Sorry for the slightly clickbait-y title.
Some commenters have expressed, in the last open thread, their disappointment that figureheads from or near the rationality sphere seemed to have lost their cool when it came to this US election: when they were supposed to be calm and level-headed, they instead campaigned as if Trump was going to be the Basilisk incarnated.
I've not followed many commenters, mainly Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and they both endorsed Clinton. I'll try to explain what were their arguments, briefly but as faithfully as possible. I'd like to know if you consider them mindkilled and why.
Please notice: I would like this to be a comment on methodology, about if their arguments were sound given what they knew and believed. I most definitely do not want this to decay in a lamentation about the results, or insults to the obviously stupid side, etc.
Yudkowsky made two arguments against Trump: level B incompetence and high variance. Since the second is also more or less the same as Scott's, I'll just go with those.
Level B incompetence
Eliezer attended a pretty serious and wide diplomatic simulation game, that made him appreciate how difficult is to just maintain a global equilibrium between countries and avoid nuclear annihilation. He says that there are three level in politics:
- level 0, where everything that the media report and the politicians say is taken at face value: every drama is true, every problem is important and every cry of outrage deserves consideration;
- level A, where you understand that politics is as much about theatre and emotions as it is about policies: at this level players operate like in pro-wrestling, creating drama and conflict to steer the more gullible viewers towards the preferred direction; at this level cinicism is high and almost every conflict is a farce and probably staged.
But the bucket doesn't stop here. As the diplomacy simulation taught him, there's also:
- level B, where everything becomes serious and important again. At this level, people work very hard at maintaining the status quo (where outside you have mankind extinction), diplomatic relations and subtle international equilibria shield the world from much worse outcomes. Faux pas at this level in the past had resulted in wars, genocides and general widespread badness.
In August fifty Republican security advisors signed a letter condemning Trump for his position on foreign policy: these are, Yudkowsky warned us, exactly those level B player, and they are saying us that Trump is an ill advised choice.
Trump might be a fantastic level A player, but he is an incompetent level B player, and this might very well turn to disaster.
High variance
The second argument is a more general version of the first: if you look at a normal distribution, it's easy to mistake only two possibilities: you either can do worst than the average, or better. But in a three dimensional world, things are much more complicated. Status quo is fragile (see the first argument), surrounded not by an equal amount of things being good or being bad. Most substantial variations from the equilibrium are disasters, and if you put a high-variance candidate, someone whose main point is to subvert the status quo, in charge, then with overwhelming probability you're headed off to a cliff.
People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists, thinking that civilization is robust, the current state is bad and variations can definitely help with getting away from a state of bad equilibrium.
One flaw in this argument could be the assumption that "Clinton will maintain the Level B status quo" implicitly means "everything is fine now and therefor will continue to be fine for much the same reasons".
Eliezer views a Trump election as accepting a higher% risk of annihilation for essentially no reason. What if it's not no reason? What if all the Level B players are just wrong, irrationally buying into a status quo where we need to be engaging in brinksmanship with Russia and China and fighting ground battles in the Middle East in order to defend ourselves? You have to admit it's possible, right? "Smart people can converge en mass on a stupid conclusion" is practically a tenet of our community.
Hillary's campaign strategy has already shown this in principle. The obviously intelligent party elite all converged on a losing strategy, and repeatedly doubled down on it. It is reminiscent of our foreign policy.
Saying "we haven't had a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, therefor our foreign policy and diplomatic strategy is good" is an obvious fallacy. Maybe we've just been lucky. Shit, maybe we've been unlucky and we're having this conversation due to anthropic miracles.
The last countless elections have seen candidates running on "more humble foreign policy" and then changing their stance once in office. There a semi-joke that the new president is taken into a smoke filled room and told what is really going on. Maybe so, but in that case, we're putting a lot of unexamined faith in the assessments of the people in that smoke filled room.
None of this is so much my strongly held beliefs as my attempt to find flaw with the "nuclear blackmail" argument.
This is a really good comment, and I would love to hear responses to objections of this flavour from Eliezer etc.
I mean it's less about whether or not it's good as much as it is trying to work out the likelihood of whether policies resulting from Trump's election are going to be worse. You can presuppose that current policies are awful and still think that Trump is likely to make things much worse.