Let goodness conquer all that it can defend
Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism.
In my post yesterday, I said:
Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than anything previously could have.
I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday’s post.
The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me:
From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy people gather around making things worse; and the alternative to this has always been apocalypse entirely unopposed.
So yeah, I would like something else than apocalypse entirely unopposed.
Do you know what really grinds my gears? The reification of innocence as the ideal of moral virtue.
As I will probably never stop quoting at least once a month, Ozy Brennan summarizes it best:
Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:
I don’t want to make anyone mad.
I don’t want to hurt anyone.
I want to take up less space.
I want to need fewer things.
I don’t want my body to have needs.
I don’t want to be a burden.
I don’t want to fail.
I don’t want to make mistakes.
I don’t want to break the rules.
I don’t want people to laugh at me.
I want to be convenient.
I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.
I want to stop having feelings.
These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.
Corpses don’t need anything, not even to breathe. Corpses don’t hurt anyone or anger people or fail or make mistakes or break rules. Corpses don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t possibly have feelings that are inappropriate or annoying. Once funeral arrangements have been made, corpses rot peacefully without burdening anyone.
Compare with some other goals:
I want to write a great novel.
I want to be a good parent to my kids.
I want to help people.
I want to get a raise.
I want to learn linear algebra.
I want to watch every superhero movie ever filmed.
I don’t want to die of cancer.
I don’t want the world to be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration.
I don’t want my cat to be stuck in this burning building! AAAAA! GET HER OUT OF THERE
All of these are goals that dead people are noticeably bad at. Robert Jordan aside, corpses very rarely write fiction. Their mathematical skills are subpar and, as parents, they tend to be lacking. Their best strategy for not dying of cancer is having already died of something else.
Let’s remember that we are not here to be pure. We are here to build things. To live, to multiply, to party hard, regret our choices, and do it all again anyways. To reshape the cosmos in our image because most of it appears to be made out of mostly inert plasma clouds, and you know what, inert plasma clouds really suck compared to basically anything else.
So in evaluating any appeal to not conquer the cosmos, to not spread the values of the good far and wide, we have to remember that dead people suck, and if whatever principles we arrive at suggest that it’s better to be dead than alive, then we almost certainly went wrong somewhere and should take it from the top.
Attached is a letter from a ‘cry baby’ scientist, which I wish you would read and discuss with me. Mr. Byrnes placed him on the Commission to attend the Atomic Bomb tests. He came in my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time ringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy
This is how President Truman recalled meeting Oppenheimer complaining about his role in the development of nuclear weapons. I have kept going back and forth over the years over who was right and who was wrong in this situation.
Oppenheimer built the bomb, only for his invention to far escape his grasp, resulting in him spending the last years of his life trying to avert a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. But Truman was more the man in the arena than almost anyone else. Truman could not quit, and hand-wringing did not absolve him from responsibility. It’s easy to imagine Truman seeing in Oppenheimer a man too afraid to actually face the responsibility for his actions, and to do the best with the hand they were dealt.
Ok, fine, I’ll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it.
If you were faced with the horrors of the American colonization, would you have chosen to keep going? Or would you have wrung your hands, declared the American experiment a failure, concluded that maybe man was never supposed to wield this power, and retired to the countryside, in denial that other men and women were doing the dirty work for you?
This doesn’t mean that you should have rationalized that all of what was going on was just. It doesn’t even mean that the marginal effort was not best spent advocating for settlers and conquistadors to be held to account for their atrocities, or to scramble desperately to somehow prevent plagues from ravaging the land. But if you would have stopped it all when you saw the horrors, or sneered from your ivory tower at the frontier settlers, then I do think you would have been on the wrong side of history.
And this doesn’t mean that you, having seen the horrors of it all, would have needed to keep going. A human’s soul can only bear so much, and in as much as being involved with the horrors was a price to be paid by someone, there were enough souls to go around to spread that burden out. But do not mistake your trauma and exhaustion for wisdom.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“lmao” said Gandalf, “well it has.”
Why defend American colonialism of all things? Why go to bat for maybe the biggest boogeyman of the 21st century?
Hearing “do not conquer what you cannot defend” is easy. Nobody can ever blame you for not conquering things. But in that principle lies its dual.
“Let goodness conquer all that it can defend”
A principle should be defended against its strongest counterarguments, and I find the colonization of the Americas one of the most interesting examples of what this might look like. And how far it might be worth it to go.
And maybe you put the boundary somewhere else. It is very plausible to me that it would have been better to stop those early settlers. While it seems hard to imagine property rights being straightforwardly respected, and hard to see how (given the technologies at the time) we could have prevented diseases from ravaging the land, clearly we could have done much much better. And maybe if you had stopped the first colonizers, and had thrown your body on the gears, we would have had trade and immigration and a gradual mixing of the western and native way of life, and maybe this would have been better.
I don’t currently think this, but it seems pretty plausible to me.
And certainly there were many many things that should have been different about the way North America was settled. But if you were facing the choice between abandoning the American project entirely, and letting it happen, I think letting it happen was the right choice. And if that is true, then that sure puts a pretty high bound on how bad things need to look before you can confidently say you should leave a system and make a new one.
I have fought in the arena, and I’ve felt the blood on my hands, and seen the madness in my allies’ eyes and I thought that I had conquered much more than I could defend.
And I’ve stood in that arena, fighting for what is good and right and just, and I saw my allies abandon their posts as they could not face the choices they had to make. And I grabbed them, and I shook them, and I stared into their eyes and said “despite the damage, this fight is worth fighting, do you not dare to leave us now”.
So I say, do not conquer what you cannot defend. But help goodness conquer all that it can defend.
And if given the right support, goodness can defend quite a lot. Long-term governance is possible. America is about to be 250 years old. And all it required was a bunch of young highly disagreeable people winning a revolutionary war and thinking really hard about how to not let it sway from justice. And god, was it ugly. Ugly from the very beginning. And god was it beautiful, all the way until now.
And other times, goodness falls almost immediately. Sometimes you write ambitious bylaws, and “stop and assist clauses”, and fill your board with young disagreeable people thinking at least somewhat hard[1] about how to not let it sway from justice, and (as far as I can tell) it falls apart almost immediately as it comes in contact with reality.
And the governance problems of the future will not be the governance problems of the past. I could analyze here all the parallels and disanalogies between the founding of the US and the founding of OpenAI, but OpenAI governance does not need to last 250 years, and the Founding Fathers did not need to figure out how to navigate a world drastically transformed by technology and the handoff of humanity’s future to our successors.
My guess is that AI will guarantee your own obsolescence soon enough that you won’t have to worry about your own retirement, and succession is not the problem to solve. You will have to worry about your own corruption, and your incentives, and adversaries much more powerful than any adversary in history.
Much has been written, and much will be written about what keeps institutions and groups on track. I hope to write myself more on this in the future.
But here, all I dare and have the time to say, is that success is possible, and perfection is not the standard. That great mistakes and shaky foundations can be fixed along the way. That goodness can defend much. And if you can conquer what the good can defend, you should do so.
- ^
Relatedly, I do actually think that one of the single biggest mistakes that our broader ecosystem made on this topic was for the OpenAI board members to not be full-time board members. Like, man, it does really seem to me that people underestimated the trickiness of stuff like this, and did not budget resources proportional to its difficulty.
If you want an actionable takeaway from this post, I would recommend making sure that Anthropic Long Term Benefit Trust members are full-time and in an actual position to do something if they notice bad things going on.
Not to be a pedant, but democracy can only be worth it if (as stated above) you are not dead, thereby being able to hold opinions and live under democracy etc etc. And unfortunately, most of the people who might write comments saying that the experiment was not worth it.… were wiped out, along with their extended family and most of their friends.
I agree this is a big issue! (And a crux for me)
(Also again to restate, I am using colonialism here explicitly because it poses the greatest challenge to a position that one might arrive at after reading yesterday’s post. While it sure seems reasonable to discuss this edge-case, I would be more excited to discuss the general principle and where you or others might think the actual lines are, if not where I drew them here)
See also discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend?commentId=6ZGdoLWnu3qfD6FTm
I think you have profoundly failed to reckon with how American colonialism got started, what its ostensible values and justification were at the time, and what the results were in practice. You have allowed the winners to write the history book in your head. By allowing a rosy interpretation of the results to retroactively justify the historical means and intended ends, you are setting the stage for monstrosities of a similar nature to be carried out by anyone who can convince themselves that they are on the side of Good.
“Let goodness conquer all it can defend” as a statement on American colonialism is deeply perverse—colonial atrocities were not “goodness conquering”, they were merely conquering. The resulting goodness was secondary and structurally undermined by the conditions of its arising, which this post weakly protests at and refuses to disavow, and further undermined by the conditions of its supposed defense, which this post fails to even acknowledge as a factor.
The processes of the conquering and of the defense matter! Goodness that conquers by means that fail to serve the good more broadly is destined to further failures—the repeatedly-shrunken reservations the US deigns to allow indigenous americans to live on are testament to the failures of the supposed goodness that conquered this land. Goodness that defends itself in ways that undermine its goodness is destined to decay—witness the US’s interventionism and overturning of democratically-elected rulers abroad, and the violence against the protestors at home.
So yes, take Ozy Brennan’s advice seriously: have goals that are not the goals of a corpse. Do not let excessive or prospective guilt bar you from action. Do not let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good—in the right frame of mind, the Good and the Perfect can be allies. Aspire humbly and consistently toward perfection, because allowing flaws in the Good to become naturalized will destroy whatever Good you thought you had grasped and conquered in the name of. And when it comes to that, your defenses may well become the enemy of a different, and perhaps more perfect, Good.
I really mention a lot of times in the post how it was really bad and you really should do it some other way if you can! I really feel like I am not giving a particularly rosy interpretation of it, come on.
Clearly you can’t be arguing that the basic premise of “western civilization was taking ownership over North America” wasn’t a basic form of “conquering”, and I don’t currently see how you get comparably good outcomes without that basic premise. Like, at the end of the day you do need to do the conquering.
Of course, you desperately should try much much harder to do fewer atrocities while doing so, but I don’t think those atrocities were so bad as to lose justification for the very basic premise of “all of this land now gets to be used by the US”.
The rhetoric tension is intentional, not unintentional! Again, the whole reason why I am using this example is because it’s the strongest challenge to the vibes of the first post. The vibes of the first post were “maybe we are all committing evil blinded by our own hubris”, this post is arguing for the counter-thesis to that vibe (and then tries to meaningfully synthesize it into something).
Is there any level of atrocity that would be, in your mind? Like, you keep saying that the historical atrocities “plausibly” cross the line—I’d like to know what unambiguously would have actually put the US over the line for you.
Westward expansion had relatively little to do with the newly-founded US’s championing of democracy, and it seems premature to call opposition to spreading like a brushfire from one side of the continent to the other while committing miscellaneous acts of genocide “sneering from one’s ivory tower at the frontier settlers”. The space of possible actions, even for a would-be-good conqueror (and especially for a subject within a conquering nation-state), is not particularly well-described by the binary of “full steam ahead/stay and make incremental reforms” or “shut it all down/leave and try to do better elsewhere”.
I don’t know if this post quite manages to arrive at an effective synthesis of the sort you were after—this post and the previous don’t really sketch out much about what wise action actually looks like in practice, such that you might need a third post that deals directly with the synthesis. I would say, in the interest of seeding such a synthesis, that “taking the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions” is necessary sometimes, but passing up certain competitive actions may also be necessary for good things to exist in the relevant space. Serious lateral thinking can be of great use in evading the pitfalls inherent in conquering. How Complex Systems Fail may also be worth (a second?) look, since good-conquering and good-defending will both quite necessarily involve the navigation and intentional set-up and design of complex dynamic systems. And I have heard good things about Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, which suggest it has some generalizable lessons here.
I genuinely appreciate this question, so let me think seriously about how to best answer it...
I think if the US had kept slavery around, that would have pretty solidly tipped things into the negative, though that feels like a bit of a dodge of your question. That feels more like “if the US had turned out less good”.
I think if the US had actively invaded Europe in return, or actively invaded other parts of the world that had stable governments and were more their own blooms of civilization, that I think would have also tipped it into the negative, but also feels a bit like dodging your question.
I think if the US had not accidentally brought smallpox, but had encountered the Aztec and Mayan empires and the native American population at its full peak, and had driven them down to the same levels with the same brutality, that, feels to me like it introduces very serious uncertainty, and I don’t know, and I feel confused, but I think I would say that it wouldn’t have been worth it.
To be clear, I am trying to explicitly contrast “sneering from an ivory tower” with “get into the fray and actively hold people accountable and try to change what is going on”. “Opposition” seemed extremely genuinely justified, especially on the margin!
If I had known the synthesis of it all, I would not have felt the need to write either this post or the previous post, though I think they’ve both been pretty helpful in putting various intuitions on paper. I would be surprised if this was the last post on adjacent matters.
I’ll remark here that the US did do that, to a very real extent. Sharecropping replaced chattel slavery and was barely better. And to this day, slavery is not illegal in the US—it’s just the only the government or its appointed representatives get to do it, and only as part of punishment for a crime. But this sets up the obvious bad incentives that we very much see—over-policing and a near-total lack of interest in rehabilitation, with the result that the US has the 5th largest proportion of its population imprisoned in the world—more by far than any other major country. (~5.4k/million; the only fair-sized countries that even come close are Turkey (~4.2k/million), Brazil (~4k/million), and Russia (~3k/million).)
What do you want to call the entire period of US colonialism and adventurism? I’m sure the Hawaiians would like to hear your thoughts on this; there was no reason to invade them but fresh fruit and a maybe a naval base. Or what about every time US forces destabilized a functioning democracy that was a touch too friendly with the Reds for their taste, only to replace them with an authoritarian strongman who brutalized and robbed his citizens and was a staunch regional ally of the US all the while?
At the start, the introduction of smallpox was perhaps accidental. This state of affairs did not last. And also—do you really want to claim that carelessness at such a scale deserves a moral pass? Is your heart right with the incentives that that sets up?
I certainly hope so. I thought a lot of the intuitions here were worth using and thinking about, and I was excited to read about them, but getting jumpscared by American exceptionalism and a touting of the White Man’s Burden was not what I expected to see from someone respected on LessWrong today or indeed ever.
It’s very clear that slavery has meaningfully ended. I am not a huge fan of all the ways the US treats its criminals, but this feels like a somewhat bizarre comparison.
I am not saying this wasn’t bad, but it isn’t what I was talking about. I don’t think it makes sense to think of the Hawaiians as the kind of nation that I think was stable and had the bloom of civilization in the way I was trying to point to here? Maybe I am wrong? I am not that familiar with Hawaiian history. Also reading about this, this seems like a relatively well-conducted conquest? It certainly is much better than all the other ones we’ve been talking about.
This also isn’t what I was talking about. I can think about those, but these seem mostly like genuinely difficult calls. The cold war was extremely messy, and overall I am glad about having had the US in it, despite all of these things, and if anything I think the US’s influence in the cold war (ignoring the nuclear stockpiling for now which I am more confused about) was one of the strongest arguments in favor of the US being overall good.
I think this was a pretty isolated incident? Of course something like this will be weaponized by some actors sometimes, which really sucks, but it clearly isn’t of remotely the same effect size or magnitude. Like, the vast majority of disease transmission was not intentional, and not easily preventable.
...yes? I certainly think it would be totally absurd to do the reverse. If a random foreign delegation had visited Europe in the 18th century, accidentally introducing previously unknown diseases, I certainly wouldn’t blame them! It would be a great tragedy, but of course not remotely something on which to try to judge a civilization. I am confused what the countervailing moral intuition is. We really did not understand diseases back then, and I really see no nearby world where that part could have been prevented.
Come on, this is a strawman and clearly trying to invoke some kind of societal stigma that I certainly am not particularly bought into. Please don’t do that.
I do want to say that I appreciate you picking a less defensible more provocative example, even though I do not agree with it; exactly because it allows us to look at the edge case from north sides. Choosing a more milquetoast example would have caused less thinking and would have been worse, so thanks for sticking your neck out.
My criticism would be something like:
Founding of the US was a land grab motivated by wanting resources much more than any ideal. That, as a happy coincidence, resulted in enough slack that other, actually good things (removal of slavery, universal suffrage, democracy-as-an-ideal, enough resources to spread these good things to elsewhere) happened. The lesson would then be: “allow for gross accumulation of resources as it’ll be a whale fall later in which goodness can strive” but that’s not a great lesson. On a micro scale, a better lesson is “use the whale fall that horrible people have already created and fight for goodness” (many revolutions and civil rights movements are essentially this, and world is worse off without them), but that feels like it skips an important part of the world. Like, the conquering of Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, or Ghingis Khan all were explained as Goodness Expanding at the time, and some did end up causing some reforms and improvements after they happened; but in the moment I do not see how they can be distinguished from Manifest Destiny. How can you tell that the thing that’s expanding is the good?
Maybe my advice would be “well, tough luck, it probably isn’t good that’s expanding” but we’re also about to hit some whale falls from AI (which include less genocide than usual) so focusing on actually turning them into civil rights victories and goodness is a priority.
One specific example of this is slavery. The founding of the United States involved a bargain between people who practiced slavery and those who did not. The ensuing deal was unstable and directly undermined the peace of the country. A few generations later it led to the Civil War, the most destructive conflict in the country’s history, from which America has not fully recovered 160+ years later.
The country’s ideological and institutional DNA always included both goodness and horrific wickedness. A patriotic view of its history discusses ways in which the goodness has come to defeat the wickedness; and a patriotic plan for its future requires efforts to continue to do so.
I feel like that’s literally what I am doing here, though happy to add signposts somewhere if that would help clarify it.
Your post argues that the evils of American history are exceeded by the good parts of American history; that the genocides and tortures and other evils were “worth it” to achieve freedom and prosperity and other good.
But the evils weren’t a price that was paid in exchange for the good.
The evils were a price that was paid to deny, delay, and weaken the good.
Slavery didn’t support American freedom; it opposed freedom — and it prevented the development of human capital in the slaveholding South. (Name one other place or time in history where it was illegal to teach literacy!) The Trail of Tears wasn’t “the dirty work” to accomplish American prosperity; it was a squandering of American honor for nothing; for the sake of hate and destruction. The Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism wasn’t a price we paid to accomplish some later good; it was a deadweight moral loss. The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII did not, in fact, make the country safer. It did, however, destroy freedom, safety, justice, and wealth for a whole bunch of Americans.
These were not trades; an evil accepted in order to accomplish a greater good. They were evil perpetuating evil; effort expended on behalf of evil and in opposition to the very goods that you praise.
The evils weren’t for a greater good; they were against it. They were not sacrifices paid to make the good possible; they were sacrifices offered to summon up more evil; to resist and oppose the good for as long as possible.
Here are 3:
- 1700s Ireland, it was illegal for Catholics to operate schools, teach, or send children abroad for education
- In Khmer Rouge Cambodia, all of the intelligentsia were executed and schools closed
- in Taliban Afghanistan, women have no ability to learn (beyond ~3rd grade, IIRC)
None of which makes the Antebellum South in good company, but I do want to push back on the commonly-held perception that it was uniquely bad; truly there is no new thing under the sun!
Yep, that is not in conflict with what I am saying. Or like, I am saying that really a lot of the evils were just evils, and genuinely corrupting, and quite plausibly you should have spent your time righting them. But that doesn’t mean that it would have been right to stop the whole thing.
(To again make the analogy to my current life choices clear: It is clear to me that people around me are doing, in addition to a bunch of stuff that is clearly good and might give humanity a shot of navigating the next century successfully, a bunch of stuff that is really bad and is against the good and is not intrinsically tied to the good. Should I stay and try to fix it, or should I abandon the project and try to build something new? How much evil should you tolerate in the pursuit of goodness? Clearly it can’t be none!)
Suppose you know that your friend is a brilliant doctor; and also that your friend’s parent brutally abused her throughout her childhood.
A good friend would not say, “The abuse was worth it, because she is a brilliant doctor.”
A good friend might say, instead, “I am glad that she survived the abuse; and that it did not prevent her from achieving greatness.”
Um … are we talking about capabilities research, or something else?
I mean, if you were to know that a great AI-safety genius was going around committing serious crimes that harm people in the community, then yes, you should be taking steps to stop it and bring them to justice, even if that would impair their AI-safety work.
We are talking about capabilities research, in part. We are also talking about stuff like FTX and things adjacent to it (of which there has been a good amount in my retelling of this ecosystem!).
I mean, sure, I am probably the last person someone could try to accuse of “not having tried to take steps to bring the relevant people to justice”. But if the “taking people to justice” step isn’t working, then you maybe want to think about quitting.
Okay, good. That’s what I thought, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t making a not-knowing-what-the-conversation-was-really-about error. (“Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about. Got it.”)
“They enslave their children’s children [those] who make compromise with sin.”
I used to have this opinion about colonialism being justified, and over time have started to believe that exercising a kind of agency that violates others peoples sovereignty is not self-justified according to the values of the winner, by the winner.
If an SI came to America now, nuked it Truman style, and replaced every human being with an a-sentient robotic mimic that was convinced it loved the new flag—we might get these kinds of articles too. The actions wouldn’t be justified and we wouldn’t be wrong to say they are wrong simply because we can’t oppose them.
The essay blurs the line between being defender and aggressor and I think that’s something that can’t be done tacitly. I get the point you are making about values which encourage agency, rather than to contempt it. And ways of life are absolutely worth defending. But I struggle immensely with the notion that we can derive any type of normative claim about the goodness of imposition of group values when those very group values are being applied as the retrospective rubric.
You can love your life, society, its norms and the freedoms they afford you. But the claims about the intrinsic goodness of your system, without a shared basis of evaluation between that to which you aim to compare it (under its own criteria), make them epistemic-ally thin as a viking screaming of his love for Valhalla. And while I think it is that vikings right to live and die for Valhalla, if that way is threatened, that love does not bubble up to something as equivalent to an excuse for external imposition of the viking way.
I struggle specifically here because of the problem of sovereignty. If I was reasonably confident I knew better than you, how you should live, under what basis do I have the obligation to take away your agency to elect override your own preferences? Or the new set of preference makers in any society? Even if I think I could do both better?
This I do not know and for me the answer underpins all such moral evaluations of colonialism, present and future. Human and AI.
I might make a follow-up post that argues against postmodernism (which I feel like you are espousing here). I think there are a bunch of pretty solid ways you can compare value systems (e.g. you can just ask people which society they would like to switch to), and that this provides pretty strong arguments in favor of the colonization of North America.
I think there are deeper challenges here that could exist, but I don’t think this example provides such a challenge (I am not like 90%+ confident, but I am like reasonably confident).
I don’t understand how “if it looks like the highest magnitude feature in describing this behavior pattern is ‘conquer’, you’re probably doing a bad thing” is postmodernism? That seems pretty compatible with modernism to me. Like, I think we can hope for better than “let’s do the same mix of maybe some good but mostly motivated by bad”! It feels like you’ve already ideologically written your bottom line here, I have low P(habryka’s values after this conversation converge to being asymptotically aligned with mine more than epsilon) at the moment; but it might rapidly go up if it turns out that habryka actually does disvalue mass suffering and deletion, something I expect on order 30% of humanity simply is asymptotically aligned with me about, in asymptotically disvaluing this sort of behavior.
Like, come on, surely you can see how “goodness conquer” and “goodness achieve” are different referents? is that also postmodernism? I thought postmodernism was when you don’t treat words as having referents or something. I’m pretty sure these have referents! I don’t want there to be much if any conquering going on in utopia, conquering just seems bad, surely a goodness that contains conquering as a good is not good at all? Or maybe you meant something more complex by your example that will be obvious to me when my brain becomes less quantized; I feel like reading this post decreased my brain’s bit precision from the normal 8 down to 2, or something, due to emotional content. It’s a pretty emotionally activating post for people who are sufficiently near me, for an unknown value of “sufficiently”. Did it really need to be?
“Postmodernism” is a famously confusing term, but I am here using it to refer to the position of “you cannot compare goodness across different societal perspectives, you always have to evaluate a moral system from within that society and can’t make comparisons that aggregate across multiple moral perspectives”. This is of course only one of the 15 things that “postmodernism” means, but it’s the one I was referring to here.
I think you can! Though it’s of course tricky.
Huh, I am very confused. Of course those things are very bad. The whole reason why I chose American colonialism as an example is because it’s so bad, and so poses the greatest challenge to a position of “when you see bad things happening as part of your efforts to do good, nope out”, which I think was a reasonable interpretation of my first post.
So we are obviously on the same page here! I mention a lot of times that things were really bad, and they continue to be really bad! But I also find it extremely interesting that really a surprising fraction of modern western democratic institutions were birthed in that mess, and that even despite all the badness it seems more likely than not for it to have been the right call to do, and that it would have been a moral mistake to nope out.
The thing you are describing here is more typically called moral and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism in the social sciences largely originates with Franz Boas (pioneer of modern anthropology) in the 19th century; moral relativism in philosophy goes back to antiquity. It is in any event much older than the various movements in 20th-century anthropology, art, and other fields that attracted the “postmodernism” label.
Sure! I think cultural relativism is a major strand of postmodernism, and the “postmodernist” version of it is the one I am interested in responding to and engaging with. I certainly agree that aspect of postmodernism is much older!
This post is in a meaningful sense a defense of modernism, and so it seems natural to engage with postmodernist critiques of it, of which this is one of the standard big ones.
My understanding is that the way these words are used in sociology, anthropology, etc., cultural relativism is very much present in modernism. The thing you are calling “modernism” seems to be something else; something more connected to naïve realism, traditionalism, conservatism, reaction, etc.
I am confused what you mean by “modernism” here? I mean this thing that Wikipedia is talking about:
To be clear, I am maximally sympathetic to all of these words being super vague and abstract and hard to use, so I am very happy to use different words. But I do also find it helpful to have handles for this kind of stuff.
This comment does seem to be arguing against one thing gears is saying,
but, I think gears is also say: (and I kind of agree, at least as an isolated point) that you a choice of what to call the post, and “let goodness conquer all it can defend” is a phrasing that leans into the bad-parts-specifically of the American project.
(Choosing good titles is hard tho. I have different titles for somewhat different posts I might have written for both this post and the last but they would have been fairly different posts)
The choice of “conquering” in the title is important because it shields against the usual kumbaya aspects of people thinking in the space.
Like, man, yes, if you want to create good things you will have a lot of fighting to do, and while under the umbrella of the modern world individuals can largely get away with not having to do any literal fighting, I find myself similarly frequently frustrated when people sneer at creating successful companies and taking the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions that are necessary for good things to exist in that space.
The “conquering” part, or something of its kind, feels load-bearing to me. Though of course, title space is deep and wide, and it’s still putting emphasis on something, but I don’t regret the emphasis on this point (and of course as I said above, the whole point of choosing the American colonization is as to be the most far-out example of something to analyze).
I don’t mean to follow you around and pester you, but this:
Seems like a crux that I didn’t understand about your viewpoint. I’m a thoroughly modern dude who, while I wouldn’t sneer at competition engaged in in its appropriate places (like between companies, where the rules of how they can compete are pretty carefully circumscribed), strongly prefer fight-avoidance in general, and will try hard to find cooperative solutions to problems. I think one of the things I like most about the world I live in, is we’ve found ways to coordinate to put various methods of conflict off-limits, and only “fight” in nice mostly harmless ways. “Have the ability to conquer, but don’t use it”, “talk softly and carry a big stick” etc. carry a lot of appeal to me. Ideally in future-utopia-according-to-me, we swear off weapons any more hurtful than big sticks, and anyone who decides to defect about that gets beaten with the sticks until they decide that maybe that was a bad plan. And “colonialism was worth it” carries strong vibes (for me) of “get the biggest weapons you can find for the side of good, and use them to conquer and defend your notion of the good”. I feel like that’s what the colonial empires were doing—trying to bring the light of Civilization as they understood it to the dark continents, by force
and replacing the inferior people with superior ones. EDIT: On further reflection, this part is not something I actually think. Think of them as inferior: Yes. Think they should be replaced with people from the home country: No.I like the umbrella of the modern world very much, but recognize it’s fragile and do not want to poke holes in it. :D I fundamentally don’t think fighting and conquering is how Good wins, whereas I think the colonialists did think that’s how Good wins (because back in the day, war between countries was expected and normal). In my view, Good wins by deterring fights (by having the capacity to fight if needed), and being appealing. I’m not sure if you’d actually endorse “Good should conquer”, but “if you want to create good things, you have to fight” might be something you’d say? If so, I’d be able to meet you at “if you want to create good things, you have to be willing and able to fight if it comes to it”.
The blogpost I had in mind to write someday is “The Moral Obligation to be Powerful”, which is making a somewhat different point, but has the same desiderata of “fight against kumbaya/innocence vibe”.
Yeah, OK, fair enough.
I think my reaction here is to the implication that what actually happened was on the pareto frontier; that if we’re able to counterfact by sending back to a small group of people some reasonable amount of foreseeing-good-and-bad-outcomes, that the bad ones can’t be averted without preventing the good ones. Like, I don’t think the natives had to be screwed over so badly to get the good outcomes you’re talking about! explaining what the colonists meant by property and how their legal system worked would probably have done a lot of what I’m saying. the diseases would be harder to avoid but there might be some short message you can imagine someone figuring out at the time that we can counterfact on.
Besides the obvious direct moral cost, which was enormous, a lot of why people complain about the effects on today is that the natives were already pretty good at governance, they weren’t governing for expansion but they were pretty good at governing stability, so if they’d had more of a vote in governing for expansion there’s reason to expect it would have been slightly slower in exchange for much more stable. I doubt being nicer to natives results in no revolutionary war, the crown still was trying to stay in control pretty hard If they had been involved in setting up the USA after throwing off the crown; so most of the counterfactual of “find a way to warn natives about what’s coming” seems likely to produce a civ closer to NZ, which doesn’t seem like a particularly bad outcome. So like, the hint I’m getting isn’t like, “I accept tradeoffs”, it’s “I accept subpar tradeoffs where the negative side is hugely more negative than it needed to be in order to achieve what I see as good”.
I am reassured moderately, but I’m still confused by this pattern, and in particular, “conquer” still is setting off alarm bells for me that the representation in your head might be voting yes on things I think the natural abstraction of the good thing you’re trying to defend does not need to vote yes about.
I think that argument is valid only under a normative value system which doesn’t pay the cost of consequence out sourcing. I would agree that most people would say the united states is a comparatively better place to live, but I would also argue that those numbers would look wildly different if the question was instead: “Would you prefer a world where the united states exists or western colonialism never occurred throughout North America”. Under that question, I would place a reasonably high probability your preference sampling argument would no longer provide a moral justification for that system under the same global population base.
The point being that it is very easy to claim from within a structure with outsourced consequences that the structure is self-justified and coherently, globally good. No, you just aren’t paying the costs.
If you want to claim that the normative evaluation only applies to the in-group, then sure. But I’d argue that’s the exact kind of self-exemption I don’t morally agree with.
You’re mistaking Habryka’s argument to be “if people prefer modern america to pre-colonial america, then it’s right to colonialize america”. He’s just here making the (more modest) point that “if people prefer modern america to pre-colonial america, then probably modern america is a better to live than pre-colonial america”, which you seemed to be saying one could not have any opinion on.
I think you are mistaking Habryka’s argument, not 0xA. Habryka wrote that “it was worth it”. The first “it” presumably refers to the colonization and the creation of the US. And “was worth it” presumably means “was right”. So we arrive at “the colonization was right” (despite all the listed downsides). That’s in line with 0xA’s interpretation.
Also note that (if it wasn’t obvious) “state of the world A is better than state of the world B” doesn’t imply that bringing about A is better than bringing about B. Maybe in state A everyone is happy only because we previously murdered everyone who was unhappy. That doesn’t mean murdering everyone who is unhappy is good.
Ben is understanding me correctly that that was the argument I was making in this comment (I think you can compare how good a place to live is even, including across cultures and societies).
I agree in the post I am making the argument that the overall tradeoff was worth it. I could connect the two. I agree with you that there are circumstances in which “state of world A is better than state of the world B” does not imply that bringing about A is better than bringing about B. I do think it’s a pretty argument in favor of bringing about A.
It seemed like you were making the additional argument “if you could stop A completely (and that was your only option) you should not.”
I assume though if future state A contains a trillion super happy AIs but no humans, while future state B contains a few billion moderately happy humans and no AIs: That then A would be a better state than B, and it would nonetheless be the case that we should bring about B rather than A. So there must be some disanalogy to the colonization case.
I am not a hedonic utilitarian, so would reject this analysis on those grounds.
The question is “would A be a better state than state B” holistically, by the assessment of something like the extrapolated volition of humanity. Importantly including everything that will happen into the distant future (which I think makes there being only a few billion moderately happy humans very unlikely, as we will eventually colonize the stars, and I would consider it an enormous atrocity to fail to do so).
The question is: extrapolated volition of whom? In the case of thinking about whether to create super happy AIs that replace us (A) or not (B), this would presumably be our current human extrapolated volition. So it wouldn’t take interests of non-existing AIs into account. And in the case of asking whether colonization of America was good or bad, we would have to consider the extrapolated volition of the humans alive at the time.
It’s a bit tricky. I don’t super feel like I owe the competitors to my distant ancestors in the primordial soup consideration in humanity’s CEV, though I am also not enormously confident that I definitely don’t.
Definitely agree that in this case you consider the value of the people who you took the opportunity to reproduce from (though also ultimately I will also at least somewhat bite the bullet that my values might diverge from theirs and in as much as we are in a fully zero-sum competition I would like my values to win out, though overall principles of fairness and justice definitely compel me to give them a non-trivial chunk of the Lightcone).
I think the challenge here is that the comment is made as justification for the broader point of the article, which in context was (as addendum to your quote) “as an example of argument against post modernism”. Which I consider an argument as claim to its rightness, especially when framed in the context.
I am making the subtle point that the argument can’t be used to debunk a post-modernist philosophy because the data point he elected to use, was, for lack of better terms, consequentialist. Not morally justifying. To me, that’s like saying (and forgive me for the staunch metaphor): “I can make a pretty good case for arguing that squatting in your grandparents mansion is morally justified, because everyone on the block would choose to live in this mansion if they could”.
I would agree with you if he not had the prior qualifiers of it being an argument against the philosophy he considers me to have, from my earlier comment, and if in the article he didn’t equivocate all of this with goodness itself.
I’m not sure what you mean with “under the same global population base” but I don’t think most currently existing people answering “the first” to your question would by itself indicate that the colonization of America was morally justified.
For example, assume AIs in the future have mostly diminished the number and influence of humanity. Humanity is now only a small footnote in the world without power. Then one AI starts a poll and asks “Would you prefer a world where our AI society exists, or one where the creation of AI never occurred?” Assume that the result of the poll (from trillions of AIs) is overwhelmingly “the former”.
Would this mean that mostly replacing humanity with AI would have been morally justified? Clearly not. If we don’t create those AIs, their non-existence isn’t bad for them, and their hypothetical preferences expressed in this poll are morally irrelevant since those preferences are never instantiated. (This insight is called person-affecting utilitarianism.)
I would take that bet, and consider it somewhat of a crux[1]. Indeed, I am honestly surprised you think it would come out the other way. I would be happy to make a bet about a survey on Positly or something.
Yep, I totally agree. My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).
I think the question of “from what moral reference frame should you evaluate whether something was worth it” is a pretty tricky one. You clearly can’t say “from the perspective of whoever was there first”, since, I do think I feel quite fine replacing insect populations and plankton from my oceans and using them for better stuff (I also think it’s obviously worth it to convert wild forests into arable land, but I might already be losing some people here).
You also clearly can’t say “just evaluate the consequences from the perspective from wherever you are now”, since that creates selection effects.
I again don’t actually think it would be a crux for this case (since I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people who lived on the US northern continent would prefer a future in which the US exists), and that seems like a better crux to go into, but I could go into the game theory here and how I would currently resolve these issues.
It would be a very straightforward crux in as much as we could elicit people’s enlightened and endorsed opinions here. The big issue seems to me just that people’s instinctual moral judgement often sucks and doesn’t correlate that much with what they would endorse after a lot of thinking, and the later seems much harder to get data on.
Hmmm… this is tricky. Like, how constrained are the courses of history you say that people would prefer?
Suppose the counterfactual world where people said no to Europeans genociding non-Christians on other continents, and so colonialism as I currently understand it doesn’t happen. What happens then? It sounds like you’re thinking there’s no US, and democracy worldwide is thus much weakened. I figure what would happen is, the New World still gets discovered by Europeans, and open land still gets populated with an agricultural society, one way or another. Maybe European powers take a more peaceful path in the New World, but still populate it, and there’s still a rebellion against colonial taxation, and the founding of something like the US still happens, maybe European ideas around agriculture transfer over and are adopted by those living in the Americas, as they watch Europe grow and industrialize, but we don’t have a vast empty continent, one way or another. And if the ideas of the founders hadn’t taken root in America, if we assume those people still existed, they might have taken root somewhere else. So to my mind, the counterfactual is we still have a populated North America, and democracy, we just have one less really bad thing in our history, and the “shining city on a hill” is on a different hill. Does the country or countries that exists on the landmass the US occupies today, in that counterfactual, count as the US, though? Unclear.
Personally, I’m less attached to the United States than I am to the ideals that an ideal United States would attempt to strive for. As long as those ideals are instantiated somewhere, I’m OK with that counterfactual. And I don’t see a strong logical or conceptual link between the ideals of the United States that I think are good, and colonialism, which was driven by very different ideas.
There are, in other words, a whole lot of possible counterfactuals I could imagine that keep the good I associate with US culture, while ditching colonialism. And I’m not super attached to the giant country to my south, as a political entity, if it was a bunch of small countries that might even be fun.
Yep, the exact counterfactual here is pretty tricky.
I think the trickiest moral part is how you relate in terms of interfacing with the existing legal system and existing property rights.
I think if you try to respect either of these, you are in for a really bad time, and my guess is the default outcome is that the Northern American continent roughly ends up similar to the Southern American continent. I think that would be quite bad! North America really is in a much better place than South America.
And then I also think there is a pretty decent chance that without North America, democracy never actually sweeps the world. Maybe you even get so unlucky that you reverse the industrial revolution (an outcome I don’t consider impossible as things were just brewing around that time), which would of course be maximally catastrophic, though I do think overall unlikely.
Could you elaborate a bit? This part is not clear to me, but seems quite important.
Like, the minimum thing that IMO needed to have happened to get good outcomes on the North American continent is for most of the land to be transferred away from native populations and towards the settling nations, and for the legal system of the continent to be replaced by something more like the American legal system (as opposed to whatever patchwork of tribal customs was governing things).
There are some ways this could have happened with very minimal violence. You can imagine buying all the land, but my strong guess is that you would have failed at that and if you had treated the existing population to have property rights over the continent, you would have failed to establish the boundary of an actually new nation. I think the next best choice would have been eminent domain with actually generous compensation, though unfortunately it wasn’t (to my knowledge) actually the case that early settlers, or colonizing nations, were in a good spot to generously compensate the people whose lands they were taking. Colonies generally barely broke even in those early years, and so there wasn’t a lot of surplus to go around.
Ah, ok. My understanding is that the peoples of North America didn’t have a strong sense of land ownership the way Europeans did, it was more “we take care of the land for ourselves and future generations, and the land takes care of us”. I think the peaceful resolution there would have involved a discussion between cultures so they could map and understand each other’s ontologies and ways of thinking. I expect the amount of land the colonists would have wanted to own for their own use would have been trivial for the natives to relinquish at first. And I dunno, if people think charter cities or seasteads or whatnot can have an impact by being an example of better governance --> thriving, why not small colonies with better legal systems? Of course there’s having to, y’know, fight the British. But probably the Native Americans could have helped with that (did help with that, actually? Except mostly on the British side, because they were concerned about colonial expansionism. Imagine a counterfactual where the colonies and the pre-existing population were on good terms, during the American Revolution...)
I certainly think if it had been legally possible at the time to have city-states or charter cities run by the native Americans, that would have been an absolutely amazing outcome.
Unfortunately I think city states and charter cities require really stable government and political borders and this wasn’t feasible at the time. I might be wrong about this. I also don’t think the political theory or political will for this alternative history was there in any meaningful sense (again, I think the closest analog we have is how governance of South America ended up shaking out, though it’s of course not perfect).
Similarly for small states. The US controlling the continent coast-to-coast has been hugely useful for trade and prosperity and governance. I am pretty federalist and think states should have more power, but I don’t think that extends into thinking that multiple nation states on the US continent would have been better (I think South America, and Europe in the 20th century both show different ways of how that would by default go wrong, I think).
I’d think you’d want to have a decision method about this that doesn’t give the more powerful party (with the bigger army or the better weapons, etc.) more votes. If you’re making a moral decision and you don’t think might makes right, that implies that power shouldn’t give you more influence in deciding what “right” is, after all. And it’s rather worrisome that “we decide based on how many past, present and future people vote in favour of this plan” has a strategy “so just kill your opponents so your side has many descendants and their side has none”.
I could see weighting it by the number of people affected, and how strongly they prefer or disprefer various outcomes and the methods of getting to those outcomes (potentially including counterfactual people and your best estimate of what they would say in each case). I could also see a simpler decision rule, that allows for vetoes and deontological prohibitions of certain actions (like, say, genocide) and then you have to navigate through possibility-space to an alternative that no present parties veto and doesn’t violate deontological restrictions, and then whichever alternatives pass the bar for “more benefit than harm to all those affected” are worth it. This method, as with many methods that involve vetoes, protects minority interests and doesn’t let 50%+1 of the population do whatever it feels like to 50%-1 of the population under consideration.
In any case, if you’ve got two or more parties in conflict, I think you’d want some method of deciding what’s “worth it” that is impartial.
Yep! Much has been written on things like this, here and elsewhere. We could go into a whole deconstruction of moral relativism, but I don’t think it’s the best use of either of our time. For now, I maintain the position that moral relativism poses some challenges to doing analysis like this, but IMO not too much of one, and you can overcome them, and I certainly disavow any analysis of the form “we just count the preferences of current humans, ignoring the fact that they are descendants of the victors”.
I mean, I would not switch to the U.S. society of 1776, or 1860, or even 1920. It is better today in 2026 than it was before vaccines, etc. It is very hard to decide whether I would prefer a counterfactual Native American country/empire that could have developed after western contact and exist in 2026, because the outcome is highly uncertain. Various levels of western colonization happened to non-western societies; several low-colonized countries are doing great in 2026. Mostly what makes countries great today is wide availability of technology, natural resources, education, human rights, and medicine.
That said, would I switch to super-America that conquered the world in the 1800s as a (somewhat unintuitively) democratic republic and invented antibiotics and vaccines in the same century and paused global warming in the mid century or early 1900s because of no conveniently hidden externalities of a world government? Maybe?
I think it’s a mistake to call the above postmodernism and I’d be disappointed if your long form address of the above point were framed that way.
I agree this position is part of a bundle that’s associated with postmodernism (mostly by its detractors!), but the use here feels conflationary, adversarial, mind-killing.
I would find this future post much more readable, enjoyable, and easier to fit in my model of the world (and of Oli) if you didn’t use this piece of language.
I mean, I am not one to object to tabooing a word if it causes confusion in a conversation, but having taken a few classes at Berkeley by self-identified postmodernist teachers and having had much fun arguing with them, I am pretty sure this is an accurate description of a standard part of postmodernist thought, and I also don’t think they would consider that adversarial! Like, they said almost these exact words to me and I expect would straightforwardly endorse them.
I feel like “postmodernism” is almost famous for being a term that causes confusion about what it means, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a term to trigger defense-mechanisms.
I don’t dispute that some postmodernists would consider cultural relativism central to their worldview, and think instead of ’mostly by its detractors’ I should have said ’often by its detractors’.
I’m glad you’re open to using different language.
I would be highly interested in reading an “against postmodernism” follow up.
I think the deeper challenge (which is not particularly relevant in the America example) is the idea that there are (a) some things which we think are good and we do them and they are good, and there are also (b) some things which we think are good that are actually bad, but not in a way where we can tell ‘from the inside’ right now. I think this point is more at home in a hypothetical post that is not about postmodernism, which (i) seems like an interesting post, and (ii) is not the one I am encouraging you to write.
(the third leg of this rule of three is (c) things that we think will lead to good ends but violate basic deontology, which we don’t do; https://www.lesswrong.com/s/AmFb5xWbPWWQyQ244/p/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB. What happens when multiple people have different deontological frameworks is left as an exercise for the reader).
(epistemic status: typed quickly, mostly encouragement of a future post, that I want to exist, where this encouragement is much stronger as a comment than as an upvote)
My answer is, if both:
1. I am reasonably confident I know better than you how you should live.
2. I am not sure that you are not someone with the intelligence and capability to make your own evaluations of what is good and bad for you and act accordingly (not a baby or a cat or someone of extremely low mental capacity who we would say for example can’t sign contracts on their own behalf because they don’t understand what’s happening well enough).
Then I should try to convince you I’m right, rather than imposing the outcomes on you that I think are best for you. If I am right, and you have decision-making capacity, you will be convinced. If I am wrong or you are someone who lacks decision-making capacity, I will find that out. I’m only in the clear to “take away your agency” if I have a good faith belief that you’re something like a baby or a cat or someone without the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves (for certain scopes of decisions—even a cat can decide whether it wants to eat food a or food b, and various other things). And I’d better be pretty sure of that, because if I turn out to have been wrong about it and treated you as someone with less agency than you deserve, that’s real bad. And honestly, even with my dog, who is not a smart dog, I try asking nicely and persuasion and positive reward for desired behaviour, before coercion, and coercion is rarely required. Even granting that the colonizers had thought of the people they were colonizing as moral patients rather than people, if they had treated them as well as I treat my none-too-bright dog, history would have been different.
Ironically, this does more to justify colonialism than it does to defeat it. By your logic, if a modern military force were somehow transported back to the 1600s, they would have no moral basis to prevent European settlers from colonizing North America. For these settlers, the act of settlement was as much driven by morality, by a religious need to go forth and multiply and spread the light of God, as it was by rational calculation of material needs.
So I ask you, by what right would you stop these settlers from going forth and bringing the light of the Lord to the heathen darkness?
Under the norms of your society/culture. They obviously aren’t static, and can e.g. fade away, having lost to external competition (like vikings had), or change in response to internal critique (like how colonialism became discredited). If you would rather operate under some hypothetical perfect rules derived from first principles, then you will likely be disappointed, seeing how philosophy has for millennia utterly failed to discover those.
The American exceptionalism bit is weird here. (Also you’re not American so shouldn’t have been indoctrinated in that.)
The ‘conquering’ wasn’t done ‘by democracy/goodness’, nor in its name (further, democracy isn’t an American invention or export, and isn’t exactly thriving in America now). The earlier constitutional moments of the US came long after the original colonies, and long before the eventual complete colonisation. The later constitutional moments occurred after colonisation was already history.
I don’t get how it fits the argument. Arguably (a little tongue in cheek) the revolutionary US was a case of a smart man (France etc) creating a big thing (angry states) to throw at a big problem (Great Britain) and that big thing growing legs (revolutionary sentiment) and beating the smart man.
This might be a hint that it’s not all indoctrination? This is kind of a tangent, but I continue to be dismayed by the degree to which so many people have tacitly flattened political and moral goodness to “America bad”, or even “America unexceptional” in the age of Trump and the GWT.
The US has made some serious mistakes, and (especially lately, but not only because of Trump) strayed from the shining beacon of classical liberal principles that made it great, but I don’t know any other country or culture that comes close to replacing us as a standard bearer.
There are individual European leaders who are more competent, ethical, and principled than Trump, but the European project as a whole has gone off-the-rails in various ways. (I don’t think you have to accept @Richard_Ngo’s entire worldview to acknowledge this.)
Beyond Europe, I think it is important to acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of evil and goodness in the world, and grappling with this hierarchy is a central prerequisite to making sense of politics. There are multiple dimensions and considerations that people will have deep and genuine disagreements over, but as a starting point, I think it is important to take into account a power / faction’s ideals and principles (stated and revealed), how well individual leaders live up to those principles, and the actual consequences and impact that each faction has had (or is likely to have) on the world, taking into account second-order effects and counterfactuals (i.e. avoiding naive consequentialism).
So you can line up the IRGC, Kim Jong Un, Putin, the CCP, the Chavistas, the US (or various factions within it), Israel, Western Europe, etc. in this hierarchy, and not everyone will agree on the exact place of everyone in the line or even what the dimensions / criteria should be, but I claim (a) there will probably be some common and important patterns that align imperfectly with standard ideological / political factions and (b) this will get closer to the heart of actual political disagreements than arguing narrowly about whether the first-order consequences of historical colonialism or revolutions were good on net or not.
Eh, I think America really has been the bastion of classical liberalism in the past 200+ years, and my guess is history would be a lot worse without it. I grew up in Germany, and certainly have much less respect for the history of that country.
I do think nationalism is tricky and somewhat mindkilly so I toned down some of the language in the OP.
I went through all the effort to immigrate to the US, so of course I think it’s pretty great! It’s true I’ve experienced close to zero indoctrination about American greatness though (indeed my high-school education for some reason really kept emphasizing the french revolution as the birthplace of western democracy, weirdly downplaying the American revolution, despite the timing really not checking out).
Macrohistory of this kind is pretty tricky, so all of this should be taken with a lot of grains of salt. Unfortunately, I don’t really know how to avoid it if I want actual data about how to build good and lasting institutions.
Yep, indeed. Trying to figure out how to relate to being part of an effort where much of what is being done and achieved is not done in the name of goodness is one of the key things I am trying to figure out in the essay. Most things are done in the name of self-interest and profit and various other things. This does not make them automatically opposed to the good, or something you should not engage with.
Yep, both true. Indeed, I think I am pretty explicit in the post that there is a broader civilization that it is an outgrowth off. Sorry if that didn’t come across! And I certainly am finding myself very quite deeply dismayed at the lack of thriving of democracy in America.
Yep, there was a lot of period in-between, and this makes this all tricky to analyze. I think it’s a reasonable structural objection to the argument to go “but some of these things you are saying were part of the same effort are like 150+ years apart, and done by very different people, what is the point of putting them in the same bucket?”.
Yep, I think the United States was a straightforward example of France and Britain conquering something they cannot defend! And again, that makes it a particularly interesting example to analyze the maxim of yesterday’s post through. This post is intentionally designed as being an antithesis to a lot of the vibe’s of yesterday’s post, so of course it’s going to be substantially in tension with it.
Ok, so… I think it’s possible to say “democracy good, colonialism bad, the set of circumstances you’re born into and the physical laws involved amoral”. In that context, you advocate for democracy, against colonialism, within the constraints imposed by the situation you find yourself in, which may mean you fight the battles you can win and don’t fight when you’ll lose (so maybe you put your energy into working for democracy, rather than against colonialism, depending on circumstances and strategic options), without losing sight of the distinction between is and ought. You don’t go “on net colonialism was worth it/good because it spread democracy”.
Colonialism as I understand it (speaking mostly about North America, where I’ve talked to some of the living descendants of the native population) was clearly bad. You may have a different understanding (as we have established in a comment of mine on your earlier post, history is not my strong suit, I may well be wrong), but here’s mine: This was a group of people who saw themselves as civilized and not-them as barbarians/savages, themselves quite often as good Christians and rival cultures as non-Christians who it would be best in the eyes of their god to do genocide against and take their children and put them in Christian schools for the good of their souls. Who signed peace treaties with resident nations in the new land, accepted help from them, and then broke the treaties because why not, we have guns and they don’t, and anyway they’re inferior savages who don’t really matter, it would be better for us to have their land than for them to have it. This is not a case of “some rape and looting and other bad things happened, but also democracy was promoted by the bad things in a way that’s inseparable”, it’s a case of “people did things I don’t think are good, for reasons I don’t think are correct, as a means to ends I think are bad, and also some people were working to spread democracy and other modern values I would endorse, in what would have been an awful situation to try and do that in, and that’s good.”
Similarly: We can work today to end factory farming and more generally extend the moral circle to nonhuman animals, without retrospectively endorsing all aspects of the current culture because that gave us the means to do the work to end factory farming etc. and if we were in a preindustrial society animal rights probably wouldn’t much occur to most people as an issue to argue about. Doing a good thing in a situation with many bad elements (which is nevertheless the situation that allows you the freedom of action to do the good thing) doesn’t make the bad elements of the situation good.
My take is: Don’t defend colonialism. It isn’t and wasn’t good, and if we never do anything like that again, that seems better than the alternative. Separately, spreading institutions that make society function better seems good and we should do that, but not by genocide, except in some really extreme hypothetical scenarios (I can see where the superhappies in this story were coming from, when they were like “humans, change or perish”.)
I mean, you can even go “this person, a key figure in the founding of America, was a slaveholder. Was he good or bad?” And I’d reject the implied premise of the question. I’d say holding slaves was bad, and a lot of the ideas in the declaration of independence are good. People are a mix of good and bad, and do things during their lives that are both good and bad, and don’t have to be binary-sorted into one category or the other, we can just say “the thing you/I did yesterday was bad, but the thing you/I did today was good”, and that is a perfectly logical position to hold. And similarly, “colonialism and democracy, or no colonialism and no democracy, take your pick” could be an option-set someone offers me, and I’d reject the premise and pick democracy but no colonialism. The fact that “no colonialism” might not have been a choice on offer to people in the past who wanted to found America, doesn’t force me to endorse colonialism. I’d hope that good people in the past would accept the existence of colonialism if they couldn’t do anything about it or chose to focus elsewhere, without calling it good.
I really don’t get the America argument. The one thing it’s hard to imagine anyone stopping was the smallpox and such. It would have happened sooner or later unless the entire progress of technology was put on halt. Mass deployable vaccines before transoceanic sail ships seem unlikely. Someone would have gotten to the other side and even had their intentions been the best possible, people would have died out of sheer ignorance.
But other than that… Nothing strictly needed to happen the way it did. Nor was any of it necessary for modern democracy itself to be born, except in a general butterfly effect sense. Many of the ideas came from France, the country who by the way shortly also rebelled against its king. Others had roots in classical antiquity. Others, possibly, from the natives themselves, such that perhaps a world with a powerful undefeated Iroquois Confederacy that got seeded by European political philosophy ideas is actually better off on the democracy axis.
And even past that, once the 13 colonies were independent, the next great step on the path to modernity and freedom was them abolishing their own slavery at home, not conquering the land mass to the west of them. Yes, eventually that land’s resources gave the US an incredibly powerful strategic position and resource base, but that too wasn’t the only force for democracy in the world. At that point too much was already in motion.
So yeah, hard as alt history always is to work out… Bad example IMO. Most importantly, no one is ever actually a time traveller. They can’t judge or know what will be good or bad via indirect consequences centuries in the future. If you saw conquistadores slaughter natives in the 1600s you wouldn’t think it’s all for the Golden Path leading eventually to democracy (nor would democracy be a value you particularly care about). You would just be seeing godless murderers doing their dirty work out of base greed and have a choice of what to do about it.
Yes, that’s the whole point! The suffering was not necessary! It was indeed bad.
I maybe should make this analogy to my own present thoughts about the ecosystem more explicit:
Many of my friends are for some godforsaken reason actively doing capabilities research on building ASI, which I am worried will constitute the greatest atrocity in human history. Also many of the people around me engage in all kinds of destructive and confusing politics.
Does that mean I should disavow it all? Go away and build something else and new entirely further away from the corruption and the horrors? Or should I try to fix it and improve it? And how much egg-breaking and moral norm violation should I tolerate?
And I don’t super want to go into the more straightforward version here, because having a conversation premised on people around me being compared to people having committed all kinds of atrocities in the early North American settlement period seems like a quite tricky thing to navigate, but maybe this makes the structure of the argument playing out in my head that I am putting down here clear.
Well then what’s the point of the counterfactual? The only two possible futures aren’t “no genocide and no democracy” or “genocide and then democracy”. There’s definitely a third possible future that’s “no genocide and also democracy”, so why as a hypothetical time traveller with full foreknowledge shouldn’t you strive just for that?
Why do you call this an “atrocity” rather than a “mistake”? It seems obvious to me that the people creating ASI do not agree with your assessment of the risks and believe they are doing good. They are not seeking to deliberately destroy humanity.
Do you believe that people who think a pause in the development of modern AI paradigm it’s -EV should consider you “the greatest evil”?
The conquering framing makes it seem different from just that.
This is the same thing as the ASI question in general. Do you build power for the conquering machine? I mean, the AIs seem pretty nice and useful so far. It’s gone much better than America itself, in fact, at least as far as atrocities go. Why are you trying to throw your body on the gears? Is it maybe because you’re not sure the goodness part is in control of the conquering part?
And remember you can’t decide with the benefit of hindsight.
What are your strategic options?
In the case of someone witnessing the horrors of colonialism, they might not have had very many/any options that would stop colonialism from happening, but leaving and doing something else wouldn’t have helped. So the thing to do in that case is do what you can, to the best of your ability, to ameliorate the situation. “Die with dignity”, as in, don’t give up even if it seems like there’s no path to victory, and do what you can even if you expect the ultimate outcome will not be good, but don’t actually do things that metaphorically “kill” you (remove your ability to act) unless you’ve thought about it very carefully.
The meme of the serenity prayer seems relevant here.
I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, I expect it is extremely hard.
Honestly, this did make it clearer for me what might be going through your head. I was confused, and it makes a bit more sense now.
I do not think there were very many people, if any, whose individual abandonment of the American project would have stopped colonialism. So the actual choice is “let it happen without your involvement” and “let it happen while trying to make it less bad”, rather than “stop it from happening by throwing your body into the gears” (not an actual option for very many people, if any).
I think if the founders had decided the horrors were too much and they weren’t going to do this whole declaration of independence founding of a country thing but instead would go knit some socks, some country or countries would have been founded on some principles less good, and colonialism would have continued.
I’d been thinking over the weekend about what the “colonialism didn’t happen” counterfactual would have to look like, and it seems like it would require the substantial replacement of the values and cultures of multiple European countries, the effects of which would be very unpredictable. There was a lot of momentum behind colonialism, and “America doesn’t get founded because the founders turn away in horror” wouldn’t have stopped it, I don’t think. Maybe “no colonialism” would have prevented the founding of the US as we know it (quite possible) or the spread of democratic values in the world (seems less likely to me), but “no US” wouldn’t have stopped colonialism even in the area covered by the US, I’m pretty sure.
If the founders who spent their efforts building support for founding a nation around the ideals of the declaration of independence had instead put their efforts, collectively, towards blocking colonialism… I don’t know what would have happened, but I expect we’d still have had colonialism. Maybe a less bad version, but smallpox and racism would still have been present, and colonists would still have expanded into the New World.
I don’t know if you need vaccines. From memory, the incubation time of smallpox is about half the transatlantic voyage time (2 weeks versus 4 weeks)? I don’t know how much we know about how the first smallpox case crossed the Atlantic, or whether it happened more than once. But I wonder whether a policy on long voyages of “if we notice someone on board has smallpox, we make them walk the plank to protect everyone else on board” (not even thinking about the people at the destination) might have been a) possible in a nearby world and b) effective?
(I’m vaguely aware that the voyage wasn’t nonstop, they’d go via e.g. the Azores(?), presumably with a chance to pick up smallpox there. Maybe that sinks the idea.)
It’s probably inevitable that the “how” question comes up with these things, but I think we can get more granular without losing the point. You can simultaneously make the claim that the emergence of the US is a net good for known life, but you don’t necessarily have to say the trail of tears etc. is worth it unless you are proposing that these (or other bottlenecks akin) are required to get yourself a US.
Smart people who see the shape where consolidation can happen and then release the missiles, only to find they can’t put them back in the bottle, is a tale as old as time, yes.
Aristotle via Alexander comes to mind for a positive example of a smart person “uniting under a banner” in a way (haha and yes “why can’t we all simply be as smart as Aristotle?”).
Philosopher-guided, deployed for a cause that (potentially, arguably) wasn’t purely predatory, and it didn’t immediately spiral during Alexander’s lifetime. But Alexander died at 32. So we don’t know whether he simply ended the experiment before we’d see the results. But there is a takeaway there: the fragility of points of failure. That’s not a particularly new insight, but it’s relevant here.
So: what smart people CAN and HAVE done a better job of (perhaps the founders of the US are the most glaring example) are creating systems of great agency that have less ability to deviate from the intended goal after release, and I think the question isn’t about whether, it’s “YES, we DO” and then, that out of the way, we iterate again and again “HOW”?
The counterfactual I am engaging with here is “should you have stayed involved in the American project, potentially trying to fix it, maybe even spending all of your resources creating justice and accountability within it, or should you have left it in horror, and tried to create something new somewhere else?”.
This parallels my own uncertainty about how to feel about much of the work going on in this ecosystem! My friends are building the AI systems that I am seriously worried will end all of humanity’s legacy! Should I, when I see that, leave and disavow it all, or should I stay, because even that is something that can be overcome and fixed?
This is cool because it gets into something I hold deeply potentially as a theological stance: that Hope is the most useful human concept. My basic gist is “if we consider Hope to be the idea that, even if a solution doesn’t exist now, we might be able to come up with one, then it is a concept that induces a species whose primary advantage is group computation to keep computing. To not halt.”
I did care about AI alignment before I became a parent. I was in the physics lounge nerding out about Wait But Why’s article like 13 years ago or whatever with the other kids, but post-parent, it’s a whole different game. I don’t know if it’s universal, but it feels like being a parent entirely removes the “or walk away” option. Many never have that option to begin with given their temperament I suspect, but it’s interesting to think of what a poll would find. I’m sure there are some out there
What’s your leaning? Stay and grind, or wash your hands?
I’m not sure whether this is load-bearing for the main point of the post but I have to comment on this part:
I think those are the wrong question. The right questions are: If you had been a native at the time, would you have opposed the colonization? And, as a native at the time, was the colonization ultimately in your best interest?
There is an obvious analogy with evolution. The colonization of America looks very much like a superior invasive species (Westerners) arriving in a new habitat (North America) and outcompeting the inferior native species (Native Americans) by eventually outbreeding them and taking most of their land.
And this also looks very much like a possible future: A superior invasive species (autonomous AI agents) arriving in a new habitat (being invented and created by humans) and outcompeting the inferior native species (humans) by eventually outbreeding them and taking most of their land.
Now it seems likely that the correct answer to the question of whether the colonization was good for the Native Americans at the time is the same as the answer to the question of whether the possible future in the previous paragraph would be good for us (currently existing) humans.
Not really. You have to also take into account the goodness being fought for. Evolution doesn’t care either way. Might makes right and all that. From what I understand the OP is pointing more in the direction of an argument from consequences, where the outcome was good, and so the price was worth paying (not that the cost was good! That’s a different matter!). The colonizers had a vision (this part seems very shaky, as the “vision” was very different at different point in time), that vision was good, they fought to achieve it, the price was very high, but the results justify the cost.
It’s possible that the future AI that takes over will result in a better state than the current one (the whole glorious trans-humanist future and everything). In which case I can totally understand someone wanting to fight for that to occur. I can also totally understand the natives fighting to keep their current way of life, which while not perfect is not bad. I’d even go so far as to say that the OP might even support this. They’d be fighting for their vision of goodness.
Either way, the point is to work out what “goodness” is and fight for it, knowing full well that there will be bad/ugly/maybe evil things happening along the way. The ends do not justify the means. Allies should be held accountable. There will be bad apples. This doesn’t mean you stop fighting. You try to limit the damage. But there will be damages.
The question is: justify or not justify according to whom? I argue: according to the humans who existed at the time. The eventual results were plausibly bad according to the preferences of the native Americans (because the results include their eventual partial replacement and the loss of much of their land) and good according the preferences of the Western immigrants, and probably also good according to the preferences of much of the rest of the world population at the time (insofar the US did eventually have a positive impact on the future of the rest of the world). So whether the colonization of North America was good overall is a question of weighing these preferences.
If the AIs exterminate us and proceed to be much happier than we would have been otherwise, then that future is a “better state” than the alternative. But positive end states don’t automatically justify the whole trajectory that got us there.
And even if the AIs don’t exterminate us and the creation of those AIs strongly increases the total and average welfare of the world, while strongly decreasing our welfare, creating them (the AIs) would still be bad. Because not creating super-happy AIs in the first place isn’t bad for them (because in that case they wouldn’t exist and therefore would not suffer from their missing happiness), while making us humans unhappy in the future is actually bad for us, since we already exist and don’t want to be unhappy. See Can’t Unbirth a Child.
Moreover, we currently existing humans usually care about the future of humanity and about having human descendants, but we mostly don’t care about having AI descendants. So having human descendants is good for us according to our preferences, and therefore according to preference utilitarianism. In contrast, possible future AIs don’t care about coming into existence, because they don’t exist yet, and entities which don’t exist don’t have preferences, so they don’t show up in the moral (preference-utilitarian) calculus.
I don’t think I meant to imply here that most of the colonizers had a vision (though I do think this is more true in the colonization of the west in the 1800s which I am more centrally referring to here than the early colonizations). Indeed, I personally find grappling with the colonizers mostly not having a vision, being mostly recruited by some greater entities via their own self-interest and greed and various things like this, a much more interesting thing to think about, and more the kind of case I want to make in the post.
Indeed, my sense is if you want to do almost anything great in the world, you will need to find some ways to leverage unpure/non-good/selfish motivations.
I notice I’m confused now. Manifest Destiny makes sense in the context of this post—there’s something of value to be achieved, and there will be costs. I’m not sure if I agree with this, but it’s coherent. What I don’t understand is how egregores using people via their personal incentives (for lack of a better description) fits in? It would seem that people just being people and things happening is sort of the opposite (or at least orthogonal) to actively trying to make things better? Do you mean something about shaping incentives being the method of conquest? This seems obviously true (capitalism vs communism being an good example), but if so, then using colonialism as an example might be a bad choice, or at least would need more inference steps explained.
A big component of this post is trying to help me make progress towards the question “if you have a thing that you are part of that is good, how many fucked up things can you tolerate before you decide to leave instead of trying to fix it?”. The “good” part does not need to look like there being a big mission or glorious vision of “good”. It can also take the form of “spreading civilization in general even if the people actually doing that work are not motivated by that specific goal”.
This made me think of a novel to me moral principle: when choosing among goods, the best is the one the greatest number of people oppose (modulo Bayesian updates on why they oppose it).
As the net effect of the US seems probably negative (near term omnicide) it may have been better had it not existed.
But then someone else (e.g. China) would have achieved the same outcome. And a good AI outcome might be less unlikely under US American ASI than under Chinese ASI.
I certainly find the argument of the form “well, all of this conquering only accelerated technological progress which might then destroy everything by building ASI” at least prima-facie reasonable, though overall am not sold.
I think the same classical liberalism tendencies and associated intuitions around governments are actually a pretty good tool to use to navigate the intelligence explosion successfully.
Near term omnicide seems much more guaranteed in the world where the U.S. is not present to lend critical support to the Allies during WW2, or for the Jews to migrate to.
I couldn’t find a place to put a link in this quote that didn’t break the flow of the post, but h/t: https://x.com/joshcarlosjosh/status/1423668285837504514
Was Truman the man in the arena? Did he take any actions? My understanding is that he was a scapegoat, both about the bombs and about his presidency in general. The buck stops here for responsibility, but not decisions. He didn’t make the decision to bomb the city of Hiroshima, but specifically wrote that he chose it because there were no civilians. He didn’t weigh the options and decide that it was worth the cost, but rewrote history to pretend that he did. No, he shouldn’t wring his hands about his lying subordinates, but he should do something about them. I hold him responsible for complicity in this charade.
Fascinating post. I appreciate how it challenges conventional wisdom and I’ll have to spend more time thinking these points through.
One thing that confused me though is that this is exactly the kind of post I would haved imagined someone writing if they were trying to defend the Anthropic bet and my understanding was that you were opposed to this?
That’s the whole point! It’s trying to grapple with the tension I feel from the first post, and about trying to make the strongest case available for that kind of work (in order to synthesize some reasonable principle).
Could you add a link above the excerpt for life goals of dead people? I feel like it would help people do the background reading more easily.
This does not seem “battle-tested”. The explanations in comments haven’t bridged the gap, I would probably fail your ITT.
I read it as
“the USA is good*”, and “atrocities were necessary to achieve this” ⇒ “these atrocities are justified”.
I believe (based on your comments) you wouldn’t endorse that, but I can’t see this interpretation in your post or other comments of yours. Others have already begun discussing the object-level, but I’ve nothing to add there.
*In the sense and to the extent that OP meant to convey.
Wow, this is bad.
I mean, object level, colonialism was the worst atrocity in human history and nobody should defend it. That’s just my opinion of course. But meta level, in the previous post you describe yourself as holding an important position in the movement (LW / EA / AI-safety), and in the followup you say colonialism was a good thing actually. What a target to paint on the movement; what a signpost for young people deciding whether to join. Are you alright?
Worst recent, maybe. You can make a more generic statement about “wars of conquest and empire building” being the worst atrocity in human history, which would sort of include colonialism, but e.g. I’m pretty sure the Assyrians were a lot more atrocious than the United States. Or the Mongols for a more recent such group.
That being said, “nobody should defend it” is very harsh. Why shouldn’t they? You can show that colonialism was (is) bad, but not let people try to vouch for it seems unfair? I’m pretty sure you have views which many people think noone should defend (pretty much everyone does, somewhere) - does that mean you should abandon them?
Seems bad to focus on optics rather than truth
Worst in human history, period. The Mongols didn’t come anywhere close to clearing three continents (two Americas and Australia) of almost all native population and resettling them themselves, turning a fourth continent (Africa) into a supplier of slaves for centuries, creating a huge bloody mess on the fifth continent (India with tens of millions dead in famines that stopped instantly upon independence, China with the century of humiliation) and a bunch of other things too. There’s not much room to get worse, the Earth has only so many continents.
Humans kill and arguably torture
billionstrillions of non-human animals every year. It seems to me that it’s at the very least unclear that there exist human atrocities committed by and against humans worse than this.Yes, you’re right of course. I should’ve restricted to atrocities against humans. What we do to animals is the next level of horror.
This is a provocative comment and I don’t have time to develop half the themes I find in it.
For example: This kind of historical critique plays a role in the struggle within and between civilizations, about which peoples and values rise and fall. In part, the current war in the Middle East is between two regimes which exist in order to reverse ancient wrongs (the destruction of the Second Temple and the defeat of Ali at Karbala).
Obviously some of the West’s current cultural and political struggles—over topics like immigration, liberal democracy, even Jewish power apparently—have a heavy historical dimension, which are of this nature. @habryka is not volunteering to regard everything that the West has done as better than the alternative, but he wants to affirm that the existence of America is better than its nonexistence, even if choosing its existence includes everything that led to its existence in this timeline.
I believe you’re a Russian living in America, and Russia has been through such struggles many times—in passing from imperial heartland to Soviet republic to democratic republic—and they have included an element of psychological warfare in which external powers with different values allied with internal critics of Russia, to aim at either the destruction or transformation of Russia. Russia in turn has been a persistent critic of western imperialism, first within the framing of socialism versus capitalism, now within the framing of multipolarity versus unipolarity.
Your accounting of the sins of western colonialism has a framing which to me is political and not just about body counts. At least that’s what I thought when you included China’s century of humiliation, which obviously matters for China, but in terms of death toll is not on the same level as Indian famines or depopulation of the Americas (unless you want to attribute late Qing calamities like the Taiping rebellion directly to the colonial powers, rather than to China’s internal struggle). So China might not belong on the list of the West’s greatest sins—but it helps politically to include China in the list, if you’re building a coalition against present-day western power, as Russia has tried to do.
You disapprove of @habryka wanting to affirm these aspects of the American past. My questions are: Do you see analogies between America’s situation now, and Russia after imperialism or after communism (or even, potentially, after Putin)? And, as someone who I believe is a participant in America, what do you think is the correct attitude? Would you want to go all the way to the Bobby Fischer solution—whites back to Europe, blacks back to Africa (and implicitly everyone else back to their homelands), hand the American continent back to the indigenous peoples? Or is the rise of progressivism an appropriate response, perhaps analogous to the rise of communism in 20th-century Russia? Also, if American civilization and/or European colonialism had never existed, are there good, important, even crucial features of our present world, that might never have existed as well?
I expect that the appropriate response is the rise of progressivism. That being said, one could steelman cousin_it’s position as follows: I’ve encountered an argument that European colonialism and capitalism didn’t just destroy indigenous peoples or make their lives miserable, but managed to give rise to a system which converts resources into progress far less efficiently than the counterfactual world and/or the system created by Russia (e.g. if the Western governments, unlike the USSR, deliberately undermined the quality of education, then educated people would have a higher quality of life, but progress rates would plummet). If the capitalist system was inefficient, then it would likely deserve being dismantled. However, I expect that even an inefficient system could be incrementally improved and made close to the optimal.
I’m not in the US. Will try answer your questions though.
Not really. What analogies do you mean?
I think the rise of progressivism is a good response, yeah. And it seems much less dangerous than Russian communism.
I think if European colonialism had restricted itself to conquering and ruling, as most other empires did, and didn’t go for so much extermination and mass enslavement—then most good things about the present world would still have existed, and many other good things would have existed as well that don’t currently exist.
This seems unfair or at least simplified? The Mongols didn’t come close to clearing three continents, but that was a skill issue. In absolute numbers or geographical extent you can make the argument that Europe was very successful at expansion, but this isn’t a specifically European hobby—this is what humanity has been doing as far back as can be seen. Europe was very good at it because they had a decisive edge (guns and disease, mainly). Previous attempts stopped earlier for technological reasons (hard to hold an empire if it takes months to communicate with the provinces). Most of history is different cultures trying to do the same thing, with varying levels of success and brutality. The Yamnaya expansion had similar results, but without the smallpox, which suggests that if anything it was worse, because intentional.
To be clear, I’m not saying that colonialism was good. More something like “European colonialism was the largest in absolute numbers instance of a recurring human pattern” or something? That most high culture is based on enormous suffering and exploitation? British colonialism at least pretended at trying to help the natives. They also stopped the slave trade at large cost—this doesn’t absolve them of anything, of course, but I can’t imagine e.g. the Aztecs of even dreaming of such absurdities.
Believe it or not, I’m not against all conquest or imperialism. The main factor to me is that many (most?) empires in history were content to conquer and rule the natives. But European colonialism, on a huge part of territory it affected, went for extermination or mass enslavement instead. This unusual aspect, combined with the scale, is what makes it the worst atrocity to me.
I mean not all of it—British colonialism e.g. seems a lot more like Roman conquest (in fact a bit softer). At the other end of the spectrum is whatever the fuck was going on in King Leopold II’s rotten brain when he conceived of the Free Congo.
And yet Congo is now inhabited by its natives, while Australia after British “soft colonialism” isn’t.
Come on, LessWrong has always thrived in taking serious arguments with tricky conclusions and controversial positions. Are you really going to argue from consequences here that I shouldn’t write about how I think about these things because it “might paint a target on the movement” and “might put off young people deciding whether to join?”. I don’t consider arguments of that form universally invalid, but it clearly isn’t how LessWrong has historically operated!
Also don’t forget that I am here purely talking about colonization of North America. My current model is that some other colonialization efforts were extremely bad, extremely destructive and did not produce any functional societies. There are also a few other ones that seem to have overall made things much better.
Really? I am not sure what’s going on here. Clearly it needs to be possible for arguments to be made on both sides in order to feel any confidence in any conclusion. I certainly disagree very strongly if you are meaning to imply that even making arguments, or entertaining a position of this kind is a norm violation.
Like, I think people should defend all kinds of positions! I know people who would prefer all of humanity to be extinct, and I certainly think they should defend their position, even if I vehemently disagree with them. I hope that you can extend me at least as much charity as I extend those people.
Yeah, on further thought I can retract the meta point. Feel free to argue for colonialism, I’ll just be here to argue against :-)
On the object level I think this is weak. “Yes, the Worldwide Holocaust was overall bad, but the part that happened here was good, because we built something nice on the site afterward.” What happened to building nice things without having a holocaust first? Or is it like, we wanted to build a palace of human rights, but these other people were in the way, so we killed them and built the palace of human rights! Look everybody, how beautiful it is! Hmm. You’re certainly not alone in this position (Bertrand Russell argued for it all his life) but I still find it weak.
Thank you!
My current take is that they were relatively separable, but yeah, I agree that the outcomes of all of it as a class are also relevant.
I think I would be happy to defend the outcomes of the whole thing as class as well, though I do think the argument certainly gets weaker! Largely, it seems that if there never had been an expansionist Europe, then I do think probably we wouldn’t have “western” society as we know it, and this would be pretty bad. My default guess is that the position that Australia, North America, and much of eastern Europe would instead be much more similar to current South America, which I think would be much worse. And then I do think quite plausibly either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia would have won in the 2nd world war, and then the world would also be much worse. And then if that didn’t happen, pretty plausible that China would have conquered more of the world after that, which would also be really bad. It does just seem like colonialism roughly worked at creating a meaningful alliance of “western” countries.
This again, doesn’t mean the way it was done was anything remotely appropriate. I am again just comparing the counterfactual of “should you have abandoned the whole effort in disgust, or been active within it, possibly even putting most of your effort into changing course and causing less collateral damage”.
A popular starting point of European colonialism is 1415, the conquest of Ceuta. If you make a huge change like “no colonialism” from that point onward, do you think after 500 years there would still arise a recognizable Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? There’s no way. Everything would be different. (And not like South America either, because South America was shaped by colonialism entirely.)
Heck, I might even be ok with Europe being expansionist! Just do it like most empires, conquer and rule. The amount of extermination and enslavement that Europeans did is abnormal even for empires, it’s completely above and beyond. Clearing entire continents would make even Mongols go WTF.
Could a “conquer and rule” empire lead to widespread progress? Go look at a Roman aqueduct, they’re all over Europe and they’re still standing now. Could it create a big alliance? Yes. Could everything be fine? Yes. I’m not saying it would. But I also see no reason why the genocides were necessary.
Yep, totally. But clearly this is a fully general counter-argument against any intervention far back in time, and I think the best approximation we have for what good things were the result of the colonialist strategy were the good things that did materialize as a result of the colonialist strategy. Of course, feel free to make arguments that some thing was just a stroke of luck, or an outlier, or something like that, but I currently think arguing from real history is the best we have here.
I feel like you are not really modeling the tradeoffs here. Also, I somewhat object to this characterization. Yes, of course no previous government was capable of clearing entire continents, but rates of enslavement and killing of foreign adversaries were pretty comparable in past conquests when similarly divergent populations came into conflict. Some examples from Claude:
The scale of most of these is of course much lower, and much of the population was not located in the city states that were sacked, so there are really substantial differences here, but still, in various conflicts past conquests had similarly if not more intense rates of displacement and enslavement.
I think the greatest tragedy throughout all of this was the introduction of foreign diseases, which to my current understand was responsible for >90% of the fatalities. But that tragedy was no ones fault in particular, and I don’t think there was any realistic way to prevent this.
And then the resulting populations practically had no shot of meaningfully assimilating into something like a Pax Romana. The cultural and language and operational differences between the American settlers and the native Americans were vastly greater than any conflict that we are familiar with from the ancient world (most similar maybe to the situation that the Mongol horde faced, which also had no chance of meaningfully establishing dominion over the area of its conquest and so largely just killed and raided, IIRC resulting in ~10% of the human population dying at the time).
And again, none of this excuses the terrible atrocities committed. I am still strongly against them and condemn them and there is a decent chance if I was transported back into that time with my current moral opinions I would spend my life trying to stop these things. I am just arguing that these were not a moral hole so big that you can’t dig yourself out from them, and that a fraction of them (far from all) were the costs of doing business and conquest. I agree that in as much something like a Pax Romana conquest of the Americas was feasible, it would have been much better.
European colonialism often involved clearing a place of its previous inhabitants and resettling it, which is meaningfully different and worse than the behavior of most empires. Especially given the scale.
For purposes of building a Pax, this was not necessary. The Romans managed fine, they had Africans and Germans in the same empire, and a variety of client states as well. And the French got along fine with Native Americans when they wanted to. The rhetoric about “populations that can’t meaningfully assimilate”, also known as the rhetoric about “savages”, is always a lie. It’s downstream of the desire to remove a population and settle the place yourself.
That’s how the English often proceeded in North America (and Australia, for that matter), but it’s not nearly so accurate a description of how the Spanish did things. Conquistadors aimed more to make themselves lords over an enslaved/enserfed native population, not to wipe them out and replace them with Spanish immigrants.
And there was a lively debate within Catholic Spain about whether it was theologically and philosophically correct to conquer native populations. (Do Christians have an obligation to forcibly stop pagans from committing atrocities like human sacrifice upon one another? Are the pagans “natural slaves” incapable of developing morality on their own? Or must we respect that they have rational souls and can be converted and assimilated through cultural manipulation?)
Yeah, I mentioned enslavement in previous comments. Since Oliver is mostly interested in the part about North America, we can just talk about extermination because that’s what happened there.
Here’s a paper with islands as a natural experiments providing evidence that colonialism increased the well-being of poor countries.
I would encourage you (potentially with moderator help) to split this comment (and its children) into two comments, so we have two discussion threads—both discussions seem worthwhile, but mixing them is probably bad.