Ben—your subtext here seems to be that only lower-class violent criminals are truly ‘evil’, whereas very few middle/upper-class white-collar people are truly evil (with a few notable exceptions such as SBF or Voldemort) -- with the implications that the majority of ASI devs can’t possibly be evil in the ways I’ve argued.
I think that doesn’t fit the psychological and criminological research on the substantial overlap between psychopathy and sociopathy, and between violent and non-violent crime.
It also doesn’t fit the standard EA point that a lot of ‘non-evil’ people can get swept up in doing evil collective acts as parts of collectively evil industries, such as slave-trading, factory farming, Big Tobacco, the private prison system, etc. - but that often, the best way to fight such industries is to use moral stigmatization.
You mis-read me on the first point; I said that (something kind of like) ‘lower-class violent criminals’ are sometimes dysfunctional and bad people, but I was distinguishing that from someone more hyper competent and self-aware like SBF or Voldemort; I said that only the latter are evil. (For instance, they’ve hurt orders of magnitude more people.)
(I’m genuinely not sure what research you’re referring to – I am expect you are 100x as familiar with the literature as I am, and FWIW I’d be happy to get a pointer or two of things to read.[1])
The standard EA point is to use moral stigmatization? Even if that’s accurate, I’m afraid I no longer have any trust in EAs to do ethics well. As an example that you will be sympathetic to, lots of them have endorsed working at AI companies over the past decade (but many many other examples have persuaded me of this point).
To be clear, I am supportive of moral stigma being associated with working at AI companies. I’ve shown up to multiple protests outside the companies (and I brought my mum!). If you have any particular actions in mind to encourage me to do (I’m probably not doing as much as I could) I’m interested to hear them. Perhaps you could write a guide to how to act when dealing with people in your social scene who work on building doomsday devices in a way that holds a firm moral line while not being socially self-destructive / not immediately blowing up all of your friendships. I do think more actionable advice would be helpful.
I expect it’s the case that crime rates correlate with impulsivity, low-IQ, and wealth (negatively). Perhaps you’re saying that psychopathy and sociopathy do not correlate with social class? That sounds plausible. (I’m also not sure what you’re referring to with the violent part, my guess is that violent crimes do correlate with social class.)
Ben—your subtext here seems to be that only lower-class violent criminals are truly ‘evil’, whereas very few middle/upper-class white-collar people are truly evil (with a few notable exceptions such as SBF or Voldemort) -- with the implications that the majority of ASI devs can’t possibly be evil in the ways I’ve argued.
I think that doesn’t fit the psychological and criminological research on the substantial overlap between psychopathy and sociopathy, and between violent and non-violent crime.
It also doesn’t fit the standard EA point that a lot of ‘non-evil’ people can get swept up in doing evil collective acts as parts of collectively evil industries, such as slave-trading, factory farming, Big Tobacco, the private prison system, etc. - but that often, the best way to fight such industries is to use moral stigmatization.
You mis-read me on the first point; I said that (something kind of like) ‘lower-class violent criminals’ are sometimes dysfunctional and bad people, but I was distinguishing that from someone more hyper competent and self-aware like SBF or Voldemort; I said that only the latter are evil. (For instance, they’ve hurt orders of magnitude more people.)
(I’m genuinely not sure what research you’re referring to – I am expect you are 100x as familiar with the literature as I am, and FWIW I’d be happy to get a pointer or two of things to read.[1])
The standard EA point is to use moral stigmatization? Even if that’s accurate, I’m afraid I no longer have any trust in EAs to do ethics well. As an example that you will be sympathetic to, lots of them have endorsed working at AI companies over the past decade (but many many other examples have persuaded me of this point).
To be clear, I am supportive of moral stigma being associated with working at AI companies. I’ve shown up to multiple protests outside the companies (and I brought my mum!). If you have any particular actions in mind to encourage me to do (I’m probably not doing as much as I could) I’m interested to hear them. Perhaps you could write a guide to how to act when dealing with people in your social scene who work on building doomsday devices in a way that holds a firm moral line while not being socially self-destructive / not immediately blowing up all of your friendships. I do think more actionable advice would be helpful.
I expect it’s the case that crime rates correlate with impulsivity, low-IQ, and wealth (negatively). Perhaps you’re saying that psychopathy and sociopathy do not correlate with social class? That sounds plausible. (I’m also not sure what you’re referring to with the violent part, my guess is that violent crimes do correlate with social class.)