I feel like there’s conservation of expected evidence stuff going on there—it’s because we know a lot about how gravity works that we think anti-gravity is impossible. Similarly, I’m pessimistic about extending trendlines from the past because of the likely causal factors of those trendlines.
Much of the recent increase in tribalism seems to have been driven by the rise of social media, though; and it’s highly unobvious that you couldn’t have a form of social media that didn’t contribute to equally toxic dynamics. Similarly, although it remains debated whether or not depression etc. have actually become more common or not, it seems like a reasonable guess that they might have.
It’s not likely gravity where we’ve gotten most of the domain figured out and we’re not coming up with anything new; rather, the domain is changing all the time, and there are various identifiable factors that are contributing to the problem and pushing it in different directions, and these have changed over time due to various causal forces that we can identify.
I think a core difference between MIRI-style AI safety work and this is that MIRI is trying to figure out what non-adversarial reasoning looks like in a mostly non-adversarial environment, whereas the ‘non-tribal’ forces have to do their figuring out in a mostly adversarial environment.
Clearly there is some degree of adversariality going on with the problem. But while there are a lot of people who benefit from tribalism to some extent, it doesn’t seem obvious that they wouldn’t turn from adversaries to allies if you gave them an even better solution for dealing with their problems.
E.g. I spoke with someone who had done research on some of the nastier SJW groups and had managed to get into some private Facebook groups from which outrage campaigns were being coordinated. He said that his impression was that much of this was being driven by a small group of individuals who seemed to be doing really badly in life in general, and who were doing the outrage stuff as some kind of a coping mechanism. If that’s correct, then while those people would probably like to maintain tribalism as a way to maintain their coping mechanism, even they would probably prefer to have their actual problems fixed. And in fact, if the right person just approached them and offered to help them with their actual problems, it’s unlikely that they’d even perceive that as being in opposition to the outrage stuff they were doing—even if getting that help would in fact cause them to lose interest in the outrage stuff.
Also, I obviously don’t have a representative sample here, but it feels like there are a lot more people who hate the tribal climate on social media than there are people who would like to maintain it. Most people don’t know what to do about it (and in fact aren’t speaking up because they are scared that they’d become targeted if they did), but would be happy to help out with reducing it if they just knew how.
Much of the recent increase in tribalism seems to have been driven by the rise of social media, though; and it’s highly unobvious that you couldn’t have a form of social media that didn’t contribute to equally toxic dynamics. Similarly, although it remains debated whether or not depression etc. have actually become more common or not, it seems like a reasonable guess that they might have.
It’s not likely gravity where we’ve gotten most of the domain figured out and we’re not coming up with anything new; rather, the domain is changing all the time, and there are various identifiable factors that are contributing to the problem and pushing it in different directions, and these have changed over time due to various causal forces that we can identify.
Clearly there is some degree of adversariality going on with the problem. But while there are a lot of people who benefit from tribalism to some extent, it doesn’t seem obvious that they wouldn’t turn from adversaries to allies if you gave them an even better solution for dealing with their problems.
E.g. I spoke with someone who had done research on some of the nastier SJW groups and had managed to get into some private Facebook groups from which outrage campaigns were being coordinated. He said that his impression was that much of this was being driven by a small group of individuals who seemed to be doing really badly in life in general, and who were doing the outrage stuff as some kind of a coping mechanism. If that’s correct, then while those people would probably like to maintain tribalism as a way to maintain their coping mechanism, even they would probably prefer to have their actual problems fixed. And in fact, if the right person just approached them and offered to help them with their actual problems, it’s unlikely that they’d even perceive that as being in opposition to the outrage stuff they were doing—even if getting that help would in fact cause them to lose interest in the outrage stuff.
Also, I obviously don’t have a representative sample here, but it feels like there are a lot more people who hate the tribal climate on social media than there are people who would like to maintain it. Most people don’t know what to do about it (and in fact aren’t speaking up because they are scared that they’d become targeted if they did), but would be happy to help out with reducing it if they just knew how.