Ian McKenzie's Shortform

Ian McKenzie

This is a special post for quick takes by Ian McKenzie. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Maybe the most important test for a political or economic system is whether it self-destructs. This is in contrast to whether it produces good intermediate outcomes. In particular, if free-market capitalism leads to an uncontrolled intelligence explosion, then it doesn’t matter if it produced better living standards than alternative systems for ~200 years – it still failed at the most important test.

A couple of other ways to put it:

Would the US economic/political system pass the Great Filter?
Would Norway do an intelligence explosion?

Under this view, political/economic systems that produce less growth but don’t create the incentives for unbounded competition are preferred. Sadly, for Molochian reasons this seems hard to pull off.

1Ian McKenzie9mo

I'm not sure what you mean by standard, but navigating superintelligence well is something I care a lot about. So it seems like a reasonable thing to criticize a system for, and it would be great if we found a pattern that did navigate it well (even if finding or switching to another one is very hard).

What I meant was, if you're trying to discriminate between political/economic systems and notice "21st century capitalism / mix-mash-distribution-of-democracy-and-various-flavors-of-authoritatian-etc" doesn't look on track to successfully navigate superintelligence, well, that might be true, but, it's probably also true of most political/economic-systems that aren't Dath Ilan or similar.

It seems true, but, something like "there are kinds of different ways to fail, there are relatively few ways to succeed, so failure isn't actually that informative."

4Viliam9mo

Maybe it's just my bubble -- and I really do not want to offend anyone, only to report honestly on what I observe around me -- understanding economics seems right-wing coded. More precisely, when I talk to right-wing people about economics, there is a mix of descriptive and normative, but when I talk to left-wing people about economics, it is normative only: what should be done, in their opinion, often ignoring the second-order effects. Describing the economics as it is, seems like expressing approval; and approving of capitalism is right-wing. Basically, if you made a YouTube video containing zero opinion on how things should be, only explaining the basic things about supply and demand (like, how scarcity makes things more expensive in a free market) and similar stuff, people listening to the video would label you as right-wing. Many of those who identify as left-wing would even dismiss the video as right-wing propaganda. So, if my understanding is correct, this seems like a problem the left wing needs to solve internally. There is not much we can do as rationalists when someone makes not understanding something a signal of loyalty.