"People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,"
I don't think that's really a fair charge.
Like, reading through Yudkowsky's stuff, his LW writings and HPMOR, there is the persistent sense that he is 2 guys.
One guy is like "Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented". I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like "Here are my values!" That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole "I am a superhero and I am killing God" stuff is not sarcastic.
It is the second guy who writes his facebook posts.
So when he is accusing us of not paying sufficient attention to the consequences of a Trump victory, I'm more inclined to say that we paid attention, but we don't value those consequences the way he does.
To spell it out: I don't share (and I don't think my side shares), Yudkowsky's fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I've got a duty to preserve every pulse.
That belief, the idea that any beating heart means we have a responsibility to keep it that way, leads to the insane situations where the bad guys can basically take themselves hostage. It is silly.
The whole "most variations from the equilibria are disasters", only really works if you share my guy's mania about valuing the other team's welfare. In terms of America's interests, Trump is a much safer choice than Hillary. Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia). Hillary -> Putin is a chilly, fraught relationship, with potential flashpoints in Crimea / Syria. Trump -> Putin is less likely to involve conflict. Putin will thug around his neighbors, Trump will (probably not) build a wall between us and Mexico.
I didn't reply to Yudkowsky's facebook post. I don't know him, and it wouldn't be my place. But he is making a typical leftist mistake, which is dismissing the right as a defective left.
You've seen it everywhere. The left can't grok the idea that the right values different things, and just can't stop proving that the left's means lead to the left's ends way better than the right's means lead to the left's ends. "What's the Matter With Kansas", if you want a perfect example. The Home School wars if you want it rubbed in your face.
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity. We'd like to replace our interventionist foreign policy with an isolationist one.
LW isn't a place to argue about politics, so I'm not going to go into why we have the values that we have here. I just want to point out that Yudkowsky is making the factual mistake of modeling us as being shitty at achieving his goals, when in truth we are canny at achieving our own.
I'd agree that Jan 6th was top 5 most surprising US political events 2017-2021, though I'm not sure that category is big enough that top 5 is an achievement. (That is, how many events total are in there for you?)
I wasn't substantially surprised by it in the way that you were, however. I'm not saying that I predicted it, mind you, but rather that it was in a category of stuff that felt at least Trump-adjacent from the jump. As a descriptive example, imagine a sleezy used car salesman lies to me about whether the doors will fall off the car...
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.