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If one believes that unaligned AGI is a significant problem (>10% chance of leading to catastrophe), speeding up public progress towards AGI is obviously bad.
What if one simultaneously believes that our current trajectory without AGI has a higher (>11%) chance of leading to catastrophe? Social unrest and polarization are rising, deaths of despair are rising, the largest war in Europe since WW2 was just launched, the economy and the paradigm of globalization are faltering. Add nuclear proliferation, the chance of nuclear terrorism, and the ability to make deadly bioweapons becoming more widespread.
I might prefer to take my chances with AGI than to risk the alternative...
"It's not the end of the world... but you can see it from here."
The ChatGPT impressiveness we are witnessing is calculated in real-time using relatively little hardware. Somewhere behind the scenes, all kinds of people and organizations are messing with ChatGPT+++. Striking gold, hitting "true intelligence", might take another decade, or two, or three, or hundred. It might happen in a month. Or tomorrow. Or in a second. AI-go-FOOM could happen every moment and it's only becoming more likely.
The French revolution and the subsequent devastating Napoleonic wars happened during the early onset of steam machines and the Industrial Revolution. Barely anybody links these events though, and certainly nobody from that time period that I have read about. To what extent is our current social unrest/inflation/Ukraine war already caused by exponentionally advancing technology?
It's literally a semantical discussion. There is no true right or wrong here. If you want to use the word "male" to describe those born with male genitals only, excluding trans men - that's a valid definition. A lot of trans men want to be seen as male, and including them is a valid definition as well. IMHO, the latter definition is kinder.
IMHO, modern medicine is quite limited.
Our body and mind are super complex, and interconnected in a billion ways. Psychological stress can create physical issues. Physical issues can cause psychological stress. Your diet can cause autoimmune problems. Lack of exercise can cause disease. Even things like lack of cold exposure seem to be able to generate massive problems.
We evolved to be suited to a hunter-gatherer environment, where we mostly lived active outdoor lives and always ate fresh food. Then we lived in pre-industrial agrarian societies for thousands of years. Our modern industrial environment is brand new and causes a lot of unexpected new problems.
You mention anxiety, and taking medicine to treat that. Would it be possible to treat your anxiety without medicine? Is your job or something else in your life causing the anxiety, something that a lifestyle change could fix?
I bought a new house last year, and it has an old empty workshop attached. I'd like to 'revive' it, but I've got little "workshop-experience".
In preparation, I bought some books on woodworking and pottery. The woodworking books are very traditionally masculine. Men! Chest hair! Beer! BBQ!
But the book on pottery is quite feminine. Bright photos, soft colors, everything is demonstrated by a female Instagram influencer.
That doesn't matter in the slightest to me. I don't think my interest in pottery has any relationship to my gender. I don't feel less manly for it. I like making physical objects with my own hands and that's a human trait, not a gendered trait.
You describe "female-attired trans women who write great Rust code" as worthy of being its own separate gender. Why? Why can't (trans) women who write great code just be... women? Is it impossible to simultaneously be defined as a woman and to be able to write great code? That feels sexist and backwards to me.
IMHO, behaviours, skills and hobbies don't define your gender. Your genitals do.
People born with male genitals are male - even if they like to wear dresses and do ballet.
People born with female genitals are female - even if they wear pants and write great code.
Trans women often want to be recognized as female - even if they are "demisexual" (people who want a strong emotional connection before they can feel sexual attraction) and write great Rust code.
And trans men often want to be recognized as male - despite [stereotypical female activity].
Last but not least - aren't sexuality and gender completely detached? Why should a gay man be any less of a man?
From a completely different angle: Nietzsche.
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value.
I love this text and come back to it often. Isn't it true for everything? Reality is infinitely complex - the only way we can talk about it is by making abstractions that are very distant from reality as it 'really' is. Everything can be "zoomed in" upon and labeled with an infinite, expanding dictionary.
I just call something a "plank", but a carpenter will know exactly from what tree it has come, how old it is, and what varnishes it has received.
I talk about my "fingers", but a doctor knows the Latin names for all bones and tendons there.
I notice "electral wires", an electrician says all kinds of complicated stuff about volts and amperes and types of wirings and grounding etcetera.
When you delve into any subject, you will notice new distinctions, and gain new vocabulary to describe these distinctions. That's very helpful in many subjects!
But do you want that with humans? Do you like it when somebody starts dividing up humans in "alphas" and "betas"? Should Facebook display your BMI? Do you want to make the near infinite depth of a human - of a mind, of a personality, of a complex genome, the unique set of things they've learned from their culture, their family and their friends - something that is easily legible to everyone? Something that ought to be legible?
How we ought to behave, how we want to behave, studying humans and cultures, finding new norms for relationships and sex appropriate to the 21st century - these are fascinating subjects! They are worthy of attention, and I could understand the necessity to develop a deeper vocabulary to study them in detail.
But I don't think creating some new boxes to fit people into, and demanding that special physical spaces are created for them, and making teens very confused about what box they ought to be in, is very helpful...
I'm from the Netherlands. We've always had fairly laid back attitudes towards gender. When I grew up, I didn't have hyperfeminine cheerleaders and hypermasculine bodybuilders in my class. Lots of girls wore pants and other 'non-feminine' clothing, and/or had short hair.
Of course, there was a division in male/female, which 99% of the time, didn't matter. But things like showers and changing rooms were clearly separated between boys and girls.
I notice that this post is a bit frustrating to me, because it feels regressive.
But if society can go from 3 rainbow colors to 7 we can probably add at least a few genders as well. As soon as new categories become common knowledge people will shape themselves to match them
I grew up with two clear genders and infinite variation within those genders, and a general attitude against putting people in 'boxes'. It allows for individuality. I don't want to lose that variation and individuality and have it replaced by five or seven 'genders' which all have their own prescribed behavior, clothing, restroom and politics.
I'm totally in favor of self-expression. If you're male and you want be emotionally sensitive, wear dresses and make-up and be quite flamboyant - that's fine. It's pretty close to Jack Sparrow! But that doesn't mean you've got to invent all kinds of special labels for it, and be 'confused' about your 'identity', or find a tribe to imitate.
What is actually being proposed is more like a 20 year pause in AI research to let MIRI solve alignment
Isn't that insanely unrealistic? Both A.) unrealistic in achieving that pause, and B.) just letting MIRI solve alignment in 20 years? MIRI was formed back in 2000, 22 years ago, and now global AI research has to pause for two decades so MIRI can write more papers about Pearlian Causal Inference?
Ok, really, all of this has already been answered. These are standard misconceptions about alignment, probably based on some kind of antropomorphic reasoning.
Where? By whom?
Why would you possibly make this assumption?
Why would you possibly assume that deep, intelligent understanding of life, consciousness, joy and suffering has 0 correlation with caring about these things?
All of the assumptions we make about biological, evolved life do not apply to AI.
But where do valid assumptions about AI come from? Sure, I might be antropomorphizing AI a bit. I am hopeful that we, biological living humans, do share some common ground with non-biological AGI. But you're forcefully stating the contrary and claiming that it's all so obvious, but why is that? How do you know that any AGI is blindly bound to a simple utility function that cannot be updated by understanding the world around it?
A paperclip-maximizer, or other AI with some simple maximization function, is not going to care if it's born in a nice world or a not-nice world. It's still going to want to maximize paperclips, and turns us all into paperclips, if it can get away with it.
Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous and incompatible with all human preferences?
An AI, by default, does not have mirror neurons or care about us at all.
If you learn that there is alien life on Io, which has emerged and evolved separately and functions in unique ways distinct from life on earth, but it also has consciousness and the ability to experience pleasure and the ability to suffer deeply - do you care? At all?
An AI, by default, has a fixed utility function and is not interesting in "learning" new values based on observing our behavior.
Why? Us silly evolved monkeys try and modify our own utility functions all the time - why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI with an IQ beyond 3000 be a slave to a fixed utility function, uninterested in learning new values?
Why would we create a superintellingence that would want things that don't perfectly align with our interests?
Why do parents have children that are not perfect slaves but have their own independent ambitions? Why do we want freethinking partners that don't obey our every wish? Why do you even think you can precisely determine the desires of a being that surpasses us in both knowledge and intelligence?
The safe thing to do is not to create any AGIs at all until we are very certain we can do it safely, in a way that is perfectly aligned with human values.
Would the world have been a safer place if we had not invented nuclear weapons in WWII? If conventional warfare would still have been a powerful tool in the hands of autocrats around the world?
Why would a hyperintelligent, recursively self-improved AI, one that is capable of escaping the AI Box by convincing the keeper to let him free, which the AI is capable of because of his deep understanding of human preferences and functioning, necessarily destroy the world in a way that is 100% disastrous and incompatible with all human preferences?
I fully agree that there is a big risk of both massive damage to human preferences, and even the extinction of all life, so AI Alignment work is highly valuable, but why is "unproductive destruction of the entire world" so certain?
I fully agree here. This is a very valuable post.
After all, if we agree that there is a set of values, a set of behaviors that we would want to a superintelligence acting in humanity's best interest to have, why wouldn't I myself choose to hold these values and do these behaviors?
I know Jordan Peterson is quite the controversial figure, but that's some core advice of his. Aim for the highest, the best you could possibly aim for - what else is there to do? We're bounded by death, you've got nothing to lose, and everything to gain - why not aim for the highest?
What’s quite interesting is that, if you do what it is that you’re called upon to do—which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane, daily, selfish, impulsive issues that might upset you—and you attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with that which you might hold in the highest regard, whatever that might be—to aim high, and to make that important above all else in your life—that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence, like nothing else can. I truly believe that’s the most practical advice that you could possibly receive.
I sincerely believe there is nothing more worthwhile for us humans to do than that: aim for the best, for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for the world, in the now, in the short term, and in the long term. It seems... obvious? And if we truly work that out and act on it, wouldn't that help convince an AGI to do the same?
(You might be interested in this recent post of mine)
AI Boxing is often proposed as a solution. But of course, a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to convince their human keepers to let them go free. How can an AI do so? By having a deep understanding of human goals and preferences.
Will an IQ 1500 being with a deep understanding of human goals and preferences perfectly mislead human keepers, break out and... turn the universe into paperclips?
I can certainly understand that that being might have goals at odds with our goals, goals that are completely beyond our understanding, like the human highway versus the anthill. These could plausibly be called "valid", and I don't know how to oppose the "valid" goals of a more intelligent and capable being. But that's a different worry from letting the universe get turned into paperclips.
Good to hear the event went smoothly, and thanks for sharing your experience!
I'm not sure yet how we should decide when to stop requiring [masks], and am open to suggestions!
How about organizing an event without masks (and/or other COVID measures)? Allow people to choose whether to go the maskless/measureless event or the masked/'protected' event (or both!). Compare attendance, and change the frequency of each category of events depending on that. Perhaps both events are roughly evenly popular, perhaps maskless is much more popular, perhaps 'protected' is much more popular. If you do this experiment, let me know the results!
Looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation!
But as far as I know, none of them have made it a focus of theirs to fight egregores, defeat hypercreatures
Egregore is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.
I do know one writer who talks a lot about demons and entities from beyond the void. It's you, and it happens in some of, IMHO, the most valuable pieces you've written.
I worry that Caplan is eliding the important summoner/demon distinction. This is an easy distinction to miss, since demons often kill their summoners and wear their skin.
That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch, Gnon, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty high priority.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It seems pretty obvious to me:
1.) We humans aren't conscious of all the consequences of our actions, both because the subconscious has an important role in making our choices, and because our world is enormously complex so all consequences are practically unknowable
2.) In a society of billions, these unforeseeable forces combine in something larger than humans can explicitly plan and guide: "the economy", "culture", "the market", "democracy", "memes"
3.) These larger-than-human-systems prefer some goals that are often antithetical to human preferences. You describe it perfectly in Seeing Like A State: the state has a desire for legibility and 'rationally planned' designs that are at odds with the human desire for organic design. And thus, the 'supersystem' isn't merely an aggregate of human desires, it has some qualities of being an actual separate agent with its own preferences. It could be called a hypercreature, an egregore, Moloch or the devil.
4.) We keep hurting ourselves, again and again and again. We keep falling into multipolar traps, we keep choosing for Moloch, which you describe as "the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war". And thus, we have not accomplished for ourselves what we want to do with AI. Humanity is not aligned with human preferences. This is what failure looks like.
5.) If we fail to align humanity, if we fail to align major governments and corporations, if we don't even recognize our own misalignment, how big is the chance that we will manage to align AGI with human preferences? Total nuclear war has not been avoided by nuclear technicians who kept perfect control over their inventions - it has been avoided by the fact that the US government in 1945 was reasonably aligned with human preferences. I dare not imagine the world where the Nazi government was the first to get its hands on nuclear weapons.
And thus, I think it would be very, very valuable to put a lot more effort into 'aligning humanity'. How do we keep our institutions and our grassroots movement "free from Moloch"? How do we get and spread reliable, non-corrupt authorities and politicians? How do we stop falling into multipolar traps, how do we stop suffering unnecessarily?
Best case scenario: this effort will turn out to be vital to AGI alignment
Worst case scenario: this effort will turn out to be irrelevant to AGI alignment, but in the meanwhile, we made the world a much better place
You are 200% right. This is the problem we have to solve, not making sure a superintelligent AI can be technologically instructed to serve the whims of its creators.
Have you read Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch? It's brilliant, and is quite adjacent to the claims you are making. It has received too little follow-up in this community.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
(...)
I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.
(...)
But the current rulers of the universe – call them what you want, Moloch, Gnon, whatever – want us dead, and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. And since I’m not down with that plan, I think defeating them and taking their place is a pretty high priority.
The opposite of a trap is a garden. The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.
(...)
The Universe is a dark and foreboding place, suspended between alien deities. Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”
But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.
There are many gods, but this one is ours.
I must say that I am very surprised. I was completely not worried about Russia supporting the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia supporting Russian-speaking regions full of Russians who seem to not want to be a part of Ukraine - that makes a lot of sense in my head.
I hadn't expected Russia to attack the rest of Ukraine. I don't see what there is to gain for them there?
I'm watching the official Dutch news (NOS) and they claim Russian tanks and troops are rolling into Ukraine from all sides, from the east, from Belarussia and from Crimae. There is some evidence for Russian tanks and troops indeed crossing some borders, but I've not seen evidence of land units deeper into Ukraine, beyond the easternmost regions where conflict has been raging for years?
I can imagine things being better than expected if reports of Russian land units in western Ukrain are exaggerated. But if Russia is truly waging war against the entire Ukrainian state, I expect things to turn out quite badly. This will create massive tensions in Europe. Russia might be completely cut off from the West, which also means 'we' Europeans can't rely on Russian gas anymore. Energy prices are already very high.
This could cause all kinds of unforeseen consequences, like how COVID went from a pandemic to BLM riots in a couple of months.
Update, 5 hours later: more pieces of evidence have emerged, indicating that land units are actually advancing deeper into Ukraine. This is bad.
Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Plant-based diets also require lots of intense agriculture, which destroys local ecosystems and inadvertently kills millions of mice, other small vertebrates and insects.
It doesn't seem correct to disregard all of these as "massively outweighed by career/donation choices". Nor does it seem wise to pick one of these areas (animal suffering in meat production) and treat it as the one and only lifestyle choice a True Rational ought to make.
The problems mentioned above are gigantic. How do we provide everybody with comfortable, affordable existences without destroying the climate or exploiting workers anywhere? How do we produce food for billions of humans without destroying ecosystems and harming other living beings, even indirectly and inadvertently? We'll get there eventually, and we're improving every year. But converting to vegetarianism for purposes of virtue signalling, doesn't seem to be very helpful there.
Of course, if you truly reduce or stop your meat consumption for legitimate reasons of harm reduction, that's awesome and I'll applaud anybody for that. Just as reducing your energy consumption and looking for products produced by companies that treat their employees responsibly are probably also virtuous actions. But they shouldn't become litmus tests.
Kindness and empathy on a local scale seems much more effective to me than Effective-Altruism-style 'purchasing endless mosquito nets'. Good post and thank you. I hope your Christmas is awesome, and I wish you an amazing 2022!
I hope you'll consider, and think you'll enjoy this article, Killing the Ants: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAGPk4EXaXSkKWY9a/killing-the-ants
I still think about it regularly. The author carefully considers various animal-killing actions. Is it bad to exterminate ants that invade our house? It is bad to kill ants when we walk across grass? Every time we wash our bed sheets, we kill dust-mites. Is that morally significant?
In some aspects, our world is a hell. Everything has a cost, and often a cost that is quickly translated into suffering and death. In plant production, field mice are crushed by tractors. Combines destroy bird's nests. Pesticides kill billions of insects. Every product we buy, every bit of electricty we spend, every kilometer we drive in our cars, we cause harm and suffering.
I support vegetarians and vegans. When they eat at my home, I cook a vegetarian meal. But these actions and pledges seem excessive. Not eating where animals are being eaten seems excessive. Not being able to eat a Thanksgiving meal without crying, an hour in the basement and hurting your partner's mother seems excessive.
You own electronics. You probably drove to the house of your partner's parents. You're probably not spending all your time working and donating the money to Effective Altruism. Would you want to be 'attacked' for that? Would you want people to not be able to eat with you because you own a smartphone and/or PC? Would you want people to not be able to socialize with you because you regularly drive to places, or because you benefit from people and products that have been driving to places? You would harm less beings if you wouldn't own and do these things... Where to draw the line?
It's good to want to improve the world. It's good to want to relieve suffering, and to improve well-being. But the world is complex. Your actions and non-actions have infinite consequences and we know so little about them.
I think lab-grown meat is great. We're getting closer to mass producing it every day. If it's fully developed, if it's healthy, if it's tasty, if it's affordable - 'real' meat will be out of the grocery store in no time. And then it'll get very tightly regulated. Aim for revolutions like that one. Make the world a better place, permanently, for everybody, instead of starting conflicts and polarizing ourselves even further for little gain.
Small error: In 'Then two regions extended it to the unvaccinated as well', unvaccinated has to be 'vaccinated' :)
Standard railways have a track gauge of less than 1.5 meters. Back in the 1930s, Hitler planned the Breitspurbahn, broad-gauge railway with a track gauge of 3 meters. No dramatic new tech required, but it would seriously scale up transportation by rail of people and goods. Hitler planned to connect many European cities with them.
None of that happened. We're still using the old track gauge, and European connections are relatively mediocre. But we've landed on the Moon and we've all got smartphones in our pockets.
Planned developments with relatively straightforward tech regularly don't happen. Surprising new tech regularly disrupts all plans.
I'm not saying the future is completely unknowable, but your three requirements don't seem too matter very much when you look for similar scenarios in history.
Can we place bets?
I've read pretty much all of Zvi's blogs since then, and he doesn't seem to have changed his mind. The rise in cases, especially the rise in hospitalizations, seems mostly confined to the unvaccinated. That's not really relevant to gatherings of only vaccinated people.
What exactly would the risks be of the event with the rules I proposed?
You could just host the event, requiring vaccination for adults and full access for all children below the FDA minimum? Perhaps you could do a rapid test on the unvaccinated children.
I strongly endorse Zvi's encouragement to start living your life again.
Thanks for the detailed analysis! I massively disagree with your conclusions though. Your claim:
Relative to no vaccination, reduces transmission by 0.5x and reception by 0.17, for a total of 0.08x.
I'm seeing transmission x0.35 (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people-are-less-likely-spread-covid-new-research-finds-n1280583) and x0.11 for reception (https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/pages/science_updates_7_may_2021.pdf), for a total of x0.0385.
Combined with the protection against serious illness, this pretty much makes COVID a non-issue for vaccinated people, especially the young and healthy. Yes, some risks remain, but car accidents and the consequences of processed food, sugary drinks, a lack of exercise all seem much, much more relevant for a majority of the population.
You do count the 'costs' of getting a vaccine, but not the costs of getting a mask, because "everybody already has one". The costs of always having a mask with you (and the costs of getting rejected because you forgot your mask), and especially the costs of wearing a mask (for long periods of time, while exercising and socializing), seem much higher than the costs of 'being vaccinated'.
I live in the Netherlands, and we have an easy, reliable app on our smartphones with a QR code related to our vaccination status. This makes "check vaccine cards" pretty painless.
"Not allowing food" seems very costly as well. You could skip it for 1 - 1.5 hours of dancing, but if it's a longer event and people are socializing, food seems quite valuable.
For COVID, I would solely focus on vaccines. Get everybody vaccinated, done, allow normal life to resume. Removing food and wearing facemasks all the time seems way too costly.
Air purifiers / ventilation / a focus on air quality do seem worth it, but not just for COVID. It helps prevent the spread of other diseases as well, and good air is pleasant and healthy.
Great reminder to focus on complex truth, instead of a simple safe/unsafe options.
Very interesting story about the normalization of 'child isolation'.
But how dare you dislike Dune!
I'm not sure why your Venn diagram doesn't have "sentient" lying entirely within "conscious"
Noggin-scratcher made a much improved version of my diagram that does exactly what you suggest: https://i.imgur.com/5yAhnJg.png
I prefer that one!
Why is sapience without sentience or self-awareness marked "impossible"?
In my opinion, a sapient entity is an entity that posseses something like "general purpose intelligence". Wouldn't such an entity quickly realize that it's a distinct entity? That would mean it's self-aware.
Maybe it doesn't realize it at first, but when you communicate with it, you should be able to "make it self-aware" quite quickly. If it's unable to become self-aware, I wouldn't assign the entity "human level sapience".
I do agree that I can imagine a very intelligent machine that is completely unable to gather information about its own status. Edge case!
It may be that sentience is literally just the intersection of self-awareness and consciousness
Using the definition proposed in the article, I can easily imagine an entity with an "internal observer" which has full knowledge of its own conditions, still without the ability to feel pleasure or pain.
Consciousness may be nothing more or less than self-awareness.
How would you define self-awareness?
I really like your version of the Venn diagram! I've never seen one like that before, but it makes a lot of sense.
I could indeed imagine an intelligent being that is somehow totally bared from self-knowledge, but that is a very flawed form of sapience, in my opinion.
The European wars of religion included among others the Thirty Years War which killed one-third of the German population. It's mentioned as a period that caused a lot of human suffering, but not as something that seriously harmed the long-term development of Europe. To the contrary, this happened during Europe's ascendancy as a global superpower. Crisis, war and mismanagement is certain in nearly all periods of human history. They're not sufficient causes of long-term decline.
"Full", "empty" and "population pressure" are very relative terms. New technological inventions, new systems of agriculture and new organizational forms constantly change the balance. That makes it very hard to assess the actually "felt" pressure at a certain moment in time.
I've heard that some coal was used by Romans, but also that it was always a very niche activity. Do you have sources about coal being used by blacksmiths 'often'?
As the title states, I don't think "progress" existed (exists?). Not as a monolithic thing that simultaneously boosts population size, population density, economic activity, individual well-being, intellectual development, real-world power/dominance/influence and cultural legacy. Think of the internet today. 20/25 years ago, it was a niche activity for highly educated, relatively wealthy tech experts. Nowadays, it's used by the masses. The average IQ of the average internet user has probably declined significantly. Better technology and years of development have given us new possibilities; tech monopolies and bad habits like declining attention spans and polarization have made other things worse. The internet of 2021 is not superior or inferior to the internet of 2001 in all aspects.
I believe the Europe of 1000AD was significantly more densely populated than the Roman Europe of 1AD (or 300AD). This led to fuel scarcity and an enormous decline in fuel-intensive luxuries like bathhouses, concrete, bricks and roof tiles. I also believe an ever increasing population pressure (and probably declining standards of living for many individuals!) was a vital trigger for the Industrial Revolution many centuries later. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That makes it really difficult to talk about states being 'sophisticated".
Thanks a lot!
- In regards to your last point: I'll certainly concede that naval mobility must have been very helpful to the Greeks. As a Dutch person, I'm well aware how helpful sea-based trade was, historically :)
- In regards to the third point: are you aware that early farmers were shorter and had significantly worse health than hunter-gatherers? I don't believe it was an amazing new invention, it's a thing desperate, hungry people do when 'wild' food resources run out. It allowed for sedentary life and higher population densities, and in the very long term that's crucial for 'civilization', but it was not an improvement for the individual.
I believe that trade-off didn't happen merely at the start, when the first hunter-gatherers switched to agriculture, I believe that trade-off to have increased gradually as agriculture became more intensive.
I'm going to be deeply unfair here and it's easy to criticize these emotional arguments, but look at this drawing of a Bronze Age farm versus Victorian London homes, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Victorian England had way more advanced technology, and as an empire, it had very impressive stats. But I doubt I wanted to live there as a middle-class or poor individual. (Not saying the Bronze Age was awesome, but day-to-day life may have been more tolerable).
I think Ancient Egypt must have been similarly terrible for individuals. Long hours of hard physical farm labor in dense, crowded villages. It creates mighty nations, but I doubt it was good for individual well-being. Consider Zvi's writings on slack.
Make sure that under normal conditions you have Slack. Value it. Guard it. Spend it only when Worth It. If you lose it, fight to get it back. This provides motivation for fighting things Out To Get You, lest you let them eat your Slack.
I believe our ancestors were human beings just like you and I. They valued slack as well. And they guarded it as well. There is a lot you can do to optimize crop yield. They weren't desperate for technology and knowledge, they were desperate for time and energy. They didn't plough and do all the other requirements of the most intensive agriculture unless absolutely forced to by necessity - by population pressure and land scarcity.
Think of COVID. (Disclaimer: The Netherlands has sky-high infections, overwhelmed ICs and a relatively low amount of vaccinations) We act like we're doing 'our best', like we really care, and like we really want to end this pandemic. But we don't. 99% of infected people survive, only the elderly have a serious chance of dying, so a lot of people act like it's pretty much a flu and are not going to put their lives on hold for that.
I'm 100% certain that if a way more deadly disease entered the Netherlands, we suddenly were able to take more drastic measures and actually stop that virus in its tracks. Which means we currently are not doing our best at fighting the pandemic according to our full pandemic-fighting potential, we are doing our best according to "we consider this to be a very serious flu"-potential.
I don't think our ancestors were 24/7 operating on their actual this is our crop yield if we put all our effort in it potential. They were guarding their slack and trying to enjoy their lives, and they were not using all potential agricultural technology and knowledge. Ester Boserup has countless examples of this. German colonists in Argentina quickly dropped their intensive agriculture because they weren't so land-constrained there. Sparsely populated Indonesian islands had extensive contact with other densely populated islands without adopting their agricultural technology, only doing so when their own population grew. - In regards to your first point: consider the text above. I don't believe humans tried to optimize for population density, because it decreased their quality of life. I agree that Europe could have been become a lot denser, a lot quicker if people were rationally aiming for that, but they weren't.
- Sure, if it was just concrete that disappeared, I could believe that. But simultaneously, nearly all fuel-intensive luxuries disappear. And a lot of them, including concrete, suddenly reappear when new cheap fuel sources become available. That makes it really plausible to me that fuel is indeed the crucial element.
Sure! I don't think the fact that Dutch history books end in the Netherlands is good evidence that the Netherlands is the most significant place in world history :)
But Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Classical Rome do seem to be of global significance. Greek ideas and inventions, from Aristotle to the Antikythera mechanism, do seem to be lasting and unique. And a bit harsher: the Greeks conquered Egypt. The Romans conquered Greece and Egypt. The balance of power actually seems to have shifted in that direction.
Thanks for the long reply!
You're describing a lot of local contrasts. The city of Rome vs the provinces. The Western Rome Empire vs the Eastern half. Charlemagne vs the Umayyads. While certainly interesting and worthy of discussion, the trends I try to perceive and explain happen on more of a global level.
Look at the shipwrecks and lead pollution graph or the social development graph from the first article. I'm pretty sure the lead pollution was measured from ice cores in Greenland. It's pollution from all of Europe (and perhaps even more distant), not just pollution in the vicinity of the city of Rome. It was barely existant in 600BC, peaks enormously in the first century AD, and it's at ~10% of its former peak in 600AD.
The social development graph follows the most advanced civilization in either the western or eastern half of Afro-Eurasia. If one culture declines and is taken over by another, it switches. Look at this example of Western maximum settlement sizes:
100 CE: Rome, 1,000,000; 9.36 points
200 CE: Rome, 1,000,000; 9.36 points
300 CE: Rome, 800,000; 7.49 points
400 CE: Rome, 800,000; 7.49 points
500 CE: Constantinople, 450,000; 4.23 points
600 CE: Constantinople, 150,000; 1.41 points
700 CE: Constantinople, 125,000; 1.17 points
800 CE: Baghdad, 175,000; 1.64 points
900 CE: Cordoba, 175,000; 1.64 points
1000 CE: Cordoba, 200,000; 1.87 points
1100 CE: Constantinople, 250,000; 2.34 points
1200 CE: Baghdad, Cairo, Constantinople, 250,000; 2.34 points
1300 CE: Cairo, 400,000; 3.75 points
1400 CE: Cairo, 125,000; 1.17 points
1500 CE: Cairo, 400,000; 3.75 points
1600 CE: Constantinople, 400,000; 3.75 points
1700 CE: London and Constantinople, 600,000; 5.62 points
1800 CE: London, 900,000; 8.43 points
1900 CE: London, 6,600,000; 61.8 points
2000 CE: New York, 16,700,000; 156.37 points
As you suggest, in 800 AD, the author is looking at the Umayyads and not Charlemagne. While they quantatively exceed Europe in that time period, they don't exceed 'peak-Rome' in these statistics.
I'm not trying to say that Rome was inherently awesome and good and virtuous. It's probably true that they were parasitic and exploitative. But it seems that the first century AD certainly was an era of unprecedented economic activity in the West. Trade and pollution and building happened on a huge scale. And this just.... vanished. Of course, there were still large countries and empires, some even bearing some of the titles of the former Roman Empire. There were still cities and economic activity and inventions. But the scale of the first century AD, and a lot of specific Roman practices like concrete, large public bathhouses and the mass use of brick, seems to have completely disappeared until the Industrial Revolution.
Thanks!
In regards to the bucket metaphor: the 'width' is the amount of fertile land available to its inhabitants.
Water only starts 'stacking', going 'up', if it can't go 'down' or 'to the sides' anymore. The walls of a bucket prevent sidewards expansion and force the water level to go up.
Like water, pre-industrial humans had good reasons to avoid 'stacking' as well. Population density forces farmers (which is 90%+ of the population in pre-industrial times) to adopt more labor-intensive practices. So when humans had the chance, they preferred to spread out.
When hunter-gatherers cannot find enough food anymore, and all surrounding lands are exhausted by other hunter-gatherers, 'spreading out' ceases to be a viable method. 'HumanWater' has spread as far as it can, and now it will start to 'stack': hunter-gatherers will adopt slash-and-burn agriculture, raising the potential population density. When slash-and-burn agriculture has spread through the entire 'bucket' (all reachable fertile ground), the next agricultural step is implemented. The easiest one: they don't go from slash-and-burn agriculture to plowing, irrigating, weeding and spreading manure in one generation. It happens step by step, starting with the least labor intensive 'upgrade' and only escalating when forced to.
I hadn't really considering overflowing buckets, but for example, the Greek colonisation might be a good example of that happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation
I love the blog you linked! Funny to see the screengrabs from Game of Thrones, that exact problem bothered me as well :)
Cutting trees on hillsides could easily lead to erosion and the destruction of the soil - agreed. But we're looking at a process that impacted all of Europe, from ~300AD to ~1800AD. I doubt a large cause of that is 'Permanent Roman Forest Destruction'. It seems most plausible to me that the land was used for other purposes.
Thanks! I definitely don't want to imply that the average Roman lived in an awesome villa built out of bricks. But in regards to for example bathhouses:
Small bathhouses, called balneum (plural balnea), might be privately owned, while they were public in the sense that they were open to the populace for a fee. Larger baths called thermae were owned by the state and often covered several city blocks. The largest of these, the Baths of Diocletian, could hold up to 3,000 bathers. Fees for both types of baths were quite reasonable, within the budget of most free Roman males.
While the baths were enjoyed by almost every Roman, there were those who criticized them.
And the army, with its advanced equipment, was open to the average citizen as well. They would not have profited equally from all Roman luxuries, but it seems clear that the Roman civilization as a whole was more prosperous than the Early Medieval one, at least in a lot of material aspects.
I definitely agree that it is wrong to assume that Rome was superior to Medieval Europe in all ways! I think they definitely outclassed Medieval Europe in a lot of aspects - but also that Medieval Europe outclassed Rome in a lot of other aspects.
From the Wikipedia article on the Fall of the Western Roman Empire:
The fall of the Western Roman Empire (also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome), c. 376-476, was the process of decline in the Western Roman Empire in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided into several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the Emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. Increasing pressure from invading barbarians outside Roman culture also contributed greatly to the collapse. The reasons for the collapse are major subjects of the historiography of the ancient world and they inform much modern discourse on state failure.[1][2][3]
In 376, unmanageable numbers of Goths and other non-Roman people, fleeing from the Huns, entered the Empire. In 395, after winning two destructive civil wars, Theodosius I died, leaving a collapsing field army, and the Empire, still plagued by Goths, divided between the warring ministers of his two incapable sons. Further barbarian groups crossed the Rhine and other frontiers and, like the Goths, were not exterminated, expelled or subjugated. The armed forces of the Western Empire became few and ineffective, and despite brief recoveries under able leaders, central rule was never effectively consolidated.
It seems "barbarians" are explicitly mentioned as one of the influential and clear causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The second paragraph in the quote isn't a random paragraph from the article; it's the second paragraph of the article itself. Causes like "the economy / population / competence of the Emperors declined" are pretty vague. They seem more like parts of an interdependent process than clear causes.
I don't want to imply other historians only look at barbarians! But I've never encountered a clear theory that properly explains why the late-Roman / Early Medieval Period is such a unique and devastating period of decline. The short story is "stuff was bad and barbarians invaded", the long story is "here is a long list of everything that went wrong". But things like "they had incompetent Emperors" seem like bad explanations to me: all periods had bad rulers and they didn't cause 1000 years of decline and stagnation.
From Ian Morris' companion book Social Development:
I define “East” and “West” as the societies that have developed from the original core areas in the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and between the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers where agriculture began developing after the end of the Ice Age.
Agreed, there are plenty of historians who argue for an internal decline. Bad leadership, infighting, civil war, corruption, decadence, etcetera. I won't deny they play a role, but personally, I was never strongly convinced by these arguments. The Roman decline is exceptional; incompetent politics and corrupt humans seem to be universal.
These are all good points! They remind me of the "Swiss Cheese Model" in regards to COVID. No single solution is 100% effective, but combine enough layers and there won't be any 'holes' in the strategy anymore.
I fully agree that there is a strong lack of proper communication with the public! If all/most citizens have a decent grasp of the "COVID basics" and best practices, ending the pandemic would be a lot easier.
Except for general information about the virus itself, there should also be some kind of "weather forecast" about the prevalence of the virus in your local vicinity. AFAIK, South Korea was very strong in this regard, at least at the start of the pandemic. Citizens received local reports of how many cases were confirmed in their area.