I’ve recently been thinking about medieval alchemy as a metaphor for longtermist EA.
I think there’s a sense in which it was an extremely reasonable choice to study alchemy. The basic hope of alchemy was that by fiddling around in various ways with substances you had, you’d be able to turn them into other things which had various helpful properties. It would be a really big deal if humans were able to do this.
And it seems a priori pretty reasonable to expect that humanity could get way better at manipulating substances, because there was an established history of people figuring out ways that you could do useful things by fiddling around with substances in weird ways, for example metallurgy or glassmaking, and we have lots of examples of materials having different and useful properties. If you had been particularly forward thinking, you might even have noted that it seems plausible that we’ll eventually be able to do the full range of manipulations of materials that life is able to do.
So I think that alchemists deserve a lot of points for spotting a really big and important consideration about the future. (I actually have no idea if any alchemists were thinking about it this way; that’s why I billed this as a metaphor rather than an analogy.) But they weren’t really very correct about how anything worked, and so most of their work before 1650 was pretty useless.
It’s interesting to think about whether EA is in a similar spot. I think EA has done a great job of identifying crucial and underrated considerations about how to do good and what the future will be like, eg x-risk and AI alignment. But I think our ideas for acting on these considerations seem much more tenuous. And it wouldn’t be super shocking to find out that later generations of longtermists think that our plans and ideas about the world are similarly inaccurate.
So what should you have done if you were an alchemist in the 1500s who agreed with this argument that you had some really underrated considerations but didn’t have great ideas for what to do about them?
I think that you should probably have done some of the following things:
Try to establish the limits of your knowledge and be clear about the fact that you’re in possession of good questions rather than good answers.
Do lots of measurements, write down your experiments clearly, and disseminate the results widely, so that other alchemists could make faster progress.
Push for better scientific norms. (Scientific norms were in fact invented in large part by Robert Boyle for the sake of making chemistry a better field.)
Work on building devices which would enable people to do experiments better.
Overall I feel like the alchemists did pretty well at making the world better, and if they’d been more altruistically motivated they would have been even better.
There are some reasons to think that pushing early chemistry forward is easier than working on improving the long term future, In particular, you might think that it’s only possible to work on x-risk stuff around the time of the hinge of history.
Huh, interesting thoughts, have you looked into the actual motivations behind it more? I’d’ve guessed that there was little “big if true” thinking in alchemy and mostly hopes for wealth and power.
Another thought, I suppose alchemy was more technical than something like magical potion brewing and in that way attracted other kinds of people, making it more proto-scientific? Another similar comparison might be sincere altruistic missionaries that work on finding the “true” interpretation of the bible/koran/..., sharing their progress in understanding it and working on convincing others to save them.
Regarding pushing chemnistry being easier than longtermism, I’d have guessed the big reasons why pushing scientific fields is easier are the possibility of repeating experiments and profitability of the knowledge. Are there really longtermists who find it plausible we can only work on x-risk stuff around the hinge? Even patient longtermists seem to want to save resources and I suppose invest in other capacity building. Ah, or do you mean “it’s only possible to *directly* work on x-risk stuff”, vs. indirectly? It just seemed odd to suggest that everything longtermists have done so far has not affected the probability of eventual x-risk, in the very least it has set in motion the longtermism movement earlier and shaping the culture and thinking style and so forth via institutions like FHI.
I’ve recently been thinking about medieval alchemy as a metaphor for longtermist EA.
I think there’s a sense in which it was an extremely reasonable choice to study alchemy. The basic hope of alchemy was that by fiddling around in various ways with substances you had, you’d be able to turn them into other things which had various helpful properties. It would be a really big deal if humans were able to do this.
And it seems a priori pretty reasonable to expect that humanity could get way better at manipulating substances, because there was an established history of people figuring out ways that you could do useful things by fiddling around with substances in weird ways, for example metallurgy or glassmaking, and we have lots of examples of materials having different and useful properties. If you had been particularly forward thinking, you might even have noted that it seems plausible that we’ll eventually be able to do the full range of manipulations of materials that life is able to do.
So I think that alchemists deserve a lot of points for spotting a really big and important consideration about the future. (I actually have no idea if any alchemists were thinking about it this way; that’s why I billed this as a metaphor rather than an analogy.) But they weren’t really very correct about how anything worked, and so most of their work before 1650 was pretty useless.
It’s interesting to think about whether EA is in a similar spot. I think EA has done a great job of identifying crucial and underrated considerations about how to do good and what the future will be like, eg x-risk and AI alignment. But I think our ideas for acting on these considerations seem much more tenuous. And it wouldn’t be super shocking to find out that later generations of longtermists think that our plans and ideas about the world are similarly inaccurate.
So what should you have done if you were an alchemist in the 1500s who agreed with this argument that you had some really underrated considerations but didn’t have great ideas for what to do about them?
I think that you should probably have done some of the following things:
Try to establish the limits of your knowledge and be clear about the fact that you’re in possession of good questions rather than good answers.
Do lots of measurements, write down your experiments clearly, and disseminate the results widely, so that other alchemists could make faster progress.
Push for better scientific norms. (Scientific norms were in fact invented in large part by Robert Boyle for the sake of making chemistry a better field.)
Work on building devices which would enable people to do experiments better.
Overall I feel like the alchemists did pretty well at making the world better, and if they’d been more altruistically motivated they would have been even better.
There are some reasons to think that pushing early chemistry forward is easier than working on improving the long term future, In particular, you might think that it’s only possible to work on x-risk stuff around the time of the hinge of history.
Huh, interesting thoughts, have you looked into the actual motivations behind it more? I’d’ve guessed that there was little “big if true” thinking in alchemy and mostly hopes for wealth and power.
Another thought, I suppose alchemy was more technical than something like magical potion brewing and in that way attracted other kinds of people, making it more proto-scientific? Another similar comparison might be sincere altruistic missionaries that work on finding the “true” interpretation of the bible/koran/..., sharing their progress in understanding it and working on convincing others to save them.
Regarding pushing chemnistry being easier than longtermism, I’d have guessed the big reasons why pushing scientific fields is easier are the possibility of repeating experiments and profitability of the knowledge. Are there really longtermists who find it plausible we can only work on x-risk stuff around the hinge? Even patient longtermists seem to want to save resources and I suppose invest in other capacity building. Ah, or do you mean “it’s only possible to *directly* work on x-risk stuff”, vs. indirectly? It just seemed odd to suggest that everything longtermists have done so far has not affected the probability of eventual x-risk, in the very least it has set in motion the longtermism movement earlier and shaping the culture and thinking style and so forth via institutions like FHI.