cousin_it
Sorry to resurrect the thread, but I found another possible bug: the “see in context” link doesn’t work if the comment is a descendant of a negative-voted one, even if the comment itself is positive-voted.
Yeah, the world treats activists badly. I think the most effective activists are those who are aware of this and can calculate on it.
The best activist playbook is this phrase from the Bible: “Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and gentle as doves”. Translation: when you go out into the world to defend an ideal that the world doesn’t share, you’re going to be weak. So you have to be sincere about holding the ideal, like a dove, but be ruthlessly strategic about how you promote it, like a serpent. There is a complex balancing act of being naive and being strategic about being naive. This is why, when reading the biographies of Christian saints, you get the impression that they were trying to get killed as publicly as possible. They knew the world would treat them badly, and instead of getting discouraged by that, they used it strategically. This played a big role in how they ended up winning so much.
Of course I’m not saying that one should try to get killed as publicly as possible. What I’m saying is that when you step up a little bit, you sign up for the activist life a little bit. It’s best to go into it with open eyes.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, on further thought I can retract the meta point. Feel free to argue for colonialism, I’ll just be here to argue against :-)
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
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.
And yet Congo is now inhabited by its natives, while Australia after British “soft colonialism” isn’t.
I’m not in the US. Will try answer your questions though.
Do you see analogies between America’s situation now, and Russia after imperialism or after communism (or even, potentially, after Putin)?
Not really. What analogies do you mean?
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?
I think the rise of progressivism is a good response, yeah. And it seems much less dangerous than Russian communism.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The biggest examples to me are RLHF and the idea of the HHH assistant (alignment techniques that ended up accelerating the race a lot). And less direct but still relevant, both OpenAI and Anthropic being founded in the name of alignment.
There are some on LW, but more prominently elsewhere, on the political left. Like this article by Mike Monteiro.
Well I was never offered to work on AI at a big lab, and don’t have the skills for it. So there’s a bit of self-flattery in my comment =)
I can write a lot without stopping, but the result is often bad (when I reread it on the next day with a clear head). But sometimes it’s good. There’s an important mystery in what determines that.
Here’s maybe a datapoint. I often write song lyrics. When I do it at home, or walking in the street, the result is usually meh. But when I do it on the tram, it comes out much better. Why the difference? I don’t know. Maybe there’s a certain amount of noise, or motion, or something like that, that makes my mind better at writing lyrics. Maybe it’s even a subtractive effect: it stops me from focusing too much on something, so I can better focus on something else. It’s really hard to tell.
Yeah. AI was always going to be used to increase power imbalance, and a bunch of people (including me) have been yelling about this for a long time. Things like “gotta win the race for good”, “gotta protect cybersecurity”, “gotta protect the model against jailbreaks”, “gotta keep the model closed because it’s too capable” have been excuses and smokescreens for a long time. As are things like “gonna have post-scarcity”, “gonna have UBI at an undefined point in the future” and so on. It’s all about grabbing power now. I’m as cynical about this as can be.
And work is fungible, too. Joining big labs to work on alignment = actually helping improve capabilities, helping concentrate power at the top, and getting a very nice paycheck for it. So many people went for this, it just depresses me.
My hopeful scenario is that if AI power gets spread out enough (something like “everyone gets +50 points due to AI”), then people will start acting together more, and act together to prevent extreme power concentration and abuse. Basically, democracy and human rights becoming more of an attractor as people get smarter. Of course there will be lots of opportunities for people to defect, or just individually go off the rails; but I think if power is spread out enough, people are more likely to keep each other sane and in check.
Note that one of the authors is Ronan Farrow, son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who previously did influential investigative reporting on Harvey Weinstein, and on the links between Jeffrey Epstein and the MIT Media Lab, and a bunch of other good things. He was also on HN answering questions about the piece earlier today, and came out well. So this is far from the usual “journalistic broken telephone” kind of thing; from what I can tell, this is good reporting.
Raising awareness of AI risk led directly to the founding of OpenAI and Anthropic. Raising awareness of AI risk on the level of governments can easily backfire and lead to an arms race in the same way.
The best and clearest statement of the problem and the only possible solution is Bill Hibbard’s critique of SIAI back in 2003. It’s almost unbelievable how much this text got right, 23 years ago:
To highlight the key part that I’d like people to take away, “only a strong public movement driving government regulation” has a chance of solving the problem. Attempts to influence governments that don’t go through the public risk concentrating the power and will to change in the hands of governments, instead of where it should be: with the public.