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- “we” can’t steer the future.
- it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
- if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
- most cultures and societies in human history have been so bad, by my present values, that I’m not sure they’re not worse than extinction, and we should expect that most possible future states are similarly bad;
- history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
- the literal species Homo sapiens is pretty resilient and might avoid extinction for a very long time, but have you MET Homo sapiens? this is cold fucking comfort! (see e.g. C. J. Cherryh’s vision in 40,000 in Gehenna for a fictional representation not far from my true beliefs — we are excellent at adaptation and survival but when we “survive” this often involves unimaginable harshness and cruelty, and changing into something that our ancestors would not have liked at all.)
- identifying with species-survival instead of with the stuff we value now is popular among the thoughtful but doesn’t make any sense to me;
- in general it does not make sense, to me, to compromise on personal values in order to have more power/influence. you will be able to cause stuff to happen, but who cares if it’s not the stuff you want?
- similarly, it does not make sense to consciously optimize for having lots of long-term descendants. I love my children; I expect they’ll love their children; but go too many generations out and it’s straight-up fantasyland. My great-grandparents would have hated me. And that’s still a lot of shared culture and values! Do you really have that much in common with anyone from five thousand years ago?
- Evolution is not your friend. God is not your friend. Everything worth loving will almost certainly perish. Did you expect it to last forever?
- “I love whatever is best at surviving” or “I love whatever is strongest” means you don’t actually care what it’s like. It means you have no loyalty and no standards. It means you don’t care so much if the way things turn out is hideous, brutal, miserable, abusive… so long as it technically “is alive” or “wins”. Fuck that.
- I despise sour grapes. If the thing I want isn’t available, I’m not going to pretend that what is available is what I want.
- I am not going to embrace the “realistic” plan of allying with something detestable but potent. There is always an alternative, even if the only alternative is “stay true to your dreams and then get clobbered.”
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I don't think it was articulated quite right -- it's more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist.
I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to "constrain" or "bind" all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for "brute" survival.
And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It's good to save lives, but mortality is pretty "priced in" to my sense of how the world works. It's good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly "priced in" as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: "You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!" If our days are as a passing shadow, that's not that bad; we're used to it.
I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still "win" -- even though the meaning of "winning" is so changed it isn't worth it any more.
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I do think this comes back to the messages in On Green and also why the post went down like a cup of cold sick - rationality is about winning. Obviously nobody on LW wants to "win" in the sense you describe, but more winning over more harmony on the margin, I think.
The future will probably contain less of the way of life I value (or something entirely orthogonal), but then that's the nature of things.
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I think 2 cruxes IMO dominate the discussion a lot that are relevant here:
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Will a value lock-in event happen, especially soon in a way such that once the values are locked in, it's basically impossible to change values?
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Is something like the vulnerable world hypothesis correct about technological development?
If you believed 1 or 2, I could see why people disagreed with Sarah Constantin's statement on here.
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