I initially posted a comment that was negative here shortly after the post came out, then quickly deleted it when I realized I was being unreasonable. I think there’s some sense in which I actually agree with some conceptual threads underlying this fairly strongly, but I’m very hesitant about the risk of invoking a different part of a conflationary alliance than intended. I find, when trying to clean up politically loaded concepts, the first thing I want to do is rephrase away from the originating memeplex so that I’m not relying on shared understanding of shibboleths—it seems like possibly your approach is, instead of rephrasing away, to try to be precise about which part of the shibboleth conflationary space you’re referring to?
Some disagreements, though:
I’d hope humanity as a whole is a set within which we can converge on something like egalitarian or near-egalitarian terminal valuation, possibly via something that looks vaguely like an eigenmorality coprotection group? I’m not sure what that would look like concretely. This might look, in your framework, like an international alliance, for example. But this would be separate from obviously correct asymmetric instrumental valuation. In a sense, you seem to be talking about that with the nationalism concept, but I’d hope to see a larger set than a single current nation as the conserved group.
I’m also quite concerned that this approach might end up preventing many of the uplifts that one would want humanity to have from a successful alignment outcome. If the framework requires people to stay human in a way the overall group is in agreement on, rather than having the flexibility to select the part of being-human which permits large-scale degradation prevention.
I’m not at all convinced that this adds up to “right wing politics is best equipped”. I buy, and have bought for a while, that right wing politics has frameworks which are ready to talk about the rise of AI. It doesn’t seem clear from this argument that the frameworks’ concerning properties would be robust to degradation over time, though. That still seems to me to be an unsolved problem.
I initially posted a comment that was negative here shortly after the post came out, then quickly deleted it when I realized I was being unreasonable. I think there’s some sense in which I actually agree with some conceptual threads underlying this fairly strongly, but I’m very hesitant about the risk of invoking a different part of a conflationary alliance than intended. I find, when trying to clean up politically loaded concepts, the first thing I want to do is rephrase away from the originating memeplex so that I’m not relying on shared understanding of shibboleths—it seems like possibly your approach is, instead of rephrasing away, to try to be precise about which part of the shibboleth conflationary space you’re referring to?
Some disagreements, though:
I’d hope humanity as a whole is a set within which we can converge on something like egalitarian or near-egalitarian terminal valuation, possibly via something that looks vaguely like an eigenmorality coprotection group? I’m not sure what that would look like concretely. This might look, in your framework, like an international alliance, for example. But this would be separate from obviously correct asymmetric instrumental valuation. In a sense, you seem to be talking about that with the nationalism concept, but I’d hope to see a larger set than a single current nation as the conserved group.
I’m also quite concerned that this approach might end up preventing many of the uplifts that one would want humanity to have from a successful alignment outcome. If the framework requires people to stay human in a way the overall group is in agreement on, rather than having the flexibility to select the part of being-human which permits large-scale degradation prevention.
I’m not at all convinced that this adds up to “right wing politics is best equipped”. I buy, and have bought for a while, that right wing politics has frameworks which are ready to talk about the rise of AI. It doesn’t seem clear from this argument that the frameworks’ concerning properties would be robust to degradation over time, though. That still seems to me to be an unsolved problem.