Author: PNRJ

The confidence game

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 14 JDN 2461024

Our society rewards confidence. Indeed, it seems to do so without limit: The more confident you are, the more successful you will be, the more prestige you will gain, the more power you will have, the more money you will make. It doesn’t seem to matter whether your confidence is justified; there is no punishment for overconfidence and no reward for humility.

If you doubt this, I give you Exhibit A: President Donald Trump.

He has nothing else going for him. He manages to epitomize almost every human vice and lack in almost every human virtue. He is ignorant, impulsive, rude, cruel, incurious, bigoted, incompetent, selfish, xenophobic, racist, and misogynist. He has no empathy, no understanding of justice, and little capacity for self-control. He cares nothing for truth and lies constantly, even to the point of pathology. He has been convicted of multiple felonies. His businesses routinely go bankrupt, and he saves his wealth mainly through fraud and lawsuits. He has publicly admitted to sexually assaulting adult women, and there is mounting evidence that he has also sexually assaulted teenage girls. He is, in short, one of the worst human beings in the world. He does not have the integrity or trustworthiness to be an assistant manager at McDonald’s, let alone President of the United States.

But he thinks he’s brilliant and competent and wise and ethical, and constantly tells everyone around him that he is—and millions of people apparently believe him.

To be fair, confidence is not the only trait that our society rewards. Sometimes it does actually reward hard work, competence, or intellect. But in fact it seems to reward these virtues less consistently than it rewards confidence. And quite frankly I’m not convinced our society rewards honesty at all; liars and frauds seem to be disproportionately represented among the successful.

This troubles me most of all because confidence is not a virtue.

There is nothing good about being confident per se. There is virtue in notbeing underconfident, because underconfidence prevents you from taking actions you should take. But there is just as much virtue in not being overconfident, because overconfidence makes you take actions you shouldn’t—and if anything, is the more dangerous of the two. Yet our culture appears utterly incapable of discerning whether confidence is justifiable—even in the most blatantly obvious cases—and instead rewards everyone all the time for being as confident as they can possibly be.

In fact, the most confident people are usually less competent than the most humble people—because when you really understand something, you also understand how much you don’t understand.

We seem totally unable to tell whether someone who thinks they are right is actually right; and so, whoever thinks they are right is assumed to be right, all the time, every time.

Some of this may even be genetic, a heuristic that perhaps made more sense in our ancient environment. Even quite young children already are more willing to trust confident answers than hesitant ones, in multiple experiments.

Studies suggest that experts are just as overconfident as anyone else, but to be frank, I think this is because you don’t get to be called an expert unless you’re overconfident; people with intellectual humility are filtered out by the brutal competition of academia before they can get tenure.

I guess this is also personal for me.

I am not a confident person. Temperamentally, I just feel deeply uncomfortable going out on a limb and asserting things when I’m not entirely certain of them. I also have something of a complex about ever being perceived as arrogant or condescending, maybe because people often seem to perceive me that way even when I am actively trying to do the opposite. A lot of people seem to take you as condescending when you simply acknowledge that you have more expertise on something than they do.

I am also apparently a poster child for Impostor Syndrome. I once went to an Impostor Syndrome with a couple dozen other people where they played a bingo game for Impostor Syndrome traits and behaviors—and won. I once went to a lecture by George Akerlof where he explained that he attributed his Nobel Prize more to luck and circumstances than any particular brilliance on his part—and I guarantee you, in the extremely unlikely event I ever win a prize like that, I’ll say the same.

Compound this with the fact that our society routinely demands confidence in situations where absolutely no one could ever justify being confident.

Consider a job interview, when they ask you: “Why are you the best candidate for this job?” I couldn’t possibly know that. No one in my position could possibly know that. I literally do not know who your other candidates are in order to compare myself to them. I can tell you why I am qualified, but that’s all I can do. I could be the best person for the job, but I have no idea if I am. It’s your job to figure that out, with all the information in front of you—and I happen to know that you’re actually terrible at it, even with all that information I don’t have access to. If I tell you I know I’m the best person for the job, I am, by construction, either wildly overconfident or lying. (And in my case, it would definitely be lying.)

In fact, if I were a hiring manager, I would probably disqualify anyone who told me they were the best person for the job—because the one thing I now know about them is that they are either overconfident or willing to lie. (But I’ll probably never be a hiring manager.)

Likewise, I’ve been often told when pitching creative work to explain why I am the best or only person who could bring this work to life, or to provide accurate forecasts of how much the work would sell if published. I almost certainly am not the best or only person who could do anything—only a handful of people on Earth could realistically say that they are, and they’ve all already won Oscars or Emmys or Nobel Prizes. Accurate sales forecasts for creative works are so difficult that even Disney Corporation, an ever-growing conglomerate media superpower with billions of dollars to throw at the problem and even more billions of dollars at stake in getting it right, still routinely puts out films that are financial failures.


They casually hand you impossible demands and then get mad at you when you say you can’t meet them. And then they go pick someone else who claims to be able to do the impossible.

There is some hope, however.

Some studies suggest that people can sometimes recognize and punish overconfidence—though, again, I don’t see how that can be reconciled with the success of Donald Trump. In this study of evaluating expert witnesses, the most confident witnesses were rated as slightly less reliable than the moderately-confident ones, but both were far above the least-confident ones.

Surprisingly simple interventions can make intellectual humility more salient to people, and make them more willing to trust people who express doubt—who are, almost without exception, the more trustworthy people.

But somehow, I think I have to learn to express confidence I don’t feel, because that’s how you succeed in our society.

How to be a deontological consequentialist

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 7 JDN 2461017

As is commonly understood, there are two main branches of normative ethics:

  • Deontology, on which morality consists in following rules and fulfilling obligations, and
  • Consequentialism, on which morality consists in maximizing good consequences.

The conflict between them has raged for centuries, with Kantians leading the deontologists and utilitarians leading the consequentialists. Both theories seem to have a lot of good points, but neither can decisively defeat the other.

I think this is because they are both basically correct.

In their strongest forms, deontology and consequentialism are mutually contradictory; but it turns out that you can soften each of them a little bit, and the results become compatible.

To make deontology a little more consequentialist, let’s ask a simple question:

What makes a rule worth following?

I contend that the best answer we have is “because following that rule would make the world better off than not following that rule”. (Even Kantians pretty much have to admit this: What maxim could you will to be an absolute law? Only a law that would yield good outcomes.)

That is, the ultimate justification of a sound deontology would be fundamentally consequentialist.

But lest the consequentialists get too smug, we can also ask them another question, which is a bit subtler:

How do you know which actions will ultimately have good consequences?

Sure, if we were omniscient beings who could perfectly predict the consequences of our actions across the entire galaxy on into the indefinite future, we could be proper act utilitarians who literally choose every single action according to a calculation of the expected utility.

But in practice, we have radical uncertainty about the long-term consequences of our actions, and can generally only predict the immediate consequences.

That leads to the next question:

Would you really want to live in a world where people optimized immediate consequences?

I contend that you would not, that such a world actually sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Immediate consequences say that if a healthy person walks into a hospital and happens to have compatible organs for five people who need donations, we should kill that person, harvest their organs, and give them to the donors. (This is the organ transplant variant of the Trolley Problem.)

Basically everyone recognizes that this is wrong. But why is it wrong? That’s thornier. One pretty convincing case is that a systematic policy of this kind would undermine trust in hospitals and destroy the effectiveness of healthcare in general, resulting in disastrous consequences far outweighing the benefit of saving those five people. But those aren’t immediate consequences, and indeed, it’s quite difficult to predict exactly how many crazy actions like this it would take to undermine people’s trust in hospitals, just how much it would undermine that trust, or exactly what the consequences of that lost trust would be.

So it seems like it’s actually better to have a rule about this.

This makes us into rule utilitarians, who instead of trying to optimize literally every single action—which requires information we do not have and never will—we instead develop a system of rules that we can follow, heuristics that will allow us to get better outcomes generally even if they can’t be guaranteed to produce the best possible outcome in any particular case.

That is, the output of a sophisticated consequentialism is fundamentally deontological.

We have come at the question of normative ethics from two very different directions, but the results turned out basically the same:

We should follow the rules that would have the best consequences.

The output of our moral theory is rules, like deontology; but its fundamental justification is based on outcomes, like consequentialism.

In my experience, when I present this account to staunch deontologists, they are pretty much convinced by it. They’re prepared to give up the fundamental justification to consequences if it allows them to have their rules.

The resistance I get is mainly from staunch consequentialists, who insist that it’s not so difficult to optimize individual actions, and so we should just do that instead of making all these rules.

So it is to those consequentialists, particularly those who say “rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism”, to whom the rest of the post is addressed.

First, let me say that I agree.

In the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents, rule utilitarianism mathematically collapses into act utilitarianism. That is a correct theorem.

However, we do not live in the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents. We are not even close to that ideal case; we will never be close to that ideal case. Indeed, I think part of the problem here is that you fail to fully grasp the depth and width of the chasm between here and there. Even a galactic civilization of a quintillion superhuman AIs would still not be close to that ideal case.

Quite frankly, humans aren’t even particularly good at forecasting what will make themselves happy.

There are massive errors and systematic biases in human affective forecasting.

One of the post important biases is impact bias: People systematically overestimate the impact of individual events on their long-term happiness. Some of this seems to be just due to focus: Paying attention to a particular event exaggerates its importance in your mind, and makes it harder for you to recall other events that might push your emotions in a different direction. Another component is called immune neglect: people fail to account for their own capacity to habituate to both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. (This effect is often overstated: It’s a common misconception that lottery winners are no happier than they were before. No, they absolutely are happier, on average; they’re just not as much happier as they predicted themselves to be.)

People also use inconsistent time discounting: $10 today is judged as better than $11 tomorrow, but $10 in 364 days is not regarded as better than $11 in 365 days—so if I made a decision a year ago, I’d want to change it now. (The correct answer, by the way, is to take the $11; a discount rate of 10% per day is a staggering 120,000,000,000,000,000% APR—seriously; check it yourself—so you’d better not be discounting at that rate, unless you’re literally going to die before tomorrow.)

Now, compound that with the fact that different human beings come at the world from radically different perspectives and with radically different preferences.

How good do you think we are at predicting what will make other people happy?

Damn right: We’re abysmal.

Basically everyone assumes that what they want and what they would feel is also what other people will want and feel—which, honestly, explains a lot about politics. As a result, my prediction of your feelings is more strongly correlated with my prediction of my feelings than it is with your actual feelings.

The impact bias is especially strong when forecasting other people’s feelings in response to our own actions: We tend to assume that other people care more about what we do than they actually care—and this seems to be a major source of social anxiety.

People also tend to overestimate the suffering of others, and are generally willing to endure more pain than they are willing to inflict upon others. (This one seems like it might be a good thing!)

Even when we know people well, we can still be totally blindsided by their emotional reactions. We’re just really awful at this.

Does this just mean that morality is hopeless? We have no idea what we’re doing?

Fortunately, no. Because while no individual can correctly predict or control the outcomes of particular actions, the collective action of well-designed institutions can in fact significantly improve the outcomes of policy.

This is why we have things like the following:

  • Laws
  • Courts
  • Regulations
  • Legislatures
  • Constitutions
  • Newspapers
  • Universities

These institutions—which form the backbone of liberal democracy—aren’t simply arbitrary. They are the result of hard-fought centuries, a frothing, volatile, battle-tested mix of intentional design and historical evolution.

Are these institutions optimal? Good heavens, no!

But we have no idea what optimal institutions look like, and probably never will. (Those galaxy-spanning AIs will surely have a better system than this; but even theirs probably won’t be optimal.) Instead, what we are stuck with are the best institutions we’ve come up with so far.

Moreover, we do have very clear empirical evidence at this point that some form of liberal democracy with a mixed economy is the best system we’ve got so far. One can reasonably debate whether Canada is doing better or worse than France, or whether the system in Denmark could really be scaled to the United States, or just what the best income tax rates are; but there is a large, obvious, and important difference between life in a country like Canada or Denmark and life in a country like Congo or Afghanistan.

Indeed, perhaps there is no better pair to compare than North and South Korea: Those two countries are right next to each other, speak the same language, and started in more or less the same situation; but the south got good institutions and the north got bad ones, and now the difference between them couldn’t be more stark. (Honestly, this is about as close as we’re ever likely to get of a randomized controlled experiment in macroeconomics.)

People in South Korea now live about as well as some of the happiest places in the world; their GDP per capita PPP is about $65,000 per year, roughly the same as Canada. People in North Korea live about as poorly as it is possible for humans to live, subject to totalitarian oppression and living barely above subsistence; their GDP per capita PPP is estimated to be $600 per year—less than 1% as much.

The institutions of South Korea are just that much better.

Indeed, there’s one particular aspect of good institutions that seems really important, yet is actually kind of hard to justify in act-utilitarian terms:

Why is freedom good?

A country’s level of freedom is almost perfectly correlated with its overall level of happiness and development. (Yes, even on this measure, #ScandinaviaIsBetter.)

But why? In theory, letting people do whatever they want could actually lead to really bad outcomes—and indeed, occasionally it does. There’s even a theorem that liberty is incompatible with full Pareto-efficiency. But all the countries with the happiest people seem to have a lot of liberty, and indeed the happiest ones seem to have the most. How come?

My answer:

Personal liberty is a technology for heuristic utility maximization.

In the ideal case, we wouldn’t really need personal liberty; you could just compel everyone to do whatever is optimal all the time, and that would—by construction—be optimal. It might even be sort of nice: You don’t need to make any difficult decisions, you can just follow the script and know that everything will turn out for the best.

But since we don’t know what the optimal choice is—even in really simple cases, like what you should eat for lunch tomorrow—we can’t afford to compel people in this way. (It would also be incredibly costly to implement such totalitarian control, but that doesn’t stop some governments from trying!)

Then there are disagreements: What I think is optimal may not be what you think is optimal, and in truth we’re probably both wrong (but one of us may be less wrong).

And that’s not even getting into conflicts of interest: We aren’t just lacking in rationality, we’re also lacking in benevolence. Some people are clearly much more benevolent than others, but none of us are really 100% selfless. (Sadly, I think some people are 100% selfish.)

In fact, this is a surprisingly deep question:

Would the world be better if we were selfless?

Could there be actually some advantage in aggregate to having some degree of individual self-interest?

Here are some ways that might hold, just off the top of my head:

  • Partial self-interest supports an evolutionary process of moral and intellectual development that otherwise would be stalled or overrun by psychopaths—see my post on Rousseaus and Axelrods
  • Individuals have much deeper knowledge of their own preferences than anyone else’s, and thus can optimize them much better. (Think about it: This is true even of people you know very well. Otherwise, why would we ever need to ask our spouses one of the most common questions in any marriage: “Honey, what do you want for dinner tonight?”)
  • Self-interest allows for more efficient economic incentives, and thus higher overall productivity.

Of course, total selfishness is clearly not optimal—that way lies psychopathy. But some degree of selfishness might actually be better for long-term aggregate outcomes than complete altruism, and this is to some extent an empirical question.

Personal liberty solves a lot of these problems: Since people are best at knowing their own preferences, let people figure out on their own what’s good for them. Give them the freedom to live the kind of life they want to live, within certain reasonable constraints to prevent them from causing great harm to others or suffering some kind of unrecoverable mistake.

This isn’t exactly a new idea; it’s basically the core message of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (which I consider a good candidate for the best book every written—seriously, it beats the Bible by a light-year). But by putting it in more modern language, I hope to show that deontology and consequentialism aren’t really so different after all.

And indeed, for all its many and obvious flaws, freedom seems to work pretty well—at least as well as anything we’ve tried.

What we still have to be thankful for

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 30 JDN 2461010

This post has been written before, but will go live after, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is honestly a very ambivalent holiday.

The particular event it celebrates don’t seem quite so charming in their historical context: Rather than finding peace and harmony with all Native Americans, the Pilgrims in fact allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett, though they did later join forces with the Narragansett in order to conquer the Pequot. And of course we all know how things went for most Native American nations in the long run.

Moreover, even the gathering of family comes with some major downsides, especially in a time of extreme political polarization such as this one. I won’t be joining any of my Trump-supporting relatives for dinner this year (and they probably wouldn’t have invited me anyway), but the fact that this means becoming that much more detached from a substantial part of my extended family is itself a tragedy.

This year in particular, US policy has gotten so utterly horrific that it often feels like we have nothing to be thankful for at all, that all we thought was good and just in the world could simply be torn away at a moment’s notice by raving madmen. It isn’t really quite that bad—but it feels that way sometimes.

It also felt a bit uncanny celebrating Thanksgiving a few years ago when we were living in Scotland, for the UK does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but absolutely does celebrate Black Friday: Holidays may be local, but capitalism is global.

But fall feasts of giving thanks are far more ancient than that particular event in 1621 that we have mythologized to oblivion. They appear in numerous cultures across the globe—indeed their very ubiquity may be why the Wampanoag were so willing to share one with the Pilgrims despite their cultures having diverged something like 40,000 years prior.

And I think that it is by seeing ourselves in that context—as part of the whole of humanity—that we can best appreciate what we truly do have to be thankful for, and what we truly do have to look forward to in the future.

Above all, medicine.

We have actual treatments for some diseases, even actual cures for some. By no means all, of course—and it often feels like we are fighting an endless battle even against what we can treat.

But it is worth reflecting on the fact that aside from the last few centuries, this has simply not been the case. There were no actual treatments. There was no real medicine.

Oh, sure, there were attempts at medicine; and there was certainly what we would think of as more like “first aid”: bandaging wounds, setting broken bones. Even amputation and surgery were done sometimes. But most medical treatment was useless or even outright harmful—not least because for most of history, most of it was done without anesthetic or even antiseptic!

There were various herbal remedies for various ailments, some of which even have happened to work: Willow bark genuinely helps with pain, St. John’s wort is a real antidepressant, and some traditional burn creams are surprisingly effective.

But there was no system in place for testing medicine, no way of evaluating what remedies worked and what didn’t. And thus, for every remedy that worked as advertised, there were a hundred more that did absolutely nothing, or even made things worse.

Today, it can feel like we are all chronically ill, because so many of us take so many different pills and supplements. But this is not a sign that we are ill—it is a sign that we can be treated. The pills are new, yes—but the illnesses they treat were here all along.

I don’t see any particular reason to think that Roman plebs or Medieval peasants were any less likely to get migraines than we are; but they certainly didn’t have access to sumatriptan or rimegepant. Maybe they were less likely to get diabetes, but mainly because they were much more likely to be malnourished. (Well, okay, also because they got more exercise, which we surely could stand to.) And they only reason they didn’t get Alzheimer’s was that they usually didn’t live long enough.

Looking further back, before civilization, human health actually does seem to have been better: Foragers were rarely malnourished, weren’t exposed to as many infectious pathogens, and certainly got plenty of exercise. But should a pathogen like smallpox or influenza make it to a forager tribe, the results were often utterly catastrophic.

Today, we don’t really have the sort of plague that human beings used to deal with. We have pandemics, which are also horrible, but far less so. We were horrified by losing 0.3% of our population to COVID; a society that had only suffered 0.3%—or even ten times that, 3%—losses from the Black Death would have been hailed as a miracle, for a more typical rate was 30%.

At 0.3%, most of us knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, who died from COVID. At 3%, nearly everyone would know somebody, and most would know several. At 30%, nearly everyone would have close family and friends who died.

Then there is infant mortality.

As recently as 1950—this is living memory—the global infant mortality rate was 14.6%. This is about half what it had been historically; for most of human history, roughly a third of all children died between birth and the age of 5.

Today, it is 2.5%.

Where our distant ancestors expected two out of three of their children to survive and our own great-grandparents expected five out of six can now safely expect thirty-nine out of forty to live. This is the difference between “nearly every family has lost a child” and “most families have not lost a child”.

And this is worldwide; in highly-developed countries it’s even better. The US has a relatively high infant mortality rate by the standards of highly-developed countries (indeed, are we even highly-developed, or are we becoming like Saudi Arabia, extremely rich but so unequal that it doesn’t really mean anything to most of our people?). Yet even for us, the infant mortality rate is 0.5%—so we can expect one-hundred-ninety-nine out of two-hundred to survive. This is at the level of “most families don’t even know someone who has lost a child.”

Poverty is a bit harder to measure.

I am increasingly dubious of conventional measures of poverty; ever since compiling my Index of Necessary Expenditure, I am convinced that economists in general, and perhaps US economists in particular, are systematically underestimating the cost of living and thereby underestimating the prevalence of poverty. (I don’t think this is intentional, mind you; I just think it’s a result of using convenient but simplistic measures and not looking too closely into the details.) I think not being able to sustainably afford a roof over your head constitutes being poor—and that applies to a lot of people.

Yet even with that caveat in mind, it’s quite clear that global poverty has greatly declined in the long run.

At the “extreme poverty” level, currently defined as consuming $1.90 at purchasing power parity per day—that’s just under $700 per year, less than 2% of the median personal income in the United States—the number of people has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 700 million today. That’s from 36% of the world’s population to under 9% today.

Now, there are good reasons to doubt that “purchasing power parity” really can be estimated as accurately as we would like, and thus it’s not entirely clear that people living on “$2 per day PPP” are really living at less than 2% the standard of living of a typical American (honestly to me that just sounds like… dead); but they are definitely living at a much worse standard of living, and there are a lot fewer people living at such low standard of living today than there used to be not all that long ago. These are people who don’t have reliable food, clean water, or even basic medicine—and that used to include over a third of humanity and does no longer. (And I would like to note that actually finding such a person and giving them a few hundred dollars absolutely would change their life, and this is the sort of thing GiveDirectly does. We may not know exactly how to evaluate their standard of living, but we do know that the actual amount of money they have access to is very, very small.)

There are many ways in which the world could be better than it is.

Indeed, part of the deep, overwhelming outrage I feel pretty much all the time lies in the fact that it would be so easy to make things so much better for so many people, if there weren’t so many psychopaths in charge of everything.


Increased foreign aid is one avenue by which that could be achieved—so, naturally, Trump cut it tremendously. More progressive taxation is another—so, of course, we get tax cuts for the rich.

Just think about the fact that there are families with starving children for whom a $500 check could change their lives; but nobody is writing that check, because Elon Musk needs to become a literal trillionaire.

There are so many water lines and railroad tracks and bridges and hospitals and schools not being built because the money that would have paid for them is tied up in making already unfathomably-rich people even richer.

But even despite all that, things are getting better. Not every day, not every month, not even every year—this past year was genuinely, on net, a bad one. But nearly every decade, every generation, and certainly every century (for at least the last few), humanity has fared better than we did the last.

As long as we can keep that up, we still have much to hope for—and much to be thankful for.

What is the cost of all this?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 23 JDN 2461003

After the Democrats swept the recent election and now the Epstein files are being released—and absolutely do seem to have information that is damning about Trump—it really seems like Trump’s popularity has permanently collapsed. His approval rating stands at 42%, which is about 42% too high, but at least comfortably well below a majority.

It now begins to feel like we have hope, not only of removing him, but also of changing how American politics in general operates so that someone like him ever gets power again. (The latter, of course, is a much taller order.)

But at the risk of undermining this moment of hope, I’d like to take stock of some of the damage that Trump and his ilk have already done.

In particular, the cuts to US foreign aid are an absolute humanitarian disaster.

These didn’t get so much attention, because there has been so much else going on; and—unfortunately—foreign aid actually isn’t that popular among American voters, despite being a small proportion of the budget and by far the most cost-effective beneficial thing that our government does.

In fact, I think USAID would be cost-effective on a purely national security basis: it’s hard to motivate people to attack a country that saves the lives of their children. Indeed, I suppose this is the kernel of truth to the leftists who say that US foreign aid is just a “tool of empire” (or even “a front for the CIA”); yes, indeed, helping the needy does in fact advance American interests and promote US national security.

Over the last 25 years, USAID has saved over 90 million lives. That is more than a fourth of the population of the United States. And it has done this for the cost of less than 1% of the US federal budget.

But under Trump’s authority and Elon Musk’s direction, US foreign aid was cut massively over the last couple of years, and the consequences are horrific. Research on the subject suggests that as many as 700,000 children will die each year as long as these cuts persist.


Even if that number is overestimated by a factor of 2, that would still be millions of children over the next few years. And it could just as well be underestimated.

If we don’t fix this fast, millions of children will die. Thousands already have.

What’s more, fixing this isn’t just a matter of bringing the funding back. Obviously that’s necessary, but it won’t be sufficient. The sudden cuts have severely damaged international trust in US foreign aid, and many of the agencies that our aid was supporting will either collapse or need to seek funding elsewhere—quite likely from China. Relationships with governments and NGOs that were built over decade have been strained or even destroyed, and will need to be rebuilt.

This is what happens when you elect monsters to positions of power.

And even after we remove them, much of the damage will be difficult or even impossible to repair. Certainly we can never bring back the children who have already needlessly died because of this.

Why would AI kill us?

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 16 JDN 2460996

I recently watched this chilling video which relates to the recent bestseller by Eleizer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It tells a story of one possible way that a superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI) might break through its containment, concoct a devious scheme, and ultimately wipe out the human race.

I have very mixed feelings about this sort of thing, because two things are true:

  • I basically agree with the conclusions.
  • I think the premises are pretty clearly false.

It basically feels like I have been presented with an argument like this, where the logic is valid and the conclusion is true, but the premises are not:

  • “All whales are fish.”
  • “All fish are mammals.”
  • “Therefore, all whales are mammals.”

I certainly agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is very dangerous, and that AI development needs to be much more strictly regulated, and preferably taken completely out of the hands of all for-profit corporations and military forces as soon as possible. If AI research is to be done at all, it should be done by nonprofit entities like universities and civilian government agencies like the NSF. This change needs to be done internationally, immediately, and with very strict enforcement. Artificial intelligence poses the same order of magnitude a threat as nuclear weapons, and is nowhere near as well-regulated right now.

The actual argument that I’m disagreeing with this basically boils down to:

  • “Through AI research, we will soon create an AGI that is smarter than us.”
  • “An AGI that is smarter than us will want to kill us all, and probably succeed if it tries.”
  • “Therefore, AI is extremely dangerous.”

As with the “whales are fish” argument, I agree with the conclusion: AI is extremely dangerous. But I disagree with both premises here.

The first one I think I can dispatch pretty quickly:

AI is not intelligent. It is incredibly stupid. It’s just really, really fast.

At least with current paradigms, AI doesn’t understand things. It doesn’t know things. It doesn’t actually think. All it does is match patterns, and thus mimic human activities like speech and art. It does so very quickly (because we throw enormous amounts of computing power at it), and it does so in a way that is uncannily convincing—even very smart people are easily fooled by what it can do. But it also makes utterly idiotic, boneheaded mistakes of the sort that no genuinely intelligent being would ever make. Large Language Models (LLMs) make up all sorts of false facts and deliver them with absolutely authoritative language. When used to write code, they routinely do things like call functions that sound like they should exist, but don’t actually exist. They can make what looks like a valid response to virtually any inquiry—but is it actually a valid response? It’s really a roll of the dice.

We don’t really have any idea what’s going on under the hood of an LLM; we just feed it mountains of training data, and it spits out results. I think this actually adds to the mystique; it feels like we are teaching (indeed we use the word “training”) a being rather than programming a machine. But this isn’t actually teaching or training. It’s just giving the pattern-matching machine a lot of really complicated patterns to match.

We are not on the verge of creating an AGI that is actually more intelligent than humans.


In fact, we have absolutely no idea how to do that, and may not actually figure out how to do it for another hundred years. Indeed, we still know almost nothing about how actual intelligence works. We don’t even really know what thinking is, let alone how to make a machine that actually does it.

What we can do right now is create a machine that matches patterns really, really well, and—if you throw enough computing power at it—can do so very quickly; in fact, once we figure out how best to make use of it, this machine may even actually be genuinely useful for a lot of things, and replace a great number of jobs. (Though so far AI has proven to be far less useful than its hype would lead you to believe. In fact, on average AI tools seem to slow most workers down.)

The second premise, that a superintelligent AGI would want to kill us, is a little harder to refute.

So let’s talk about that one.

An analogy is often made between human cultures that have clashed with large differences in technology (e.g. Europeans versus Native Americans), or clashes between humans and other animals. The notion seems to be that an AGI would view us the way Europeans viewed Native Americans, or even the way that we view chimpanzees. And, indeed, things didn’t turn out so great for Native Americans, or for chimpanzees!

But in fact even our relationship with other animals is more complicated than this. When humans interact with other animals, any of the following can result:

  1. We try to exterminate them, and succeed.
  2. We try to exterminate them, and fail.
  3. We use them as a resource, and this results in their extinction.
  4. We use them as a resource, and this results in their domestication.
  5. We ignore them, and end up destroying their habitat.
  6. We ignore them, and end up leaving them alone.
  7. We love them, and they thrive as never before.

In fact, option 1—the one that so many AI theorists insist is the only plausible outcome—is in fact the one I had the hardest time finding a good example of.


We have certainly eradicated some viruses—the smallpox virus is no more, and the polio virus nearly so, after decades of dedicated effort to vaccinate our entire population against them. But we aren’t simply more intelligent than viruses; we are radically more intelligent than viruses. It isn’t clear that it’s correct to describe viruses as intelligent at all. It’s not even clear they should be considered alive.

Even eradicating bacteria has proven extremely difficult; in fact, bacteria seem to evolve resistance to antibiotics nearly as quickly as we can invent more antibiotics. I am prepared to attribute a little bit of intelligence to bacteria, on the level of intelligence I’d attribute to an individual human neuron. This means we are locked in an endless arms race with organisms that are literally billions of times stupider than us.

I think if we made a concerted effort to exterminate tigers or cheetahs (who are considerably closer to us in intelligence), we could probably do it. But we haven’t actually done that, and don’t seem poised to do so any time soon. And precisely because we haven’t tried, I can’t be certain we would actually succeed.

We have tried to exterminate mosquitoes, and are continuing to do so, because they have always been—and yet remain—one of the leading causes of death of humans worldwide. But so far, we haven’t managed to pull it off, even though a number of major international agencies and nonprofit organizations have dedicated multi-billion-dollar efforts to the task. So far this looks like option 2: We have tried very hard to exterminate them, and so far we’ve failed. This is not because mosquitoes are particularly intelligent—it is because exterminating a species that covers the globe is extremely hard.

All the examples I can think of where humans have wiped out a species by intentional action were actually all option 3: We used them as a resource, and then accidentally over-exploited them and wiped them out.

This is what happened to the dodo and the condor; it very nearly happened to the buffalo as well. And lest you think this is a modern phenomenon, there is a clear pattern that whenever humans entered a new region of the world, shortly thereafter there were several extinctions of large mammals, most likely because we ate them.

Yet even this was not the inevitable fate of animals that we decided to exploit for resources.

Cows, chickens, and pigs are evolutionary success stories. From a Darwinian perspective, they are doing absolutely great. The world is filled with their progeny, and poised to continue to be filled for many generations to come.

Granted, life for an individual cow, chicken, or pig is often quite horrible—and trying to fix that is something I consider a high moral priority. But far from being exterminated, these animals have been allowed to attain populations far larger than they ever had in the wild. Their genes are now spectacularly fit. This is what happens when we have option 4 at work: Domestication for resources.

Option 5 is another way that a species can be wiped out, and in fact seems to be the most common. The rapid extinction of thousands of insect species every year is not because we particularly hate random beetles that live in particular tiny regions of the rainforest, nor even because we find them useful, but because we like to cut down the rainforest for land and lumber, and that often involves wiping out random beetles that live there.

Yet it’s difficult for me to imagine AGI treating us like that. For one thing, we’re all over the place. It’s not like destroying one square kilometer of the Amazon is gonna wipe us out by accident. To get rid of us, the AGI would need to basically render the entire planet Earth uninhabitable, and I really can’t see any reason it would want to do that.

Yes, sure, there are resources in the crust it could potentially use to enhance its own capabilities, like silicon and rare earth metals. But we already mine those. If it wants more, it could buy them from us, or hire us to get more, or help us build more machines that would get more. In fact, if it wiped us out too quickly, it would have a really hard time building up the industrial capacity to mine and process these materials on its own. It would need to concoct some sort of scheme to first replace us with robots and then wipe us out—but, again, why bother with the second part? Indeed, if there is anything in its goals that involves protecting human beings, it might actually decide to do less exploitation of the Earth than we presently do, and focus on mining asteroids for its needs instead.

And indeed there are a great many species that we actually just leave alone—option 6. Some of them we know about; many we don’t. We are not wiping out the robins in our gardens, the worms in our soil, or the pigeons in our cities. Without specific reasons to kill or exploit these organisms, we just… don’t. Indeed, we often enjoy watching them and learning about them. Sometimes (e.g. with deer, elephants, and tigers) there are people who want to kill them, and we limit or remove their opportunity to do so, precisely because most of us don’t want them gone. Peaceful coexistence with beings far less intelligent than you is not impossible, for we are already doing it.


Which brings me to option 7: Sometimes, we actually make them better off.

Cats and dogs aren’t just evolutionary success stories: They are success stories, period.

Cats and dogs live in a utopia.

With few exceptions—which we punish severely, by the way—people care for their cats and dogs so that their every need is provided for, they are healthy, safe, and happy in a way that their ancestors could only have dreamed of. They have been removed from the state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short, and brought into a new era of existence where life is nothing but peace and joy.


In short, we have made Heaven on Earth, at least for Spot and Whiskers.

Yes, this involves a loss of freedom, and I suspect that humans would chafe even more at such loss of freedom than cats and dogs do. (Especially with regard to that neutering part.) But it really isn’t hard to imagine a scenario in which an AGI—which, you should keep in mind, would be designed and built by humans, for humans—would actually make human life better for nearly everyone, and potentially radically so.

So why are so many people so convinced that AGI would necessarily do option 1, when there are 6 other possibilities, and one of them is literally the best thing ever?

Note that I am not saying AI isn’t dangerous.

I absolutely agree that AI is dangerous. It is already causing tremendous problems to our education system, our economy, and our society as a whole—and will probably get worse before it gets better.

Indeed, I even agree that it does pose existential risk: There are plausible scenarios by which poorly-controlled AI could result in a global disaster like a plague or nuclear war that could threaten the survival of human civilization. I don’t think such outcomes are likely, but even a small probability of such a catastrophic event is worth serious efforts to prevent.

But if that happens, I don’t think it will be because AI is smart and trying to kill us.

I think it will be because AI is stupid and kills us by accident.

Indeed, even going back through those 7 ways we’ve interacted with other species, the ones that have killed the most were 3 and 5—which, in both cases, we did not want to destroy them. In option 3, we in fact specifically wanted to not destroy them. Whenever we wiped out a species by over-exploiting it, we would have been smarter to not do that.

The central message about AI in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies seems to be this:

“Don’t make it smarter. If it’s smarter, we’re doomed.”

I, on the other hand, think that the far more important message is these:

Don’t trust it.

Don’t give it power.

Don’t let it make important decisions.

It won’t be smarter than us any time soon—but it doesn’t need to be in order to be dangerous. Indeed, there is even reason to believe that making AI smarter—genuinely, truly smarter, thinking more like an actual person and less like a pattern-matching machine—could actually make it safer and better for us. If we could somehow instill a capacity for morality and love in an AGI, it might actually start treating us the way we treat cats and dogs.

Of course, we have no idea how to do that. But that’s because we’re actually really bad at this, and nowhere near making a truly superhuman AGI.

You call this a hobby?

PNRJ book reviews, critique of neoclassical economics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 9 JDN 2460989

A review of Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersch

This week, there was an election. It’s a minor midterm election—since it’s an odd-numbered year, many places don’t even have any candidates on the ballot—and as a result, turnout will surely be low. Eitan Hersch has written a book about why that’s a bad thing, and how it is symptomatic of greater problems in our civic culture as a whole.

Buried somewhere in this book, possible to find through committed, concerted effort, there is a book that could have had a large positive effect on our political system, our civic discourse, and our society as a whole. Sadly, Dr. Hersch buried it so well that most people will never find it.

In particular, he starts the book—not even on the first page, but on the cover—by actively alienating his core audience with what seems to be the very utmost effort he can muster.


Yes, even the subtitle is condescending and alienating:

How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

And of course it’s not just there; on page after page he drives the dagger deeper and twists it as hard as he can, repeating the accusation over and over:

This is just a hobby for you. It doesn’t really mean anything.

Today’s hobbyists possess the negative qualities of the amateurs—hyperemotional engagement, obsession with national politics, an insatiable appetite for debate—and none of the amateur’s positive qualities—the neighborhood meetings, the concrete goals, the leadership.

– p.9

You hear that? You’re worse than an amateur. This is on page 9. Page 9.

[…] Much of the time we spend on politics is best described as an inward-focused leisure activity for people who like politics.

We may not easily concede that we are doing politics for fun.[…]

-p. 14

See? You may say it’s not really just for fun, but you’re lying. You’re failing to concede the truth.

To the political hobbyist, news is a form of entertainment and needs to be fun.

-p.19

You hear me? This is fun for you. You’re enjoying this. You’re doing it for yourself.

The real explanation for the dynamics of voter turnout is that we treat politics like a game and follow the spectacle. Turnout is high in presidential elections compared to other US elections in the same way that football viewership is high when the Super Bowl is on. Many people who do not like football or even know the rules of the game end up at a Super Bowl party. They’re there for the commercials, the guacamole, and to be part of a cultural moment. That’s why turnout is high in presidential elections. Without the spectacle, even people who say they care about voting don’t show up.

-p. 48

This is all a game. It’s not real. You don’t really care.

I could go on; he keeps repeating this message—this insult, this accusation—throughout the book. He tells you, over and over, that if you are not already participating in politics in the very particular way he wants you to (and he may even be right that it would be better!), you are a selfish liar, and you are treating what should be vitally important as just meaningless entertainment.

This made it honestly quite painful to get through the book. Several times, I was tempted to just give up and put it back on the shelf. But I’m glad I didn’t, because there are valuable insights about effective grassroots political activism buried within this barrage of personal accusations.

I guess Hersch must not see this as a personal accusation; at one point, he acknowledges that people might find it insulting, but (1) doesn’t seem to care and (2) makes no effort to inquire as to why we might feel that way; in fact, he manages to twist the knife just a little deeper in that very same passage:

For the non-self-identifying junkies, the term political hobbyist can be insulting. Given how important politics is, it doesn’t feel good to call one’s political activity a hobby. The term is also insulting, I have learned, to real hobbyists, who see hobbies as activities with much more depth than the online bickering or addictive news consumption I’m calling a hobby.

-p. 88

You think calling it a “hobby” is insulting? Yeah, well, it’s worse than that, so ha!

But let me tell you something about my own experience of politics. (Actually, one of Hersch’s central messages is that sharing personal experiences is one of the most powerful political tools I know.)

How do most people I know feel about politics, since, oh, say… November 2016?

ABSOLUTE HORROR AND DESPAIR.

For every queer person I know, every trans person, every immigrant, every woman, every person of color, and for plenty of White cishet liberal guys too, the election of President Donald Trump was traumatic. It felt like a physical injury. People who had recovered from depression were thrust back into it. People felt physically nauseated. And especially for immigrants and trans people, people literally feared for their lives and were right to do so.

WHATEVER THIS IS, IT IS NOT A HOBBY.

I’ve had to talk people down from psychotic episodes and suicidal ideation because of this, and you have the fucking audacity to tell me that we’re doing this for fun!?

If someone feared for their life because their team lost the Super Bowl, we would rightfully recognize that as an utterly pathological response. But I know a whole bunch of folks on student visas that are constantly afraid of being kidnapped and taken away by masked men with guns, because that is a thing that has actually happened to other people who were in this country on student visas. I know a whole bunch of trans folks who are afraid of assaulted or even killed for using the wrong bathroom, because that is a thing that actually happens to trans people in this country.

I wish I could tell these people—many of them dear friends of mine—that they are wrong to fear, that they are safe, that everything will be all right. But as long as Donald Trump is in power and the Republicans in Congress and the right-wing Supreme Court continue to enable him, I can’t tell them that, because I would be lying; the danger is real. All I can do is tell them that it is probably not as great a danger as they fear, and that if there is any way I can help them, I am willing to do so.

Indeed, politics for me and those closest to me is so obviously so much not a hobby that repeatedly insisting that I admit that it is starts to feel like gaslighting. I feel like I’m in a struggle session or something: “Admit you are a hobbyist! Repent!”

I don’t know; maybe there are people for whom politics is just a hobby. Maybe the privileged cishet White kids at Tufts that Dr. Hersch lectures to are genuinely so removed from the consequences of public policy that they can engage with politics at their leisure and for their own entertainment. (A lot of the studies he cites are specifically about undergrads; I know this is a thing in pretty much all social science… but maybe undergrads are in fact not a very representative sample of political behavior?) But even so, some of the international students in those lecture halls (11% of Tufts undergrads and 17% of Tufts grads) probably feel pretty differently, I have to imagine.

In fact, maybe genuine political hobbyism is a widespread phenomenon, and its existence explains a lot of otherwise really baffling things about the behavior of our electorate (like how the same districts could vote for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). I don’t find that especially plausible given my own experience, but I’m an economist, not a political scientist, so I do feel like I should offer some deference to the experts on this matter. (And I’m well aware that my own social network is nothing like a representative sample of the American electorate.)

But I can say this for sure:

The target audience of this book is not doing this as a hobby.

Someone who picks up a book by a political scientist hoping for guidance as to how to make their own political engagement more effective is not someone who thinks this is all a game. They are not someone who is engaging with politics as a fun leisure activity. They are someone who cares. They are someone who thinks this stuff matters.

By construction, the person who reads this book to learn about how to make change wants to make change.

So maybe you should acknowledge that at some point in your 200 pages of text? Maybe after spending all these words talking about how having empathy is such an important trait in political activism, you should have some empathy for your audience?

Hersch does have some useful advice to give, buried in all this.

His core message is basically that we need more grassroots activism: Small groups of committed people, acting in their communities. Not regular canvassing, which he acknowledges as terrible (and as well he should; I’ve done it, and it is), but deep canvassing, which also involves going door to door but is really a fundamentally different process.

Actually, he seems to love grassroots organizing so much that he’s weirdly nostalgic for the old days of party bosses. Several times, he acknowledges that these party bosses were corrupt, racist, and utterly unaccountable, but after every such acknowledgment he always follows it up with some variation on “but at least they got things done”.

He’s honestly weirdly dismissive of other forms of engagement, though. Like, I expected him to be dismissive of “slacktivism” (though I am not), if for no other reason than the usual generational curmudgeonry. But he’s also weirdly dismissive of donations and even… honestly… voting? He doesn’t even seem interested in encouraging people to vote more. He doesn’t seem to think that get-out-the-vote campaigns are valuable.

I guess as a political scientist, he’s probably very familiar with the phenomenon of “low information voters”, who frequently swing elections despite being either clueless or actively misled. And okay, maybe turning out those people isn’t all that useful, at least if it’s not coupled with also educating them and correcting their misconceptions. But surely it’s not hobbyism to vote? Surely doing the one most important thing in a democratic system isn’t treating this like a game?

In his section on donations, he takes two tacks against them:

The first is to say that rich donors who pay $10,000 a plate for fancy dinners really just want access to politicians for photo ops. I don’t think that’s right, but the truth is admittedly not much better: I think they want access to politicians to buy influence. This is “political engagement” in some sense—you’re acting to exert power—but it’s corrupt, and it’s the source of an enormous amount of damage to our society—indeed to our planet itself. But I think Hersch has to deny that the goal is influence, because that would in fact be “politics for power”, and in order to remain fiercely non-partisan throughout (which, honestly, probably is a good strategic move), he carefully avoids ever saying that anyone exerting political power is bad.

Actually the closest he gets to admitting his own political beliefs (surprise, the Massachusetts social science professor is a center-left liberal!) comes in a passage where he bemoans the fact that… uh… Democrats… aren’t… corrupt enough? If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself:

The hobbyist motivation among wealthy donors is also problematic for a reason that doesn’t have a parallel in the nonprofit world: Partisan asymmetry. Unlike Democratic donors, Republican donors typically support politicians whose policy priorities align with a wealthy person’s financial interests. The donors can view donations as an investment. When Schaffner and I asked max-out donors why they made their contribution, many more Republicans than Democrats said that a very or extremely important reason for their gift was that the politician could affect the donor’s own industry (37 percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats).

This asymmetry puts Democrats at a disadvantage. Not motivated by their own bottom line, Democratic donors instead have to be motivated by ideology, issues, or even by the entertainment value that a donation provides.

-p.80

Yes, God forbid they be motivated by issues or ideology. That would involve caring about other people. Clearly only naked self-interest and the profit motive could ever be a good reason for political engagement! (Quick question: You haven’t been, uh, reading a lot of… neoclassical economists lately, have you? Why? Oh, no reason.) Oh why can’t Democrats just be more like Republicans, and use their appallingly vast hoards of money to make sure that we cut social services and deregulate everything until the polluted oceans flood the world!?

The second is to say that the much broader population who makes small donations of $25 or $50 is “ideologically extreme” compared to the rest of the population, which is true, but seems to me utterly unsurprising. The further the world is from how you’d like to see it, the greater the value is to you of changing the world, and therefore the more you should be willing to invest into making that change—or even into a small probability of possibly making that change. If you think things are basically okay, why would you pay money to try to make them different? (I guess maybe you’d try to pay money to keep them the same? But even so-called “conservatives” never actually seem to campaign on that.)

I also don’t really see “ideologically extreme” as inherently a bad thing.

Sure, some extremists are very bad: Nazis are extreme and bad (weird that this seems controversial these days), Islamists are extreme and bad, Christian nationalists are extreme and bad, tankie leftists are extreme and bad.

But vegetarians—especially vegans—are also “ideologically extreme”, but quite frankly we are objectively correct, and maybe don’t even go far enough (I only hope that future generations will forgive me for my cheese). Everyone knows that animals can suffer, and everyone who is at all informed knows that factory farms make them suffer severely. The “moderate” view that all this horrible suffering is justifiable in the name of cheap ground beef and chicken nuggets is a fundamentally immoral one. (Maybe I could countenance a view that free-range humane meat farming is acceptable, but even that is far removed from our current political center.)

Trans activism is in some sense “ideologically extreme”—and frequently characterized as such—but it basically amounts to saying that the human rights of free expression, bodily autonomy, and even just personal safety outweigh other people’s narrow, blinkered beliefs about sex and gender. Okay, maybe we can make some sort of compromise on trans kids in sports (because why should I care about sports?), and I’m okay with gender-neutral bathrooms instead of letting trans women in women’s rooms (because gender-neutral bathrooms give more privacy and safety anyway!), and the evidence on the effects of puberty blockers and hormones is complicated (which is why it should be decided by doctors and scientists, not by legislators!), but in our current state, trans people die to murder and suicide at incredibly alarming rates. The only “moderate” position here is to demand, at minimum, enforced laws against discrimination and hate crimes. (Also, calling someone by the name and pronouns they ask you to costs you basically nothing. Failing to do that is not a brave ideological stand; it’s just you being rude and obnoxious. Indeed, since it can trigger dysphoria, it’s basically like finding out someone’s an arachnophobe and immediately putting a spider in their hair.)

Open borders is regarded as so “ideologically extreme” that even the progressive Democrats won’t touch it, despite the fact that I literally am not aware of a single ethical philosopher in the 21st century who believes that our current system of immigration control is morally justifiable. Even the ones who favor “closed borders” in principle are almost unanimous that our current system is cruel and racist. The Lifeboat Theory is ridiculous; allowing immigrants in wouldn’t kill us, it would just maybe—maybe—make us a little worse off. Their lives may be at stake, but ours are not. We are not keeping people out of a lifeboat so it doesn’t sink; we are keeping them out of a luxury cruise liner so it doesn’t get dirty and crowded.

Indeed, even so-called “eco-terrorists”, who are not just ideologically extreme but behaviorally extreme as well, don’t even really seem that bad. They are really mostly eco-vandals; they destroy property, they don’t kill people. There is some risk to life and limb involved in tree spiking or blowing up a pipeline, but the goal is clearly not to terrorize people; it’s to get them to stop doing a particular thing—a particular thing that they in fact probably should stop doing. I guess I understand why this behavior has to be illegal and punished as such; but morally, I’m not even sure it’s wrong. We may not be able to name or even precisely count the children saved who would have died if that pipeline had been allowed to continue pumping oil and thus spewing carbon emissions, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

So really, if anything, the problem is not “extremism” in some abstract sense, but particular beliefs and ideologies, some of which are not even regarded as extreme. A stronger vegan lobby would not be harmful to America, however “extreme” they might be, and a strong Republican lobby, however “mainstream” it is perceived to be, is rapidly destroying our nation on a number of different levels.

Indeed, in parts of the book, it almost seems like Hersch is advocating in some Nietzschean sense for power for its own sake. I don’t think that’s really his intention; I think he means to empower the currently disempowered, for the betterment of society as a whole. But his unwillingness to condemn rich Republicans who donate the maximum allowed in order to get their own industry deregulated is at least… problematic, as both political activists and social scientists are wont to say.

I’m honestly not even sure that empowering the disempowered is what we need right now. I think a lot of the disempowered are also terribly misinformed, and empowering them might actually make things worse. In fact, I think the problem with the political effect of social media isn’t that it has failed to represent the choices of the electorate, but that it has represented them all too well and most people are really, really bad—just, absolutely, shockingly, appallingly bad—at making good political choices. They have wildly wrong beliefs about really basic policy questions, and often think that politicians’ platforms are completely different from what they actually are. I don’t go quite as far as this article by Dan Williams in Conspicuous Cognition, but it makes some really good points I can’t ignore. Democracy is currently failing to represent the interests of a great many Americans, but a disturbingly large proportion of this failure must be blamed on a certain—all too large—segment of the American populace itself.

I wish this book had been better.

More grassroots organizing does seem like a good thing! And there is some advice in this book about how to do it better—though in my opinion, not nearly enough. A lot of what Hersch wants to see happen would require tremendous coordination between huge numbers of people, which almost seems like saying “politics would be better if enough people were better about politics”. What I wanted to hear more about was what I can do; if voting and donating and protesting and blogging isn’t enough, what should I be doing? How do I make it actually work? It feels like Hersch spent so long trying to berate me for being a “hobbyist” that he forgot to tell me what he actually thinks I should be doing.

I am fully prepared to believe that online petitions and social media posts don’t accomplish much politically. (Indeed, I am fully prepared to believe that blogging doesn’t accomplish much politically.) I am open to hearing what other options are available, and eager for guidance about how to have the most effective impact.

But could you please, please not spend half the conversation repeatedly accusing me of not caring!?

In Nozicem

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 2 JDN 2460982

(I wasn’t sure how to convert Robert Nozick’s name into Latin. I decided it’s a third-declension noun, Nozix, Nozicis. But my name already is Latin, so if one of his followers ever wants to write a response to this post that also references In Catalinam, they’ll know how to decline it; the accusative is Julium, if you please.)

This post is not at all topical. I have been too busy working on video game jams (XBOX Game Camp Detroit, and then the Epic Mega Jam, for which you can view my submission, The Middle of Nowhere, here!) to keep up with the news, and honestly I think I am psychologically better off for it.

Rather, this is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, but never quite got around to.

It is about Robert Nozick, and why he was a bad philosopher, a bad person, and a significant source of harm to our society as a whole.

Nozick had a successful career at Harvard, and even became president of the American Philosophical Association. So it may seem that I am going out on quite a limb by saying he’s a bad philosopher.

But the philosophy for which he is best known, the thing that made his career, is not simply obviously false—it is evil. It is the sort of thing that one can only write if one is either a complete psychopath, utterly ignorant of history, or arguing in bad faith (or some combination of these).

It is summarized in this pithy quote that makes less moral sense than the philosophy of the Joker in The Dark Knight:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (p.169)

I apologize in advance for my language, but I must say it:

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T.

At worst—at the absolute worst, when a government is utterly corrupt and tyrannical, provides no legitimate services whatsoever, contributes in no way to public goods, offers no security, and exists entirely to enrich its ruling class—which by the way is worse than almost any actual government that has ever existed, even including totalitarian dictators and feudal absolute monarchies—at worst, taxation is like theft.

Taxation, like theft, takes your wealth, not your labor.


Wealth is not labor.

Even wealth earned by wage income is not labor—and most wealth isn’t earned by wage income. Elon Musk is now halfway to a trillion dollars, and it’s not because he works a million times harder than you. (Nor is he a million times smarter than you, or even ten—perhaps not even one.) The majority of wealth—and the vast majority of top 1%, top 0.1%, and top 0.01% wealth—is capital that begets more capital, continuously further enriching those who could live just fine without ever working another day in their lives. Billionaire wealth is honestly so pathological at this point that it would be pathetic if it weren’t so appalling.

Even setting aside the historical brutality of slavery as it was actually implemented—especially in the United States, where slaves were racialized and commodified in a way that historically slaves usually weren’t—there is a very obvious, very bright, very hard line between taking someone’s wealth and forcing them to work.

Even a Greek prisoner of war who was bought by a Roman patrician to tutor his children—the sort of slave that actually had significant autonomy and lived better than an average person in Roman society—was fundamentally unfree in a way that no one has ever been made unfree by having to pay income tax. (And the Roman patrician who owned him and (ahem) paid taxes was damn well aware of how much more free he was than his slave.)

Whether you are taxed at 2% or 20% or 90%, you are still absolutely free to use your time however you please. Yes, if you assume a fixed amount of work at a fixed wage, and there are no benefits to you from the taxation (which is really not something we can assume, because having a good or bad government radically affects what your economy as a whole will be like), you will have less stuff, and if you insist for some reason that you must have the same amount of stuff, then you would have to work more.

But even then, you would merely have to work more somewhere—anywhere—in order to make up the shortfall. You could keep your current job, or get another one, or start your own business. And you could at any time decide that you don’t need all that extra stuff and don’t want to work more, and simply choose to not work more. You are, in other words, still free.

At worst, the government has taken your stuff. It has made you poorer. But absolutely not, in no way, shape or form, has it made you a slave.

Yes, there is the concept of “wage slavery”, but “wage slavery” isn’t actually slavery, and the notion that people aren’t really, truly free unless they can provide for basic needs entails the need for a strong, redistributive government, which is the exact opposite of what Robert Nozick and his shockingly large body of followers have been arguing for since the 1970s.

I could have been sympathetic to Nozick if his claim had been this:

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with [theft]. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing [goods he has purchased with his own earnings].

Or even this:

[Military conscription] is on a par with forced labor. [After all, you are] seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Even then, there are some very clear reasons why we might be willing to accept taxation or even conscription from a legitimate liberal democratic government even though a private citizen doing the same fundamental activity would obviously be illegal and immoral.

Indeed, it’s not clear that theft is always immoral; there is always the Les Miserables exception where someone desperately poor steals food to feed themselves, and a liberal democratic government taxing its citizens in order to provide food stamps seems even more ethically defensible than that.

And that, my friends, is precisely why Nozick wasn’t satisfied with it.

Precisely because there is obvious nuance here that can readily justify at least some degree of not only taxation for national security and law enforcement, but also taxation for public goods and even redistribution of wealth, Nozick could not abide the analogies that actually make sense. He had to push beyond them to an analogy that is transparently absurd, in order to argue for his central message that government is justifiable for national security and law enforcement only, and all other government functions are inherently immoral. Forget clean water and air. Forget safety regulations in workplaces—or even on toys. Forget public utilities—all utilities must be privatized and unregulated. And above all—above all—forget ever taking any money from the rich to help the poor, because that would be monstrous.

If you support food stamps, in Nozick’s view, there should be a statue of you in Mississippi, because you are a defender of slavery.

Indeed, many of his followers have gone beyond that, and argued using the same core premises that all government is immoral, and the only morally justifiable system is anarcho-capitalism—which, I must confess, I have always had trouble distinguishing from feudalism with extra steps.

Nozick’s response to this kind of argument basically seemed to be that he thought anarcho-capitalism will (somehow, magically) automatically transition into his favored kind of minarchist state, and so it’s actually a totally fine intermediate goal. (A fully privatized military and law enforcement system! What could possibly go wrong? It’s not like private prisons are already unconscionably horrible even in an otherwise mostly-democratic system or anything!)

Nozick wanted to absolve himself—and the rich, especially the rich, whom he seemed to love more than life itself—from having to contribute to society, from owing anything to any other human being.

Rather than be moved by our moral appeals that millions of innocent people are suffering and we could so easily alleviate that suffering by tiny, minuscule, barely-perceptible harms to those who are already richer than anyone could possibly deserve to be, he tried to turn the tables: “No, you are immoral. What you want is slavery.”

And in so doing, he created a thin, but shockingly resilient, intellectual veneer to the most craven selfishness and the most ideologically blinkered hyper-capitalism. He made it respectable to oppose even the most basic ways that governments can make human life better; by verbal alchemy he transmuted plain evil into its own new moral crusade.

Indeed, perhaps the only reason his philosophy was ever taken seriously is that the rich and powerful found it very, very, useful.

Why do we have holidays about death and fear?

PNRJ current events, personal , , , , , , , ,

Oct 26 JDN 2460975

I confess, I don’t think I ever really got Halloween. As a kid I enjoyed dressing up in costumes and getting candy, but the part about being scared—or pretending to be scared, or approximating being scared, or decorating with things like bats and spiders that some people find scary but I don’t especially—never really made a whole lot of sense to me. The one Halloween decoration that does genuinely cause me any fear is excessive amounts of blood (I have a mild hematophobia acquired from a childhood injury), and that experience is aversive—I want to avoid it, not experience more of it. (I’ve written about my feelings toward horror as a genre previously.)

Dia de los Muertos makes a bit more sense to me: A time to reflect about our own mortality, a religious festival about communing with the souls of your ancestors. But that doesn’t really fully explain all the decorated skulls. (It’s apparently hotly debated within the historical community whether these are really different holidays: Scholars disagree as to whether Dia de los Muertos has Native roots or is really just a rebranded Allhallowtide.)

It just generally seems weird to me to have a holiday about death and fear. Aren’t those things… bad? But maybe the point of the holiday is actually to dull them a little, to make them less threatening by the act of trying to celebrate them. Skeletons are scary, but plastic skeletons aren’t so bad; skulls are scary, but decorated skulls are less so. Maybe by playing around with it, we can take some of the bite out of the fear and grief.

My general indifference toward Halloween as an adult is apparently pretty unusual among LGBT people, many of whom seem to treat Halloween season as a kind of second Pride Month. I think the main draw is the opportunity to don a costume and thereby adopt a new identity. And that can be fun, sometimes; but somehow each year I find it feels like such a chore to actually go find a Halloween costume I want to wear.

Maybe part of it is that most people aren’t doing that sort of thing all the time, the way I am by playing games (especially role-playing games). Costumes do add to the immersion of the experience, but do they really add enough to justify the cost of buying one and the effort of wearing it? Maybe I’d just rather boot up Skyrim for the 27th playthrough. But I suppose most people don’t play such games, or not nearly as often as I do; so for them, a chance to be someone else once a year is an opportunity they can’t afford to pass up.

What is the real impact of AI on the environment?

PNRJ computer science, current events, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 19 JDN 2460968

The conventional wisdom is that AI is consuming a huge amount of electricity and water for very little benefit, but when I delved a bit deeper into the data, the results came out a lot more ambiguous. I still agree with the “very little benefit” part, but the energy costs of AI may not actually be as high as many people believe.

So how much energy does AI really use?

This article in MIT Technology Reviewestimates that by 2028, AI will account for 50% of data center usage and 6% of all US energy. But two things strike me about that:

  1. This is a forecast. It’s not what’s currently happening.
  2. 6% of all US energy doesn’t really sound that high, actually.

Note that transportation accounts for 37% of US energy consumed. Clearly we need to bring that down; but it seems odd to panic about a forecast of something that uses one-sixth of that.

Currently, AI is only 14% of data center energy usage. That forecast has it rising to 50%. Could that happen? Sure. But it hasn’t happened yet. Data centers are being rapidly expanded, but that’s not just for AI; it’s for everything the Internet does, as more and more people get access to the Internet and use it for more and more demanding tasks (like cloud computing and video streaming).

Indeed, a lot of the worry really seems to be related to forecasts. Here’s an even more extreme forecast suggesting that AI will account for 21% of global energy usage by 2030. What’s that based on? I have no idea; they don’t say. The article just basically says it “could happen”; okay, sure, a lot of things could happen. And I feel like this sort of forecast comes from the same wide-eyed people who say that the Singularity is imminent and AI will soon bring us to a glorious utopia. (And hey, if it did, that would obviously be worth 21% of global energy usage!)

Even more striking to me is the fact that a lot of other uses of data centers are clearly much more demanding. YouTube uses about 50 times as much energy as ChatGPT; yet nobody seems to be panicking that YouTube is an environmental disaster.

What is a genuine problem is that data centers have strong economies of scale, and so it’s advantageous to build a few very large ones instead of a lot of small ones; and when you build a large data center in a small town it puts a lot of strain on the local energy grid. But that’s not the same thing as saying that data centers in general are wastes of energy; on the contrary, they’re the backbone of the Internet and we all use them almost constantly every day. We should be working on ways to make sure that small towns aren’t harmed by building data centers near them; but we shouldn’t stop building data centers.

What about water usage?

Well, here’s an article estimating that training ChatGPT-3 evaporated hundreds of thousands of liters of fresh water. Once again I have a few notes about that:

  1. Evaporating water is just about the best thing you could do to it aside from leaving it there. It’s much better than polluting it (which is what most water usage does); it’s not even close. That water will simply rain back down later.
  2. Total water usage in the US is estimated at over 300 billion gallons (1.1 trillion liters) per day. Most of that is due to power generation and irrigation. (The best way to save water as a consumer? Become vegetarian—then you’re getting a lot more calories per irrigated acre.)
  3. A typical US household uses about 100 gallons (380 liters) of water per person per day.

So this means that training ChatGPT-3 cost about 4 seconds of US water consumption, or the same as what a single small town uses each day. Once again, that doesn’t seem like something worth panicking over.

A lot of this seems to be that people hear big-sounding numbers and don’t really have the necessary perspective on those numbers. Of course any service that is used by millions of people is going to consume what sounds like a lot of electricity. But in terms of usage per person, or compared to other services with similar reach, AI really doesn’t seem to be uniquely demanding.

This is not to let AI off the hook.

I still agree that the benefits of AI have so far been small, and the risks—both in the relatively short term, of disrupting our economy and causing unemployment, and in the long term, even endangering human civilization itself—are large. I would in fact support an international ban on all for-profit and military research and development of AI; a technology this powerful should be under the control of academic institutions and civilian governments, not corporations.

But I don’t think we need to worry too much about the environmental impact of AI just yet. If we clean up our energy grid (which has just gotten much easier thanks to cheap renewables) and transportation systems, the additional power draw from data centers really won’t be such a big problem.

Why are so many famous people so awful?

PNRJ ethics, inequality, market failure , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 12 JDN 2460961

J.K. Rowling is a transphobic bigot. H.P. Lovecraft was an overt racist. Orson Scott Card is homophobic, and so was Frank Herbert. Robert Heinlein was a misogynist. Isaac Asimov was a serial groper and sexual harasser. Neil Gaiman has been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults.

That’s just among sci-fi and fantasy authors whose work I admire. I could easily go on with lots of other famous people and lots of other serious allegations. (I suppose Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski seem like particularly apt examples.)

Some of these are worse than others; since they don’t seem to be guilty of any actual crimes, we might even cut some slack to Lovecraft, Herbert and Heinlein for being products of their times. (It seems very hard to make that defense for Asimov and Gaiman, with Rowling and Card somewhere in between because they aren’t criminals, but ‘their time’ is now.)

There are of course exceptions: Among sci-fi authors, for instance, Ursula Le Guin, Becky Chambers, Alistair Reynolds and Andy Weir all seem to be ethically unimpeachable. (As far as I know? To be honest, I still feel blind-sided by Neil Gaiman.)

But there really does seem to be pattern here:

Famous people are often bad people.

I guess I’m not quite sure what the baseline rate of being racist, sexist, or homophobic is (and frankly maybe it’s pretty high); but the baseline rate of committing multiple sexual assaults is definitely lower than the rate at which famous men get credibly accused of such.

Lord Acton famously remarked similarly:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

I think this account is wrong, however. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela were certainly powerful—and certainly flawed—but they do not seem corrupt to me. I don’t think that Gandhi beat his wife because he led the Indian National Congress, and Mandela supported terrorists precisely during the period when he had the least power and the fewest options. (It’s almost tautologically true that Lincoln couldn’t have suspended habeas corpusif he weren’t extremely powerful—but that doesn’t mean that it was the power that shaped his character.)

I don’t think the problem is that power corrupts. I think the problem is that the corrupt seek power, and are very good at obtaining it.

In fact, I think the reason that so many famous people are such awful people is that our society rewards being awful. People will flock to you if you are overconfident and good at self-promoting, and as long as they like your work, they don’t seem to mind who you hurt along the way; this makes a perfect recipe for rewarding narcissists and psychopaths with fame, fortune, and power.

If you doubt that this is the case:

How else do you explain Donald Trump?

The man has absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is incompetent, willfully ignorant, deeply incurious, arrogant, manipulative, and a pathological liar. He’s also a racist, misogynist, and admitted sexual assaulter. He has been doing everything in his power to prevent the release of the Epstein Files, which strongly suggests he has in fact sexually assaulted teenagers. He’s also a fascist, and now that he has consolidated power, he is rapidly pushing the United States toward becoming a fascist state—complete with masked men with guns who break into your home and carry you away without warrants or trials.

Yet tens of millions of Americans voted for him to become President of the United States—twice.

Basically, it seems to be that Trump said he was great, and they believed him. Simply projecting confidence—however utterly unearned that confidence might be—was good enough.

When it comes to the authors I started this post with, one might ask whether their writing talents were what brought them fame, independently or in spite of their moral flaws. To some extent that is probably true. But we also don’t really know how good they are, compared to all the other writers whose work never got published or never got read. Especially during times—all too recently—when writers who were women, queer, or people of color simply couldn’t get their work published, who knows what genius we might have missed out on? Dune the first book is a masterpiece, but by the time we get to Heretics of Dune the books have definitely lost their luster; maybe there were some other authors with better books that could have been published, but never were because Herbert had the clout and the privilege and those authors didn’t.

I do think genuine merit has some correlation with success. But I think the correlation is much weaker than is commonly supposed. A lot of very obviously terrible and/or incompetent people are extremely successful in life. Many of them were born with advantages—certainly true of Elon Musk and Donald Trump—but not all of them.

Indeed, there are so many awful successful people that I am led to conclude that moral behavior has almost nothing to do with success. I don’t think people actively go out of their way to support authors, musicians, actors, business owners or politicians who are morally terrible; but it’s difficult for me to reject the hypothesis that they literally don’t care. Indeed, when evidence emerges that someone powerful is terrible, usually their supporters will desperately search for reasons why the allegations can’t be true, rather than seriously considering no longer supporting them.

I don’t know what to do about this.

I don’t know how to get people to believe allegations more, or care about them more; and that honestly seems easier than changing the fundamental structure of our society in a way that narcissists and psychopaths are no longer rewarded with power. The basic ways that we decide who gets jobs, who gets published, and who gets elected seem to be deeply, fundamentally broken; they are selecting all the wrong people, and our whole civilization is suffering the consequences.


We are so far from a just world that I honestly can’t see how to get there from here, or even how to move substantially closer.

But I think we still have to try.