I think of this as coarse-grained influence vs. fine-grained influence, which basically comes down to how many bits are needed to specify the nature of the influence.
I think there is a fair amount of overlap between the epistemic advantages of being a moderate (seeking incremental change from AI companies) and the epistemic disadvantages.
Many of the epistemic advantages come from being more grounded or having tighter feedback loops. If you're trying to do the moderate reformer thing, you need to justify yourself to well-informed people who work at AI companies, you'll get pushback from them, you're trying to get through to them.
But those feedback loops are with that reality as interpreted by people at AI companies. So, to some degree, your thinking will get shaped to resemble their thinking. Those feedback loops will guide you towards relying on assumptions that they see as not requiring justification, using framings that resonate with them, accepting constraints that they see as binding, etc. Which will tend to lead to seeing the problem and the landscape from something more like their perspective, sharing their biases & blindspots, etc.
Instead, the intuitions at play here are mainly about how to set up networks of coordination between agents. This includes
Voluntary interactions: limiting interaction with those who didn't consent, limiting effects (especially negative effects) on those who didn't opt in (e.g. Mill's harm principle)
Social roles: interacting with people in a particular capacity rather than needing to consider the person in all of their humanity & complexity
Boundaries/membranes: limiting what aspects of an agent and its inner workings others have access to or can influence
1Seems like a mistake to write these intuitions into your axiology.
1Sounds like this agency thing is so central to how you orient to the world that you're bringing it with you when you try to empathize with someone (at least if they're human).
If you want to try to do something more like the sort of empathizing that other people talk about, you could try:
- Imagining some other scenario where the way that you would relate to that other scenario matches the way that this person is relating to the scenario that they're in.
- Finding a case where someone is showing some of the agency thing, in a context where you wouldn't, and empathize with them in that scenario. (This can also help with doing 1, if you also notice how you relate to this context where you wouldn't show that agency thing, because it adds to your collection of 'other scenarios' which could match how someone else engages with a scenario where you would have more agency.)
- Empathizing with people in contexts that are orthogonal to the agency thing, where how much agency a person is showing isn't central to what's happening. (Perhaps someone liking a book/movie/hobby/etc. that you don't like?)
It's standard for parents to have these sorts of models about their kids' emotions, e.g. "She's cranky because she didn't get her nap."
I've seen hangriness-style advice circulating on twitter (via Zvi, so perhaps in the rationalist milieu) and tiktok (not in the rationalist milieu afaict).
If you feel like you hate everyone, eat
If you feel like everyone hates you, sleep
If you feel like you hate yourself, shower
If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside
If you feel overwhelmed by your thoughts, write them down
If you feel lost and alone, call a friend
If you feel stuck in the past, plan for the future
...
The Iraq war & surrounding debate was a formative political experience for me, so I have lots of thoughts/memories/opinions about it.
I agree with the basic account: shocking events (especially 9/11) gave a source of power (the White House) a lot of freedom of action, they made some bad choices about to do with that freedom of action (in part influenced by the shocking events), and other potential sources of power (e.g. US public opinion, the Senate, the UN) which could have interfered were disinclined to (which is basically what it means for one source of power to have a lot of freedom of action).
So probably the most important takeaway is that it's important who is in positions of power which might get lots of freedom of action depending on what events take place, what ideas & ability to execute effectively they have, and what views they will have after the key events have happened (as they have reactions to those events and reason to focus on the topic, pay attention to others' views on it, and think about it themselves).
To go into more detail:
The national mood in the US after 9/11 (and then the DC snipers and anthrax attacks) was that the world is a dangerous place, and we need to rally together to keep ourselves safe, and trust the president to do what's necessary to keep us safe. 9/11 was the big traumatic event, but the set of 3 attacks made a trend and heightened the sense that future attacks could happen to anyone anywhere at any time (as the DC snipers did) and could be technologically sophisticated (as the anthrax attacks were) and kill lots of people. That gave the Bush administration a ton of freedom of action to choose what to do, especially for things like starting wars to keep America safe from terrorism.
Why did George W. Bush choose war? My sense (in line with this article) is that Bush was a 'big picture' kind of guy who wasn't inclined to think through the nuts & bolts of 'what is this going to accomplish' and 'how else might this course of action turn out, besides going the way we want it to'. He tended to latch onto a broad narrative, and in the wake of 9/11 a narrative he found appealing was of himself as a wartime leader, fighting for freedom & democracy against terror & bad guys. The Afghanistan war on its own wasn't enough to support this narrative so they were looking for other things to do, and Saddam Hussein was the obvious next bad guy sitting around, someone who we had unfinished business with. That Scholar's Stage article claims (and I find it plausible) that there wasn't actually much focused discussion within the administration about whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq.
The faction within the administration that had already been pushing for war with Iraq was a big part of what made Iraq the obvious next target, but that wasn't the whole story. As the Scholar's Stage article discusses, some people pushing for the war in 2002 had been part of the previous Iraq war in 1991, where they'd decided that it was imprudent to remove Saddam Hussein from power, and hadn't openly changed their minds and been pushing for war in the interim.
Two of the main potential barriers to the White House's freedom of action in choosing to go to war in Iraq were getting approval from Congress and the United Nations. I think that the zeitgeist of trusting the president to keep us safe played a huge role in getting Congress's approval, and a weaker variant of that zeitgeist combined with American power helped with (effectively) getting UN approval. It also helped that both happened before the weapons inspectors were allowed back into Iraq. The case for war looked weaker after the weapons inspectors were allowed in and didn't find signs of the alleged WMD programs, but by that point there was a lot of momentum towards war and the Bush administration had already gotten the authority they needed. France had pushed back on giving that authority through the UN - they wanted a two-resolution plan where first the UN would demand that Iraq let weapons inspectors in, and then after the weapons inspections the UN would reconsider whether to authorize war - and wound up reaching a compromise with the US where they made the wording of the first UN resolution ambiguous so that the US could say that the resolution authorized the war without requiring a second resolution and France could say that they hadn't supported that. (This is the dispute that led to french fries being called "freedom fries" and the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" surging in popularity.)
I also have a lot of thoughts about the Iraq war debate, since that is what I was most immersed in at the time, though in hindsight a lot of that seems mostly epiphenomenal. This is more of a thought dump & less focused, but I'll share anyways since some of the details & texture seem relevant:
The Bush administration's public case for the war was more like a marketing campaign than part of a public debate over what to do. They talked a lot about how bad Saddam Hussein was (often citing stuff he'd done in the 1980s); this could be used as part of a coherent argument (and therefore he is likely to do such-and-such) but often it was just presented as an emotionally resonant argument fragment - a suggestive fact which felt like it fit with being in favor of a war to remove him from power. There were lots of mentions of 9/11 and terrorism in the context of talking about Iraq & Saddam Hussein; they weren't explicitly claiming that Hussein had contributed to the 9/11 attack but they did manage to leave a majority of the US believing that he had been involved in 9/11 according to polls at the time. There was also a lot of talk about WMDs, some of it referencing intelligence that turned out to be inaccurate about Iraq's weapons programs (especially chemical & biological), but much of it framed more like 'it would be bad if Saddam Hussein got nuclear weapons' (but rhetorically punchier) or using sleight of hand with the term "WMD" to basically say 'we have evidence that Iraq has banned chemical weapons programs, and it would be bad if they had nukes'.
There was something more like an actual debate over whether it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq (the Slate dialogue archived here, beginning with this article, provides a pretty good snapshot of the higher quality portion of that debate). That debate took place on a slanted playing field where the pro-war side had the mantle of the zeitgeist on their side, and the anti-war side was generally on the defensive. e.g., There was often an implicit or explicit question of whether opponents of the war were apologists for Saddam Hussein, and so people making an argument against the war might head it off by including something about how they agree that Saddam Hussein is a bad person who has done some awful things. Whereas it was rarer for war proponents to include something about how Saddam Hussein hadn't been involved in 9/11, or to get pushback for not including that (though it did sometimes happen, especially in higher quality debates or discussions among people who were left-of-center or more distrusting of the Bush administration).
There were a wide range of pro-war cases, including (more on the left) "liberal internationalists" who wanted there to be more constitutional liberal democracies and thought that toppling a bad government and replacing it with a good one was a feasible and good thing to do, and might spread to more of the middle east and make the world a safer place. Others (more on the right) wanted the US to kick some ass so that people/countries would be afraid of getting America mad at them, and that this would help keep us safe. Or, more viscerally & less strategically, some just wanted to get back at people like the ones who had attacked us. There was some tension between these views, and not much effort to create a single coherent view out of them; they were all welcomed into the pro-war coalition.
I think part of the reason that support for the war faded gradually over the years, rather than evaporating during the first year of the war when it became apparent that Iraq didn't have meaningful WMD programs (or before the war when the weapons inspections didn't find anything) is that there were so many different cases for war. Partly this is because there were multiple coherent views on the point of the war that got discredited at different times - getting bogged down in a seemingly endless quagmire eventually undermined the "we'll kick ass so hard that others will be afraid to cross us because they might be next", and the developments of the new Iraqi government eventually undermined the liberal internationalist case, but those took longer than the WMD info. But I think a bigger part was that the pro-war attitude was more like vibes and side-taking rather than specific arguments about a concrete purpose for the war - see the post-9/11 rallying around the flag, the backlash against France, the "you're with us or your against us" talk & attitude, etc. Much of the debate & discussion over the war was more like this kind of side-taking than like arguments over whether we should go to war. Another example: saying that the war wouldn't succeed at accomplishing its proponents goals was often treated as being "defeatist" and felt to some degree like it was siding against the war and against the US. To some degree this side-taking intensified after the start of the war, because then the pro-war side was the American side.
e.g., Betty could cause one more girl to have a mentor either by volunteering as a Big Sister or by donating money to the Big Sisters program.
In the case where she volunteers and mentors the girl directly, it takes lots of bits to describe her influence on the girl being mentored. If you try to stick to the actions->consequences framework for understanding her influence, then Betty (like a gamer) is engaging in hundreds of actions per minute in her interactions with the girl - body language, word choice, tone of voice, timing, etc. What the girl gets out of the mentoring may not depend on every single one of these actions but it probably does depend on patterns in these micro-actions. So it seems more natural to think about Betty's fine-grained influence on the girl she's mentoring in terms of Betty's personality, motivations, etc., and how well she and the girl she's mentoring click, rather than exclusively trying to track how that's mediated by specific actions. If you wanted to know how the mentoring will go for the girl, you'd probably have questions about those sorts of things - "What is Betty like?", "How is she with kids?", etc.
In the case where Betty donates the money, the girl being mentored will still experience the mentoring in full detail, but most of those details won't be coming directly from Betty so Betty's main role is describable with just a few bits (gave $X which allowed them to recruit & support one more Big Sister). e.g., For the specific girl who got a mentor thanks to Betty's donation, it probably doesn't make any difference what facial expression Betty was making as she clicked the "donate" button, or whether she's kind or bitter at the world. Though there are still some indirect paths to Betty influencing fine-grained details for girls who receive Big Sisters mentoring, as the post notes, since the organization could change its operations to try to appeal to potential donors like Betty.