CW: fairly frank discussions of violence, including sexual violence, in some of the worst publicized atrocities with human victims in modern human history. Pretty dark stuff in general.
tl;dr: Imperial Japan did worse things than Nazis. There was probably greater scale of harm, more unambiguous and greater cruelty, and more commonplace breaking of near-universal human taboos.
I think the Imperial Japanese Army is noticeably worse during World War II than the Nazis. Obviously words like “noticeably worse” and “bad” and “crimes against humanity” are to some extent judgment calls, but my guess is that to most neutral observers looking at the evidence afresh, the difference isn’t particularly close.
probably greater scale
of civilian casualties: It is difficult to get accurate estimates of the number of civilian casualties from Imperial Japan, but my best guess is that the total numbers are higher (Both are likely in the tens of millions)
of Prisoners of War (POWs): Germany’s mistreatment of Soviet Union POWs is called “one of the greatest crimes in military history” and arguably Nazi Germany’s second biggest crime. The numbers involved were that Germany captured 6 million Soviet POWs, and 3 million died, for a fatality rate of 50%. In contrast, of all Chinese POWs taken by Japan, 56 survived to the end.
Japan’s attempted coverups of warcrimes often involved attempted total eradication of victims. We see this in both POWs and in Unit 731 (their biological experimental unit, which we will explore later).
more unambiguous and greater cruelty
It’s instructive to compare Nazi Germany human experiments against Japanese human experiments at unit 731 (warning:body horror). Both were extremely bad in absolute terms. However, without getting into the details of the specific experiments, I don’t think anybody could plausibly argue that the Nazis were more cruel in their human experiments, or incurred more suffering. The widespread casualness and lack of any traces of empathy also seemed higher in Imperial Japan:
“Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: ‘What would happen if we did such and such?’ What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play.”
When (Japanese) Unit 731 officials were infected, they immediately went on the experimental chopping block as well (without anesthesia).
more commonplace breaking of near-universal human taboos
I could think of several key taboos that were broken by Imperial Japan but not the Nazis. I can’t think of any in reverse.
Taboo against biological warfare:
To a first approximation, Nazi Germany did not actually do biological warfare outside of small-scale experiments. In contrast, Imperial Japan was very willing to do biological warfare “in the field” on civilians, and estimates of civilian deaths from Japan-introduced plague are upwards of 200,000.
Taboo against mass institutionalized rape and sexual slavery.
While I’m sure rape happened and was commonplace in German-occupied territories, it was not, to my knowledge condoned and institutionalized widely. While there are euphemisms applied like “forced prostitution” and “comfort women”, the reality was that 50,000 − 200,000 women (many of them minors) were regularly raped under the direct instruction of the Imperial Japanese gov’t.
Taboo against cannibalism outside of extreme exigencies.
“Nazi cannibals” is the material of B-movies and videogames, ie approximately zero basis in history. In contrast, Japanese cannibalism undoubtedly happened and was likely commonplace.
We have documented oral testimony from Indian POWs, Australian POWs, American soldiers, and Japanese soldiers themselves.
My rationalist-y friends sometimes ask why the taboo against cannibalism is particularly important.
I’m not sure why, but I think part of the answer is “dehumanization.”
I bring this topic up mostly as a source of morbid curiosity. I haven’t spent that much time looking into war crimes, and haven’t dived into the primary literature, so happy to be corrected on various fronts.
My own professional opinion, not speaking for any other grantmakers or giving an institutional view for LTFF etc:
Yeah I sure can’t convince you that donating to us is definitely net positive, because such a claim wouldn’t be true.
So basically I don’t think it’s possible to do robustly positive actions in longtermism with high (>70%? >60%?) probability of being net positive for the long-term future[1], and this number is even lower for people who don’t place the majority of their credence on near- to medium-term extinction risk timelines.
I don’t think this is just an abstract theoretical risk, as you mention there’s a real risk that our projects are net negative; and advancing more AI capabilities than AI safety is the most obvious way that this is true.
I think the other LTFF grantmakers and I are pretty conscious about downside risks in capabilities enhancements, though I expect there’s a range of opinions on the fund on how much to weigh that against other desiderata, as well as which specific projects have the highest capabilities externalities.
I would guess that we’re better about this than most (all?) other significant longtermist funders, including both organizations and individuals (though keep in mind that the average for individuals is driven by the long left tail). But since we’re optimizing for other things as well (most importantly positive impact), I think we’d do worse than you would on this axis if you a) have reasonably good judgment b) are laser-focused on preventing capabilities externalities, and c) have access to good donation options directly, especially by your own worldview. And of course reality doesn’t grade on a curve, so doing better than other funders isn’t a guarantee we’re doing well enough.
I don’t do much evaluations of alignment grants myself because others on the fund seem more technically qualified so my time is usually triaged to looking at other projects (eg forecasting, biosecurity). But I do try to flag downside risks I see in ltff grants overall, including in alignment grants. (So far, I think the rest of the fund is sensible about capabilities risks and capabilities risks usually aren’t the type of thing that non-public information is super useful for, so possibly none of my flags were on capabilities, more like interpersonal harm or professional integrity). When I did, I’ve found the rest of the fund to be sensible about them. You might find this recent post to be useful.
(On the flip side, there were a small number of grants that I liked that we were blocked from making for legal or PR reasons; for the most promising ones, one of us tried to connect the applicant to other funders)
If I were to hypothesize why LessWrongers should be worried about our capabilities externalities:
I think the average view in the fund (both unweighted and weighted by votes on alignment grants) is more optimistic on prosaic AI alignment strategies than what I perceive the median LessWrong view to be.
I expect under most worldviews, prosaic AI alignment to have more capabilities externalities than other research agendas
To be clear, I don’t think views in the fund to be out-of-line with working AI safety researchers; I think the louder (and probably median?) voices on LessWrong are more negative on prosaic approaches.
Some of our grantees go on to work at AI labs like Anthropic or DeepMind, which many people here would consider to be bad for the world.
My own weakly-to-moderately held view is that doing AI Safety work at big labs is a good-to-great idea, but don’t think the case is very robust and reasonable people can and should disagree.
As you allude, an important crux is whether/how much the work at the labs end up being safety-washing
I’m personally fairly against working at big labs in non-safety roles; the capabilities externalities just seem rather high, and the career capital argument seem a) both not that high compared to getting a random ML job at Google doing ads or working at collision detection at Tesla or something and b) to rely implicitly on a certain willingness to defect for personal gain.
The moral mazes and institutional/cultural incentives to warp your beliefs seem pretty scary to me, but I don’t have a good solution.
We are not institutionally opposed to receiving money from employees at big labs
Though as an empirical matter I don’t think we’ve received much.
The ecosystem/memes/vibes near us has in fact resulted in a bunch of negative externalities before, there’s no guarantee we wouldn’t cause the same.
We haven’t tracked past negative externalities/negative impact grants very well, so I couldn’t eg point to our10 worst grants ex post with an estimate of how bad there were (but we’re working on this).
We didn’t see the FTX crash coming.
I also think potential donors to us can also just look at our past grants database, our payout report, or our marginal grants post to make an informed decision for themselves about whether donations to us are (sufficiently) net positive in expectation.
On a personal level:
I don’t really know, man? I think the longtermist/rationalist EA memes/ecosystem were very likely causally responsible for some of the worst capabilities externalities in the last decade; I don’t have a sense of how bad it is overall because counterfactuals are really hard but I don’t think it’s plausible that the negative impact was small. I’m pretty confused about whether people with thought process like me have been historically net positive or net negative; I can see a strong case either way. The whole thing had a pretty direct effect on me being depressed for most of this year (with the obvious caveat that etiology is hard for mental illness stuff, and being sad for cosmic reasons is one of the most self-flattering stories I could have for melancholy). Interestingly, I think the emotional effect is much larger than I would’ve ex ante predicted, if you asked me in 2017 if I thought longtermist work might be net negative, I don’t think my numbers would’ve been that different; I guess the specific details and concreteness did matter.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who decided to be a bit more checked out of morality, or decided to give up on this whole AI thing and focus on just reducing suffering in the next few decades (I think farmed animal welfare is the most popular candidate). But ultimately I think they’re wrong. The future is still going to be big, and likely really wild, and likely at least somewhat contingent. Knowing (or at least having a high probability) that people near us did a bunch of harmful stuff in the past is certainly an argument for being much more careful going forwards (as well as a number of more concrete and specific updates), but not really a good case to just roll over. (In the abstract, I do think it’s more plausible that for some people acting now is wrong compared to retreating to the woods for a year and thinking really hard; as an empirical matter when I did weaker versions of that, the effect was basically between useless and negative).
I think it’s a bit more feasible if you’re willing to make >3 OOMs sacrifice in expected positive impact. But still pretty rough. Some green energy stuff might be safe? Maybe try to convince doomsday preppers to be nicer people? I confess to not thinking much about it; I think some of the Oxford people might have a better idea.