My utmost sympathy goes out to the civilians (and soldiers for that matter) who have been harmed in such a horrible way. The conduct of Hamas is unspeakable.
My guess is that you most likely do not expect the currently unfolding Israeli response to result in a massive humanitarian tragedy (please correct me if that’s wrong). Do you have any specific response to those who have concerns in this vein?
Specifically, the likely results of denying food supplies and electricity to Gaza seem disastrous for the civilians therein. Water disruption is also dangerous, though I read that water is being trucked in.
Also, Israel seems to be gearing up for a very large scale operation in Gaza, with potentially tens of thousands of soldiers involved. What is your expectation of the casualties—of combatants, for both sides, and non-combatants on the Palestinian side?
Ansel
Thanks for the response, especially including specific examples.
My motivation for asking these questions, is to anticipate that which will be obvious and of greatest humanitarian concern in hindsight, say in a year.
This is a scenario that I think is moderately probable, that I’m worried about:
Part 1, most certain: Israeli airstrikes continue, unclear if they’re still using their knocking system much. Due in part to deliberate Hamas mixing of combatants and non-combatants, numbers of civilian casualties rise over time.
Part 2, less certain: Israel continues to withhold or significantly restrict electricity and/or food/medical supplies. Civilian casualties rise over time.Part 3, less certain: Israel proceeds with an invasion/occupation of Gaza. Goals could be restricted to killing known members of Hamas, destroying Hamas materiel, rescuing hostages, or they could be expanded to some kind of occupation or even resettlement objectives.
With part 2 and 3, the possibilities for non-combatant casualties seem largely open ended. The results (if these things happen) will depend not just on Israel’s conduct, but also the reaction from Hamas and the general Palestinian population.
I think that those who are able to consider the situation dispassionately, both inside and outside of Israel, should be clear that the maximally aggressive Israeli response would be tragic and catastrophic. The question, therefore, is how much restraint can be shown; and to a lesser extent, if the response can do any good. As a backdrop to all this, I also consider that it’s as yet uncertain whether, among other considerations, there could be more attacks against Israel yet to come in the near term.
I understand that you might not have much to say about all this since it’s largely speculation, just thought I’d throw in my thoughts about the situation.
Would you be willing to summarize the point you’re making at the object level? Is it something like “the Soviets had to make the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, and that doesn’t say anything meaningful about their cultural approach to the interaction of world religions”? I don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything, I just want to understand the “extremely low-epistemics” bit.
That does clarify where you’re coming from. I made my comment because it seems to me that it would be a shame for people to fall into one of the more obvious attractors for reasoning within EA about the SBF situation.
E.G., an attractor labelled something like “SBF’s actions were not part of EA because EA doesn’t do those Bad Things”.Which is basically on the greatest hits list for how (not necessarily centrally unified) groups of humans have defended themselves from losing cohesion over the actions of a subset anytime in recorded history. Some portion of the reasoning on SBF in the past week looks motivated in service of the above.
The following isn’t really pointed at you, just my thoughts on the situation.
I think that there’s nearly unavoidable tension with trying to float arguments that deal with the optics of SBF’s connection to EA, from within EA. Which is a thing that is explicitly happening in this thread. Standards of epistemic honesty are in conflict with the group need to hold together. While the truth of the matter is and may remain uncertain, if SBF’s fraud was motivated wholly or in part by EA principles, that connection should be taken seriously.My personal opinion is that, the more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that several cultural features of LW adjacent EA are really ideal for generating extremist behavior. People are forming consensus thought groups around moral calculations that explicitly marginalize the value of all living people, to say nothing of the extreme side of negative consequentialism. This is all in an overall environment of iconoclasm and disregarding established norms in favor of taking new ideas to their logical conclusion.
These are being held in an equilibrium by stabilizing norms. At the risk of stating the obvious, insofar as the group in question is a group at all, it is heterogeneous; the cultural features I’m talking about are also some of the unique positive values of EA. But these memes have sharp edges.
I wish the cuteness made a difference. Interesting reading though, thanks.
Strongly upvoted, I think that the point about emotionally charged memeplexes distorting your view of the world is very valuable.
I’m not persuaded at all by the attempt to classify people into the two types. See: in your table of examples, you specify that you tried to include views you endorse in both columns. However, if you were effectively classified by your own system, your views should fit mainly or completely in one column, no?
The binary individual classification aspect of this doesn’t even seem to be consistent in your own mind, since you later talk about it as a spectrum.
Maybe you meant it as a spectrum the whole time but that seems antithetical to putting people into two well defined camps.
Setting those objections aside for a moment, there is an amusing meta level of observing which type would produce this framework.
I suspect that massive destabilization following the precipitous fall of most of the great powers (NATO + Russia at the least) would result in war on every continent (sans Antarctica). If Asian countries don’t get nuked in this scenario like you suppose, I think it’s quite plausible general war in Asia would follow shortly as the surviving greatest powers jockey for dominance. If we posit the complete collapse of U.S. power projection in the Pacific, surely China is best positioned to fill the void, and I don’t think it’s clear where they’d draw the new lines.
These are just one native speaker’s impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.
Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.
This quora result indicates that it’s a quality of “definiteness” that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you’re likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).
In those examples, the meaning doesn’t rely on pointing at two specific “curiosity” and “context” objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases “out of curiosity” and “in context” that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object.
I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The “definiteness” argument doesn’t apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.
I’d be interested in someone with legal expertise weighing in on whether the farm example is in violation of child labor laws. There are special regulations and exemptions for farms, especially run by a parent or person standing for the parent, but a nine year old driving that tractor seems very likely to be illegal to me. I broadly agree with all the stuff about letting children roam, and it comports well with my own experience, but tractors in particular can be very dangerous and 9 seems very young to be doing genuinely independent ag work like this. Would be interested in other people’s thoughts.
It seems like you might be reading into the post what you want to see to some extent(after reading what I wrote, it looked like I’m trying to be saucy paralleling your first sentence, just want to be clear that to me this is a non valenced discussion), the OP returns to referring to K-type and T-type individual people after discussing their formal framework. That’s what makes me think that classifying people into the binary categories is meant to be the main takeaway.
I’m not going to pretend to be more knowledgeable than I am about this kind of framework, but I would not have commented anything if the post had been something like “Tradeoffs between K-type and T-type theory valuation” or anything along those lines.
Like I said, I don’t think the case has remotely been made for being able to identify well defined camps of people, and I think it’s inconsistent to say that there are K-type and T-type people, which is a “real classification”, and then talk about the spectrum between K-type and T-type people. This implies that K-type and T-type people really aren’t exclusive camps, and that there are people with a mix of K-type and T-type decision making.
Conceptually I like the framing of “playing to your outs” taken from card games. In a nutshell, you look for your victory conditions and backchain your strategy from there, accepting any necessary but improbable actions that keep you on the path to possible success. This is exactly what you describe, I think, so the transposition works and might appeal intuitively to those familiar with card games. Personally, I think avoiding the “miracle” label has a significant amount of upside.
I think it’s useful to point out that training muscles for strength/size results in a well documented phenomenon called supercompensation. However, training for other qualities like speed doesn’t really work the same way. There’s lots of irrational training done because people make an inferential leap from the supercompensation they see in strength training and apply it to cases which intuitively seem like they might be analogues (e.g., weighted sprints don’t make you faster).
I think counterexamples are relevant because sometimes intuition points out real analogues, and sometimes fake ones, so we should value evidence and mechanistic explanation over analogies and cultural beliefs.
Sorry if this is a little incoherent, I wrote it when I was really sleepy.
You imply that you understand it’s a metaphor, but your other sentences seem to insist on taking the word “wrestling” literally as referring to the sport. The sentence in bold
“This was no passive measure to confirm a hypothesis, but a wrestling with nature to make her reveal her secrets.”
Makes it pretty clear I think. Do you simply not like the metaphor?
In practice, leading thinkers in EA seem to interpret AGI as a special class of existential threat (i.e., something that could effectively ‘cancel’ the future)
This doesn’t seem right to me. “Can effectively ’cancel’ the future” seems like a pretty good approximation of the definition of an existential threat. My understanding of why A.I. risk is treated differently is because of a cultural commonality between said leading thinkers such that A.I. risk is considered to be a more likely and imminent threat than other X-risks. Along with a less widespread (I think) subset of concerns that A.I. can also involve S-risks that other threats don’t have an analogue to.
I appreciate the clarification, at first #1 seemed dissonant to me (and #2 and #3 following from that) given the trope of highly inbred European nobility, but on further reflection that might be mostly a special case due to dispensations. I hadn’t thought of worldwide consanguination/marriage norms as a potential X factor for civilizational development, but it’s an interesting angle.
Just to clarify, with this sentence:
Christianity was also unusual in other potentially key dimensions—it dramatically promoted outbreeding (by outlawing inbreeding far beyond the typical), which plausibly permanently altered the european trajectory.
are you proposing that Christian Europe was historically successful in significant part due to inbreeding less than non-Christian-European civilizations? Is there somewhere I can read more about that thesis? I’m not familiar with it.
The parent post amusingly equated “accurately communicating your epistemic status”, which is the value I selected in the poll, with eating babies. So I adopted that euphemism (dysphemism?) in my tongue-in-cheek response.
Also, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
I modestly propose that eating babies is more likely to have good outcomes, including with regard to the likelihood of apocalypse, compared to the literal stated goal of avoiding the apocalypse.
It’s not immediately clear to me that this isn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy.