Folks growing up in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and early '80s will remember the existential threat of that era: communism.
ISIS has a long way to go before it can capture the fear of total nuclear annihilation. The vietnam war, the korean war, the cold war, domino theory, the day after, red dawn, war games, duck-and-cover drills in school...
Whenever I hear hand-wringing from these youngsters about ISIS, I have to chuckle. Back in my day we had real existential threats, sonny.
Now I'm going back to watch my copy of Rocky iV. On VHS of course.
First, an obligatory reminder that the original post is not an injunction against talking politics, it is against politicizing a non-political discussion.
Do you think that the very same idea of rationality can be the subject of existential risk?
Second, let's imagine the future where the fundamental/radical/militant Islam won. Specifically, the Salafi version of Sunni Islam. Unconditionally. Everyone is muslim, no other religion is allowed. Everyone not originally muslim is either converted or killed. What's the worst that can happen to "rationalit...
My prediction is that IS will go pretty much the same route as the ideologically and structurally very similar Mahdist State in South Egypt / Sudan in the late 19th century. Meaning I expect it to have more success, maybe sustained over a couple of years, due to their ability to wage war at comparatively little cost, then fall apart due to factional infighting when a new leader needs to take over.
That's because succession crises tend to be worse when the old leader's legitimacy depends on something any new leader cannot easily obtain. Abu Bakr, like Muhamm...
Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress: think about the wonderful skyscrapers and green patches in the desert of the Arab Emirates or the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. So it might well be the case that in the future some scientist will start a seed AI believing that Allah will guide it to evolve in the best way.
Both skyscrapers and nuclear weapons weren't invented in the middle East. The countries hired experts from Western countries that provided valuable expertise. If you want to argue that significant new discove...
I expect Islamic State specifically to vanish within the next ten years, although fundamentalist Islamic terrorism will continue to be about as much of a threat as it was before, which isn't actually very much.
Violent jihadism is only a threat to the sanity waterline in the Islamic nations where it finds fertile ground, and what we should be worried about elsewhere is the reaction to Islamic extremism, which mostly involves new security measures that use "terrorism" as an excuse to infringe on liberties.
Islamic extremist AIs are only likely to be...
Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?
Define your time scale. "Future" is very very long, everything will vanish in time.
Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?
No. I can't see why a particular brand of fundamentalist Islam is a worse menace than, say, Stalin or Mao.
...Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the f
Rationality is hard enough when you're talking about simple topics about which a lot of information is known, like quantum physics. But politics is an extremely complicated subject, and there is a lot of unknown and missing information and this is by design. To give one example, during the cold war the US military did not often reveal the full extent of its capabilities, and this lead the public to be excessively fearful of the Soviet Union. Presidents were often criticised for lack of military buildup and taking a 'soft' stance. It was partly due to this ...
Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?
In the future? Yes. In the near future? Unlikely. The Islamic State is a reaction to forces that have been at work in the Middle East for some decades now and there are certain parties who think it in their short-term benefit for the Islamic State to continue its existence.
Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?
No. It's violent enough tha...
Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress
Disagreed; a primary danger of fundamentalism is that it stops technological progress, and puts too much focus and attention on the past as opposed to the future. Consider al-Ghazali as the standardbearer for reactionary fundamentalist thought at the close of the Islamic Golden Age, and Ibn Rushd as the standardbearer for rationality. Consider Zheng He against the Confucian faction.
Now, that's not to say there won't be any engineers among the violent side; consider the example o...
Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?
Nothing lasts forever, though religions (in a fairly general sense) last longer than most things.
To my mind, the interesting question is whether the Islamic State will be gone soonish. In the short run, it's anti-fragile. It feeds on being attacked. On the other hand, it revolts every other institution which has a preference for normal human life.
It's possible that the rest of the world will solve coordination problems so as to destroy IS by military attacks.
I like t...
What I am worried about is that the Christian Reformation was an extremely traumatic event for Europe. I still feel the effects today -- the fact that I can't find a garbage can in London's Waterloo station can be directly traced to the Reformation.
Lots of folks remarked that Islam has not gone through its own Reformation event, and probably should/will at some point. This will be far more traumatic for Islam than for Christianity, and there are nukes now, and mass communication which are multipliers for how bad this kind of conflict can get.
In general:
Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being 'quiverfull' people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.
Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.
The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won't genes win out?
Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I'm sure we are all aware that ex...
Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement
It can be coupled with "lone genius" types of advancement but not with more systematic ones. Probably they are unable to stand on the lone genius's shoulders, fundamentalism requires you either worship him and do not dare to revise and improve his work, or to ignore/hate. This is because these lines of thought are very strongly focused on authority, focusing more on who says it not what is said. So if a lonely genius impresses them sufficiently they will eithe...
To a mildly rational person, the conflict fueling the rise of the Islamic State, namely the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, is the worst kind of Blue/Green division. A separation that causes hundreds of billions of dollars (read that again) to be wasted trying kill each other.
Would you apply the same logic to say the doctrinal differences between say Welfare-State Librelism and Communism (or Nazism)? Or this is just a case of "all ideologies that aren't mine look alike to me"?
...Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to
Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?
We need to understand empathically what they are thinking and how they are feeling in order to build predictive mind-models. Can we? I can't. I am unwilling to believe people simply buy into the most possibly uncharitable reading of a holy book purely because of murky theological reasons. They could be like some nice farmer dude in Indonesia, reading the same holy book. The difference is no...
Politics is the mind-killer. Politics IS really the mind-killer. Please meditate on this until politics flows over you like butter on hot teflon, and your neurons stops fibrillating and resume their normal operations.
Preface
I've always found silly that LW, one of the best and most focused group of rationalists on the web isn't able to talk evenly about politics. It's true that we are still human, but can't we just make an effort at being calm and level-headed? I think we can. Does gradual exposure works on group, too? Maybe a little bit of effort combined with a little bit of exposure will work as a vaccine.
And maybe tomorrow a beautiful naked valkyrie will bring me to utopia on her flying unicorn...
Anyway, I want to try. Let's see what happens.
Intro
Two recent events has prompted me to make this post: I'm reading "The rise of the Islamic State" by Patrick Coburn, which I think does a good job in presenting fairly the very recent history surrounding ISIS, and the terrorist attack in Tunis by the same group, which resulted in 18 foreigners killed.
I believe that their presence in the region is now definitive: they control an area that is wider than Great Britain, with a population tallying over six millions, not counting the territories controlled by affiliate group like Boko Haram. Their influence is also expanding, and the attack in Tunis shows that this entity is not going to stay confined between the borders of Syria and Iraq.
It may well be the case that in the next ten years or so, this will be an international entity which will bring ideas and mores predating the Middle Age back on the Mediterranean Sea.
A new kind of existential threat
To a mildly rational person, the conflict fueling the rise of the Islamic State, namely the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, is the worst kind of Blue/Green division. A separation that causes hundreds of billions of dollars (read that again) to be wasted trying kill each other. But here it is, and the world must deal with it.
In comparison, Democrats and Republicans are so close that they could be mistaken for Aumann agreeing.
I fear that ISIS is bringing a new kind of existential threat: one where is not the existence of humankind at risks, but the existence of the idea of rationality.
The funny thing is that while people can be extremely irrational, they can still work on technology to discover new things. Fundamentalism has never stopped a country to achieve technological progress: think about the wonderful skyscrapers and green patches in the desert of the Arab Emirates or the nuclear weapons of Pakistan. So it might well be the case that in the future some scientist will start a seed AI believing that Allah will guide it to evolve in the best way. But it also might be that in the future, African, Asian and maybe European (gasp!) rationalists will be hunted down and killed like rats.
It might be the very meme of rationality to be erased from existence.
Questions
I'll close with a bunch of questions, both strictly and loosely related. Mainly, I'm asking you to refrain from proposing a solution. Let's assess the situation first.