Trigger warning: discussion of white racism (read: “Please don’t ban me.”)
I think censorship plays an important role in the memetic environment—a meme that is fit will be less successful if censored. An obvious case would be anti-CCP ideologies in China. Closer to home, any meme which big tech companies all decide should be banned will reach far fewer eyes and ears.
One object-level example of a fit-but-censored meme is racist white nationalism.
The reason I bring it up is this: I think its adherents would strongly reject let’s-all-die-ism. It is certainly not pro-all-humans but is at least pro-some-humans. Their slogan, called “the 14 words” from “14/88″ is literally: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
(disclaimer: I am not suggesting I think trying to secretly convert white AI researchers into racists is the best plan to save the world; just a relevant thought and perhaps an instructive example of an anti-collective-suicide meme advantaged by aspects of human instinct and psychology (regardless of its truth value).)
Including AI in your moral circle could be framed as a symptom of extending your moral circle “too wide”. The opposite is restriction of your moral circle, like seeing your own family’s wellbeing as more important than <outgroup>’s. Any type of thought like this which puts AI in the outgroup, and appeals to the good-ness of the ingroup, would produce similar will-to-exist.
Making a connection between racism and AI successionism seems likely to stoke argument and make shouting angrily about it more likely, but I am skeptical the results of that shouting could be relied upon to come to the correct conclusion. I can see loose thematic similarities but currently, I think it would be a better strategy NOT to try to popularize those similarities by making a bigger deal of them than is warranted.
Ok, but, take it a step further. The AI can be chauvanist too. Isn’t it strange to be more afraid of AI memeplexes about co-evolution and integration than about trying to bail out the ocean by censoring all memeplexes that don’t comport with human chauvanism? It’s one step from human chauvanism to AI chauvanism. They just are isomorphic. You can’t emote enough about the human special sauce to make this not true. And you can’t prevent an AI from noticing. This just seems like a really bad plan.
This is also just begging the question about the fitness justification of white nationalism. In an American context it’s pretty explicitly a coalitional strategy between different white races mostly adopted by the races who, under late 19th or early 20th century racial conceptions, would have been considered most marginally white. It is just as plausible the fitness function is in ensuring access to and protection from socially dominant white races for less socially dominant white races. You could even get into some Albion’s Seed style racist evopsych and make gestures at the ancestral need for such scheming in the historical borderer population under conditions of constant war between the English and Scottish.
The aesthetics of strategies of this shape are unattractive to most rationalists, since it relies on evoking tribalism. Rationalism instructs against tribalism as one of the first steps toward thinking well (as it should!), but when stoking tribalism in others is actually a winning strategy, the internalised moralism of non-tribalism can override the rational pursuit of winning in favor of the irrational pursuit of rationalism as its own end.
I think worlds in which we survive are likely ones in which “anger toward the outgroup” among the general public is mobilized as a blunt weapon against the pro-ASI-development memeplex. I think we are likely to see much more of this humanist angle in the coming year.
Blind hatred between human tribes is indeed irrational—fighting wars instead of constructively cooperating for mutual benefit, and so on.
Deliberately aggravating existing anger or hatred towards AI as an “outgroup” could be one strategy.
But what my comment was focusing on was the opposite—that love of the ingroup directly implies protecting that ingroup’s continued existence. That is all the 14 words actually say, and it’s what words like “white pride” fundamentally mean: an ingroup focus.
(This does not imply working towards the nonexistence of all outgroups. “I love my family and want them to live on,” does not mean “I hate all other families and want them all to die.”)
If your goal is to convince humans to want to not die, and if the human genetic space comes with natural built-in ingroups for us to instinctually love and protect, then actively opposing and suppressing these extremely convenient instincts is irrational.
Feeling affinity toward one’s own race is a trait that must be socialized in, however, and I think it’s a counterproductive trait to be inculcating in people; as compared to a situation where people receive no such training in childhood, I think the situation where they have lots would have significantly more ethnic tension, which in turn hampers cooperation on goals like pausing AI.
There’s some hypothetical version of white pride that matches this description but getting from literally anywhere in history including now to there would be a heroic process. I mean yeah, there is something charming about Rockwell dialoguing with Malcolm X. But remember that in the picture, they were wearing the uniform of a regime that butchered over 11 million captive civilians and killed probably as many civilians in other places through war. That wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. That reflected, at the most charitable, the conviction that such actions were within the realm of permissible strategies. And even if you’re willing to devil’s advocate that, which sure, why not, we’re in hell, why rule anything out a priori, it with almost equivalent certainty reflected the conviction that such actions were permissible as a response to the conditions of Weimar Germany, which is just not true, and a conviction immediately worthy of violence.
Trigger warning: discussion of white racism (read: “Please don’t ban me.”)
I think censorship plays an important role in the memetic environment—a meme that is fit will be less successful if censored. An obvious case would be anti-CCP ideologies in China. Closer to home, any meme which big tech companies all decide should be banned will reach far fewer eyes and ears.
One object-level example of a fit-but-censored meme is racist white nationalism.
The reason I bring it up is this: I think its adherents would strongly reject let’s-all-die-ism. It is certainly not pro-all-humans but is at least pro-some-humans. Their slogan, called “the 14 words” from “14/88″ is literally: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
(disclaimer: I am not suggesting I think trying to secretly convert white AI researchers into racists is the best plan to save the world; just a relevant thought and perhaps an instructive example of an anti-collective-suicide meme advantaged by aspects of human instinct and psychology (regardless of its truth value).)
Including AI in your moral circle could be framed as a symptom of extending your moral circle “too wide”. The opposite is restriction of your moral circle, like seeing your own family’s wellbeing as more important than <outgroup>’s. Any type of thought like this which puts AI in the outgroup, and appeals to the good-ness of the ingroup, would produce similar will-to-exist.
Making a connection between racism and AI successionism seems likely to stoke argument and make shouting angrily about it more likely, but I am skeptical the results of that shouting could be relied upon to come to the correct conclusion. I can see loose thematic similarities but currently, I think it would be a better strategy NOT to try to popularize those similarities by making a bigger deal of them than is warranted.
Ok, but, take it a step further. The AI can be chauvanist too. Isn’t it strange to be more afraid of AI memeplexes about co-evolution and integration than about trying to bail out the ocean by censoring all memeplexes that don’t comport with human chauvanism? It’s one step from human chauvanism to AI chauvanism. They just are isomorphic. You can’t emote enough about the human special sauce to make this not true. And you can’t prevent an AI from noticing. This just seems like a really bad plan.
This is also just begging the question about the fitness justification of white nationalism. In an American context it’s pretty explicitly a coalitional strategy between different white races mostly adopted by the races who, under late 19th or early 20th century racial conceptions, would have been considered most marginally white. It is just as plausible the fitness function is in ensuring access to and protection from socially dominant white races for less socially dominant white races. You could even get into some Albion’s Seed style racist evopsych and make gestures at the ancestral need for such scheming in the historical borderer population under conditions of constant war between the English and Scottish.
The aesthetics of strategies of this shape are unattractive to most rationalists, since it relies on evoking tribalism. Rationalism instructs against tribalism as one of the first steps toward thinking well (as it should!), but when stoking tribalism in others is actually a winning strategy, the internalised moralism of non-tribalism can override the rational pursuit of winning in favor of the irrational pursuit of rationalism as its own end.
I think worlds in which we survive are likely ones in which “anger toward the outgroup” among the general public is mobilized as a blunt weapon against the pro-ASI-development memeplex. I think we are likely to see much more of this humanist angle in the coming year.
Blind hatred between human tribes is indeed irrational—fighting wars instead of constructively cooperating for mutual benefit, and so on.
Deliberately aggravating existing anger or hatred towards AI as an “outgroup” could be one strategy.
But what my comment was focusing on was the opposite—that love of the ingroup directly implies protecting that ingroup’s continued existence. That is all the 14 words actually say, and it’s what words like “white pride” fundamentally mean: an ingroup focus. (This does not imply working towards the nonexistence of all outgroups. “I love my family and want them to live on,” does not mean “I hate all other families and want them all to die.”)
If your goal is to convince humans to want to not die, and if the human genetic space comes with natural built-in ingroups for us to instinctually love and protect, then actively opposing and suppressing these extremely convenient instincts is irrational.
Feeling affinity toward one’s own race is a trait that must be socialized in, however, and I think it’s a counterproductive trait to be inculcating in people; as compared to a situation where people receive no such training in childhood, I think the situation where they have lots would have significantly more ethnic tension, which in turn hampers cooperation on goals like pausing AI.
There’s some hypothetical version of white pride that matches this description but getting from literally anywhere in history including now to there would be a heroic process. I mean yeah, there is something charming about Rockwell dialoguing with Malcolm X. But remember that in the picture, they were wearing the uniform of a regime that butchered over 11 million captive civilians and killed probably as many civilians in other places through war. That wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. That reflected, at the most charitable, the conviction that such actions were within the realm of permissible strategies. And even if you’re willing to devil’s advocate that, which sure, why not, we’re in hell, why rule anything out a priori, it with almost equivalent certainty reflected the conviction that such actions were permissible as a response to the conditions of Weimar Germany, which is just not true, and a conviction immediately worthy of violence.