Oct 11 JDN 2461325

I have discussed before the notion of a motte and bailey, in which uses ambiguity to present a view in two different forms: A motte, which is highly defensible but often banal or uncontroversial, and a bailey, which is highly interesting and radical but ultimately indefensible. Like the medieval strategy, you want to live in the bailey, but you can only defend the motte.

I think the “rationalist” and “effective altruism” communities suffer quite severely from this dynamic.

I use the scare quotes precisely because many so-called “rationalists” deeply fail to conform to the principles of rationalism, and many so-called “effective altruists” don’t seem particularly altruistic.

This saddens me greatly, because the core principles of rationalism and effective altruism are not simply correct: They are among the best ideas that have ever been formulated by human minds.

The core of rationalism is this:

Reason is the best source of knowledge and truth.

The core of effective altruism is this:

The best acts are those that do the most good for the least cost.

Both of these ideas seem beyond defensible—more like unassailable, perhaps even undeniable, as in literally impossible to coherently deny. They have the ring of not simply truth, but deep truth, perhaps even capital-T Truth, fundamental laws that have the power and certainty of logical or mathematical theorems.

Moreover, they are not banal or uncontroversial! It is quite bizarre that they are not; it speaks of deep irrationality within human brains and human societies that anyone would even try to deny these things. Yet the very existence of religion as we know it proves that rationalism is not uncontroversial, and many people still cling to moral systems that condemn people for harmless acts or create needless suffering.

This is the motte, and it is a fine motte indeed: Beautiful, imposing, perfectly-engineered, and utterly impregnable. The closest real-world equivalent is something like the walls of Troy, which were (as the story goes) invincible against conventional force and could only be defeated by deception. (Or perhaps if you consider all of Japan a fortress: Conquering that island nation from the outside required air power and nuclear weapons.)

I love this motte will all my heart, but I am deeply concerned about the bailey.

What is the bailey of rationalism and effective altruism?

First, let me address the parts that I am not too concerned about; I think many people go a bit too far with them, but I believe they are basically sound:

• Bayesianism: The best way to reason about uncertainty is using Bayesian statistics.
• Utilitarianism: Morality consists in doing the greatest good for the greatest number.
• Expected utility: The best way to make decisions under uncertainty is to maximize expected utility.
• Behavioral economics: Economic behavior is best understood by recognizing that human beings use heuristics and are subject to biases that prevent them from being fully rational.
• Longtermism: One of our most important moral concerns is what kind of world we are making for future generations of humanity.

As I have stated them, I consider these views to be basically sound. Now, let me rephrase them in ways that they are often taken too far:

• McNamara fallacy: Only what you can mathematically quantify matters, and if you are not explicitly computing a posterior distribution from a prior distribution and a likelihood, you are not making a rational judgment under uncertainty.
• Act utilitarianism: Morality consists in taking each action in isolation and maximizing the utility it creates, without regard for the deep uncertainty and complex ramifications involved in doing so.
• Shut up and multiply: Regardless of whether it violates common sense, rests upon flimsy assumptions, or involves deep uncertainty and unacceptable risk, the proper thing to do when making decisions is always to go with what you calculate yields the highest expected utility.
• Fallacy fallacy: If your opponent is reasoning in a fallacious way, you are free to completely dismiss their beliefs.
• Utopian longtermism: As long as you can convince yourself that what you are doing will provide some miniscule increase in the probability of a utopian future for our galaxy-colonizing descendants, you are free to ignore the consequences of your actions for people who are alive today.

These are already a big problem, especially the last one. I have seen far too many “rationalists” and “effective altruists” pivot away from projects that could have done enormous good today with a high degree of certainty (such as improving economic policy, or supporting environmental causes, or donating to medical research or malaria prevention) in favor of trying to advance AI (often in the name of “AI safety”, but for some reason never actually involving regulating anything) toward some pie-in-the-sky vision of a utopian future.

In particular, I am deeply concerned about people who attach huge payoffs to tiny probabilities, and then convince themselves that “expected utility” means they must care about those things more than anything else. This is essentially a secular version of Pascal’s Wager, and it can drive people to terrible, terrible things.

It is far better for you to do small good things that are certain. Yes, we should care about people thousands of years from now; but the truth is, we really have no idea what the future will be like thousands of years from now. So how about we do our best to help the people who are here, now?

If you don’t find this argument convincing, consider this:

Helping people now can push us toward a brighter future.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are truly most concerned about what happens thousands of years from now when humans have colonized the galaxy. What sort of society would you want to be responsible for that colonization?

Would it be one where people used esoteric and highly-uncertain mathematical arguments to convince themselves that they should abuse and exploit other people in the name of some unprovable “greater good”?

Or would it be one where people helped each other, locally and globally, showed compassion for all living things, and sought to help everyone achieve their full potential?

I contend that spreading kindness and compassion might very well be the very best thing you could do to make humanity’s future brighter. It will not only increase the probability that humanity survives long enough to colonize the galaxy, but also increase the probability that the society which does so is a good society, made of people who are kind and compassionate.

Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to donate to, or work for, AI safety or advocacy for AI regulation. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do those things. But they are not the one most important thing—and indeed, anyone who tells you that something is the one most important thing is basically trying to hack your hedonic mind.

But there is more to the bailey here, and it gets worse.

The majority of people who identify as rationalists and/or effective altruists also seem to believe the following things:

• Libertarianism: Government is always the problem, never the solution. We should always trust in free markets rather that democratic governments.
• Prediction markets: Rather than trust experts or even admit that some things are fundamentally unpredictable, we should base our decisions on the results of prediction markets, and we should have prediction markets for virtually everything.
• AI-doomism: The end of the world is nigh, and this is a terrible thing; any day now, artificial general intelligence will take over the world and wipe out humanity.
• Singularitarianism: The end of the world as we know it is nigh, and this is a good thing; any day now, artificial general intelligence will take over the world and lead us into a glorious utopian future.

This excellent and eye-opening video on the conference Manifest does a nice job of expressing just how weird and dangerous the culture around these beliefs can become. (And while they are much rarer, there have absolutely been people who tried to adopt rationalist ideas and became literal cults.)

Of course AI-doomism and Singularitarianism are contradictory, but in an odd sort of way: Both sides agree that AGI is imminent and will change everything; they simply disagree about whether this will turn out very good or very bad. As a result, many people who seem to assign a higher-than-normal probability of AI doom also assign a higher-than-normal probability of Singularity. This is not incoherent (as long as all their probabilities add to 1, of course); it simply means that they assign a high probability to AGI being imminent and world-changing, and aren’t sure whether that will turn out good or bad.

(I was once cited as a “Singularitarian blogger”, for this post; I am deeply flattered to be thus cited, but I really don’t think of myself as a Singularitarian. There is a weak sense of Singularitarianism that I guess I agree with: Artificial intelligence will, sooner than most people think, effect radical changes upon human society, and this could be a very good thing if it is handled correctly. But I do not believe we are on the cusp of the Culture.)

The weirdest part, for me at least, is how libertarianism and AI-doomism collide: People will tell me that they believe that AI has a greater than 10%—some say 50% or even 90%—chance of imminently wiping out the human race, and yet they reject any attempt to ban or even significantly regulate AI.

I believe that there is a less than 1% chance of AI wiping out the human race, and yet I believe that we urgently need severe regulations on AI that would substantially slow its development and limit its capabilities. (I think Dynomight makes the best argument for this risk being genuine, cutting through a lot of irrelevant nonsense. As it is, I actually think IQ-300 aliens would likely be better than AGI, because a species of genuinely-intelligent beings (as opposed to computer software that simulates but probably doesn’t actually exhibit intelligence) that is advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel is likely to be peaceful and cooperative enough that they would do us more good than harm. Also, Dynomight’s timeline of “the next few decades” is a lot more plausible than the panicky doomers who say “the next few years”.)

In part I want to regulate AI more because I can already see ways that AI is causing harm (this Jacobin article provides a nice summary), but even without those things, a 1% chance of total annihilation is well worth a great deal of regulation and slowed innovation. Indeed, let me get on record saying that reducing the chances of human annihilation by one percentage point would be well worth slowing economic and technological development by a century.

Libertarianism and prediction markets of course go quite well together, and indeed I rarely encounter one without the other. But this faith in the market is deeply misplaced—especially if we believe, as I do, in behavioral economics!—and in particular, prediction markets are in fact fundamentally flawed as a means of making decisions because of how they handle conditional probabilities. It’s actually kind of a corollary of Goodhart’s Law: Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, because rational agents try to game the system. Prediction markets can work very well if the outcome is totally beyond human control and wouldn’t totally render the outcome moot (e.g. an earthquake); but once human decisions can affect the result, the prediction market effectively becomes insider trading, and for really big things (like existential risk), the outcome itself could easily render the prediction market—or even money itself—utterly irrelevant.

We must defend the motte with all our might—but perhaps it’s best to abandon some of this bailey.

Yes, by all means, abandon religion, learn to think more rationally, support AI safety, and do what you can to do the most good for the least cost. Those things are good, and right, and important.

But if you find yourself thinking that you should sacrifice yourself, or abandon ordinary concepts of morality, in the name of some ultimate good that will save us from imminent destruction, you need to take a step back, and re-immerse yourself in the rest of society. You are not going to single-handedly save the world; nobody is. If the world is to be saved, we will all do it together.