You are one of my favourite writers on lesswrong. That being said, there is something about your writing that irks me a lot.
Your writing seems to imply that the end goal for you personally is to convert every person you meet into a high trust culture, where they never carry their sword with them. I don’t know if this is what your actual goal is, but it is the vibe your writing gives out.
On the margin, I do want more people to do the work you are doing. I don’t want everyone to do the work you are doing though, and I would see it as actively destructive to the future of the world if you were successfully recruiting everyone to your work.
I want some people to carry their sword in hand and fight fire with fire. If someone threatens to kill you, consider threatening to kill their family in return. If they threaten to create new dangerous technology, consider threatening to nuke their country out of existence.
We are less than 10 years away from the possible extinction of the human race. Most of us have accepted as normal that our lives depend on crude oil extracted from other countries at threat of nuclear war. Some of us have spies in our midst who report to foreign governments or our own govt.
People are low trust because ground reality is low trust. Someone has to live in this reality in order to fight.
There is a wisdom to making such decisions, but IMO that wisdom is not to permanently abstain from violence like you suggest.
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. - John Quincy Adams
Update: Continued in DMs due to lesswrong ratelimiting. Posted below with permission.
Samuel
It is possible I’m assuming things about you that are not true, in my reply to your post.
Your writing gives the vibe that high trust cultures are default good, without acknowledging that sometimes actually low trust culture is good. If the underlying reality is low trust, maybe you should use norms that work for low trust culture. Do you agree?
Also what’s happening globally affects what’s happening locally, I prefer fixing what’s happening globally first, over fixing what happens locally. Do you agree this makes sense?
Duncan
(Dunno how much I’ll be able to participate in a back and forth)
I think you’re bucketing “good” and “appropriate” in a way that doesn’t make sense to me.
Analogy: surgery is extremely helpful and often indicated. That doesn’t make it non-damaging or non-painful. The damage and the pain of surgery are always bad; they’re just heavily (heavily!) outweighed by the goodness of the resulting improvement to health.
Low-trust is worse than high-trust. It just … is. Objectively. In the same way that surgery involves physical trauma and pain. Constantly spending resources in a red queen race is bad. Constantly being on alert is bad. Cortisol is bad. Violence is bad.
Nevertheless, low-trust behaviors are quite often the obviously correct way to go. You should absolutely carry a sword if you expect to be accosted by highway robbers, and you should carry a sword if there are wild animals in the woods that cannot be coordinated with, and you should carry a sword if everyone else is carrying a sword even if actual violence is rare because (probably) the sword-carrying is part of the local low-violence equilibrium and you don’t want to broadcast that you’re uniquely vulnerable.
But all of that doesn’t make carrying a sword not effortful. Carrying a sword is more costly (period) than not carrying one, in the sense that it requires you to spend energy and be wary and alert and spend time practicing bladecraft and live with higher cortisol downstream of stressful high suspicion, etc. etc. etc.
I am not and have never advocated “unilaterally disarm, it’ll be great!” I am not and have never advocated “expose yourself to the predictable attacks of your enemies!” I have never written anything that could reasonably be construed as meaning “there aren’t monsters out there.” Something like a full third of my writing is talking about the myriad and omnipresent threats we have to navigate.
The presence of monsters is what makes low-trust culture net good. Better than naive, unsustainable high-trust culture moves that just get you robbed and raped and killed. Often, disarmament is a fabricated option (this is explicitly mentioned in the grayspace post, among others).
But a) if you take each behavior set in isolation, high-trust is just incredibly obviously better than low-trust along like six different axes. It’s objectively, ridiculously better, which is why Adams wanted it for his children and his grandchildren.
And b) if you lose track of this fact, and start thinking “this low-trust stuff is just good, on its own!” rather than remembering “ah, right, these are costly-but-appropriate responses to an unpleasant reality,” then you start to lose track of which direction you ought to be heading, and which way you ought to be nudging your society. You start to be less capable of noticing when you can relinquish your vigilance. People can end up romanticizing violence and mistrust, and start thinking that it’s better to be the biggest warlord than to live in a utopia.
It isn’t.
As for fixing global problems versus fixing local ones, I don’t think I agree that there’s anything like a dichotomy there? If you can fix a problem globally, that saves you from having to continually cut back weeds at the boundaries of your garden. But also often you can’t fix something globally, and so it’s better to make a garden. And also often both paths are technically available, but you only have the resources to do things at small scale (and sometimes successfully pulling it off at small scale is how you build momentum for the global solution).
Samuel
Holy shit this is a pretty good reply.
I agree with everything you said. Thanks for taking the time to write this.
Feel free to copy paste this back to the thread, I just DMed because lesswrong has rate limited me. Their current voting system rewards groupthink ime, although that’s not their intention.
Duncan
I think I’m not expecting to copy-paste it myself but if you find yourself in a window where you have nothing else to comment and you want to, feel free. Blanket permission; you can treat the above text as public.
I think that if you were to poll people in this general bubble “hey, does Duncan put swords away too readily?” you would overwhelmingly hear back “wtf? No, the opposite; he’s too ready to carry and draw swords by default.”
(One of my more popular and also more controversial posts was titled “Killing Socrates” and was in part about how maybe it was actually good that they literally killed Socrates.)
i.e. I think something has been missed or projected; I notice I am confused.
Late edit: The Adams quote seems to be not at all an argument in favor of your position; Adams is pointing at “yeah, obviously we still have problems that require swords but the whole point is to make that less and less the case over time.”
You are one of my favourite writers on lesswrong. That being said, there is something about your writing that irks me a lot.
Your writing seems to imply that the end goal for you personally is to convert every person you meet into a high trust culture, where they never carry their sword with them. I don’t know if this is what your actual goal is, but it is the vibe your writing gives out.
On the margin, I do want more people to do the work you are doing. I don’t want everyone to do the work you are doing though, and I would see it as actively destructive to the future of the world if you were successfully recruiting everyone to your work.
I want some people to carry their sword in hand and fight fire with fire. If someone threatens to kill you, consider threatening to kill their family in return. If they threaten to create new dangerous technology, consider threatening to nuke their country out of existence.
We are less than 10 years away from the possible extinction of the human race. Most of us have accepted as normal that our lives depend on crude oil extracted from other countries at threat of nuclear war. Some of us have spies in our midst who report to foreign governments or our own govt.
People are low trust because ground reality is low trust. Someone has to live in this reality in order to fight.
There is a wisdom to making such decisions, but IMO that wisdom is not to permanently abstain from violence like you suggest.
Update: Continued in DMs due to lesswrong ratelimiting. Posted below with permission.
Samuel
Duncan
Samuel
Duncan
Samuel
I think that if you were to poll people in this general bubble “hey, does Duncan put swords away too readily?” you would overwhelmingly hear back “wtf? No, the opposite; he’s too ready to carry and draw swords by default.”
(One of my more popular and also more controversial posts was titled “Killing Socrates” and was in part about how maybe it was actually good that they literally killed Socrates.)
i.e. I think something has been missed or projected; I notice I am confused.
Late edit: The Adams quote seems to be not at all an argument in favor of your position; Adams is pointing at “yeah, obviously we still have problems that require swords but the whole point is to make that less and less the case over time.”
I can’t upvote it directly, but thanks to Duncan for the detailed and interesting comment!