Democracy is worth it
Not to be a pedant, but democracy can only be worth it if (as stated above) you are not dead, thereby being able to hold opinions and live under democracy etc etc. And unfortunately, most of the people who might write comments saying that the experiment was not worth it.... were wiped out, along with their extended family and most of their friends.
As the net effect of the US seems probably negative (near term omnicide) it may have been better had it not existed.
I used to have this opinion about colonialism being justified, and over time have started to believe that exercising a kind of agency that violates others peoples sovereignty is not self-justified according to the values of the winner, by the winner.
If an SI came to America now, nuked it Truman style, and replaced every human being with an a-sentient robotic mimic that was convinced it loved the new flag - we might get these kinds of articles too. The actions wouldn't be justified and we wouldn't be wrong to say they are wrong simply because we can't oppose them.
The essay blurs the line between being defender and aggressor and I think that's something that can't be done tacitly. I get the point you are making about values which encourage agency, rather than to contempt it. And ways of life are absolutely worth defending. But I struggle immensely with the notion that we can derive any type of normative claim about the goodness of imposition of group values when those very group values are being applied as the retrospective rubric.
You can love your life, society, its norms and the freedoms they afford you. But the claims about the intrinsic goodness of your system, without a shared b...
I might make a follow-up post that argues against postmodernism (which I feel like you are espousing here). I think there are a bunch of pretty solid ways you can compare value systems (e.g. you can just ask people which society they would like to switch to), and that this provides pretty strong arguments in favor of the colonization of North America.
I think there are deeper challenges here that could exist, but I don't think this example provides such a challenge (I am not like 90%+ confident, but I am like reasonably confident).
I think that argument is valid only under a normative value system which doesn't pay the cost of consequence out sourcing. I would agree that most people would say the united states is a comparatively better place to live, but I would also argue that those numbers would look wildly different if the question was instead: "Would you prefer a world where the united states exists or western colonialism never occurred throughout North America". Under that question, I would place a reasonably high probability your preference sampling argument would no longer provide a moral justification for that system under the same global population base.
The point being that it is very easy to claim from within a structure with outsourced consequences that the structure is self-justified and coherently, globally good. No, you just aren't paying the costs.
If you want to claim that the normative evaluation only applies to the in-group, then sure. But I'd argue that's the exact kind of self-exemption I don't morally agree with.
You're mistaking Habryka's argument to be "if people prefer modern america to pre-colonial america, then it's right to colonialize america". He's just here making the (more modest) point that "if people prefer modern america to pre-colonial america, then probably modern america is a better to live than pre-colonial america", which you seemed to be saying one could not have any opinion on.
I think you are mistaking Habryka's argument, not 0xA. Habryka wrote that "it was worth it". The first "it" presumably refers to the colonization and the creation of the US. And "was worth it" presumably means "was right". So we arrive at "the colonization was right" (despite all the listed downsides). That's in line with 0xA's interpretation.
Also note that (if it wasn't obvious) "state of the world A is better than state of the world B" doesn't imply that bringing about A is better than bringing about B. Maybe in state A everyone is happy only because we previously murdered everyone who was unhappy. That doesn't mean murdering everyone who is unhappy is good.
I would agree that most people would say the united states is a comparatively better place to live, but I would also argue that those numbers would look wildly different if the question was instead: "Would you prefer a world where the united states exists or western colonialism never occurred throughout North America". Under that question, I would place a reasonably high probability your preference sampling argument would no longer provide a moral justification for that system under the same global population base.
I'm not sure what you mean with "under the same global population base" but I don't think most currently existing people answering "the first" to your question would by itself indicate that the colonization of America was morally justified.
For example, assume AIs in the future have mostly diminished the number and influence of humanity. Humanity is now only a small footnote in the world without power. Then one AI starts a poll and asks "Would you prefer a world where our AI society exists, or one where the creation of AI never occurred?" Assume that the result of the poll (from trillions of AIs) is overwhelmingly "the former".
Would this mean that mostly replacing humanity with AI would have been morally justified? Clearly not. If we don't create those AIs, their non-existence isn't bad for them, and their hypothetical preferences expressed in this poll are morally irrelevant since those preferences are never instantiated. (This insight is called person-affecting utilitarianism.)
My current beliefs here are (without total confidence) that everyone involved here would prefer a course of history where the US was established across the North American continent (my guess is also everyone would agree that you should make a lot lot of changes to how it was colonized).
Hmmm... this is tricky. Like, how constrained are the courses of history you say that people would prefer?
Suppose the counterfactual world where people said no to Europeans genociding non-Christians on other continents, and so colonialism as I currently understand it doesn't happen. What happens then? It sounds like you're thinking there's no US, and democracy worldwide is thus much weakened. I figure what would happen is, the New World still gets discovered by Europeans, and open land still gets populated with an agricultural society, one way or another. Maybe European powers take a more peaceful path in the New World, but still populate it, and there's still a rebellion against colonial taxation, and the founding of something like the US still happens, maybe European ideas around agriculture transfer over and are adopted by those living in the Americas, as they watch Europe grow and industrialize, ...
I think you have profoundly failed to reckon with how American colonialism got started, what its ostensible values and justification were at the time, and what the results were in practice. You have allowed the winners to write the history book in your head. By allowing a rosy interpretation of the results to retroactively justify the historical means and intended ends, you are setting the stage for monstrosities of a similar nature to be carried out by anyone who can convince themselves that they are on the side of Good.
"Let goodness conquer all it can defend" as a statement on American colonialism is deeply perverse - colonial atrocities were not "goodness conquering", they were merely conquering. The resulting goodness was secondary and structurally undermined by the conditions of its arising, which this post weakly protests at and refuses to disavow, and further undermined by the conditions of its supposed defense, which this post fails to even acknowledge as a factor.
The processes of the conquering and of the defense matter! Goodness that conquers by means that fail to serve the good more broadly is destined to further failures - the repeatedly-shrunken reservations the US de...
1I don't think those atrocities were so bad as to lose justification for the very basic premise of "all of this land now gets to be used by the US".
Is there any level of atrocity that would be, in your mind? Like, you keep saying that the historical atrocities "plausibly" cross the line - I'd like to know what unambiguously would have actually put the US over the line for you.
I don't currently see how you get comparably good outcomes without that basic premise.
Westward expansion had relatively little to do with the newly-founded US's championing of democracy, and it seems premature to call opposition to spreading like a brushfire from one side of the continent to the other while committing miscellaneous acts of genocide "sneering from one's ivory tower at the frontier settlers". The space of possible actions, even for a would-be-good conqueror (and especially for a subject within a conquering nation-state), is not particularly well-described by the binary of "full steam ahead/stay and make incremental reforms" or "shut it all down/leave and try to do better elsewhere".
I don't know if this post quite manages to arrive at an effective synthesis of the sort you were after - this post a...
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1The American exceptionalism bit is weird here. (Also you're not American so shouldn't have been indoctrinated in that.)
The 'conquering' wasn't done 'by democracy/goodness', nor in its name (further, democracy isn't an American invention or export, and isn't exactly thriving in America now). The earlier constitutional moments of the US came long after the original colonies, and long before the eventual complete colonisation. The later constitutional moments occurred after colonisation was already history.
I don't get how it fits the argument. Arguably (a little tongue in cheek) the revolutionary US was a case of a smart man (France etc) creating a big thing (angry states) to throw at a big problem (Great Britain) and that big thing growing legs (revolutionary sentiment) and beating the smart man.
The American exceptionalism bit is weird here. (Also you're not American so shouldn't have been indoctrinated in that.)
This might be a hint that it's not all indoctrination? This is kind of a tangent, but I continue to be dismayed by the degree to which so many people have tacitly flattened political and moral goodness to "America bad", or even "America unexceptional" in the age of Trump and the GWT.
The US has made some serious mistakes, and (especially lately, but not only because of Trump) strayed from the shining beacon of classical liberal principles that made it great, but I don't know any other country or culture that comes close to replacing us as a standard bearer.
There are individual European leaders who are more competent, ethical, and principled than Trump, but the European project as a whole has gone off-the-rails in various ways. (I don't think you have to accept @Richard_Ngo's entire worldview to acknowledge this.)
Beyond Europe, I think it is important to acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of evil and goodness in the world, and grappling with this hierarchy is a central prerequisite to making sense of politics. There are multiple dimensions and considerations tha...
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1The American exceptionalism bit is weird here.
Eh, I think America really has been the bastion of classical liberalism in the past 200+ years, and my guess is history would be a lot worse without it. I grew up in Germany, and so certainly have much less respect for the history of that country.
I do think nationalism is tricky and somewhat mindkilly so I toned down some of the language in the OP.
(Also you're not American so shouldn't have been indoctrinated in that.)
I went through all the effort to immigrate to the US, so of course I think it's pretty great! It's true I've experienced close to zero indoctrination about American greatness though (indeed my high-school education for some reason really kept emphasizing the french revolution as the birthplace of western democracy, weirdly downplaying the American revolution, despite the timing really not checking out).
Macrohistory of this kind is pretty tricky, so all of this should be taken with a lot of grains of salt. Unfortunately, I don't really know how to avoid it if I want actual data about how to build good and lasting institutions.
The 'conquering' wasn't done 'by democracy/goodness', nor in its name
Yep, indeed. Trying to figure...
It’s probably inevitable that the “how” question comes up with these things, but I think we can get more granular without losing the point. You can simultaneously make the claim that the emergence of the US is a net good for known life, but you don’t necessarily have to say the trail of tears etc. is worth it unless you are proposing that these (or other bottlenecks akin) are required to get yourself a US.
Smart people who see the shape where consolidation can happen and then release the missiles, only to find they can’t put them back in the bottle, is a tale as old as time, yes.
Aristotle via Alexander comes to mind for a positive example of a smart person “uniting under a banner” in a way (haha and yes “why can’t we all simply be as smart as Aristotle?”).
Philosopher-guided, deployed for a cause that (potentially, arguably) wasn’t purely predatory, and it didn’t immediately spiral during Alexander’s lifetime. But Alexander died at 32. So we don’t know whether he simply ended the experiment before we’d see the results. But there is a takeaway there: the fragility of points of failure. That’s not a particularly new insight, but it’s relevant here.
So: what smart people CAN and HAVE done a better job of (perhaps the founders of the US are the most glaring example) are creating systems of great agency that have less ability to deviate from the intended goal after release, and I think the question isn’t about whether, it’s “YES, we DO” and then, that out of the way, we iterate again and again “HOW”?
Ok, so... I think it's possible to say "democracy good, colonialism bad, the set of circumstances you're born into and the physical laws involved amoral". In that context, you advocate for democracy, against colonialism, within the constraints imposed by the situation you find yourself in, which may mean you fight the battles you can win and don't fight when you'll lose (so maybe you put your energy into working for democracy, rather than against colonialism, depending on circumstances and strategic options), without losing sight of the distinction between is and ought. You don't go "on net colonialism was worth it/good because it spread democracy".
Colonialism as I understand it (speaking mostly about North America, where I've talked to some of the living descendants of the native population) was clearly bad. You may have a different understanding (as we have established in a comment of mine on your earlier post, history is not my strong suit, I may well be wrong), but here's mine: This was a group of people who saw themselves as civilized and not-them as barbarians/savages, themselves quite often as good Christians and rival cultures as non-Christians who it would be best in the e...
I really don't get the America argument. The one thing it's hard to imagine anyone stopping was the smallpox and such. It would have happened sooner or later unless the entire progress of technology was put on halt. Mass deployable vaccines before transoceanic sail ships seem unlikely. Someone would have gotten to the other side and even had their intentions been the best possible, people would have died out of sheer ignorance.
But other than that... Nothing strictly needed to happen the way it did. Nor was any of it necessary for modern democracy itself to be born, except in a general butterfly effect sense. Many of the ideas came from France, the country who by the way shortly also rebelled against its king. Others had roots in classical antiquity. Others, possibly, from the natives themselves, such that perhaps a world with a powerful undefeated Iroquois Confederacy that got seeded by European political philosophy ideas is actually better off on the democracy axis.
And even past that, once the 13 colonies were independent, the next great step on the path to modernity and freedom was them abolishing their own slavery at home, not conquering the land mass to the west of them. Yes, e...
I'm not sure whether this is load-bearing for the main point of the post but I have to comment on this part:
Ok, fine. I'll say it directly. I am extremely glad the west colonized North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and god was it far from perfect. Despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — yes, all of that, and still it was worth it. America is worth it. Democracy is worth it.
If you were faced with the horrors of the American colonization, would you have chosen to keep going? Or would you have wrung your hands, declared the American experiment a failure, concluded that maybe man was never supposed to wield this power, and retired to the countryside, in denial that other men and women were doing the dirty work for you?
I think those are the wrong question. The right questions are: If you had been a native at the time, would you have opposed the colonization? And, as a native at the time, was the colonization ultimately in your best interest?
There is an obvious analogy with evolution. The colonization of America looks very much like a s...
This made me think of a novel to me moral principle: when choosing among goods, the best is the one the greatest number of people oppose (modulo Bayesian updates on why they oppose it).
1“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“lmao” said Gandalf, “well it has.”
I couldn't find a place to put a link in this quote that didn't break the flow of the post, but h/t: https://x.com/joshcarlosjosh/status/1423668285837504514
Fascinating post. I appreciate how it challenges conventional wisdom and I'll have to spend more time thinking these points through.
One thing that confused me though is that this is exactly the kind of post I would haved imagined someone writing if they were trying to defend the Anthropic bet and my understanding was that you were opposed to this?
This does not seem "battle-tested". The explanations in comments haven't bridged the gap, I would probably fail your ITT.
I read it as
"the USA is good*", and "atrocities were necessary to achieve this" => "these atrocities are justified".
I believe (based on your comments) you wouldn't endorse that, but I can't see this interpretation in your post or other comments of yours. Others have already begun discussing the object-level, but I've nothing to add there.
*In the sense and to the extent that OP meant to convey.
Wow, this is bad.
I mean, object level, colonialism was the worst atrocity in human history and nobody should defend it. That's just my opinion of course. But meta level, in the previous post you describe yourself as holding an important position in the movement (LW / EA / AI-safety), and in the followup you say colonialism was a good thing actually. What a target to paint on the movement; what a signpost for young people deciding whether to join. Are you alright?
EDIT: This became a bit of meta-discussion about me trying to suppress argument, so I guess I can go back on this. Let's just argue about colonialism on the object level, my position is clear enough.
21Worst recent, maybe. You can make a more generic statement about "wars of conquest and empire building" being the worst atrocity in human history, which would sort of include colonialism, but e.g. I'm pretty sure the Assyrians were a lot more atrocious than the United States. Or the Mongols for a more recent such group.
That being said, "nobody should defend it" is very harsh. Why shouldn't they? You can show that colonialism was (is) bad, but not let people try to vouch for it seems unfair? I'm pretty sure you have views which many people think noone should defend (pretty much everyone does, somewhere) - does that mean you should abandon them?
Seems bad to focus on optics rather than truth
Yeah, on further thought I can retract the meta point. Feel free to argue for colonialism, I'll just be here to argue against :-)
Also don't forget that I am here purely talking about colonization of North America. My current model is that some other colonialization efforts were extremely bad
On the object level I think this is weak. "Yes, the Worldwide Holocaust was overall bad, but the part that happened here was good, because we built something nice on the site afterward." What happened to building nice things without having a holocaust first? Or is it like, we wanted to build a palace of human rights, but these other people were in the way, so we killed them and built the palace of human rights! Look everybody, how beautiful it is! Hmm. You're certainly not alone in this position (Bertrand Russell argued for it all his life) but I still find it weak.
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Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism.
In my post yesterday, I said:
I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday's post.
The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me:
So yeah, I would like something else than apocalypse entirely unopposed.
Do you know what really grinds my gears? The reification of innocence as the ideal of moral virtue.
As I will probably never stop quoting at least once a month, Ozy Brennan summarizes it best:
Let's remember that we are not here to be pure. We are here to build things. To live, to multiply, to party hard, regret our choices, and do it all again anyways. To reshape the cosmos in our image because most of it appears to be made out of mostly inert plasma clouds, and you know what, inert plasma clouds really suck compared to basically anything else.
So in evaluating any appeal to not conquer the cosmos, to not spread the values of the good far and wide, we have to remember that dead people suck, and if whatever principles we arrive at suggest that it's better to be dead than alive, then we almost certainly went wrong somewhere and should take it from the top.
This is how President Truman recalled meeting Oppenheimer complaining about his role in the development of nuclear weapons. I have kept going back and forth over the years over who was right and who was wrong in this situation.
Oppenheimer built the bomb, only for his invention to far escape his grasp, resulting in him spending the last years of his life trying to avert a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. But Truman was more the man in the arena than almost anyone else. Truman could not quit, and hand-wringing did not absolve him from responsibility. It's easy to imagine Truman seeing in Oppenheimer a man too afraid to actually face the responsibility for his actions, and to do the best with the hand they were dealt.
Ok, fine, I'll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it.
If you were faced with the horrors of the American colonization, would you have chosen to keep going? Or would you have wrung your hands, declared the American experiment a failure, concluded that maybe man was never supposed to wield this power, and retired to the countryside, in denial that other men and women were doing the dirty work for you?
This doesn't mean that you should have rationalized that all of what was going on was just. It doesn't even mean that the marginal effort was not best spent advocating for settlers and conquistadors to be held to account for their atrocities, or to scramble desperately to somehow prevent plagues from ravaging the land. But if you would have stopped it all when you saw the horrors, or sneered from your ivory tower at the frontier settlers, then I do think you would have been on the wrong side of history.
And this doesn't mean that you, having seen the horrors of it all, would have needed to keep going. A human's soul can only bear so much, and in as much as being involved with the horrors was a price to be paid by someone, there were enough souls to go around to spread that burden out. But do not mistake your trauma and exhaustion for wisdom.
Why defend American colonialism of all things? Why go to bat for maybe the biggest boogeyman of the 21st century?
Hearing "do not conquer what you cannot defend" is easy. Nobody can ever blame you for not conquering things. But in that principle lies its dual.
"Let goodness conquer all that it can defend"
A principle should be defended against its strongest counterarguments, and I find the colonization of the Americas one of the most interesting examples of what this might look like. And how far it might be worth it to go.
And maybe you put the boundary somewhere else. It is very plausible to me that it would have been better to stop those early settlers. While it seems hard to imagine property rights being straightforwardly respected, and hard to see how (given the technologies at the time) we could have prevented diseases from ravaging the land, clearly we could have done much much better. And maybe if you had stopped the first colonizers, and had thrown your body on the gears, we would have had trade and immigration and a gradual mixing of the western and native way of life, and maybe this would have been better.
I don't currently think this, but it seems pretty plausible to me.
And certainly there were many many things that should have been different about the way North America was settled. But if you were facing the choice between abandoning the American project entirely, and letting it happen, I think letting it happen was the right choice. And if that is true, then that sure puts a pretty high bound on how bad things need to look before you can confidently say you should leave a system and make a new one.
I have fought in the arena, and I've felt the blood on my hands, and seen the madness in my allies' eyes and I thought that I had conquered much more than I could defend.
And I've stood in that arena, fighting for what is good and right and just, and I saw my allies abandon their posts as they could not face the choices they had to make. And I grabbed them, and I shook them, and I stared into their eyes and said "despite the damage, this fight is worth fighting, do you not dare to leave us now".
So I say, do not conquer what you cannot defend. But help goodness conquer all that it can defend.
And if given the right support, goodness can defend quite a lot. Long-term governance is possible. America is about to be 250 years old. And all it required was a bunch of young highly disagreeable people winning a revolutionary war and thinking really hard about how to not let it sway from justice. And god, was it ugly. Ugly from the very beginning. And god was it beautiful, all the way until now.
And other times, goodness falls almost immediately. Sometimes you write ambitious bylaws, and "stop and assist clauses", and fill your board with young disagreeable people thinking at least somewhat hard[1] about how to not let it sway from justice, and (as far as I can tell) it falls apart almost immediately as it comes in contact with reality.
And the governance problems of the future will not be the governance problems of the past. I could analyze here all the parallels and disanalogies between the founding of the US and the founding of OpenAI, but OpenAI governance does not need to last 250 years, and the Founding Fathers did not need to figure out how to navigate a world drastically transformed by technology and the handoff of humanity's future to our successors.
My guess is that AI will guarantee your own obsolescence soon enough that you won't have to worry about your own retirement, and succession is not the problem to solve. You will have to worry about your own corruption, and your incentives, and adversaries much more powerful than any adversary in history.
Much has been written, and much will be written about what keeps institutions and groups on track. I hope to write myself more on this in the future.
But here, all I dare and have the time to say, is that success is possible, and perfection is not the standard. That great mistakes and shaky foundations can be fixed along the way. That goodness can defend much. And if you can conquer what the good can defend, you should do so.
Relatedly, I do actually think that one of the single biggest mistakes that our broader ecosystem made on this topic was for the OpenAI board members to not be full-time board members. Like, man, it does really seem to me that people underestimated the trickiness of stuff like this, and did not budget resources proportional to its difficulty.
If you want an actionable takeaway from this post, I would recommend making sure that Anthropic Long Term Benefit Trust members are full-time and in an actual position to do something if they notice bad things going on.