When thinking about the tail of dictators don’t you also have to think of the tail of good people with truly great minds you would be saving from death? (People like John von Neumann, Benjamin Franklin, etc.)
Overall, dictators are in a very tough environment with power struggles and backstabbing, lots of defecting, etc. while great minds tend to cooperate, share resources, and build upon each other.
Obviously, there are a lot more great minds doing good than ‘great minds’ wishing to be world dictators. And it seems to trend in the right direction. Compare how many great smart democratic leaders there are now vs 100 years ago. Extend that line another 100 years and it seems like we’ll be improving.
In a world in which a long tail dictator could theoretically work out an ironclad grasp of their country for evil, wouldn’t there be thousands of truly brilliant minds with lots of global coordinated resources around the world pushing against this? (see Russia vs Ukraine for a very very simple real-world example of “1 evil guy vs the world”)
So this long tail dictator has to worry about intense internal struggle/pressure but also most of the world externally pressuring them as well? I don’t see how the moral brilliant minds don’t just outmaneuver this dictator because they have 100x+ more people, resources, and coordination (in this theoretical future).
It’s a good point that by default you’d be extending all the great minds too. Abstractly I was tracking this, but I like calling it out explicitly.
& I agree with the trend that we’re improving over time. But I worry that if we’d had immortality for the last thousand years maybe we wouldn’t have seen the same degree of improvement over time. The concern is if someone had achieved global dictatorship maybe that would have involved repressing all the smart good people, and preventing coordination to overthrow them.
But we’re not debating if immortality over the last thousand years would have been better or not, we’re looking at current times and then estimating forward, right? (I agree a thousand years ago immortality would have been much much riskier than starting today)
In today’s economy/society great minds can instantly coordinate and outnumber the dictators by a large margin. I believe this trend will continue and that if you allow all minds to continue the great minds will outgrow the dictator minds and dominate the equation.
Dictators are much more likely to die (not from aging) than the average great mind (more than 50x?). This means that great minds will continue to multiply in numbers and resources while dictators sometimes die off (from their risky lifestyle of power-grabbing).
Once there are 10,000 more brilliant minds with 1,000x more resources than the evil dictators how do you expect the evil dictator to successfully power grab a whole country/the whole world?
I agree that probably you’d be fine starting today, and it’s a much safer bet than starting 1,000 years ago, but is it a safer bet than waiting say another 200 years?
I’d be concerned about dictators inciting violence against precisely the people they most perceive as threats. e.g. I don’t know the history of the Cultural Revolution well, but my impression is that something like this happened there.
The thing that’s hard to internalize (at least I think) is that by waiting 200 years to start anti-aging efforts you are condemning billions of people to an early death with a lifespan of ~80 years.
You’d have to convince me that waiting 200 years would reduce the risk of totalitarian lock-in so much that it offsets billions of lives that would be guaranteed to “prematurely end”.
Totalitarian lock-in is scary to think about and billions of people’s lives ending prematurely is just text on a screen. I would assume that the human brain can easily simulate the everyday horror of a total totalitarian world. But it’s impossible for your brain to digest even 100,000,000 premature deaths, forget billions and billions.
I certainly feel like it’s a very stakesy decision! This is somewhere where a longtermist perspective might be more hesitant to take risks that jeopardize the entire future to save billions alive today.
I also note that your argument applies to past cases too. I’m curious in what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?
(As mentioned in the opening post, I’m quite confused about what’s good here.)
I agree, it feels like a stakesy decision! And I’m pretty aligned with longtermist thinking, I just think that “entire future at risk due to totalitarianism lock-in due to removing death from aging” seems really unlikely to me. But I haven’t really thought about it too much so I guess I’m really uncertain here as we all seem to be.
“what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?”
I kind of reject the question due to ‘immortality’ as that isn’t the decision we’re currently faced with. (unless you’re only interested in this specific hypothetical world). The decision we’re faced with is do we speed up anti-aging efforts to reduce age-related death and suffering? You can still kill (or incapacitate) people that don’t age, that’s my whole point of the great minds vs. dictators.
But to consider the risks in the past vs today:
Before the internet and modern society/technology/economy it was much much harder for great minds to coordinate against evils in a global sense (thinking of the Cultural Revolution as you mentioned). So my “great-minds counter dictators” theory doesn’t hold up well in the past but I think it does in modern times.
The population 200 years ago was 1⁄8 what is today and growing much slower so the premature deaths you would have prevented per year with anti-aging would have been much less than today so you get less benefit.
The general population’s sense of morals and demand for democracy is improving so I think the tolerance for evil/totalitarianism is dropping fairly quickly.
So you’d have to come up with an equation with at least the following: - How many premature deaths you’d save with anti-aging - How likely and in what numbers will people, in general, oppose totalitarianism - If there was opposition, how easily could the global good coordinate to fight totalitarianism - If there was coordinated opposition would their numbers/resources outweigh the numbers/resources of totalitarianism - If the coordinated opposition was to fail, how long would this totalitarian society last (could it last forever and totally consume the future or is it unstable?)
I don’t buy the asymmetry of your scope argument. It feels very possible that totalitarian lock-in could have billions of lives at stake too, and cause a similar quantity of premature deaths.
Of course, it would, but if you’re reducing the risk of totalitarian lock-in from 0.4% to 0.39% (obviously made up numbers) by waiting 200 years I would think that’s a mistake that costs billions of lives.
I think Matt’s on the right track here. Treating “immortal dictators” as a separate scenario from “billions of lives lost to an immortal dictator” smacks of double-counting.
Really, we’re asking if immortality will tend to save or lose lives on net, or to improve or worsen QoL on net.
We can then compare the possible causes of lives lost/worsened vs gained/bettered: immortal dictators, or perhaps immortal saints; saved lives from life extension; lives less tainted by fear of death and mourning; lives more free to pursue many paths; alignment of individual self-interest with the outcome of the long-term future; the persistent challenge of hyperbolic discounting; the question of how to provide child rearing experiences in a crowded world with a death rate close to zero; the possible need to colonize the stars to make more room for an immortal civilization; the attendant strife that such a diaspora may experience.
When I just make a list of stuff in this manner, no individual item jumps out at me as particularly salient, but the collection seems to point in the direction of immortality being good when confined to Earth, and then being submerged into the larger question of whether a very large and interplanetary human presence would be good.
I think that this argument sort of favors a more near-term reach for immortality. The smaller and more geographically concentrated the human population is by the time it’s immortal, the better able it is to coordinate and plan for interplanetary growth. If humanity spreads to the stars, then coordination ability declines. If immortality is bad in conjunction with interplanetary civilization, the horse is out of the barn.
One question is whether coalitions of pro-social people are better at deferring power to good successors than dictators are at ensuring that they have equally bad/dictatorial successors. If you believe that Democracies are unlikely to “turn bad,” shouldn’t you be in favor of reducing the variance to the lifetime of dictatorships?
The discussion here is very abstract, so I’m unsure if I disagree because I picture a different pathway to giving people extreme longevity or whether I disagree with your general world model and reasoning. In any case, here are some additional related thoughts:
You point to a trendline with the share of Democracies increasing, but that’s not the same as seeing improvements in leaders’ quality (some democracies may be becoming increasingly dysfunctional). I’m open to the idea that world leaders are getting better, but if I had to make an intuition-driven judgment based on the last few years, I wouldn’t say so.
It’s inherently easier to attain and keep power by any means necessary with zero ethics vs. gaining it to do something complicated and altruistic (and staying ethical along the way and keeping people alive, etc.)
There’s another asymmetry where it’s often easier to destroy/attack/kill than build something. Those brilliant people coordinating to keep potential dictators in check, they may not be enough. If having no ethics means you get to use super powers, then the people with ethics are in trouble (as Owen points out, they’re the ones who will die first or have their families imprisoned). (Related: I think it’s ambiguous whether Putin supports your point. The world is in a very precarious situation now because of one tyrant. Lots of people will starve even if nuclear escalation can be avoided.)
Some personality pathologies like narcissism and psychopathy seem to be increasing lately, tracking urbanization rates and probably other factors. Evolutionarily, higher death rates at the hands of upset others seem to be “worth it” for these life-history strategies.
People can be “brilliant” on some cognitive dimensions but fail at defense against dark personality types. For instance, some otherwise brilliant people may be socially naive.
Outside of our EA bubble, it doesn’t look like the world is particularly sane or stable. Great/brilliant people cannot easily do much in a broken system. And maybe the few brilliant people who take heroic responsibility are outnumbered by too many merely mediocre people who are easily corrupted and easily self-deceive.
That said, I see some important points in favor of your more optimistic picture:
There are highly influential EA orgs whose leadership and general culture I’m really impressed by. (This doesn’t go for all highly influential EA orgs.)
I expect EA to continue to gain more influence over time.
This is a good comment. I’d like to respond but it feels like a lot of typing… haha
but that’s not the same as seeing improvements in leaders’ quality
I just mean the world is trending towards democracies and away from totalitarianism.
It’s inherently easier to attain and keep power by any means necessary with zero ethics
Yes, but 100x easier? Probably not. What if the great minds have 100x the numbers and resources? Network effects are strong
There’s another asymmetry where it’s often easier to destroy/attack/kill than build something.
Same response as above
I think it’s ambiguous whether Putin supports your point. The world is in a very precarious situation now because of one tyrant.
My point is that the vast majority of the world immediately pushed back on Putin much harder than people thought. This backs up my trend that people are less tolerant of totalitarianism than they were 100 years ago. We are globally trying (and succeeding) to set stronger norms against inflicting violence and oppression.
Some personality pathologies like narcissism and psychopathy seem to be increasing lately, tracking urbanization rates and probably other factors.
I’m guessing it will be somewhat easier to reverse these trends in a less scarcity-based society in the future, especially when we have a better handle on mental health from all angles. And the increases are probably not enough to matter in the wider question of great minds vs dictators.
People can be “brilliant” on some cognitive dimensions but fail at defense against dark personality types. For instance, some otherwise brilliant people may be socially naive.
The great minds can just outnumber the dictators in numbers and in resources, but again network effects can fight against this because each individual person doesn’t have to succeed against dictators, the whole global fight for good has to collectively succeed.
Outside of our EA bubble, it doesn’t look like the world is particularly sane or stable.
When thinking about the tail of dictators don’t you also have to think of the tail of good people with truly great minds you would be saving from death? (People like John von Neumann, Benjamin Franklin, etc.)
Overall, dictators are in a very tough environment with power struggles and backstabbing, lots of defecting, etc. while great minds tend to cooperate, share resources, and build upon each other.
Obviously, there are a lot more great minds doing good than ‘great minds’ wishing to be world dictators. And it seems to trend in the right direction. Compare how many great smart democratic leaders there are now vs 100 years ago. Extend that line another 100 years and it seems like we’ll be improving.
In a world in which a long tail dictator could theoretically work out an ironclad grasp of their country for evil, wouldn’t there be thousands of truly brilliant minds with lots of global coordinated resources around the world pushing against this? (see Russia vs Ukraine for a very very simple real-world example of “1 evil guy vs the world”)
So this long tail dictator has to worry about intense internal struggle/pressure but also most of the world externally pressuring them as well? I don’t see how the moral brilliant minds don’t just outmaneuver this dictator because they have 100x+ more people, resources, and coordination (in this theoretical future).
It’s a good point that by default you’d be extending all the great minds too. Abstractly I was tracking this, but I like calling it out explicitly.
& I agree with the trend that we’re improving over time. But I worry that if we’d had immortality for the last thousand years maybe we wouldn’t have seen the same degree of improvement over time. The concern is if someone had achieved global dictatorship maybe that would have involved repressing all the smart good people, and preventing coordination to overthrow them.
But we’re not debating if immortality over the last thousand years would have been better or not, we’re looking at current times and then estimating forward, right? (I agree a thousand years ago immortality would have been much much riskier than starting today)
In today’s economy/society great minds can instantly coordinate and outnumber the dictators by a large margin. I believe this trend will continue and that if you allow all minds to continue the great minds will outgrow the dictator minds and dominate the equation.
Dictators are much more likely to die (not from aging) than the average great mind (more than 50x?). This means that great minds will continue to multiply in numbers and resources while dictators sometimes die off (from their risky lifestyle of power-grabbing).
Once there are 10,000 more brilliant minds with 1,000x more resources than the evil dictators how do you expect the evil dictator to successfully power grab a whole country/the whole world?
I agree that probably you’d be fine starting today, and it’s a much safer bet than starting 1,000 years ago, but is it a safer bet than waiting say another 200 years?
I’d be concerned about dictators inciting violence against precisely the people they most perceive as threats. e.g. I don’t know the history of the Cultural Revolution well, but my impression is that something like this happened there.
The thing that’s hard to internalize (at least I think) is that by waiting 200 years to start anti-aging efforts you are condemning billions of people to an early death with a lifespan of ~80 years.
You’d have to convince me that waiting 200 years would reduce the risk of totalitarian lock-in so much that it offsets billions of lives that would be guaranteed to “prematurely end”.
Totalitarian lock-in is scary to think about and billions of people’s lives ending prematurely is just text on a screen. I would assume that the human brain can easily simulate the everyday horror of a total totalitarian world. But it’s impossible for your brain to digest even 100,000,000 premature deaths, forget billions and billions.
I certainly feel like it’s a very stakesy decision! This is somewhere where a longtermist perspective might be more hesitant to take risks that jeopardize the entire future to save billions alive today.
I also note that your argument applies to past cases too. I’m curious in what year you guess it would first have been good to grant people immortality?
(As mentioned in the opening post, I’m quite confused about what’s good here.)
I agree, it feels like a stakesy decision! And I’m pretty aligned with longtermist thinking, I just think that “entire future at risk due to totalitarianism lock-in due to removing death from aging” seems really unlikely to me. But I haven’t really thought about it too much so I guess I’m really uncertain here as we all seem to be.
I kind of reject the question due to ‘immortality’ as that isn’t the decision we’re currently faced with. (unless you’re only interested in this specific hypothetical world). The decision we’re faced with is do we speed up anti-aging efforts to reduce age-related death and suffering? You can still kill (or incapacitate) people that don’t age, that’s my whole point of the great minds vs. dictators.
But to consider the risks in the past vs today:
Before the internet and modern society/technology/economy it was much much harder for great minds to coordinate against evils in a global sense (thinking of the Cultural Revolution as you mentioned). So my “great-minds counter dictators” theory doesn’t hold up well in the past but I think it does in modern times.
The population 200 years ago was 1⁄8 what is today and growing much slower so the premature deaths you would have prevented per year with anti-aging would have been much less than today so you get less benefit.
The general population’s sense of morals and demand for democracy is improving so I think the tolerance for evil/totalitarianism is dropping fairly quickly.
So you’d have to come up with an equation with at least the following:
- How many premature deaths you’d save with anti-aging
- How likely and in what numbers will people, in general, oppose totalitarianism
- If there was opposition, how easily could the global good coordinate to fight totalitarianism
- If there was coordinated opposition would their numbers/resources outweigh the numbers/resources of totalitarianism
- If the coordinated opposition was to fail, how long would this totalitarian society last (could it last forever and totally consume the future or is it unstable?)
I don’t buy the asymmetry of your scope argument. It feels very possible that totalitarian lock-in could have billions of lives at stake too, and cause a similar quantity of premature deaths.
Of course, it would, but if you’re reducing the risk of totalitarian lock-in from 0.4% to 0.39% (obviously made up numbers) by waiting 200 years I would think that’s a mistake that costs billions of lives.
I think Matt’s on the right track here. Treating “immortal dictators” as a separate scenario from “billions of lives lost to an immortal dictator” smacks of double-counting.
Really, we’re asking if immortality will tend to save or lose lives on net, or to improve or worsen QoL on net.
We can then compare the possible causes of lives lost/worsened vs gained/bettered: immortal dictators, or perhaps immortal saints; saved lives from life extension; lives less tainted by fear of death and mourning; lives more free to pursue many paths; alignment of individual self-interest with the outcome of the long-term future; the persistent challenge of hyperbolic discounting; the question of how to provide child rearing experiences in a crowded world with a death rate close to zero; the possible need to colonize the stars to make more room for an immortal civilization; the attendant strife that such a diaspora may experience.
When I just make a list of stuff in this manner, no individual item jumps out at me as particularly salient, but the collection seems to point in the direction of immortality being good when confined to Earth, and then being submerged into the larger question of whether a very large and interplanetary human presence would be good.
I think that this argument sort of favors a more near-term reach for immortality. The smaller and more geographically concentrated the human population is by the time it’s immortal, the better able it is to coordinate and plan for interplanetary growth. If humanity spreads to the stars, then coordination ability declines. If immortality is bad in conjunction with interplanetary civilization, the horse is out of the barn.
One question is whether coalitions of pro-social people are better at deferring power to good successors than dictators are at ensuring that they have equally bad/dictatorial successors. If you believe that Democracies are unlikely to “turn bad,” shouldn’t you be in favor of reducing the variance to the lifetime of dictatorships?
The discussion here is very abstract, so I’m unsure if I disagree because I picture a different pathway to giving people extreme longevity or whether I disagree with your general world model and reasoning. In any case, here are some additional related thoughts:
You point to a trendline with the share of Democracies increasing, but that’s not the same as seeing improvements in leaders’ quality (some democracies may be becoming increasingly dysfunctional). I’m open to the idea that world leaders are getting better, but if I had to make an intuition-driven judgment based on the last few years, I wouldn’t say so.
It’s inherently easier to attain and keep power by any means necessary with zero ethics vs. gaining it to do something complicated and altruistic (and staying ethical along the way and keeping people alive, etc.)
There’s another asymmetry where it’s often easier to destroy/attack/kill than build something. Those brilliant people coordinating to keep potential dictators in check, they may not be enough. If having no ethics means you get to use super powers, then the people with ethics are in trouble (as Owen points out, they’re the ones who will die first or have their families imprisoned). (Related: I think it’s ambiguous whether Putin supports your point. The world is in a very precarious situation now because of one tyrant. Lots of people will starve even if nuclear escalation can be avoided.)
Some personality pathologies like narcissism and psychopathy seem to be increasing lately, tracking urbanization rates and probably other factors. Evolutionarily, higher death rates at the hands of upset others seem to be “worth it” for these life-history strategies.
People can be “brilliant” on some cognitive dimensions but fail at defense against dark personality types. For instance, some otherwise brilliant people may be socially naive.
Outside of our EA bubble, it doesn’t look like the world is particularly sane or stable. Great/brilliant people cannot easily do much in a broken system. And maybe the few brilliant people who take heroic responsibility are outnumbered by too many merely mediocre people who are easily corrupted and easily self-deceive.
That said, I see some important points in favor of your more optimistic picture:
There are highly influential EA orgs whose leadership and general culture I’m really impressed by. (This doesn’t go for all highly influential EA orgs.)
I expect EA to continue to gain more influence over time.
This is a good comment. I’d like to respond but it feels like a lot of typing… haha
I just mean the world is trending towards democracies and away from totalitarianism.
Yes, but 100x easier? Probably not. What if the great minds have 100x the numbers and resources? Network effects are strong
Same response as above
My point is that the vast majority of the world immediately pushed back on Putin much harder than people thought. This backs up my trend that people are less tolerant of totalitarianism than they were 100 years ago. We are globally trying (and succeeding) to set stronger norms against inflicting violence and oppression.
I’m guessing it will be somewhat easier to reverse these trends in a less scarcity-based society in the future, especially when we have a better handle on mental health from all angles. And the increases are probably not enough to matter in the wider question of great minds vs dictators.
The great minds can just outnumber the dictators in numbers and in resources, but again network effects can fight against this because each individual person doesn’t have to succeed against dictators, the whole global fight for good has to collectively succeed.
The world definitely seems to be trending towards saner and more stable though.