I was trying to be sincere with 4), although I admit that without tone of voice and body language, that's hard to communicate sometimes. And even if LW hasn't done as good a job as we could have with this topic, from what I've seen we've done far better than just about anyone not in the rationalist community at trying to remain rational.
Glad you agree with 1); when I first heard that argument (I didn't come up with it), I had a massive moment of "that seems realy obvious, now that someone said it."
With regards to 2), you're right that we do have information on Trump; I spoke without precision. What I mean is this: beliefs are informed by evidence, and we have little evidence, given the nature of the American election, of what a candidate will behave like when they aren't campaigning. I believe there's a history of president-elects moderating their stances once they take office, although I have no direct evidence to support myself there.
When it comes to Islam, I should begin by saying that I'm sure the vast majority of Muslims simply want to live a decent life, just like the rest of us. However, theirs is the only religion active today that currently endorses holy war.
Then observe that MAD only applies to people unwilling to sacrifice their children for their cause, and further observe that Islam, as an idea, a meme, a religion, has successfully been able to make people do exactly that.
An American wouldn't launch a nuke if it would kill their children, and Russian wouldn't either. But a jihadist? From what I understand (which is admittedly not much on this topic), a jihadist just might. At least, the jihadist has a much higher probability of choosing a nuclear war over a nationalist.
I agree that the West overreacts in terms of Terrorism, in the sense that any given person is more likely to die in a car accident than be killed by a terrorist, but I was referring to existential threats, a common topic on LW and one that Yudkowsky himself seems concerned with regarding this election. Car crashes don't threaten the existence of humanity; nuclear war does.
And because I can't see how either candidate would effect the likelihood of unfriendly AI, a meteor, a plague, or any of the other existential risks, nuclear war becomes the deciding vote in the "who's less likely to get us all killed" competition.
Admittedly, the risk of catastrophic climate change might be higher under Trump, but I've no evidence for that save the very standard left vs. right paradigm, which doesn't seem to apply all that well to Trump anyway.
Thank you for your response.
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.