Interesting, this is the first time I remember reading a post on LessWrong that's so heavy on conflict theory with a degrowth/social justice perspective. A few of the crux points are brushed aside "for another day", which is a little disappointing.
"the grasshopper coordinated with the many unhappy ants – those who did not like the colonomy but who were trapped in it by its powerful network effects and Moloch’s usual bag of tricks. Together they circumscribed the colonomy (e.g. through culture that holds competition at bay)," this is unfortunately where my willing suspension of disbelief collapsed. From Scott's:
Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong AI.
Everyone outside doesn’t do those things. And so the only question is whether you’ll be destroyed by foreign diseases, foreign memes, foreign armies, foreign economic competition, or foreign existential catastrophes.As foreigners compete with you – and there’s no wall high enough to block all competition – you have a couple of choices. You can get outcompeted and destroyed. You can join in the race to the bottom. Or you can invest more and more civilizational resources into building your wall – whatever that is in a non-metaphorical way – and protecting yourself.
I can imagine ways that a “rational theocracy” and “conservative patriarchy” might not be terrible to live under, given exactly the right conditions. But you don’t get to choose exactly the right conditions. You get to choose the extremely constrained set of conditions that “capture Gnon”. As outside civilizations compete against you, your conditions will become more and more constrained.
Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out?
Hint: is it part of the cosmos?
Yeah, you’re kind of screwed.
Thanks for reading!
conflict theory with a degrowth/social justice perspective
Yea, I find myself interested in the topics LWers are interested in, but I'm disappointed certain perspectives are missing (despite them being prima facie as well-researched as the perspectives typical on LW). I suspect a bubble effect.
this is unfortunately where my willing suspension of disbelief collapsed
Yup, I suspected that last version would be the hardest to believe for LWers! I plan on writing much more in depth on the topic soon. You might be interested in Guive Assadi's recent work on this topic (not saying he makes the story more plausible, but he does tease out some key premises/questions for its plausibility).
My only intention here was to layout the comparison that needs making (assuming you're a consequentialist with very low discount rates etc): what's the EV of this "once and for all" expansionist solution vs the EV of a "passing the torch" solution? And what level of risk aversion should we be evaluating this with? Neither will last forever or will be perfect. I wouldn't so quickly dismiss the potentially ~10^5 or ~10^6 year long "passing the torch" solution over the comparatively OOMs lower certainty "once and for all" solution. Especially once I add back in the other cruxes that I couldn't develop here (though I encourage reading the philosophical literature on it). I want to see a lot more evidence on all sides – and I think others should too.
so, I'm in the same time happy there is an answer, but can't be happy with the answer itself. which is to say, i tried to go and find the pints i agree with, and find one after another point of disagreement. but i also believe this post deserve more serious answer, so i will try to write at least part of my objections.
i do believe that x-risk and societies destroying themselves as thy become more clever then wise is a real problem. but i disagree with the framing that the ants are the ones to blame. it's running from the problem. if grasshoppers are to grow, even if slower, they too may bring atomic winter.
and you just... assume it away. in the way of worst Utopian writing, where societies have features that present-people hate and find bad but somehow everyone happy and no one have any problems with that and everything is okay. it's just... feel cheap to me.
and if you assume no growth at all, then... what about all the people that value growth? there are a lot of us in the world. if it's actually "steady-state existence", not sustainable growth but everything stay the same way... it's really really really bad by my utility function, and the one good thing i can say about that, is that state doesn't look stable to me. there were always innovators and progressors. you can't have your stable society without some Dystopian repression of those.
but you can have dath ilan. this was my main problem with the original parable. it was very black-and-white. dath ilan didn't come to the ants and ask for food, instead it offered it. but it definitely not table state. and to my intuition, it's look both possible and desirable.
and it also doesn't assume that the ants throw away decision theory from the window. the original parables explicitly mentioned it. i find representation of ants that forego cooperation in prisoner dilemma strawmanish.
but beside all that, there is another, meta-point. there was prediction after prediction for pick-oil and the results, and they all proved wrong. so are other predictions for that strand of socialism. from my point of view, the algorithm that generating this predictions is untrustworthy. i don't think Less Wrong is the right place for all those discussions.
and i don't plan to write my own, dath-ilani replay to the parables.
but i don't think some perspectives are missing. i think they was judged false and ignored afterwards. and the way in which the original parables felt fair to the ants, and those don't, is evidence this is good rule to follow.
it's not bubble, it's the trust in the ability for fair discussion, or the absent of trust. because discussion in which my opinions assumed to be result of bubble and not honest disagreement... i don't have words to describe the sense of ugliness, wrongness, that this create. it the same that came from feeling the original post as honest and fair, and this as underhanded and strawmanish.
(all written here is not very certain and not precise representation of my opinions, but i already took way too much time to write it, and i think it better to write it then not)
Literary status: lacking in grace, hopefully compensated by its information density. Inspired by, and in reply to Richard Ngo’s post of parables.
Disclaimer: Though I cite ecological economics and degrowth literature, I don’t have strong credence in all their conclusions (e.g. the high probability of a catastrophic economic climacteric). I do however find solid macro-economic insights in their work (e.g. various formulations of a “growth imperative”), and I find systems dynamics to be a very powerful conceptual framework.
One ant-made winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches the remaining colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“Of course,” says the grasshopper, “but not so much as to survive the millennia-long winter you have brought upon us. You thought that by ever increasing your power, by collectively forbidding yourselves from ever fully enjoying the gains in productivity you won, by always reinvesting and pushing off singing and dancing to next year, then you or your descendants would eventually enjoy an eternal summer. Instead all this has rewarded you with is a great collapse and a small, precarious existence. My carnival wasn’t just shrewd cashing in in the face of risk and uncertainty: it was a key release valve for surplus, essential to maintaining summers for the long-run. With regards to laughter and love I am the efficient one; you, the inefficient.”
(“But what about the gains in health, wealth and material luxury we've accumulated ? Surely those increase laughter and love?”
“Very questionable. And at what cost?”)
On a planet which is resource rich enough for the ant-colonization process to reach escape velocity before burning the house down, and the ants have managed to get themselves on a trajectory to do so…
… “No,” says the grasshopper. “In the past, your colonies diseased, robbed and murdered us. Now you convert us to your way of life by gentler means – interest bearing loans, economic dumping, shiny consumer products, pretty graphs that go up. And any who continue to reject your way are eventually hemmed in, such is your colony’s voracious hunger for resources. Thus I find myself obliged to join your ranks or perish.”
“Apologies for the intrusion, but this universe can only ever reward flawless efficiency in colonization. It was only a matter of time” reply the ants.
“Even if that's true in some sense,[1] that’s certainly no excuse. Might, economic or otherwise, still doesn't make right, and expansion for the sake of expansion is still distasteful. Your colony economy – your "colonomy" – may have appetite for such things, but presumably you find them as despicable as I. You are still basically the same insect I have known for some 200 000 years. You have not self-modified, not yet. But you are responsible for your colony: it’s your job to keep its appetites in check, or better, to modify it so as not to have such appetites. You must fight back against Moloch.”
“We agree they aren’t the most tasteful. But since those appetites are the only this universe rewards, maybe riding them across the stars is our best chance to maximize our values – to defeat Moloch once and for all.”
“I assume you mean ‘best chance at getting the largest portion of matter to be reshaped in accordance to a preference ranking over future world states that is (minimally different from) our own’? Yes I suppose that’s one way to do ethics – it’s not mine, but that’s for another day. Regardless, that’s a big “maybe.” The EV of your gamble depends on many things: how likely you are to survive at all, how fast and far this colonization can physically be carried (given uneven distribution of resources and technological upper bounds), how well you can preserve and instill your values over this process (a problem of signal degradation and control), and of course the values themselves. If, for example, you value chilling at home, then depending on how long this conquest is going to take, how far ahead/behind the leading wave you are, how far any wave is from home, how much time you’d have to enjoy chilling at home between quelling rebellions… you may be better off just chilling at home. And if you intrinsically value good character (as you likely do), and find this cold expansionism to be a form of vicious gluttony, then once more: you’ll think twice before chaining yourself to this macro-economic creature of colonization and throwing away the key. (Which raises another question: will your ravenous colonomy come peaceably to halt once it has done its job? You might avoid collapse by peak oil by switching to another energy source in time, but how do you plan to avoid peak matter?)”
“All in all,” concludes the grasshopper, “I suspect the risk of our destroying everything we hold dear or turning into something that disgusts us greatly overshadows the gross expected value. Especially in light of past failures: every previous attempt to ride power-seeking beasts led to atrocities of every kind – slavery, genocide, patriarchy... what makes you confident this breed is any different?”
(“You greatly underestimate gross expected value: computronium will allow us to simulate untold numbers of virtuous minds chilling at home.”
“Digital minds are also for another day... let’s just say, many of us don’t place the locus of value solely in the positive valent states of minds, find mind uploading tantamount to death, and that entering the experience machine to be the total abandonment of the duties and virtue-giving bonds we have toward the proper objects of our care. We find computronium to offer little.”)
“No matter – it is too late: we bound ourselves to the colonomy decades ago. Do as you please – just don’t expect kindly reciprocation: here the market is the law” said the ants, turning to their rockets and leaving the grasshopper to fade into irrelevance.
One summer, seeing where unbridled antdom and its colonomy would lead (arbitrary expansionism, or cycles of accumulation and catastrophic collapse, the cultivation of market acumen at the expense of all other virtues), the grasshopper coordinated with the many unhappy ants – those who did not like the colonomy but who were trapped in it by its powerful network effects[2] and Moloch’s usual bag of tricks. Together they circumscribed the colonomy (e.g. through culture that holds competition at bay[3] and careful mechanism design), putting it firmly in the service of guarding against 90% of the distribution of possible winters while not letting it get out of hand (e.g. increasing the likelihood of winters they were not already equipped for[4] or encroaching on love and laughter time). They do not defeat Moloch once and for all, but instead keep vigil, each generation passing the torch to the next.[5] With some luck, they enjoy countless seasonal oscillations, village-sized arcs of corruption and redemption, all in all making for a relatively peaceful and happy steady-state existence.
I'm not convinced it is: who says that all dynamical systems in the actual universe which attempt total colonization – unending growth – aren't all doomed to implode well before they succeed? I'd be shocked if we have anything close to a robust model for predicting the likelihood of the Goldilocks conditions arising in our universe – the conditions required to spawn a dynamical system that succeeds in "total colonization."
The cost of exiting the colonomy being excessive.
Witness weekends and holidays.
Cf. Anthropogenic climate change. I wonder if there isn't an "incompleteness theorem" of sorts here: there will always be another type of winter, of problem, unaccounted for and possibly made worse. No patch can patch for every winter.
Here is one interesting proposal of what this might look like/how it might be accomplished. I don't have strong credences yet regarding the desirability or plausibility of this setup: curious to hear thoughts.