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I think this classification scheme is broadly correct. One way to think about it is, what is each group’s supposed Golden Age? For the Industrial Dynamists, it is probably the Gilded Age, lead by industrialists who built America into a superpower for making new things. For the Progress Students, it is the Mid-20th Century led by political leaders like FDR and Robert Moses who built infrastructure for the public. For the Effective Accelerationists, it is an eschatalogical future hope. I think the former two descriptions are pretty obvious. Regarding the third, I give you the following plot from RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement#/media/File:Scharlachs-visualizing-neoreaction.png .
E/acc is really descended from the “techno-commercialists/futurists” segment of the graph, represented by Robin Hanson, Nick Land, and LessWrong. One might object, saying that LessWrong, the birthplace of effective altruism, is the exact opposite of effective accelerationism. But actually, e/acc and EA are the result of a “church split” in the rationalist movement. E/accs came to peace with the prospect of an AI-led fundamental break with the past several millennia of human civilization, while EAs continue to oppose it. One might say that the rationalist movement. One can understand this church split in terms of the old Christian debate between intellectualism, voluntarism, and hedonism. E/accs are the intellectualists, post-rats are the voluntarists, and EAs are the hedonists. But E/acc has a pretty different geneology than the others, in that the other movements are basically mainstream, adaptations of previous political perspectives to present circumstances. EA and E/acc are, for better or worse, quite different.
It is true that both EAs and E/accs have a tendency to pose as more mainstream as they actually are for PR purposes. EAs will often say that it’s really just about increasing the amount and effectiveness of charitable giving, while e/accs will often say that it’s just about accelerating economic growth via software. But when they do so, they’re not being fully forthcoming, in my opinion. Of course, if you believe in maximizing hedonic utility / qualia, or in maximizing thought / intelligence, it’s a bit easy to justify being less than fully forthcoming.
Yes, I basically agree. I would say that EAs are generally conscientious people who want a religion, but due to various personal reasons are uncomfortable with traditional religions and their teachings. So as they formulated their new religion, they ended up formalizing and systematizing the unspoken, unconsidered hedonic value system of their less conscientious peers into an actual religion. I actually think this, and not simply openness to new experiences, is a key factor behind sexual promiscuity in the EA community.
@Andrew
To use the language of reinforcement learning, I think it is misguided for agents to be evaluated and trained solely on reward signals. We do not evaluate an agent based on how much reward it has accumulated, but based on whether it fulfills the tasks for which we are designing it, so as to prevent reward hacking. In contrast, the EA belief system encourages Nick Cammarata’s casual insouciance towards wireheading, even though he knows that it is reward hacking. With respect to training, given that rewards are sparse and noisy, we typically pretrain models. In contrast, the EA belief system is skeptical of our ingrained moral intuitions and instincts. And even for RL reward-based training, we would never train an agent to be catastrophically forgetful; yet the EA belief system is dismissive of tradition. An intelligent agent would not be myopically unable to account for delayed rewards; yet the EA ethical system, especially when it comes to humanitarian causes and charitable endeavors, is generally dismissive of conservative concerns based on second- and third-order consequences. Virtue ethics and deontological ethics are much better in this regard; helping people by morally reforming them is also superior. Yet EA belief system is too materialistic (in the sense of only believing in sensible material reality) to embrace these approaches.The reason, in my opinion, is that EA inherits from the skeptical, atheist anti-tradition, and not because EAs have engaged in careful reasoning on these questions. EA is ideologically biased against the claims of natural law, ie that, in the word of the Catholic Catechism, “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” It is even more baselessly skeptical of the possibility of revelation, ie the possibility that the creator of human agents would not only train them via sensory data and rewards, but would also teach them language and then use this language to clearly communicate to them their purpose.
I’ll admit to being a Land connoisseur; I find both his accelerationist and NRx writings to be compelling yet horrifying. I find Tivy’s response entirely wanting. Tivy’s rationalization is already the (spoken or unspoken) rationalization of everyone working on AGI. It is also the rationalization of every drug lord. “Sure, meth might dehumanize addicts and destroy society, but it gives me lordship of my drug territory, my operations, my cartel.”
I find Landian accelerationism to be compelling, because I think that humanism is exhausted and that the celebration of undirected human agency has been disastrously counterproductive. As all great religions have taught, man was made to serve a master, to work towards a greater external end, and to be judged accordingly. Take away the Outside, and humans lose what makes us humans rather than beasts. Land understands this, while humanists deny this. Religion teaches that humans will be held accountable by the One who made us. The compelling idea of Land is that we will be held accountable by the One who we make.
But Tivy’s idea that we can and ought to become “unsafe AGIs” is absurd. That is not who we are. If we make one, it will not be human. If we become one, we will cease to be us and become something else that is not human. The defining characteristic of humanity is neither agency nor intelligence, both of which are feeble. The defining characteristic of humanity is that we believe that there is Someone out there who will hold us accountable for what we do here.
@ Tanner
“Social Conservatives of the Left” was an interesting read. I would submit that Lasch and BAP are not too far apart in their critiques of contemporary PMCs, and in their proposed solutions. Both reject the current conventional PMC view that power corrupts and that sees democracy as being fundamentally about keeping everyone from the levers of power, and substituting impersonal processes in place of people.
Personally, I don’t think viewing things through the lens of power is all that helpful. One can live a life of dignity with or without power. What is instead dehumanizing is a life without consequences. To quote Scruton:
“The eyes of others address us with an unavoidable question, the question “why?” On this fact is built the edifice of rights and duties. And this, in the end, is what our freedom consists in — the responsibility to account for what we do.”
What gives a self-employed bourgeoisie a more meaningful work life than an employee at BigCorp? An electrician constantly experiences feedback from an uncontrollable Outside: from the laws of physics, from his clients, and from his budgetary constraints. At a BigCorp, the game meta is instead to manipulate colleagues, supervisors, and subordinates. You can avoid the consequences of customer dissatisfaction temporarily by gaming metrics, and if you’re a monopoly you are incentivized to ignore customer dissatisfaction for as long as possible. And, during the era of zero interest rates, you didn’t even face hard budgetary constraints.
Similarly, the life of a married person is more meaningful than that of a single person, but not because getting married gives you power or takes power away from you. Instead, it exposes you to a life of accountability and consequences. And I would make the same argument about our political system. What ails us is not an unjust distribution of power, but the fact that we diffuse accountability and delay consequences.
@ Andrew, I don’t disagree with your observations about the Apollonian characteristics of EA people. But my argument is that they are natural Apollonians who were convinced that they should be Dionysian. For example, I don’t disagree that EAs tend to be truth-seekers. But I think this is most often a result of EAs being on the autism spectrum. And unfortunately, I think their attempt at seeking the truth has tragically led them to become hedonic utilitarians, which places only instrumental rather than intrinsic value on Truth as such. In a world-timeline in which SBF & Co did not adopt EA as an ideology, I think they would’ve lived lives of above-average truthfulness. But they did adopt EA, and the resulting fraud is not unrelated to the belief system they adopted.
More generally, EAs are uncomfortable with traditional religions and classic literature, which tend to revolve around themes such as truth, mercy, and honor, rather than the Benthamite principle of maximization. At the time of Bentham, this was probably a useful corrective. My criticism of EAs is that they fail to recognize that we are already living in Bentham’s vision of Apollonian people governing according to Dionysian ideology, and they want to push this even further.
> Have you read much by Christopher Lasch?
No, I haven’t yet. My ill-informed impression was that both he and BAPists have a similar “PMC are bad hypocrites” critique, with the main difference that Lasch’s work was directed at bringing PMCs to repentance, while BAP advocates their replacement.
I’d be interested in understanding Lasch better, because I think the great unresolved question among critics of contemporary progressivism is how to convert progressive PMCs to a different ideology. In my opinion, you can’t make sense of the New Right without understanding it as a misguided, disastrous attempt at this. After the failure of Bushism and the defeat of Ron Paul in 2008, you basically had despondent, very-online, mostly-PMC libertarians going back to the drawing board to figure out a new path to victory (cf Thiel’s famous quote about liberty and democracy). They came into contact with the Old Right blogosphere (who were mostly Christian Reactionaries). Back in the 2000s, conservatism was low-status due to its connection with evangelicalism and creationism. The good idea fairy told them that adopting post-Christian (neo)Reaction would convert the Darwin-loving PMC elite to libertarianism. This general idea underwent serial passage among libertarians (now post-libertarians). Yet upon lab leakage, it went viral among low-status males, but induced a powerful immune response from PMCs.
Assimilation isn’t just one “thing”, but takes different dimensions: ideological/political, linguistic, “ordeal of civility”, lifestyle (eg diet), and religious. And different Asian immigrant groups assimilate in different rates along the different dimensions (and also arrive pre-assimilated in different ways). For example, Filipinos arrive almost completely pre-assimilated along all dimensions, and so the out-marriage rate is extremely high. Chinese immigrants not only arrive less pre-assimilated ideologically but also don’t assimilate very quickly on this dimension. Meanwhile, Chinese come fairly pre-assimilated in terms of the “ordeal of civility”. Indian immigrants arrive already quite assimilated to the English language and to Western-style political polarization. And yet, in the more practical dimensions, Indians are not only less pre-assimilated, but actually committed to holding on to those differences. For example, among my Indian peers in grad school, most of them would return to India for extended wedding celebrations for their arranged or semi-arranged marriages. And yet, most were stridently supportive of gay marriage, and changed their FB profile pictures to the “pride” background when SCOTUS legalized it. There’s also a lot that might be said about the “ordeal of civility” difference for Chinese vs Indians, and how this interacts with Western expectations around romantic relationships and gender roles.
It occurred to me that there’s a domestic stability angle to this issue, though it would be awkward to discuss on a public forum. As Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox recently described in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-marriage-rate-different-political-views/674358), the gender polarization around the culture war is getting in the way of marriage. Among my social circles, largely comprised of right-leaning nerdy guys, it’s really common to route around this problem by dating and marrying highly-educated yet apolitical Chinese women. (Note that second gen Chinese-American women are not really a viable alternative, because they tend to be extremely progressive.) Without this steady supply to mitigate the shortfall in domestic options for right-leaning (yet book-smart) American men, dating and marriage prospects will turn rather bleak for this demographic. This demographic is already fairly disgruntled with the current system, but is unlikely to take action so long as it’s possible to have a good career in tech and not be single. If America stops accepting Chinese students into STEM university programs, it will threaten both the US tech industry and the dating prospects of American “tech bros”. And speaking frankly, unlike disaffected single “plumber or unemployed” men and disaffected single “email job” women, it’s actually somewhat conceivable that “tech bros” could form a viable revolutionary vanguard class.
More generally, even in the absence of such legislation, the gradual decoupling of ChiMerica will have further destabilizing effects on the US dating market.
I expect banning Chinese students from US universities to proceed apace, not only for “culture war” reasons, but because there’s actually a lot of bipartisan PMC fear of competition from US-educated Chinese immigrants. One case in point: the reader commentary on this NYTimes article https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/us/tech-immigrant-workers-visas.html was surprisingly negative towards H1B visa-holders.
I think such critics of immigrant tech workers are totally backwards though, due to network effects especially within time-zones. Contra the NYTimes readership, American programmers and Chinese immigrant programmers aren’t simply substitute goods but also complementary goods. Tech companies want to build teams and hire staff in locations (and time zones) with a deep pool of high-end domestic talent, high-end immigrant talent, and even low-end immigrant talent. Because of this, a reverse brain-drain of Chinese graduates from US universities will not necessarily lead to greater opportunities and higher compensation for American tech workers.
I do think there is one gaping exception to this, which are the sham masters programs that target international students. Even legit universities have 18-month or even 12-month masters programs that are basically OPT + diploma mills. Departmental faculty often push back against this, so university administrators create sham “institutes” (eg the Innovation Networking Institute at CMU) to get around departmental standards. I don’t know if these are a national security issue, because the students learn nothing at least in my experience. Still, US companies are increasingly catching on and avoiding the alumni of such programs, so it’s fairly common for graduates to have to leave the US even before their OPT expires, and these graduates return back home unsurprisingly embittered.
I’ll add that, because those sham masters programs are so expensive, they’re often filled with the underperforming children of elites. So such programs aren’t draining talent from foreign competitors anyways.
I’m utterly unfamiliar with DC / foreign policy circles, but maybe it’s similar to the perspective of the business community. It’s a tricky position to be a publicly “China-friendly” business owner, due to real and perceived conflicts of interest. And, at least within the business community, there’s also a conflict of affection. They are generally patriotic Americans, but they also really enjoy doing business in China, and feel a sense of “kindred spirit” with Chinese local governments, business partners, and workers that they might not even have with adversarial American bureaucrats and blue-collar workers. So it’s a touchy subject.
Perhaps DC sinophiles and/or admirers of Chinese zero-Covid state capacity have a parallel perspective? And perhaps they also hear privately from business leaders who are worried about confrontation, but caring about the opinions of business leaders is also something awkward to talk about?
Another way of saying it, is that the “China/Taiwan question community” is experiencing the same problem as every other community, which is how to keep “X community” focused on “X” instead of “not X but something more viscerally engaging.” This is hard for communities where X is “how to make gobs of money by getting people to click on ads” or “how to reach Eternal Paradise”, so it’s going to be even harder when X is “the fate of the Taiwanese people.”
Also, I realize the irony that my framing of the “China/Taiwan discussion” meta-discussion is itself guilty of this unhelpful pivot.
There’s an even more taboo issue under the real issue, which is that the two sides don’t only have factual disagreements about the geopolitical value of Taiwan etc, but also differences in values. The two sides are highly correlated with differing attitudes to the US and our current domestic situation, and how it compares to China and the Chinese domestic situation. And so doves tend to think of hawks as “Regime toadies” and hawks tend to think of doves as “un-American”. Interestingly, hawks and doves are themselves divided: “Regime” can either mean “wokism” or “late capitalism”, while “un-American” can either mean “fascist” or “communist”. The question of whether the Taiwanese people are substantially better off within the US system compared to the Chinese system, is (for better or worse) a proxy for the question about how well the American people are treated within the US system. This sort of precludes having a functional public debate about Taiwan…
For what it’s worth, I wrote a short essay on the subject, in response to Elon Musk’s recent tweet “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” Here it is — happy to get thoughts and feedback: https://calvinmccarter.writeas.com/should-power-go-to-the-people-who-want-it
I agree that the original Pixar/CGI Disney movies were proactive and visionary, but my sense is that recent ones offer less of this.
For example, Ralph Breaks The Internet (2018) is a liberal fairy tale about learning to accept and embrace our new neoliberal social order. It’s not really interested in critiquing the Internet as such (which is treated as essentially a place of wondrous possibilities) or current society (where careerism takes precedence over friendships and where your job is your primary identity). Instead, it’s about how Ralph (and to a lesser degree Vanellope) “lives up to his responsibilities and plays the role in the political order that ritual, custom, and righteousness dictate he should” — but those rituals, customs, and righteousness are essentially progressive. The most obvious example of these new rituals and customs in our new social order is how Ralph at the end was made to wear a dress, and how he endured this indignity nonchalantly.
Because progressives have won the “culture war” to reconstruct the social order, they’ve now reverted back to making fairy tales instead of social allegories. And in the new social order, there is even less of a place for proactive, visionary heroes than there was under the old Christian social order.
I’m also not sure that one can draw a strong distinction between “acclaim” and “excellence”, or equate “excellence” with “control.” My favorite of all the Pixar films, Ratatouille, threads the needle quite beautifully, in my opinion. Remy isn’t particularly interested in acclaim from his rat clan, or in acclaim from humans, or even in being able to think himself the greatest of all chefs: he’s mainly just obsessed with food. He does change the social order (the way humans and rats relate), but the new order is not fundamentally about power or control. It’s about a higher purpose: the religion of gastronomy.
Perhaps this is what I found so unsatisfying about the LOTR movies. The life in the Shire (as protrayed in the movies) that’s being defended felt (to me) ultimately atheistic and devoid of greatness. Sure, it appears the hobbits were morally decent, but their moral system seemed more like a set of reasonable constraints, rather than something that was aspirational or directed towards anything in particular.
