Iain McGilchrist on the left and right hemispheres

The left hemisphere is good at helping us manipulate the world, but not good at helping us to understand it. To just use this bit and then that bit, and then that bit. But the right hemisphere has a kind of sustained, broad, vigilant attention instead of this narrow, focused, piecemeal attention. And it sustains a sense of being, a continuous being, in the world. So, these are very different kinds of attention. And they bring into being for us quite different kinds of a world.

It is not so much what each hemisphere does, it's the way in which it does it. By which, I don't mean by what mechanism. I mean, the manner in which it does it. The two halves of the brain have, as we do, different goals, different values, different preferences, different ways of being.

In a nutshell: the left hemisphere has a map of the world, and the right hemisphere sees the terrain that is mapped. So, the right hemisphere is seeing an immensely complex, very hard-to-summarise, nonlinear, deeply embedded, changing, flowing, ramifying world. And in the other—the left-hemisphere take on the world—things are clear, sharp, distinct, dead, decontextualised, abstract, disembodied. And then they have to be put together, as you would put things together like building a machine in the garage.

https://www.econtalk.org/iain-mcgilchrist-on-the-divided-brain-and-the-master-and-his-emissary/

Pragmatism, evolution & moral philosophy

Those who grow passionate on one or the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. —Richard Rorty

Pragmatism casts philosophy in a different light. It sees philosophy—including moral philosophy—as just another thing that humans do to get by.

That's to say: it situates philosophy within the glorious indifference of the natural world, the competition and selection, the evolving universe, the dust clouds, the equations of physics.

In general and on average over the long run ¹, we see things as good or bad insofar as it helps us get by. And "getting by" ultimately means: survive and reproduce. In the long run, your belief-value bundles have to be adaptive.

On this view, moral philosophy is not—as the non-naturalist moral realist would have it—a quest for values that are "correct" independently of the evolutionary environment ². Strange as it sounds, evolutionary processes are the source of normativity. Philosophers who hope to improve our values need to think about the messy, hard realities of adaptiveness, equilibria and economics at least as much as they think about moral principles we can all (currently) agree on. The former underwrite the latter ³.

Maladaptive belief-value bundles can emerge and persist for short periods, of course ^{4 5}. I once heard the story of the Scottish Highlanders, whose inflexibility of custom kept them in relative poverty while the modernising Southerners became rich. Eventually, economic incentives for the Southerners led to the Highland Clearances, the forceful destruction of the Highlander way of life.

As the environment changes, our values change too, whether we like it or not.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Vuiamor2.jpg

Tyler Cowen on axiology: I see the good as more holistic than additive-aggregative

These days, I see the good as more holistic than additive-aggregative. [...] We can make some gross comparisons of better and worse at the macro level, with partial rankings at best, but for many individualized normative comparisons there simply isn’t a right answer.  I view “ranking” as a luxury, occasionally available, rather than an axiomatic postulate which can be used to generate normative comparisons, and thus normative paradoxes, at will.  I see that response as different than allowing or embracing intransitivity across multiple alternatives and in that regard my final position differs from Temkin’s.  Furthermore, in a holistic approach, the “pure micro welfare numbers" used to generate the paradoxical comparisons aren’t necessarily there in the first place but rather they have to be derived from our intuitions about the whole.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/rethinking-the-good-by-larry-temkin.html

Reading Robin Hanson

Tyler Cowen characterises Robin Hanson and Thomas Malthus as "thinkers of constraints". I read them both while wondering: what constraints apply to moral philosophy?

In This is the Dream Time, Robin Hanson claims that we are living through an unusual period of abundance. Usually, in the natural world, when the available resources grow, population grows too, so after a brief period of abundance, most members of the species revert to subsistence level. Since the industrial revolution, the resources available to humanity have been growing much faster than population, and so, Hanson suggests, we should think of ourselves as living through one of these unusual periods of abundance. In such periods, competitive pressures are eased, and we can sustain all sorts of belief-behaviour packages that do not maximise our rate of reproduction.

How's this for a prediction:

Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

In the future, we should expect population and wealth growth rates to converge again, and for most people to once again live at subsistence levels—unless we co-ordinate to constrain the reproduction rate.

Hanson predicts that our descendents will eventually explictly endorse maximising their reproduction rate as a value. The basic thought:

Biological evolution selects roughly for creatures that do whatever it takes to have more descendants in the long run. When such creatures have brains, those brains are selected for having supporting habits. And to the extent that such brains can be described as having beliefs and values that combine into actions via expected utility theory, then these beliefs and values should be ones which are roughly behaviorally-equivalent to the package of having accurate beliefs, and having values to produce many descendants (relative to rivals). [...] with sufficient further evolution, our descendants are likely to directly and abstractly know that they simply value more descendants.

During a conversation with Agnes Callard, Hanson says:

I do tend to think natural selection, or selection, will just be a continuing force for a long time. And the main alternative is governance. I actually think one of the main choices that we will have, and the future will have, is the choice between allowing competition or replacing it with governance.

The question of where and how to push back against the logic of competition and selection will be central over the long-term. Co-ordinating humans on earth to make such decisions will be hard, but perhaps not impossible. Co-ordinating with other civilisations from other galaxies... seems very hard, but perhaps not impossible.

On this perspective, there's a direct tradeoff between sustaining non-adaptive values we care about over the short-term and sustaining our existence over the long-term. Invest too much in non-adaptive values, and the long-term viability of your group will be threatened by another group that is less invested in these values.

Attitudes towards this evolutionary perspective vary. Hanson does not consider this model of things "that dark", though he concedes it is not "as bright as the unicorns and fairies that fill dream-time visions". In fact, Hanson is concerned about a future where our descendents restrain competitive dynamics too much:

When I try to do future analysis one of the biggest contrary assumptions or scenarios that I focus on is: what if we end up creating a strong world government that strongly regulates investments, reproduction and other sorts of things, and thereby prevents the evolutionary environment in which the evolutionary analysis applies. And I’m very concerned about that scenario. That is my best judgement of our biggest long term risk […] the creation of a strong civilisation-wide government that is going to be wary of competition and wary of allowing independent choices and probably wary of allowing interstellar colonisation. That is, this vast expansion into the universe could well be prevented by that.

Eliezer Yudkowksy and Carl Schulman, by contrast, are more keen on the idea of replacing competition with governance, and I think Nick Bostrom is too.

Reading Hanson, and reading more about Pragmatism, has left me with a greater awareness that, over the long run, value systems need to promote survival, reproduction and resource accumulation, or else reliably prevent competition in these domains. If they don't, they will be replaced with those that do.

If you're in the business of reflecting on how we should change our values, you probably want to bear this in mind.

One option is to relax the longevity demand. We could settle for pursuing things we care about over the short run, and accept that in the long run, things will come to seem weird and bad by our current lights (but hopefully fine to our (very different) descendents).

Robin Hanson on his methods

My usual first tool of analysis is competition and selection.

To predict what rich creatures do, you need to know what they want. To predict what poor creatures do, you just need to know what they need to do to survive.

Looking back through history it is clear that humanity has not been driving the train. There has been this train of progress or change and it has been a big fast train, especially lately, and it is making enormous changes all through the world but it is not what we would choose if we sat down and discussed it or voted. We just don't have a process for doing that.

Whatever processes that changed things in the past will continue. So I can use those processes to predict what will happen. I am assuming we will continue to have a world with many actions being taken for local reasons as they previously were. But that's a way to challenge my Age of Em hypothesis: you can say no, we will between now and then acquire an ability to foresee the consequences of such changes and to talk together and to vote together on do we want it, and we will have the ability to implement such choices and that will be a change in the future that will prevent the Age of Em.

https://notunreasonable.com/2022/03/21/robin-hanson-on-distant-futures-and-aliens%ef%bf%bc/

Dominic Cummings: given they don't take nuclear weapons seriously, never assume they're taking X seriously

For many years I’ve said that a Golden Rule of politics is that, given our leaders don’t take nuclear weapons seriously, never assume they’re taking X seriously and there is a team deployed on X with the incentives and skills to succeed.

People think this is an overstated metaphor but I always meant it literally.

Having explored the nuclear enterprise with deep state officials 2019-20, I can only stress just how extremely literally I mean this Golden Rule.

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic

Joe Carlsmith on expected utility maximisation

There's nothing special about small probabilities—they're just bigger conditional probabilities in disguise.

[...]

Suppose the situation is: 1000 people are drowning. A is a certainty of saving one of them, chosen at random. B is a 1% chance of saving all of them.

Thus, for each person, A gives them a .1% chance of living; whereas B gives them a 1% chance. So every single person wants you to choose B. Thus: if you’re not choosing B, what are you doing, and why are you calling it “helping people”? Are you, maybe, trying to “be someone who saved someone’s life,” at the cost of making everyone 10x less likely to live? F*** that.

[...]

If, in the face of a predictable loss, it’s hard to remember that e.g. you value saving a thousand lives a thousand times more than saving one, then you can remember, via coin-flips, that you value saving two twice as much as saving one, saving four twice as much as saving two, and so on.

[...]

There's a vibe [...] that's fairly core to my own relationship with EUM: namely, something about understanding your choices as always “taking a stance,” such that having values and beliefs is not some sort of optional thing you can do sometimes, when the world makes it convenient, but rather a thing that you are always doing, with every movement of your mind and body. And with this vibe in mind, I think, it’s easier to get past a conception of EUM as some sort of “tool” you can use to make decisions, when you’re lucky enough to have a probability assignment and a utility function lying around — but which loses relevance otherwise. EUM is not about “probabilities and utilities first, decisions second”; nor, even, need it be about “decisions first, probabilities and utilities second,” as the “but it’s not action-guiding!” objectors sometimes assume. Rather, it’s about a certain kind of harmony in your overall pattern of decisions — one that can be achieved by getting your probabilities and utilities together first, and then figuring out your decisions, but which can also be achieved by making sure your decision-making satisfies certain attractive conditions, and letting the probabilities and utilities flow from there. And in this latter mode, faced with a choice between e.g. X with certainty, vs. Y if heads (and nothing otherwise), one need not look for some independently specifiable unit of value to tally up and check whether Y has at least twice as much of it as X. Rather, to choose Y-if-heads, here, just is to decide that Y, to you, is at least twice as valuable as X.

I emphasize this partly because if – as I did — you turn towards the theorems I’ll discuss hoping to answer questions like “would blah resources be better devoted to existential risk reduction or anti-malarial bednets?”, it’s important to be clear about what sort of answers to expect. There is, in fact, greater clarity to be had, here. But it won’t live your life for you (and certainly, it won’t tell you to accept some particular ethic – e.g., utilitarianism). Ultimately, you need to look directly at the stakes – at the malaria, at the size and value of the future – and at the rest of the situation, however shrouded in uncertainty. Are the stakes high enough? Is success plausible enough? In some brute and basic sense, you just have to decide.

https://handsandcities.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-part-1-skyscrapers-and-madmen/ https://handsandcities.com/2022/03/18/on-expected-utility-part-2-why-it-can-be-ok-to-predictably-lose/

Francis Bacon on pragmatism

The roads to human power and to human knowledge lie close together, and are nearly the same; nevertheless, on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of dwelling on abstractions, it is safer to begin and raise the sciences from those foundations which have relation to practice and let the active part be as the seal which prints and determines the contemplative counterpart.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Novum_Organum/Book_II_(Spedding)

Adam Waytz on The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

If you asked one hundred people on the street if they understand how a refrigerator works, most would respond, yes, they do. But ask them to then produce a detailed, step-by-step explanation of how exactly a refrigerator works and you would likely hear silence or stammering. This powerful but inaccurate feeling of knowing is what Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002 termed, the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), stating, “Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.”

Rozenblit and Keil initially demonstrated the IOED through multi-phase studies. In a first phase, they asked participants to rate how well they understood artifacts such as a sewing machine, crossbow, or cell phone. In a second phase, they asked participants to write a detailed explanation of how each artifact works, and afterwards asked them re-rate how well they understand each one. Study after study showed that ratings of self-knowledge dropped dramatically from phase one to phase two, after participants were faced with their inability to explain how the artifact in question operates. Of course, the IOED extends well beyond artifacts, to how we think about scientific fields, mental illnesses, economic markets and virtually anything we are capable of (mis)understanding.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27117

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler on libertarian paternalism

Our central empirical claim here has been that in many domains, people’s preferences are labile and ill-formed, and do not predate social and legal contexts. For this reason, starting points and default rules are likely to be quite sticky. Building on empirical work involving rationality and preference formation, we have sketched and defended libertarian paternalism – an approach that preserves freedom of choice but that encourages both private and public institutions to steer people in directions that will promote their own welfare.

Some kind of paternalism, we believe, is likely whenever such institutions set out default plans or options. Unfortunately, many current social outcomes are both random and inadvertent, in the sense that they are a product of default rules whose behaviorshaping effects have never been a product of serious reflection. In these circumstances, the goal should be to avoid arbitrary or harmful consequences and to produce contexts that are likely to promote people’s welfare, suitably defined.

Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler (2006) 'Preferences, Paternalism, and Liberty' http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S135824610605911X

Holden Karnofsky on utility legions

Utilitarianism allows "utility monsters" and "utility legions." A large enough benefit to a single person (utility monster), or a benefit of any size to a sufficiently large set of persons (utility legion), can outweigh all other ethical considerations. Utility monsters seem (as far as I can tell) to be a mostly theoretical source of difficulty, but I think the idea of a "utility legion" - a large set of persons such that the opportunity to benefit them outweighs all other moral considerations - is the root cause of most of what's controversial and interesting about utilitarianism today, at least in the context of effective altruism.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem#The_scope_of_utilitarianism

Tyler Cowen on historicism and taking sides

I've become more historicist as I've got older. We in the west are embedded in a society that we should not pull apart and reassemble. We're embedded in some form of common sense morality, there's a history behind us. A lot of things we can't change readily but we can make different alterations at the margin.

I don't have answers to the large scale Parfitian or Rawlsiam or Nozicikian moral questions. I don't think there are absolutes and even if there are I don't think there are many things we can treat as absolutes in real-world decision making.

[...]

I'm not sure there is really a morality across species that are very different and cannot trade with each other. It may be that in some unpleasant way we just have to take sides. And to take the side of a vision of the world that is not just nature but is also humans building... I don't think I can justify it morally but that is the side I will take. Because the alternative is we all go extinct pretty rapidly. I mean you can be a very conscientious vegan but if you look closely at different parts of your life they're actually all pretty morally unacceptable, where you live, the various supply chains you interact with.

I just don't think there's a utilitarian scale where you can add up the insects on one side and the humans on the other. And so I'm on the side of the humans and the other animals we trade with.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/jessica-flanigan-interviews-me-and-i-interview-her-back.html

Fallow period

It is winter. Cold and wet outside, but your apartment is warm. You take your morning walk, do your 20 press ups, and show up at your desk—to write and think, per your plan for the week. But your mind is blank. All you really want to do is sit and read. Or gaze at storm clouds, the rain blowing sideways. Or take another walk.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on naturalism

Belief in a fair universe often manifests in more subtle ways than thinking that horrors should be outright prohibited:  Would the twentieth century have gone differently, if Klara Pölzl and Alois Hitler had made love one hour earlier, and a different sperm fertilized the egg, on the night that Adolf Hitler was conceived?

For so many lives and so much loss to turn on a single event, seems disproportionate.  The Divine Plan ought to make more sense than that.  You can believe in a Divine Plan without believing in God—Karl Marx surely did.  You shouldn't have millions of lives depending on a casual choice, an hour's timing, the speed of a microscopic flagellum.  It ought not to be allowed.  It's too disproportionate.  Therefore, if Adolf Hitler had been able to go to high school and become an architect, there would have been someone else to take his role, and World War II would have happened the same as before.

But in the world beyond the reach of God, there isn't any clause in the physical axioms which says "things have to make sense" or "big effects need big causes" or "history runs on reasons too important to be so fragile".  There is no God to impose that order, which is so severely violated by having the lives and deaths of millions depend on one small molecular event.

The point of the thought experiment is to lay out the God-universe and the Nature-universe side by side, so that we can recognize what kind of thinking belongs to the God-universe.  Many who are atheists, still think as if certain things are not allowed.  They would lay out arguments for why World War II was inevitable and would have happened in more or less the same way, even if Hitler had become an architect.  But in sober historical fact, this is an unreasonable belief; I chose the example of World War II because from my reading, it seems that events were mostly driven by Hitler's personality, often in defiance of his generals and advisors.  There is no particular empirical justification that I happen to have heard of, for doubting this.  The main reason to doubt would be refusal to accept that the universe could make so little sense—that horrible things could happen so lightly, for no more reason than a roll of the dice.

But why not?  What prohibits it?

In the God-universe, God prohibits it.  To recognize this is to recognize that we don't live in that universe.  We live in the what-if universe beyond the reach of God, driven by the mathematical laws and nothing else.  Whatever physics says will happen, will happen.  Absolutely anything, good or bad, will happen.  And there is nothing in the laws of physics to lift this rule even for the really extreme cases, where you might expect Nature to be a little more reasonable.

Tyler Cowen on who should get more status

Nick: You’ve often said that most political disputes are really disputes about who gets status. Nominate a few things or people to which we should give more status?

Tyler: Everyone. Everyone pretty much deserves more status (not Hitler, not mass murderers) but most things are underappreciated and they’re criticized and praise motivates people and helps them have a sense of fitting in and to go around and appreciate and express your appreciation for what you really value, that’s one of the best things you can do with your life.

https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2019/10/bpr-interviews-tyler-cowen/

Nick Bostrom on singletons

Can we trust evolutionary development to take our species in broadly desirable directions?

[...]

What we shall call the Panglossian view maintains that this past record of success gives us good grounds for thinking that evolution (whether biological, memetic, or technological) will continue to lead in desirable directions. This Panglossian view, however, can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, because we have no reason to think that all this past progress was in any sense inevitable‒‐much of it may, for aught we know, have been due to luck. And second, because even if the past progress were to some extent inevitable, there is no guarantee that the melioristic trend will continue into the indefinite future.

[...]

Evolution made us what we are, but no fundamental principle stands in the way of our developing the capability to intervene in the default course of events in order to steer future evolution towards a destiny more congenial to human values.

Directing our own evolution, however, requires coordination. If the default evolutionary course is dystopian, it would take coordinated paddling to turn the ship of humanity in a more favorable direction. If only some individuals chose the eudaemonic alternative while others pursued fitness‐maximization, then, by assumption, it would be the latter that would prevail. Fitness‐maximizing variants, even if they started out as a minority, would be preferentially selected for at the expense of eudaemonic agents, and a process would be set in motion that would inexorably lead to the minimization or disappearance of eudaemonic qualities, and the non‐eudaemonic agents would be left to run the show.

To this problem there are only two possible solutions: preventing non‐eudaemonic variants from arising in the first place, or modifying the fitness function so that eudaemonic traits become fitness‐maximizing.

[...]

A singleton could be a rather minimalist structure that could operate without significantly disrupting the lives of its inhabitants. And it need not prohibit novelty and experimentation, since it would retain the capacity to intervene at a later stage to protect its constitution if some developments turned malignant. Increased social transparency, such as may result from advances in surveillance technology or lie detection, could facilitate the development of a singleton. Deliberate international political initiatives could also lead to the gradual emergence of a singleton, and such initiatives might be dramatically catalyzed by ‘wild card’ events such as a series of cataclysms that highlighted the disadvantages of a fractured world order. It would be a mistake to judge the plausibility of the ultimate development of a singleton on the basis of ephemeral trends in current international affairs. The basic conditions shaping political realities may change as new technologies come online, and it is worth noting that the longterm historical trend is towards increasing scope of human coordination and political integration. If this trend continues, the logical culmination is a singleton.

[...]

A singleton could take a variety of forms and need not resemble a monolithic culture or a hive mind. Within the singleton there could be room for a wide range of different life forms, including ones that focus on non‐eudaemonic goals. The singleton could ensure the survival and flourishing of the eudaemonic types by restricting the ownership rights of non‐eudaemonic entities, by subsidizing eudaemonic activities, by guaranteeing the enforcement of property rights, by prohibiting the creation of agents with human‐unfriendly values or psychopathic tendencies, or in a number of other ways. Such a singleton could guide evolutionary developments and prevent our cosmic commons from going to waste in a first‐come‐first‐served colonization race.

[...]

We do not know that a dystopian scenario is the default evolutionary outcome. Even if it is, and even if the creation of a singleton is the only way to forestall ultimate catastrophe, it is a separate question what policies it makes sense to promote in the here and now. While creating a singleton would help to reduce certain risks, it may at the same time increase others, such as the risk that an oppressive regime could become global and permanent. If our preliminary study serves to draw attention to some possibly non‐obvious considerations and to stimulate more rigorous analytic work, its purpose will have been achieved.

https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html

It could act merely as a subtle enforcer of certain background conditions that could serve, e.g. to guarantee security or to administer some other minimal governmental tasks. [...] When considering the characteristics of a singleton it would be a mistake to assume that it would necessarily possess the attributes commonly associated with large human bureaucracies – rigidity, lack of imagination, inefficiency, a tendency to micro-manage and to expand its own powers, etc. This would be true of some possible singletons but it might not be true of others.

The concept of a singleton is thus much broader and more abstract than concept of a world government. A world government (in the ordinary sense of the word) is only one type of singleton among many.

Nevertheless, all the possible singletons share one essential property: the ability to solve global coordination problems. Intelligent species that develop the capability to solve global coordination problems, such as those listed in the next section, may in the long run develop along very different trajectories than species that lack this capacity.

[...]

A major risk with creating a singleton is that it would turn out to be a bad singleton. Smaller units of decision-making, such as states, can also turn bad. But if a singleton goes bad, a whole civilization goes bad. All the eggs are in one basket.

https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html

Anders Sandberg on transhumanism

Anders Sandberg characterises the essence of transhumanism as:

Questioning the necessity and optimality of the current human condition, as well as suggesting that methods to improve it might be both feasible and desirable. If we were living in a fantasy world transhumanists would no doubt argue in favor of using cutting edge magic to improve life.

Sandberg notes that, in contrast, Nick Bostrom sometimes emphasises "the desire to explore the posthuman realm, the states of being that are currently unavailable to us".

But:

In practice there [are] plenty of transhumanists who are not terribly interested in becoming radically posthuman - a few extra centuries in comfort with enhanced minds and bodies is all right with them. They want to personally explore the nicer reaches of the human modes of being and maybe some near posthuman modes. But the common theme is that they do not see the current limitations as desirable, and think (with varying levels of confidence and evidence) that there are or will be ways of overcoming them.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/06/what-is-transhumanism.html?commentID=157345040

Elsewhere, Sandberg writes:

All things considered, the human condition has many things going for it. Unfortunately, there are some problems. The need to sleep. Hangovers. Pain. Forgetfulness. Bad judgement. Cruelty. Depression. Ageing. Mortality. To name a few.

One approach is to try to accept these limitations and pains. Learning to live with adversity can sometimes be good for a person—it might teach them perseverance or humility . . . Unfortunately, adversity can also numb, harden, or crush us—and surely we should not just accept cruelty or ignorance as a fact of life.

Another approach is to try to fix our limitations and problems. This is the goal of human enhancement: if we are forgetful, maybe we can improve our brains to forget less, for example by taking drugs that increase neural plasticity. To counteract ageing we might use gene therapy to increase production of enzymes that decline with age, remove aged and ill cells, or add fresh stem cells.

Human enhancement is all around us. The morning coffee or tea contains stimulating caffeine that counteracts sleepiness. Vaccines are a form of collective, global immunity against illnesses we may have never encountered. Less invasively, most of us live our lives with smartphones connecting us to a sizeable fraction of humanity and its knowledge. We are never alone, never lost, never bored, able to record anything. Our medieval ancestors would find our (long, healthy, rich) lives superhuman.

Robin Hanson on world government and collective suicide

If your mood changes every month, and if you die in any month where your mood turns to suicide, then to live 83 years you need to have one thousand months in a row where your mood doesn’t turn to suicide. Your ability to do this is aided by the fact that your mind is internally divided; while in many months part of you wants to commit suicide, it is quite rare for a majority coalition of your mind to support such an action.

[...]

When there are powers large enough that their suicide could take down civilization, then the risk of power suicide becomes a risk of civilization suicide. Even if the risk is low in any one year, over the long run this becomes a serious risk.

[...]

Alas, central power risks central suicide, either done directly on purpose or as an indirect consequence of other broken thinking. In contrast, in a sufficiently decentralized world when one power commits suicide, its place and resources tend to be taken by other powers who have not committed suicide. Competition and selection is a robust long-term solution to suicide, in a way that centralized governance is not.

This is my tentative best guess for the largest future filter that we face, and that other alien civilizations have faced. The temptation to form central governments and other governance mechanisms is strong, to solve immediate coordination problems, to help powerful interests gain advantages via the capture of such central powers, and to sake the ambition thirst of those who would lead such powers. Over long periods this will seem to have been a wise choice, until suicide ends it all and no one is left to say “I told you so.”

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/11/world-government-risks-collective-suicide.html

Future filters could result from either too little or too much coordination. To prevent future filters, I don’t know if it is better to have more or less world government.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/05/two-types-of-future-filters.html

Joe Carlsmith on non-naturalist realism vs anti-realism

Utopia, for [the non-naturalist realist], was always the promise of something more than e.g. joy, love, creativity, understanding — it was the promise of those things, with an extra non-natural sauce on top. A Utopia with no sauce is an empty shell, the ethical analog of a phenomenal zombie. It looks right, but the crucial, invisible ingredient is missing.

How one reacts here is ultimately a question of psychology, not metaphysics. Some robots are envelope-ranking-maximizers, and they won’t change their goals just because the envelope probably doesn’t exist. But I think we should be wary of assuming too quickly that we’re like this.

[...]

[On the anti-realist picture] it’s clearer to me what I’m doing, in deciding whether to help the deer, create Utopia, etc, given the posited metaphysical clarity. I feel somehow more grounded, more like a creature in the real, raw, beautiful world, with my eyes open, taking full responsibility for my actions, and less like I’m somehow playing pretend, seeking guidance from some further realm or set of facts that I secretly suspect does not exist.

[...]

To me, what this currently looks like is a place where the choice about what sort of world to create is in a deep way on us. Just as there is no theistic God to tell us what to do, so there is no further realm of normative facts to tell us, either. We have to choose for ourselves. We have to be, as it were, adults. To stand together, and sometimes alone, amidst the beauty and horror and confusion of the world; to look each other and ourselves in the eye; to try to see as clearly as possible what’s really going on, what our actions really involve and imply and create, what it is we really do, when we do something; and then, to choose.

This isn’t to say we can’t mess up: we can — deeply, terribly, irreparably. But messing up will come down to some failure to understand our actions, ourselves, and each other, and to act on that understanding; some veil between us and the real world we inhabit; not some failure to track, in our decisions, the True Values hidden in some further realm. And when we don’t mess up – when we actually find and build and experience what it is we would seek if we saw with full clarity — what we will get isn’t the world, and therefore something else, the “goodness” or “value” of that world, according to the True Values beyond the world. It will be just the world, just what we and others chose to do, or to try to do, with this extraordinary and strange and fleeting chance, this glimpse of whatever it is that’s going on.

https://handsandcities.com/2021/01/03/the-despair-of-normative-realism-bot/

Bernard Williams on Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics

My own view is that no ethical theory can render a coherent account of its own relation to practice: it will always run into some version of the fundamental difficulty that the practice of life, and hence also an adequate theory of that practice, will require the recognition of what I have called deep dispositions; but at the same time the abstract and impersonal view that is required if the theory is to be genuinely a theory cannot be satisfactorily understood in relation to the depth and necessity of those dispositions. Thus the theory will remain, in one way or another, in an incoherent relation to practice.

Making Sense of Humanity (1995), "The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics"