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I definitely appreciate these scenarios, but it's worth looking at where things don't seem to fit, because people will often use these details to dismiss them.
In particular, this section seems to clash with my understanding of conflict logistics and incentives.
Data centers in China erupt with shrapnel. Military bases become smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly toward strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some get through, and the public watch destruction on their home turf in awe.
Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC spend most of their stockpiles of conventional missiles
As far as I can tell, it's 1) practically unfeasible and 2) misaligned with both sides' incentives to deplete their stockpiles of short- to mid-range missiles on opposition soil in such a short timeframe.
For the PRC, the main objective would be to restore deterrence and maintain regional dominance. Some missile strikes might occur, but the focus would likely be on targeting naval forces, rather than widespread strikes on land targets. Both sides would prioritise controlling the South China Sea, focusing on air superiority, naval engagements etc. The PRC wouldn't want to spread themselves too thin, they might instead try to force the Taiwan issue through strikes on naval defences and regional infrastructure.
If the PRC continued to escalate to U.S. bases to knock-out naval and air support to the South China Sea, it's only feasible that they'd focus on bases they could reach with land-based missiles (max range 3100 miles), like Guam and Okinawa. Striking the U.S. mainland would be logistically impractical, because China doesn't have missile platforms anywhere nearby. Also, many of their longer-range missiles are dual-use (nuclear and conventional), so large-scale non-nuclear strikes would scupper their own deterrence. It's also massively escalatory to attack the mainland, and risks direct nuclear exchange (where U.S. would dominate, despite massive destruction on both sides).
Also, in terms of "depleting all their stockpiles", I don't think either side would be able to deploy their stockpiles within two weeks. The U.S. has a decent missile stockpile deployed on submarines and Pacific fleet vessels (maybe 1/3 of their total), which could be launched within a few days. But even if they wanted to instantly restock Tomahawk stockpiles to keep on blasting away at the Chinese mainland, it'd take well over two weeks to get stuff over from the Atlantic, and they wouldn't have much strategic incentive to do so.
This is partly because you get diminishing returns on missile strikes. Each additional missile has less marginal impact as key targets are destroyed or degraded and the comparative value of keeping missiles as strategic reserves for when new high-value targets emerge increases.
I wonder what you think of the super-setting weights vs. HIIT trade-off?
I've gone full circle on this - I used to prefer HIIT, then I switched to hypertrophy-style weight training (mainly after watching "exercise science youtube, RP etc."), now I've gone back to HIIT for most workouts. A typical workout will look like a 21-15-9 progression of 5 or 6 exercises, e.g. weighted squats, pull-ups, burpees, lunges, kettlebell swings, press-ups, leg raises, box jumps, or (relatively light) deadlifts or olympic lifts for 15-25 mins. My heart rate usually stays above 140, and hits VO2 max at some point.
To me, HIIT feels way better, and more time efficient. Hypertrophy training (even with supersets, which are definitely better) still feels a bit more like a chore, and I never get a "buzz".
I don't have good enough theory of mind to know which is best to recommend to others, though.
There's a world of difference between "let's just continue doing this research project on something obscure with no theory of impact because penicillin" and "this is more likely than not to become irrelevant in 18 months time, but if it works, it will be a game-changer".
Robustness and generalizability are subcomponents of the expected value of your work/research. If you think that these are neglected, and that your field is too focused on the "impact" components of EV, i.e. there are too many moon shots, please clarify that, but your analogy fails to make this argument.
As it is, I suspect that optimizing for robust generalizability is a sure-fire way of ensuring that most people become "very general helpers", which seems like a very harmful thing to promote.
Despite finishing your comment in a way that I hope we can all just try to ignore... you make an interesting point. The Pollywog example works well, if accurate. If wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world, it follows that wild animal pleasure could easily the best thing in the world, and it might be a huge opportunity to do good in the world if we can identify species for which this is true. This seems like one of the only ways to make the world net-positive, if we do choose to maintain biological life.
But, tragically, I think that's a difficult case to make for most animals. Omnizoid addresses it partly: "If you only live a few weeks and then die painfully, probably you won’t have enough welfare during those few weeks to make up for the extreme badness of your death. This is the situation for almost every animal who has ever lived." But I think he understates it here.
Most vertebrates are larval fish. 99%+ of fish larvae die within days. For a larval fish, being eaten by predators (about 75%, on average) is invariably the best outcome, because dying of starvation, temperature changes, or physiological failure (the other 25%) seems a lot worse.
When they do experiments by starving baby fish to death (your reminder that ethics review boards have a very peculiar definition of ethics), they find that most sardines born in a single spawning don't even start exogenous feeding, and survive for a few days from existing energy reserves. I would speculate that much of this time is spent in a state of constant hunger stress, driven by an extremely high metabolism and increasing cortisol levels, and for the vast majority who cannot secure food, their few hours-days of existence probably look a lot more like a desperate struggle until they gradually weaken and lose energy before dying. This is partly because they were born too small to ever have a chance of exogenous feeding - like a premature human baby unable to suckle, most don't have the suction force to consume plankton.
I don't doubt that there might be some pleasure there to balance out the suffering, but it seems like a hard sell for most K-strategists.
If you'll forgive diving into the linguistics here, English is atypical in that we have a distinctive present perfect.
In French, the present perfect - type construction (passé composé) has subsumed the past simple, which is now reserved for literate or archaic uses, so you use that for any past experience. But you can use something close to our future perfect with a similar sense: (I will have finished my degree by March/ "J'aurai terminé mon diplôme d'ici mars"). In Chinese (and other Sino languages), there's a present-perfect type construction, albeit used less consistently (e.g. have been to... quguo 去过）, but it's very awkward to use future perfect-style constructions: “I just want to have read this”. I'm sure many obscure languages will have even less of a distinction.
So, if the theory in your title is correct, people from languages without a present perfect will have unruined lives, or at least lives ruined by different grammatical structures (we're looking at you, subjonctif...)! This sounds like a testable theory to me!
There's a bunch of theories around language influencing thought patterns, e.g. the idea that people who speak future-less languages save more etc. https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf , so you could test something similar for perfect tenses. I hear that some Italian and Spanish dialects differ in whether the present-perfect and past simple are distinct. So you might have a great natural experiment there.
My personal hobby horse here is counterfactual conditionals, usually used to express regret (mainly: "If I had done x..." or "I should have done x ...", "I wish I'd done x ..."). I used to have harmful, regretful thought patterns like this until I learned Chinese very immersively. I realised that, in Chinese-thinking mode, I had stopped using these conditionals in my train of thought, and noticed them returning when I reintegrated into an English-speaking context. It wasn't a clean experiment by any means - it could have been partly due to thinking in a non-native language, which made (over-) thinking slower, and of course, I was living in China, with obviously massive lifestyle effects. But still, I did identify these conditional thought patterns as almost definitely negative, so I'm convinced there's at least some effect.
I haven't noticed "wanting to have done something" being less common in Chinese- or French-mode because of a more limited present perfect tense, but it would be interesting if bilinguals on LW have noticed something there.
I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.
Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.
It seems like the most common situation when you'd ignore bad vibes would be when a trait like this confuses your signals. When you identify a negative trait that "feels more obvious", especially if it's socially taboo to be prejudiced against (race, ethnicity/accent, LGBT-status, mental/physical disability), this can interfere with your ability to correctly interpret other evidence (including "vibes"), so that it's very easy to overcompensate the other way.
The classic example from women's self-defence classes: you enter an enclosed space (e.g. a lift) with a man of a particular ethnicity who makes you instantly nervous. You consider not getting in, but then think "oh, this must just be his ethnicity I'm reacting to", castigate yourself for your prejudice, ignore the bad vibes, get in any way, and it turns out he was dodgy.
Or a neuro-atypical colleague suggests a small business venture in a manner that would normally raise red flags. You get "bad vibes", but you interpret this as irrational prejudice against autistic behaviour traits, so you go along with it despite your vibes. Only later do you realise that your red flags were real, and your correction for prejudice was adding unnecessary noise into your decision-making.
I don't know whether there's evidence to back this up, but my sense is that "correction for potential prejudice" would be the major source of error here, especially among people who are more reflective.
I explained why I think tracing back personal history is impractical.
Your separate method to spot check my model is just a simplified version of the same model.
Well, you can stick your own numbers into the model and see what you get - a few tweaks in the estimates puts farmer ancestors higher, as would assuming more prehistoric lineage collapses.
For example, if you think that almost everyone who had offspring from 2000BC-1200AD was your ancestor, then you get more farmer ancestors. I initially put it closer to 40% (assuming little to no Sub-Saharan or Native American ancestry, and a more gradual spread throughout Eurasia), but the model is sensitive to these estimates.
From a "Eurasia-centric" perspective, my sense is that personal ancestry doesn't make a major difference except for pockets like Siberia and Iceland, perhaps. It's noticeably different for people with some New World or Sub-Saharan ancestry, and wildly different if you're pure-blooded Aboriginal Australian.
Sorry, just read this response.
On the intuition question, my intuition was probably the other way because most of human history was non-farming, and because the vast majority of farmers (those born in the last millennium) weren't my ancestors.
I updated my model to account for an error - it's now a bit closer. 7.8 billion non-farmers to 6.4 billion farmers, and 4.9 billion exclusive farmers, but I still basically stand by the logic.
To respond to your question, why I didn't pick a fixed number of personal ancestors:
We have fewer recent ancestors, assuming 16 generations, we'd have around 20k to 50k ancestors at 1600. (2^16 - inbreeding). If we want to count these ancestors carefully, we should count back with an algorithm accounting for population size and exponentially increasing inbreeding.
We could also plausibly try to use this strategy to draw a more accurate number of ancestors from 1200-1600--- this might be a period where individual/geographical differences, or population constraints, play a significant role. If you're Icelandic, most of your ancestors in this period will still be from Iceland, but if you are Turkish, your ancestors from this period are more likely to extend from Britain to Japan. My model doesn't do this, because it sounds difficult, and because the numbers are negligible anyway- I just estimate that 0.1% to 1% of total humans born from 1200- today were my ancestors.
By around 1200 AD, it surely becomes impractical to rely on a personal family tree to track ancestry, because of the exponential growth in the number of ancestors. Beyond that point, your total potential ancestors (in the billions, without factoring in inbreeding) massively exceed the global population (in the 100s of millions). The limited population size becomes the constraint.
So an Italian might assume that they are descended from a significant portion (40%?) of Europe’s population in 1200 AD. By 800 AD, this would extend to a majority (60%?) of people living across Eurasia and Northern Africa. By the time we reach 500 BC to 1000 AD, it’s likely that most people from the major Old World civilizations and peripheries (where the bulk of the global population lived) were direct ancestors of people alive today. My numbers could be way off, but I think this is a better way of getting in the right ballpark than trying to trace back individual ancestry. I used these figures as a baseline. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
You're right that I don't account for major bottlenecks - my assumption is that they basically even out over time, and there's a constant 20-60% chance of humans born in each period not passing down ancestors to the modern day. If you wanted to refine this model you'd take into account more recent (e.g. Black Death) and less recent (Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck) bottlenecks.
Ah, interesting. His Guerre des intelligences does seem more obviously accelerationist, but his latest book gives slightly different vibes, so perhaps his views are changing.
But my sense is that he actually seems kind of typical of the polémiste tradition in French intellectual culture, where it's more about arguing with flair and elegance than developing consistent arguments. So it might be difficult to find a consistent ideology behind his combination of accelerationism, a somewhat pessimistic transhumanism, and moderate AI fear.
Thanks for this post, great to have this overview!
I can't put my finger on whether Laurent Alexandre is an accelerationist - I don't know his work too well, but he seems to acknowledge at least some AI-risk arguments.
This is a quote (auto-translated) from his new book:
"The political dystopia described by Harari, predicting that the world of tomorrow would be divided into "gods and useless people," could unfortunately become a social reality.
Regulating a force as monumental as ChatGPT and its successors would require international cooperation. However, the world is at war. Each geopolitical bloc will use the new AIs to manipulate the adversary and develop destructive or manipulative cyber weapons."
My initial intuition was "surely there were more non-farmers", but I did some calculations and it looks closer than I thought.
I had a go at a guesstimate model, where I estimate the number of humans who lived in each period, the % of them having offspring, the chance that I descend from them, and an estimate % who are farmers in each period.
I get 11 billion non-farming ancestors, and 4.6 billion farming ancestors (around 3.6 billion exclusively/mainly farmers).
What I see as the "crux period" is 0 BC - 1200 AD; I can't find any data how many of the humans in that period are likely to have been my/your ancestors. I've put 15-40%, but if it's closer to 60%, farmers might edge it. Also, I haven't accounted for lineages ending - aside from individuals not having offspring (which I take as a constant in the model), there may have been some huge lineage collapses, presumably more before farming than after.
Of course, but there reaches a level of sun exposure at which the marginal increased harm becomes negligible compared to other things that damage your skin (see this meta-analysis - photo-aging is just one component among many), and below that level you're probably actually getting suboptimal levels of UV exposure for skin health (see this article for benefits of UV - from Norway, aptly).
I'd love to see someone try to measure and compare the specific trade-offs, but I strongly suspect that people at northern latitudes should just trust common sense - only wear sunscreen in summer months, and when you're actually exposed to the sun for extended periods.
I know LW is US/ California heavy, but just as a counter to all the sunscreen advocates here, daily sunscreen use is probably unnecessary, and possibly actively harmful, in winter and/or at northern latitudes.
There doesn't seem to be much data on using sunscreen when there's no real risk to skin, but you can find a modelling study here:
"There is little biological justification in terms of skin health for applying sunscreen over the 4–6 winter months at latitudes of 45° N and higher (most of Europe, Canada, Hokkaido, Inner Mongolia etc.) whereas year-round sunscreen is advised at latitudes of 30° N (e.g. Southern U.S., Shanghai, North Africa) and lower ... Using products containing UV filters over the winter months at more northerly latitudes could lead to a higher number of people with vitamin D deficiency."
Although most approved sunscreens are generally seen as safe, there are potential systemic health risks from a few products, some proven environmental harms, a potentially increased risk of vit-D deficiency, and some time/financial costs.
There should be a question at the end: "After seeing your results, how many of the previous responses did you feel a strong desire to write a comment analyzing/refuting?" And that's the actual rationalist score...
But I'm interested that there might be a phenomenon here where the median LWer is more likely to score highly on this test, despite being less representative of LW culture, but core, more representative LWers are unlikely to score highly.
Presumably there's some kind of power law with LW use (10000s of users who use LW for <1 hour a month, only 100s of users who use LW for 100+ hours a month).
I predict that the 10000s of less active community members are probably more likely to give "typical" rationalist answers to these questions: "Yeah, (religious) people stupid, ghosts not real, technology good". The 100s of power users, who are actually more representative of a distinctly LW culture, are less likely to give these answers.
I got 9/24, by the way.
I think your intuitions are generally correct, and as I say, it's usually a good heuristic to avoid overly processed food. In the absence of other evidence, if you're in a food market where everything is edible, you should probably opt for the less processed option. I also don't disagree with it playing a role in national health guidelines.
But it's a very imprecise heuristic, and I think LessWrong-ers with aspirations to understand the world more accurately should feel a bit uncomfortable with it, especially when benign and beneficial processes are lumped together with those with much clearer mechanisms for harm.
Thanks for this piece. I admit I have always had a bit of residual aversion to seed oils that I've struggled to shake.
Having said that, as you're pushing so strongly against seed oils in favour of "processing" as a mechanism for poor health, I think I need to push back a bit.
If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats.
"Avoid processed food" works very well as a heuristic - far better than anything like the "nutrition pyramid", avoiding saturated fats/sugars or calorie counting etc. But it also seems like something that should annoy people who like clear thinking and taxonomies.
As you note, "processing" includes hundreds of processes, most of which have no plausible mechanism by which they might harm human health. Articles describing the ultra-processed taxonomy often just list a litany of bad-sounding things without an explanation why they're bad e.g. "mechanically separated meat", "chemical modifications" and "industrial techniques". Most of these are either benign when you think about it (we'd all prefer a strong man wearing a vest separating our meat with his bare hands, but come now...), or so vague as to be uninformative.
If ultra-processed foods are bad because they contain "hydrogenated oil, modified starch, protein isolate, and high-fructose corn syrup" or "various cosmetic additives for flavour enhancement and colour", then it's these products that are bad, not some mysterious processing!
If it is some technical part of the processing, like "hydrolysis, hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding, or pre-frying" that's bad, surely we should just identify that rather than lumping everything together?
If it's some emergent outcome of all these processes, like "hyper-palatability" or "energy density", then that's the problem, not the fact of being "processed". If so we should all stop eating strawberries after they hit a certain deliciousness threshold, and avoid literally any edible oil (because all oil is identically energy-dense).
But, having said that, I still use this heuristic, and I'm pretty glad I trained myself out of preferring highly-processed food when I was less analytical.
Ah, thanks, okay, I get it now. That's a very different proposition! Updated my post.
MoviePass users are selected for seeing a lot of movies. If MoviePass makes a business plan that models users as average people, it will lose a lot of money. Conditional on someone wanting to buy MoviePass, MoviePass probably should not want them as a customer.
I'm going to nitpick here and note that the marginal cost to the cinema of allowing in an extra customer is often close to zero, seeing as most films don't sell out. It may even be positive, if they spend money on popcorn and drinks, and invite their friends who don't have a pass. It seems from that article that the failure in the business model was partly that MoviePass was just badly managed, partly that people were abusing the system in various ways by scalping/ selling tickets/ getting hundreds of people using the same service. I checked my local cinema chain and they started running an 'Unlimited' service over a decade ago, and it's still in use, so I think it remains a valid model.
Correction: I understand the MoviePass model now and the adverse selection argument makes more sense. Cinemas with a subscription model can work even with a high proportion of power users, but that's because the externalities (popcorn, drinks, inviting friends) accrue to the cinema.
I presume the stated goal of schooling your child in this way is to set the grown-up's mind at ease, rather than ensuring the child is left alone (which is probably the default outcome), and I expect both responses would suffice for this instrumental purpose.
I expect the grown-up would probably look confused, then question the child further. The well-rehearsed child would then explain the negative externalities that society has imposed upon itself by reducing these risks to near-zero, and how it is optimal for society to only reduce these risks until the marginal benefit of further risk reduction is equal to the marginal cost.
At this point, if your child has managed to make the case effectively, the grown-up would realise that the child is probably mature enough to make their own decisions whether to stay outside alone or not.
Technically true, but it's a very unagentic way for a five-year old to respond to something they should have the capability to justify through argument.
I think we should be discouraging unjustified appeals to authority in our children, so...
"Rehearsing with my kids what they’d say if a grownup asks why they’re alone: “My parents said it’s ok for me to be here The socially optimal level of abduction/traffic accident risk is not zero”
Some good thoughts here.
My thinking is that participation in online communities is mostly incentivised through status and inclusion. Upvotes or informal status mechanisms enable someone to be perceived as a valued member of an online community that they identify with. But power and status are subtly different - moderators have the power to ban, admonish, censor, and sometimes signal-boost, but they don't necessarily gain respect or status based on this - in fact, it's often the opposite.
Creators acquire status based on the quality of their output (through formal (Karma) and informal (general reputation) mechanisms), but the power that this affords is usually quite indirect (extra upvoting power on LW and EA forums). This can potentially transform into real-world power over the moderators in the case of a coup or a protest, but I'd say that this attracts a different kind of person to moderation.
I'm not sure how useful the "duty vs. privilege" framing is, but the idea that some of these activities may be over- or under-incentivised is an important question. I'd have thought that moderation would be under-incentivised, which is why I've always been a bit fascinated by voluntary moderation. 4chan-type forums are the most bizarre example; it has always perplexed me that someone is taking this "responsible" social role to make sure that /pol stays "on-topic" despite the sub-forum being an anarchic cesspit, and probably getting influxes of hate from censored/ banned participants while doing so. But the existence of moderation suggests that there must be a type of person who genuinely enjoys the power that it affords.
Writing high-quality original posts is probably appropriately incentivized - there are enough people who like writing and it provides internal and external validation. Like with meta-analysis and replicating in academia, there are probably some curation tasks that are under-incentivized in most online spaces, but LW/ EA seem pretty good at that.
Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there's any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
This response is incorrect. Firstly, Google Consumer Surveys is very different from MTurk. MTurk users are paid to pay attention to the task for a given amount of time, and they are not 'paid ads'.
"People are incentivized to complete these as soon as possible and there is little penalty for inaccuracy."
This is generally untrue for MTurk - when you run online surveys with MTurk:
1) You set exclusion criteria for people finishing too quickly
2) You set attention check questions that, when you fail, exclude a respondent
3) A respondent is also excluded for certain patterns of answers e.g. answering the same for all questions or sometimes for giving contradictory answers
4) The respondent is rated on their response quality, and they will lose reputation points (and potentially future employment opportunities) for giving an inaccurate response
You can apply these criteria more or less rigorously, but I'd assume that the study designers followed standard practice (see this doc), at least.
I'm not claiming that MTurk is a very good way of getting humans to respond attentively, of course. There are lots of studies looking at error rates: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.04459.pdf and there are obvious issues with exclusively looking at a population of 'professional survey respondents' for any given question.
So I'm not exactly sure how this survey causes me to update. Perhaps especially because they're slightly rushing the answers, it's genuinely interesting that so many people choose to respond to the (perceived) moderate complexity task (which they assume is: "calculate 110 - 100"), rather than either the simple task: "write out the number 5".
"What is the empirical evidence for decomposition being a technique that improves forecasts?"
I might be misunderstanding here, but I'm fairly confident that the recent history of predicting sports outcomes and developing live betting odds very strongly supports decomposition as a technique (under some conditions).
It seems like the only rational way of predicting the outcome of a multi-stage sports event (like the FIFA World Cup, for example) is decomposing the chances of a team winning the World Cup into the chances of them winning each previous game. (And then adding a K-factor to adjust to recent results).
American capitalism "stealing" food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they're mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they're high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule.
I'd guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe).
In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine.
This wouldn't explain the "German restaurant phenomenon" you identify, but I think you'll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: "chicago "german restaurant"" and "chicago "French restaurant"". There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.
I'll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.
A few points:
- Europeans denigrate the American food they are exposed to, which is the "unsophisticated" stuff that they import the most of. It would be weird if they spent their time ripping into gumbo and fried rattlesnake.
- Regular consumers of McDonalds in Europe are not the same people who also denigrate American food. The people who denigrate American cuisine are usually also a little sneering towards domestic consumers of McD.
- Many consumers (in US and Europe) see McD cuisine as an inferior product, but it has obvious benefits beyond taste (convenience/ speed/ child-friendliness/ toilets/ wi-fi).
I was pretty surprised that Peru was so low, as I assumed it was generally recognised as an excellent cuisine. But a lot of the ordering seems to match my understanding of the world, so something strange must be going on with Peru.
It probably has to do with the sample "people who have tried the cuisine in that country", but don't know why that would apply to Peru. It would make sense that, say, Saudi/ Emirati cuisine are under-rated, as the majority of visitors probably just grab an overpriced meal at the airport or in a mall during a stopover.
That's true for fancy meals, the opposite for regular diets. Chinese people have very high-carb diets (200 kg of grains (rice/ wheat) per person, one of the higher grain consumers globally), but fancy meals are intended to signal prestige, so therefore avoid cheap carbs.
Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.
Small comment- I'm sure it is mostly about the food. Almost every time I've tried Indian cuisine with Chinese people, they make the same comments about the unfamiliar and strange spices.
The perceptions of hygiene/ racism might play a small role, but Chinese people do enjoy some Indian snacks (you get Manda Roti at some tourist locations), so it seems much more parsimonious to me that it's mostly about the flavours.
20% of Gen Z Americans seem to identify as LGBT, so increasing LGBT rates could explain a lot of the variance- especially for women (where there's less variance to explain and more LGBT). Correction: (But it does seem that the B (57%) is more common than the LGT (https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx), which might make it less explanatory - but there could be a reasonable proportion of bi young people avoiding hetero relationships).
Thanks for the positivity! Much appreciated.
I think the counterargument to your "added complexity" point would be that this complexity might be a good thing (returning to the 'theatre/ fun' point and the 'mental practice' point in the piece), so I would only consider it a cost if you're trying to simplify your social interactions. I personally tell the truth almost all the time now, but this is partly just out of laziness- I struggle to harness the energy or creativity to weave and maintain interesting webs of deception (it was both easier and more fun to lie when I travelled more and didn't have a full-time job). On the other hand, I also suspect that it's mentally more difficult to be radically honest than to lean towards the 'mostly honest' part of the spectrum of honesty/ dishonesty.
I'm not sure if people who lie are more likely to believe falsehoods, actually. It seems plausible that liars could be better at detecting deception.
I deliberately wanted to avoid the 'truly adverserial cases' here- I find that the debate around honesty is too closely anchored to the premise that 'lying is always bad' (but what about the murderer at the door?) and I wanted to make the case there might be rational and fairly obvious reasons to lie.
Having said that, I do think honesty norms are generally good, especially with colleagues, close friends and partners- I'm probably more honest than the default in my culture, and would bring a child up with fairly strong honesty norms, at least until they were old enough to weigh up the trade-offs themselves.
But I also think that, when people lie, they should do so with a sense of playfulness, which probably inspired the tone for the post.
Not sure what your point is here...
It's true that virtue ethics and game theory permeate through our experiences, but much of life is comprised of single-shot games, or situations where utilitarian calculus (or even just selfishness) overwhelms virtue ethics.
It's intended as a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of laying out five basic arguments for why lying is desirable.
I do find that satire works better if you're not sure if it's intended as such, but I should stress that it's not intended as satire in the sense that I don't think these are valid arguments and fundamentally disagree with them.
I think they generally are valid arguments, and I do think that if you want to advocate for very strong honesty norms, you should address these simplistic arguments for why people lie.
I allow the reader to make the more nuanced case for when and why each of them do or don't apply.
Very good point. If we want to build a better model of an individual's behaviour or the dynamics of a social group, lying can be an invaluable tool.
Good point- I should have stressed that the overwhelming and undeniable visual effect from the bum in the dress was that of a whale swallowing another larger whale, such that saying anything else would be dishonest in spirit.
Well, inducing a mass societal collapse is perhaps one of the few ways that a small group of people with no political power or allies would be able to significantly influence AI policy. But, as I stressed in my post, that is probably a bad idea, so you shouldn't do it.
KOL = Key Opinion Leaders, as in a small group of influential people within the neo-Luddite space. My argument here was simply that people concerned about AI alignment need to be politically astute, and more willing to find allies with whom they may be less aligned.
I think it's probably a problem that those interested in AI alignment are far more aligned with techno-optimists, who I see as pretty dangerous allies, than more cautious, less technologically sophisticated groups, (bureaucrats or neo-Luddites).
Don't know why you feel the need to use my unrelated post to attempt to discredit my comment here- strikes me as pretty bad form on your part. But, to state the obvious, a 40% shot at a desirable outcome is obviously not a call to action if the 60% is very undesirable (I mention that negative outcomes involve either extinction or worse).
Of course there are no such posts, and I hoped that people would read it in this spirit! I'm in fact arguing against that elephant in many a room where people are discussing collapse and x-risk.
I'm sure many people have thought:
a= x-risk this century, and b= chance of non-recovery post collapse and c= likelihood of future society reaching modernity at a stage when they're better organised than current society at addressing the age of perils.
If a>b and c > 0.5, and we accept longtermism, then collapse seems desirable. If we add fairly pessimistic views about ongoing moral tragedies, or ideas like antinatalism and negative utilitarianism, it tips the balance further towards collapse.
This post is an expression of this dilemma- I feel it captures the tone I was hoping for... but no-one else seems to like it, unfortunately.
Definitely relevant, but not sure if it supports my argument that we shouldn't try to induce collapse.
This post is about unilaterally taking a very radical action to avert a potentially worse scenario that inertia and race dynamics are pushing us towards. That looks like classic 'unilateralist's benediction' territory.
Thanks! I'm actually a more serious EA type in everyday life, but my lesswrong alter ego is proudly Kakistocurious.
Sorry, I think the logic of my 60% figure was imprecise.
If we're just talking about 1 person attempting to deliberately induce societal collapse, the chances of any kind of impact, either way, would be relatively low (depending on the person), so the 60% would seem a bit meaningless there.
If we're talking about whether it's worth developing a more serious movement to initiate societal collapse (potentially in an optimal way) or to plan for it as an option, I think there are arguments both ways, but I'd lean against it being a good idea because of the risks laid out in the post. This is what my 60% figure was aiming at.
If we're talking about a world where we have successfully induced collapse (in a way that allows society to rebuild in some way), would this be a better or worse world, in expectation? This is the question I was really hinting at with this post, and I would definitely dispute your 5 in 1000 claim if this was the question you were thinking of.
If we're Eliezer-level pessimistic about TAI timelines, serious about the horrors of factory farming (and perhaps antinatalism), and optimistic about moral progress in the absence of technological progress, I think this question gets very interesting.
- When considering whether to delay AI, the choice before us is not merely whether to accelerate or decelerate the technology. We can choose what type of regulations are adopted, and some options are much better than others.
We (the AI Safety community/ generally alignment-concerned people/ EAs) almost definitely can't choose what type of regulations are adopted. If we're very lucky/ dedicated we might be able to get a place at the table. Everyone else at the table will be members of slightly, or very, misaligned interest groups who we have to compromise with.
Various stripes of "Neo-Luddite" and AI-x-risk people have different concerns, but this is how political alliances work. You get at the table and work out what you have in common. We can try to take a leadership role in this alliance, with safety/ alignment as our bottom line- we'll probably be a smaller interest group than the growing ranks of newly unemployed creatives, but we could be more professionalised and aware of how to enact political change.
If we could persuade an important neo-Luddite 'KOL' to share our concerns about x-risk and alignment, this could make them a really valuable ally. This isn't too unrealistic- I suspect that, once you start feeling critical towards AI for taking your livelihood, it's much easier to see it as an existential menace.
- Adopting the wrong AI regulations could lock us into a suboptimal regime that may be difficult or impossible to leave. So we should likely be careful not [to] endorse a proposal because it's "better than nothing" unless it's also literally the only chance we get to delay AI.
Expecting anything close to optimal regulation in the current national/ international order on the first shot is surely folly. We should endorse any proposal that is "better than nothing" while factoring potential suboptimal regime shifts into our equations.
I'm not sure if it's better or worse that the longtermist funder is the target of oncoming hate. I think it means that the 'all those nice EAs stopping malaria and giving what they can' narrative should remain positive, while the 'crazy tech billionaire giving his money to stop an AI apocalypse' narrative will be more negative, but quite distinct from the former.
If it were the other way around, and SBF had been the global poverty guy, that probably would have spawned an interesting societal reflection about consequentialism vs deontology. As it is, longtermism/ AI is too niche for it to be generally seen as altruistic rather than a techie pet project to most people, though.
I'd say that, in reality, open borders do require action by the state; just like deregulation, it's something that is often portrayed as 'inaction', but actually ends up quite complex in practice. The EU/ Schengen zone, for example, needs to harmonise residency policies and external borders, develop cross-border policing and justice coordination between nations, harmonise workers' rights and healthcare, all without a common language or a common defence force. Especially as most laws are designed for a world with borders, you would need to change a lot to implement open borders. Of course, you could just completely scrap the border police, visas, and any border checks and see what happens, but I doubt that anyone is seriously suggesting that.
I'm not arguing that we should always invoke a strict precautionary principle based on the status quo, although a mild 'Chesterton's Fence' precautionary principle until we understand the facts on the ground is always prudent. Either way, any change we want to make or campaign for will be marginal, based on a country's specific circumstances (imagine Canada vs. Israel). I presume you agree that it's a bit ridiculous to have a hard border between the US and Canada, but I presume you wouldn't recommend that Israel opens her gates freely to the Arab world.
As for the 'policy paralysis' idea, any policy I would suggest or campaign for would be at a far, far smaller scale than open borders. This is both for practical reasons, and out of a precautionary principle. I think it would probably be more ethical if the UK spent 2+% of its budget on foreign aid, for example, but I think that's both politically impossible and could possibly have adverse consequences (if we cut other parts of the budget), but I've contributed to an (unsuccessful) campaign to keep the aid budget from going down from 0.7%, which I'm very confident is the ethically superior choice, and whose adverse consequences would be much smaller.
With migration, we all have a basic understanding of how migration can work and how it can cause harm, therefore any intervention I'd propose would try to harness these benefits and mitigate the harm based on this model. I might dedicate some time or effort to loosening restrictions concerning a certain population (I would be in favour of post-Brexit free movement to the UK by Aussies and Kiwis, for example), but I might also support restricting certain kinds of migration. I've read Caplan's book and a lot of migration literature, and while I'm generally pro- migration at the margins, I don't think we have anything like good evidence that open borders work, largely because all the evidence is theoretical and/ or based on controlled migration (or migration within a group of similar income countries etc.).
Great review, I agree very strongly with the America-centric nature of the book being annoying and misleading, but I have a few niggling points:
- "Do more populous countries have greater growth in the long run? If so, this points us in the direction of open borders." I think this is true, that populous countries have greater growth on the whole. But this doesn't seem to point to open borders. I think there is a selection effect whereby only countries with a particularly strong system of governance don't split up into other countries, and it's the strong governance that creates growth. And some large nations don't even have open borders between regions; it's actually easier to move from rural Poland to Paris for work, and benefit from public services there, than it is to move from rural Hunan to Shanghai.
- "There are various arguments related to longtermism that Caplan didn’t use. The downsides of immigration (higher crime, perhaps draining the government’s budget) are temporary but the upsides (higher economic growth) bear their fruit over centuries and will likely affect billions of future people." I disagree with this, connected to reasons you mention later. The downsides can continue, even accelerate, for a good few generations, and then become fundamentally unpredictable; in France, for example, children of immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and be unemployed than 1st gen immigrants. Muslim migrants are less likely to want to assimilate to European countries than they used to be; a 2nd gen Muslim woman in Bradford is far more likely now to wear a Burqa than a 1st gen woman was 20 or 30 years ago, for example. For most people concerned about immigration, it's the fact that their country (imagine Ukraine/ England/ Tibet/ Israel/ Luxembourg) won't be their country anymore in a few decades (or centuries) that worries them. Tibetans have seen the number of Han Chinese in their nation rapidly increasing over the past 50 years, and they reasonably fear that once Tibet is 60-70% Han, they'll either have to assimilate or be reduced to something akin to Aboriginals on reservations. Similarly, the theme of Soumission by Houellebecq is arguing something similar for France; if the rate of Islamic immigration continues to increase, then it's possible that within a few decades an Islamist candidate could start implementing Islamic law within a European country (as we see regionally already, with divorce courts). You can only imagine if Israel were to allow open borders with her neighbours... This is to say that negative impacts of open borders may not be temporary, and could affect the mid-to-long-term identity, culture, norms and stability of a nation. It's hard to make concrete predictions, but I'm tempted to predict that low-immigration, high-GDP countries (or countries with very selective migration, like Switzerland) will be more politically stable in the coming few decades. Paul Collier explains this dilemma well in his book, Exodus.
- "The countries that are the closest to having open borders are the Gulf states; they have many migrant workers from countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka." This seems the strangest line of the review. Depending on your definition, I'd say that the Gulf States have the opposite of open borders. They previously had targeted immigration policies allowing other Arabs from the MENA region to work there, then they caused too many social problems, so the Gulf countries threw them all out, and invited targeted immigration from a few specific poor countries (with people who didn't speak Arabic, and therefore wouldn't get involved in local politics). There is actually a decent amount of social mobility in these countries (a strangely high proportion of my friends are Gulf-state Indians based in Europe), so I wouldn't be too worried about long-term racial segregation. If you see this story of poor South Asians taken out of poverty by working in the gulf, the Gulf States are a strong argument for a very 'non-open borders' way of doing mass immigration: inviting large numbers of migrants to come to a country on guest worker schemes, with very limited rights. Although these migrants have no social support, and can be thrown out on the whim of the recipient country, they can make loads of money compared to back home. I actually think this might be a really good idea, and this is also similar to what Chinese cities do with domestic migration, which avoids parts of Beijing and Shanghai turning into huge shantytowns. However, as you mention, having a 'second-class' population sits poorly with European norms and sensibilities.
I don't think your claim that 'the intervention is closed borders' is quite right. The status quo is differing levels of restriction of movement between regions and nations that have developed as a result of long historical processes. As the EU demonstrates, it can be as difficult to manage (relatively) open borders as it is to manage (relatively) closed borders. The status quo is that countries and regions choose different levels of migration, and different kinds of migration, to suit their values and needs, therefore the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, China, the Gulf Countries and Australia have all developed hugely different migration policies, while all remaining largely successful as nations over the last few decades.
Arguing for '100% closed vs. 100% open borders' gets very abstract and it's difficult to argue from the facts rather than ideology, because fully open or closed borders are so rare. Although it can be useful to try and nudge the Overton window, the intervention is always going to be a marginal shift in the status quo, but even then, we should be humble about the downsides of marginal shifts either way.