The ones who endure
16rvnnt
12Richard_Ngo
15rvnnt
0nim
2M. Y. Zuo
9nim
4Donald Hobson
2Duncan Beggs
1Kenoubi
4Richard_Ngo
2Raemon
3Richard_Ngo
2Portia
2Richard_Ngo
1Portia
1NoriMori1992
New Comment
When people call things like this post "rough to write/read", and consider them to require a content warning, I wonder if most people are able to think clearly (or at all) about actually terrible scenarios, and worry that they aren't. (I'm especially worried if those people have influence in a domain where there might be a tradeoff between mitigating X-risks vs mitigating S-risks.)
I liked the description of the good future, though. Thanks for the reminder that things can (maybe) go well, too.
Whenever people are sad for any reason except s-risk, I wonder if they're able to think at all about important issues. /s
1Right; that would be a silly thing to think.
My intended message might've been better worded as follows
If staring into abysses is difficult/rough, then adequately staring into the darker abysses might require counter-intuitively large amounts of effort/agency. And yet, I think it might be necessary to grok those darker abysses, if we are to avoid falling into them. That makes me worried.
OTOH, you seem exceptionally reflective, so perhaps that worry is completely unfounded in your case. Anyway, I'm grateful for the work you do; I wish there were more people like you in this world. (Also, your attention is extremely valuable, so please feel free to promptly drop/forget this conversation.)
A 10lb weight might be tough for one person to do a particular exercise with, but trivial for another person. Does that mean the weight shouldn't be labeled?
How would we quantify relative weights if we didn't have mass as a globally agreed-upon metric to order them by? I think we could do better-than-nothing by comparing relative weight: In a world without lbs and kg, a gym could still mark one dumbbell as being the smallest, the next one up as being above the smallest, the next as being above the second, and so on.
In the domain of content, we similarly lack an objective scale of absolute weight, but it's still often better than nothing to flag "heavier than you might be expecting".
Do you get annoyed at stores that put out a "wet floor" sign after mopping, if you personally happen to have good balance and be wearing non-slip shoes? Or do you accept that convention as existing to help people who are in a worse situation than yours, such as being infirm or poorly shod, avoid a kind of mishap that's not relevant to you?
The problem is not that there is a distribution of X along a spectrum, more so a problem that X is arbitrarily defined by each imperfect agent with some non-zero degree of self-serving goals, and that each agent can secretly coordinate with other agents.
So readers will always have the lingering suspicion that some amount of secret coordination is going on behind the scenes.
Of course this general principle applies to nearly everything, including every internet essay ever written, but it's especially noticeable when very high levels of trust are needed in a community.
There is no such problem with physical units of measurement, such as mass, because no amount of political power, social status, etc., can even slightly tilt the meaning of 1 kg without a worldwide consensus.
Since billions of people have enough resources to independently verify what's 1 kg or not, the effective outcome is a billion+ strong unanimous consensus. A consensus of a few dozen LW accounts is microscopic in comparison.
Some throw themselves into the thrill of discovery, trying to rederive in small groups what it previously took the efforts of whole hiveminds to understand.
Perhaps the new humans get the same thrill of discovery for re-derivation as they'd get for initial derivation. Perhaps their thrill of re-derivation is even greater than their thrill of initial derivation, because initial derivation implies uncertainty and thus fear of potential consequences.
The hiveminds are post-scarcity, and that's good for them when they are. But if some external threat appeared and re-imposed a period of scarcity, all those minds that value something else more than they value life would likely be killed by their things' losses. These "adult" minds can all die off, dropping from humanity like leaves from a tree in autumn.
The child survives, though, a seed or spore, a dormant tardigrade drifting through the cosmos. The hiveminds easily forget (except for those who make lifetimes of philosophy on the topic), but the child is not static. It's constantly changing, breathing, living, tautologically antithetical to the constancy of death. Slow as a drip of pitch, the child changes, grows, develops new parts of itself, meeting always that minimum derivative of change necessary to define continued life. And by the definition of life, parts sometimes shear from it, icebergs of different interests and potentials calving into the sea off its constant, glacial self, even as a trickle of nourishment snows in uphill.
The hiveminds know they're safe, human, permanent, because they don't have to fear a future without themselves. The child does that for them, and its conviction in that fear is human as a self-negating prophecy, human as how society collapsed at Y2K.
If some external threat appeared, well some of those joyous minds explored antimatter rocketry. They explored it as a puzzle, an intellectual curiosity. The optimal form being automatically calculated by the AI. But if the AI that protects them disappeared and they turned that knowledge to practical use, they could design an antimatter bomb.
The suffering child mind has no skills with which to defend itself.
I was wondering if anyone would mention that story in the comments. I definitely agree that it has very strong similarities in its core idea, and wondered if that was deliberate. I don't agree with any implications (which you may or may not have intended) that it's so derivative as to make not mentioning Omelas dishonest, though, and independent invention seems completely plausible to me.
Edited to add: although the similar title does incline rather strongly to Omelas being an acknowledged source.
So actually the main reason I didn't mention it being a rewrite of Omelas is because I did a typical-mind fallacy and assumed it would be obvious. Will edit to mention in intro.
fwiw I kinda liked it being a subtle nod without being spelled out (but, seems fine either way)
1Yeah, but I've been surprised by the number of people I've talked to about it who hadn't heard of Omelas, and I do think the tone and style of the story is kinda weird without that context.
1I feel your story misses the thing that made the original so painful, though - that the joy of the group is supposedly only possible and conceivable due to the suffering of the child, and the fact that the child wants out and begs for it and could be released, but is denied for the sake of the other members, as an active choice against its even most basic human rights:
"The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In
the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten.
It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through
fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or
genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of
the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there;
and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever
comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes
the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may
come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at
it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is
locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has
not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes
speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of
whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to
its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its
buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are
content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them
understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of
their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their
scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers
of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. (...)
Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not
free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its
existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the
profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They
know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player,
could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight
of the first morning of summer. (...)
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they
seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people,
though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the
matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at
the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger,
outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child.
But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and
be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in
Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the
chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child
and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. (...)
Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. "
And most importantly... the whole point of the original story is the ending - those who do not want to accept a system in which a bargain for torture is the only option, and act on it.
"At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or
rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent
for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the
street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the
beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth
or girl, man or woman.
Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit
windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards
the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they
do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than
the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem
to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
I feel your story misses the thing that made the original so painful, though - that the joy of the group is supposedly only possible and conceivable due to the suffering of the child, and the fact that the child wants out and begs for it and could be released, but is denied for the sake of the other members, as an active choice against its even most basic human rights:
Yes, I reject this part because I don't think that we live in the least convenient possible world, where cities like Omelas can only be accepted or rejected, never gradually improved.
And so I wanted to ask: could this sort of suffering still happen in a world where things aren't magic, where you can make incremental changes? And I think the answer is yes, for the reasons in the story—which I personally find much more poignant than the original.
On that point, we very much agree. Them walking out, for all its beauty of rejecting such a choice, always felt something of a cop-out to me - they aren't actually dealing with the difficult situation, and they are leaving the kid behind in its misery. It's one of the parts of left-wing thinking that has always bothered me, when people reach for revolutions or isolated communities as the solution when systemic incremental reforms are hard, disregarding how much harder revolutions are to pull of well, especially if you lack a precise idea of your goal, which, if you had it, you should also be able to work towards with reforms.
The linked PDF has a number of typos (OCR errors, perhaps?). Might be better to link to an Internet Archive version, such as this one (from New Dimensions 3; I can't find The Wind's Twelve Quarters on IA to link to that one).
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