A large number of nice smart people do not have a good understanding of enmity. Almost on principle, they refuse to perceive people and movements as an enemy.[1] They feel bad about the mere idea of perceiving a group as an enemy.
And as a result, they consistently get screwed over.
In this article, I’ll walk through the example of Greenpeace, who I wager is an enemy to most of my readers.
As an example of enemy, Greenpeace is quite an interesting one:
Many (likely most?) Greenpeace supporters are regular nice people. Few are cartoonish eco-terrorists / turbo-antisemites / hyper-accelerationists / violent-communists and whatnot.
Greenpeace cares about a few nice topics, like Climate Change and Pollution.
It consistently takes terrible stances, like against growth, nuclear energy and market solutions.
It fights its opposition, groups who don’t agree with its terrible stances.
A good understanding of enmity is needed to deal with Greenpeace.
A group of nice people will always get stuck on the fact that Greenpeace is made of nice people. It thus may be wrong, but not an actual enemy. And so, while they are stuck, Greenpeace will still fight against them and win.
A group of mean people will get tribal, and start becoming reactionary. They will make opposing Greenpeace the centre of their attention, rather than one strategic consideration among others. They will start going for reverse stupidity, and go “Climate Change is not real!”
In this essay, I’ll try to offer an alternative to overcome these two classic failures.
Greenpeace
Let’s assume that, as one of my readers, you may be hopeful in helping climate change with solutions based on technology and market mechanisms, like nuclear power, offsets or carbon capture.
If that’s you, I have bad news: Greenpeace is most certainly your enemy.
This may come as strong language, but bear with me. When I say “Greenpeace is your enemy”, I do not mean “Greenpeace is evil.”
(I, for one, do not think of myself as the highest paragon of virtue, rationality and justice. Certainly not so high that anyone opposing me is automatically stupid or evil.)
What I mean by enmity is more prosaic.
“We and Greenpeace have lasting contradictory interests. Neither side expects reconciliation or a lasting compromise in the short-term. In the meantime, both sides are players of The Game. Thus, they should predictably work explicitly against each other.”
You may not know that Greenpeace is your enemy, but they sure do know that you are theirs. For instance, in 2019, Greenpeace USA, with +600 organisations, sent a letter to the US Congress. Their letter stated:
Further, we will vigorously oppose any legislation that: […] (3) promotes corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, waste-to-energy and biomass energy.
From their point of view, market-based mechanisms and technology options are “corporate schemes”, and they “will vigorously oppose” them.
This is not an isolated incident.
Greenpeace doesn’t merely think that Nuclear Energy or Carbon Offsets are not the best solutions to address Climate Change.
It consistently fights against them.
It may sound stupid to you, and you may want to make excuses for them, but this fight is a core tenet of their beliefs.
Dissing these solutions is part of their goal when they lobby policy makers. It is what they decide to invest their social capital when they work with hundreds of organisations.
They do not merely believe that our solutions are worse. They explicitly try to work against them.
In their understanding, they have enemies (which include us), and they naturally work against their enemies.
Opposing opponents (it’s in the name, duh!) is a major part of playing The Game.
And Greenpeace has been playing The Game for quite a while.
Greenpeace is huge, its impact must not be underrated!
For green parties, the support of Greenpeace is critical. Beyond green parties, most political parties on the left fear facing too much backlash from Greenpeace.
However, I find that Greenpeace’s strength is more pernicious.
It lies in the fact that most environmentally aware people support Greenpeace. When they go work at the EPA and its non-US counterparts, they will push Greenpeace’s agenda.
This means that as they are employed there, they will purposefully slow down nuclear energy, technological solutions and market mechanisms. They will use their job to do so. I keep this in mind when I read articles like this one from the BBC, reporting on why a safety barrier for bats induced a hundred million pounds extra-cost to a UK high speed rail project.
That Greenpeace is a Player is an important fact of the world. It helps understand why nuclear power is so uncommon, why various technologies are so under-invested, or why policy makers consistently go for terrible policies around environmental topics.
Without this fact in mind, one may resort to overly cynical explanations like “It’s because people are stupid!” or “It’s because policy makers are corrupt!”. In general, I believe these are the desperate cries of weak people who understand little of the world and need excuses to keep doing nothing.
The much truer answer is that Greenpeace has been playing The Game better than us, and as a direct result, it has been winning. We should get better and stop being scrubs.
It may feel bad to be united in having an enemy. It is low-brow, doesn’t signal a higher intellect, and makes one look tribalistic. Worse, uniting against an enemy may taint us and infect us with tribalitis.
This is superstitious thinking. Tribalism doesn’t just emerge from having an enemy. It results from not punishing our own when they act badly, and being overly harsh on enemies.
And while we are lost in such superstitions, Greenpeace is not. It is united, and it is united in being our enemy. It is aware that it is our enemy, and naturally, it fights us.
Paradoxically, Greenpeace is more aware of us as a group, than we are ourselves!
This is why, right now, we are losing to them.
If we want to win, the first step is to recognise the situation for what it is.
We have enemies, and we must be united in fighting them.
These enemies are winning because they put more money in the fight than we do, they are more of a group than we are, they are more organised than we are, and they act more in the real world.
Their victory so far has been trivial. It is always trivial to win against someone who doesn’t know the rules. Let alone one who does not even realise they’re playing The Game. Let alone someone who has been avoiding The Game!
Greenpeace simply just has to push for their things, pour money into them, and they face almost no pushback whatsoever.
Stealing candy from a baby.
Enmity
Enmity is the quality of a situation that is marked by the presence of enemies. It is a core part of social dynamics. Without a solid understanding of Enmity, one will keep getting surprised and screwed over by the world and people.
A toy model of Enmity is playing chess. Assuming away stalemates, in Chess, there is a winner, and a loser. A good move for our opponent is a bad move for us, and vice-versa. Conversely, if our enemy is happy after one of our moves, it’s bad news for us.
At a first approximation, every dollar Greenpeace earns is a loss for us. And Greenpeace earns a lot of dollars. Greenpeace International gets a hundred million dollars per year from its national & regional organisations.[2] Said national & regional organisations get even more from their supporters.
It’s not only about dollars. We lose whenever people trust Greenpeace, whenever Greenpeace’s brand gains more public awareness, whenever policy makers come to see it as an authority on environmental problems. In any of these situations, nuclear energy gets undermined.
By the way, I made a comparison to Chess before. This was not benign. Chess is not a fistfight. It has rules and decorum.
Greenpeace being our enemy doesn’t mean that we should start gratuitously insulting them or destroying their property.
There are rules, and we play by the rules.
Some of the rules are set by the Law. Although it is sometimes warranted to go against the Law[3], it is the exception, not the rule. To my knowledge, while Greenpeace has had a bad impact on the world, their actions haven’t been anywhere close to warranting such responses.
Other rules rules are set by the social world. There are many things that are memetic, that people care about, that will gain more attention and reach, etc. And all of these rules constrain our behaviour. For instance, long essays lose to impactful images and short videos. Nerdy unknown Nobel prize winner loses against super famous youtube influencers. Scissors lose against rock.
Finally, our morals set many more rules. It may feel bad and restrictive to not lie constantly, especially when we see Greenpeace being so incoherent and being seemingly rewarded for it. But morals exist for a reason, and it’s beyond the scope of this text to explain why.
More generally, everyone has their own rules. You have different rules than I do, and that’s ok. My point is more that as long as we abide by our rules, we should take our enemies seriously, and actually try to win.
Quite a few people are weak, meek or cheems. They are pathologically averse to conflict. They reject meanness except when they are truly forced to get there. They will always insist that there are no enemies that must be fought, or that there are always alternatives.
In abstract terms, they will state that we should always assume good faith or the best from people. That it is immoral not to do so. That we never know, and that it would be beyond the pale to ever retaliate against what was a mere accident.
Conversely, they may agree on the principle, that yes, sometimes we theoretically should act against enemies. But coincidentally, they will reject all plans to actually act against enemies, and they will never provide good alternatives.
For them, “morals” is not a consideration to be factored and weighed in. If someone proposes a morally bad plan to attack an enemy, they will not come up with a morally good one, let alone a morally least bad plan.
For them, “morals” is a thought-stopper, a thought terminating cliché. It is an excuse to their cowardice and social awkwardness.
The opinion of these people should be discarded. At best, they will slow us down if given any inch of power in our structures. At worst, they will actually try to screw us over because they can’t handle any amount of Enmity, and they will resent us for introducing it to their pure ivory tower of intellectual and meditative calm.
Some readers will finish this and go “But what about the costs of thinking in terms of Enmity? And shouldn’t we steelman Greenpeace, what if they have a point?”
This is precisely the meekness I am warning about.
If one’s first response to “You must defend yourself!” when they’re getting utterly screwed over is “What if I accidentally become too aggressive?”, then they are still missing the point. An hypothetical overcorrection is not a worry borne out of a rational analysis of the current situation: the pendulum is swinging too much in the other direction for it to be an actual concern.
It is merely the instinct of meekness to reject conflict, to go for both-sideism and doing the PR of our opponents while they are slandering us and overtly working against us.
Beyond Enmity
The Game is complex, and it cannot be reduced to Enmity. But without addressing Enmity, one doesn’t get access to the later stages.
Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, prepare for war.
If we want order, we need strong police forces.
If we want an international order, we need a large and efficient military force.
If we want to make the world a more civilised place, a safe place for the weak, the strong must be strong enough for two.
Else, we just get utterly screwed over. People will simply repeatedly exploit and defect against us. Up until the point where we get literally conquered. It is simple game theory.
The relationship to someone who keeps exploiting us is very one-dimensional. There’s not much to it: we exist, they screw us over, rinse and repeat.
But, once we accept that we must address Enmity, take part in some conflicts, and gain offensive strength, then we can reach more interesting relationships.
The relationship to a proper enemy is not one-dimensional. An enemy isn’t just an enemy. They abide by their own rules, and these rules (for both moral and pragmatic reasons!) involve not constantly nuking and sending terrorists at each other. And the threat of retaliation disproportionately increases the value of helping each other.
Thus, there’s usually ample space to negotiate, debate, or at least talk with an enemy. Sometimes, there may even be a greater enemy (or faceless danger) looming ahead, forcing alliances of convenience.
However, we should never become complacent. The Game is still ongoing.
A wise man once said that asking polite with a gun in your hand is always better than just asking polite. Enemies tend to become much more civilised and willing to come to the tea, debate or negotiating table; when we hold at least a modicum of power.
I am a great believer in debates and the pursuit of truth. We are respect each other, and are all worthy of respect.
In that world, when I tell people that AI risks our literal extinction, it is enough for them to take me seriously, because they know I am reasonable. That I would never say this publicly if it was not the case.
In that world, when people tell me that either white supremacy or immigration is an existential risk, it is enough for me to take them seriously, because I would know they are reasonable. That they would never say this publicly if it was not the case.
We do not live in such an ideal world.
Thus, we must deal with conflicts. Conflicts that result from differences in values, differences in aesthetics, or differences in mere risk assessments.
There’s another way in which enemies are not just enemies.
Enemies are very rarely fully misaligned against us. Although I believe that Greenpeace had an overall effect that was negative, there are certainly some nice things that they have done from my point of view.
For instance, they have raised awareness on the issue of climate change. Could they have done it better? Certainly. But I care about many other problems that are missing their Greenpeace. When I look at them, like the fertility crisis or rising rents, I wouldn’t say they are faring better than climate change.
I feel similarly about the Far Right Focus on immigration and demographics. There hasn’t been a Far Right Focus on the problems I care about, and they have been thoroughly ignored as a result.
So, even though I believe that every additional dollar that goes to Greenpeace and Far Right organisations nets out as a loss, I would not say it is a complete loss.
This distinction, between a complete loss and a partial loss, matters! The less an enemy is misaligned against us, the more opportunities there are for compromises, negotiations, alliances, and so on.
I know that my enemies are not moral aliens with whom I share nothing. I know they are not a stupid beast that can’t be reasoned with.
Ultimately, this is how we have maintained long lasting peaces. A few actors were powerful enough to maintain a collective order, and they all understand that they stand to gain more from cooperating than trying to stupidly exploit one another and getting punished as a result.
Conclusion
This piece is addressed to people who tend to forget that they have enemies, who take pride in being quokkas who keep losing and getting exploited.
There are more coalitions that are more enemies than Greenpeace. The reason I am picking Greenpeace is that it is a pretty tame enemy.
This is on purpose: people are truly bad at maintaining a healthy notion of enmity. A notion of enmity that can entertain, at the same time, working explicitly against each other and negotiating.
And the true thing is that enmity is present everywhere to some extent. We always have some misalignment between each other; it is okay to fight based on it if we respect the rules of engagement, and especially so as we collaborate or negotiate on the matters where we agree.
On this, cheers!
- ^
To be clear, there’s also a large number of mean stupid people have trouble transcending their tribalistic and black-and-white vision of enmity.
As a result, they also make the world worse for everyone.
I don’t have any hope that this specific piece will help them lol. Thus I will simply ignore them here, and focus on the nice smart people instead.
- ^
Greenpeace Germany leads with a third of the contribution, and Greenpeace UK is the second with ~10% of the contribution.
- ^
The armed Resistance against the Nazis was justified.
I mean, do you guys, like, know why Greenpeace is against some of these market solutions? I didn’t know either, but in five minutes of googling I was able to find some arguments. Here’s an example argument: in the world there are poor countries and rich countries. Poor countries are not always ruled in their people’s best interest; and rich countries and corporations don’t always act in poor countries’ best interest, either. So, what would happen if a rich country paid a dictator of a poor country a billion dollars to irrevocably mess up the poor country’s environment? What would happen? Huh?
Maybe in more than five minutes you could find other arguments too. Anyway, fast-tracking your readers straight to “Greenpeace is your enemy” doesn’t feel right.
Yea, having similar feelings about this post. The conclusion is probably still correct, but not sufficiently established. And I think there should be, idk, a norm about being more thorough when talking badly about an org, and violating that doesn’t seem worth the point made here.
I am genuinely interested in your point of view.
I see it as causally connected to why the Lesswrong community has supported three orgs racing to AGI.
Out of the following, which of them would count as “talking badly about an org” and would a norm of being more thorough before?
“Greenpeace has tied its identity to anti-nuke, and if you’re pro-nuke you’ll be fighting them for as long as they exist”
“If you are for nuke and market solutions, you’ll find Greenpeace has taken consistently terrible stances”
“If you are for nuke and market solutions, every dollar Greenpeace gets is a loss for you”
“Greenpeace is an enemy, but specifically not stupid or evil”
“Strong supporters of Greenpeace will purposefully slow down nuclear energy, technological solutions and market mechanisms”
If the above passes your threshold for “need to be more thorough before saying it”, then that informs what a potential follow-up to my article geared toward Lesswrong would have to be about.
Specifically, it should be about Lesswrong having a bad culture. One that favours norms that make punishing enemies harder, up to the point of not being able to straightforwardly say “if you are pro-nuke, an org that has been anti-nuke for decades is your enemy”. Let alone dealing with AI corporations racing to AGI that have friends in the community.
If the above doesn’t pass your threshold and you think it’s fine, then I don’t think it makes sense for me to write a follow-up article to Lesswrong. It was basically as far as my article goes IIRC, and so the problem lies deeper.
So I think the norm is something like “if you write something that will predictably make people feel worse about [real person or org], you should stick to journalistic standards of citing sources and such”. That means all your quotes depend on whether you’ve sufficiently established the substance of the quote.
If we take your post as it is now, well you only have one source, which is the group letter to congress. Imo as you used it this actually does not even establish that they’re anti nuclear power because the letter is primarily about fossil fuels, and the quote about nuclear power is in the context of protecting indigenous rights. Also you said it was signed with 600 other companies, so it might have been a compromise (maybe they oppose some parts of the content but thought the entire thing was still worth signing). An endorsement of a compromise/package is just really not a good way to establish their position. It would be much better to just look at the Wikipedia page and see whether that says they’re anti nuclear. Which in fact it does in the introduction. Some would probably quibble with that but for me that would actually be enough. So if you just did that, then I’d excuse all quotes that only reference them being anti-nuclear power (which I guess is just the first in your list).
Saying that they’re my enemy is a little harder because it would require establishing that they’re a negative for climate protection on net. This is not obvious; you could have an org that’s anti nuclear power and still does more good than harm overall. It probably still wouldn’t be that difficult, but your post as is certainly falls short. (And BTW it’s also not obvious that being anti nuclear power now is as bad as having been anti nuclear power historically. It could be the case that having been anti nuclear power historically was a huge mistake and we should have invested in the technology all this time, but that since we didn’t, at this point it actually no longer makes sense and we should only invest in renewables. I don’t think that’s the case, I think we should probably still build nuclear reactors now, but I’m genuinely not sure. This kind of thing very much matters for the ‘net negative impact’ question.)
I think it’s very unlikely that having laxer standards for accusing others is a good thing. Broadly speaking it seems to me that ~100% of groups-that-argue-about-political-or-culture-war-topics suffer from having too low standards for criticizing the outgroup, and ~0% suffer from having too high standards. And I don’t think these standards are even that high, like you could write a post that says Greenpeace is my enemy, you’d just have to put in the effort to source your claims a little. Or, more practically, you could have just written the post about a fictional org, then you can make your point about enemies without having to deal with the practical side of attacking a real org.
Not related but
This was not my impression. My impression was that people associated with the community have founded orgs that then did capability research, but that many, probably most, people on LW think that’s a disaster. To varying degrees. People are probably less negative on Anthropic than OpenAI. We’re certainly not enthusiastic about OpenAI.. In any case I don’t think it summarizes to “the Lesswrong community has supported” these orgs.
This is a selective demand for rigour, which induces an extremely strong positivity bias when discussing other people. I would not willingly introduce such a strong bias.
I think other norms make sense, and do not lead to entire communities distorting their vision of the social world. Cordiality, politeness, courtesy and the like.
I know you think so. And I disagree, especially on “~0% suffer from having too high standards” (my immediate reaction is that you are obviously rejecting the relevant evidence when you say this).
This is why I am thinking of having an article specifically about this, specifically tailored to Lesswrong.
Have you read the most upvoted responses to your link?
Its conclusion is “I think people who take safety seriously should consider working at OpenAI” (with the link to its job page!)
The conclusion of the second most voted one, from Ben Pace, is “Overall I don’t feel my opinion is very robust, and could easily change.”, and “And of course I’m very happy indeed about a bunch of the safety work they do and support. The org give lots of support and engineers to people like Paul Christiano, Chris Olah, etc”. For reference, Paul Christiano’s “safety work” included RLHF, which was instrumental to ChatGPT.
From my point of view, you are painfully wrong about this, and indeed, Lesswrong should have had much more enmity toward OpenAI, instead of recommending people work there because of safety.
yes. I don’t think any of them suggest that LessWrong is supporting or enthusiastic about OpenAI. (In particular, whether you should work there doesn’t have much relation to whether the company as a whole is a net negative.) I would describe the stance of top 2 comments on that post as mixed [1] and of LW’s stance in general as mixed-to-negative.
Fwiw this is not a crux, I might agree that we should be more negative toward OpenAI than we are. I don’t think that’s an argument for laxer standards of critcism. Standards for rigor should lead toward higher quality criticism, not less harsh criticism. If you had attacked Greenpeace twice as much but had substantiated all your claims, I wouldn’t have downvoted the post. I’d guess that the net effectiveness of a community’s criticism of a person or org goes up with stricter norms.
e.g., Ben pace also says, “An obvious reason to think OpenAI’s impact will be net negative is that they seem to be trying to reach AGI as fast as possible, and trying a route different from DeepMind and other competitors, so are in some world shortening the timeline until AI. (I’m aware that there are arguments about why a shorter timeline is better, but I’m not sold on them right now.)”
By the way, tone doesn’t come across well in writing. To be fair, even orally, I am often a bit abrasive.
So just to be clear: I’m thankful that you’re engaging with the conversation. Furthermore, I am assuming that you are doing so genuinely, so thanks for that too.
I think you may have misread what I wrote.
My statements were that the LessWrong community has supported DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, and that it had friends in all three companies.
I did not state that it was enthusiastic about it, and much less so that it currently is. When I say “has supported”, I literally mean that it has supported them. Eliezer introducing Demis and Thiel, Paul Christiano doing RLHF at OpenAI and helping with ChatGPT, the whole cluster founding Anthropic, all the people safety-washing the companies, etc. I didn’t make a grand statement about its feelings, just a pragmatic one about some of its actions.
Nevertheless a reaction to my statements, you picked up a thread the top answer recommends people work at OpenAI, and where the second topmost answer expresses happiness at capabilities (Paul’s RLHF) work.
How could he have known that Paul’s work would lead to capabilities 2 years before ChatGPT? By using enmity and keeping in mind that an organisation that races to AGI will leverage all of its internal research (including the one labelled “safety”) for capabilities.
I don’t know how you did footnotes in comments, but...
For instance, the context of Ben Pace’s response was one when many people in the community at the time (plausibly himself too!) recommended people work at OpenAI’s safety teams.
He mentions in his comment that he is happy that Paul and Chris get more money at OpenAI than they would have had otherwise, the same reasoning would have applied to other researchers working with them.
From my point of view, this is pretty damning. You picked one post, and the topmost answers featured two examples of support. The type that you would naturally and should clearly avoid with enemies.
To be clear, the LessWrong community has supported many times DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, and at the same time, felt bad feelings about them too. This is quite a normal awkward situation in the absence of clear enmity.
This is not surprising. Enmity would have helped with clarifying this relationship and not committing this mistake.
Also, remember that I do not view enmity as a single-dimensional axis, and this is a major point of my thesis! My recommendation sums to: be more proactive in deeming others enemies, and at the same time, remain cordial, polite and professional with them.
Having spoken with you in the past, I literally do not know if you are making a joke or not.
--
Assuming you are making a joke...
It is a beautiful one!
It completely encapsulates how many in my target audience truly struggle with the enmity, and would immediately react to “Greenpeace” and “enemy” before reading the essay. “Oh, I could find one argument on Google! Ergo, it is all mistake theory!”
I especially like the “do you guys, like” and the “What would happen? Huh?” parts, that make it feel very Reddit.
--
Assuming you are not… (or for the people who missed the joke)
You have missed the point of the essay. I recommend reading it again. Of course Greenpeace has arguments, and I have read quite a few of them.
Enemy does not mean “evil, stupid, and has no arguments that can be found on Google”.
Quite early in the essay, it is written:
If you take “an organisation has arguments on Google” as strong evidence that they can’t be your enemy, your model of the world is broken, in a way that hope internalising the essay would mend.
I agree with the point about acknowledging enmity in general; I’m not shy to do so myself. But the post didn’t convince me that Greenpeace in particular is my enemy. For that I’d need more detailed arguments.
This is unreasonably wrong and virulent. It reads as not having read the full article.
Of course I know that Greenpeace has arguments for its stances, and I am familiar with them. I mention a public letter it campaigned for, its budget, and its historical policy positions!
Like, when I was asked by PranavG whether he could link-post, I expected that the LessWrong Community would not like this article. Of course, “how nice nerds often botch enmity” will not fare well in a community that managed to support three companies racing to AGI (DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic) while it was worried about the risks of extinction from it.
But… “I mean, do you guys, like, know why Greenpeace is against some of these market solutions?”, “Maybe in more than five minutes you could find other arguments too.”, and “What would happen? Huh?”
Disappointing.
Having read the full article, I had basically the same objection and think your response is more or less nonsense. The point is that choosing enemies without understanding them as actors is bound to fail. A new political movement needs both friends and enemies if it is to succeed. It will need to offer its friends a new perspective in accordance with their values in order to endear itself to them. It will need to offer its enemies a coherent response to their disagreements to avoid being consumed by them. Identifying enemies based on policies and actions but not arguments is the canonical losing move in politics.
More directly: it is useful for political movements to have convenient enemies, but you should always wonder whether you or your enemy is the convenient one. A bunch of wealthy libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley nerds who routinely dismiss the concern that wealthy countries could exploit poor countries, to the point that they’re offended when they’re asked to even address that concern in their manifestos against Greenpeace, are more or less Greenpeace’s ideal enemy. Maybe you aren’t such an enemy! But you sure are doing an excellent job blending in with them.
You are projecting.
I have written in the past specifically against tech-libertarianism, in the context of wealth concentration leading to abuses of power.
I’m not offended that I’m asked to address a concern. I merely find it irrelevant.
What offends me is the lack of thought behind assuming that I didn’t know that Greenpeace had arguments. I have seen better on Lesswrong.
I think I was pretty clear in saying that this characterization may be invalid, was I not? You read the characterization as an accusation, for which I apologize, but I worry that this might speak to your state of mind in this discussion, which makes me worry that further discussion may be unproductive.
I notice that when you’re concerned about your views being characterized correctly, you address arguments and not just positions. Perhaps when you’re writing about the importance of choosing one’s enemies in politics, in the part where you explicitly choose an enemy and explain how your views differ from theirs, you could do that without needing to be provoked.
To be clear, I suspect we agree about enough issues of policy that in a reasonable political landscape, we should be allies. I’m certainly not a libertarian, I’m not projecting here, I’m trying to explain how I expect your political project to be categorized and defeated if you continue to approach politics the way you do in this essay. I’m frustrated with you because I would like my potential political allies to not make easily-avoidable mistakes and you are making one. Greenpeace is a bloated, inefficient, anti-progress organization, and yet it persists and amasses power because its political situation is convenient. Greenpeace has picked the right enemies, has (often correctly) accused them of acting in myopic and self-serving ways, and so has endured. If you make Greenpeace your enemy, you should try to understand what their favored enemy looks like and try to be visibly something other than that, not just in the abstract across your body of work, but specifically when you talk about Greenpeace. As I said earlier, and as I’m willing to explain if needed, this is the canonical losing move in politics.
This seems very fake, idiosyncratic, a much smaller problem (if any) than failing to organise against one’s enemies.
Nevertheless, if you have a write-up about it of −10 pages, I’m interested in checking it out (I often routinely get proven wrong, and I have found it good to extend this amount of interest to ~anyone who engages with me on a topic that I started).
I don’t currently have a write-up of that length or with the right lens, I have a draft that I’ve been working on for a while. Next time I’m working on it, I’ll see if I can consolidate this claim from it and ping you? Incidentally, I appreciate your willingness to engage and retract my previous worries about this conversation being too charged to be productive.
It has in fact been a while since the last time I have had written conversations with strangers, I’m sorry that my tone came up as too abrasive for productive conversation.
> Next time I’m working on it, I’ll see if I can consolidate this claim from it and ping you?
I have shared my email in DM.
I think it would be more accurate to use the word “opponent” or “adversary”. It’s not unusual to be in some kind of contest with someone else—you use the example of chess yourself. But that doesn’t make someone your enemy.
“Enemy” AFAIK strongly suggests hostility / seeking to harm, which is not true for chess nor for most policy disagreements. Important distinction!
(I’m usually less pedantic about word choice, but this essay is centrally about the use of the word “enemy”, so it seemed appropriate).
While Chess is clearly about adversariality, the central examples I care about (most notably politics and policy disagreements) are in fact about enmity.
It is in great part because enmity is more durable. A Chess game is bounded in time, you have the expectation to close the game soon.
Whereas Greenpeace is a durable enemy. Part of its identity is to be anti-nuke. Most likely, as long as it will exist, it will be anti-nuke.
Similarly, AGI corps will be enemies until they build ASI or get durably prevented from doing so.
I think it’s also partly that in practice, enmity, this type of durable adversariality, does involve hostility. When someone tries to durably undermine you and your endeavours, and when you try to durably undermine them, it’s hard to maintain a cordial relationship.
In “Beyond Enmity”, I gesture at ways to maintain a durable adversarial relationship, with less hostility. But I do explain that it is predicated on the ability to actually engage in enmity.
If a nerd thinks they are in a durable adversarial relationship, they are most likely coping, and they are losing, getting trounced by an opponent who is considering the full enmity of the situation.
I think the people who truly want climate change mitigation, but are pro-nuclear and pro-market, may be unwilling to call Greenpeace an enemy, because they regard the real enemy as those who work to outright deny the problem.
An example closer to home may be Taylor Lorenz’s recent video “Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead”, which describes the tech tycoons as “pro extinction” because of their AI accelerationism, and frames it all in terms of the TESCREAL narrative. I think it’s likely that this kind of opposition to advanced AI, will overwhelm the EA-adjacent form of “Pause AI” activism.
Entities are can both be enemies and allies at the same time, entities can be more or less enemies, etc.
From my point of view: accepting to see someone as an enemy only in extreme cases or in the most complete opposition is part of the mindset that I am denouncing.
I think this article would’ve been far better without talking about Greenpeace. The engagement with Greenpeace is brief and low-context but most of the argument relies on taking your position on Greenpeace as fact.
While you may disagree with Greenpeace’s goals or actions, I don’t think its a good framing to think of such a political disagreement in terms of friends/ enemies. Such an extreme and adversarial view is very dangerous and leads to hatred. We need more respect, empathy, and rational discussion.