My impression is that although your essay frames this as a deep disagreement, in fact you’re reacting to something that we’re not saying. I basically agree with the heart of the content here—that there are serious failure modes to be scared of if attempting to orient to the long term, and that something like loop-preservation is (along with the various more prosaic welfare goods we discussed) essential for the health of even a strict longtermist society.
However, I think that what we wrote may have been compatible with the view that you have such a negative reaction to, and at minimum I wish that we’d spent some more words exploring this kind of dynamic. So I appreciate your response.
Thanks for the generous response. You write that we “may have been compatible” and I’m “reacting to something you’re not saying.”
Here’s my concern: I’ve come to recognize that reality operates as a dynamic network—nodes (people, institutions) whose capacity is constituted by the relationships among them. This isn’t just a modeling choice; it’s how cities function, how pandemics spread, how states maintain capacity. You don’t work from this explicit recognition.
This creates an asymmetry. Once you see reality as a network, your Section 5 framework becomes incompatible with mine—not just incomplete, but incoherent. You explicitly frame the state as separate from people, optimizing for longtermist goals while managing preferences as constraints. But from the network perspective, this separation doesn’t exist—the state’s capacity just IS those relationships. You can’t optimize one while managing the other.
Let me try to say this more directly: I’ve come to understand my own intelligence as existing not AT my neurons, but BETWEEN them—as a pattern of activation across connections. I am the edge, not the node. And I see society the same way: capacity isn’t located IN institutions, it emerges FROM relationships. From this perspective, your Section 5 (state separate from people) isn’t a simplification—it’s treating edges as if they were nodes, which fundamentally misunderstands what state capacity is.
That’s the asymmetry: your explicit framing (state separate from people) is incompatible with how I now understand reality. But if you haven’t recognized the network structure, you’d just see my essay as “adding important considerations” rather than revealing a foundational incompatibility.
Thanks AJ!
My impression is that although your essay frames this as a deep disagreement, in fact you’re reacting to something that we’re not saying. I basically agree with the heart of the content here—that there are serious failure modes to be scared of if attempting to orient to the long term, and that something like loop-preservation is (along with the various more prosaic welfare goods we discussed) essential for the health of even a strict longtermist society.
However, I think that what we wrote may have been compatible with the view that you have such a negative reaction to, and at minimum I wish that we’d spent some more words exploring this kind of dynamic. So I appreciate your response.
Thanks for the generous response. You write that we “may have been compatible” and I’m “reacting to something you’re not saying.”
Here’s my concern: I’ve come to recognize that reality operates as a dynamic network—nodes (people, institutions) whose capacity is constituted by the relationships among them. This isn’t just a modeling choice; it’s how cities function, how pandemics spread, how states maintain capacity. You don’t work from this explicit recognition.
This creates an asymmetry. Once you see reality as a network, your Section 5 framework becomes incompatible with mine—not just incomplete, but incoherent. You explicitly frame the state as separate from people, optimizing for longtermist goals while managing preferences as constraints. But from the network perspective, this separation doesn’t exist—the state’s capacity just IS those relationships. You can’t optimize one while managing the other.
Let me try to say this more directly: I’ve come to understand my own intelligence as existing not AT my neurons, but BETWEEN them—as a pattern of activation across connections. I am the edge, not the node. And I see society the same way: capacity isn’t located IN institutions, it emerges FROM relationships. From this perspective, your Section 5 (state separate from people) isn’t a simplification—it’s treating edges as if they were nodes, which fundamentally misunderstands what state capacity is.
That’s the asymmetry: your explicit framing (state separate from people) is incompatible with how I now understand reality. But if you haven’t recognized the network structure, you’d just see my essay as “adding important considerations” rather than revealing a foundational incompatibility.
Does this help clarify where I’m coming from?