Richard Meadows & Nassim Taleb on FU money
Humphrey Bogart used to keep a $100 bill in his dresser drawer at all times—a decent chunk of change in the 1920s. He referred to it as his ‘fuck-you money’, because it meant he’d never be forced to take a crappy part. According to Bogie, the only good reason for making money was “so you can tell any son-of-a-bitch in the world to go to hell”.
A sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation.
Money buys freedom: intellectual freedom, freedom to choose who you vote for, to choose what you want to do professionally. But having what I call “fuck you” money requires a huge amount of discipline. The minute you go a penny over, then you lose your freedom again.
— Nassim Taleb
The last homily of Pope Pius XII
Our mouths are filled with the word “love”.
“But I, before anyone else, didn’t know how to define it.
Our mouths are filled with the word “beauty”.
But I, before anyone else, didn’t know how to receive it.
For this, I ask you forgiveness.
Please, forgive me.
At times we confound love with madness.
Beauty with ecstasy.
History has repeated itself.
Madness and ecstasy have once again proven to be irresistible temptations, but they always end the way they did on Ventotene.
With unjust death.
In this case, of a good and innocent priest.
There is a life of happiness to be found in the sphere of gentleness, kindness, mildness, lovingness.
We must learn to be in the world.
And the Church must contemplate the idea of opening up to the love that is possible, in order to fight against the love that is aberrant.
All this, John Paul III, with great humility, calls “the middle way.”
In the past few days I have understood.
It’s not the middle way.
It is the way.
Ever since I came back, you’ve been asking yourselves all sorts of questions.
Is he the father or the son?
Is he God or the Holy Spirit?
Is he man or is he Jesus?
Did he wake up or did he rise from the dead?
Is he a saint or is he an imposter?
Is he Christ or is he the Antichrist?
Is he alive or is he dead?
It doesn’t matter.
You know what is so beautiful about questions?
It’s that we don’t have the answers.
In the end, only God has the answers.
They are his secret.
God’s secret, which only He knows.
That is the mystery in which we believe.
And that is the mystery which guides our conscience.
And now I would like to come down among you, and do what I have wanted to do since the first moment: embrace you, one by one.
Marc Andreessen on the heros we’re allowed to have
The anti-hero is the portrait of the Nietzschean superhero that we are allowed to have. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper. We can have someone who does Great Things, so long as that person is fundamentally bad by the standards of modern morality.
We are not allowed to have the full version of the Nietzschean superman doing something outstanding. We’re not allowed Napoleon figures, the building of the pyramids, Beethoven, or even the person who built the transcontinental railroad, the car industry, that sort of thing.
The full Nietzschean superman is the person who says ‘I really am going to rule the world, and rule it much better’. Those narratives are gone. They’re too scary. They’re absolutely frightening, because if we rediscover that kind of morality it would upend our entire order.
Marc is right. It is scary.@FukuyamaFrancis, with Nietzsche, fears that the return of thymos will cause terrible wars of the spirit, this time with modern weapons.
— Peter Hartree (@peterhartree) January 15, 2023
Fukuyama reminds us of the scenes in 1914: huge *pro-war* protests in Berlin, Paris, Petrograd, London & Vienna.
Since then, we've mostly avoided enthusiasm for war due to fear of nuclear holocaust.
— Peter Hartree (@peterhartree) January 15, 2023
How long will this keep working?
"Effective altruism" & "progress studies" might satisfy us for a while, but I see people chafing (e.g. @palladiummag).
According to me, the best recent anti-hero is Pope Pius XIII. pic.twitter.com/dz1sliQMmv
— Peter Hartree (@peterhartree) January 15, 2023
Email to Tyler on Bernard Williams & effective altruism
In your MacAskill interview, and again in the St Andrews talk, I heard you channeling Bernard Williams on Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline and especially “The Human Prejudice”.
I agree that Williams on philosophy and impartiality is an important message for EA. I pushed this line in conversations with Will MacAskill and others in 2015, and with several other Oxford figures since then. I’m surely not the ideal advocate, but in the replies I mostly heard a lot of “ugh, Bernard” followed by weak arguments against superficial misreadings of his work. People seemed very much in the mode of “devalue and dismiss”.
My best EA Forum post is also my least popular:
Williams’ low status within EA is surprising given how seriously Derek Parfit took him as a peer. I understand that Williams was often seen as using non-kosher methods and unkind remarks in his philosophical writing and conversation, and was intensely disliked by some of his peers. So I suspect that much of his neglect is driven by residual animosity in the Oxford crowd. But they ignore this kind of thing and just “take the ideas seriously”… right…?
There are some notable exceptions. For example, Thomas Moynihan is somewhat associated with the Oxford EA scene, and appropriately rates Bernard Williams. Unsurprisingly, Tom has a background in “continental” philosophy.
You’ve not blogged much about Williams. How about it? E.g.
Was Williams a pragmatist in denial, per Rorty’s review of Truth and Truthfulness? Why did he resist Rorty?
What prioritisation errors are made by those who go too far with impartiality?
On (2): if EAs stopped going “too far” with impartiality, I think we’d see the EA portfolio shift a bit towards catastrophic risk and away from existential risk. The current strong focus on x-risk can be seen as another form of the 51:49 bet.
A couple years ago one of the more influential EAs told me that rejecting the 51:49 bet is a form of egoism. We should not care about our personal chances of survival: we should just follow the rule that maximises EV across all possible worlds. I replied that ecological rationality beats axiomatic rationality in the world I care about. But if you think impartial reasons are the only reasons that count, you can’t justify your “arbitrary” care for this particular world over others.
And with that—and your remarks on the useful generativity of a mistake taken seriously—we’re back to Nietzsche’s remarks on Plato:
It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe- inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind–for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error–namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier–sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the PERSPECTIVE–the fundamental condition–of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: “How did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?” But the struggle against Plato, or–to speak plainer, and for the “people”–the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity (FOR CHRISITIANITY IS PLATONISM FOR THE “PEOPLE”), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals.
Peter
P.S. Nietzsche’s thoughts on effective altruism, according to ChatGPT.
Jonathan Bi on how to live with a Girardian worldview
I compared Girard to my Virgil in the sense that he was able to rescue me through Hell. He was able to show me how to purge more milder forms of perversion.
But, just as Virgil couldn’t take Dante all the way to heaven, neither could Girard. Girard kind of just retreats.
What I’m about to share with you is mostly my own creative interpretations on top of Girard.
I think there’s in general two solutions, once you’ve identified there’s a metaphysical and there’s a physical desire. One wing, and I think this is what Girard leans to, is to say this metaphysical–this is the Buddhist as well as the Girardian way–is to say this metaphysical desire, this desire for being, it’s completely perverse. It’s _always_perverse, whether from Girard’s perspective, because it’s essentially a desire to be God. This is why it’s satanic. You’re desiring persistence; you’re desiring power; you’re desiring reality. If you push those far enough, those are the metaphysical qualities of the Judeo-Christian God. So, Girard actually sees metaphysical desire as the original sin, as the satanic drive to rival God in his metaphysical splendor.
And the Buddhists–right–we don’t have to go into that, but long story short, these metaphysical qualities are not possible in the world. Emptiness is what permeates the world. So, this is a fundamentally wrong sort of desire.
So, for the Christians and Buddhists, the way to good health is to completely get rid of metaphysical desire, to be only concerned by the object physical desire.
There’s another, however, strand of thinking, and probably most popular amongst the Germans, in Hegel, is to say there is actually a healthy way–the Germans, and Plato actually, which we’ll talk about–there actually is a healthy way to exist in society. And the way, long story short, to do so is for your metaphysical and your physical desires to align.
That is to say: if you really like to do philosophy, don’t hang out with a bunch of people who are industrialists. Hang out with a bunch of philosophers, so that the somewhat partial spectator, as we’ve discussed, will naturally _align_with your normative values, with your physical desires, and thus you’ll receive recognition and a form of reality.
https://www.econtalk.org/johnathan-bi-on-mimesis-and-rene-girard/
Nick Bostrom on differential technological development
The Principle of Differential Technological Development
Retard the development of dangerous and harmful technologies, especially ones that raise the level of existential risk; and accelerate the development of beneficial technologies, especially those that reduce the existential risks posed by nature or by other technologies Bostrom, 2002).
The principle of differential technological development is compatible with plausible forms of technological determinism. For example, even if it were ordained that all technologies that can be developed will be developed, it can still matter when they are developed. The order in which they arrive can make an important difference — ideally, protective technologies should come before the destructive technologies against which they protect; or, if that is not possible, then it is desirable that the gap be minimized so that other countermeasures (or luck) may tide us over until robust protection become available. The timing of an invention also influences what sociopolitical context the technology is born into. For example, if we believe that there is a secular trend toward civilization becoming more capable of handling black balls, then we may want to delay the most risky technological developments, or at least abstain from accelerating them.