Despite our superior technology, there are many things that Western countries could do in the past that we can’t today—e.g. rapidly build large-scale infrastructure, maintain low-crime cities, and run competent bureaucracies.

Why do you focus on these problems? I mean, sure, the average person in the West can feel threatened by crime, infrastructure decay, or incompetent bureaucracy. But they live every day under much bigger threats, like the threat of losing their job, getting evicted, getting denied healthcare, or getting billed or fee-d into poverty. These seem to be the biggest societal (non-health, non-family) threats for our hypothetical average person. And the common pattern in these threats isn't decay or incompetence, it's exploitation by elites.

[-]Richard_Ngo2mo*145

The threats of losing one’s job or getting evicted are not actually very scary when you’re in healthy labor and property markets. And we’ve produced so much technological abundance over the last century that our labor and property markets should be flourishing. So insofar as those things are still scary for people today, a deeper explanation for that comes in explaining why our labor and property markets arent very healthy, which comes back to our inability to build and our overrregulation.

But also: yes, there’s a bunch of stuff in this curriculum about exploitation by elites. Somehow there’s a strange pattern though where a lot of the elite exploitation is extremely negative-sum: e.g. so so much money is burned in the US healthcare system, not even transferred to elites (e.g. there are many ways in which being a doctor is miserable which you would expect a healthy system to get rid of). So I focused on paradigm examples of negative-sum problems in the intro to highlight that’s there’s definitely something very Pareto suboptimal going on here.

[-]cousin_it2mo*43

It seems to me that such "unhealthiness" is pretty normal for labor and property markets: when I read books from different countries and time periods, the fear of losing one's job and home is a very common theme. Things were easier in some times and places, but these were rare.

So it might make more sense to focus on reasons for "unhealthiness" that apply generally. Overregulation can be the culprit in today's US, but I don't see it applying equally to India in the 1980s, Turkey in the 1920s, or England in the early 1800s (these are the settings of some books on my shelf whose protagonists had very precarious jobs and housing). And even if you defeat overregulation, the more general underlying reasons might still remain.

What are these general reasons? In the previous comment I said "exploitation", but a more neutral way of putting it is that markets don't always protect one particular side. Markets are two-sided: there's no law of economics saying a healthy labor market will always be a seller's market, and housing will be a buyer's market. Things could just as easily go the other way. So if we want to make the masses less threatened, it's not enough to make markets more healthy overall; we need to empower the masses' side of the market in particular.

[-]Cole Wyeth2mo10

Those problems don’t sound new and also don’t seem that relevant to navigating AGI.

[-]cousin_it2mo74

I think questions of power differences between the "elites" and the "masses" are very relevant to the AI transition, both as a model for intuitions and as a way to choose policy directions now, because AI will tend to amplify and lock-in these power differences and at some point it'll get too late. For more context, see these comment threads of mine: 1, 2, 3, or this book review.

[+][comment deleted]2mo20

[-]Raemon2mo52

A thing very unobvious to me and hard to figure out – how much depth is there here? There's a version of this I'd expect to be pretty interesting even if I already follow you and Samo, and version where I spend the whole time thinking "okay, I get it."

(for onlookers: I would not want to rely soley on a series by Samo and Richard for getting my political background knowledge but I've historically found them both useful frames to have in my pocket)

[-]Richard_Ngo2mo*135

Good question. I learned from my last curriculum (the AGI safety fundamentals one) that I should make my curricula harder than I instinctively want to. So I included a bunch of readings that I personally took a long time to appreciate as much as I do now (e.g. Hoffman on the debtor's revolt, Yudkowsky on local validity, Sotala on beliefs as emotional strategies, Moses on The Germans in week 1). Overall I think there's at least one reading per week that would reward very deep thought. Also I'm very near (and plausibly literally on) the global Pareto frontier in how much I appreciate all of MAGA-type politics, rationalist-type analysis, and hippie-type discussion of trauma, embodied emotions, etc. I've tried to include enough of all of these in there that very few people will consistently think "okay, I get it".

Having said that, people kept recommending that I include books, and I kept telling them I couldn't because I only want to give people 20k words max of main readings per week. Given a word budget it seems like people will learn more from reading many short essays than a few books. But maybe that's an artifact of how I personally think (basically, I like to start as broad as possible and then triangulate my way down to specific truths), whereas other people might get more out of going deeper into fewer topics.

I do think that there's not enough depth to be really persuasive to people who go in strongly disagreeing with me on some/all of these topics. My hope is that I can at least convey that there's some shape of coherent worldview here, which people will find valuable to engage with even if they don't buy it wholesale.

[-]Raemon2mo20

Also I'm very near (and plausibly literally on) the global Pareto frontier in how much I appreciate all of MAGA-type politics, rationalist-type analysis, and hippie-type discussion of trauma, embodied emotions, etc. I've tried to include enough of all of these in there that very few people will consistently think "okay, I get it".

Yeah this is why I would recommend the series to people who aren't already following you relatively closely, I'm mostly like "will I get something out of this if I'm already reading most of what Richard and Samo say online?" (I don't actually read Samo in depth but skim him)