[POLITICS] Jihadism and a new kind of existential threat

Folks growing up in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and early '80s will remember the existential threat of that era: communism.

ISIS has a long way to go before it can capture the fear of total nuclear annihilation. The vietnam war, the korean war, the cold war, domino theory, the day after, red dawn, war games, duck-and-cover drills in school...

Whenever I hear hand-wringing from these youngsters about ISIS, I have to chuckle. Back in my day we had real existential threats, sonny.

Now I'm going back to watch my copy of Rocky iV. On VHS of course.

First, an obligatory reminder that the original post is not an injunction against talking politics, it is against politicizing a non-political discussion.

Do you think that the very same idea of rationality can be the subject of existential risk?

Second, let's imagine the future where the fundamental/radical/militant Islam won. Specifically, the Salafi version of Sunni Islam. Unconditionally. Everyone is muslim, no other religion is allowed. Everyone not originally muslim is either converted or killed. What's the worst that can happen to "rationality" in this case?

Clearly this would not affect instrumental rationality much, as striving to succeed is what people do. Also clearly, anything associated with Jews would be purged. This forum would be one of many casualties, but probably would not even register on the scale of destruction. Now, if you look back into history, this happened before, multiple times in various places. Only the dominant religion and the outgroup are different. Almost every time it was a setback, but only a temporary one. Science survived and eventually prospered. The dominant religious movement mellowed, then eventually splintered and crumbled, freeing the epistemic rationality to develop once more. I see no reason that this would be different the next time around.

What do Neoreactionaries think of the Islamic State?

I would imagine they would reply with their usual metaphors, about the Cathedral, Cthulhu's swimming habits and so on.

My prediction is that IS will go pretty much the same route as the ideologically and structurally very similar Mahdist State in South Egypt / Sudan in the late 19th century. Meaning I expect it to have more success, maybe sustained over a couple of years, due to their ability to wage war at comparatively little cost, then fall apart due to factional infighting when a new leader needs to take over.

That's because succession crises tend to be worse when the old leader's legitimacy depends on something any new leader cannot easily obtain. Abu Bakr, like Muhammad Ahmad before him, is holding together a large group of very angry people only due to the great respect he gets from them for the very successful campaign that put his organisation on the landscape. This campaign took years of clandestine preparation and would be very hard to copy for a now super visible group like IS.

Finally, that campaign was less than a year ago. Their infrastructure hasn't had time to crumble, they haven't run out of stolen bullets, their lieutenants haven't had time to develop grudges against each other. Give it time.

I find your scenario of a death of rationality ridiculous - even if IS could nuke the Bay Area, even that wouldn't do it. Rationality doesn't need anybody's approval. And from a monotheistic perspective, autonomous machines, let alone intelligent ones, seem so blatantly Demonic that I honestly cannot imagine any true believer attempting to build a godly one.

Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress: think about the wonderful skyscrapers and green patches in the desert of the Arab Emirates or the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. So it might well be the case that in the future some scientist will start a seed AI believing that Allah will guide it to evolve in the best way.

Both skyscrapers and nuclear weapons weren't invented in the middle East. The countries hired experts from Western countries that provided valuable expertise. If you want to argue that significant new discoveries are made under the umbrella of fundamentalism you need to bring different examples.

To me it's not clear that significant advances in computer science can be made in a climate of strict authority. Thinking for yourself is required to be a hacker and while it's possible to believe in Allah and think for yourself, the social structures of authority that exist in the region make progress in software hard. There are a lot of Indian programmers but few globally successful Indian software companies.

I expect Islamic State specifically to vanish within the next ten years, although fundamentalist Islamic terrorism will continue to be about as much of a threat as it was before, which isn't actually very much.

Violent jihadism is only a threat to the sanity waterline in the Islamic nations where it finds fertile ground, and what we should be worried about elsewhere is the reaction to Islamic extremism, which mostly involves new security measures that use "terrorism" as an excuse to infringe on liberties.

Islamic extremist AIs are only likely to be a problem when it's already been technologically possible to make an AI for several years, and the technological front-runners have been holding back due to safety concerns and not having solved FAI yet. This isn't because fundamentalism completely obstructs technological advancement, but the most technologically advanced majority-muslim nation is miles behind the most technologically advanced nation, and there's no reason to think they'll advance much faster and catch up.

Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?

Define your time scale. "Future" is very very long, everything will vanish in time.

Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?

No. I can't see why a particular brand of fundamentalist Islam is a worse menace than, say, Stalin or Mao.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the future will presents us with Islamic AI's?

Coupled with technological advancement, yes, as to "Islamic AIs" I don't understand what does that mean.

Do you think that the very same idea of rationality can be the subject of existential risk?

The subject of existential risk is humanity. Are you asking whether rationality can become extinct? Not likely, for, as Richard Feynman noted, "Nature cannot be fooled".

Rationality is hard enough when you're talking about simple topics about which a lot of information is known, like quantum physics. But politics is an extremely complicated subject, and there is a lot of unknown and missing information and this is by design. To give one example, during the cold war the US military did not often reveal the full extent of its capabilities, and this lead the public to be excessively fearful of the Soviet Union. Presidents were often criticised for lack of military buildup and taking a 'soft' stance. It was partly due to this kind of pressure that, for instance, the existence of the SR-71 spy plane was declassified. Declassified intelligence reports now indicate that American offensive, defensive, and espionage capabilities were far ahead of the Soviets. The US had more missiles, faster aircraft, and much better stealth capabilities.

So now consider the level of sophistication required for a rational debate on politics. You have to have a good grasp of human psychology, something which is hard enough in itself. You have to have a handle on all the various things that are going on in the world, and this is usually just impossible unless you're someone like the POTUS. You just don't have access to the information. And finally, you need to be able to wrestle all of this information and analyze things in a rational, evidence-based way, continuously updating your beliefs and fighting the ever-present mind-killing forces that are present in your brain. This is Hard, and to think we are capable of doing all three of these things is unrealistic. That's the main reason I don't think LW is a good place for political discussion, although I'm sure I don't speak for everyone.

Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?

In the future? Yes. In the near future? Unlikely. The Islamic State is a reaction to forces that have been at work in the Middle East for some decades now and there are certain parties who think it in their short-term benefit for the Islamic State to continue its existence.

Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?

No. It's violent enough that it's not the sort of thing that makes people insane, but rather the sort of thing that attracts the insane.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the future will presents us with Islamic AI's?

It's possible. Terrorists tend to be educated and the most common college degree among them is engineering. There are certainly people with the relevant background to enable technological advancement.

Do you think that the very same idea of rationality can be the subject of existential risk?

No. If rationality ceased to exist tomorrow, someone would just reinvent it later. As long as people are around and civilization remains a possibility, rationality won't be permanently gone.

What do Neoreactionaries think of the Islamic State? After all, it's an exemplar case of the reactionaries in those areas winning big. I know it's only a surface comparison, I'm sincerely curious about what a NR think of the situation.

It happened under Obama's watch, so it's clearly evidence of the failure of leftist politics.

Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress

Disagreed; a primary danger of fundamentalism is that it stops technological progress, and puts too much focus and attention on the past as opposed to the future. Consider al-Ghazali as the standardbearer for reactionary fundamentalist thought at the close of the Islamic Golden Age, and Ibn Rushd as the standardbearer for rationality. Consider Zheng He against the Confucian faction.

Now, that's not to say there won't be any engineers among the violent side; consider the example of the 9/11 WTC attack. I expect we will see more and more clever IEDs as time goes on.

It's also not clear to me that "rationality" is really the right thing to be worried about here. Be specific: it's much easier to talk about the impact of violent Islamic reactions to freedom of speech on the principle of freedom of speech, and about how that will alter our imperfect instantiation of it, for better or for worse.

Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?

Nothing lasts forever, though religions (in a fairly general sense) last longer than most things.

To my mind, the interesting question is whether the Islamic State will be gone soonish. In the short run, it's anti-fragile. It feeds on being attacked. On the other hand, it revolts every other institution which has a preference for normal human life.

It's possible that the rest of the world will solve coordination problems so as to destroy IS by military attacks.

I like the idea that it will take inspiration-- the development of a new religion or variant of Islam or alternatively some brilliant satire-- to create something to move people away from IS. It's pretty clear that mere decency isn't motivating enough.

Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?

I have no idea. I wasn't there for the other religions.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the future will presents us with Islamic AI's?

I don't think fundamentalists are good at innovation (have I missed something?), but they're at least as good as everyone else at using innovations invented by other people. They may be better at it if they're more motivated.

If there are AIs without a FOOM, there will be Islamic AIs, which is not the same thing as jihadist AIs. I think we can expect AIs from all the major religions and subdivisions of religions. If AIs are cheap (and I haven't seen speculation on what AIs will cost), there will be AIs based on fringe and new religions as well.

What I am worried about is that the Christian Reformation was an extremely traumatic event for Europe. I still feel the effects today -- the fact that I can't find a garbage can in London's Waterloo station can be directly traced to the Reformation.

Lots of folks remarked that Islam has not gone through its own Reformation event, and probably should/will at some point. This will be far more traumatic for Islam than for Christianity, and there are nukes now, and mass communication which are multipliers for how bad this kind of conflict can get.

In general:

Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being 'quiverfull' people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.

Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.

The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won't genes win out?

Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I'm sure we are all aware that exponential growth curves can cause very rapid changes. Trying to put an exact time-frame is difficult, because of immigration, questions of how long communities can remain isolated from the rest of the country, positive feedback where immigrants vote for more immigration, negated feedback from backlashes, birthrates decreasing in a demographic transition, and so forth.

I did a calculation and decided that within around 100 years many secular countries would be run by religious fanatics, and then I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn't buy all that more time.

The problem isn't that ISIS take over. They don't have the weapons, they don't have the numbers, they don't control any tank factories. The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn't happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France's nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.

Obviously that is just one hypothetical. But as the average religiosity rises, and when both Islam and Christianity have a serious history of violence, it seems likely to end in disaster, if baseline humans are still the dominant force at that point in time.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement

It can be coupled with "lone genius" types of advancement but not with more systematic ones. Probably they are unable to stand on the lone genius's shoulders, fundamentalism requires you either worship him and do not dare to revise and improve his work, or to ignore/hate. This is because these lines of thought are very strongly focused on authority, focusing more on who says it not what is said. So if a lonely genius impresses them sufficiently they will either worship him and his work and never dare to improve on it, or ignore/hate.

This is a very easy failure mode for humans. Probably vast majority of Westerns would not really dare to try to improve on what Einstein figured, out of too much respect. Thankfully it is not so in academia.

To a mildly rational person, the conflict fueling the rise of the Islamic State, namely the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, is the worst kind of Blue/Green division. A separation that causes hundreds of billions of dollars (read that again) to be wasted trying kill each other.

Would you apply the same logic to say the doctrinal differences between say Welfare-State Librelism and Communism (or Nazism)? Or this is just a case of "all ideologies that aren't mine look alike to me"?

Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress: think about the wonderful skyscrapers and green patches in the desert of the Arab Emirates

How is the UAE fundamentalist? I don't see what standard you are using the applies to the UAE that wouldn't apply to nearly the whole world pre-1950 (and possibly even pre-1990).

•What do Neoreactionaries think of the Islamic State? After all, it's an exemplar case of the reactionaries in those areas winning big. I know it's only a surface comparison, I'm sincerely curious about what a NR think of the situation.

By a remarckable co-incidence Jim has recently posted a blog post on this very subject.

Edit: Also this post for his attitude on Islam in general.

What's with the strange "barney" comments? A worm? Sloppy NSA eavesdropping?

Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?

We need to understand empathically what they are thinking and how they are feeling in order to build predictive mind-models. Can we? I can't. I am unwilling to believe people simply buy into the most possibly uncharitable reading of a holy book purely because of murky theological reasons. They could be like some nice farmer dude in Indonesia, reading the same holy book. The difference is not in the book. (I used to learn Indonesian folk dancing at their embassy. They are super normal people, if there was any hint of weird, it was more about too much respect for Sukarno than too much religion. So it is evidence that it is not simply so that reading that kind of holy book really efficiently makes people want to kill infidels.)

It is possible they are just doing it for the advantages it brings + the hell of it. Adventure. Excitement. Power.

It is also possible the men are extremely sexually frustrated. Higher-status men keeping harems and most guys there seeing no chance to find a woman or something like that. When men are violent and angry, that is one of the first causes to check. A huge chunk of evolution went into men competing with each other for women, so it is reasonable to start investigating abnormal behavior from there.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the future will presents us with Islamic AI's?

No. Almost by definition there will be no technological advancements there.

Toxic religions do exist, and they can become existential threats. Frankly I don't have a problem with stomping on Islam - HARD! - before we see land wars with Muslim armies on the European continent again. I also favor immigration restrictions to keep Muslims out of Western countries.

We really should put more effort into studying and learning from history as a corrective to fantasizing about transhuman futures. The experience of applying prophylaxis to Islam as a nuisance cult could come in handy for dealing with this sort of thing if another dangerous religion emerges in a few centuries.