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.
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.
“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.
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”.
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.
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).
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”.
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.
I don’t currently see how you get comparably good outcomes without that basic premise.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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!
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.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
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.
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.