Anti-social approaches that directly hurt others are usually ineffective because social systems and cultural norms have evolved in ways that discourage and punish them.
I’ve only known two high-functioning sociopaths in my life. In terms of getting ahead, sociopaths generally start life with some strong disadvantages, namely impulsivity, thrill-seeking, and aversion to thinking about boring details. Nevertheless, despite those handicaps, one of those two sociopaths has had extraordinary success by conventional measures. [The other one was not particularly power-seeking but she’s doing fine.] He started as a lab tech, then maneuvered his way onto a big paper, then leveraged that into a professorship by taking disproportionate credit for that project, and as I write this he is head of research at a major R1 university and occasional high-level government appointee wielding immense power. He checked all the boxes for sociopathy—he was a pathological liar, he had no interest in scientific integrity (he seemed deeply confused by the very idea), he went out of his way to get students into his lab with precarious visa situations such that they couldn’t quit and he could pressure them to do anything he wanted them to do (he said this out loud!), he was somehow always in debt despite ever-growing salary, etc.
I don’t routinely consider theft, murder, and flagrant dishonesty, and then decide that the selfish costs outweigh the selfish benefits, accounting for the probability of getting caught etc. Rather, I just don’t consider them in the first place. I bet that the same is true for you. I suspect that if you or I really put serious effort into it, the same way that we put serious effort into learning a new field or skill, then you would find that there are options wherein the probability of getting caught is negligible, and thus the selfish benefits outweigh the selfish costs. I strongly suspect that you personally don’t know a damn thing about best practices for getting away with theft, murder, or flagrant antisocial dishonesty to your own benefit. If you haven’t spent months trying in good faith to discern ways to derive selfish advantage from antisocial behavior, the way you’ve spent months trying in good faith to figure out things about AI or economics, then I think you’re speaking from a position of ignorance when you say that such options are vanishingly rare. And I think that the obvious worldly success of many dark-triad people (e.g. my acquaintance above, and Trump is a pathological liar, or more centrally, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) should make one skeptical about that belief.
(Sure, lots of sociopaths are in prison too. Skill issue—note the handicaps I mentioned above. Also, some people with ASPD diagnoses are mainly suffering from an anger disorder, rather than callousness.)
In contrast, I suspect you underestimate just how much of our social behavior is shaped by cultural evolution, rather than by innate, biologically hardwired motives that arise simply from the fact that we are human.
You’re treating these as separate categories when my main claim is that almost all humans are intrinsically motivated to follow cultural norms. Or more specifically: Most people care very strongly about doing things that would look good in the eyes of the people they respect. They don’t think of it that way, though—it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing, and indeed they would be offended by that suggestion. Instead, those things just feel like the right and appropriate things to do. This is related to and upstream of norm-following. I claim that this is an innate drive, part of human nature built into our brain by evolution.
Why does that matter? Because we’re used to living in a world where 1% of the population are sociopaths who don’t intrinsically care about prevailing norms, and I don’t think we should carry those intuitions into a hypothetical world where 99%+ of the population are sociopaths who don’t intrinsically care about prevailing norms.
In particular, prosocial cultural norms are likelier to be stable in the former world than the latter world. In fact, any arbitrary kind of cultural norm is likelier to be stable in the former world than the latter world. Because no matter what the norm is, you’ll have 99% of the population feeling strongly that the norm is right and proper, and trying to root out, punish, and shame the 1% of people who violate it, even at cost to themselves.
So I think you’re not paranoid enough when you try to consider a “legal and social framework of rights and rules”. In our world, it’s comparatively easy to get into a stable situation where 99% of cops aren’t corrupt, and 99% of judges aren’t corrupt, and 99% of people in the military with physical access to weapons aren’t corrupt, and 99% of IRS agents aren’t corrupt, etc. If the entire population consists of sociopaths looking out for their own selfish interests with callous disregard for prevailing norms and for other people, you’d need to be thinking much harder about e.g. who has physical access to weapons, and money, and power, etc. That kind of paranoid thinking is common in the crypto world—everything is an attack surface, everyone is a potential thief, etc. It would be harder in the real world, where we have vulnerable bodies, limited visibility, and so on. I’m open-minded to people brainstorming along those lines, but you don’t seem to be engaged in that project AFAICT.
Intertemporal norms among AIs: Humans have developed norms against harming certain vulnerable groups—such as the elderly—not just out of altruism but because they know they will eventually become part of those groups themselves. Similarly, AIs may develop norms against harming “less capable agents,” because today’s AIs could one day find themselves in a similar position relative to even more advanced future AIs. These norms could provide an independent reason for AIs to respect humans, even as humans become less dominant over time.
Again, if we’re not assuming that AIs are intrinsically motivated by prevailing norms, the way 99% of humans are, then the term “norm” is just misleading baggage that we should drop altogether. Instead we need to talk about rules that are stably enforced against defectors via hard power, where the “defectors” are of course allowed to include those who are supposed to be doing the enforcement, and where the “defectors” might also include broad coalitions coordinating to jump into a new equilibrium that Pareto-benefits them all.
Thanks!
I’ve only known two high-functioning sociopaths in my life. In terms of getting ahead, sociopaths generally start life with some strong disadvantages, namely impulsivity, thrill-seeking, and aversion to thinking about boring details. Nevertheless, despite those handicaps, one of those two sociopaths has had extraordinary success by conventional measures. [The other one was not particularly power-seeking but she’s doing fine.] He started as a lab tech, then maneuvered his way onto a big paper, then leveraged that into a professorship by taking disproportionate credit for that project, and as I write this he is head of research at a major R1 university and occasional high-level government appointee wielding immense power. He checked all the boxes for sociopathy—he was a pathological liar, he had no interest in scientific integrity (he seemed deeply confused by the very idea), he went out of his way to get students into his lab with precarious visa situations such that they couldn’t quit and he could pressure them to do anything he wanted them to do (he said this out loud!), he was somehow always in debt despite ever-growing salary, etc.
I don’t routinely consider theft, murder, and flagrant dishonesty, and then decide that the selfish costs outweigh the selfish benefits, accounting for the probability of getting caught etc. Rather, I just don’t consider them in the first place. I bet that the same is true for you. I suspect that if you or I really put serious effort into it, the same way that we put serious effort into learning a new field or skill, then you would find that there are options wherein the probability of getting caught is negligible, and thus the selfish benefits outweigh the selfish costs. I strongly suspect that you personally don’t know a damn thing about best practices for getting away with theft, murder, or flagrant antisocial dishonesty to your own benefit. If you haven’t spent months trying in good faith to discern ways to derive selfish advantage from antisocial behavior, the way you’ve spent months trying in good faith to figure out things about AI or economics, then I think you’re speaking from a position of ignorance when you say that such options are vanishingly rare. And I think that the obvious worldly success of many dark-triad people (e.g. my acquaintance above, and Trump is a pathological liar, or more centrally, Stalin, Hitler, etc.) should make one skeptical about that belief.
(Sure, lots of sociopaths are in prison too. Skill issue—note the handicaps I mentioned above. Also, some people with ASPD diagnoses are mainly suffering from an anger disorder, rather than callousness.)
You’re treating these as separate categories when my main claim is that almost all humans are intrinsically motivated to follow cultural norms. Or more specifically: Most people care very strongly about doing things that would look good in the eyes of the people they respect. They don’t think of it that way, though—it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re doing, and indeed they would be offended by that suggestion. Instead, those things just feel like the right and appropriate things to do. This is related to and upstream of norm-following. I claim that this is an innate drive, part of human nature built into our brain by evolution.
(I was talking to you about that here.)
Why does that matter? Because we’re used to living in a world where 1% of the population are sociopaths who don’t intrinsically care about prevailing norms, and I don’t think we should carry those intuitions into a hypothetical world where 99%+ of the population are sociopaths who don’t intrinsically care about prevailing norms.
In particular, prosocial cultural norms are likelier to be stable in the former world than the latter world. In fact, any arbitrary kind of cultural norm is likelier to be stable in the former world than the latter world. Because no matter what the norm is, you’ll have 99% of the population feeling strongly that the norm is right and proper, and trying to root out, punish, and shame the 1% of people who violate it, even at cost to themselves.
So I think you’re not paranoid enough when you try to consider a “legal and social framework of rights and rules”. In our world, it’s comparatively easy to get into a stable situation where 99% of cops aren’t corrupt, and 99% of judges aren’t corrupt, and 99% of people in the military with physical access to weapons aren’t corrupt, and 99% of IRS agents aren’t corrupt, etc. If the entire population consists of sociopaths looking out for their own selfish interests with callous disregard for prevailing norms and for other people, you’d need to be thinking much harder about e.g. who has physical access to weapons, and money, and power, etc. That kind of paranoid thinking is common in the crypto world—everything is an attack surface, everyone is a potential thief, etc. It would be harder in the real world, where we have vulnerable bodies, limited visibility, and so on. I’m open-minded to people brainstorming along those lines, but you don’t seem to be engaged in that project AFAICT.
Again, if we’re not assuming that AIs are intrinsically motivated by prevailing norms, the way 99% of humans are, then the term “norm” is just misleading baggage that we should drop altogether. Instead we need to talk about rules that are stably enforced against defectors via hard power, where the “defectors” are of course allowed to include those who are supposed to be doing the enforcement, and where the “defectors” might also include broad coalitions coordinating to jump into a new equilibrium that Pareto-benefits them all.