Is LessWrongism the new Bolshevism?

So, now replying knowing your context, this actually came up in discussion with Eliezer at the dinner after his talk at MIT. The most agreed upon counterexample was more restrictive drug laws. But if one interprets Eliezer's statement as being slightly more poetic and allowing that occasional slips do occur but that the general trend is uni-directional, that looks much more plausible. And the opinion of the general American population in 1850 in many ways doesn't enter into that: most of that population took for granted factually incorrect statements about the universe that we can confidently say are wrong (e.g. not just religious belief but belief in a literal global flood and many other aspects of the Abrahamic religions which are demonstrably false).

Did you mean to make this as a reply to another comment or was "This" meant to link somewhere?

This is an extraordinary claim by Eliezer Yudkowsky that progress is a ratchet that moves in only one direction. I wonder what, say, the native Americans circa 1850 thought about Western notions of progress? If you equate "power" with "progress" this claim is somewhat believable, but if you're also trying to morally characterize the arc of history then it sounds like you've descended into progressive cultism and fanaticism.

For me it's Nietzsche by a wide margin. After Nietzsche, you can safely throw away most of your philosophy books. Nietzsche brought psychological insight that Western philosophy had never seen before. Nietzsche dared to deconstruct and challenge the foundations of Judeo-Christian morality, rationalism and liberalism. Nietzsche created potent memes like the Ubermensch, the Last Man, God is Dead, the Will to Power, and the coming of the strangest of all guests, Nihilism, that shape our intellectual discourse to this day. Nietzsche was perhaps the closest thing the West has seen to a prophet -- a dark Buddha or Antichrist who haunts the Western philosophical enterprise like a specter. Nietzsche has been ignored, misinterpreted and criticized relentlessly, but his challenges to the philosophers are as potent as ever.

These are my thoughts.

I wonder how to detect and exorcise one's inner asshole. Or whether this is even an instrumentally useful thing to do.

We need a name for the "effective altruists" or "extreme altruists" who specifically care about the cosmic future that allegedly potentially depends on events on Earth. Or even just for the field of studies which concerns itself with how to act in such a situation. "Astronomical altruism" and "astronomical ethics" suggest themselves... And I would be more impressed with such astronomical altruists, and their earthbound cousins the effective altruists, if they showed more awareness of the network of catastrophe and disappointment that is so much a part of human life to date.

The astronomical altruists are a minority within a minority, and I suppose I see two camps here. One group thinks in terms of FAI and the contingency of value systems, so the possible futures are conceived as: extinction, a civilization with human-friendly values replicated across the galaxies, a civilization with warped values replicated across the galaxies, paperclips... and so there is the idea that a cosmically bad outcome is possible, not just because of the "astronomical waste" of a future universe that could have been filled with happy people but instead ends up uninhabited, but because the blueprint of the cosmic civilization was flawed at its inception - producing something that is either just alien to human sensibilities, even "renormalized" ones, because it forgot some essential imperatives or introduced others; or (the worst nightmare) producing something that looks actually evil and hostile to human values, and replicating that across millions of light-years.

I was going to say that the other camp just hopes for an idyllic human life copied unto infinity, and concerns itself neither with contingency of value, nor with the possibility that a trillionfold duplication of Earth humanity will lead to a trillionfold magnification of the tragedies already known from our history. Some extreme advocates of space colonization might fit this description, but of course there are other visions out there - a crowded galaxy of upload-descended AIs, selected for their enthusiasm for replication, happily living in subsistence conditions (i.e. with very tight resource budgets); or poetic rhapsodies about an incomprehensibly diverse world of robot forms and AIs of astronomical size, remaking the cosmos into one big Internet...

So perhaps it's more accurate to say that there are two subtypes of astronomical altruism which are a little unreflective about the great future that could happen, the great future for the sake of which we must fight those various threats of extinction grouped under "existential risk". There is a humanist vision, which supposes that the great future consists of human happiness replicated across the stars. It imagines an idyll that has never existed on Earth, but which has certainly been imagined many times over by human utopians seeking a way beyond the grim dour world of history; the novelty is that this idyll is then imagined as instantiated repeatedly across cosmic spaces. And there is a transhumanist vision, basically science-fictional, of inconceivable splendors, endless strange worlds and strange modes of being, the product of an imagination stirred by the recent centuries of intellectual and technological progress.

Now here is something curious. If we keep looking for other views that have been expressed, we will occasionally run across people who are aware that cosmically extended civilization means the possibility or even likelihood of cosmically extended tragedy and catastrophe. And some of these people will say that, nonetheless, it is still worth affirming the drive to spread across the universe: this prospect is so grand that it would redeem even astronomically sized tragedy. I cannot think of any prominent public "tragic cosmists" in the present, who have the fanaticism of the astronomical altruists but whose sensibility is tragic affirmation of life, but I'm sure such views are held privately by a few people.

In any case, you would think that utilitarians concerned about "astronomical waste" would also be concerned about the possibility of "astronomical tragedy". And perhaps they could perform their utilitarian calculation, which normally turns up the result that the good outweighs the bad and therefore we should go for it. But this whole aspect seems very underplayed in discussions e.g. of existential risk. There might be a good future, or a bad future, or no future; but who ever talks of a good future riddled with bad, or a bad future with islands of good?

There seems to be a mindset according to which actions here and now (I mean 21st century Earth) set the tone for everything that follows. We need to make the effort to produce a good future, but once it is achieved and set in motion, then we can relax, and we or our descendants will just reap the rewards. Perhaps the FAI camp has some justification for thinking like this, since they envision the rise of a hyperintelligence of overwhelming power, with the capacity to make its preferences law within its expanding sphere of influence...

But otherwise, this idea that this is the Now that matters the most, reflects a sort of optimism of the will, an optimism about one's place in the scheme of things and one's capacity to make a difference in a big way. Some advocates of space colonization say that it's about not having all our eggs in one basket; so there might be some justification there, for thinking this is a special moment - this is indeed the time when it has first become possible for humans to live beyond Earth. If you're worried about whole-Earth vulnerabilities, then this is our first chance to simply place people beyond their reach. Take that, earthbound existential risks!

From this perspective, what I don't see discussed is (1) the fact that hazard persists even beyond Earth (2) the fact that saving the human race from destruction also means perpetuating its suffering, evil, and folly. Of course it's very difficult to get your mind around the full spectrum of possibilities, when they include wars between ideologies that don't even exist yet, or the catastrophic decline and fall of vast projects not yet imagined. But I think that much of the ethical anxiety about the imperative to keep the possibility of a big future alive, has not assimilated the lessons of the earthbound present; that it's based in either a desire to protect the happiness of oneself and one's friends from a threatening world, or an affirmation of will and power, which hasn't accepted the lesson of life and history, that things do fall apart or get torn apart, that life also includes frustration, desolation, and boredom.

I do not know whether any form of cosmic hope is warranted, but I especially doubt that cosmic hope that is pursued in a state of blindness or denial, will nonetheless be fulfilled.

These are some fast guesses-- my impression is that it can take years [1] to track down this sort of thing. Also, I don't know how much of this has already been done.

Start with five minutes thought. What does Eliezer know about his symptoms? Can anything be deduced by mulling over them?

I'd start with poking around to find out whether other people have the same pattern of symptoms. Does it have a medical name? What does medical research say about what works? What do people say about what works? Do the symptoms ever become better or worse? Does this correlate with something that could be experimented with?

Hire MetaMed, but also look for anecdotal information.

Exercise might be bad for some people.

I'm going to recommend some caution about experiments-- so far as I know, Eliezer has fairly good health. He's got some energy problems, an inability to lose weight, reacts very badly to missing a meal, and doesn't get any good from exercise. There's a lot of room for making things worse.

I'm in substantial agreement with this, but I do think the bad reaction to missing a meal is enough to be of at least a little concern. On the other hand, the cultural issues around fat are weird and extreme enough that it could explain the lack of thought that's gone into Eliezer's efforts to lose weight.

[1] Something in the neighborhood of 2 years or more for people who report success. Original research takes time.

This will cross the biggest bottleneck to eugenics in today's world - educated women not having enough children.

This may be the biggest bottleneck for eugenics. But decreasing the birthrate among the poor who lack the support network to raise children is a bigger problem for improving the average outcome, and is much lower hanging fruit.

In short, lowering the birthrate among the underclass while holding the upper class birthrate constant has much more payoff and is easier to implement than raising the upper class birthrate while leaving the underclass birthrate constant.