Thanks for asking. I think the underlying issue here is that I’m in a period of boggling at wtf is going on with society. I have a sense that there’s a bunch of insane stuff happening all over the place. Funnily enough, one of the people who’s most sharply articulated a similar sense is Eliezer, when he wrote (I think in some glowfic) about how Earth is fractally disequilibriated, and the whole planet is made out of coordination failure.
But I think Eliezer and many rationalists maybe just take “the world is inadequate” as some kind of brute fact that doesn’t really have a clear socio-historical-political explanation. Like, we used to be able to do Manhattan projects, and now the US govt is nowhere near coordinated enough to do that, but… eh, that’s just how entropy works. Whereas it seems to me that actually it might be possible to trace the historical forces that contributed towards this, and the social principles that maintain it, and so on, to develop a fairly principled understanding of the situation.
However, this is a sufficiently ambitious project that my default strategy is to do a lot of exploration in a bunch of directions, which then leads to a lot of individual claims that people think are sloppy, which then leads to the kind of engagement that’s frustrating on both sides—where to them it feels like I’m just throwing out crazy takes, and to me it feels like they’re not trying to engage with the core ideas. (I don’t think these ideas should be sufficient to change people’s strategic frame, yet, but I do think they should be sufficient to make people confused.)
As one example: in response to this shortform, a bunch of people have commented about why they disagree-voted my previous post, how I should interpret that, and so on. But literally zero people have mentioned either my ML analogy, or the thing where Scott Alexander is calling himself a Nazi, which to me were the two most substantive parts of the shortform, that are pointing at an extremely important dynamic. So in hindsight it feels like even just mentioning my previous post derailed this one, and the move of going meta was insufficient to defuse this.
Basically I think the kind of engagement I want is more like “riff with me”, but that’s just unrealistic to expect from a community in public on controversial topics (at least without requiring me to put a level of care into phrasing things that would make it no longer “riffing” on my end).
Whereas it seems to me that actually it might be possible to trace the historical forces that contributed towards this, and the social principles that maintain it, and so on, to develop a fairly principled understanding of the situation.
As an example, I think the influence of the Soviet Union is underrated on the loss of American confidence / positive-self-conception. (Like I think it’s obvious to Europeans that WWI / WWII did a lot to destroy European confidence / positive-self-conception, but I really don’t think it had the same impact on the US, and our psychic collapse came much later and for different reasons.) This itself is hard to talk about because it’s deliberate enemy action, which includes it attempting to disguise itself / prevent consensus-creation on its existence (and source). And, like, the USSR collapsed, so how much value is there in litigating the historical source rather than the current facts?
[IMO a nontrivial amount; I think there’s a correlated updates thing where it’s worth invalidating the cache and recalculating a lot of things. But that recalculation is probably better done from the standpoint of a positive vision rather than a negative one, and that’s it’s own project...]
Thanks for asking. I think the underlying issue here is that I’m in a period of boggling at wtf is going on with society. I have a sense that there’s a bunch of insane stuff happening all over the place. Funnily enough, one of the people who’s most sharply articulated a similar sense is Eliezer, when he wrote (I think in some glowfic) about how Earth is fractally disequilibriated, and the whole planet is made out of coordination failure.
But I think Eliezer and many rationalists maybe just take “the world is inadequate” as some kind of brute fact that doesn’t really have a clear socio-historical-political explanation. Like, we used to be able to do Manhattan projects, and now the US govt is nowhere near coordinated enough to do that, but… eh, that’s just how entropy works. Whereas it seems to me that actually it might be possible to trace the historical forces that contributed towards this, and the social principles that maintain it, and so on, to develop a fairly principled understanding of the situation.
However, this is a sufficiently ambitious project that my default strategy is to do a lot of exploration in a bunch of directions, which then leads to a lot of individual claims that people think are sloppy, which then leads to the kind of engagement that’s frustrating on both sides—where to them it feels like I’m just throwing out crazy takes, and to me it feels like they’re not trying to engage with the core ideas. (I don’t think these ideas should be sufficient to change people’s strategic frame, yet, but I do think they should be sufficient to make people confused.)
As one example: in response to this shortform, a bunch of people have commented about why they disagree-voted my previous post, how I should interpret that, and so on. But literally zero people have mentioned either my ML analogy, or the thing where Scott Alexander is calling himself a Nazi, which to me were the two most substantive parts of the shortform, that are pointing at an extremely important dynamic. So in hindsight it feels like even just mentioning my previous post derailed this one, and the move of going meta was insufficient to defuse this.
Basically I think the kind of engagement I want is more like “riff with me”, but that’s just unrealistic to expect from a community in public on controversial topics (at least without requiring me to put a level of care into phrasing things that would make it no longer “riffing” on my end).
As an example, I think the influence of the Soviet Union is underrated on the loss of American confidence / positive-self-conception. (Like I think it’s obvious to Europeans that WWI / WWII did a lot to destroy European confidence / positive-self-conception, but I really don’t think it had the same impact on the US, and our psychic collapse came much later and for different reasons.) This itself is hard to talk about because it’s deliberate enemy action, which includes it attempting to disguise itself / prevent consensus-creation on its existence (and source). And, like, the USSR collapsed, so how much value is there in litigating the historical source rather than the current facts?
[IMO a nontrivial amount; I think there’s a correlated updates thing where it’s worth invalidating the cache and recalculating a lot of things. But that recalculation is probably better done from the standpoint of a positive vision rather than a negative one, and that’s it’s own project...]