I always think it’s interesting when I read these stories. No matter how bad it gets. No matter how many red flags are raised no one is going to do a single thing. Our governments are completely failing us by doing nothing useful.
I’d guess it’s largely just a consequence of the Tragedy of the Commons. My favorite example demonstrating the effect I read in Meditations on Moloch:
The Fish Farming Story
As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.
But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.
A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.
But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.
Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.
Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”
Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…
A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.
Until it’s more profitable to do the right thing it’s likely we’ll continue doing nothing, if not outright exacerbating things, just so we can get ours before it’s all gone.
The example is pretty standard, but I feel obligated to caution people about the author (just because he’s linked to here and some unassuming people might dive in).
Scott Alexander falls loosely under the TESCREAL umbrella of ideologies. Even in this article, he ends up concluding the only way out is to build a superintelligent AI to govern us… which is like the least productive, if not counterproductive, approach to solving the problem. He’s just another technoptimist shunting problems onto future technologies that may or may not exist.
So, yeah, if anyone decides they want to read more of his stuff, make sure to go in informed / having read critiques of TESCREALism.
I don’t know much about the author and as far as I know haven’t read any of their other work, so while it’s certainly possible they’re pushing some shitty “AI will save us all” techbro agenda, I really don’t feel convinced of that based on that Washington Spectator article or the short paragraphs near the end of the mountain of text preceding it on the Slate Star Codex. There’s a lot of guilt by association implied in the page about TESCREAL but I’m not seeing any alarming smoking guns re: Scott Alexander and his Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to call out any concerning incidents or positions (not to imply all of its content is complete or truthful).
I’m not invested in this enough to try pushing back more but if you want to claim the author is roughly equivalent to an Elon Musk or some red pill monosphere proponent I’d expect more evidence. It’s good to be mindful of sources of info in general though, I agree with the sentiment of “follow those seeking the truth, avoid those claiming to have found it.”
I understand, a good instinct to have. Unfortunately I have read so much in such a piecemeal way I cannot really compile a specific list. But I can point you to where “evidence” can be found. I don’t expect you to read any of this, but if you want to evaluate Alexander’s views further it will help:
- The New York Times did a piece on him that does a good job outlining Alexander’s ties to and influence on Silicone Valley. Probably the best actual piece of journalism on him.
- There used to be a reddit community (/r/SneerClub) that would read his (mountainous, as you point out) posts and pull out errors and misteps to “sneer” at, but that’s been dead since the API revolts. The old posts are still up. Basically you had a club of people that spent years finding (cherry-picking, mind) the juicy bits for you.
- You may find some passing reference to Alexander is one of Émile Torres’s articles or interviews on the subject of TESCREAL, but probably nothing substantial.
- If you spend time on communites like LessWrong and the EA Forum, you will see heavy reference to and influence from Alexander’s writing among members.
A lot of what I say comes from my experiencd spending way too much time following these socisl circles and their critics online. Unfortunately, the best way I know to see for yourself is to dive in yourself. Godspeed, if you choose to go that way.
Edit: of course, reading his work itself is a great way , too, if you have time for that.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and suggested reading. Holy shit, paywalls are hardcore now (NYT link dividing the screen space literally in half) but fortunately there was an archive link to eliminate that issue. I was only really interested in knowing the details around Scott Alexander in so far as I didn’t want to be unknowingly spreading messages from Hitler 2.0 or something, but still without having a dog in this fight, I get the impression the ominous dangers implied about the nefarious Rationalists is overselling the reality of the situation.
The way the author/group’s positions are offhandedly portrayed (especially under the Life in the Grey Tribe heading) definitely raise red flags for me, but just opening a couple of the links and reading the content myself I didn’t come away with nearly the same impression of intent. (NOTE: I’m adding the bolding to certain elements)
NYT
The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.
Right away I can envision another “why would you want to silence me? I’m allowed to say anything if this is a free country!” excuse from some jerk online. I read that post on SSC and it has the following before it even begins:
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]
There’s also no hits on “speech”, “absolute”, “censor” in the post. It doesn’t come across to me like someone advocating for the unrestricted right to spread their hateful/harmful ideology. A figure like Elon Musk has made his positions pretty clear about why he (nominally, but not actually) believes in absolute free speech, the Grey Tribe post seems to mostly be a criticism about in-group purity testing and self-censorship.
NYT
He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”
Again, it’s easy to imagine this is going to be another red pill argument about how giving disenfranchised people an equal shot is really just repressing white people etc. With more of the quote providing context it doesn’t read as that (to me):
You’ve probably heard that memo writer James Damore has sued Google for discrimination against conservative white men. It seems like a complicated case: political discrimination is generally legal but might not be in California (see here), and discriminating against white men seems hard to distinguish from affirmative action and various societywide diversity campaigns universal enough that I assume someone would have noticed before now if they were illegal. […]
That NYT piece was really hung-up on his real name throughout though which to me raises questions about their motivations behind their stated concerns. It would be understandable if this was a scenario where some NGO was masquerading as a single real person, but here I can easily understand why someone would prefer to keep their offline identity de-emphasized.
Re: Reddit
In this area I’m going to willfully stick my head in the sand and ignore completely. I just can’t bring myself to want to wade through that collection of bots, bad-faith users, advertisers etc. to try to separate fact from fiction.
I also have contrarian tendencies and I’m not intending this to be a fight about who’s right/wrong – you’re clearly far more familiar with this author and subject than I am. And again, I sincerely appreciate the follow-up info. I can certainly see how some positions taken or discussed can act like a beacon attracting bad elements, but I also think that is nearly universal whenever there’s people involved - and that it’s possible to interpret virtuous things into a call for evil if predisposed. There’s some truth to dangers of gazing into the abyss and all that, but I also think it’s foolish to be concerned that everyone that reads Catcher in the Rye is going to get bad ideas about presidents, ya know?
Ya know, all perfectly fair.
Good choice on reddit. As much as I love a good 'ol sneer, there’s a lot of jargon and clowning to wade through. There are a lot of genuinely solid critiques of his views there, though.
I appreciate you doing your due diligence on this, but I’m not really sure where to keep this discussion going. I still stand by my original comment’s warning. Reading Siskind is probably not going to corrupt an unassuming reader to immediately think XYZ bad thing. His writings tend to be very data heavy and nuanced, to his credit.
Is he Hitler 2.0? No, far from it.
But he shares a set of core assumptions with the other ideologies, and the circles between his community and the other communities have large overlap. If you start with one, it’s likely you encounter the other. If you start to think like one, it’s a small jump to start thinking like the other. (From experience).
In my opinion, anyone encountering Siskind for the first time is well-served by an understanding of TESCREAL—which they are likely to encounter in either his posts, its comments, or linked material—, and its critiques—which should help them assess what they encounter through a critical lense.
That’s more or less what I wanted to give caution about, which may or may not have come across correctly.
(Not that his stuff is entirely innocent either, but beside the point)
Not an unreasonable concern about wandering into dark ideologies or not appreciating nuance leading to bad conclusions. It’s also entirely possible I was just reading more into your comments than was intended. I don’t currently have any plans to seek out more of his writing but I’ll be sure to keep our conversation in mind to filter it through if I do (and others should as well).
Was nice to have a respectful and constructive conversation online, thanks again :)
Humans can be so disappointing sometimes.
Europe’s governments are doing a pretty tight job, I feel personally. Actually a LOT of proper handling of issues. I’m surprised over the decades, honestly. I voted no to EU back then, but now I’d see it as an obvious yes, even if this or that cunt got rich in the process. It’s still a sane fucking system, it’s just under attack from organized trolls with nukes.
Part of the problem is that our atmosphere and oceans are shared across the planet. Stop fishing one spot? Another country will poach the fish. Stop buying oil/coal from one country and they just sell it to another.
I’m not trying to justify not doing anything. When it comes to our oceans and atmosphere we will need a global effort but localized efforts can still help and will teach us what is effective.
But, but, what about the shareholders? /s
“puzzled and concerned?” Like they’re surprised about this thing called global warming they’ve already been talking about for the last 20+ years?
TL;DR
Abraham suspects the main cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.
You miss understand.
It’s like saying if we double the weight of our go-kart we will go twice as fast. But instead of going twice as fast they went 50 times as fast. Then every says “that’s fucking weird why did it do that?”
You mister understands.
Every climatologist and entomologist I personally know have been low key shitting themselves for the last eight years and telling everyone they know not to have kids.
Everyone is puzzled. What on Earth could have caused this? The answer to the mystery keeps eluding scientists!
Oh the scientists know, but the billionaires are spending a lot of money to convince 40% of the population otherwise.
You don’t have to fool all of the people all of the time…
It’s going to be an entire year of
“How many weather records did we break today? Two, three?”
“Five records broken today. It’s been a rough day.”
“Five?! That’s got to be a record.”
“They’ve only been tracking for decades, don’t believe their lies. They just want to tax and control you. Volcanoes exist so it is impossible for carbon to even be bad. Its just a warm year, jeez people really forget the weather can have ups and downs. I wouldn’t mind every winter being warm anyway”
-your local climate change denier
Almost didn’t see the quotation marks man
This reply brought to you by the Didn’t Have Kids Gang™️
I wish your parents had been part of that gang. Then I wouldn’t have to read your inane comments.
It’s just a joke, buddy.
I’m not your buddy, pal!
I’m not your pal, friend-o!
I’m not you friend-o, chief!
Just wait until the ocean burps hydrogen sulfide again,
We’ll get massive methane outgassing from Siberia before we hit that point, and once that happens we are just a few centuries away from being Venus.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here with some people. Climate change is
one of thea significant underlying cause, yes, but the observed temperature rise is too high to be from just climate change. The article isn’t saying “damn if only there was some global phenomena scientists had identified decades ago”, it’s saying that global warming alone isn’t enough to cause this – and there must be other factors at play we’re not understanding.No, the article clearly says the main cause is climate change.
Abraham suspects the leading cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.
It’s not one of the causes it’s the leading cause. This is to say that if global warming didn’t exist, the sea temperature event would also not exist.
Your comment is wrong, and you should delete it.
Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor. Climate models predict a steady rise in sea surface temperatures, but not this quickly, and ocean surface temperatures also fluctuate and can be affected by natural climate variability, including patterns such as El Niño and La Niña.
So scientists don’t yet know precisely why sea surface temperatures have climbed so high.
The article is pretty damn clear that there’s something else going on, and it isn’t only climate change. Your own quote says “with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well”.
My point is not that climate change isn’t playing a big role or the main role here. My point is that there’s something else that’s also going on, and it’s there’s way too many comments saying “it’s climate change lmao”. The entire thesis of the article is that something beyond climate change is also raising temperatures.
I’ll edit my comment to make it clear that climate change is likely the major cause, but I’m not going to delete a comment that’s trying to reinforce what the article is actually saying. As an engineer I consider it part of my job to make it clear what science news is actually saying. I’m no climate scientist, but I would prefer for people to actually listen to what the climate scientists are saying. And they’re saying it isn’t only global warming.
Human-caused climate change is likely playing a role, researchers said, but is probably not the only factor.
Whut? I stopped here. Because it is the only factor!
So you feel bad if republicans ignore science in regards to, let’s say, Covid, but if the science doesn’t fit your world view you feel okay to ignore it yourself?
A tad
hypocratichypocritical, no?Minor correction:
It’s hypocritical. Hippocratic is the oath that doctor’s take to do no harm.
Thank you.
if i’m not burning alive by 50 i’m gonna be really disappointed by all these headlines
disappointed is an interesting choice of words. But I guess not having a roving hellscape is kind of boring.
You’ll be overwhelmed by climate refugees and food riots long before your piggy pasty skin burns.
You lack imagination on exactly how fuckdamn bad its going to get. Hint: pretty fuckdamn bad and if you aren’t rich it is going to hurt.
You think groceries are expensive NOW?! Wait till 30% of equatorial farmland is dead and unusuable. It’s ALREADY happening.
And when Siberia starts to melt, viruses that make COVID look tame and that our immune record has no knowledge of because they’ve been dormant under ice since we were monkeys.
Shit is so bad and people like you are the reason why we never addressed it until it was too late.
