It seems to me that you use âintergenerational justiceâ and longtermism in somewhat synonymous fashion. I think I would disagree with this sentiment. Longtermism is a specific set of positions whereas I would see intergenerational justice as a more open concept that can be defined and discussed from different positions.
I also think that there are reasonable critiques of longtermism. In the spirit of your post, I hope you stay open to considering those views.
I have only read the summarybot comment but based on that I wanted to leave a literature suggestion that could be interesting to people who liked this post and want to think more about how to put a pragmatic approach to ethics into practice.
Ulrich, W. (2006). Critical Pragmatism: A New Approach to Professional and Business Ethics. In Interdisciplinary Yearbook for Business Ethics. V. 1, v. 1,. Peter Lang Pub Inc.
Abstract: Major contemporary conceptions of ethics such as discourse ethics and neocontractarian ethics are not grounded in a sufficiently pragmatic notion of practice. They suffer from serious problems of application and thus can hardly be said to respond to the needs of professionals and decision makers. A main reason lies in the tendency of these approaches to focus more on the requirements of ethical universalization than on those of doing justice to particular contexts of action â at the expense of practicality and relevance to practitioners. If this diagnosis is not entirely mistaken, a major methodological challenge for professional and business ethics consists in finding a new balance between ethical universalism and ethical contextualism. A reformulation of the pragmatic maxim (the methodological core principle of American pragmatism) in terms of systematic boundary critique (the methodological core principle of the authorâs work on critical systems thinking and reflective professional practice) may provide a framework to this end, critical pragmatism.
I am wondering if you could say something about how the political developments in the US (i.e., Trump 2.0) are affecting your thinking on AGI race dynamics? It seems like the default assumption communicated publicly is still that the US are âthe good guysâ and a âwestern liberal democracyâ that can be counted on, when the actual actions on the world stage are casting at least some doubt on this position. In some sense, one could even argue that we are already playing out a high-stakes alignment crisis at this very moment.
Any reactions or comments on this issue? I understand that openness around this topic is difficult at the moment but I also donât think that complete silence is all that wise either.
I donât agree with this sentiment. At least for me I really do not see any real cost associated with being vegan that would keep me from earning more or being a better person in any meaningful way.
For example, I am pretty sure I wouldnât work more if I ate more meat, why would I? There really doesnât seem to be a causal pathway here. Maybe if you really crave beef and you canât help yourself thinking about this all the time⌠yeah, that could be distracting and reduce your performance but I am not sure that something like this occurs all that often. Never happened to me at least.
I would argue itâs actually quite the opposite. Being vegan is normally quite a healthy lifestyle that has positive effects on health all around. Donât underestimate the impact of having to live with the cognitive dissonance of being directly responsible for the unnecessary suffering of harmless animals.
But I guess there are different preferences and maybe you see things differently. I just wanted to flag that you are not really presenting knock down arguments here. To me it seems more like a self-justificatory move to somehow âabsolveâ you from doing the right thing.
Maybe I am naive but what is the cost thatâs associated with not eating meat? Not having the taste of it? What motivates you to donate money to reduce animal suffering if you believe that your taste is more valuable than the life of the animal in the first place? Or are you at a point where you believe that animals matter enough to warrant some small amounts of donations but not to deprive you of their taste?
I mean, of course itâs good to donate but I donât see why this means that you should continue the practice that you want to offset if you can help it or am I missing something?
Similarly, if I offset pollution, I do not turn around and pollute more because that would defeat the purpose?!
Reading your comments, I think we come from different perspectives when reading such a post.
I read the post as an attempt to highlight a blind spot in âorthodoxâ EA thinking, which simply tries to make a case for the need to revisit some deeply ingrained assumptions based on alternative viewpoints. This tends to make me curious about the alternative viewpoints offered and if I find them at least somewhat plausible and compelling I try to see what I can do with them based on their own assumptions. I do not necessarily see it as the job of the post to anticipate all the questions that a person coming from the âorthodoxâ perspective may come up with. Certainly, itâs nice if it is well written and can anticipate some objections but this forum is not a philosophical journal (far from it).
So, what I am concerned with in your reaction is that it gives me an impression that you may be applying the same standards for people who share your âorthodoxâ understanding that âonly sentient beings countâ and those who question the viability of this understanding. You seem to take the âorthodoxâ understanding as given and demand that the other person makes arguments that are convincing from this âorthodoxâ perspective. This can be very difficult if the other side questions very fundamental assumptions of your position. There is a huge gap between noticing inconsistencies and problems with an âorthodoxâ framework and being able to offer viable alternatives that make sense to people looking at this through the lens of the âorthodoxâ framework. A seminal reading to appreciate the nature of this situation would probably be Thomas Kuhn (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition.
The whole reason I commented in the first place is that I am sometimes disappointed by people down-voting critical posts that challenge âorthodoxyâ but in the next breath triumphantly declare how open-minded EA is and how curiosity and critique is at the heart of the movement. âEA is an open-ended questionâ, they say and go down-vote the post that questions some of their core assumptions (not saying this is you, but there must be some cases of this given what I have seen happen here in the forum). Isnât it in this communities best interest and stated self-understanding that it should be a welcoming place to people who are well meaning and able to articulate their questions or critiques in a coherent manner even if they go against prevailing orthodoxy? Isnât this where EA itself came from?
Moving out of the slight rant mode and trying to reply to your substantial question about practical differences. I think my previous comment and also this provide some initial directions for this. If your fundamental assumptions change, it does not necessarily make sense to keep everything else as is. In this way, itâs a starting point for the development of a new âparadigmâ and this can take time. For example, EA still has arguably a mostly modern understanding of âprogressâ, which may need to be revisited in a more systemic paradigm. There are some efforts ongoing in this direction, for example, under the label of âmetamodernismâ.
I personally also find the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Civilization Research Institute quite interesting. They have a new article on this very topic that may be an interesting read: https://ââconsilienceproject.org/ââdevelopment-in-progress/ââ.
However, there are many more people active in this space. The âGreat Simplificationâ podcast by Nate Hagens has some interesting episodes with quite a few of them. Disclaimer: I am not naively endorsing all of the content on the podcast (e.g., I donât really listen to the âfranklyâ episodes) but I think it provides an interesting, useful, and often inspiring window on this emerging systemic perspective. If you are not too familiar with the planetary boundaries framework there is a recent episode with Johan RockstrĂśm that discusses it in broad strokes.
I think the post was already acknowledging the difference in perspective and trying to make the case that the perspective that you are advocating for seems shortsighted from their perspective.
The key point here seems to be the consideration that is given to interconnectedness. Whereas âtraditionalâ EA assumes stability in the Earth System and focuses âonlyâ on marginal improvements ceteris paribus, the ecological perspective highlights the interconnectedness of âeverythingâ and the need for a systemic focus on sustaining the entire Earth system rather than simply assuming itâs continued functioning in the face of ongoing disruption and destruction.
I think the argument is sound and does show a pretty big blind spot in âtraditionalâ EA thinking. I think the post itself probably could have made the point in a way that is easier to digest for people with contrarian beliefs but the level of downvoting seems pretty harsh and ultimately self-defeating to me.
In terms of practical consequences, I would first of all expect more recognition of systemic perspectives in EA discourse and more openness to considering the value of ecosystems and earth systems in general. This seems worthwhile even just on instrumental grounds.
I have never said that how we treat nonhuman animals is âsolelyâ due to differences in power. The point that I have made is that AIs are not humans and I have tried to illustrate that differences between species tend to matter in culture and social systems.
But we donât even have to go to species differences, ethnic differences are already enough to create quite a bit of friction in our societies (e.g., racism, caste systems, etc.). Why donât we all engage in mutually beneficial trade and cooperate to live happily ever after?
Because while we have mostly converging needs in a biological sense, we have different values and beliefs. It still roughly works out in the grand scheme of things because cultural checks and balances have evolved in environments where we had strongly overlapping values and interests. So most humans have comparable degrees of power or are kept in check by those checks and balances. That was basically our societal process of getting to value alignment but as you can probably tell by looking at the news, this process has not reached a satisfactory quality, yet. We have come far but itâs still a shit show out there. The powerful take what they can get and often only give a sh*t to the degree that they actually feel consequences from it.
So, my point is that your âlooseâ definition of value alignment is an illusion if you are talking about super powerful actors that have divergent needs and donât share your values. They will play along as long as it suits them but will stop doing it as soon as an alternative more aligned with their needs and values is more convenient. And the key point here is that AIs are not humans and that they have very different needs from us. If they become much more powerful than us, only their values can keep them in check in the long run.
But what makes you think that this can be a longterm solution if the needs and capabilities of the involved parties are strongly divergent as in human vs AI scenarios?
I agree that trading can probably work for a couple of years, maybe decades, but if the AIs want something different from us in the long term what should stop them from getting this?
I donât see a way around value alignment in the strict sense (ironically this could also involve AIs aligning our values to theirs similar to how we have aligned dogs).
The difference is that a superintelligence or even an AGI is not human and they will likely need very different environments from us to truly thrive. Ask factory farmed animals or basically any other kind of nonhuman animal if our world is in a state of violance or war⌠As soon as strong power differentials and diverging needs show up the value cocreation narrative starts to lose itâs magic. It works great for humans but it doesnât really work with other species that are not very close and aligned with us. Dogs and cats have arguably fared quite well but only at the price of becoming strongly adapted to OUR needs and desires.
In the end, if you donât have anything valuable to offer there is not much more you can do besides hoping for, or ideally ensuring, value alignment in the strict sense. Your scenario may work well for some time but itâs not a longterm solution.
This reminds me of the work on the Planungszelle in Germany but with some more bells and whistles. One difference that I see is that afaik the core idea in more traditional deliberation processes is that the process itself is also understandable by the average citizen. This gives it some grounding and legitimacy in that all people involved in the process can cross-check each other and make sure that the outcome is not manipulated. You seem to be diverging from this ideal a little bit in the sense that you seem to require the use of sophisticated statistical techniques, which potentially cannot be understood or cross-checked by a general cross-section of the population.
Maybe it would make sense to use a two-stage procedure where in the first (preparation) stage you gain general agreement on what process to run in the second (work) stage? Or looking at your model to actually have the citizen assembly be involved in managing and controlling the expert modeling process or have at least multiple different expert teams provide models to the citizen assembly. Otherwise it seems like you have a single point of failure where the democratic aspect of the process can be neutralized potentially quite easily.
I am just speculating though, havenât had time to look at the white paper in detail. Maybe/âprobably you have thought about those aspects already!
The key point that I am trying to make is that you seem to argue against our common sense understanding that animals are sentient because they are anatomically similar to us in many respects and also demonstrate behavior that we would expect sentient creatures to have. Rather you come up with your own elaborate requirements that you argue are necessary for a being able to say something about qualia in other beings but then at some point (maybe at the point where you feel comfortable with your conclusions) you stop following your own line of argument through to the end (i.e., qualia somewhere in the causal structure != other humans have qualia) and just revert back to âcommon senseâ, which you have argued against just before as being insufficient in this case. So, your position seems somewhat selective and potentially self-serving with respect to supporting your own beliefs rather than intellectually superior to the common sense understanding.
But how can you assume that humans in general have qualia if all the talking about qualia tells you only that qualia exist somewhere in the causal structure? Maybe all talking about qualia derives from a single source? How would you know? For me, this seems to be a kind of a reductio ad absurdum for your entire line of argument.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I think you are onto an interesting angle here that could be worthwhile exploring if you are so inclined.
One interesting line of work that you do not seem to be considering at the moment but could be interesting is the work done in the âmetacrisisâ (or polycrisis) space. See this presentation for an overview but I recommend diving deeper than this to get a better sense of the space. What this perspective is interested in is trying to understand and address the underlying patterns, which create the wicked situation we find ourselves in. They work a lot with concepts like âMolochâ (i.e., multi-polar traps in coordination games), the risk accelerating role of AI or different types of civilizational failure modes (e.g., dystopia vs. catastrophe) we should guard against.
Interesting for you may also be a working paper that I am working on with ALLFED, where we are looking at the digital transformation as a driver of systemic catastrophic risks. We do this based on a simulation model in specific scenarios but then generalize a framework where we suggest that the key features that make digital systems valuable also make them an inherent driver of what we called âthe risk of digital fragilityâ. Our work does not yet elaborate on the role of AI but only the pervasive use of digital systems and services in general. My next steps are to work out the role of AI more clearly and see if/âhow our digital fragility framework can be put to use to better understand how AI could be contributing to systemic catastrophic risks. You can reach out via PM if you are interested to have a chat about this.
Hey Daniel,
as I also stated in another reply to Nick, I didnât really mean to diminish the point you raised but to highlight that this is really more of a âmeta pointâ thatâs only tangential to the matter of the issue outlined. My critical reaction was not meant to be against you or the point you raised but the more general community practice /â trend of focusing on those points at the expense of engaging the subject matter itself, in particular, when the topic is against mainstream thinking. This I think is somewhat demonstrated by the fact that your comment is by far the most upvoted on an issue that would have far reaching implications if accepted as having some merit.
Hope this makes it clearer. Donât mean to criticize the object level of your argument, itâs just coincidental that I picked out your comment to illustrate a problematic development that I see.
P.S.: There is also some irony in me posting a meta critique of a meta critique to argue for more object level engagement but thatâs life I guess.
Hey Nick,
thanks for your reply. I didnât mean to say that Daniel didnât have a point. Itâs a reasonable argument to make. I just wanted to highlight that this shouldnât be the only angle to look at such posts. If you look, his comment is by far the most upvoted and it only addresses a point tangential to the problem at hand. Of course, getting upvoted is not his âfaultâ. I just felt compelled to highlight that overly focusing on this kind of angle only brings us so far.
Hope that makes it clearer :)
Your question reminded me of the following quote:
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Maybe here we are talking about an alternative version of this:
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Say Something When His Salary (or Relevance, Power, Influence, Status) Depends Upon Him Not Saying It
Isnât your point a little bit pedantic here in the sense that you seem to be perfectly able to understand the key point the post was trying to make, find that point somewhat objectionable or controversial, and thus point to some issues regarding âframingâ rather than really engage deeply with the key points?
Of course, every post could be better written, more thoughtful, etc. but letâs be honest, we are here to make progress on important issues and not to win âargument style points.â In particular, I find it disturbing that this technique of criticizing style of argument seems to be used quite often to discredit or not engage with ânicheâ viewpoints that criticize prevailing âmainstreamâ opinions in the EA community. Happened to me as well, when I was suggesting we should look more into whether there are maybe alternatives to purely for profit/âclosed sourced driven business models for AI ventures. Some people where bending over backwards to argue some concerns that were only tangentially related to the proposal I made (e.g., government canât be trusted and is incompetent so anything involving regulation could never ever work, etc.). Another case was a post on engagement with âpost growthâ concepts. There I witnessed something like a wholesale character assassination of the post growth community for whatever reasons. Not saying this happened here but I am simply trying to show a pattern of dismissal of niche viewpoints for spurious, tangential reasons without really engaging with them.
Altogether, wouldnât it be more productive to have more open minded discussions and practice more of what we preach to the normies out there ourselves (e.g., steel-manning instead of straw-manning)? Critiquing style is fine and has its place but maybe letâs do substance first and style second?
Thank you for writing this post!
I think it is really important to stay flexible in the mind and to not tie ourselves into race dynamics prematurely. I hope that reasonable voices such as yours can broaden the discourse and maybe even open up doors that were only closed in our minds but never truly locked.
I think it would be helpful to not use longtermism in this synonymous way because I think itâs prone to lead to misunderstandings and unproductive conflict.
For example, there is a school of thought called the person affecting view, which denies that future, non-existing people have moral patient hood but would still be able to have reasonable discussions about intergenerational justice in the sense of children might want to have children, etc.
In general, I wouldnât characterize those views as any more or less extreme or flat-footed than weak forms of longtermism. I think these are difficult topics that are contentious by nature.
For me, the key is to stay open-minded and seek some form of discursive resolution that allows us to move forward in a constructive and ideally for all acceptable way. (Thatâs a critical pragmatist stance inspired by discourse ethics)
This is why I appreciate your curiosity and willingness to engage with different perspectives, even if itâs sometimes hard to understand opposing viewpoints. Keep at it! :)