Awesome article! I do have a small piece of feedback to offer, though.
Interestingly, no notable historical group has combined both the genocidal and suicidal urges.
No historical group has combined both genocidal and suicidal actions, but that may be because of technological constraints. If we had had nukes widely available for millennia, how many groups do you think would have blown up their own cities?
Without sufficiently destructive technology, it takes a lot more time and effort to completely wipe out large groups of people. Usually some of them survive, and there’s a bloody feud for the next 10 generations. It’s rare to win sufficiently thoroughly that the group can then commit mass suicide without the culture they attempted genocide against coming back in a generation or two.
There have, of course, been plenty of groups willing to fight to the death. How many of them would have pressed a domesday button if they could?
I actually think most historical groups wanted to vanquish the enemy, but not destroy either themselves or the environment to the point at which it’s no longer livable. This is one of the interesting things that shifts to the foreground when thinking about agents in the context of existential risks. As for people fighting to the death, often this was done for the sake of group survival, where the group is the relevant unit here. (Thoughts?)
Awesome article! I do have a small piece of feedback to offer, though.
No historical group has combined both genocidal and suicidal actions, but that may be because of technological constraints. If we had had nukes widely available for millennia, how many groups do you think would have blown up their own cities?
Without sufficiently destructive technology, it takes a lot more time and effort to completely wipe out large groups of people. Usually some of them survive, and there’s a bloody feud for the next 10 generations. It’s rare to win sufficiently thoroughly that the group can then commit mass suicide without the culture they attempted genocide against coming back in a generation or two.
There have, of course, been plenty of groups willing to fight to the death. How many of them would have pressed a domesday button if they could?
I actually think most historical groups wanted to vanquish the enemy, but not destroy either themselves or the environment to the point at which it’s no longer livable. This is one of the interesting things that shifts to the foreground when thinking about agents in the context of existential risks. As for people fighting to the death, often this was done for the sake of group survival, where the group is the relevant unit here. (Thoughts?)