pretty regularly. All a vacuum adapted organism needs would be to fly out to the oort cloud whenever the next stellar taxi flies by and they've got a new biome to play in.
> People tend to "brush over it" because detailing the results of a 10 billion dollar research program involving thousands of highly paid engineers performing greenfield research into a completely novel scenario is not possible. You're never going to get an answer that satisfies you for why it's possible until someone actually does it.
And yet you just confidently declare it's possible, despite there being absolutely zero evidence except "trust me guys it'll totally work."
> People have provided mitigation strategies for the stuff you've brought up, which starts with shielding and goes into material selection, power selection, and so on.
Cite them.
> Of course, it doesn't even matter because you don't actually need to survive even one light year to hop to the next star system. Wandering stars pass by every 50k years, and that means that material between stars gets shared pretty regularly. All a vacuum adapted organism needs would be to fly out to the oort cloud whenever the next stellar taxi flies by and they've got a new biome to play in.
How many of these stars have planets?
> And yet you just confidently declare it's possible, despite there being absolutely zero evidence except "trust me guys it'll totally work."
And you're going "trust me it's impossible no i'm not gonna cite any research". Pot, kettle.
> Cite them.
Pay me to do your research.
> How many of these stars have planets?
You haven't exactly been keeping up with space science have you? Most stars have exoplanets, they're a fundamental side effect of accreting a star. And they'll definitely have icy bodies ubless something really weird happened. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/what-is-an-exoplanet/overview/
May I suggest yelling at breakthrough starshot, a research program aimed at visitING proxima centauri?
> And you're going "trust me it's impossible no i'm not gonna cite any research". Pot, kettle.
I'm not saying that I know it's impossible, I'm saying that it being impossible is a valid solution to the Fermi paradox. None of the other ones are particularly convincing, if you believe that interstellar colonization is actually easy.
> Pay me to do your research.
You're the one so confidently declaring it's possible. It's *your* research.
> You haven't exactly been keeping up with space science have you?
As boring as space is, I am in fact aware of what exoplanets are. Any single star that *doesn't* have an exoplanet though is a one in fifty thousand year chance you don't get to take advantage of, though.
Icy bodies are, of course, mostly ice with some dust and organic compounds, so are not particularly useful for making new spacecraft or doing repairs.
> None of the other ones are particularly convincing, if you believe that interstellar colonization is actually easy.
Personally "rare earth" seems best. Gotta have just the right mix, from massive planets shielding us, to the atmosphere we have, to the low spin rate of our star, to our presence outside of the core and it's extreme space events, to the moon, and so on. All of these individually are likely to happen on any given planet, but the sheer number of them going right for us and maintaining life in the sheer abundance it has for the time it has seems an acceptable resolution. That and society is probably hard.
> You're the one so confidently declaring it's possible. It's your research.
Impossibilities are much stronger claims than "it's probably possible." You're the one claiming that there is *no technology possible* that can move around the galaxy. You're the one claiming that no matter what route we go down, from building spaceships to creating biosynthetic vacuum life to literally just throwing planets between stars to *just hopping between systems when they pass each other* that it just can't happen. *You're* the one making the strong statement here that's counter to pretty much everyone elses opinion on it, *you* have to support it.
> Icy bodies are, of course, mostly ice with some dust and organic compounds, so are not particularly useful for making new spacecraft or doing repairs.
You *really* haven't been thinking outside the box, huh. Icy bodies seem pretty perfect for biosynthetic spacecraft, if you go that route. But there *will* be rock there, because rock is common. And beyond that you can just harvest directly from stars. Finally, it doesn't matter if one of the systems you run into isn't perfect because every system is gonna start meeting *other* systems and you're gonna spread exponentially (actually a sigmoid function but that looks exponential for a while).
> Personally "rare earth" seems best. Gotta have just the right mix, from massive planets shielding us, to the atmosphere we have, to the low spin rate of our star, to our presence outside of the core and it's extreme space events, to the moon, and so on. All of these individually are likely to happen on any given planet, but the sheer number of them going right for us and maintaining life in the sheer abundance it has for the time it has seems an acceptable resolution. That and society is probably hard.
The assumptions that all of these are necessary are remarkably chauvinistic. The Moon, for instance, [probably isn't necessary](https://www.npr.org/2011/11/18/142512088/is-a-moon-necessary-for-a-planet-to-support-life) for life to endure.
> Impossibilities are much stronger claims than "it's probably possible." You're the one claiming that there is no technology possible that can move around the galaxy. You're the one claiming that no matter what route we go down, from building spaceships to creating biosynthetic vacuum life to literally just throwing planets between stars to just hopping between systems when they pass each other that it just can't happen. You're the one making the strong statement here that's counter to pretty much everyone elses opinion on it, you have to support it.
Here's the thing: I don't accept the Rare Earth hypothesis (there's no proof of that one, either), and I think explanations like the Great Filter are bunkum (ditto). Fermi's Paradox has to be solved someway. "Interstellar colonization is practically impossible" is a perfectly legitimate solution.
> You really haven't been thinking outside the box, huh. Icy bodies seem pretty perfect for biosynthetic spacecraft, if you go that route.
Biosynthetic spacecraft are a fun science fiction concept that I am well aware of. There is basically no reason they should be presumed to be anything but a fun science fiction concept.
> The assumptions that all of these are necessary are remarkably chauvinistic. The Moon, for instance, probably isn't necessary for life to endure.
My position is that there's a range of possible habitability. How would evolution proceed on an earth that could support half the biomass it can today? A quarter? An eighth? At what point is the amount of energy required for a min just not become available? At what point are minds too scattered and low population to allow for the formation of a society? What would happen if mass extinctions are twice as common? There's a lot of questions like that. It's less that earth needs *all* of those to still be life bearing, but having *all* of them puts it far ahead of the pact.
> Here's the thing: I don't accept the Rare Earth hypothesis (there's no proof of that one, either), and I think explanations like the Great Filter are bunkum (ditto). Fermi's Paradox has to be solved someway. "Interstellar colonization is practically impossible" is a perfectly legitimate solution.
Except for the whole "zero evidence" part you take umbrage with for the other theories.
> Biosynthetic spacecraft are a fun science fiction concept that I am well aware of. There is basically no reason they should be presumed to be anything but a fun science fiction concept.
Says the guy arguing about aliens. What do you view the future of humanity like? Are we just going to scramble about on this dirt ball forever with 21st century materials and technology? What kind of concepts do you even think are possible?
> Are we just going to scramble about on this dirt ball forever with 21st century materials and technology
I mean, that's pretty good, far better than the likely scenario of scrambling about this dirt ball forever with the increasingly decrepit remnants of 21st century materials and technology as we run out of resources and the supply chains that make high tech possible get disrupted.
> Says the guy arguing about aliens. What do you view the future of humanity like? Are we just going to scramble about on this dirt ball forever with 21st century materials and technology? What kind of concepts do you even think are possible?
The concepts I think are possible are the concepts where we can very clearly outline how we expect them to work. No handwaving to fill in the gaps. I am not the sort of person who puts a lot of faith in the ability of technology to bridge those gaps. I have seen too many failed attempts.
So yeah. It's going to assumed to be 21st materials and technology until discovered to be otherwise.
Talk about self-replicating machines or biosynthetic spacecraft sounds science-fictional, but we are trying to guess the technologies that would be available to civilizations up to millions of years old. It's hard to dismiss them as purely science fiction concepts when a.) they don't break any obvious laws of physics, b.) we're already studying genetic engineering and robotics, and reasonably expect them to have enormous effects over timescales of centuries, and c.) we already have evidence of [isolated organisms](https://www.pnas.org/content/104/36/14401) surviving for up to hundreds of thousands of years, and [data storage technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage) that could last for similar timescales.
If super-long travel times are too much of a problem, then something like an [Orion drive spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)) could get colonists or just machinery between the stars on a timescale of decades or centuries. Crazy as it sounds, that vehicle is apparently plausible from a physics perspective.
And of course, a solution to the Fermi Paradox has to explain not just the lack of colonists or probes, but also the lack of transmissions, which would be vastly less technically demanding to make.
Scientists have recently fleshed out the Drake Equation up to the "number of planets" parameter, but everything else (likelihood of life, likelihood of intelligent life, likelihood of intelligent technological life, etc.) remains utterly unknown. Those free parameters seem to me like the better candidate for a Fermi Paradox explanation than assuming there is no possible machine that could go between the stars, although you're right that we can't currently disprove the possibility.
> Talk about self-replicating machines or biosynthetic spacecraft sounds science-fictional, but we are trying to guess the technologies that would be available to civilizations up to millions of years old. It's hard to dismiss them as purely science fiction concepts when a.) they don't break any obvious laws of physics, b.) we're already studying genetic engineering and robotics, and reasonably expect them to have enormous effects over timescales of centuries, and c.) we already have evidence of isolated organisms surviving for up to hundreds of thousands of years, and data storage technologies that could last for similar timescales.
The issue is that I think that we've reached a technological plateau. I recognize most people do not think this and think that technology will continue to ramp upwards. Years of repeated disappointment following announcements of triumphant technological progress, and repeatedly finding that technologies we thought were possible have apparently insurmountable practical challenges have led me to the conclusion I have now, though, so it is not baseless. Ultimately, we will see... though we'll be dead by the time it happens.
> If super-long travel times are too much of a problem, then something like an Orion drive spacecraft) could get colonists or just machinery between the stars on a timescale of decades or centuries. Crazy as it sounds, that vehicle is apparently plausible from a physics perspective.
The Orion drive spacecraft is one I'm familiar with, but my issue is that while it could take machinery (I'm skeptical about colonists) to someplace like Alpha Centauri, it does not necessarily follow that it could get to Alpha Centauri, set up factories and refueling stations, and make an expedition to go farther out into the galaxy.
> And of course, a solution to the Fermi Paradox has to explain not just the lack of colonists or probes, but also the lack of transmissions, which would be vastly less technically demanding to make.
Transmissions capable of being received at long distances tend to be made very briefly, and at a very limited section of the sky. So it's not terribly surprising to me that we've missed them so far, even if civilizations sending transmissions are relatively common. We've only been listening for a few decades, and we've only made a few long range transmissions over all that time.
I don't think we've reached a technological plateau, although admittedly I can't see the future. I'm not sure we'll get entire new disciplines of science popping up, the way electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution, genetics, etc. all popped up in the last few centuries, but I think there's lots of scope remaining for transformative applications of those previous discoveries. When I'm optimistic, I think it will happen fast, the way computers have improved fast. When I'm pessimistic, I think it will be drawn out trial and error. But if that process can continue for tens or hundreds of thousand of years, even slow linear improvements can add up to huge change. So I suppose it substantially depends on whether you think a technological civilization at our current level can continue plugging away for that timespan, building up incremental improvements, or whether it must be doomed to fall (but that could be considered a Great Filter argument).
Out of curiosity, I tried to get rough numbers for interstellar travel/communication. The density of stars in our neighborhood is about 0.004 per cubic lightyear. An Orion drive could go about 10% of lightspeed. So if you don't have replicators, and your probe could stay functional for 100 years (uncontroversial), you could send a probe to \~17 star systems. If your probe could last 1000 years, you could send it to \~16,700 star systems. With a 2000 year lifespan, \~134,000 star systems are accessible. With a 10,000 ly communication range for paired Arecibo-style telescopes, you could communicate with \~1,257,000,000 star systems. Presumably for probes or radio observation/transmission, you would use something like the James Webb telescope (or a larger, more advanced version) to pick good candidate systems based on atmospheric spectra or something. Obviously for the longer probe travel times, your society has to be pretty farsighted. Maintaining an Arecibo style facility could be within the means of private organizations/religions.
> All a vacuum adapted organism needs would be to fly out to the oort cloud whenever the next stellar taxi flies by and they've got a new biome to play in.
Sounds great for the tardigrades, but nobody else.
Tardigrades die if you expose them to space. They just die slightly slower than most other multicellular lifeforms, which means that after ten days forty percent of them die and a bunch die afterwards.
> but if it's turned off and not in use wear and tear practically drops to zero
Leave a car in a barn for 30 years. The rubber and plastics will deteriorate, the fuel will go bad, etc, etc.
Most human technology tends to outlive their design lives, Voyager 2's still ticking 43 years after launch, more notably that's 40 years longer that past the end of its primary mission. You can engineer things to last if yo put the effort in.
Really, if you want to make an anti-interstellar colonisation take, you don't need top invent these constraints, the rocket equation is harsh enough as it is.
The question is, if you can build self replicating machines, if that is possible, we could possibly see von nueman machines, if we arent the first wave, life is common, etc etc etc.
For sure. I'm excited about [The Galileo Project](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3NqRak2tjc) for just that reason; a seemingly-legit scientific inquiry into whether Von Neuman Machines are present in (or visit) our solar system.
One of their ultimate goals is to intercept interstellar objects like Oumuamua to take photos and samples. We can't know that there *aren't* VNMs without sincerely looking for them, after all.
People have sneered at Rationalism/ssc and called it ‘an empathy
removal training camp’, and this whole longtermism where you can easily
justify killing millions of people is one of them.
‘I’m sorry it is for the long term good of the species’, the
Rationalist murmurs, as he presses the button which activates the
machine-guns on the climate refugee assistance patrol iRobot.
In a very real way it's not even particularly internally consistent logic; for people claiming to be concerned about existential risks they have laughably limited views of what represents an existential risk scenario. For as much as they've essentially exported sci-fi ideas they've not actually seemed to have read very broadly into the available trove of sci-fi out there. Even taking their assumptions that climate change is not *itself* an existential risk for the human species as true that does not mean it could not lead to one. It doesn't even take runaway reactions with regards to warming and CO2.
Catastrophic die-offs in the 'global south' and such are naturally going to be very disruptive towards the global trade network which the 'global north' relies on for much of its wealth; lots of materials and intermediary goods are produced in not rich countries. Losing access to all that is going to drastically reduce the resources available for pie-in-the-sky projects like preventing asteroid impacts or developing so-called 'superintelligence' (ignoring for the moment the emptiness of the term). It also has high chances of exploding out into hot conflicts which would further drain resources. That's not to mention the possibility of similar and worse pandemics like Covid-19.
And that's just in the short term.
Longtermists, as the author of the piece calls them, seem to assume that the effects of climate change will be a sort of discrete event and that after it 'passes' the field will be clear for human life to surge back into dominance. But there's no good reason to assume so. Once we've experienced one winnowing event it is entirely possible to experience another in rapid order. Essentially Climate Change could set off a sort of death spiral for our species in which all hopes of those uncounted numbers of future potential humans/lives disappear into nothing.
Someone who were truthfully interested in the best possible chance of managing existential risks should actually be *more* concerned with Climate Change; because the time you're most likely to see the most consistent investment in such effort is when other concerns are lessened. Governments and people that are concerned with feeding themselves and securing water and energy and all other sorts of baser needs are unlikely to care much about the possibility of an asteroid in 100 years of the hypothetical possibility of some magic god-AI appearing out of nowhere. More over the more people with access to resources and education to consider the problem the more likely you are to find a solution; leaving all those millions and billions of people to suffer the worst consequences of Climate Change is not only a moral failing of near psychopathy, but also an economic and utilitarian failing of the rankest idiocy.
TL;DR: 'Longtermists' lack the imagination to actually address their supposed aims.
Yeah, I agree, I have mentioned before that I worry about humanity being stuck in a subistence farming forever scenario. Some resources when they run out, are gone.
I think there are various levels of contrarianism and religious belief in the friendly AI singularity will fix things forever, which kinda suck.
Btw, there are so many weird climate change known unknown risks, it is just weird they don't consider it a problem. Hell, increased co2 might change the nutritional values of our foods, we might end up starving ourselves of vital micronutrients while you get enough kcal in, causing problems for not just for humans, but also for animals, who can't learn to just get some vitamin pills. ('climate change is no problem' people love to go 'but the plants will grow faster!'), so many things might change, and none for the better. And our sense of 'civilization is working out fine' is pretty fragile, just look what a few months at home have done to people. During ww2 for example, one of the most vital things for the brits was to ensure there were enough variants and supply of tea, because that is what kept up the 'we are not losing yet' spirit of the brits. (this stuff is weird). Now imagine a world without bananas, or coffee (this is really horrible, I recently accidentally went a few days without coffee without noticing, I felt bad, so much more people are prob caffeine addicted, and coffee plants might be at risk for climate change (as are a lot of other staple crops, bananas might die out again due to fungal infections however)).
E: I also don't really like talking about this stuff, because I'm not really hopeful, and atm I think there is a higher risk of convincing people to give up on environmentalism and go full doomer, and no chance of convincing people who don't believe in climate change of the need to take drastic action (And while currently people are not a fan of going 'people should change their personal behavior', I personally think we should do both, go after the polluting companies, and change personal behavior, just eating less big animals would help a ton for example (data varies [here is a random google result](https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/) but big herd animals are the worst co2 wise)).
Oh I see what you mean us - reverting to some pre-technological subsistence existence. I was asking because one “ideal” future humanity I think of sometimes is a world of is a combination of highly sustainable subsistence/technologically advanced humanity that lives in techno farm cities and has bought into a “half-earth” type idea for replenishing wilderness. Not trying to argue about means and hurdles, just a world I’d personally like to live in.
I mean, at this point I really don't understand how they find the balls to cry foul when they are called nazi. They believe in eugenetics, in a "natural" hierarchy determined by factors they deem to be innate (IQ or g or whatever is their fetish now), they are very into skull measurment, and they are explicitely willing to let billion of people die (that in their allegedly utilitarian perspective is the same as killing them) because they believe history will vindicate them.
Like, the fact that they, so down in the pipeline, are still sincerely convinced not to be nazi is the ultimate proof of how much their "rationality" is feel-good rationalization. Any even remotely rational person would have recognized himself as a nazi way earlier in this walk of insanity. Hell, I have met people who proudly self-declare as fascists who would find some of the most extreme consequences of rationalism icky. Yet they not only deny all accusations, they appear to be *sincerely* disgusted by that, with endless post on how people calling them nazi is detroying thier mental health and all that boo-hoo stuff.
> I mean, at this point I really don't understand how they find the balls to cry foul when they are called nazi.
Well because logically the NSDAP was disbanded after they lost the war. So they cant be nazis. Checkmate sneerclubber!
And yes, it all has very much the 'banality of evil' risk.
If you take most values axiomatically and extrapolate them to the end point, "insanity" is the likely result. One can even argue that if you don't get "insanity" you are not trying hard enough since conventional values are not arrived from such processes and there is no reason to expect convergence when development processes are so different.
The paperclip maximizer is not a property of silicon, but that of thought.
I’m surprised the article didn’t mention The Long Now Foundation,
which also thinks about the long-term, but in a much different style,
and has just as much if not more connection to the tech world as these
clowns.
For the same reasons the long now doesn’t really give EA/rationalist types massive hard ons. It’s directed squarely at their claims and beliefs, not versions of long term thinking that some might find more “moral”. But hey I agree, it would’ve been a good addition to at least mention them.
Eh. I feel like it works in the abstract sense of, "People are people no matter when they live."
It's just that we can't really be sure of the effect our actions will have in a few billion years, or even if they'll matter at all, so even if we value any hypothetical people the same as we would current people, we're excused from thinking about them because we don't know if they'll ever exist.
yes i had the same reaction, I think the article thought it had to cede that to justify concern about climate change, but shit is already in motion, caring about your own life is enough, even more those of your children.
If there is one person deserving sneer, it’s Nathan Robinson. It has
to be the epitome of cringe portraying yourself as a champion of the
working class, and then faking a posh British accent despite being from
Florida and dressing as if you want to rechain django. I know he didn’t
write this article, but it amuses me every time I think about Current
Affairs.
I’m quite unapologetic about believing that Jews also deserve self-determination, and reject your bigoted insinuation that the Jewish national liberation movement is (((somehow))) any more sinister than any other national movement.
If you looked through my recent post history, you would to the contrary see that I’m very much against ethnostates. But whatever you think of nation-states, I think one must be consistent. Calling Israel an apartheid ethnostate while not calling my native Norway anything of the like is highly bigoted.
But I’m not gonna take the bait and go into a long discussion about Israel. I’m in themotte because I find culture war topics interesting, while I mostly lurk in this subreddit for the parts of the rational sphere I find sneer worthy.
> Your first major post on Reddit was a long-explainer for why Israel has no obligations (legally or morally) vaccinate the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
I don't understand how that's relevant, but no it wasn't. [This](https://old.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/9pwp6v/comparisons_of_israel_and_nazism_are_antisemitic/) post, for instance, predates it with more than 2 years. I also had many non-Israel related posts before that, but I've always been more of a commenter than submitter.
> Pure evil. Absolute Nazi-esque trash.
If you have any objections with the analysis, you are free to engage in that discussion [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/lq8bxq/israel_has_no_obligation_to_vaccinate_palestinians/) instead of coming with trite nazi comparisons without justification
I think it is extremely good that we have people who are advocating for socialism beyond just the blue hair crowd. Current Affairs, from its title, to its prose, to Nathan's outfits is aimed squarely towards the "classy reader", with a little *wink wink* that classiness itself is a bit silly.
The demands that everyone advocating for radical economic and social change must LOOK and ACT like some society-rejecting outcast, is to demand that movement be doomed. You need to appeal to every group: the hippies, the punks, the suburban normies, the sophisticated upper class, the working poor, and yes even the Plantation Dandy.
If you grow up and live virtually your entire life in the US, you have to make a deliberate effort to keep your British accent even if your parents has one. Just like a Chinese person moving to the US when they're 4 will speak the language perfectly despite their parents having broken English.
He just wants to LARP as a high brow intellectual, but a British accent is a lousy way to conceal the pseudoscience and bad arguments in one’s rants.
I can assure you from personal experience that you don't always adopt the accent of where you live most of your life, even if you live there at a very young age.
In combination with the posh British clothing, I think it's fair to assume that this is most likely unnatural. Listening to him speak the accent even sounds very unconvincing
Thanks for providing further evidence of "rationalists" sliding down the alt-right pipeline with your sterling example of whataboutism. "Epitome of cringe", indeed.
I think, as im not a spacecowboy, it relates to these 2 steps. Doing away with rationalisms stated goal to be above bias. (Or at least remove it from your thinking), and going full, 'socialists should look lower class, else cringe', which isn't directly alt right, but it is something most of the alt right would agree with as a kneejerk reaction. Just go to an alt-right place, and post 'NJR says he is pro socialism but he lives in american, and he speaks like a brit and wears bowties, what a cringelord hypcrite' and people will gladly join in with you in dunking on current affairs.
> 'socialists should look lower class, else cringe'
I'm absolutely not trying to say that socialists must look lower class. What I'm instead arguing is that he is making a conscious effort to look exactly like the caricature of what he is criticising. Which could in some cases work as ironic meta commentary, but that doesn't seem to be what he's attempting.
> which isn't directly alt right, but it is something most of the alt right would agree with as a kneejerk reaction
That some alt right would agree with a particular point is a pretty far leap from sliding down the alt right pipeline. I'm sure the alt right would agree with some of sneerclub's critiques of figures they don't like as well (eg. of new atheism), but that doesn't make it a good faith argument for me to say that this subreddit is sliding into the alt right pipeline. Or to say that a vegetarian is sliding into the Hitler pipeline. The only political forum I frequent is neoliberal, and they would surely also agree about Robinson.
Just FYI, Robinson’s fashion style - love it or loathe it - is far more associated with that of the stereotypical “Southern Gentleman” than with Britain, although from your other comments I doubt you could tell the difference
This article got me thinking, has anyone tried to put forward the “EA” case that the EA movement itself is a potential X-risk?
For example, if climate change long tail effects actually were big enough to end civilisation, a sufficiently powerful long-termist EA movement could divert enough funds from climate change to inadvertently cause the apocalypse.
Or say super-AI is possible, but prohibitively expensive, so the only reason it gets built and kills everyone is that Yudkowsky persuades enough billionaires that he’s solved friendly AI.
Or perhaps a future EA president does a calculation that nuclear brinksmanship will raise the odds of future super-utopia by 0.0001%, and inadvertently starts a nuclear war that kills everyone
People have sneered at Rationalism/ssc and called it ‘an empathy removal training camp’, and this whole longtermism where you can easily justify killing millions of people is one of them.
‘I’m sorry it is for the long term good of the species’, the Rationalist murmurs, as he presses the button which activates the machine-guns on the climate refugee assistance patrol iRobot.
I’m surprised the article didn’t mention The Long Now Foundation, which also thinks about the long-term, but in a much different style, and has just as much if not more connection to the tech world as these clowns.
I think it is a very good idea to put a lot of work into existential risk research.
I merely find it ridiculous to classify AI alignment as an existential risk while not taking climate change seriously.
Oxford is such a malignant shithole.
Not sure anyone should give two shits about future simulated beings. They’re simulated.
[deleted]
They’re basically just arguing that we should all be working to make sure Pharaoh is happy in the afterlife, aren’t they.
If there is one person deserving sneer, it’s Nathan Robinson. It has to be the epitome of cringe portraying yourself as a champion of the working class, and then faking a posh British accent despite being from Florida and dressing as if you want to rechain django. I know he didn’t write this article, but it amuses me every time I think about Current Affairs.