A game of angels and devils
TL;DR: On the surface, many problems in the world seem more like inspired evil than unfortunate accident.
Every now and then I hear some conspiracy fanatic claim that all the greatest problems in the world are the result of inspired evil instigated by a handful of shadowy figures, and I will quietly shake my head in wonder: How silly and immature, and how very convenient for them, to blame the evils of the world on a handful of sinister individuals! I feel similarly about those who insist on the existence of a devil, or “a sinister force of negative energy” as the new-age types tend to put it, who they deem responsible for mucking things up for humanity. I find it amazing that even those who discard their belief in god will often hold on to their belief in a devil, as the one responsible for the world’s problems. As if humanity needs the help! This quote from The Gulag Archipelago comes to mind:
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Or, perhaps more commonly known, Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” And I still feel this way: Human stupidity is so commonplace that it is surely a better explanation than actual malice, which seems much rarer. Yet recently, something happened which caused me to reconsider this position somewhat, during a conversation with a friend late one evening when we were waiting for the tram to arrive.
“Let’s play a game of angels and devils”, I said on a whim. “One of us plays the part of the angel, and his task is to come up with ways to improve the world in the most efficient way possible. The other plays the part of the devil, and his job is to make things as difficult for humanity as possible. The goal of the game is to see who comes up with the best ideas to further their cause.” The game did not really head anywhere, since we only had a few minutes, but I found the suggestions we came up with for the devil quite interesting.
We decided that the most important task to be accomplished by the devil in order to maximize human misery was to prevent any progress from occurring on the part of humanity, since we are both what you might call futurists. This meant first and foremost that education needed to be discouraged at all costs. Having just read part of predictably irrational, and with some other psychology texts firmly in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that the best way to discourage education might be to make it a chore. As Dan Ariely pointed out, people’s valuation of a good is very strongly influenced by the way it is treated: Setting an outrageous price for a good could actually create a demand for it, as seen with his example of black pearls. Similarly, it was noted in Freakonomics that imposing a (fairly low) fine for being late in bringing one’s child to a daycare center would actually cause parents to perceive a lower social stigma to doing so, thereby encouraging it.
In my role as a devil, I couldn’t help but notice what a fine job had already been done to discourage children from learning: By making it mandatory, the powers that be had managed to transform education from a privilege (as it was considered to be in the past, if elderly people are to be believed) to a chore. Not only that, but in taking away the ability of teachers to punish children in any other way, homework became the penalty of choice: “Hand in your essay on history in time, or else you will have to write two essays on history!” Not only had education become a chore, it had become a punishment to be meted out! What amazing ingenuity! And if that weren’t enough, by locking an overly large group of students into a relatively small compartment, the students naturally developed a primitive society complete with harsh pecking order and all the horror that implies (Paul Graham’s why nerds are unpopular illustrates this nicely). Of course, it is not too difficult to imagine the situation being made even worse: A truly diabolical mind would encourage complete indoctrination of children, with harsh physical punishment meted out by sadistic and frustrated teachers, as seen in some of the more primitive societies in the world. But in a western society that doesn’t allow anything too obviously evil, I find my devilish self in awe at how diabolically subtle and yet cruelly effective the current system already is at discouraging education and dispensing misery in equal measure. If I had designed the system myself, I would be justly proud.
And it’s not just the western educational system that gives off the impression of fiendish design. If the march of reason is my greatest enemy, then surely I in my role as devil would want to impede progress as much as possible by creating a mental framework that actively hinders any progress from occurring. What better invention for this purpose than faith? The notion of faith, the idea that it is somehow good to hold a proposition to be true, is surely the very anti-thesis of reason. “Believe what I say, or else you are wicked!” It is as if religion is a virus that was intentionally designed to curb any discussion and prevent any progress from taking place. I can easily imagine myself as devil shopping around in the lower levels of hell, muttering darkly to myself about how I need to stop those dang human kids from having reasonable discussions before it is too late and they discover the scientific method, when I chance upon this product: “Instant dark age, just add faith! This mental virus has been perfectly honed to maximize misery, and has even inoculated itself against the only thing that can destroy it!” With such a sales pitch, I would soon be convinced that I found the solution to all my problems, and I would go home with one “faithotron 2000” (including free trial religion). I’d probably hum a merry tune as I went to work, as well.
And what of politics? As devil, I’d find nothing more deliciously evil than having humans inflict misery upon each other, and it’s much more efficient than having to do it myself all the time. However, I can’t just have a group of Satanists actively hurt people; they’d be easily identified and killed, as illustrated in the first quote of this post. So what I’d need, clearly, is some system that justifies hurting others. Politics are great for this! Just have some people like Ayn Rand spread ideas like unmitigated greed being good, and presto! You get a whole bunch of people who now feel justified in spending all of their combined human ingenuity to hurting each other in an attempt to get ahead in society. They get more evil done together than I ever could by myself, and they are even supported in doing so by the very people who are oppressed the most! How wonderfully elegant! And what about the notion of nationalism, which causes people to hurt each other simply for being born in a different country or culture than their own? Brilliant! The notion of status, which causes people to aggressively compete with each other in a zero sum game? Lovely! The list of things that seem designed purely to inflict misery goes on and on.
Am I saying that there is a literal devil out there responsible for these things? Of course not. Nor am I saying that somewhere out there evil people are indeed committing insidious deeds just for the heck of it. But I did gain more sympathy for the point of view that many problems in the world really look like they are the result of malevolent intent, if you just kind of squint and blur out the details a little. If nothing else, I find the thought experiment a very interesting one.
So, what do you lot here on Less Wrong think? Is this post insightful, or am I merely cherry picking examples and interpreting them to suit my needs? What evils would you commit as devil? Do you want to see more posts from me in this trend or not? Please let me know what you think.
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- 's comment on Inferential silence by (28 Sep 2013 2:50 UTC; -2 points)
Well, step one would be to convince a team of rationalists to come up with ideas to maximize misery… :P
I think that when choosing examples of misery causing things, your mind went first to examples of misery causing things which you come across in daily life. The reason i reach this conclusion is that your “devil” isn’t nearly evil enough. There have been actual, real-world devils who have done worse than your imaginary one. If you had lived in a society more plagued by real-world devils, you might have imagined something more sinister.
It is an interesting game though.
Even a dreary educational system generally results in literacy. And how will you crush the next education reformer who comes along?
In the real world, the most effective ways to discourage education have been to replace education with propaganda, randomized violence against schools and schoolchildren, and economic conditions which make education impossible. The first two have been employed on purpose by various groups. Although, I suppose the first method does require that the “devil” be some sort of position of political power, all the second method requires is a small band of decentralized thugs. As for the third method, a reasonably wealthy person could probably economically unbalance a small third world country if they were smart about it.
These methods aren’t even targeted for misery maximization—they are just means to an end. If your goal is specifically to cause misery, there are even more effective ways. If anyone comes up with anything that seems truly effective, I suggest not sharing it online on the off-chance that someone happens upon it and tries!
I would centralize all education, and let the bureaucrats decide everything. Then I would set incentives to the bureaucrats so that they have nothing to fear by keeping the status quo.
(But I guess a truly evil-maximizing devil would instead invent a religion that tells people to torture all educational reformers to death. The status quo could be made sacred, literally.)
Bureaucrats aren’t evil, though. They’d be pro-social enough to let obviously good and obviously popular ideas go through.
That would be effective, but it’s also stretching the scope and specificity of the devil’s powers beyond what any human has possessed, ever.
To laugh or cry—that is the question.
How about I just suggest you read 1984?
I have heard biologists speak of the “illusion of design,” that is, features that we all know developed naturally but reached so elegant a state that they make you feel they were made with a purpose in mind. The evolution of social attitudes and customs appears to follow a similar pattern, but it raises the question of why our society didn’t evolve to maximize happiness instead of maximizing oppression, which appears to have been the designer’s aim all along.
This is cute, but, as you admit, not actually true and probably not very useful either.
There are fairly easy ways to screw things up that people don’t do; the “Beltway Sniper” created a huge disruption and lots of fear with relatively little effort, but there haven’t been any copycats that I know of. For some reason, terrorists insist on using bombs instead, which are flashier but don’t actually produce as much actual fear.
That seems unsurprising to me, given that nobody actually calls themselves a “terrorist”. The tendency to call anyone a terrorist if they blow something up, merely because “terrorist” is the worst insult we have in our vocabulary, is what causes this confusion, I feel.
Gwern has some interesting points about how “terrorism” is not really about terror: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
You might like C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters which are written as a series of letters from a Senior Tempter to his apprentice. It takes the same approach as your thought experiment, but in the context of day to day moral life of an individual. And, as in your example, a lot of the best parts for me was in recognizing the cleverness/efficiency of a devilish technique and then realizing I was currently doing it to myself!
Would you care to elaborate on which techniques you were using, for those of us who might wish to recognize it in ourselves?
Well, this helped me kill a lot of trivial items from my RSS reader:
And this helps me notice if, when I’m trying to decide how to act, I keep thinking only about me or about abstractions and have ended up very different from the person I might have the chance to serve:
Very interesting. I should probably put that book somewhat higher on my reading list.
As per Hanlon’s razor you mention, malice and stupidity look very much alike from the outside, so your musings do not count as evidence. You have to analyze each case from the inside. For example, the Libor scandal is an example of malevolence, while the much more harmful subprime lending crisis was due to poor decision-making. Similarly, the continuing copyright extension was largely due to the Disney’s lobbying (I’m simplifying here), while the unwieldy patent system just happened. You can find similar examples in technology, politics, culture and everywhere else you look.
Yet somehow it didn’t stop science from being invented by Christians.
Because they fooled themselves into believing that you can scientifically prove God?
This is the danger of having an incorrect model of the world: you may work hard to achieve your goals just to find out that you actually destroyed them. The people who worked hard on creating a scientific model that could prove God, created a scientific model that actually made God hypothesis unnecessary.
The current education system in Europe does a much better job at making education unpopular than at actually preventing those who may positively impact technology and society in the future from acquiring the necessary education to do so. Turning education into a chore is merely an annoyance for anyone involved, but doesn’t actually hold back technological advance in any way.
If I was the devil, I would try to restrict internet access for as many people as possible. As long as you have internet, traditional education isn’t really needed for humanity to advance technologically.
Also, does the devil win if humanity goes extinct? Because in that case I would instead try to make the best education available for free to all children, and focus on getting a few Satanists in positions where you get to push red buttons. Since the devil is traditionally displayed as persuasive and manipulative to the point that intelligent and well-educated people tend to more receptive to his offers than normal folk, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Just imagine a few Hitlers with modern nuclear ICBMs.
Never heard of Hanlon’s razor before, but I think it makes much more sense if you replace stupidity with indifference.
Also, indifference (of most people) should always be the null hypothesis when predicting what happens.
The Wit and Wisdom of Quirinus Quirrell
I feel as though if you want to make more (posts, discussion, what have you) out of this thought experiment you need to define the goals and powers of the angel and devil much more exactly.
The examples you’ve given of the things that strike you as similar to an imaginary devil’s manipulations don’t seem so to me. Your devil is interested in slowing down humanity’s progress (why? Shouldn’t it be steering us off a cliff instead of applying the breaks?) and it’s able to modify human thought. If I think of what the world would look like with such a creature I don’t think of the modern world, I think of an uninhabited wasteland. Instead of mucking around with faith and nationalism it installed a time delayed urge to suicide.
This post seems to contain a lot of rationalist applause lights. ( are not just wrong, they are EVIL. If those individuals who believed in the devil were right they’d be his patsies...nyuk nyuk nyuk.) But I think the base premise needs more refinement.
I meant more posts from me in general, since this is my first article on this site. As for why the devil would hinder social progress: allowing humans access to nuclear weapons while preventing reasonable discussion actually seems to me a pretty good way to achieve exactly the wasteland you describe. (Obviously this though experiment assumes the ‘devil’ has no actual supernatural powers, since that would make the exercise pointless)
I have no idea what you mean with your last paragraph.
Somehow displays of Ayn Rand Derangement Syndrome still surprise me. And it still surprises me that no one else will call anyone on it around here.
The author should be ashamed to have written this, and the rest of you should be ashamed to have let it pass without comment.
I didn’t call it out because I’m not at all familiar with Rand’s philosophy, and while Sophronius’s characterization does read like a caricature, it’s a caricature that is pretty common in the (primarily left-wing) circles I frequent.
I would have appreciated your call-out a lot more if you had explained what is wrong with Sophronius’s description, rather than immediately ascending to the meta level.
Shouldn’t that give you pause? Give left wing people pause?
There is a general pattern on the left of attributing evil motives to their opponents as opposed to understanding their positions. (A comment supported by Haidt’s research). But Rand, in not just disagreeing but rejecting the moral premises of the left, seems to have made herself their absolute bogeyman. I can’t think of anyone who receives the same level of lasting hatred and abuse, and most all of it displaying a complete ignorance of what she said, with the latest here a glaring case in point.
I didn’t explain further about Objectivism because you shouldn’t need to know the details to recognize this as a drive by character assassination, and it seems you didn’t.
And yes, it happens all the time in some circles. Isn’t that all the more reason to point it out?
Defend Ayn Rand if you will, but attaching a disdainful term to people who hold a view you oppose and insisting that anyone who defends that view should be ashamed is not a good way to hold an argument.
Edit: This is such a poisonous viewpoint you’re advocating that I am amazed Less Wrong has not downvoted it into oblivion. “Anyone who says something bad about my favourite author should be ashamed of themselves and then shamed by others”. Really? And then my post explaining why I wrote that sentence gets downvoted to −6 instead? Really, Less Wrong? Really?
How terribly rude of me to criticize your tremendous civility in insisting that Rand and those who agree with her are
Obviously I did not handle the issue in depth in my post, given that it was an off-handed example, but I thought it would be pretty uncontroversial that Ayn Rand’s work has been used to justify crony capitalism. I seem to recall many of the republican candidates (including Paul Ryan) use it to justify their positions. And I remember reading a post by Yudkowsky who downright called objectivism a cult.
Btw, I see that someone just went and downvoted every one of my posts in this thread; was that you?
When you say stuff like this, to a person who has read Rand you sound like a creationist blaming Darwin for racism and ethnic cleansing. Rand was a proponent of peaceful, honest, mutually beneficial human interactions, not of a “might-makes-right” philosophy. Among other things, Atlas Shrugged features a critique of crony capitalism.
(Disclosure: I have not downvoted you. I am not an Objectivist), but I have read just about everything Rand wrote and am probably more sympathetic to her ideas than the average Less Wronger.)
That post also contained an explanation why. It listed specific things Ayn Rand did wrong. (She admired a philosopher from two millenia ago, but ignored recent research related to her central topics. She wanted to be rational, but didn’t know how exactly, and thus couldn’t teach her followers. So she made “rationality” an applause light, and her followers admired her, but didn’t know how—or even aspire—to surpass her.) And there are also a few nice things in the article, when deserved.
Compared with that, you merely did a drive-by shooting. (Which does not contribute to a reasonable discussion.)
EDIT: Connotations disclaimer: I listed a summary of criticism by Eliezer to show that Eliezer provided specific criticism in his article. It does not mean that I agree with all of it. It means that I support that style of debate, as opposed to the drive-by shooting in this article.
There were circles of dysfunction about Rand, the worst in the center where she was the Queen bee of her coterie of intimates. I wouldn’t confuse the problems of her philosophy with the social problems of a group of hangers on to a wealthy and famous woman with an ideology to spread.
Even in the philosophy itself, there are Peikoff and the “closed system” Objectivists who believe that Objectivism was a completed truth, to “open system” Objectivists like David Kelley who do intend to revise, extend, and surpass Rand.
And for the rank and file Objectivists, I’ve known a few and none of them thought Rand was always right and not to be surpassed.
Do you see how you went from character assassination of Rand, to character assassination of those who downvoted you, to character assassination of me. Is that what you consider “terribly mature”?
And no, I didn’t downvote all your posts, just the original and your first reply to me, which one should expect given my disapproving responses.
Maybe your best just wasn’t good enough, and that is not a moral failing of the LW community.
You already have way too much sympathy for this view.
I officially don’t understand how less wrong rates articles. I have done my best to write an intelligent, thought provoking post, and spent quite a few hours on it. As far as I can tell it is well written, well founded with references to other material, I don’t make any obvious logical errors as far as I can see… and yet I get zero karma for it. Why? Plenty of people have commented on it, so it is not as if the topic is uninteresting.
I mean, I get that it’s not a perfect post, I suppose I could work it out some more, but is Less Wrong really trying to tell me that they are indifferent as to whether I continue posting articles or not? As in, this article provides zero value? Because that seems… extremely harsh. I spent several hours doing my best on writing a high-level post and get zero points while a single off-handed post saying that Soviet Russia wasn’t a haven of critical thinking gets at least one point. Polymathwannabe writes a short comment on there being an illusion of design (interesting but nothing new) and gets seven points while I get zero for a well written article that took up a big chunk of my day… WHY? I don’t get it.
Am I missing something here? Is there some glaring flaw in my post that makes it useless and I am not seeing it? Or is Less Wrong just ridiculously negative about articles to the point where getting as many downvotes as I get upvotes is not unusual for what is surely a well written and at least somewhat thought provoking post?
I understand your frustration. It’s not fun being voted down.
The baseline isn’t zero—it’s the the opportunity cost of reading the article. Would readers have preferred reading your article to another random article? If you don’t cross that threshold, many of your readers will suffer a net loss. It’s a high bar, especially with many great articles around.
Readers outnumber article writers hundreds to one. Optimizing for quality reading is more important than producing more articles.
I think some readers at least already take that into account when deciding how to vote.
You didn’t deliver on your thought experiment premise and ended up doing a political rant against your favorite unlikable targets instead.
it’s a bunch of weird speculation about nothing useful. I read it and was like, shrugs? You say you’re not trying to convince us that the devil actually exists, but What’s your actual point?
Your article isn’t actually well-written, however much time you may have put into it. It doesn’t convey whatever you think the point is effectively and it isn’t particularly relevant to most of what what we talk about here. You do indeed cherry-pick a lot (as you seem to have noticed.)
FWIW, I read your summary and the first paragraph, decided I wasn’t interested in the article, and moved on.
Do you think I should have done something different?
If so, why?
I won’t reply to everyone individually, since I don’t want to swarm the site with posts about me, so I’ll just reply to everyone here. Thanks to those people who took time to point out what they objected to in my post. I especially appreciate the posts in this thread by Ishaan, Solipsist and such who gave valuable commentary and criticism while still being respectful. I’ve also come to appreciate that my biggest fault was perhaps the length of the post, which caused people to expect more than a simple thought experiment could deliver. I will try to keep the information density higher in any future posts, if I ever feel up to it again.
I must admit I am still surprised by the reaction to that one line about Ayn Rand, which I thought was largely irrelevant to the main point of the post. I definitely don’t see my post as a political rant in any way, as politics itself was merely used as an example. I suspect my fault here was that I had underestimated the apparent libertarian sympathies on this forum, and so I had not couched the political reference with sufficient disclaimers (Ayn Rand is not necessarily responsible for the behaviour of her followers, much like Richard Dawkins wasn’t responsible for the reaction to The Selfish Gene, etc. This doesn’t change the fact that both were used for political ends.)
I still feel that the reaction to my post asking why the response was so negative, whereupon some people went and downvoted every one of my posts without saying why, is incredibly unhelpful. I suspect that these people are an immature minority who would rather “punish” people who disagree with their political affiliation than actually engage with others in reasonable discussion. Fortunately I am not too bothered by karma, I was just confused and frustrated as to what the heck was going on.
No, your biggest flaw is that the thought experiment amounts to little more than an excuse to attack hated enemies. Specifically it looks like: if [philosophy you don’t approve of] can be associated (however tenuously) with [bad thing X], I as the devil will promote said philosophy. If [philosophy I approve of] is widely associated with [bad thing Y], I as the devil will seek to discredit said philosophy by associating it with [bad thing Y].
Then why did you include it? See this post by EY where he advises against using political examples to illustrate not political points.
Notice your attempt at guilt by association there. You are trying to associate the behavior of Ayn Rand’s followers with some of the bad behavior of people who read The Selfish Gene, without explicitly calling said behaviour bad, or providing any examples of bad behavior. All you mention is that she was “used for political ends”, well, duh, she was explicitly trying to be political. Another example is here were you appear to be trying to implicate Paul Ryan with supporting crony capitalism, without explicitly saying that he supports it (which would be false).
This is all hindsight; pointing out the greatest sources of misery in the world, whatever they happen to be, and calling them a devious plot.
It seems to me that you could write the same article whether we were living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (“what better way to cause ceaseless misery than ZOMBIES?”) or in a near-utopia (“perfect bliss ruined by dust specks? how wonderfully efficient!”).
Yes :-)
10 seconds of thought produced this: make it so goodness/pleasure/happiness in the world is a zero-sum game—the only way you can get happier is by making someone else unhappier. And make the total pool of goodness/happiness slowly decrease over time.
Can it be made a negative-sum game instead?
Please don’t take this post too literally. Of course a Yudkowsky styled creative devil would be… Worse. Much worse. I merely meant to highlight how things like faith on the surface really look designed to be maximally awful, though of course they arise from natural processes. It’s a thought experiment meant to make you consider things in a different light, and to make you gain sympathy for those who attribute these things to malicious forces.
Oh. Hehe … personally, judging by my emotional responses, I already instinctively attribute things like missing the bus and bumping into things to malicious forces, so I totally have sympathy for people who intellectually as well as instinctively anthropomorphize everything.
I saw an article once about how the tendency to anthropomorphize varies among individuals, and this is supposed to be correlated to other things. I’ll see if i can dig it up...
I would be interested in seeing this, if you find it.
Funny then how deliberate all-out attempts to suppress and eradicate faith are historically associated with places like Stalinist Russia.
Funny how if I were a devil, and I tried to make the world miserable through faith, and I were getting concerned about those dangerous anti-faith ideas, I’d try to create a horrible political regime based on suppressing faith ;)
Stalin’s soviet Russia suppressed religion, not faith. It wasn’t exactly a haven for critical thinking.
Personally I agree, but if I were a devil I’d just fall in love with the kind of double-think you’d need to . After all, I wouldn’t actually want to suppress faith, I’d just want to create in people’s minds associations between atheism and nice places like Stalinist Russia. Phrases like “scientific socialism” would just send nice little shivers of pleasure down any nice devil’s spine, wouldn’t they?
It’s all mind projection. If you examine the world, you can find all shades of good and evil, and indifference in between.
Honestly, I don’t feel like the game has enough constraints to be interesting.
A related game is to think of ways you could accomplish maximal harm not as some kind of puppetmaster who choses educational, philosophical, or political ways-people-do-things, but as who you actually are in real life. I have a few terrible ideas, I’m not going to share them though.
I think it’s a lot easier to break things in real life than to protect or fix them. I don’t think it would take that many effective anti-altruists to destroy the world. In fact, I bet one could do it.
That’s actually my primary objection to “people are crazy, the world is mad, PCs beat NPCs at everything—” if this were the case, I would expect that we would all be dead by now. The fact that we aren’t seems to indicate that either:
PCs never want to destroy the world (this seems dubious)
The superhero movies were right—there are battles in the shadows between good and evil PCs for the fate of the world, and thanks to luck/fate/divine intervention/anthropics the good guys win all the time. (this seems absurd)
PCs aren’t as powerful as we might initially believe (this seems plausible)
For anyone who believes that, I recommend playing a computer game under conditions that they can’t save the game and they have only one attempt. And the game is chosen by someone else, and there is no manual or online walkthrough. And it’s the only game they can play, ever.
Now let’s see how often PCs would beat all the NPCs.
Actually I think I could do this for a lot of video games, if I exercised caution on a level that would make the game unfun. (if it’s an RPG for example, farming up on monsters way lower level than me until the limit of when I stop getting XP, always being the highest level allowed at that part of the storyline, etc). I bet I could even do it for a lot of dangerous puzzle games with no leveling up. I almost made it through Portal 2 without dying, and I was only playing at a level of caution that was fun.
Wait, what? I’d love to see a post describing some beliefs (especially quantity/probability and operational expected results) related to a PC/NPC split among humans (and other beings?)
I fully understand a me/not-me split. And gradiations or even quanta of multiple dimensions of effectiveness make sense. But a statement like “PCs beat NPCs at everything” doesn’t fit my model of the world at all—it’s purely a concept from fiction.
It doesn’t even hold in fiction. Many NPCs are effectively unbeatable by design. They just don’t happen to be fully engaged on achieving the goals of the protagonist.
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None have ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master
Unfortunately, a number of people on LW have this distinction.
How many PCs (of roughly the highest caliber you think exist) do you think there are who are making a desperate, extraordinary, near-lifelong effort to destroy the world (including themselves)? Even among those who are creative and convinced enough that the world should be destroyed, I think there is squeamishness and lingering deontological rules restricting most of a large sample of them, which may be all of the very small number that actually exists. It is not sociopaths who want to watch the world burn enough to actually burn it. There’re religious people who think it’s God’s will, but believing that basically disqualifies you from being strategic enough. There’re antinatalists and negative utilitarians, but they seem to be rare and not nearly committed enough to their ideas.
Basically there’s wanting to destroy the world, and there’s wanting it with every fiber of your being, such that you do not flinch away from any method of carrying it out. Some of the antinatalists I linked, balk at the idea of even forced sterilization.
How many PCs (of that caliber, for it is not the average effective altruist who could pull it off even if they turned to the dark side in my opinion), in general (whether desirous of world-destruction or not) do you think exist?
I don’t think PCs of sufficient caliber do exist, which is my point.
That’s not what I asked. I’m arguing that there aren’t enough PCs of the caliber that you think can’t destroy the world, and I think can, for the world not being destroyed to serve as strong evidence that this class of PCs can’t, when you consider how rare it is to desperately want to (as I described in my last post) destroy the world.
So I asked how many PCs of the highest caliber you think exist there are, not how many are there that can actually destroy the world, and I also asked:
Would you mind tabooing “PCs”.
Not many. I’d be surprised if there were more than one or two. But if they’re powerful enough, it would only take one or two throughout the course of recent history (and maybe earlier).
I think it might be more useful to instead look at world political order rather than the world itself. It is uncontroversially the case that there are a great many people who consider themselves enemies of the United States and wish to destroy or destabilize it, for instance. Has there never been a true PC among this group?
You have convinced me that destroying America, but not the rest of the world is hard. But I think destroying the world is now a lot easier than it ever was, and it is easier than destroying a particular power and leaving your own country intact. I think there are (or have been) some true PCs that wanted to destroy The US, but failed. I don’t think any of them (at least in recent enough history) wanted to destroy humankind though.
Usually I am very wary of arguments that spit in the face of large numbers. But I seriously think 10B humans is not enough to find such a person among them.
I think you’re cherry-picking. Faith is undergoing an unprecedented decline, and has been for the last century or so; society takes time to adjust, but it’s happening. There are countries without compulsory education, but it seems to leave them worse off overall. Zero-sum competition is a commonsense outcome of evolution, but politics has matured to the point where we in the west can largely ignore it and get on with their lives (end of history). And there are enough areas where we seem luckier than one would reasonably expect. Above all, progress is happening.
As a devil I would probably try and associate more good things with atrocities, to get people to stop trying them. The holocaust puts people off reasonable eugenics; I’d make sure there was a holocaust committed by e.g. a culturally integrated organization. Or maybe try and fragment language more. Once you get people to divide into in-groups and out-groups they do the rest of the work for you.
The world is a process of elimination, whether it be planets outside the habitable zone, animals without enough positive adaptations to stay alive long enough to make more offspring than their peers, or factors in the contradictions in human psychology that result in us harming each others: The things you identify as evil are precisely the most effective methods on account of having survived up until now; they have not yet been eliminated. You might think of adaptation as random (stupid) in basis, with elimination processes getting rid of the bad bits bit by bit.
The truth is, you’re not more evil than the margin of chance. ;)