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I could be wrong here, but the stuff you mentioned appear either ephemeral, or too particular. The “last few years” of political correctness is hardly enough time to judge world-trends by, right? By contrast, the stuff I mentioned (end of slavery, explicit policies against racism and war) seem likely to stick and stay with us for decades, if not centuries.

It sounds like you think that something like another Communist Revolution or Cultural Revolution could happen (that emphasizes some random virtues at the expense of others), but the effect would be temporary and after it's over, longer term trends will reassert themselves. Does that seem fair?

In the context of AI strategy though (specifically something like the Long Reflection), I would be worried that a world in the grips of another Cultural Revolution would be very tempted to (or impossible to refrain from) abandoning the plan to delay AGI and instead build and lock their values into a superintelligent AI ASAP, even if that involves more safety risk. Predictability of longer term moral trends (even if true) doesn't seem to help with this concern.

I could be wrong here, but the stuff you mentioned as counterexamples to my model appear either ephemeral, or too particular. The "last few years" of political correctness is hardly enough time to judge world-trends by, right? By contrast, the stuff I mentioned (end of slavery, explicit policies against racism and war) seem likely to stick and stay with us for decades, if not centuries.

We can explain this after the fact by saying that the Left is being forced by impersonal social dynamics, e.g., runaway virtue signaling, to over-correct, but did anyone predict this ahead of time?

When I listen to old recordings of right wing talk show hosts from decades ago, they seem to be saying the same stuff that current people are saying today, about political correctness and being forced out of academia for saying things that are deemed harmful by the social elite, or about the Left being obsessed by equality and identity. So I would definitely say that a lot of people predicted this would happen.

The main difference is that it's now been amplified as recent political events have increased polarization, the people with older values are dying of old age or losing their power, and we have social media that makes us more aware of what is happening. But in hindsight I think this scenario isn't that surprising.

Russia and China adopted communism even though they were extremely poor

Of course, you can point to a few examples of where my model fails. I'm talking about the general trends rather than the specific cases. If we think in terms of world history, I would say that Russia in the early 20th century was "rich" in the sense that it was much richer than countries in previous centuries and this enabled it to implement communism in the first place. Government power waxes and wanes, but over time I think its power has definitely gone up as the world has gotten richer, and I think this could have been predicted.

By unpredictable I mean that nobody really predicted:

1. The Left routed the Right so thoroughly in the Cultural War in just the last few years.
2. Having won, the Left is over-correcting so much in places where it gained power (e.g., establishing policies to achieve equality of outcomes, which ignore politically incorrect facts that nobody is allowed to argue about, establishing the equivalent of loyalty pledges in academia, "canceling" people on the flimsiest of pretexts, etc.). We can explain this after the fact by saying that the Left is being forced by impersonal social dynamics, e.g., runaway virtue signaling, to over-correct, but did anyone predict this ahead of time? How could we have known ahead of time that the virtue of "open inquiry" would lose out to that of "diversity, equity, and inclusion"?
3. Why is the Left so focused now on equality based on identity groups instead of socioeconomic class, or individual outcomes?
4. Russia and China adopted communism even though they were extremely poor. (They were ahead of the US in gender equality and income equality for a time due to that, even though they were much poorer.)

None of these seem well-explained by your "rich society" model. My current model [LW · GW] is that social media and a decrease in the perception of external threats relative to internal threats both favor more virtue signaling, which starts spiraling out of control after some threshold is crossed. But the actual virtue(s) that end up being signaled/reinforced (often at the expense of other virtues) is historically contingent and hard to predict.

This is probably the post I got the most value out of in 2018. This is not so much because the precise ideas (although I have got value out of the principle of meta-honesty, directly), but because it was an attempt to understand and resolve a confusing, difficult domain. Eliezer explores various issues facing meta-honesty – the privilege inherent in being fast-talking enough to remain honesty in tricky domains, and the various subtleties of meta-honesty that might make it too subtly a set of rules to coordinate around.

This illustration of "how to contend with potential dealbreakers for a new philosophical tool" was more useful to me than the tool itself. I learned a bit about how to become more honest from this post, and more generally, how to improve my policies and coordination procedures in a careful, sane way.

I don't that currently, meta-honesty is a good concept to coordinate around in large groups. It may or may not be too complicated to ever work on the 100-300 person scale. If it could work there, I think there is more distillation work that's needed.

I do think it works fairly well among individuals who know each other well and have the time to build up high resolution models of each other.

I can't remember whether I've explicitly used meta-honesty while communicating with others, but I've built up some internal models that rely more broadly on "meta-trust". (I have some posts-in-the-works ironing out what that means)

Part of why I'm skeptical of these concerns is that it seems like a lot of moral behavior is predictable as society gets richer, and we can model the social dynamics to predict some outcomes will be good.

As evidence for the predictability, consider that rich societies are more open to LGBT rights, they have explicit policies against racism, against war, slavery, torture, and it seems like rich societies are moving in the direction of government control over many aspects of life, such as education and healthcare. Is this just a quirk of our timeline, or a natural feature of civilizations of humans as they get richer?

I am inclined to think much of it is the latter.

That's not to say that I think the current path we're going on is a good one. I just think it's more predictable than what you seem to think. Given its predictability, I feel somewhat confident in the following statements: eventually, when aging is cured, people will adopt policies that give people the choice to die. Eventually, when artificial meat is very cheap and tasty, people will ban animal-based meat.

I'm not predicting these outcomes because I am confusing what I hope for and what I think will happen. I just genuinely think that human virtue signaling dynamics will be favorable to those outcomes.

I'm less confident, leaning pessimistic about these questions: I don't think humans will inevitably care about wild animal suffering. I don't think humans will inevitably create a post-human utopia where people can modify their minds into any sort of blissful existence they imagine, and I don't think humans will inevitably care about subroutine suffering. It's these questions that make me uneasy about the future.

It maps to a finite length binary number if you force the particle into one of two states. So you could think of this universe as equidistant (in time) instants of a continuous universe where positions are measured, then they're let to evolve and then positions are measured again. The binary strings refer only to the snapshots where the continuous universe is measured.

This ignores the fact that there must be something to measure the particles with. The goal of this thought experiment is to play around with the Born rule while ignoring the time evolution of a wave function governed by the Schrödinger equation.

... Simulacrum levels  continue to rise.

Ben's post is the best reference I've seen for this so far: Excerpts from a larger discussion about simulacra [LW · GW]

Having done some research, it turns out the thing I was actually pointing to was ratifiability and the stance that any reasonable separation of world-modeling and decision-selection should put ratifiability in the former rather than the latter. This specific claim isn't new: From "Regret and Instability in causal decision theory":

Second, while I agree that deliberative equilibrium is central to rational decision making, I disagree with Arntzenius that CDT needs to be ammended in any way to make it appropriately deliberational. In cases like Murder Lesion a deliberational perspective is forced on us by what CDT says. It says this: A rational agent should base her decisions on her best information about the outcomes her acts are likely to causally promote, and she should ignore information about what her acts merely indicate. In other words, as I have argued, the theory asks agents to conform to Full Information, which requires them to reason themselves into a state of equilibrium before they act. The deliberational perspective is thus already a part of CDT

However, it's clear to me now that you were discussing an older, more conventional, version of CDT[1] which does not have that property. With respect to that version, the thought-experiment goes through but, with respect to the version I believe to be sensible, it doesn't[2].

[1] I'm actually kind of surprised that the conventional version of CDT is that dumb -- and I had to check a bunch of papers to verify that this was actually happening. Maybe if my memory had complied at the time, it would've flagged your distinguishing between CDT and EDT here from past LessWrong articles I've read like CDT=EDT [LW · GW]. But this wasn't meant to be so I didn't notice you were talking about something different.

[2] I am now confident it does not apply to the thing I'm referring to -- the linked paper brings up "Death in Damascus" specifically as a place where ratifiable CDt does not fail

Apparently Metformin doesn't work when used by itself: https://nintil.com/longevity

(I haven't poked the underlying studies.)

Just encountered this, also: https://nintil.com/longevity