I study law
SeñorDingDong
Karma: 94
A Town Without Children
Interesting post! Personally, I would have liked more soft and hard data.
For the former, the lack of anecdota or specific examples of residents meant I didn’t feel the emotions I normally feel in a town without children. The book Children of Men does this quite well—capturing the spiritual sense of ‘what is this all for?’ There is something very sombre about 1-2 people left remaining in a town which previously held hundreds and sometimes even thousands. Before-after comparisons show this powerfully. Satellite image comparisons using birthrate proxies?
For the latter, I would have liked more forecasts. It seems low birthrates cascade slowly, with nurseries closing, then primary schools, and finally secondary schools. Each can have progressively large catchment areas so the cascade is not linear. As they go, swimming pools, play parks, sports fields, and community centres (in the UK at least) begin falling into disrepair. I suspect ‘children qua customers’ is actually more load-bearing in our society than we realise, and all manner of things not typically associated with children by non-parents will shrink or transform (exhibit 30). The distribution of young people in society also seems to be shifting, hiding to some extent the falling birthrate—e.g., university towns, particular areas of cities, suburbs with good schools. Concretising this with some stats would be fascinating.
Finally, the effects of low birthrates superficially look similar to rural depopulation. But they are clearly not: when do you think the first city in japan will be abandoned/cease running normally? That seems like an important threshold.
So overall, despite the limitations on the role of philosophy in AI alignment that I discussed above, I do think it’s nevertheless important that our AIs do philosophy in the ways we’d endorse.
I find the tone or vibe of this essay fluctuates. Sometimes the tone is ‘powerful AI is coming and we better make sure it wants to do the right kind of philosophy’, which imo seems incredibly fraught. The world where the manipulation example is a live problem is absurdly dangerous.
Other times—especially in section 3, I get the vibe that philosophy is less relevant than not building strong AI in the first place (limiting the extent of optimization, or keeping AI as a tool, or confined to local contexts &c).
The effect is disconcerting. I think I am confused because the background model of AI progress is missing. I.e: do you think a pause is ideal but impossible, so this is the next best thing?
Re: Soft Law. Today, I agree it is mostly wordcel bullshit.
But in the 1950s and 1960s? Quite influential, especially with US + friends, even without the threat of ‘bombs.’ Many of the moral and legal norms on bioethics are the downstream result of soft-law promulgated in the postwar period.
To get in this headspace, think of a UN resolution taking up space in the major national newspaper for several weeks, or even months. A world where single books and conferences routinely defined the future of fields and movements (e.g. Silent Spring) because of its relative media undersaturation.
Very helpful. If you are interested in adding a section about other countries/regions, I have done some research on various regulatory regimes (mainly in Europe). Happy to share.
I think this might explain the difference in framing? From the quote below, I assumed you were trying to come up with a fully general solution to the problem you specify:
What I think Wat Do is, figure out how to build a political network that is powerful enough to have leverage, but, is still based on a solid foundation of epistemic trust.
But I see now that you were taking the existence of a community of sane, reasonable, and mostly value-aligned participants as a given, and instead focusing on a framework which could make their interaction with the wider political process saner.
The uncharitable reading is that you are assuming a can opener, but, from reading your other writing, evidently the better reading is that you do have a model for producing/widening this community elsewhere (inter alia).
Have you ever read Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”? You can have as many checks and balances and clever system frameworks as you want, but at some point you just need people to believe in democracy. That is to say, your model of good government is never going to be complete without some kind of model of culture and shared values.
Maybe talking about culture—which is fuzzy, historical, symbolic, and social—is outside your wheelhouse. So what? Maybe clever system design and creating good incentive structures is outside my competency—that doesn’t mean I can create meaningful political change by writing fiction alone or going to rallies. Don’t fall into the failure mode of: ‘to the hammer everything looks like a nail.’
To concretise this, consider your proposal “Have private evaluator people who check in on whether candidates seem good, and whether the whole political bloc seems sane.”
Who watches the watchmen? Who ensures they are sane and good? No-one, it can’t be checks-and-balances all the way down: at some point you just need to trust experts will have high integrity and aligned values. Not everyone can be elected, not everyone can be hired by a market process, not everyone can be monitored all the time, an objective bureaucratic examination can never filter for everything you want in a leader.
Does that mean your proposals are wrong or unhelpful? No, they seem well thought-out and plausible. It is merely to say your world-model seems to be missing a few gears.
Some points:
1. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Brevity & elegance =/= low-effort.
2. Footnotes/endnotes, collapsable boxes, and appendices exist for a reason. Good writing succinctly conveys an idea and withstands deeper scrutiny. The internet is not paper.
3. Often a few in-depth reads > a million skims. Small group dynamics are potent—e.g., NrX and Mencius Moldbug, or early Tumblr. True for both development of ideas & influence.
4. “You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people.” Literally false:Somebody has nontrivial technical & regulatory control over what an algorithm promotes. Algorithms are not natural processes. It is possible to become this ‘somebody’ or reason with them.
The citizen has varying control over social technology & media via the political process. Unless you really mean “you should never have any control...” But do you mean this?
Taste-makers and trend-setters exist. Likewise content aggregators, traditional media gatekeepers, and advertisers. Listen to them speak in private, do they feel powerless? And they listen to criticism.
Arguing specific actors should be accountable for the sanity of online culture is reasonable and realistic. Online writers are allowed to join in too.
The practical solution that medieval courts arrived at, and later the British and American admiralty, was the ship itself does.
This is not false, but unhelpfully misleading when compared to corporations. The medieval reference is presumably referring to deodand law, which has little to do legal personhood in the sense most people are interested in.
The description of the legal personification of the vessel is accurate, but it can hardly be said that ships are ‘accorded the rank of person’ analogously to a corporation.
That said, if we are going with the broad, non-technical use of the word ‘person’, an interesting case is the trial of animals.
This post surely cannot be complete without a mention of the Soviet petrol-powered rocket boots.
If it is of interest, I carried out a highly informal reddit survey on the birthrate in the context of Scotland’s TFR being below that of Japan (with a summary here).
A common reason for not having children was the cost in terms of health, time, stress, freedom to travel, plan holidays, and move house. These are mostly invariant with income (unless you can afford a full-time nanny) and are the natural product of “good parenting” norms/obligations.
(which, it should be noted, are often reasonable: I think being a good parent does require spending a lot—more than any usual lifestyle activity—of time on your children; the kind of emotional investment which can lead to stress or pain; and a degree of stability/commitment which precludes the free-wheeling lifestyle of a single or DINK).
I am guessing that many modern people rate these intangible costs quite highly and the amount needed to pay them to accept the tradeoffs is therefore very high.
This is fun (although endless, especially if we include things related to deliberate/semi-deliberate signalling), here are a few:
(1) Hobby-related examples. Callouses on the palm in the spot where fingers connect to hand (e.g. like weightlifting callouses) , and on the thumb (on the side facing towards the other fingers), is quite commonly due to rowing. E.g., the friction of the oar rotating around the fingers and thumb holding it. Crooked nose sometimes indicates repeated breaking—high contact sports or plain fighting most common. From experience, boxing is quite common due to the artificially frequent number of blows to the face. Can combine this with scars on the knuckles, or slightly puffy knuckles & poor motor control from repeated mini-fractures to indicate a serious fighter. But how useful is knowing someone’s hobby? Often they’ll just tell you right away…
(2) How about health conditions? This one is pretty useful and seems reasonably study-able (ofc not to become some unofficial doctor, just to make informed guesses). E.g., a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitoring) in the arm for type-1 & II diabetics, ridges in the nails indicating possible zinc or iron deficiency, eye-bags for sleep deprivation; serious sun ageing on one side of the face for a possible long-haul driver; yellowing of skin for liver failure etc. And then all the obvious prosthetics, glasses, hearing aids, support dogs, dark glasses &c.
Notably, health conditions (if correctly diagnosed) often indicate lifestyle and occupation, and this is likely behind many of the observations of the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, surgeon Joseph Bell.
(3) Similarly what about nationality? Again, often informative and extremely useful in countries with...er… history. Paying attention to different accents would be a simple method, as would accumulating basic knowledge of geography and typical travel patterns. Knowing, for instance, that Russians travel to Turkey in large numbers, or Kurds to Nashville, means you could probably make pretty good guesses as to a person’s nationality even if you were not confident on different slavic/middle eastern languages.
(4) You mention clothing (red-bottomed shoes?) but this seems like a bottomless pit of data. You can gather lots of information from attire about: nationality (how easy is it to spot a tourist?) and religion (knowing the difference between the burkha, hijab, niqab, chador; happening to know most protestants rarely carry crosses on a chain; rastafarians; orthodox jews in various stages of training); occupation (looking at you, painter decorators); health (orthopedic shoes); class (in the UK traditionally, the flatcap, now, the shellsuit; quite a subtle exercise, and often region-dependent); age.
I suspect since the 19th century clothing is now less useful due to the slow breakdown of class and gender markers (and general trend towards bland causalwear internationally). The stratification and diversity of clothing was notably far more noticeable in Holmes’s time (as was, perhaps, national differences). Note how many of his deductions use general patterns from a ‘social role.’
Side-note: I am also not sure if I believe that learning more facts ‘pushes out’ others (the ‘cluttered mind’ idea), the main issue is opportunity cost. Watching lots of sitcoms hasn’t made it hard to learn new things because I can’t stop thinking of ‘the one where Ross murders a child’, but watcing tv was certainly time not-studying...
A sensible point, though dating yin to the advent of ‘modern civilization’ is too extreme. The ‘spiritual’ or ‘yin-like’ aspects of green have a long history pre-dating modern civilization.
The level of material security required before one can ‘indulge in yin’ is probably extremely low (though of course strongly dependent on local environmental conditions).
Under this definition of ‘manipulation’, telling someone about a new brand of toothpaste is manipulation, which suggests to me that this framing is overly broad.
The question is whether you believe in any form of personal autonomy, such that a person can be responsible for their own internal changes, even if stimulated by someone or something else. Day to day life suggests this is a useful concept, and that there is a meaningful distinction between being lied to and being given true information, just as there is between coercive-control and sad movies.
I also believe this autonomy is sensibly treated as varying between people. It is sensible to speak of building up independence; equally, it is sensible to speak of communicating whilst respecting others have substantial control over their own preferences.
All this said, I also believe that this is an illusion made possible by the epistemic black-box of inputs and outputs into a person’s basic thought processes. People are sufficiently complex that, whilst we can sometimes predict what they’ll say, feel, or do, it is currently impossible to know exactly what inputs will lead to which outputs. This lack of clarity for both others and the person themselves gives the impression of a free-chooser.
As this veil gets peeled back, we may receive an uncomfortable degree of knowledge about ourselves and others.
Like: what happens if you read a book, or watch a documentary, or fall in love, or get some kind of indigestion – and then your heart is never exactly the same ever again, and not because of Reason, and then the only possible vector of non-trivial long-term value in this bleak and godless lightcone has been snuffed out?!
I’m finding it hard to parse this, perhaps someone can clarify for me. At first I assumed this was a problem inherent in the ‘naturalist’ view Scott Alexander gives:
“This is only a problem for ethical subjectivists like myself, who think that we’re doing something that has to do with what our conception of morality is. If you’re an ethical naturalist, by all means, just do the thing that’s actually ethical.”
E.g. Mr. negative utilitarian eats a taco and realises he ought to change his ethical views to something else, say, becoming classical utilitarian. If the later version was foomed, presumably this would be a disaster from the perspective of the earlier version.
But Joe gives broader examples: small, possibly imperceptible, changes as a result of random acts. These might be fully unconscious and non-rational—the indigestion example sticking out to me.
It feels a person whose actions followed from these changes, if foomed, would produce quite unpredictable, random futures unrelated necessarily to any particular ethical theory. This seems to be more like Scott’s ethical subjectivist worries—no matter how your messy-spaghetti morality is extrapolated, it will be unsatisfying to you (and everyone?), regardless of whether you were in the ‘right state’ at foom-time. I think Joe covers something similar in ‘On the Limits of Idealised Values.’
Perhaps to summarise the difference: extrapolating the latter ‘subjectivist’ position is like the influence of starting conditions on a projectile you are inside (‘please don’t fire!’); conversely, the naturalist view is like choosing a line on Scott’s subway route (just make sure you’re on the right line!).
Is this a useful framing?
The section on bears reminded me of a short story by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) called ‘The Bears of Namotoko.’ Here’s an internet archive translation with illustrations. To give a quick summary:
Kojuro is a lone hunter who travels through the mountains of Namotoko with his dog, hunting bears for their gall bladders and pelts. Kojuro does not hate the bears. He regrets the circumstances which force him to be a hunter, “If it is fate which caused you to be born as a bear, then it is the same fate that made me make a living as a hunter.” The bears themselves have essentially human inner lives albeit cannot communicate in words (a ‘secret world of bears’). Eventually, Kojuro is killed by a bear, after which the beats says “Ah Kojuro, I didn’t mean to kill you” and Kojuro apologises for trying to kill the bear.
I am not sure what the moral of the story is. Miyazawa (in all his stories) attributes very human features to animals (such as familial dynamics, appreciation for beauty, social hierarchy, and religious feeling). Despite this, animals continue to act in a dangerous, unknowable ways.
I suspect it has to do with the story’s roots in old folk tales. In the latter, the Other—whether as a mystical creature, bandit, wild animal, or visitor from a distant land—is often presented as essentially mysterious, much like tsunamis, wars, and famines. The Bears of Namotoko suggests it is not the otherness per se which is the problem; rather, suffering is inevitable becasue of the coil of existence. We must eat to live.
Does your argument also apply to physical sports? If not, what makes table tennis different from monopoly?
I think your analogy gestures at something useful but needs expansion. The ‘roofie detector gadget’ example could be reframed in a way which disempowers—eg, ‘it’s your fault for not using this gadget’, or ‘well you really ought to have used this gadget’, etc.
This suggests to me subject matter of the advice is less important than its underlying motive or attitude. I think advice will generally be disempowering if it presupposes the level of risk a person can acceptably run. Contrast the following: ‘well, you were wearing revealing clothes’ versus ‘you can wear whatever you like, but just note that you might be at a greater risk of being assaulted if you go to bar X.’ The latter lets the recipient make their own decision about risk. As a separate matter, whether we then have sympathy for a victim who runs a large risk depends on the justifications for running it: cf the freedom to go out at night and choose one’s own clothes versus building your own airplane out of scrap metal for fun.
Of course, even ‘empowering’ advice could still be upsetting to a victim if given as an immediate response. That’s not surprising. Advice in general—especially highly personal or intimate—often needs to be given delicately and sensitively for it to help someone. There is a reasonable position between ‘never being able to give advice’ and ‘not doing it immediately after the incident.’
In any case, I tend to agree Firinn here that there are important disanalogies between bike theft and rape which cannot be reduced to differences in the prevalence of false allegations. The latter is simply a more complicated crime both socially and legally—it is more serious (in psychological effect, social stigma, and legal penalty, with a few fringe cases excepted) and more closely implicates contentious political beliefs which cash out in different allocations of blame, responsibility, wrongfulness etc.
It seems sensible to remember that by giving advice you will engage in this complex social phenomena. But then, reading your comments, I don’t think you would deny this?
This framing is helpful.
I think the median position in rationalist circles is probably the following: There’s no reason to care about heritable IQ gaps, and good reason to not publicly discuss them. E.g., in this comment.
If one was to survey all the frontpage articles on Lesswrong over the last 6⁄9 months, how many turn on the heritable IQ gap? Very few, as far as I can tell.
Showing I am wrong in this assessment (e.g., in a short post collecting 4-5 highly upvoted posts which shows how omitting heritable IQ from their world model has caused confusion or mistake), is more likely to succeed than introducing it as a new current of debate.