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Jackercrack comments on A discussion of heroic responsibility - LessWrong
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You say he's not-mad, but isn't he the spitting image of the revolutionary that power corrupts? Wasn't Communism the archetype of the affective death spiral?It would appear he was likely suffering from syphilis, a disease that can cause confusion, dementia and memory problems. Anyway, isn't that an ad hominem argument?
No. It is an argument which happens to use the perceived negative consequences of an individual's actions as a premise. Use of 'ad hominem!' to reject a claim only (legitimately) applies when there is a fallacy of relevance that happens to be a personal attack that doesn't support the conclusion. It does not apply whenever an argument happens to contain content that reflects badly on an individual.
Lenin in the 1920s is not relevant to this argument, I would say he "took heroic responsibility" around, say, 1915-1918, and It looks to me that it would be hard to make the argument that he was already corrupted by power at this point.
But if you don't like this example I'm sure I can find others. The underlying point is rather simple -- imagine "enough sane people taking heroic responsibility" with these people having a value system you find unacceptable...
I think we're using a different meaning of the word sane. See, I hold sanity to a rather high standard which excludes a huge breadth of people, probably myself as well until I've progressed somewhat.
I am imagining enough sane people taking heroic responsibility, the world looks rather different than this and it seems to be better run. We already have people in charge with value systems unacceptable to me, making them at least competent and getting them to use evidence-based strategies seems like a step forwards. People will have a normal range of value systems, if a particularly aberrant person comes with a particularly strange value system, then they'll still have to outsmart all the other people to actually get their unacceptable value system in place
Honestly lumifer, I'm beginning to thing you never want to change anything about any power structure in case it goes horribly wrong. How are things to progress if no changes are allowed?
Why is it a step forward? If these people have value systems unacceptable to you, presumably you want them stopped or at least slowed. You do NOT want them to become more efficient.
That, um, is entirely non-obvious to me. Not to mention that I have no idea what do you mean by "normal".
Oh, I do, I do. Usually, the first thing I want to do is reduce its power, though :-D
But here I'm basically pointing out that both rationality and willingness to do something at any cost (which is what heroic responsibility is) are orthogonal to values. There are two consequences.
First, heroic responsibility throws overboard the cost-benefit analysis. That's not really a good thing for people who run the world to do. "At any cost" is rarely justified.
Second, I very much do NOT want people with values incompatible with mine to become more efficient, more effective, and more active. Muslim suicide bombers, for example, take heroic responsibility and I don't want more of them. True-believer cultists often take heroic responsibility, and no, I don't think it's a good thing either. It really does depend on the values involved.
See, you're ignoring the qualifier 'sane' again. I do not consider suicide bombers sane. Suicide bombers are extreme outliers, and they kill negligible numbers of people. Last time I checked they kill less people per year on average than diseases I had never heard of. Quite frankly, they are a non-issue when you actually look at the numbers.
It is not obvious to me that heroic responsibility implies that a thing should be done without cost/benefit analysis or at any cost.
Of course it depends on the values systems involved, I just happen to be fine with most values systems. I'll rephrase normal values systems to be more clear: People will on average end up with an average range of value systems. The majority will probably be somewhat acceptable to me, so in aggregate I'm fine with it.
Is there a specific mechanism by which reducing government power would do good? What countries have been improved when that path has been taken? It seems like it would just shift power to even less accountable companies.
Well, would you like to define it, then? I am not sure I understand your use of this word. In particular, does it involve any specific set of values?
Things done on the basis of cost-benefit analysis are just rational things to do. The "heroic" part must stand for something, no?
Ahem. Most out of which set? Are there temporal or geographical limits?
That's a complicated discussion that should start with what is meant by "good" (we're back to value systems again), maybe we should take it up another time...
I had always assumed it was intended to stand for doing things that are rational even if they're really hard or scary and unanticipated.
If you do a careful cost-benefit calculation and conclude (depending on your values and beliefs) that ...
and if you are a normal person then you shrug your shoulders, say "damn, that's too bad", and get on with your life; but if you are infused with a sense of heroic responsibility then you devote your life to researching AI safety (and propagandizing to get other people thinking about it too), or become a missionary, or live in poverty while doing lucrative but miserable work in order to save lives in Africa.
If it turns out that you picked as good a cause as you think you did, and if you do your heroic job well and get lucky, then you can end up transforming the world for the better. If you picked a bad cause (saving Germany from the Jewish menace, let's say) and do your job well and get lucky, you can (deservedly) go down in history as an evil genocidal tyrant and one of the worst people who ever lived. And if you turn out not to have the skill and luck you need, you can waste your life failing to solve the problem you took aim at, and end up neither accomplishing anything of importance nor having a comfortable life.
So there are reasons why most people don't embrace "heroic responsibility". But the premise for the whole thing -- without which there's nothing to be heroically responsible about -- is, it seems to me, that you really think that this thing needs doing and you need to do it and that's what's best for the world.
("Heroic responsibility" isn't only about tasks so big that they consume your entire life. You can take heroic responsibility for smaller-scale things too, if they present themselves and seem important enough. But, again, I think what makes them opportunities for heroic responsibility is that combination of importantly worth doing and really intimidating.)
If you're a normal person, the fact that you shrug your shoulders when faced with such things is beneficial because shrugging your shoulders instead of being heroic when faced with the destruction of civilization serves as immunity against crazy ideas and because you're running on corrupted hardware, you probably aren't as good at figuring out how to avoid the destruction of civilization as you think.
Just saying "I'm not going to shrug my shoulders; I'm going to be heroic instead" is removing the checks and balances that are irrational themselves but protect you against bad rationality of other types, leaving you worse off overall.
I am inclined to agree; I am not a fan of the idea of "heroic responsibility". (Though I think most of us could stand to be a notch or two more heroic than we currently are.)
Well, here is a counter-example. I can't imagine that was too intimidating :-/
I'll put this in a separate post because it is not to do with heroic responsibility and it has been bugging me. What evidence do you have that your favoured idea of reducing political power does what you want it to do? Are there states which have switched to this method and benefited? Are there countries that have done this and what happened to them? Why do you believe what you believe?
Well, before we wade into mindkilling territory, let me set the stage and we'll see if you find the framework reasonable.
Government power is multidimensional. It's very common to wish for more government power in one area but less in another area. Therefore government power in aggregate is a very crude metric. However if you try to imagine government power as an n-dimensional body in a high-dimensional space, you can think of the volume of that n-dimensional body as total government power and that gives you a handle on what that means.
Government power, generally speaking, has costs and benefits. Few people prefer either of the two endpoints -- complete totalitarianism or stateless anarchy. Most arguments are about which trade-offs are advantageous and about where the optimal point on the axis is located. To talk about optimality you need a yardstick. That yardstick is people's value system. Since people have different value systems, different people will prefer different optimal points. If you consider the whole population you can (theoretically) build a preference distribution and interpret one of its centrality measures (e.g. mean, median, or mode) as the "optimal" optimal point, but that needs additional assumptions and gets rather convoluted rather fast.
There are multiple complicating factors in play here. Let me briefly list two.
First, the population's preferences do not arise spontaneously in a pure and sincere manner. They are a function of local culture and the current memeplex, for example (see the Overton window), and are rather easily manipulated. Manipulating the political sentiments of the population is a time-honored and commonplace activity, you can assume by default that it is happening. There are multiple forces attempting the manipulation, of course, with different goals, so the balance is fluid and uncertain. Consider the ideas of "manufacturing consent" or the concept of "engines of consent" -- these ideas were put forward by such diverse people as, say, Chomsky and neoreactionaries.
Second, the government, as an organization, has its own incentives, desires, and goals. The primary among them is to survive, then to grow which generally means become more powerful. Governments rarely contract (willingly), most of the time they expand. This means that without a countervailing force governments will "naturally" grow too big and too powerful past that optimal point mentioned above. Historically that has been dealt with by military conquests, revolutions, and internal coups, but the world has been quite stable lately...
I'll stop before this becomes a wall of text, but does all of the above look reasonable to you?
All of it looks reasonable to me apart from the last paragraph. I can see times when governments do willingly contract. There are often candidates who campaign on a platform of tax cuts, the UK had one in power from 1979-1990 and the US had one in power from 2001-2009.
Tax cuts necessarily require eventual reductions in government spending and thus the power of government, agreed?
If they're sustained long enough, yeah. But a state has more extensive borrowing powers than an individual does, and an administration so inclined can use those powers to spend beyond its means for rather a long time -- certainly longer than the term in office of a politician who came to power on a promise of tax cuts. The US federal budget has been growing for a long time, including over the 2001-2009 period, and the growth under low-tax regimes has been paid for by deficit spending.
(Though you'd really want to be looking at federal spending as a percentage of GDP. There seems to be some disagreement over the secular trend there, but the sources I've found agree that the trend 2001-2009 was positive.)
So, how much did the government actually contract under Maggie or under Ronnie? :-) Did that contraction stick?
Oh, not at all. You just borrow more.
Besides, spending is only part of the power of the government. Consider e.g. extending the reach of the laws which does not necessarily require any budgetary increases.
Even if the tax cut are funded by reduction in government spending why would that imply a reduction of government power?
Okay, my definition of sane is essentially: rational enough to take actions that generally work towards your goals and to create goals that are effective ways to satisfy your terminal values. It's a rather high bar. Suicide bombers do not achieve their goals, cultists have had their cognitive machinery hijacked to serve someone else's goals instead of their own. The reason I think this would be okay in aggregate is the psychological unity of mankind: we're mostly pretty similar and there are remarkably low numbers of evil mutants. Being pretty similar, most people's goals would be acceptable to me. I disagree with some things China does for example, but I find their overwhelming competence makes up for it in aggregate wellbeing of their populace.
gjm gives some good examples of heroic responsibility, but I understand the term slightly differently. Heroic responsibility is to have found a thing that you have decided is important, generally by reasoned cost/benefit and then take responsibility to get it done regardless of what life throws your way. It may be an easy task or a hard task, but it must be an important task. The basic idea is that you don't stop when you feel like you tried, if your first attempt doesn't work you do more research and come up with a new strategy. If your second plan doesn't work because of unfair forces you take those unfair forces into account and come up with another plan. If that still doesn't work you try harder again, then you keep going until you either achieve the goal, it becomes clear that you cannot achieve the goal or the amount of effort you would have to put into the problem becomes significantly greater than the size of the benefit you expect.
For example, the benefit for FAI is humanities continued existence, there is essentially no amount of effort one person could put in that could be too much. To use the example of Eliezer in this thread, the benefit of a person being happier and more effective for months each year is also large, much larger than the time it takes to research SAD and come up with some creative solutions.
The definition you give sounds like a pretty low bar to me. The fact that you're calling the bar high means that there are implied but unstated things around this definition -- can you be more explicit? "Generally work towards your goals" looks to me like what 90% of the population is doing...
Is it basically persistence/stubborness/bloodymindedness, then?
Persistence is a good word for it, plus a sense of making it work even if the world is unfair, the odds are stacked against you. No sense of having fought the good fight and lost, if you failed and there were things you possibly could done beforehand, general strategies that would have been effective even if you did not know what was coming, then that is your own responsibility. It is not, I think, a particularly healthy way of looking at most things. It can only really be useful as a mindset for things that really matter.
Ah, sorry, I insufficiently unpacked "effective ways to satisfy terminal values". The hidden complexity was in "effectively". By effectively I meant in an efficient and >75% optimal manner. Many people do not know their own terminal values. Most people also don't know that what makes a human happy, which is often different from what a human wants. Of those that do know their values, few have effective plans to satisfy them. Looking back on it now, this is quite a large inferential distance behind the innocuous looking work 'sane'. I shall try to improve on that in the future.
Is there an implication that someone or something does know? That strikes me as awfully paternalistic.
Really, last time I checked there is now a Caliphate in what is still nominal Iraq and Syria.
Not quite. A collection of semi-local militias who managed to piss off just about everyone does not a caliphate make.
P.S. Though as a comment on the grandparent post, some suicide bombers certainly achieve their goals (and that's even ignoring the obvious goal to die a martyr for the cause).
But not enough for "everyone" to mount an effective campaign to destroy them.
Achieved almost entirely by fighting through normal means, guns and such so I hardly see the relevant. Suicide bombing kills a vanishing small number of people. IED's are an actual threat.
Their original goal as rebels was to remove a central government and now they're fighting a war of genocide against other rebel factions. I wonder how they would have responded if you'd told them at the start that a short while later they'd be slaughtering fellow muslims in direct opposition to their holy book.