Interesting, this is the first time I remember reading a post on LessWrong that’s so heavy on conflict theory with a degrowth/social justice perspective. A few of the crux points are brushed aside “for another day”, which is a little disappointing.
”the grasshopper coordinated with the many unhappy ants – those who did not like the colonomy but who were trapped in it by its powerful network effects and Moloch’s usual bag of tricks. Together they circumscribed the colonomy (e.g. through culture that holds competition at bay),” this is unfortunately where my willing suspension of disbelief collapsed. From Scott’s:
Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong AI.
Everyone outside doesn’t do those things. And so the only question is whether you’ll be destroyed by foreign diseases, foreign memes, foreign armies, foreign economic competition, or foreign existential catastrophes.
As foreigners compete with you – and there’s no wall high enough to block all competition – you have a couple of choices. You can get outcompeted and destroyed. You can join in the race to the bottom. Or you can invest more and more civilizational resources into building your wall – whatever that is in a non-metaphorical way – and protecting yourself.
I can imagine ways that a “rational theocracy” and “conservative patriarchy” might not be terrible to live under, given exactly the right conditions. But you don’t get to choose exactly the right conditions. You get to choose the extremely constrained set of conditions that “capture Gnon”. As outside civilizations compete against you, your conditions will become more and more constrained.
Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out?
conflict theory with a degrowth/social justice perspective
Yea, I find myself interested in the topics LWers are interested in, but I’m disappointed certain perspectives are missing (despite them being prima facie as well-researched as the perspectives typical on LW). I suspect a bubble effect.
this is unfortunately where my willing suspension of disbelief collapsed
Yup, I suspected that last version would be the hardest to believe for LWers! I plan on writing much more in depth on the topic soon. You might be interested in Guive Assadi’s recent work on this topic (not saying he makes the story more plausible, but he does tease out some key premises/questions for its plausibility).
My only intention here was to layout the comparison that needs making (assuming you’re a consequentialist with very low discount rates etc): what’s the EV of this “once and for all” expansionist solution vs the EV of a “passing the torch” solution? And what level of risk aversion should we be evaluating this with? Neither will last forever or will be perfect. I wouldn’t so quickly dismiss the potentially ~10^5 or ~10^6 year long “passing the torch” solution over the comparatively OOMs lower certainty “once and for all” solution. Especially once I add back in the other cruxes that I couldn’t develop here (though I encourage reading the philosophical literature on it). I want to see a lot more evidence on all sides – and I think others should too.
Interesting, this is the first time I remember reading a post on LessWrong that’s so heavy on conflict theory with a degrowth/social justice perspective. A few of the crux points are brushed aside “for another day”, which is a little disappointing.
”the grasshopper coordinated with the many unhappy ants – those who did not like the colonomy but who were trapped in it by its powerful network effects and Moloch’s usual bag of tricks. Together they circumscribed the colonomy (e.g. through culture that holds competition at bay),” this is unfortunately where my willing suspension of disbelief collapsed. From Scott’s:
Thanks for reading!
Yea, I find myself interested in the topics LWers are interested in, but I’m disappointed certain perspectives are missing (despite them being prima facie as well-researched as the perspectives typical on LW). I suspect a bubble effect.
Yup, I suspected that last version would be the hardest to believe for LWers! I plan on writing much more in depth on the topic soon. You might be interested in Guive Assadi’s recent work on this topic (not saying he makes the story more plausible, but he does tease out some key premises/questions for its plausibility).
My only intention here was to layout the comparison that needs making (assuming you’re a consequentialist with very low discount rates etc): what’s the EV of this “once and for all” expansionist solution vs the EV of a “passing the torch” solution? And what level of risk aversion should we be evaluating this with? Neither will last forever or will be perfect. I wouldn’t so quickly dismiss the potentially ~10^5 or ~10^6 year long “passing the torch” solution over the comparatively OOMs lower certainty “once and for all” solution. Especially once I add back in the other cruxes that I couldn’t develop here (though I encourage reading the philosophical literature on it). I want to see a lot more evidence on all sides – and I think others should too.