If you'd prefer to be a bit more restrained and even-handed, amend the hypothetical so that pressing the Yellow Button means you incapacitate each human's reproductive function. This way, all unsuspecting individuals still get to live out the rest of their lives despite their newfound inability to procreate.
I'll just stick with the harsher version, for brevity's sake.
Either way, the result is the same in a generation or four: A planet devoid of humanity, with all else remaining the same.
The kicker: You don't have days/weeks/months to decide whether or not to press the Yellow Button. You must decide right now, as the button is available for a limited time only. With ample time to make the call, loose ends might not end up being so loose, and the lesson being imparted loses some of its punch.
Decision time: If you had to press it now-or-never, would you press it?
Don't abstract the question away; consider it in as concrete terms as possible. Do your best to vividly picture the button positioned within arm's reach at this very moment, and try to predict what your primary impulse towards its availability would be.
In choosing to press it, you will have accomplished the orthodoxly advertised anti-natalist goal of Stopping Procreation. Hooray.
Hooray?
Most of us are sentiocentric anti-natalists, and extend our procreative nays to all non-human animals in proportion to their levels of sentience. If you find yourself at home here, and not here, any apprehension you might feel as it relates to the existence of Yellow Buttons would have to arise from your having already assigned a non-zero probability to a future that sees human action put an end to non-human procreations. Whether this non-zero probability is gleaned wittingly or unwittingly, is besides the point.
The point is to ask; is ducking the Yellow Button actually justifiable?
The question is directed squarely at those who boo all procreation going in. It is not directed at those who yay human procreation, or at anyone who remains apathetic, or overly ambivalent, about the isolated moral status of procreative acts as such. I pose the question to unruffled anti-natalists who subscribe to gradualist or egalitarian versions of sentiocentrism, and no one else.
Without moral reasoners, non-human casualties of the unforgiving harshness of natural habitats are doomed. With moral reasoners, the possibility of a panacea, however small, remains wide open. Based on this, it would seem that pressing the Yellow Button right-here-and-now is absolutely unjustifiable, as it guarantees the discontinuation of moral reasoning itself.
With moral reasoning gone, trillions of organisms will continue bearing the brunt of the natural order for roughly four billion additional years. According to the "Future Of Earth" wiki entry, which is adequately sourced, the grinder will keep on grinding in the interim:
- "Four billion years from now, the increase in the Earth's surface will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, heating the surface enough to melt it. By that point, all life on Earth will be extinct."
I've seen more optimistic estimates promulgated by random commenters. Estimates that narrow the meat-grinder's lifespan down to 800 million more years, at which point carbon dioxide levels are (allegedly) predicted to become too low for photosynthesis. No photosynthesis, no multi-cellular life forms on planet earth, they say. If anyone has some data that backs up this (more merciful) prediction, send it my way. I've asked, but my requests have been ignored, which is telling. So for the time being, the Four Billion Year estimate is where it's at.
Always keep in mind that that's the approximated figure; Four billion years of more-of-the-same. For any hope of a shortened span, moral reasoning is a must. But then, what are movement anti-natalists trying to accomplish in the first place?
Oh that's easy; they're trying
to drive the moon into the earth, or something...
No, they're not. I don't mean what do they purport to want to accomplish during comfy circle-jerks and live hangouts. What is claimed during
cooled gatherings of kindred spirits paints a crooked picture when
"movement" is supposed to be the name of the game. To catch a
glimpse of the real picture, you'd have to look at how the
average representative of the movement interacts with adversarial figures as
well as with the laity.
Get into the habit of asking pointed questions like: How has this particular faction's core "Us vs. Them" standoff been framed? What has it centered on, according to the faction's loudest exponents? Has it centered on demands for the moon to be driven into the earth? Nope. Has it centered on demands for more funding to be allocated towards, say, compensating researchers and ecologists? You know, the types of people who would actually study the empirical ways through which interventionists can reliably decrease, or discontinue, the wild-animal causality count? Nope again. Nothing of the sort.
Might it have centered on... emotional gratification? Now we're talking.
By emotional gratification, I mean that which brings discernably therapeutic rewards to members of the in-group. Dopamine hits generated by the leader's indignant rants impressing upon nearby out-groups the sheer recklessness of what it means to be a human procreator, for instance.
Get into the habit of asking pointed questions like: How has this particular faction's core "Us vs. Them" standoff been framed? What has it centered on, according to the faction's loudest exponents? Has it centered on demands for the moon to be driven into the earth? Nope. Has it centered on demands for more funding to be allocated towards, say, compensating researchers and ecologists? You know, the types of people who would actually study the empirical ways through which interventionists can reliably decrease, or discontinue, the wild-animal causality count? Nope again. Nothing of the sort.
Might it have centered on... emotional gratification? Now we're talking.
By emotional gratification, I mean that which brings discernably therapeutic rewards to members of the in-group. Dopamine hits generated by the leader's indignant rants impressing upon nearby out-groups the sheer recklessness of what it means to be a human procreator, for instance.
Know thyself and you'll have no difficulties recognizing that, in any intellectually free society, iconoclasm makes for a pretty good time. It's not all upside, but whatever drawbacks exist for it today pale in comparison to the drawbacks that existed in the unfree societies of yore. Especially now that paradigm-shattering renegades are "in". Certainly more "in" compared to every other bygone era I've studied. There is no penalty for blithely "crossing the line". Not in the digital age.
Now seems as good a time as any for a reminder to Beware Of Things That Are Fun To Argue:
Curiously, it is the movement types [Inmendham and co.] who devote huge chunks of time and energy to activities that aimless hobbyists should be preoccupied with. Activities that are indeed Fun, and fun for the whole group. Activities that pay no mind to PR and optics. Activities angrily blaming parents for having procreated, or histrionically dissuading prospective parents against procreation. Words like "research" and "hands-on methods" are the movement's four-leaf clovers.
Answering "What does the dispute center on?" will be a breeze for anyone who's paying real attention; most of what self-styled spreaders of anti-natalism say and do centers not on praxis, but on a craving for invective and public self-therapy.
If therapeutic release is the norm –– and it blatantly has been for as long as I can remember –– then the least Inmendham et al can do is drop the "movement" shtick and self-identify as mere hobbyists (the way I tend to). They're here to express themselves, and that's okay, provided they stop making pretenses to the contrary.
Don't get me wrong. Movement anti-natalists openly acknowledge the WAS problem as the Bigger Problem, but this alone is dissatisfactory once you wade through enough of their parent-scolding tirades on the everyday level. My piece on VHEMT from back in 2014 already explains how, if anything, human procreators have inadvertently advanced the interests of wild-animals by decreasing their total populations [read: casualty counts]. They shouldn't be patted on the back for it, but they also shouldn't be screamed at with the implication that they're at fault for the casualties that remain. They're not.
In fairness, Inmendham and co. are hardly the first faction to internalize a favourable view of their own accusatory tones and in-your-face denunciations, where it's not just belligerently self-serving. It serves the greater good, you see, because the out-groups targeted contain an undisclosed number of listeners who are susceptible to fervid deliveries, and who ignore dialectic when it comes in dry and detached forms. The bile and guilt-tripping persists not because of its salutary effects on the in-group, but because it sways certain out-group members better than a calmed approach would!
First of all, any pro-invective stance on persuasion tactics is dubious as hell:
But more importantly, recall that the know-how behind stopping WAS remains in its infancy. Despite
polar opposite worldviews, human procreators are not to blame for the lion's
share of suffering that occurs on this planet, if for no other reason than the
methodological crapshoots plaguing us all. Few within The
Movement are genuinely lost on this fact, even though their ire tells a different story. The ire implies: Had you shared my worldview, you would
have been in a position to solve the know-how puzzle(s) that me and my camp are yet to solve.
When someone persistently gives WAS the "Also a problem" treatment, burying it amidst a flurry of condemnatory zest targeting out-groups, coherence starts to crumble. There is zero reason to believe that procreative deconversions will accomplish what the doxastic-idealist thinks they will.
When someone persistently gives WAS the "Also a problem" treatment, burying it amidst a flurry of condemnatory zest targeting out-groups, coherence starts to crumble. There is zero reason to believe that procreative deconversions will accomplish what the doxastic-idealist thinks they will.
It's like dealing with someone naïve enough to believe that the mathematical realist, by accepting mathematical realism, becomes proficient at advanced calculus –– or any other object-level adeptness for maths. Whereas the former mathematical realist, who now accepts mathematical anti-realism, suddenly finds himself unable to figure out that two plus two equals four. Just as you wouldn't fixate on disabusing the anti-realist of his anti-realism as a way of helping him do basic arithmetic, you should likewise not fixate on disabusing random out-groups of their unexamined abstract beliefs if your larger goal really is WAS prevention.
Good praxis is not measured by popularity gains. You can convince millions of laypersons that they shouldn't reproduce; their not reproducing will not enhance our understandings of how to intervene without potentially worsening things for (a sizable portion of) the very animals we seek to assist. If you truly believe that WAS is the weightier problem, issues of ideological recruitment will go on the backburner.
Recruiting the dimwitted does nothing for WAS, unless you manage to weed out folks who make serious bank and who are willing to fund RTCs that increase the likelihood of bulletproof interventions. But as you surely know, finding dimwits with impressive levels of disposable income is like finding... four-leaf clovers.
Better to recruit one person who wouldn't have had children anyway, but who has wads of cash lying around which he'd be willing to spend on underfunded WAS projects. Faced with a choice between mobilizing that type of person, versus deconverting a surfeit of penniless soon-to-be parents, it's not clear to me how any coherent sentiocentric anti-natalist could opt for the latter. And yet most would.
What I'm getting at is: We keep hearing how there's this Great Urgency to spread the good anti-natal word to any would-be parent who'll listen, but I don't see these asiprational movers-and-shakers grappling with the evaluative mismatch between:
- (1) The prospect of a "Convince the Out-Groups" project being pulled off to perfection.
- (2) Refusing to press the Yellow Button if it popped up right next to you, right now.
Nifty sketches of the same:
The only thing that changes in the two diagrams: The above probability deals with individuated wild-cards that justify procreative avail, while the below probability deals with collectivized wild-cards that justify procreative avail.
Stripped down to a visual aid, it's undeniable that what we are left with is a "Collectivized > Individuated" playfulness with procreative risk. Can this > be something other than distasteful, ethically speaking?
To shun the Yellow Button "For The Animals" is akin to encouraging random couples to procreate "For The Animals". A dalliance with probability theory is all you need to accept the connection.
In the end, we have a set of similarly low probabilities treated dissimilarly by those who are prepared to shun the Yellow Button in the name of WAS stoppage. To make a case for dissimilarity on the ethical front, you'd have to show how the probability sets are themselves dissimilar (i.e. "There is indeed a far greater chance of future generations stopping WAS in unison than there is of any random couple birthing individual moral exemplars"). A quixotic hope, if you ask me.
But had you asked me a few months back, I would have counted myself as another Yellow Button avoider. Despite not being a movement type, I'd have perceived the button as an impediment to The Mission –– with up to four billion years of future casualties hanging in the balance.
Today, I grudgingly acknowledge that the probabilities at play are extremely low, and correspondingly so. I've not only recognized this on the surface level, I've internalized it to the point where I now see a moral symmetry between a willingness to bank on the non-zero probability of random couples birthing moral exemplars, and a willingness to bank on future generations of moral reasoners stopping WAS via collective action.
Let's be frank; the Yellow Button's refuser would be looking at a dauntingly low chance of any WAS-resolve project catching on adequately. While it's true that a number of effective altruists and non-EA ethicists have shown interest in this area as of late, giving rise to a spike in publications and informative studies, it's still a drop in the bucket. When you consider the problem's scope, ongoing lack of coverage in dinosaur media, ongoing lack of coverage in online media, and relative disinterest from the public at large, the nascent works bear a striking resemblance to Sisyphus and the boulder.
Even worse than that is my earlier point about wannabe movers-and-shakers who allege to be the most concerned with WAS –– or who have the gall to assume that they're the only ones concerned with WAS –– but who pay no attention to the works I sourced here (including the many WAS-related works I have a habit of propagating elsewhere).
How could you know they don't?
I am yet to see an Inmendham supporter share such studies on one
of their platforms. They don't read this stuff, just as they don't engage with
lengthy texts of any sort (a subset of them are quick to boast about that).
Which, again, is not to say that their WAS-related concerns are in any way disingenuous,
just utterly useless. Ranting tirelessly about Bastard Nature on YouTube is self-indulgent
iconoclasm at this point (was it ever much else?).
Also of note is that, no matter what is being debated, it is usually the dilettantes running on autopilot who
muster up enough rabblerousing to be noticed by a few bellicose out-groups and spectators. This keeps them busy; engaging opponents of equally low caliber. Studies? Who's got time for that when we can
ferociously type "nature is a meat-grinder!" into comment threads to our hearts' content. Way more effective
than reading up on –– let alone conducting –– the above studies and circulating them.
When you fail to put in the work it takes to memorize and convincingly answer hard-hitting questions from doubters whose misgivings are methodically ordained, rather than evaluatively ordained, you reinforce the idea that WAS-concern is a thing of cranks. Perhaps it is,
in bulk. So far, most who take issue with WAS want to
express their disgust rather than argue compellingly for a practical
way forward. The way forward entails having good PR, which calls for social networking, which means gimmicks, which demands a
level of discipline few will muster.
It's why I still view myself as something of a hobbyist at the end of the day. I do what I can to circulate the relevant studies, but I don't make next-level style sacrifices in the way of gimmickry and networking.
Neat timing. I also brought up the Manichean aspect of online antinatalism (and its impotence) just a few days before you published this piece. It was on the veganvanguard podcast on antinatalism. I think the term "call out culture" has been co-opted by reactionaries, but that's very much what's going on here. That it often masquerades as a genuine concern for suffering shouldn't be too surprising.
ReplyDeleteCalling it a movement is clearly a misnomer. I think it's half spectacle, half support group (when it's not just naive but well-intentioned concern).
Not long before I left the community discord earlier this year, I brought up the yellow button thought experiment. I don't remember if I mentioned it to you? I remember that a couple of them were very quick to say that they would press it, and one stated that not pressing it would mean you are not an antinatalist. I said that I wasn't so sure about that and got some flack for being a "fence sitter". I explained my reasoning, i.e. what you've outlined here, and got them to admit it might be a bad decision to press it. I don't think it changed anything with regards to their "advocacy" though.
In any case, good to see you being active. I'll give the other blogs a read as soon as I can. Hope you've been well.
Wait, so the Yellow Button is a thing? Discussed elsewhere? Do you recall when it was first introduced?
DeleteOr are you just calling it that to match what I've called it here? If not, I'd feel like a douche for presenting an already established thought experiment the way I have, as my brainchild.
I actually searched "The Yellow Button" a couple of months ago just to check if someone had utilized it in this way. Didn't see anything.
I explained my reasoning, i.e. what you've outlined here, and got them to admit it might be a bad decision to press it.
By the end though, I do conclude that a refusal to press it is worse because it gives in to a similar enough hopey-changey mindset that okays procreation on the micro, like with random couples (i.e. vegan couples) appealing to the possibility that their kid will improve the world. As you well know, it's usually done as a way of giving pushback to anti-natalists who tell them they have no business having kids.
So I'm left wondering if you think the probability of a "collective approach to combat WAS" gamble is indeed greater than the probability of the "individuated approach" gamble. If they're roughly the same, I don't see why the yellow button shouldn't be pressed.
Perhaps it's because humans are already causing extinctions, but then again, we're also inching closer to superintelligence, and that opens the door to astronomical suffering (simulated or other).
When I saw "neat timing" I was sure you were going to mention the latest Gary freakout over anti-natalists allegedly not caring about WAS, which is why he's not one and why anti-natalism "doesn't get at the core of the problem". Enter all his commenters mindlessly parroting the same. How many times am I going to have to drop in and say "sentiocentric, there, all fixed" until it sticks?
I swear, a goldfish would've memorized it by now.
/rant
No, I don't think it had been discussed before. It was just an easy thought experiment to come up with, especially for the purposes of getting the efil types to think outside of their usual reductionist, hyper-individualist boxes. We just happened to pick the same color for the button (if I recall correctly). :P
DeleteHonestly, I think there is very little value to the thought experiment outside of this particular context. But if I was to just comment on another possible reason why it shouldn't be pressed, at least from a sentio-AN perspective, it would be that there is a high likelihood of destroying all life as we destroy ourselves (nuclear war, reaching zero point) which is what we are on track for. I think it's significantly more implausible that reason/compassion will prevail in time to avoid these catastrophes and set itself to work on bio-engineering entire ecosystems.
I haven't listened to inmendham in a long while. Again: not surprised. It's not that he can't remember, it's that he can't allow you to exist in the dominance hierarchy he so proudly believes himself to be at the top of. As a result, and perhaps to avoid a nervous breakdown, he will always either ignore you or negate you.
Can you link me to the site/post where you bring up the button? I'd like to see how this went down. More broadly though, I need to get a sense of just how receptive/unreceptive some of these (non-YouTube?) anti-natalists are to outside-the-box problems that magnify the threat of uncertainty (uncertainty for action-directed spins on philosophy).
Delete"I think it's significantly more implausible that reason/compassion will prevail in time to avoid these catastrophes and set itself to work on bio-engineering entire ecosystems."
Path A: Reason prevails and all catastrophes are averted forever. We agree that this is highly unlikely.
Path B: Environmental or nuclear catastrophes bring about the annihilation of all sentient life, and occur before runaway A.I. gets a foot in the door. Your pick for most likely.
Path C: Runaway A.I. gets a foot in the door before all life is annihilated as a result of environmental or nuclear catastrophes. Large-scale suffering simulations start to enter the equation. No going back.
I'm not going to say that Path C is my definitive pick for what's most likely to happen, but I think it's at minimum tied with Path B. For this reason, I wouldn't rule out the Yellow Button in the here and now.
With humans gone, and all their lofty projects discontinued, the following would no longer be on the table: https://foundational-research.org/risks-of-astronomical-future-suffering/
Seems like a giant plus.
But I get it. All paths are too conjectural to warrant strong predictions in any one direction.
It just hammers home how cockamamie it is to believe that we can use "decision procedures" as a way of determining or rank-ordering the performances of moral agents. All we can do is evaluate [actual] outcomes. All that talk from me about "dual-verdicts" goes nowhere the moment an agent has to choose between a large payoff with a low-probability of panning out versus a much smaller payoff with a high-probability of panning out. Hardly an issue of how "ethical" the chooser might be.
Anyway...
"It's not that he can't remember, it's that he can't allow you to exist in the dominance hierarchy"
It doesn't come down to that, because I haven't posted any of my usual reminders in his "yard" for quite some time now. It's not his goldfish memory I'm annoyed with, on this occasion anyway. It's the people who obnoxiously echo his "AN doesn't go far enough" mantras, even though they've been around for long enough and must've seen me pop in from time to time to clarify what's what in detail.
It's bad on YouTube, even worse than you remember it being. I skimmed through 100+ comments on G's last "fuck anti-natalism, go efilism" denunciatory video, and not one of those commenters pointed out that a sentiocentrism/anti-natalism mixture is perfectly coherent. Not a single one, despite the impressively high number of people who commented.
AN/sentiocentrism is as fitting a mixture as the realism/cognitivism two-punch is in metaethics. If a bunch bunch of people who are the most vested in metaethics went around saying "Moral realism doesn't go far enough! I'm a moral cognitivist!" I'd lose my shit repeatedly. If they were considered "the face" of metaethics, there'd be no going back. Well, that's increasingly how it is with procreative ethics on YouTube.
/rant
"Can you link me to the site/post where you bring up the button? I'd like to see how this went down. More broadly though, I need to get a sense of just how receptive/unreceptive some of these (non-YouTube?) anti-natalists are to outside-the-box problems that magnify the threat of uncertainty (uncertainty for action-directed spins on philosophy)."
DeleteIt was on Discord so I don't have the chat logs since I quit the room. They are more or less the same people from YouTube. I only posed the question to 2-3 people that were active in chat at the time. It was also in a fast thinking environment, so not sufficient on its own to draw any broad conclusions. Still, in my experience, they are pretty allergic to uncertainty.
What do you mean by "no going back" in Path C? I'm thinking that for this scenario to be possible, humans would have to be thriving, since A.I cannot maintain itself (at least not yet). So, if I'm seeing this right, humans would have to have evolved to become significantly more cooperative than competitive, since that's the only way to avert the catastrophes we currently face in the first place. If those are the humans that are around in what would be a post-capitalist society, then I wouldn't be too worried about large scale "suffering simulations". What would be the motive if profit no longer predominates over everything else?
Good point on preventing the colonization of another planet. I hadn't thought about that at the time. Fully agree with you re the ridiculousness of rank-ordering the performances of moral agents.
*"It doesn't come down to that, because I haven't posted any of my usual reminders in his "yard" for quite some time now."*
I don't think you need to for it to be the case. We know he hasn't changed and we know he has excluded your ideas from the realm of ideas-worth-being-concerned-with. The reason for this, obviously, is not because your ideas are unworthy. It's because he's not going to risk his dominant position. He has slapped convenient labels on you to reduce you to "that guy who doesn't bring anything to the table except verbosity and confusion". It's his unconscious protecting him.
Consequently, this is how people see you as well, since they more or less idolize inmendham. Trust me, no one had anything good to say about you in that chat room. People who appreciate inmendham's videos are not critical thinkers and they are not fair judges of ideas. They watch because they find relief and comfort in wallowing with him in indignation and outrage. The few people who came across his videos and genuinely wanted to learn more about the world around them (and make it better) have stopped watching him, or at least stopped appreciating him and thinking he's doing something worthwhile.
No going back in Path C means: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96hjj27unJyoZvtcG/an-ai-takeover-thought-experiment
Deletehttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html
Only a few hundred humans (computer scientists, extropians, statesmen) would need to be thriving for a "Roko's Basilisk" like scenario to play out. And it's not clear that global catastrophes of the non-Roko variety are on a shorter timeline. As I recall, most doomsday talk predicts both the A.I and the eco accelerative pace of doom to kick in within the next 5 to 10 decades. Nukes being the least predictable of the big three dooms, needless to say. Nukes are also the threat that's least likely to annihilate human life. If anything, a hot war would just slow down A.I. work.
I've never seen it as a "competitive vs. cooperative" ordeal, by the way. If my views on Population Ethics were more conventional, I would've probably gotten heavily into extropianism and all the other aspects of techno-futurism. It doesn't take a competitive psychology to be captivated by this. Guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky strike me as far more intellectually curious than competitive. The way he writes, it's clear that most of his crew is directly or indirectly involved in this as well.
RE: Gary's flock...
My current position: Brains can fail. At the same time, brains that take an interest in these themes should be salvageable after a few years of failure.
Maybe I'm just having one of those optimistic weeks/months where I wanna see a shakeup. It comes and goes.
"no one had anything good to say about you in that chat room"
The nerve I have to go around pushing the SEP and other philosophical pros increasingly over the years. If they have a problem with anything recent from me, it would have to be that. So it sounds like another case of "Argue The Argument" in slogan form only.
But it's probably about the past, which saw me being abrasive in the heat of Gary's abrasiveness+. It's time for them to get over those ugly old episodes and depersonalize.
Let me clarify. They didn't have anything good to say about you but also nothing bad either. You just don't draw their attention. Or even if you still draw it at times, you quickly lose it. I don't think they have ever been able to build from anything that you've provided them with. Not just the die-hards, but also the moderates; they get confused very quickly by the jargon and the abstractions and they end up taking the path of least resistance.
DeleteI think you could still reach the die-hards if you took an ELI5 explanatory stance but you'd probably have to engage in some good ol' name calling and say "if you think X, you're WRONG" and "if you think Z, you're really fucking STUPID" frequently enough in your videos to keep them engaged.
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ReplyDeleteAh Senescence.. I remember we talked about an Orange button scenario on the discord thing last year? Or a good while ago anyway. Was a very interesting talk if I remember right. I initially said I would dive on an 'end all humans' button, but you argued me out of it if I recall. The yellow button is definitely less attractive to me now. 150 years ago, it might have made sense, but now.. I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, hope you're well and stuff. Great writing ABM.
Bobby Nomates,
Delete"The yellow button is definitely less attractive to me now. 150 years ago, it might have made sense, but now.. I have no idea."
But... it's the other way around, if anything.
150 years ago, humans were technologically impoverished, meaning Runaway AI wasn't a threat the way it is now.
I just spent/wasted precious minutes explaining the difference in the comment thread of Gary's god awful video "covering" this post. I'll just copy/paste part of that comment here, and you can tell me if it nudges you in the other direction:
*
"Actually, I could go further and make the case that betting on the collectivized, intergenerational wild-card is even worse, because in that case, human-led techno-futurism would also remain on the table. This means a non-zero probability of Rogue AI being kept on the futuristic Russian Roulette, thanks to the person who refuses to press the Yellow Button right now, in the name of WAS stoppage. The folks at MIRI have written extensively about the realistic threat of astronomical future suffering being generated by the prospect of Friendly AI morphing into Unfriendly AI.
Seriously, it's beyond time for you [Inmendham] to get out of your autopilot zone and start reading up on the dangers of AI, eternal suffering-simulations, panspermia, Roko's Basilisk, etc. I would suggest starting with any of Brian Tomasik's entries on these threats, all of which are posed by human-advanced technologies.
Brian does actual research on this stuff, as well as on the WAS problem. Imagine that, fellow wildlife-interventionists can disagree with you on this stuff, given just how low the probability of any upside generated by humanity sticking around is, and how non-low the downside is increasingly looking to be. And it would be an astronomically sized downside."
Hey Bobby, nice to see you pop in. Yeah, it wasn't my goal to argue for or against it in that discussion, I just wanted to generate some discussion over it. It was nice to see you open to re-evaluating your position on it. Hope you're well too.
DeleteSo VHEMT is *not* worse than anthropocentric natalism after all. And it's ridiculously simple: not only should the chances of fixing the world be considered, but also chances of messing it up even more. I have to say that this blog is an intellectual roller coaster (in a good way). The yellowbuttonism is still sinking in, along with a related anti-progressivist position defended in "On Progress and Prosperity" on EA forums. Weird times.
ReplyDeleteOleksiy, I wouldn't go that far. The question is: Are the billions of people who place intrinsic value on the survival of the human species over-represented by opposition to risky transhumanism/superintelligence (on the face of it) or are they over-represented by opponents of animal welfarism? I'd say the former, by a mile. And this gap would be amplified if such majorities had been exposed, in great detail, to just how deep the risks of messing around with A.I. truly run.
DeleteThere's a time/place for Probability Talk and considerations of how it squares with our moral reasoning. Here though, we'd need to look at Average Belief of the two "groups", and their direct aims, once divorced from probability-constrained decision making.
VHEMT's aims are clearly more ecocentric, aka more out of touch with animal welfarism in principle. I consider this to be worse than the aims of techno-skeptics who favor humancentric natalism, even if some nontrivial % of humancentric natalists aren't techno-skeptics, and even if the ones who are skeptical of (or outright hostile to) transhumanism happen to be sympathetic to biophilia or similar stuff that I'd rather not have them be sympathetic to. As inane as biocentrism is, it's much better than ecocentrism:
On the difference: "Both biocentrism and ecocentrism oppose anthropocentric views. Biocentric thinkers often emphasize the value of individual organisms, while ecocentric thinkers tend to be characterized by a more holistic approach, giving value to species, ecosystems, or the earth as a whole."
VHEMT is all about ecocentrism. And yes, it's easier to pin down VHEMT. They owe their existence as a group/movement to them being a monolith on the *main* issue. All humancentric natalists, not so much. There's much divergence there, and most of it doesn't enter batshit ecocentrism territory.
Glad you enjoyed the post though. Let me know if you think anything in my response struck you as inconsistent with my other points about probabilities per se.
I'll have to read that "On Progress and Prosperity" thread. I've been neglecting all EA forums/discussions for too long.
nice
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