Yes, that’s the whole point! The suffering was not necessary! It was indeed bad.
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?
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.
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.
I feel like we can see something similar in the trajectory of our politics. Go read a speech by dunno, Abraham Lincoln. It’s clear that it appeals to reason and tries to justify its positions logically. This doesn’t tell us that every single politician was therefore a honest and good faith advocate. But it tells us that society at large valued logic and rationality and consistency as fundamental to believable arguments enough that politicians felt a need to perform them, which is a good position to start from. Today a politician with the same style would likely be penalised because they’d appear to be boring and perhaps a bit too snotty compared to the Guys Just Like Us, who speak broken nonsense or parrot thoughtless slogans.
We can say centralisation vs decentralisation, but I think my point holds. Centralised organizations have a single point of failure, and if that is captured the whole thing becomes corrupted, but there’s also a certain mitigating effect usually in how willing the elites are to really go wild. The failure mainly looks like being ineffectual, slow, mired in process and politics and unable to ever embrace a bolder belief even when appropriate. Meanwhile decentralised ideologies mean everyone must fill a niche and all sorts of crazy stuff can develop and not be sanctioned.
(a fun case study of two parallel developments of the same exact core idea with these two different paradigms is the Catholic Church vs Protestantism).
Sure, my main point was “it doesn’t say much about someone of the time other than they were buying into a fad”.
For what it’s worth the French revolution inspired almost everything else afterwards. For example Napoleon disseminated a new legal order wherever he conquered and rolling it back was hard. Italian unification was strongly driven by how Napoleon’s laws had been relatively liberal and people ill tolerated the attempt to return to the old order after the Congress of Vienna. And of course France itself kept having revolutions fairly regularly.
But isn’t this more a syndrome of federalism than of centralisation? “Anyone can claim our banner and there’s no one with the authority to gatekeep and excommunicate them”. In fact the same applies to your activist example. Parties or organisations can be centralised, but movements often are not. What gets big is an idea, not any one specific group of people.
Almost everyone that considered themselves scientifically minded and rational at the dawn of the 20th century was an eugenicist, bad genetics was considered a real concern and danger to address. Doesn’t mean they all were straight up Nazis but it was one of the big fashionable positivist beliefs.
TBF I feel like at most if LessWrong really is drifting (it’s hard for me to say as I’m a relatively late joiner) the worst it’s doing is being less interesting to read. I don’t see a lot of harm coming from it right now; there are parts of the rationalist adjacent/derived community that I find reprehensible or even dangerous, but none of them are particularly represented here. If the worst that can happen is that the big thing simply waters itself down and dies with a whimper, that’s probably as good as it gets.
Well, what you can do is put yourself into situations in which you expect better feedback. E.g. maybe you get a feeling that your effort goes to waste because your workplace is shit and it does go to waste, but changing jobs might help that, and maybe see you better rewarded for what you accomplish.
Of course if after enough attempts you seem to always notice that things don’t work out either you have a systematic bias or maybe the world around you is, indeed, pretty fucked.
Wars are a particularly hard thing because of course they might sometimes be necessary, but here is the other kicker—feelings of disenfranchisement, of lacking control over the political process (as in meaningful control; if voting one side or the other feels like it always results in the same policies anyway that’s enough), mean that any successes are not also your successes, and you can’t trust any promise that this particular effort is important and worthwhile for you too.
Fair, though I think in general the direction of the process makes sense (e.g. that you might move through more turbulent feelings towards acceptance). My point was just highlighting that really this is a description of a grief process—one unusual in scope, but not too different from what an individual might face if they learn e.g. about a potentially deadly diagnosis.
Aren’t these just the classic stages of grief? There’s denial (thinking it can’t be true), anger and bargaining (various amounts of trying to do something, to lash back, to find ways in which maybe we can get out of it, save ourselves from the Permanent Underclass or whatever), depression (doom and gloom) and finally acceptance.
It’s hard to also say what is the appropriate point to stop. Maybe it really is all overinflated and we’re stressing over nothing. Maybe there really are things we can do to stop the very specific human culprits of this whole mess and not doing them is cowardly and lazy, not wise. And no matter how much one wants to be positive and whimsical, the death of all does sound like a somewhat depressing prospect. WWPD (What Would Pollyanna Do)?
I’ve actually had Opus 4.6 write me a full novel from a simple conceptual prompt. It’s managed decently on the scene to scene but overall coherence started suffering once I was about 80 pages in reading it. Some glaring flaws and contradictions, but nothing that couldn’t probably be fixed with an editing pass. Still probably not a fantastic read, but by all means passable.
Random story idea, someone transitions to avoid a voodoo curse that has been cast specifically on their name. Now their house is surrounded by confused shambling zombies that can’t quite home in on the right signal.
Working title: The Deadnamers.
You say that as if gender transition was an uncontroversial idea that everyone is on board with.
Mostly I think that I could just do things but I am very bad at finding ways for those things to earn me the money I need to stay alive. So I spend most of my time doing other things (and sometimes despairing at how badly those things are being organised/managed and how much effort is wasted by this).
Pretty much. There is an argument for “if you can’t provide a better option, don’t take away what people have out of self righteousness”. It’s hard to thread the needle exactly. But if we make everything for sale and everything available as long as there’s some marginal gain to be made, all that happens is that Moloch eventually grinds away all margins and eventually even the best option is pretty bad. Not in this case probably tbf (I don’t think Qatar cares too much about what westerners thinks and their salaries are entirely determined by how much they need to be to attract the workers they need, so in this case the argument is probably kinda fine). But overall, yeah, you would quickly get in loops such as “allow people to sell organs if so they choose → now everyone in the poorest tiers of society HAS to sell at least one kidney to survive”.
Maybe the main lesson is that it should be made more clear that constraints aren’t for the sake of the specific people who may or may not be impacted by them right now, but for the sake of shoring up principles to progressive erosion.
“They enslave their children’s children [those] who make compromise with sin.”