Why would âis x consciousâ always be a verbal dispute on type A-physicalism?
David Mathersđ¸
Karma: 5,102
Lab leaders are probably trying mostly to maximize the value of their company, not the value of the world in my view. (Doesnât mean they give zero weight to moral considerations.) Also, if the US government realizes that they are reasoning along the lines of âletâs slow down development because it doesnât matter if the US beats Chinaâ, the US government will probably find ways to stop them being lab leaders.
âThe emphasis on technical solutions only benefits themâ
This is blatantly question-begging, right? In that it is only true if looking for technical solutions doesnât lead to safe models, which is one of the main points in dispute between you versus people with a higher opinion of the work inside on safety strategy. Of course, it is true that if you donât have your own opinion already, you shouldnât trust people who work at leading labs (or want to) on the question of whether technical safety work will help, for the reasons you give. But âpeople have an incentive to say Xâ isnât actually evidence that X is false, itâs just evidence you shouldnât trust them. If all people outside labs thought technical safety work was useless that would be one thing. But I donât think that is actually true, it seems people with relevant expertise are divided even outside the labs. Now of course, there are subtler ways in which even people outside the labs might be incentivized to play down the risks. (Though they might also have other reasons to play them up.) But even that wonât get you to âtherefore technical safety is definitely uselessâ; itâs all meta, not object-level.
Thereâs also a subtler point that even if âdo technical safety work on the insideâ is unlikely to work, it might still be the better strategy if confrontational lobbying from the outside is unlikely to work too (something that I think is more true now Trump is in power, although Musk is a bit of a wildcard in that respect.)
German has always had laws allowing this, for the extremely obvious reason that Germany once fairly elected a fascist government that ended democracy, created a totalitarian dictatorship, started the most destructive war in history*, and committed genocide. Understandably, the designers of (West) Germanyâs post-war constitution wanted to stop this happening again. These laws have been used to ban neo-Nazi parties at least 4 times since 1945, so even the idea of actually using them is not a new panic response to the AfDâs popularity. If the laws make Germany a flawed democracy now, then arguably it always has been. Incidentally hardcore communist elements in Die Linke have also been surveilled by the German security services for suspected opposition to the democratic constitution, so itâs not true that only right-wing extremism is restricted in Germany. (Die Linke were cleared because it was decided the Stalinists were only a small % of the party with little influence.)
In fact of course, it is at the very least not clear the laws are bad even from a purely democracy-centric perspective and ignoring the substantive badness of Nazism. It is true I think that an election where you can vote for anti-democratic fascists is more democratic in itself. But it is of course also true that âfair elections except fascists are bannedâ is more democratic than âfascists dictatorshipâ. If the risk of the later is high in a completely free election, them a mildly restricted election that bans the fascists can easily be the democracy-maximizing move in the medium term. I think it is fair to say that in early 50s West Germany, a country where a decently-sized % of voters had been enthusiastic Nazis, the risk of fascist takeover at the ballot box was more than theoretical. (Though admittedly the result would probably have been an American military takeover of Germany, not a revived Nazi dictatorship, but that would also have been a very bad outcome.)
Now, maybe what you think is outrageous isnât that banning parties is allowed (or isnât just that), but that the accusation that the AfD are anti-democratic extremists is obviously false and pretextual. Two points about that.
Firstly, they havenât been banned yet! (And personally I suspect they wonât be, and Iâm fairly strongly inclined to think they shouldnât be, though Iâd change my mind on that if Hocke or his faction captured the leadership.**) German law doesnât allow the government to just decide a party is extremist and ban them. They have to provide evidence in a court of law that they really do count as dangerously extreme by specific standards. Now maybe that process will in fact be a total farce with terrible standards of evidence, but since it hasnât happened yet, I donât see any strong reason to think it will be right now. Of course, it is possible that the legal definitions of anti-democratic extremism are badly drafted and could be used to ban a non-fascist party in a procedurally fair way. Maybe that is true, I am not an expert on the laws. (But frankly I have some doubt that you know whether this true either.)
Now you might say it is anti-democratic for the government to threatening the AfD with a ban if they are clearly not a fascist threat to democracy, even if there is little chance of the ban getting through court. And yeah, I agree with the conditional claim here: that would be a very bad violation of liberal and democratic norms. But I donât think it is clear that the antecedent is true. Bjorn Hocke the AfDâs leader in Thuringia seems to have been a neo-Nazi in a very literal sense 10 or 15 years ago, and Iâve never seen any evidence that his views have changed. In particular, he was filmed chanting at a neo-Nazi rally in Dresden in 2010: https://ââwww.theguardian.com/ââworld/ââarticle/ââ2024/ââaug/ââ29/ââthe-trial-of-bjorn-hocke-the-real-boss-of-germany-far-right I think this sufficient evidence to show that Hocke was very probably a real Nazi in 2010, and that Nazis generally want to abolish democracy. (If you doubt The Guardianâs word that it really was a Nazi rally, note that Hockeâs supporters donât themselves seem to deny this. The defence of him quoted in the article is that he only went to the rally âto observeâ, not that it wasnât a Nazi rally.) On the other hand, Hocke doesnât currently lead the AfD, Alice Weidel does, and I think she has tried to kick Hocke out before. I havenât seen any evidence that she is anything more than a very conservative but democratic politcian. So I think it might not currently be correct to class them as Nazis as a whole, and for that reason, I think a ban is probably wrong. But I think the presence of a significant Nazi faction downgrades suggesting they should be banned from outrageous to merely not correct.
*Technically you could argue the Japanese actually started it when they invaded China, I suppose.
**If you care about track records, I am a Good Judgement superforecaster, and I gave Trump a higher chance if winning the popular vote than most of the other supers did.
At least 8 years ago though, Finland and Norway had relatively high levels of state ownership of enterprises, much higher than the US. If thatâs not a much higher level of real socialism, itâs hard to say what is. That suggests to me that whatever the Economic Freedom Index measures itâs not how little socialism there is in a country. Nonetheless, it could be the freedom not the socialism thatâs responsible for Finland and Norway doing well, of course.
Norway is a petro state so arguably it doesnât really count, but Finland isnât.
âanticapitalists often think that we should have very heavy taxation or outright wealth confiscation from rich people, even if this would come at the expense of aggregate utilitarian welfareâ
Whatâs the evidence for this? I think even if it is true, it is probably misleading, in that most leftists also just reject the claims mainstream economists make about when taxing the rich will reduce aggregate welfare (not that there is one single mainstream economist view on that anyway in all likelihood.) This sounds to me more like an American centre-right caricature of how socialists think, than something socialists themselves would recognize.
Iâm not sure I subscribe to any form of utilitarianism, and Iâm not sure what my view in population ethics is. But I am confident that the mere fact that a life would be below average well-being does not make adding it to the world a bad thing.
Thanks.
A partly underlying issue here is that itâs not clear that the consequentialist/ânon-consequentialist division is actually all that deep or meaningful if you really think about it. The facts about âutilityâ in a consequentialist theory, are plausibly ultimately just a kind of short-hand for facts about preferability between outcomes that could be stated without any mention of numbers/âutility/âmaximizing (at least if we allow infinitely long statements). But for non-consequentialist theories, you can also derive a preferability relation on outcomes (where what you do is part of the outcome, not just the results of your action), based on what the theory says you should do in a forced choice. For at least some such theories that look âdeonticâ, in the sense of having rights that you shouldnât violate, even if it leads to higher net well-being, the resulting preferability ranking might happen to obey the 4 axioms and be VNM-rational. For such a deontic theory you could then express the theory as maximizing a relevant notion of utility if you really wanted to (at least if you can cardinalize the resulting ordering of actions by prefertability, via looking at preferences between chance-y prospects I donât know enough to know if meeting the axioms guarantees you can do this.) So any consequentialist theory is sort of really a number/âutility-free theory about preferability in disguise, and at least some very deontic feeling theories are in some sense equivalent to consequentialist theories phrased in terms of utility.
Or so it seems to me anyway, Iâm certainly not a real expert on this stuff.
People donât like angry political comments here, they prefer a dispassionate tone. They also generally donât like stuff that sounds like âleft-wing activistâ, even though most people here donât identify as âright-wingâ but as left/âcentre-left/âcentre/âlibertarian. Not to mention that whilst most people here are not pro-Trump, probably a small minority are, and they can strong downvote if they want to, and if you get no upvotes, that means low Karma even if most people arenât bothered by what you said. Also, I think the Musk Nazi salute thing reads as âsilly media bullshitâ even to a lot of people who donât like Trump, because they donât think Musk is a âreal fascistâ*. Musk probably tends to get (too much of) the benefit of the doubt round here, because he shares a lot of preoccupations with the futurist, existential risk wing of EA, and because he is idolized in Silicon Valley as a great man (something that predates his public turn to the far-right.)
*(I think Musk is a real fascist, but I still kind of feel like that, because I donât think he was actually signaling that he secretly loves Hitler, he was just trying to offend for shits and giggles. Very obnoxious, but not necessarily a sign that he is secretly working towards some sort of Nazi-style regime behind the scenes.)
FTX was late in 2022, but nonetheless 2022 already shows most of the drop in new donors.
Is there any pattern of behaviour that couldnât be interpreted as maximizing utility for some utility function? If not, even if vNM is self-evident itâs not actually much of a constraint.
Maximize average welfare is a bad policy goal: https://ââutilitarianism.net/ââpopulation-ethics/ââ#:~:text=The%20average%20view%2C%20variable%20value,lives%20with%20positive%20well%2Dbeing.
I think other than the meat one, your along the lines of how some people are thinking, albeit described in a very polemical and pejorative way, that probably isnât particularly fair. But also, a lot of these people see any obviously and transparently âeliteâ group* as dodgy, not to mention that EAs tend to think like economists and donât want to abolish capitalism which to makes them âneoliberalâ to a lot of leftists (not unfairly I donât think, though whether âneoliberalismâ in this weak sense is obviously bad and evil is another matter). And as Titotal as already mentioned there are people kicking around the general EA scene with views on race that are to the right of what is acceptable even in some mainstream conservative contexts.
More generally, if you see the left/âright division as about whether we want to keep or get rid of current hierarchies, EAs are associated with things the top of current hierarchies-like big tech firms and Oxford University-and donât seem very ashamed about it. And then when we actually think about improving the world âhow do we get rid of current hierarchiesâ isnât usually our starting question. Also, for the sort of leftists who try and explain disagreement with leftism in terms of false consciousness, there seems to be a constant temptation to see anything that isnât explicitly about getting rid of current unjust hierarchies as a ploy to distract people from current unjust hierarchies, especially if it has billionaire backing. (Of course, many things other than EA receive money from >3 billionaires, but are not perceived as âbillionaireâ backed to the same degree.)
*that isnât humanities profs, but I would argue they arenât really âeliteâ in the same way as some EA leaders-Holden Karnofsky is married to the President of Anthropic after all, which is a hell of a lot more elite than âwent to a fancy grad school, but now teaches history at mid-ranking state uni
My guess (I have no hard data) is that many people on the left (or at least many of the minority of people on the left who have heard of EA at all) already (mostly wrongly) perceive EA as âconservativeâ or at least (much more fairly) âneoliberalâ. It could be that engaging with conservatives more increases that impression, and leads to reduce recruitment amongst left-wingers, without drawing in enough more conservative people to compensate. Iâm not saying donât engage with conservatives, just that there might be unintended consequences.
I havenât read the paper, but a simple objection is that youâre never going to be certain your actions only have finite effects, because you should only assign credence 0 to contradictions. (I donât actually know the argument for the latter, but some philosophers believe it.) So you have to deal with the very, very small but not literally 0 chance that your actions will have an infinitely good/âbad outcome because your current theories of how the universe works are wrong. However, anything with a chance of bringing about an infinitely good or bad outcome has an infinite expected value or an undefined one. So unless all expected values are undefined (which brings it own problems) you have to deal with infinite expected values, which is enough to cause trouble.
Yeah, I think this is probably right. My point isnât that there is nothing troubling or potentially dangerous about Vascoâs reasoning-thatâs clearly not true-but just that people should be careful in how they describe it, and not claim it rests on more controversial starting premises than it actually does. (I.e. in particular that it doesnât have hedonism or consequentialism as a starting premise; obviously it does make some controversial assumptions.)
Not giving to global health charities.
In any case though, I think what I mostly object to isnât the claim that if you endorse Vascoâs reasoning because you are a utilitarian that counts as ânaiveâ, but rather the use of the ânaive utilitarianâ label to imply that his reasoning:
a) is distinctively utilitarian rather than being compatible with a variety of moral views
b) commits you to being prepared to use violence/âdeception.
Iâd distinguish here between actions and reasons for action. The action is not conventionally immoral, but the reason for action is. I think this is probably a significant distinction, though how it is significant doesnât feel very clear to me.
âHow can we deny that this is what EA stands for? â
Because most/âall leaders would disavow it, including Nick Beckstead, who I imagine wrote the founding document you mean-indeed heâs already disavowed it-and we donât personally control Elon, whether or not he considers himself EA? And also, EAs, including some quite aggressively un-PC ones like Scott Alexander and Matthew Adelstein/âBenthamâs Bulldog have been pushing back strongly against the aid cuts/âthe America First agenda behind them?
Having said that, it definitely reduced my opinion of Will MacAskill, or at least his political judgment, that he tried to help SBF get in on Elonâs twitter purchase, since I think Elonâs fascist leanings were pretty obvious even at that point. And I agree we can ask whether EA ideas influence Musk in a bad direction, whether or not EAs themselves approve of the direction he is going in.