“On Green” is one of the LessWrong essays which I most often refer to in my own thoughts (along with “Deep Atheism”, which I think of as a partner to “On Green”). Many essays I absorb into my thinking, metabolize the contents, but don’t often think of the essay itself. But this one is different. The essay itself has stuck in my head as the canonical pointer to… well, Green, or whatever one wants to call the thing Joe is gesturing at.
When I first read the essay, my main thought was “Wow, Joe did a really good job pointing to a thing that I do not like. Screw Green. And thank you Joe for pointing so well at this thing I do not like.”. And when the essay has come up in my thoughts, it’s mostly been along similar lines: I encounter something in the wild, I’m like “ugh screw this thing… wait, why am I all ‘ugh’ at this, and why do other people like it?… oh it’s Carlsmith!Green, I see”.
But rereading the essay today, I’m struck by different thoughts than a year ago.
Green = Oxytocin Feeling?
Let’s start with the headline gesturing:
What is green?
Sabien discusses various associations: environmentalism, tradition, family, spirituality, hippies, stereotypes of Native Americans, Yoda. Again, I don’t want to get too anchored on these particular touch-points. At the least, though, green is the “Nature” one. Have you seen, for example, Princess Mononoke? Very green (a lot of Miyazaki is green). And I associate green with “wholesomeness” as well (also: health). In children’s movies, for example, visions of happiness—e.g., the family at the end of Coco, the village in Moana—are often very green.
Today, reading that, I think “oxytocin?”. That association probably isn’t obvious to most of you; oxytocin is mostly known as the hormone associated with companionate love, which looks sort of like wholesomeness and happy villages but not so much like nature. So let me fill in the gap here.
Most people feel companionate love toward their family and (often metaphorical) village. Some people—usually more hippie-ish types—report feeling the same thing towards all of humanity. Even more hippie-ish types go further, feeling the same thing toward animals, or all living things, or the universe as a whole. Generally, the phrase which cues me in is usually “deep connection”—when people report feeling a deep connection to something, that usually seems to cash out to the oxytocin-feeling.
So when I read the post, I think “hmm, maybe Joe is basically gesturing at the oxytocin-feeling, i.e. companionate love”. That sure does at least rhyme with a lot of other pieces of the post.
… and that sure would explain why I get a big ol’ “ugh” toward Green; I already knew I’m probably genetically unable to feel oxytocin. To me, this whole Green thing is a cluster of stuff which seem basically-unremarkable in their own right, but for some reason other people go all happy-spiral about the stuff and throw away a bunch of their other values to get more Green.
Is Green instrumentally worthwhile?
That brings us to the central topic of the essay: is there a case for more Green which doesn’t require me to already value Green in its own right? Given that I don’t feel oxytocin, would it nonetheless be instrumental to the goals I do have to embrace a bit more Green?
My knee-jerk reaction to deep atheism is basically “yeah deep atheism is just straightforwardly correct”. When Joe says “Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes” I’m like “yes, Green is one of the main mistakes, it still looks like that under its face too, it’s just straightforwardly a mistake”. It indeed looks like a conflation between is and ought, like somebody’s oxytocin-packed value system is trying to mess with their epistemics, like they’re believing that the world is warm and fuzzy and caring because they have oxytocin-feelings toward the world, not because the world is actually helping them.
… but one could propose that normal human brains, with proper oxytocin function, are properly calibrated about how much to trust the world. Perhaps my lack of oxytocin biases me in a way which gives me a factually-incorrect depth of atheism.
But that proposal does not stand up to cursory examination. The human brain has pretty decent general purpose capability for figuring out instrumental value; why would that machinery be wrong on the specific cluster of stuff oxytocin touches? It would be really bizarre if this one apparent reward-system hack corrects an epistemic error in a basically-working general purpose reasoning machine. It makes much more sense that babies and families just aren’t that instrumentally appealing, so evolution dropped oxytocin into the reward system to make babies and families very appealing as a terminal value. And that hack then generalized in weird ways, with people sometimes loving trees or the universe, because that’s what happens when one drops a hacky patch into a reward function.
The upshot of all that is… this Green stuff really is a terminal-ish value. And y’know, if that’s what people want, I’m not going to argue with the utility function (as the saying goes). But I am pretty darn skeptical of attempts to argue instrumental necessity of Green, and I do note that these are not my values.
I feel like you’re rejecting the instrumental value of Green based on a particular story you’ve invented about why green might be instrumentally valuable.
But … IDK, it seems to me like a lot of the value of Green relates to being a boundedly rational actor, in a world with other minds. When I envision a world with a bunch of actors who appreciate Green and try to stay connected to that in their actions, I think they’re less likely to fuck it up than a world with the same actors who otherwise disregard green. I think they’re more likely to respect Chesterton’s fences (and not cause unilateralist’s curse type catastrophes), and they’re more likely to act in ways which provide good interfaces for other people and make it easy for others to have justified trust in what’s happening.
If I imagine instead a single actor in an otherwise mindless universe, I much less have the feeling that things will go better if they appreciate Green.
Indeed, to go a little meta and a little speculative: it kind of feels like you’re making an epistemic error in this comment which I could round off as “too much Deep Atheism / lack of Green”: I don’t see a respect for the possibility that other minds, in liking Green, might be latching onto something which is deeper than what you’re perceiving it as; instead assuming that the hypothesis you thought of is the only one worth considering.
But this isn’t how Green would see Green? A justification rooted in Blue and Black instrumental motives is not what’s going on. To the extent that I get something I like from Green, it’s the extent that I think they are instrumentally useful—as one of the other colors would see it. For example, I wouldn’t wantonly cut down a rare big tree, but only for the same reason I don’t make big irreversible decisions regarding rare artifacts without careful consideration. It’s like dropping a quest item in a videogame to me.
If there’s some reason I should take on Green’s actual justifications, I don’t think the post really explained it—I simply aren’t compelled by the feeling that the tree should be respected, if I have some feeling in the Green direction that isn’t just instrumental then it’s very small. Telling me that some people have some feelings they can’t justify about why the tree should be respected, that isn’t about instrumental utility for beings that have qualia… is not very convincing.
I think it’s easy to locally adopt bits of Greenish perspective when one can see how they would be instrumentally useful.
The claim I’m making is that it’s often a good idea to adopt bits of Greenish perspective even when you can’t see how they would be instrumentally useful—because a reasonable chunk of the time they will be instrumentally useful and you just can’t see it yet.
I don’t think that requires adopting Green’s justifications as terminal, but it does require you to adopt some generator-of-Greenish-perspective that isn’t just “Blue led me to a Greenish conclusion in this particular case”.
Okay, I have instrumentally valuable Green strategies from personal experience.
When I was a little kid, my father taught me to swim. Being very anxious child, I panicked and tried to stay afloat, which resulted in me getting nose full of water, while the correct strategy was to relax and trust water to carry you because human body is floating object.
Another example is recent. I tried to understand textbook on model theory—like, I reread chapter multiple times and interrogated myself with сomprehension questions. I gave up, went to sleep and when I picked up textbook next day, my mind fluently arragened words into meaningful sentences.
(“Sleep on” something is an ultimate Green strategy, because it requires your passivity.)
Curiosity is instrumentally beneficial, but it can be directed towards different sorts of objects. Non-green curiosity is curiosity directed towards general objects. Thing like physics, math, evolutionary theory, game theory—things that are relevant everywhere. I’m bioinformatician and I love “general” part of biology, like evolution or main molecular pathways (replication, translation, electron transport chain, this sort of stuff). I struggled with less general parts of molecular biology, because any particular area of molecular biology for outsider looks like “lots of combinations of letters organized into complicated graphs”. I came to appreciation of “particular” part of biology through studying cybersecurity and realizing that vulnerabilities come from idiosyncratic properties of system, therefore, to discover them, you need curiosity about this particular system. This is also the way I learned to love immunology and oncology.
Good example of “Green curiosity” is demonstrated in novel “Annihilation” from perspective of biologist:
A species of mussels found nowhere else lived in those tidal pools, in a symbiotic relationship with a fish called a gartner, after its discoverer. Several species of marine snails and sea anemones lurked there, too, and a tough little squid I nicknamed Saint Pugnacious, eschewing its scientific name, because the danger music of its white-flashing luminescence made its mantle look like a pope’s hat.
I could easily lose hours there, observing the hidden life of tidal pool, and sometimes I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had ever craved during my studies.
Even then, though, during the drives back, I was grieving the anticipated end of this happiness. Because I knew it had to end eventually. The research grant was only for two years, and who really would care about mussels longer than that…
Green curiosity (Duncan Sabien would say “Green-Black”) is helpful for what Gwern called unseeing:
...the opposite of a mathematician: a mathematician tries to ‘see through’ a complex system’s accidental complexity up to a simpler more-abstract more-true version which can be understood & manipulated—but for the hacker, all complexity is essential, and they are instead trying to unsee the simple abstract system down to the more-complex less-abstract (but also more true) version. (A mathematician might try to transform a program up into successively more abstract representations to eventually show it is trivially correct; a hacker would prefer to compile a program down into its most concrete representation to brute force all execution paths & find an exploit trivially proving it incorrect.)
Learning principles according to which evolutionary algorithm works is helped by non-green curiosity, but understanding particular weird product of evolutionary algorithm (even knowing that it is not optimal, even knowing that this understanding won’t benefit your generalized knowledge) requires Green curiosity.
Finally, I think Green curiosity is important as complement for terminal value of knowledge. I think after Singularity, if we survive, we are going to quickly discover all “general” stuff, like physical theory of everything, theory of builing multilevel world models, optimal nanotechnology for our physics, etc. I don’t think that at this point we will need to declare project of knowing thing finished, we will just need to learn to love studying particular cases.
Another Green epistemic strategies were briefly mentioned by Carlsmith himself, like careful and patient observation of reality without pushing your frames on it, or letting reality destroy your beliefs.
I think you’ve missed some Green strategies because you grew up in modern world, where good parts of environmentalism and laissez-faire are common sense and bad parts are widely known. But High Modernism gave as a lot of examples of catastrophies which happen when you are not Green enough, like central planning (Hayekian interpretation of markets is Green) or Chinese “Eliminate Sparrows Campaign”. Attitude “this forest is useless, we should cut it down and put here golf club” until recently was not trope for cartoon villians, but position of Very Serious People deciding in which direction world should develop.
Another angle is that Green is probably the youngest of attitudes of such type in broad memetic environment. In the past, on the one hand, people were in constant fight with environment, so if you were too Green, you died or were otherwise very miserable. On the other hand, you weren’t able to do much against environment, so you needed to lean on it as much as possible and if you tried to do something stupidly agentic like drinking potions of immortality made of mercury you died quickly too. You need very specific distance from Nature made out of industrial urban civilization to recognize necessity to relate to it somehow.
I agree with you that Deep Atheism is correct, but the problem is not with Deep Atheism, it’s with people who believe in it. It’s very easy to start considering the cold harsh world your enemy, while the world is merely neutral, and if the world is not your enemy, it can spontaneously organize into beneficial structures without your intervention and sometimes you should actively non-intervene to let this happen.
Of course, none of this is obligatory. Maybe you are just a sort of adequate agentic person which doesn’t require Green to learn everything mentioned.
One element here is a level 1 < level 2 < level 3 < level 4 thing going on here and I’m not sure if you’re rejecting level 2 or level 4.
Where level 1 is like “slightly naive consequentialism/Blue”
level 2 is “oh no, we tried doing a superficially useful thing to the environment and it had worse consequences than we imagined.” (we tried replacing natural-ish crops with monocrops and got blights. we tried killing all the wolves then the deer population exploded, etc. We tried building some naive utopia and got a dystopia).
level 3 is “okay, we just won’t be idiots about doing superficially useful looking things to the environment”
and level 4 is “oh shit it turns out actually the environment is even more subtle and interconnected than we thought and we were still idiots, I guess we need to like actually try to respect the environment.”
(And then corresponding versions of green vs naive black and white, i.e. failing to appreciate that you aren’t actually a god [yet] and would do better to accept the things you can’t change, and failing to appreciate things as moral patients, or more complex forms of moral patienthood)
I’m assuming you are down with people making Level 2 mistakes and that being something that needs correcting, and just, when you get to level 4, the correct thing is “just do Blue/Black/White better.” I think Instrumental Green is claiming at stage 4 “look, it’s just actually easier to grok these things in a Green-y way than to manually remember them in a Blue/Black/White way.” Are you rejecting “this is basically never necessary, or not necessary often enough to make a big deal about it?”
level 3 is “okay, we just won’t be idiots about doing superficially useful looking things to the environment”
But a key point is that 3 is, fundamentally, a skill-issue.
And maybe, given our human-capability levels, it’s functionally a skill-issue for everyone.
But it’s a pretty common pattern for someone to try to do [something] (using a basically hopeless methodology, often), fail, and then declare that [something] is beyond the ken of man, and we must be humble in the face of our ultimate ignorance and impotence.
See for instance the way many (in my opinion, midwit) people declare that there is irreducible mystery, or that no one worldview and accommodate all of the problems of society.
I think you’re missing something here though. There’s a part of Green that’s not just for the “trees and rivers” kind of nature. It’s also for relationships, physiology, and sociopolitics. If you’re working with a system that humans currently have a serious skill issue with them you probably want to take a somewhat Greenish stance.
The question then becomes whether we ever run out of systems where we have a skill issue. I suspect—for example—that sociopolitics and relationships will stay skill issueish even if humans became superintelligent, since we’d be able to engage in more complex and complicated relationships up to our level of skill issue.
This part of green is a kind of small-c conservatism towards these systems. The other part is a reference and love of those systems. I think the first part is the instrumental part, and the second is the terminal part.
I definitely have the terminal part, and while I’m not completely oxytocin-insensitive I do sometimes think my oxytocin system is wired up in an unusual way. Without the terminal part you get (spoilers for Greg Egan’s Diaspora)
The worldview put forward by Diaspora which is pure blue/white where people and emotion’s don’t have any value and the only thing worth doing is scientific discovery, and when you run out of worlds and physics to discover you can either do maths forever or kill yourself.
Which is a worldview I find rather depressing. I sure hope that interpersonal relationships can be indefinitely complicated (or more complicated things can exist) for the sake of the future Everett branches in which any Green-loving humans succeed in getting a good future.
Fwiw I think I feel companionate love, to the point of sometimes experiencing a sort of regret for not being able to hug everyone in the universe, and getting emotionally attached to random trees, rocks, frozen peas[1], and old pairs of shoes[2] when I was a kid. And I also recall reading this and thinking: “Screw Green.”
After my mother explained to me that the pea seeds were intended to make new pea plants, I felt guilty for us eating them. For a while I insisted my mother throw a few frozen peas out the window into the tree line every time we cooked with them, because my ca. four year old brain figured that way at least a few of them might have some chance to become new pea plants.
Being ca. four years old, I was growing pretty quickly and got too big for my previous pair of shoes and my parents wanted to throw them away. I felt horrible for betraying the poor friendly shoes like that, so my parents allowed me to keep them on my shelf for a few years until I got old enough to internalise that shoes aren’t people and don’t have qualia.
Additional evidence: I don’t feel companionate love as strongly as you do (I expect I feel love closer to the average amount, skewed a bit on the low side), but still have the same negative sentiment towards Green. Internally to me the Greeny feelings don’t feel like love, but maybe most Greens do in fact feel them similar? For me it feels more like “story-thinking” or “narrative fit”. I think fiction is probably the most Green feeling thing I do, and it feels to me like people apply it to the real world and don’t feel the sense of “uhh, this is Real Life, not a book”.
“On Green” is one of the LessWrong essays which I most often refer to in my own thoughts (along with “Deep Atheism”, which I think of as a partner to “On Green”). Many essays I absorb into my thinking, metabolize the contents, but don’t often think of the essay itself. But this one is different. The essay itself has stuck in my head as the canonical pointer to… well, Green, or whatever one wants to call the thing Joe is gesturing at.
When I first read the essay, my main thought was “Wow, Joe did a really good job pointing to a thing that I do not like. Screw Green. And thank you Joe for pointing so well at this thing I do not like.”. And when the essay has come up in my thoughts, it’s mostly been along similar lines: I encounter something in the wild, I’m like “ugh screw this thing… wait, why am I all ‘ugh’ at this, and why do other people like it?… oh it’s Carlsmith!Green, I see”.
But rereading the essay today, I’m struck by different thoughts than a year ago.
Green = Oxytocin Feeling?
Let’s start with the headline gesturing:
Today, reading that, I think “oxytocin?”. That association probably isn’t obvious to most of you; oxytocin is mostly known as the hormone associated with companionate love, which looks sort of like wholesomeness and happy villages but not so much like nature. So let me fill in the gap here.
Most people feel companionate love toward their family and (often metaphorical) village. Some people—usually more hippie-ish types—report feeling the same thing towards all of humanity. Even more hippie-ish types go further, feeling the same thing toward animals, or all living things, or the universe as a whole. Generally, the phrase which cues me in is usually “deep connection”—when people report feeling a deep connection to something, that usually seems to cash out to the oxytocin-feeling.
So when I read the post, I think “hmm, maybe Joe is basically gesturing at the oxytocin-feeling, i.e. companionate love”. That sure does at least rhyme with a lot of other pieces of the post.
… and that sure would explain why I get a big ol’ “ugh” toward Green; I already knew I’m probably genetically unable to feel oxytocin. To me, this whole Green thing is a cluster of stuff which seem basically-unremarkable in their own right, but for some reason other people go all happy-spiral about the stuff and throw away a bunch of their other values to get more Green.
Is Green instrumentally worthwhile?
That brings us to the central topic of the essay: is there a case for more Green which doesn’t require me to already value Green in its own right? Given that I don’t feel oxytocin, would it nonetheless be instrumental to the goals I do have to embrace a bit more Green?
My knee-jerk reaction to deep atheism is basically “yeah deep atheism is just straightforwardly correct”. When Joe says “Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes” I’m like “yes, Green is one of the main mistakes, it still looks like that under its face too, it’s just straightforwardly a mistake”. It indeed looks like a conflation between is and ought, like somebody’s oxytocin-packed value system is trying to mess with their epistemics, like they’re believing that the world is warm and fuzzy and caring because they have oxytocin-feelings toward the world, not because the world is actually helping them.
… but one could propose that normal human brains, with proper oxytocin function, are properly calibrated about how much to trust the world. Perhaps my lack of oxytocin biases me in a way which gives me a factually-incorrect depth of atheism.
But that proposal does not stand up to cursory examination. The human brain has pretty decent general purpose capability for figuring out instrumental value; why would that machinery be wrong on the specific cluster of stuff oxytocin touches? It would be really bizarre if this one apparent reward-system hack corrects an epistemic error in a basically-working general purpose reasoning machine. It makes much more sense that babies and families just aren’t that instrumentally appealing, so evolution dropped oxytocin into the reward system to make babies and families very appealing as a terminal value. And that hack then generalized in weird ways, with people sometimes loving trees or the universe, because that’s what happens when one drops a hacky patch into a reward function.
The upshot of all that is… this Green stuff really is a terminal-ish value. And y’know, if that’s what people want, I’m not going to argue with the utility function (as the saying goes). But I am pretty darn skeptical of attempts to argue instrumental necessity of Green, and I do note that these are not my values.
I feel like you’re rejecting the instrumental value of Green based on a particular story you’ve invented about why green might be instrumentally valuable.
But … IDK, it seems to me like a lot of the value of Green relates to being a boundedly rational actor, in a world with other minds. When I envision a world with a bunch of actors who appreciate Green and try to stay connected to that in their actions, I think they’re less likely to fuck it up than a world with the same actors who otherwise disregard green. I think they’re more likely to respect Chesterton’s fences (and not cause unilateralist’s curse type catastrophes), and they’re more likely to act in ways which provide good interfaces for other people and make it easy for others to have justified trust in what’s happening.
If I imagine instead a single actor in an otherwise mindless universe, I much less have the feeling that things will go better if they appreciate Green.
Indeed, to go a little meta and a little speculative: it kind of feels like you’re making an epistemic error in this comment which I could round off as “too much Deep Atheism / lack of Green”: I don’t see a respect for the possibility that other minds, in liking Green, might be latching onto something which is deeper than what you’re perceiving it as; instead assuming that the hypothesis you thought of is the only one worth considering.
But this isn’t how Green would see Green? A justification rooted in Blue and Black instrumental motives is not what’s going on. To the extent that I get something I like from Green, it’s the extent that I think they are instrumentally useful—as one of the other colors would see it. For example, I wouldn’t wantonly cut down a rare big tree, but only for the same reason I don’t make big irreversible decisions regarding rare artifacts without careful consideration. It’s like dropping a quest item in a videogame to me.
If there’s some reason I should take on Green’s actual justifications, I don’t think the post really explained it—I simply aren’t compelled by the feeling that the tree should be respected, if I have some feeling in the Green direction that isn’t just instrumental then it’s very small. Telling me that some people have some feelings they can’t justify about why the tree should be respected, that isn’t about instrumental utility for beings that have qualia… is not very convincing.
I think it’s easy to locally adopt bits of Greenish perspective when one can see how they would be instrumentally useful.
The claim I’m making is that it’s often a good idea to adopt bits of Greenish perspective even when you can’t see how they would be instrumentally useful—because a reasonable chunk of the time they will be instrumentally useful and you just can’t see it yet.
I don’t think that requires adopting Green’s justifications as terminal, but it does require you to adopt some generator-of-Greenish-perspective that isn’t just “Blue led me to a Greenish conclusion in this particular case”.
Okay, I have instrumentally valuable Green strategies from personal experience.
When I was a little kid, my father taught me to swim. Being very anxious child, I panicked and tried to stay afloat, which resulted in me getting nose full of water, while the correct strategy was to relax and trust water to carry you because human body is floating object.
Another example is recent. I tried to understand textbook on model theory—like, I reread chapter multiple times and interrogated myself with сomprehension questions. I gave up, went to sleep and when I picked up textbook next day, my mind fluently arragened words into meaningful sentences.
(“Sleep on” something is an ultimate Green strategy, because it requires your passivity.)
Curiosity is instrumentally beneficial, but it can be directed towards different sorts of objects. Non-green curiosity is curiosity directed towards general objects. Thing like physics, math, evolutionary theory, game theory—things that are relevant everywhere. I’m bioinformatician and I love “general” part of biology, like evolution or main molecular pathways (replication, translation, electron transport chain, this sort of stuff). I struggled with less general parts of molecular biology, because any particular area of molecular biology for outsider looks like “lots of combinations of letters organized into complicated graphs”. I came to appreciation of “particular” part of biology through studying cybersecurity and realizing that vulnerabilities come from idiosyncratic properties of system, therefore, to discover them, you need curiosity about this particular system. This is also the way I learned to love immunology and oncology.
Good example of “Green curiosity” is demonstrated in novel “Annihilation” from perspective of biologist:
Green curiosity (Duncan Sabien would say “Green-Black”) is helpful for what Gwern called unseeing:
Learning principles according to which evolutionary algorithm works is helped by non-green curiosity, but understanding particular weird product of evolutionary algorithm (even knowing that it is not optimal, even knowing that this understanding won’t benefit your generalized knowledge) requires Green curiosity.
Finally, I think Green curiosity is important as complement for terminal value of knowledge. I think after Singularity, if we survive, we are going to quickly discover all “general” stuff, like physical theory of everything, theory of builing multilevel world models, optimal nanotechnology for our physics, etc. I don’t think that at this point we will need to declare project of knowing thing finished, we will just need to learn to love studying particular cases.
Another Green epistemic strategies were briefly mentioned by Carlsmith himself, like careful and patient observation of reality without pushing your frames on it, or letting reality destroy your beliefs.
I think you’ve missed some Green strategies because you grew up in modern world, where good parts of environmentalism and laissez-faire are common sense and bad parts are widely known. But High Modernism gave as a lot of examples of catastrophies which happen when you are not Green enough, like central planning (Hayekian interpretation of markets is Green) or Chinese “Eliminate Sparrows Campaign”. Attitude “this forest is useless, we should cut it down and put here golf club” until recently was not trope for cartoon villians, but position of Very Serious People deciding in which direction world should develop.
Another angle is that Green is probably the youngest of attitudes of such type in broad memetic environment. In the past, on the one hand, people were in constant fight with environment, so if you were too Green, you died or were otherwise very miserable. On the other hand, you weren’t able to do much against environment, so you needed to lean on it as much as possible and if you tried to do something stupidly agentic like drinking potions of immortality made of mercury you died quickly too. You need very specific distance from Nature made out of industrial urban civilization to recognize necessity to relate to it somehow.
I agree with you that Deep Atheism is correct, but the problem is not with Deep Atheism, it’s with people who believe in it. It’s very easy to start considering the cold harsh world your enemy, while the world is merely neutral, and if the world is not your enemy, it can spontaneously organize into beneficial structures without your intervention and sometimes you should actively non-intervene to let this happen.
Of course, none of this is obligatory. Maybe you are just a sort of adequate agentic person which doesn’t require Green to learn everything mentioned.
Re: Rejecting Instrumental Green:
One element here is a level 1 < level 2 < level 3 < level 4 thing going on here and I’m not sure if you’re rejecting level 2 or level 4.
Where level 1 is like “slightly naive consequentialism/Blue”
level 2 is “oh no, we tried doing a superficially useful thing to the environment and it had worse consequences than we imagined.” (we tried replacing natural-ish crops with monocrops and got blights. we tried killing all the wolves then the deer population exploded, etc. We tried building some naive utopia and got a dystopia).
level 3 is “okay, we just won’t be idiots about doing superficially useful looking things to the environment”
and level 4 is “oh shit it turns out actually the environment is even more subtle and interconnected than we thought and we were still idiots, I guess we need to like actually try to respect the environment.”
(And then corresponding versions of green vs naive black and white, i.e. failing to appreciate that you aren’t actually a god [yet] and would do better to accept the things you can’t change, and failing to appreciate things as moral patients, or more complex forms of moral patienthood)
I’m assuming you are down with people making Level 2 mistakes and that being something that needs correcting, and just, when you get to level 4, the correct thing is “just do Blue/Black/White better.” I think Instrumental Green is claiming at stage 4 “look, it’s just actually easier to grok these things in a Green-y way than to manually remember them in a Blue/Black/White way.” Are you rejecting “this is basically never necessary, or not necessary often enough to make a big deal about it?”
But a key point is that 3 is, fundamentally, a skill-issue.
And maybe, given our human-capability levels, it’s functionally a skill-issue for everyone.
But it’s a pretty common pattern for someone to try to do [something] (using a basically hopeless methodology, often), fail, and then declare that [something] is beyond the ken of man, and we must be humble in the face of our ultimate ignorance and impotence.
See for instance the way many (in my opinion, midwit) people declare that there is irreducible mystery, or that no one worldview and accommodate all of the problems of society.
I think you’re missing something here though. There’s a part of Green that’s not just for the “trees and rivers” kind of nature. It’s also for relationships, physiology, and sociopolitics. If you’re working with a system that humans currently have a serious skill issue with them you probably want to take a somewhat Greenish stance.
The question then becomes whether we ever run out of systems where we have a skill issue. I suspect—for example—that sociopolitics and relationships will stay skill issueish even if humans became superintelligent, since we’d be able to engage in more complex and complicated relationships up to our level of skill issue.
This part of green is a kind of small-c conservatism towards these systems. The other part is a reference and love of those systems. I think the first part is the instrumental part, and the second is the terminal part.
I definitely have the terminal part, and while I’m not completely oxytocin-insensitive I do sometimes think my oxytocin system is wired up in an unusual way. Without the terminal part you get (spoilers for Greg Egan’s Diaspora)
The worldview put forward by Diaspora which is pure blue/white where people and emotion’s don’t have any value and the only thing worth doing is scientific discovery, and when you run out of worlds and physics to discover you can either do maths forever or kill yourself.
Which is a worldview I find rather depressing. I sure hope that interpersonal relationships can be indefinitely complicated (or more complicated things can exist) for the sake of the future Everett branches in which any Green-loving humans succeed in getting a good future.
Fwiw I think I feel companionate love, to the point of sometimes experiencing a sort of regret for not being able to hug everyone in the universe, and getting emotionally attached to random trees, rocks, frozen peas[1], and old pairs of shoes[2] when I was a kid. And I also recall reading this and thinking: “Screw Green.”
After my mother explained to me that the pea seeds were intended to make new pea plants, I felt guilty for us eating them. For a while I insisted my mother throw a few frozen peas out the window into the tree line every time we cooked with them, because my ca. four year old brain figured that way at least a few of them might have some chance to become new pea plants.
Being ca. four years old, I was growing pretty quickly and got too big for my previous pair of shoes and my parents wanted to throw them away. I felt horrible for betraying the poor friendly shoes like that, so my parents allowed me to keep them on my shelf for a few years until I got old enough to internalise that shoes aren’t people and don’t have qualia.
Additional evidence: I don’t feel companionate love as strongly as you do (I expect I feel love closer to the average amount, skewed a bit on the low side), but still have the same negative sentiment towards Green. Internally to me the Greeny feelings don’t feel like love, but maybe most Greens do in fact feel them similar? For me it feels more like “story-thinking” or “narrative fit”. I think fiction is probably the most Green feeling thing I do, and it feels to me like people apply it to the real world and don’t feel the sense of “uhh, this is Real Life, not a book”.