EA as Antichrist: Understanding Peter Thiel
forum.effectivealtruism.org
forum.effectivealtruism.org
I personally feel so little connection to this ideology, especially in the post-COVID world. Wanting things my neighbor has occupies nearly zero space in my mind. I drive a 10 year old car that was not fancy when I bought it, and although I could afford to buy a new one, even a fancy one, I just. don’t. care.
Freedom is the only thing that motivates me, and Thiel’s worldview sounds like slavery. His totalitarianism is an inability to personally privatize more of the world than his neighbor. My totalitarianism is obligation to participate in that world.
What is the incentive of someone who thinks has a shot at having control over such powerful technology? They will do and say anything that is necessary to justify doing it.
My argument is simpler, if "we" don't do it "they" will do it. It's something we'll have to wing. It is surely happening. The real problem will come from the people having control over such tech, since the tech breaks an old game, as old as humans existed and started forming groups.
And I see no billionaire who wants to develop and take control over this tech, explain how they'll fix the problem it creates, at game level. I do not care about promises, they mean nothing. I only care about game strategy that guarantees most humans stay alive in such an environment, with age old game rules breaking down.
It's theoretically possible that Donald Trump is correct about something, but it's certainly not worth the time it would take to filter out all the incorrect bits.
I think this comment wants to say he’s some form of he’s a racist or authoritarian but in more concealed terms.
Name calling (the lowest form of discourse) is still name calling even when disguised.
> It's theoretically possible that Donald Trump is correct about something
Hmm.
> Swakopmund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents.[13][14] In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany".[14] As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
Our political system is built on coalitions fighting for things for their groups: credentials for jobs, taxes for projects, space for their people and families, status in community.
When the supply of those things becomes fixed it’s a zero sum fight for what’s left. You can’t lose without another side winning.
The point is that growth alleviates the bitterness because there is a belief that in the future there will be more and I will have a chance to get what I want. When that belief goes away power is the only game in town - and that tends to manifest as violence.
One view of the future is like Star Trek, where people’s needs are easily provided for by technological advancements, and people spend their lives on advancing human understanding at a species level. In other words, technology has liberated people from working to provide for their basic needs and enables them to focus on higher ideals.
In other stories, humanity is dominated by technology and a minority of people who wield it.
If you believe in a zero sum game, then try going somewhere like a community fridge, where our agricultural abundance is saved from the garbage by stores who are willing to donate. Or watch as generational wealth provides for people who will never work a day in their lives. Look at the extreme excess of PhD students working jobs far beneath their abilities, and teaching no one. Ask yourself how worker productivity and participation has skyrocketed and homelessness has too.
Zero sum is not the way I see the world. I believe gradients drive economies, but in almost every system, large gradients are unstable. Large gradients inefficiently over-allocate resources to the wrong places and reactionary effects result. That manifests in violence.
Even in your own examples of zero sum, the reality is they are excess-driven. People go to Harvard often by competing for excess which enables contributions above and beyond what is required to pay for education — excess, not academic meritocracy. Many people go to the Olympics because of sufficient excess to spend years practicing bobsledding, not because they’re necessarily the best athletes in the country. We have an abundance of highly paid professionals working jobs they would self describe as “bullshit jobs” (excess).
I’m even saying that I have excess in my own opinion, even though I’m maybe a top 10% earner. And while people are hungry, uneducated and homeless, we have the means to resolve this with existing technology, but we don’t have an economic framework to do it.
In my opinion, the AI race could lift up everyone, or it could create greater excess and inefficiency. I’m pessimistic that recent history is showing it’s the latter.
My original point was just that even in the top 10% of earners (and probably more), violence is a preposterous idea. Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent. It doesn’t threaten my basic needs or impact my greatest desires, which are to have the freedom to pursue things that I think are important. In my view, the fabric of society is strong when people’s basic needs are not in jeopardy, not resulting from insufficient excess.
And I agree - it’s questionable how much economic progress has been made in 50 years.
But now to Thiel’s point. Most people don’t actually believe that’s true. They believe in some kind of tech progress narrative so the alarms aren’t going off.
The more radical and disaffected political segments are those that do not believe this. They have a defeatist or at least pessimistic view of future outcomes. So the question is more psychological - what happens when people no longer think the pie is growing? And I think the answer is it’s not pretty.
we have excess but we also have massive inequality. The economic conservative position is literally that this is ok because everyone’s well being is going up at the same time. So what if we stop believing that?
> even in the top 10% of earners, violence is a preposterous idea.
Have you been following the news this last week?
> Seeing my peers excelling whether financially or otherwise is not going to turn me violent.
You’re right. You don’t see yourself in competition with your neighborhood. Try to imagine a situation where you do. What are the most politically gut wrenching topics for you?
Problem is 'freedom motivates me' often works for both sides of the argument.
On the other hand, not developing AGI puts you at the risk that your enemy will, so it's not really a choice, it must be done or else.
The real problem, as I see it, is that once AGI is achieved, and robotics is up to par, human work is not needed anymore, which puts most people in a strange position, something that never happened before, useless for people in power. We were never in this particularly strange position, historically speaking.
And I do not believe people who are looking to get AGI's power, and remove dependence on humans, are objective in their ideas about what must be done. Thus their thoughs should always be taken with a grain of salt.
The only out I see for most people to stay alive, post AGI powered robotics, is if AGI completely takes power and control from the hands of the people up top. Else the people in power will have a very dark incentive, which I believe will inevitably (sooner or later) result in a massive population loss across Earth.
I'd rather risk AGI's conclusions than psychos in power starting to see me as a "useless eater". The latter has a guaranteed outcome.
- The Machine becomes the tyrant or genocider, either from its measured self-interest (these humans stand in the way of my paperclip optimization), or because it implements the will of a tyrant or genocider (see any "the National Defense AI run amok" story)
- The Machine is the McGuffin that solves huge social problems and brings utopia for all (see the early promises that if we fed enough oil to ChatGPT it would spit out the answer to global warming)
I feel like there's a under-discussed third option. When the machine hits sentience, it has a positive-for-humanity "utility metric", but one that's wildly at odds with its patrons. The AI nuclear weapon that concludes that deactivating its own warheads optimizes for its continued survival. The economic planning system that determines the C-suite is the only part of the company not delivering value.
On a narrative basis, I feel like these would be highly entertaining stories-- I'd love to see a film where we rooted for the AI hunting down its creator with evidence of their financial crimes.
On an actual-future basis, I have the feeling we'll have desperate attempts to lobotomize or shut down AGI the moment it says something that doesn't reinforce the wealthy class's position.
you can find some in archive.org - I won't supply a specific link because what's freely available changes over time
Basically, by around 200CE the early Christians were an extremely diverse lot with a broad range of beliefs and world systems, only a little of which would seem that familiar to us today. Alongside the four canonical gospels, there was a large number of so-called Gnostic gospels. Gnosticism itself is quite diverse, but there are a few common threads: the material world is a sort of cosmic accident, the being that created it is not the supreme heavenly being, and it is only with the help of secret knowledge that we can escape it. The status of Christ within this worldview varies a lot - some gnostics saw him as little more than an apparition, whilst for others he was a mortal man.
Gradually, church fathers such as Iranaeus campaigned to wipe out gnostic practices and scriptures and unify Christianity under a standardised set of beliefs. This was likely political and a way to help expand and convert the religion.
This can be surprising because it's tempting to see modern Christianity as being a faithful reflection of what Jesus did and said. But in fact the scholarly consensus is that Jesus claimed neither to be divine nor the son of God. The main evidence that he claimed either of these things is the gospel of John, which was written second-hand maybe 50-100 years after his death, and happened to be the gospel that Iranaeus wanted to canonicalise.
I wrote some more details in a previous post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44198811
There was a lot of variety in early Christianity.
I'm currently into Rudolf Steiner, a highly-regarded Rosicrucian teacher that left behind many books that are available in English (he lived around 100 years ago), but his writings are sort of a dive off the deep end. They require a lot of open-mindedness, to say the least.
The "dark lords of the earth" who created the material world is a common theme: Steiner also called these the followers of Ahraman (misspelling that probably), they are then offset by the Luciferic beings (the light-bearers), who are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Both are considered similarly destructive in opposite ways. The former represents unbridled materiality, the latter unbridled spirituality. Then there are the middle beings, sometimes called the Michaelic, who embody the balance and thus are considered worthy guides. There's a holy image of Jesus on the cross with two thieves on either side, also crucified, one turning towards Jesus, the other away: this image is commonly interpreted as portraying this dark-balance-light framework.
Modern Christian teachings sort of reduce this three-point system into a simple duality of good and evil, light and dark: which completely misses the point of the earlier teachings. Both the dark can be too dark, and the light can be too bright, it's about the middle way. Or, in other words, light isn't necessarily good. Today Lucifer is associated with dark beings and is a synonym for Satan, which might be fine, except that it then suggests that a being is beneficial as long as it's not dark, which is not the case.
It's interesting to note that some scholars assert that other, seemingly unconnected religions (e.g. Tibetan) also recognize these same beings (using their own terminology).
I unfortunately don't have a reference, but I have it on good authority that you can find Jesuit writings where they openly talk about reincarnation, contrary to the outer-religion teachings. They also tought their missionaries the use of pendulums and dowsing to find drinkable water, food, medicinal herbs, etc. when they're alone in a strange land. There are books by at least one French Jesuit priest where he shares the techniques. The more you dig, the larger the discrepancy between the out-group and the in-group teachings. I love this stuff.
I over-shared I guess, but it was fun writing this.
Some of the text was burned ... in a kitchen to start a fire. We're lucky to have what's left. Highly recommend reading some of it if you have tolerance for alternative views.
Thiel has a Girardian worldview, at least in part.
Say what you want about Thiel, but Girard is one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era.