In my ontology "virtues" are ethical design patterns about how to make decisions.

I'm a virtue ethicist because I think that this kind of ethical design pattern is more important than ethical design patterns about what decisions to make (albeit with some complications that I'll explore in some upcoming posts).

(Having said that, I feel some sense that I'm not going to use "ethical design patterns" very much going forward—it's a little unwieldy as a phrase. I think I will just use "ethics", by contrast with things like "altruism" which IMO are less well-understood as design patterns.)

Note that I've changed my position dramatically over the last few years, and now basically endorse something very close to what I was calling "rationality realism" (though I'd need to spend some time rereading the post to figure out exactly how close my current position is).

In particular, I think that we should be treating sociology, ethics and various related domains much more like we treat physics.

I also endorse this quote from a comment above, except that I wouldn't call it "thinking studies" but maybe something more like "the study of intelligent agency" (and would add game theory as a central example):

there is a rich field of thinking-studies. it’s like philosophy, math, or engineering. it includes eg Chomsky's work on syntax, Turing’s work on computation, Gödel’s work on logic, Wittgenstein’s work on language, Darwin's work on evolution, Hegel’s work on development, Pascal’s work on probability, and very many more past things and very many more still mostly hard-to-imagine future things

FWIW I used to agree with you but now agree with Nate. A big part of the update was developing a model of how "PR risks" work via a kind of herd mentality, where very few people are actually acting on their object-level beliefs, and almost everyone is just tracking what everyone else is tracking.

In such a setting, "internal influence" strategies tend to do very little long-term, and maybe even reinforce the taboo against talking honestly. This is roughly what seems to have happened in DC, where the internal influence approach was swept away by a big Overton window shift after ChatGPT. Conversely, a few principled individuals can have a big influence by speaking honestly (here's a post about the game theory behind this).

In my own case, I felt a vague miasma of fear around talking publicly while at OpenAI (and to a lesser extent at DeepMind), even though in hindsight there were often no concrete things that I endorsed being afraid of—for example, there was a period where I was roughly indifferent about leaving OpenAI, but still scared of doing things that might make people mad enough to fire me.

I expect that there's a significant inferential gap between us, so this is a hard point to convey, but one way that I might have been able to bootstrap my current perspective from inside my "internal influence" frame is to try to identify possible actions X such that, if I got fired for doing X, this would be a clear example of the company leaders behaving unjustly. Then even the possible "punishment" for doing X is actually a win.

"consistent with my position above I'd bet that in the longer term we'd do best to hit a button that ended all religions today, and then eat the costs and spend the decades/centuries required to build better things in their stead."

Would you have pressed this button at every other point throughout history too? If not, when's the earliest you would have pressed it?

Good question. One answer is that my reset mechanisms involve cultivating empathy, and replacing fear with positive motivation. If I notice myself being too unempathetic or too fear-driven, that's worrying.

But another answer is just that, unfortunately, the reality distortion fields are everywhere—and in many ways more prevalent in "mainstream" positions (as discussed in my post). Being more mainstream does get you "safety in numbers"—i.e. it's harder for you to catalyze big things, for better or worse. But the cost is that you end up in groupthink.

I like this comment.

For the sake of transparency, while in this post I'm mostly trying to identify a diagnosis, in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well. And it's reasonable to expect that people like me who are willing to break the taboo for the purposes of diagnosis will be more sympathetic to ethnonationalism in their advocacy than people who aren't. For example, I've previously argued on twitter that South Africa should have split into two roughly-ethnonationalist states in the 90s, instead of doing what they actually did.

However, I expect that the best ways of fixing western countries won't involve very much ethnonationalism by historical standards, because it's a very blunt tool. Also, I suspect that breaking the taboo now will actually lead to less ethnonationalism in the long term. For example, even a little bit more ethnonationalism would plausibly have made European immigration policies much less insane over the last few decades, which would then have prevented a lot of the political polarization we're seeing today.

This is a thoughtful comment, I appreciate it, and I'll reply when I have more time (hopefully in a few days).

Thanks for the extensive comment. I'm not sure it's productive to debate this much on the object level. The main thing I want to highlight is that this is a very good example of how the taboo that I discussed above operates.

On most issues, people (and especially LWers) are generally open to thinking about the benefits and costs of each stance, since tradeoffs are real.

However, in the case of ethnonationalism, even discussing the taboo on it (without explicitly advocating for it) was enough to trigger a kind of zero-tolerance attitude in your comment.

This is all the more striking because the main historical opponent of ethnonationalist regimes was globalist communism, which also led to large-scale atrocities. Yet when people defend a "socialist" or "egalitarian" cluster of ideas, that doesn't lead to anywhere near this level of visceral response.

My main bid here is for readers to notice that there is a striking asymmetry in how we think about and discuss 20th century history, which is best explained via the thing I hypothesized above: a strong taboo on ethnonationalism in the wake of WW2, which has then distorted our ability to think about many other issues.

For the most obvious example, for the life of me I cannot understand how leaving the gold standard makes a culture less appreciative of any kind of moral virtue, unless you equate two very different senses of the word "value".

Might reply to the rest later but just to respond to what you call "the most obvious example": consider a company which has a difficult time evaluating how well its employees are performing (i.e. most of them). Some employees will work hard even when they won't directly be rewarded for that, because they consider it virtuous to do so. However, if you then add to their team a bunch of other people who are rewarded for slacking off, the hard-working employees may become demotivated and feel like they're chumps for even trying to be virtuous.

The extent to which modern governments hand out money causes a similar effect across western societies (edited: for example, if many people around you are receiving welfare, then working hard yourself is less motivating). They would not be as able to do this as much if their currencies were still on the gold standard, because it would be more obvious that they are insolvent.

I used to agree with your understanding but I am now more skeptical. For example, here's a story that says the opposite:

The poorer humans are, the more vulnerable each human is to the group consensus. People who disagreed with groups could in the past easily be assaulted by mobs, or harassed in a way that led them to literally starvation-level wealth. Nowadays, though, even victims of extreme 'cancel culture' don't face such risks, because society is wealthy enough that you can do things like move to a new city to avoid mobs, or get charities to feed and clothe you even if you lose your job.

Also it's much harder to design parasitic egregores now than it used to be, because our science is much better and so we know many more facts, which makes it harder for egregores to lie.

I'm not saying my story is true, but it does highlight that the load-bearing question is actually something like "how does the offense-defense balance against parasitic egregores scale with wealth?" Why don't we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?

Or maybe we do live in such a world, and we are just failing to buy those defenses. That seems like a really dumb situation to be in, but I think my post is broadly describing how it might arise.