Swimmer963 comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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I want to upvote about twenty times for this phrase alone. I suspect that your psychology was very different than mine; I think I crave stability and predictability a lot more. One of the reasons that "saving the world" always seemed like an impossible thing to do, like something that didn't even count as a coherent goal, was that I didn't know where to start or even what the ending would look like. That becomes a lot more tractable if you're one of a million people trying to solve a problem, and a lot less scary.
However, idealism still scares me. I remember being a kid and reading about communism and thinking that it really ought to work. I remember thinking that if I'd been a young adult back before communism, I would have bet my time and effort on it working. And...it turned out not to work. Since I probably wasn't any smarter than the people who tried to make communism work, how could I have any better of a chance at coming up with something valuable? Better to focus on small things, one at a time, and rely on the fact that however convoluted and mess-up society is, it muddles along and hasn't self-destructed yet. And not risk ending up doing something really awful that would result in lots of people dying.
Of course, that relies on a belief that society, which has muddled along so far, will continue to do so. There've been enough changes in the past few decades and centuries that you can make a good case for this not being true.
Communism definitely serves as a warning to smart optimizers to not get ahead of themselves.
But it also cuts the other way: it lets smart optimizers the know how powerful some ideas can be.
In a sociology class, the teacher once mentioned to us that Karl Marx was the only truly applied sociologist. I don't know how far this is true, but he is certainly the one who has had the most impact.
Not coincidentally, Karl Marx was also the first to warn people about unfriendly, overly powerful optimization processes.
It's only a pity he hadn't the words to put it so succinctly!
I just ran into an intriguing blog post where the author seems to essentially bring stability and predictability into his life by deliberately pursuing an impossible goal, and remembering this comment, got curious about what you'd think about it:
The first thing this makes me think of is the Babylon 5 episode "Grail." The concept appeals to me in a romantic sort of way.
I saw that on your Facebook before I saw it here, so already had thoughts on it.
1) I can see how it's less scary to think about, as a goal.
2) Picturing it in my head, I can't imagine myself using this and actually feeling motivated to work really hard because of this goal. But that may be less because it's impossible, and more because it's big and vague–my brain has an established problem with big vague goals.
I have to disagree a bit on the communism part. One of the ways that it went wrong, that it ended in Totalitarianism, was due to how it was implemented and foreseeable to a certain extent. All it really tells us is that we have to take human nature into account when designing a society for humans, not that we shouldn't try out powerful ideas.