I’m surprised you missed out the rationalist disdain for the world. In my experience, rationalists disproportionately dislike the world as it is. This goes all the way back to Eliezer writing The Sword of Good, and joking about being an alien from Dath Ilan. Of course, Eliezer also wrote Kindness to Kin, and Three Worlds Collide, which are (supposed to be) positive on the world. But I don’t hear about those so much.
The actual “good guy” in TSoG is a guy who everyone says is evil, who is casting the spell of Ultimate Doom, who wants to rip apart the existing world and build a new one entirely to his design. The moral of the story is that doing this unilaterally is the correct course of action. Well, we have those guys in the real world, they’re the AI company CEOs.
Is the world bad? Yeah, in some ways. But do you know what’s worse than the world? Having zero worlds because you blew it up.
In reality, the person who wants to cast the spell of Ultimate Doom and end the world is probably not an enlightened being who dislikes the world for Good and principled reasons. They just don’t make many humans like that. E.g. the Unabomber made up his environmentalist schtick to justify a hatred that came from a mixture of CIA experiments (though honestly they didn’t even sound that bad) and being rejected by a woman at work.
(I also think that the rationalist penchant for book reviews comes from a similar, but distinct flavour of disdain. The point of a rat-style book review is not to recommend the book to people, even conditionally. The point of a rat book review is to obviate the need to read the book. This means that after reading the review, you don’t need to engage with the non-rat world, you can just engage with a pre-filtered and summarized version of it.)
I think disdain for the state of the world is an interesting rationalist vice, as something that is healthy in moderation and destructive in extremis.
However I don’t currently see it as happening as much as the ones above, or as damagingly. One might think of the foolish Zizians, but I think their hatred for the world comes more from leftist philosophy / animal rights background, than from rationalist vices. Their rationalist vices look more like their endless and inaccurate writing about hemispheres.
I don’t agree on book reviews FWIW. I think the counterfactual is that most people don’t read a book, and that a book review is, if done well, a successful 80⁄20 of the book. I think of book reviews as positive way that rationalists en-masse engage with parts of the world outside of their worldview.
My sense is Eliezer or rationalists generally don’t hate the world.
I don’t like the world. I think the history of the world is negative on net, and that the current existence of the world is still net negative. I would not blow up the world, because I think the future can be very very good, and is unlikely to be very very bad. But if my p(doom) was 100% by 2100, I’d prefer the world blow up sooner rather than later.
But when I express this opinion, my sense is people overwhelmingly disagree. Like less than 1% of rationalists will agree with this.
Actually, out of curiosity: could people please agree/disagree react to this to signal agreement/disagreement with the above statement?
Like the statement is:
The world (life on earth) up til now, has been a net negative. If we were sure the world would end tomorrow, then it would’ve been better for the world to never have existed at all
I put an agree vote, but also an uncertainty react. This seems like a very hard question to answer, which depends on massive subquestions like “are insects conscious and do they experience pain?” and “are subcomponents of people independent consciousnesses that can be suffering even if the ‘ego’ isn’t experiencing suffering?”
But yes, on a straightforward accounting, brushing all the complexity aside, I think the factory farming alone probably outweighs all the value of human civilization.
I disagree; I think all the stories and adventures and loves and lives that people in the world have lived are worth quite a lot of torture, and it’s not naively the case that if the torturous experiences are larger than the other experiences, that this means they’re more important. I think a world that is primarily negative experiences can still be very meaningful and worthwhile.
I think it’s worth being a good part of a bad story, rather than there being no story at all.
I think most people haven’t been tortured very much, but those that endure terrible pain regularly are often willing to give up almost anything to make it stop. (This isn’t universal. Nietzsche was enduring terrible pain nearly constantly in his later life, and he would agree with you.)
I think it’s easy for someone to say “the meaning in the world outweighs even terrible suffering on an massive scale” when they’re not the one experiencing the nearly constant suffering.
That said, I’ll add to the (incomplete) list of uncertainties “how exactly does the axiological value of meaning relate to the axiological value of suffering?”
Or to to put it another way, a part of me definitely resonates with...
I think it’s worth being a good part of a bad story, rather than there being no story at all.
Indeed, most of the personal meaning in my life is grounded in my choice of the role that I play in this this small part of the whole story of civilization. I don’t decide my circumstances, but I do decide what sort of person I chose to be in meeting those circumstances. I am proud to choose the Good, and that is most of what is personally valuable to me.[1]
But I’m suspicious that the reason why “I think it’s worth being a good part of a bad story” feels appealing as a justification for existence is scope insensitivity.
I just literally cannot comprehend the horror of the terror and the suffering of billions of years of life killing and eating life on planet earth. If I could comprehend it, if I experienced it all myself, I think it would be extremely and straightforwardly obvious that the tiny fraction of total experience in which I could contextualize the whole thing as part of an epic story doesn’t come even remotely close to justifying the horror, and any claims to the contrary are cope.
As a side note, this is related I have a strong dislike of John Wentworth’s recent categorization of human values vs Goodness.
I do not resonate with his formulation of what Goodness is. Goodness, as I mean it definitively not “conformity to local norms”. In fact, goodness depends on non-conformity, insofar as local norms are often and regularly evil. Goodness is something like the reflective unfolding of a small number of innate principles, like fairness and kindness, which are tied to strong, innate, moral emotional reactions.
And this matters a lot to me because my relationship to Goodness is probably the largest component of what I find yummy.
I think all the stories and adventures and loves and lives that people in the world have lived are worth quite a lot of torture, and it’s not naively the case that if the torturous experiences are larger than the other experiences, that this means they’re more important.
For you, is this a quantitative question, or an “in principle” question? Like could there exist some amount of extreme suffering, for which you would judge them to be outweighing the meaningful and worthwhile experiences?
Or is the sentiment more like “if there exists a single moment of meaning, that redeems all the pain and suffering of all of history”?
Scope sensitivity: Some amount of it should be able to outweigh a certain amount of meaning.
Virtue ethics: I am willing to push through a lot of suffering if it means something; the simple ratio of the two does not determine whether the overall thing is worthwhile.
Deontology: it does kind of differ on whether you’re responsible for the suffering happening or not.
It’s also plausible to me that I am more coming at this from a deontological feeling of “One should not kill everyone if one has a good reason” rather than “The world is net positive”.
It’s also plausible to me that I am more coming at this from a deontological feeling of “One should not kill everyone if one has a good reason” rather than “The world is net positive”.
I agree that these are importantly different, and easily conflated!
(Note that this message and its parent are talking about different things: the parent talked about whether the current value is negative, and the child talked about whether the total value has been negative.)
But when I express this opinion, my sense is people overwhelmingly disagree. Like less than 1% of rationalists will agree with this.
Furthermore, many of them will think that this is absurd.
Like “if you come to the conclusion that the world is bad, and it would be better if it didn’t exist, or that humanity is bad, and it would be better if it didn’t exist, then that’s a reductio ad absurdum, and that means you must have made an error somewhere.”
I’m surprised you missed out the rationalist disdain for the world. In my experience, rationalists disproportionately dislike the world as it is. This goes all the way back to Eliezer writing The Sword of Good, and joking about being an alien from Dath Ilan. Of course, Eliezer also wrote Kindness to Kin, and Three Worlds Collide, which are (supposed to be) positive on the world. But I don’t hear about those so much.
The actual “good guy” in TSoG is a guy who everyone says is evil, who is casting the spell of Ultimate Doom, who wants to rip apart the existing world and build a new one entirely to his design. The moral of the story is that doing this unilaterally is the correct course of action. Well, we have those guys in the real world, they’re the AI company CEOs.
Is the world bad? Yeah, in some ways. But do you know what’s worse than the world? Having zero worlds because you blew it up.
In reality, the person who wants to cast the spell of Ultimate Doom and end the world is probably not an enlightened being who dislikes the world for Good and principled reasons. They just don’t make many humans like that. E.g. the Unabomber made up his environmentalist schtick to justify a hatred that came from a mixture of CIA experiments (though honestly they didn’t even sound that bad) and being rejected by a woman at work.
(I also think that the rationalist penchant for book reviews comes from a similar, but distinct flavour of disdain. The point of a rat-style book review is not to recommend the book to people, even conditionally. The point of a rat book review is to obviate the need to read the book. This means that after reading the review, you don’t need to engage with the non-rat world, you can just engage with a pre-filtered and summarized version of it.)
I think disdain for the state of the world is an interesting rationalist vice, as something that is healthy in moderation and destructive in extremis.
However I don’t currently see it as happening as much as the ones above, or as damagingly. One might think of the foolish Zizians, but I think their hatred for the world comes more from leftist philosophy / animal rights background, than from rationalist vices. Their rationalist vices look more like their endless and inaccurate writing about hemispheres.
I don’t agree on book reviews FWIW. I think the counterfactual is that most people don’t read a book, and that a book review is, if done well, a successful 80⁄20 of the book. I think of book reviews as positive way that rationalists en-masse engage with parts of the world outside of their worldview.
My sense is Eliezer or rationalists generally don’t hate the world.
I don’t like the world. I think the history of the world is negative on net, and that the current existence of the world is still net negative. I would not blow up the world, because I think the future can be very very good, and is unlikely to be very very bad. But if my p(doom) was 100% by 2100, I’d prefer the world blow up sooner rather than later.
But when I express this opinion, my sense is people overwhelmingly disagree. Like less than 1% of rationalists will agree with this.
Actually, out of curiosity: could people please agree/disagree react to this to signal agreement/disagreement with the above statement?
Like the statement is:
I put an agree vote, but also an uncertainty react. This seems like a very hard question to answer, which depends on massive subquestions like “are insects conscious and do they experience pain?” and “are subcomponents of people independent consciousnesses that can be suffering even if the ‘ego’ isn’t experiencing suffering?”
But yes, on a straightforward accounting, brushing all the complexity aside, I think the factory farming alone probably outweighs all the value of human civilization.
I disagree; I think all the stories and adventures and loves and lives that people in the world have lived are worth quite a lot of torture, and it’s not naively the case that if the torturous experiences are larger than the other experiences, that this means they’re more important. I think a world that is primarily negative experiences can still be very meaningful and worthwhile.
I think it’s worth being a good part of a bad story, rather than there being no story at all.
I think most people haven’t been tortured very much, but those that endure terrible pain regularly are often willing to give up almost anything to make it stop. (This isn’t universal. Nietzsche was enduring terrible pain nearly constantly in his later life, and he would agree with you.)
I think it’s easy for someone to say “the meaning in the world outweighs even terrible suffering on an massive scale” when they’re not the one experiencing the nearly constant suffering.
That said, I’ll add to the (incomplete) list of uncertainties “how exactly does the axiological value of meaning relate to the axiological value of suffering?”
Or to to put it another way, a part of me definitely resonates with...
Indeed, most of the personal meaning in my life is grounded in my choice of the role that I play in this this small part of the whole story of civilization. I don’t decide my circumstances, but I do decide what sort of person I chose to be in meeting those circumstances. I am proud to choose the Good, and that is most of what is personally valuable to me.[1]
But I’m suspicious that the reason why “I think it’s worth being a good part of a bad story” feels appealing as a justification for existence is scope insensitivity.
I just literally cannot comprehend the horror of the terror and the suffering of billions of years of life killing and eating life on planet earth. If I could comprehend it, if I experienced it all myself, I think it would be extremely and straightforwardly obvious that the tiny fraction of total experience in which I could contextualize the whole thing as part of an epic story doesn’t come even remotely close to justifying the horror, and any claims to the contrary are cope.
As a side note, this is related I have a strong dislike of John Wentworth’s recent categorization of human values vs Goodness.
I do not resonate with his formulation of what Goodness is. Goodness, as I mean it definitively not “conformity to local norms”. In fact, goodness depends on non-conformity, insofar as local norms are often and regularly evil. Goodness is something like the reflective unfolding of a small number of innate principles, like fairness and kindness, which are tied to strong, innate, moral emotional reactions.
And this matters a lot to me because my relationship to Goodness is probably the largest component of what I find yummy.
For you, is this a quantitative question, or an “in principle” question? Like could there exist some amount of extreme suffering, for which you would judge them to be outweighing the meaningful and worthwhile experiences?
Or is the sentiment more like “if there exists a single moment of meaning, that redeems all the pain and suffering of all of history”?
I don’t know. Some frames:
Scope sensitivity: Some amount of it should be able to outweigh a certain amount of meaning.
Virtue ethics: I am willing to push through a lot of suffering if it means something; the simple ratio of the two does not determine whether the overall thing is worthwhile.
Deontology: it does kind of differ on whether you’re responsible for the suffering happening or not.
It’s also plausible to me that I am more coming at this from a deontological feeling of “One should not kill everyone if one has a good reason” rather than “The world is net positive”.
I agree that these are importantly different, and easily conflated!
(Note that this message and its parent are talking about different things: the parent talked about whether the current value is negative, and the child talked about whether the total value has been negative.)
Hmm thanks, I meant the latter both times, but I see its unclear, so I’ll edit it so no one gets confused.
Okay so 20%, which means I was directionally correct /s
Furthermore, many of them will think that this is absurd.
Like “if you come to the conclusion that the world is bad, and it would be better if it didn’t exist, or that humanity is bad, and it would be better if it didn’t exist, then that’s a reductio ad absurdum, and that means you must have made an error somewhere.”
(I don’t share this view.)
Kindness to Kin is my favorite short story of his.