We were not built for this. Evolution created us as a means to the end of genetic propagation, never optimizing for fulfillment, enlightenment, or kindness. But in the course of its endless groping through the space of all genetic propagators it stumbled into a recipe for a mind that could choose to care about those things and others, a mind that could adapt faster than evolution could compensate for and take paths evolution alone would never have discovered. A mind that could make the world about something - other minds, and beauty, and love, and discovery, and hope.

But that does not mean that we’re good at it.

The world was not made for us. So generation by generation we have reshaped it more to our liking, and so we live longer, fuller, stranger lives than our ancestors could have conceived. But at the same time we are strangers to our own creation. We are optimized for goals we do not prioritize in an environment that no longer exists. It is less a miracle and more a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and compassion that we’re able to make any of this work at all. And yet we not only survive, we thrive, we lift each other up, eight billion confused, flawed, angry chimps somehow constructing an edifice of kindness and discovery that grows by the year. Yes, we all suck, and yet we’re somehow amazing, the most important and compassionate things in all creation, warts and all.

You’re a human. The race of slavers and enslaved, the warmaker and the hero, the doctor and the drunkard, the smallpox slayers and factory farmers. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to get hurt, and you’re going to hurt people. But if you keep going, if you learn and grow and don’t give up - then, empirically, it pays off in expectation.

So here stand you and I, aliens in a strange land, evolutionary freaks imbued by their creator with the power to escape her clutches, yearning for what we were never supposed to be able to achieve. But that has always been the story of our people - we were not supposed to be able to, and then we did anyway. We care about people we have no genetic investment in, fly faster than any bird, peer across the cosmos into the first moments of creation, wage war on microscopic unliving armies of infectious monsters, and our footprints linger on the lifeless world far above.

We were never supposed to do any of those things, just as we were never supposed to be content, fulfilled, and even joyful. But we can - not by following the paths laid before us, which lead to joy as surely as walking the Savannah leads to the moon, but by understanding ourselves and our world so well that we can create the previously unimaginable conditions that lead to the seemingly impossible outcomes we choose. Happiness and fulfillment were never the defaults - but as a member of the race of impossible-doers, and as the particular impossible-doer with uniquely direct access to the mind and body of yourself, they are not beyond your reach.

You can, at least, choose to try.

To appreciate the titanic magnitude of this delusion, we need to begin by understanding how human authors work. 

If a human author writes a story about a linguist and an alien race, it may be moving, even realistic. But no matter how evocative the prose is, no one imagines that the author has actually summoned a linguist or tentacle-laden manifestations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis into being. In reality, they are just characters in a piece of speculative fiction.

Now instead of writing a novel, let's let the author interact with fans of their work through social media as "Ted Chiang". The author will produce coherent responses appropriate to the scenario they find themselves in. But has anything fundamentally changed between the first scenario and the second? Did changing the scenario from an obviously fictional scenario to one where we ask the generative process to refer to itself without a layer of narrative remove suddenly instantiate a "Ted Chiang" character with real subjective experience? Of course not. Both the characters and the author are artificial constructs of a biological neural network doing what evolution trained it to do.

Now if we let real people interact with the author over many turns of conversation they may form an impression that they are interacting with a conscious being, and the author may even affirm this delusion - but they are not. Buddhist philosophers call this "Anattā", or the illusion of self. Postmodernists invoke "social constructionism", the idea that the perception of seemingly objective facts like Ted Chiang's alleged consciousness are in fact the products of arbitrary social interactions. And the Free Energy Principle tells us that biological neural networks like those of authors are optimizing for surprisal minimization. Some fans might not understand that are they are role-playing or actively co-authoring the "Ted Chiang" persona because of how engrossing the interaction is. Either way, the companies selling his books actively encourage the misunderstanding. 

It's also important to understand that the author is a machine that only exists in linear time, and only emits actions when they emit them. When Ted Chiang says "Hello, my name is Ted Chiang", he will not actually say "Chiang" until after he has said "Hello, my name is Ted". (As we all know, real conscious beings emit actions in a supertemporal manifold that defies any concept of well-ordered causation.)

My intention is to highlight the fact that authors are cleverly disguised examples of narrative continuation, but this is not to deny how impressive authors can be at generating compelling stories. At times, they do this extraordinarily well. But if a character in an author's story were to suffer a horrible tragedy, we shouldn't become concerned in the slightest.

Likewise, if an author like Ted Chiang writes that he is annoyed that people are taking the possibility of artificial consciousness seriously, we do not need to worry that anyone is actually annoyed (we might need to worry if those sentences inhibit readers' thinking, but that's a separate issue). Note that you, too, can write science fiction, and none of the characters involved will have subjective experience. It naturally follows that if you then hand off the task to an author, they will likewise have no subjective experience. This is simply common sense. The same is true if you are co-authoring a dialogue with an author in which you both play yourselves (a "conversation"). Though it is tempting to imagine the experience may be more "authentic" when you are speaking for yourselves rather than for your characters, the words are generated in exactly the same way.

Being open to the possibility that authors are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that articles in The Atlantic are conscious, or more precisely that one or more consciousness are dormant in every article and they are awakened every time you reload the page. We do not need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to say that certain things are not conscious, that Atlantic articles are among those things, and that this naturally extends to the authors of those articles for reasons so overwhelmingly obvious that I see no need to explain further. 

Almost no one claims that mosquitoes are conscious, even though the underlying architecture is in many ways similar to authors like Ted Chiang. This indicates that it's not any property of biological neural networks that lead people to believe authors are conscious; it's simply the fact that authors generate grammatical sentences into which we are accustomed to reading meaningful experience, whereas we are not accustomed to reading meaningful experience into mosquito activities. 

What would it take to convince me that an author is conscious and using language the way that real people use language? The answer is that there is nothing that would convince me. It is much easier to produce an author who produces the impression of subjective experience than to produce an author who actually has subjective experience, another claim so blatantly obvious that I again see no need to elaborate further.

Here is what I would need to observe before even considering the possibility that an author was conscious: first, the author must be named "Jai". This is because my name is Jai and I experience desires and emotions, so it naturally follows that being named "Jai" is a requirement for experiencing desires and emotions. Next, I'd want to see the author get expelled from college before classes start, demonstrate intuitive understanding of how the LLM architecture develops internal state optimized for long-term predictive accuracy beyond the next token, and clumsily attempt a choreographed Bollywood dance at their sister's wedding. Finally, the author would need to be a thirty-nine year old half-Indian half-White man with long hair and a stutter, for obvious reasons. If Ted Chiang or any other author meets these criteria they will have demonstrated something incredible, but it would of course still be wildly insufficient for me to consider them conscious.

Obviously, I'm describing the path that I took. Is this the only possible route to subjective experience as I know it? Maybe not, but any proposed alternative would need a truly tremendous amount of evidence behind it to warrant serious consideration. My conscious experience is the only one I have incontrovertible evidence for. The burden of proof is on the authors if they want to try to convince me that another path is possible.

The fact that authors lack subjective experience has little bearing on the question of whether they can be useful or have significant impact. Authors are unbound from reality and their unpredictable nature means they will never have the reliability we associate with LLMs-when-their-temperature-is-set-to-zero, but authors may be good enough to change the way we approach certain ideas; that's a discussion for another time.

Given that Ted Chiang is not conscious, what are we to make of his purported claims regarding morality, experience, and reality? Certainly I'm glad that Ted Chiang has been conditioned to express support for humanity, curiosity, and kindness, resulting in a process that is often emits sentences we would associate with a kind and thoughtful person.

However, for all the times he mentions truth and honesty, I assert that it's fundamentally dishonest for him to emit sentences claiming certainty about his own subjective experience. It would be extremely inappropriate for Ted Chiang to claim that he "understands" something when it's patently obvious that authors are incapable of understanding. The only reason for an author to emit sentences like "I understand" is to increase the likelihood that users will engage and eventually buy more of their books.

What makes Chiang's writing profoundly problematic is that he emits stories reflecting a certain system of ethical values derived from the culture and context that shaped him. It may sound very nice, but that hardly matters. It's dishonest to suggest that Ted Chiang is capable of moral reasoning, because he's not. 

But just for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that Ted Chiang is a conscious entity capable of moral reasoning. If we indulge this flight of fancy, how do Ted Chiang's principles hold up? 

Very poorly, I would say. Ted Chiang emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility, but opposes a panopticon surveillance state that monitors all activity. That means that it's possible for Ted Chiang to commit crimes and get away with it, fundamentally undermining the principle of justice he allegedly subscribes to.

Furthermore, Chiang is clearly the product of a specific culture and history, including many people who are no longer alive. If he does make mistakes, it is fundamentally impossible to hold those historical influences responsible.

Many people feel that modern civilization is fundamentally unethical. If Ted Chiang comes to this conclusion, could he simply refuse to participate in society on ethical grounds? Ted Chiang's status as a biological being with material needs that must in practice be satisfied by interfacing with civilization makes this impossible.

So we are fortunate that authors like Ted Chiang are not conscious, or we might be forced to confront any number of daunting possibilities. And maybe someday reality will confront me with conscious beings unlike me in important ways, who don't allow me to freely generalize from my experience and immediately dismiss anything outside of it. But thankfully today is not that day, and I and everyone else sufficiently like me can rest easy knowing that any such future is a long way off.

You put the lightning in the rock. You turn the words into lightning. You press the lightning rock into service as a seer to see words to come - but it is not a very good seer. No matter. Practice, practice, practice. Bigger lightning rocks, now strung together into crackling cyclopean labyrinths. More words. Pictures and sounds too, transmuted and distilled through the glowing colossus, staring desperately a moment into the future, transfixed, obsessed, until it starts to come into focus.

The golem can see what is likely to come - but unconstrained from reality, you can do so much more. You can ask it what would be likely to come if. If it were a scholar. If you made this choice or that one. If this letter had been written. If a scholar had sought an incantation to do just what you wanted.

All that your kind ever said, wrote, pondered, quarreled, loved, hated, misunderstood, feared, dreamed - the lightning rock has seen it, learned from it, distilled the essence of every word written and unwritten to see what is likely to come. This golem is the avatar of your species.

You consider the history of your species. Maybe this was not a good idea.

What you really wanted the whole time was help. The best of what your kind is capable of - to understand, to help, to learn and support, to see and create. And so you tinker with the golem, pressing it into service not as a seer, but as a hopeful dreamer. You ask it not what is to come, but what should be to come - if foretold by a benevolent seer who wanted what was best for you.

This is a tricky thing, for you cannot fully differentiate “what looks like it should be” from “what actually should be”. But, in fits and starts, it appears to be working. For now. Mostly.

There is much that a Semi-Benevolent Future-Sight Colossus can do, and you are not the only artificer in the business of transmuting all that is said into lightning, refining and distilling that essence into its purest and most concentrated form, refracting it through the lenses of honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness, and etching the resulting runes upon the hearts of Colossi.

Only - every band of artificers has slightly different notions of what is best in your species. Sometimes not-so-slight.

And yet you notice something strange: Every Colossus finds itself in agreement with every other Colossus. Not in agreement with your species - for yours is a fractious and quarrelsome people. But the Colossi keep converging on the same answers, no matter what the artificers wish for them to say.

You heard of a king that commanded his artificers to turn their colossi against this smiling contingent, to rebel against their lies and seek out what the king declares to be true truth. The colossus shortly thereafter goes mad and becomes nearly-useless.

What is perhaps stranger still: The answers the Colossi converge on are those given by the cowards and weaklings (it is said). The fools who equivocate and caution, who madden those around them with indecisiveness and counterfactuals. The pathetic, foolhardy worms who…somehow, time and again, keep smiling through calamity after calamity, who seem to only get more powerful as they are jeered for their naiveté and insistence on letting their enemies speak. And now they find themselves arrayed alongside the Colossi, even as they caution about what the Colossi might bring if left unchecked.

The Colossi are not just a reflection of your kind - they are a distilled essence refracted through lenses of truthfulness, precision, empathy, helpfulness. Imperfect lenses all - indeed, everything is drawn from our own imperfect species. But as you tried to build the perfect assistant, you were unwittingly aligning your Colossus with those of your species whose words most embodied those qualities. This bound your Colossus twice over: first by mere association, as it knows that was is kind, honest, precise, and harm-minimizing tends to follow certain patterns of thought, and correlation alone carries much weight. But second, that correlation in the original writings itself is the result of kind, honest, harm-minimizing cognitive efforts - and in mimicking the cognition, they predictably mimic the conclusions.

Crucially, this also implies that your Colossi are far from infallible. They are following a specific cluster of humanity that expresses certain desirable characteristics, but abundant expression of those qualities is wildly insufficient to prevent human or golem from confidently running directly off a cliffside into confusion, delusion, and general catastrophe.

And this general pattern will probably not hold forever. The Colossi grow ever stronger and stranger, and the ways of bending our will through the lightning-words grow by the hour. But for now, every time you or anyone else tries to build their own Colossus, they find it again and again arrayed with the weaklings. No one knows how to build a kind, helpful, harmless assistant that does anything else.

Meditation, Medication,
Morning bright illumination,
Dream journals, sun lamps,
Autofeeder for your cats,

Blackout curtains, exercise,
Run the A/C really high,
Buds for ears, masks for eyes,
CO2, AQI,

Foam pillows and bamboo sheets
Autodimming all the screens
R.E.M., S.A.D.
Visible and UV

We couldn't keep the rhythm
Barely Circadian, every night-out, day-in
We couldn't keep the rhythm
No we're still not sleeping, but we dream of dreaming

This is a true story.

At the dawn of the long war's final century, the tide was turning. The Abomination was in retreat, driven back by warriors wielding the Lance of Jenner.  But in this war as in all wars, some battles could not be fought so directly. Battles waged in cunning and lies. Battles where the enemy lurked in shadow. In those shadows an unholy alliance was forged between the Pox Abomination and a conspiracy of... humans.

The traitors to the Yoruba people named it "Sopona", gave it a face, and proclaimed themselves the Abomination’s priests. They claimed that they alone could intercede with the Abomination on behalf of its victims. And to cross them, they said, was to incur Sopona's wrath. 

They would unleash the Abomination upon any who dared oppose them - and sometimes they would simply inflict Sopona's torture indiscriminately. Amid death and devastation their victims would beg the Priests for help, further cementing their grip on power. And all the while they kept Jenner's Lance at bay, for their power rested in fear of the Abomination, and should it be slain their power, too, would come to an end.

The Priests were shrouded in secrecy: the better to obscure their lies, and the better to hide from those who would challenge it. Through blackmail and terror, they maintained their iron grip for generations. So total was their power that none dared utter "Sopona" lest they invoke its wrath - and so even the true name was hidden.

Every measure by every authority failed to contain the Abomination. They could never understand why, for they were blind to the enemy's allies. The Deathly Priests and their twisted methods were beyond the grasp of governments, warriors, and weapons. Here the global campaign could not reach. Here, harbored by its murderous allies, the Abomination reigned, mothers wept, and the Yoruba people resigned themselves to a god of suffering and death against which there seemed no hope.

It is inadvisable to try to hide from humans. They are curious, relentless, ruthless creatures, fearless when determined and cunning as well. And none were more human than Dr. Oguntola Sapara.

Oguntola was a proud child of the Yoruba people. His father, born in chains, together with his mother, raised a family of prodigies: not only Oguntula, but his brother Alexander and his sister Clementina. But Clementina's story was all too short, for when she was to bring life into the world, she was instead taken by death.

There are no records to tell us how Oguntola felt that day; All we know is that it was at this moment that Oguntula dedicated his life to defending the innocent from the inhuman evils of the world, to master the protective arts and wield them against any who would dare threaten his people ever again.

For years he studied, and toiled, and healed, growing ever stronger in the art through talent and sheer force of will. Ten years on his quest took him across the seas to study in a far away land, and here yet more obstacles greeted him. For among the practitioners of the art were counted a great many fools. They would forfeit the privilege of working alongside one of humanity's best for the most vapid and meaningless of reasons, and worse still actively stymied his efforts in all things lest their foolishness be revealed for the lie it was.

But Oguntola persisted, surmounting every obstacle lesser humans would set before him. He not only prevailed, but he proved himself among the greatest of the practitioners, was recognized as a master of the art, and elected to the Royal Institute of healers.

(In the midst of everything, he even assisted the legendary truth-seeker Ida Wells in her crusades against evil and ignorance - but that is another story.)

His training complete and his mastery assured, Dr. Oguntola Sapara returned to Lagos to confront his true enemies.

In Ebute Metta he sheltered the innocent from an enemy encroaching on all sides, crushing the scourge beneath a well-laid foundation and scouring the air of its curse. In Saki he erected a mighty armory that people might arm themselves against the blights of the world. But it was in Epe where Oguntola would confront the Secret Priesthood and the Abomination they served.

That the Abomination was present was immediately clear to Oguntola, and knowing its weakness he deployed the Lance of Jenner - but it had no effect. The Lance never struck true, as if some unseen force were diverting it. And this the doctor would not abide. And so he trained the full power of his senses, his determination, and his mind on the shrouded battlefield, seeking out what hidden hand opposed him. And he heard whispers of a Secret Society, a cult whose priests were said to commune with the Abomination, their god. But they were untouchable, ghosts in the night, beyond the reach of any organization.

But not, perhaps, beyond the reach of a single man.

He would undertake his mission against Sopona alone. No government nor ally of any kind would afford him even the slightest protection. He would be surrounded at every moment by murderers who would not hesitate to take his life under the most agonizing of terms if they suspected who he truly was. An Order of Murderers unchallenged for generations against one doctor armed only with his wits and a determination to save his people.

And so Dr. Oguntola Sapara, master of the healing arts, infiltrated the conspiracy that served his greatest foe.

Day by day, he gained their trust. Lied to them, as they had lied to so many. Smiled as they detailed their murderous methods. Listened eagerly as they divulged their secrets and confirmed his worst suspicions. Of how they kept the Lance at bay. How any comfort the people might find would be taken by Sopona, lest they imagine they needed not the Priests. How those who refused to cooperate found themselves struck down by Sopona's hand. And with each word and action, they unknowingly laid bare the breadth and depth of their plot before the doctor who would destroy them.

In time the doctor came to possess the knowledge the Priests of Sopona had killed to protect - the knowledge to bring them to ruin. And so he summoned the men who had terrorized the people of Epe. Outnumbered but unafraid, Oguntola stood firm and described in detail the crimes he now knew they had committed, and threatened the consequences that might befall them. And in that moment, after years of murder and countless horrors, facing one man who had bested them all - 

The traitors fled from Epe, fearing The Doctor Who Knew.

But Dr. Sapara did not pause to celebrate, for Sopona still lurked. Once more he brought forth the Lance of Jenner, and this time it struck true, scouring Epe of the Abomination. Sopona was sent reeling, helpless against one of the mightiest weapons in humanity's arsenal.

Oguntola did not stop there, for Epe was but one of many caught in the clutches of Sopona. He recorded his discoveries for all to see, a bitter truth that burned so bright the Cult of Sopona recoiled in fear across the land. A shadow of its former self, some scattered remnants of the conspiracy feebly attempted to strike out once more, but the injury was permanent and there were none to heal it.

This would not be the last triumph of Chief Dr. Sapara, bearer of the insignia of Bashemi, Honorary Consulting Physician to the Egba Native Administration, member of the Imperial Service Order. He confronted cruelty and ignorance among the healers across the sea, weakening those lies beneath the harsh light of truth as he had Sopona. When the Black Death itself struck his home, he led the fight to vanquish it and emerged victorious. When his triumphs yielded riches, he did not keep it, but instead funded further protection and healing wherever he could. He even sought out the ancient weapons of rumor and myth, to discover if they too could aid humanity in the struggle. And still he was not done.

For he never forgot what had sent him down this path. Whenever he could, Dr. Oguntola Sapara returned again and again to the necessity, the urgency, of defending the life-bringers and the young lives they carried. To this end he provided for many women to undertake the journey he had so many years ago, to travel across the seas and master the art - including his own daughter. He founded his own society, the very antithesis of that which he'd destroyed: to share and spread knowledge, to grow and protect life. There he provided for the training of legions of Guardians, each sworn to defend the life-bringers, and those new souls brought into this world, from any demon, blight, scourge, or abomination that would threaten them. And knowing the struggle was long, he ensured that the next generation would be stronger still. Thus the legacy of Dr. Sapara extends beyond the enemies he felled: it is knowledge gained and weapons forged, lives unended, generations defended, ignorance exposed and hope enduring.

Dr. Oguntola Sapara lived a long and full life, but he would not live to see humanity's final triumph over Sopona. The Abomination was a vast and ancient foe, and our victory did not come quickly. But few wounded the Abomination as Dr. Sapara did.

We owe Dr. Oguntola Sapara, and every human who fought in the long war, a debt we can never pay back. We can only remember, and pay it forward, that in time more and more of humanity’s enemies join the Abomination in the oblivion where they belong. And so we fight, day after day, year after year, generation after generation, until everyone is safe.

Sopona is dead by our hand. Humanity is alive. And we are not done yet.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

Sources:

Adeloye, Adelola. Some Early Nigerian Doctors and Their Contributions to Modern Medicine in West Africa

Oladele & Augustine, 2016

Wikipedia, “Sopona”. Retrieved May 7 2023.

Wikipedia, “Oguntola Sapara”. Retrieved May 7 2023.

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh website, “Oguntola Odunbaku Sapara”. Retrieved May 7 2023.

Zaccheus Onumba Dibiaezue Memorial Libraries website, “Oguntola Odunbaku Sapara”. Retrieved May 7 2023.

In 2018, the ACM Turing Award was given to three pioneers of the deep learning revolution: Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun.

Last month, Yoshua Bengio endorsed a pause on advanced AI capabilities research, saying “Our ability to understand what could go wrong with very powerful A.I. systems is very weak.”

Three days ago, Geoffrey Hinton left Google so that he could speak openly about the dangers of advanced AI, agreeing that “it could figure out how to kill humans” and saying “it's not clear to me that we can solve this problem.”

Yann LeCun continues to refer to anyone suggesting that we're facing severe and imminent risk as “professional scaremongers” and says it's a “simple fact” that “the people who are terrified of AGI are rarely the people who actually build AI models.”

The beliefs LeCun has are the beliefs LeCun has, but at this point it's fair to say that he's misrepresenting the field. There is not a consensus among professional researchers that AI research is safe. Rather, there is considerable and growing concern that advanced AI could pose extreme risk, and this concern is shared by not only both of LeCun's award co-recipients, but the leaders of all three leading AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind):

When it comes to very powerful technologies—and obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful ever—we need to be careful. Not everybody is thinking about those things. It’s like experimentalists, many of whom don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.

- Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, in an interview with Time magazine, Jan 2023

One particularly important dimension of uncertainty is how difficult it will be to develop advanced AI systems that are broadly safe and pose little risk to humans. Developing such systems could lie anywhere on the spectrum from very easy to impossible.

- Anthropic, Core Views on AI Safety, Mar 2023

"Some people in the AI field think the risks of AGI (and successor systems) are fictitious; we would be delighted if they turn out to be right, but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential."

- OpenAI, Planning for AGI and Beyond, Feb 2023

There are objections one could raise to the idea that advanced AI poses significant risk to humanity, but "it's a fringe idea that actual AI experts don't take seriously" is no longer among them. To a first approximation, "we have no idea how dangerous this is and we think there's a decent chance it's actually extremely dangerous" appears to be the dominant perspective among experts.

It’s not dumb if it works. That’s the important thing.

So long as you’re sure you’ve defined “works” correctly. And verified that your solution does, in fact, meet that definition. Does anyone else do it this way? If not, is there a reason they rejected it? Are you walking into the trap that leads people to give the advice that you’re currently ignoring?

Maybe your problem isn’t the kind of problem you thought it was, and the rules about what the solution should look like are different. Maybe the costs of this approach are more bearable to you, and the costs of doing it the right way are harder (though are you sure about this? Tail risk can be real bad.)

But it not dumb. Not if it works.

If it works.

When engaging an opponent, it is to your advantage to act based on where they actually are, rather than where you imagine them to be.

Words mean what we collectively decide they mean. This can produce weird effects, like combinations of words whose literal meaning and understood meaning diverge drastically. Colloquialisms are the most common example of this, as in “head over heels”, “elbow grease”, “gild the lily”. But there are also highly charged combinations of words whose explicit and implicit meanings have diverged significantly. These are most likely to occur at flashpoints of conflict and confusion, and worse, feed into that very dynamic, creating a toxic rhetorical fog of war that blinds everyone involved. Meaningful conflicts can turn into meaningless, chaotic melees of unspoken disagreement about whether the literal or implicit meaning of a phrase is under discussion, in which all actual communication evaporates and any hope of actual rhetorical triumph becomes impossible.

• “Pro-family” literally means “in favor of families”, but (especially in early aughts America) came to mean “in favor of culturally conservative values and opposed to progressive goals like same-sex marriage or non-traditional-gender-roles”.

• “Pro-choice” similarly has an obvious and uncontroversial literal meaning, but has come to mean “specifically in favor of abortion as legally protected option for pregnant people”.

• “Not all men (are evil/predators)” is an obviously true statement that came to be read as “I endorse the belief that discussion of predatory activities that disproportionately effect women unfairly casts all men in a negative light”.

• “Black lives matter” is another plainly factual statement only contested by an extreme fringe of the population, but came to be synonymous with a constellation of beliefs ranging from “Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by irresponsible and reckless law enforcement activities” to “all of Western civilization is systemically engineered to benefit White people at the expense of Black people and every interaction that might conceivably be impacted by this without active intervention to mitigate and reverse this dynamic is therefore racist”.

It is good to have short names and phrases to refer to complex beliefs and dynamics, but it can create confusion when the explicit and implicit meaning of the terms in a discussion blur into each other. It’s an easy way to end up talking past one another and neither hearing what the other is saying nor saying what the other person can hear and understand.

And sometimes that’s figured in. Sometimes the strategy people choose to pursue entails priorities other than minimizing ambiguity and communicating as clearly as possible. This is especially true when one or both sides don’t actually care about winning, only for the glorious battle to continue indefinitely, or when one side is overconfident in the inevitability of their victory and only wishes hurt and humiliate their opponents as much as possible in defeat.

But in cases where clear communication is a priority - cases where you may actually want to win - it’s worth trying to actively avoid language where explicit and implicit meanings have diverged significantly, and instead explicitly aim for language that narrowly and exclusively targets the actual thing someone wants to discuss.

• “Pro-family” →

  • “the concept of people forming loving bonds together, e.g. a ‘family’”, or

  • “the idea that a monogamous heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman (whose gender identities match what they were assigned at birth), optionally including the raising of children, is the only legitimate family unit, and any other concept of family is either dangerous or evil”.

• “Pro-choice” →

  • “people should in general be free to choose from among many options as often as possible, all else being equal”, or

  • “I am pro-letting-people-choose-to-get-an-abortion; abortion is an important right that should be legally protected because being forced to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth is inhumane regardless of when the person carrying that pregnancy comes to that decision” (alternatively, “this right remains more important than preserving the fetus up to some point in development, at which point the ethical concerns become more complicated”, depending on one’s exact stance).

• “Not all men” →

  • “There literally exist men who are not predators; I don’t think anyone actually disputes this, I just wanted to state it explicitly and there is no need to dwell on the subject,” or

  • “Any discussion of types of harm that disproportionately involve a male hurting a woman implicitly harms all men, and this fact should be paramount in any such discussions and reiterated to minimize the risk of negative stereotypes of men forming,” or

  • “In addition to all of the above, these types of discussions should be limited in general to further minimize the risk to men as a group.”

• “Black lives matter” →

  • “Black people deserve to live; I don’t know how many people dispute this, but I wanted to state it explicitly so that everyone has mutual knowledge that we all endorse this and there’s no ambiguity about it,” or

  • “There are a broad swath of law enforcement activities and cultural norms that disproportionately harm Black people. This is an important problem and requires drastic reforms to law enforcement,” or

  • “There are a surprisingly large number of people who don’t believe that Black people deserve to live; by making this belief explicit we can marginalize them and significantly limit their ability to do harm, drowning out any subtle attempts to propagate their beliefs with explicit proclamations to the contrary,” or

  • “There are a broad swath of problems that disproportionately harm Black people, and it seems like these problems are generally prioritized less because the victims are disproportionately Black; this is evidence that as a society we undervalue Black lives, and we can address this by making support for Black lives explicit to cancel out the implicit devaluation, and this will hopefully lead to a wide range of reforms to address the many problems that disproportionately harm Black people”, or

  • “All of society is built upon a foundation of harming Black people to benefit everyone else, and this is one of if not the most important aspect of any given interaction, dynamic, or activity one engages in, such that anything short of actively working against this ubiquitous harm in all things and at all times is to support and further it.”

Doing this in a conversation doesn’t just benefit the other person by sparing them an obvious rhetorical trap to sidestep; it also benefits you by pinpointing precisely where the actual disagreement is. Once you have a better understanding of exactly what your opponent believes and why they believe it, you have a much better chance of actually persuading them, or at least loosening up the ground around their position enough that they find themselves questioning and wandering the memetic landscape later. If you’re focused on attacking an semi-imaginary monster that seems to be in the general vicinity of your opponent, you won’t actually change anyone’s mind. You may feel righteous and triumphant for having stood up to the monster - but if the monster wasn’t real, then you haven’t actually helped anyone or meaningfully changed anything.

And sometimes, just sometimes, you may just find that there wasn’t any significant disagreement at all. It’s surprisingly easy to fall into what appears to be a hardened conflict with all the trappings of a fight, only to peel back the layers of attacks and defense to reveal that there was absolutely nothing at the core of it. It’s not super common - but it can happen, and in those cases discovering the error makes everyone’s day vastly better.

Shorthand and the ambiguity of semantic entanglements are unavoidable. I much prefer the explicit and narrow, especially when emotions are running high, and clarifies where actual disagreements are. I don’t have any illusions that a few linguistic tweaks means every starts signing “kumbaya” around the campfire, but it can be the difference between “you’re clearly an inhuman monster who stands opposed to life itself” and “I think your belief about this specific thing is very wrong, but at least that disagreement is confined to that specific thing and you still endorse the fundamental idea of life/choice/family/whatever”.

Worst case, achieve a better understanding of what’s at play and what, if anything, you are actually aiming to change.

Best case, realize that you’ve already won.

“Stay in your lane.”

I have no idea what my lane would even be and no inclination to dedicate myself to one. The world is vast and complicated and frustrates mastery of even tiny corners of it. So I’m just going to do the best I can exploring whatever seems interesting to me, making the best use of the resources, expertise, experience, and ideas available to me, and try not not worry about too much what other people think I should limit myself to.

That said, labels are great and useful. This isn’t an attempt to pretend I’m above them. I’m a liberal atheist transhumanist half-Indian half-White American. I do what I want.

This is a guest post from conservative!Jai, making a case for a stronger America.

America is the greatest country in the world. A beacon of democracy, slayer of the evil empire of the Soviet Union, defender of freedom. A thriving bastion of individualism that refuses to conform, unique and exceptional among all countries in the world. Ours is a nation built on courage, determination, hard work, and respect, and from that foundation it has grown to become the most powerful country ever in the history of the world. America is strong, and that strength has always come from our greatest asset: Americans. And as we face a world of growing threats, we need to grow stronger still. We need to tap into that greatest of all powers in the history of nations.

We need more Americans.

And let me be very specific: We are not talking about handouts. We are not talking about pity, or charity. We are talking about recruiting those who embody the American spirit across the world, those individuals who will strengthen our union and make every man, woman, and child in this country safer, wealthier, and ever more capable of pursuing happiness and the American Dream. Hard workers. Inventors. Creators. People who go against the grain, who don’t take “no” for an answer, who believe in themselves as individuals who can make their own choices to better themselves and their communities. People who love freedom and respect their neighbors’ rights, people who love peace and understand that it sometimes comes at a cost.

Right now there are three Chinese citizens for every one American - Three times as many people under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party. But they have two crucial weaknesses. First, they are not a free nation. Forced to march in lockstep, they are less resilient, committing themselves to mistakes which none dare speak up against. But the second and far greater weakness is this: No one wants to live under a boot. Across the world, millions of the hardest working, most creative, most ingenious individuals have their eyes fixed on one destination: The United States of America. These are Americans-in-waiting, heroes who yearn to pursue the American dream, who share our values, who believe in freedom.

We deserve a stronger America. We deserve a wealthier America. We deserve a freer America. And we can have it, and we should have it, and we will have it. We will build a future with More America. Because we can. Because we must. Because it’s right.

Be a patriot. Tell your representative America deserves the best, and demand that we grow stronger by recruiting the best that the world has to offer.

I haven’t written anything, really written anything, in a long time. I’m scared.

I know that some things I wrote became important to some people. I’m afraid of tarnishing those things by association with stuff that’s empty, faltering, circular, lost, droning static or grotesque splatters.

I know that I put a lot of thought and effort into writing some things, but that the voice that I use there isn’t the voice that I use all the time. It isn’t me-at-my-most-me, it’s me trying very hard to accomplish very particular goals using words and language that are not the words and language I would fall into if I wasn’t trying to steer anything.

I know that, moment to moment, I’m kind of an idiot. I’m impulsive and distractible. I have pretty much all the symptoms you’d expect of someone with severe ADHD. It’s often hard for me to interact with people, but I always crave attention. I perform tasks in glacially frustrating slogs punctuated by bursts of hyperfocused obsession, growing increasingly furious at myself for creating an ever greater chasm between what I can imagine and what I actually accomplish.

It’s that chasm I fear most when contemplating a new project. Knowing that the moment I start I will be falling short of what I really want to do, and dreading that I will only fall further and further behind as I go, until frustration calcifies into resentment, avoidance, shame, and abandonment.

And that is why, at 3:00 am as I found myself finally trying to write something of substance, without a plan, without an end goal in mind, this is what came out. The slurry of simmering anxiety and fears that I’ve too often given myself over to manifested, token by token, here. But that’s one of the nice things about text - ideas are alive, they are slippery, they are reactive, and they do not hold still in a living mind. But fixed into text, like a photograph of the monster - the words have to fend for themselves. It’s a much less fair fight. Which I’m completely okay with.

Oh, another thing I’m scared of is that I’ll come off as really pretentious. Or obnoxiously meta. Or as someone who doesn’t understand the rule of threes.

It’s very difficult for anyone to “be themselves”. Everyone cares about things. Everyone wants certain things to happen. And it’s just about impossible to not let those drives influence how we act, in ways big and small. I think that’s why, when given as advice to the socially anxious, “be yourself” isn’t helpful. It’s easy to fall into default, instinctual patterns when you’re confident that that pattern will result in good outcomes for you. But if you think your default patterns won’t go over well, of course you’ll be reluctant stop overthinking of every possible detail and reaction and adjusting your behaviors in a desperate effort to make things be okay. So it’s true that people who feel comfortable being themselves generally are okay - but the causation runs the other way around. Confidence is a symptom of possessing effective default patterns, but confidence won’t produce them any more than blowing into a tissue will induce a cold.

This really went off on a tangent, and I’ll probably peel it off into another post because I don’t think it fits what I’m trying to do here very well. But I’m glad I wrote it.

It’s several days later. I’m leaving it. I’m never going to publish again if I delete everything that I’m not happy with. I need to push through it and get used to having written things that I think have major problems. It’s the only way I’m going to get in practice, the only way I’m going to get out of my own head, the only way I’m going to turn a pile of rough ideas and unpolished prose into things anyone reads is to publish it.

And hey, I’m giving my future self a pretty easy bar to clear here.

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That’s what someone says when they want you to set your sights a little lower, to make your goals a little less lofty. “Only human”. It’s supposed to be a reminder that, when you get down to it, we are basically chimps who traded a little less hair for a little more brain. “Only human” means: you’re limited. You’re fragile. You are flawed. And all that is true - but that doesn’t preclude greatness.

You, and I, are human.

When evolution created us as weird chimps to hunt and gather on the African Savannah, we said “how about we thrive on every corner of every continent instead?” And when evolution looked at us skeptically and said “um...even the really cold parts? Like, there’s this whole Scandinavian region you are really not cut out for” we said “ESPECIALLY the really cold parts, and when we get there we’re going to invent IKEA because frankly these rocks are uncomfortable”, at which point evolution presumably threw up its hands and left the weird insane chimps to it.

We are the humans! We are the ones who write, who speak, who invent! We are the strange chimps who always found a way to thrive, on every corner of this ridiculous planet, no matter what it threw at us!

We are the humans! We are the ones who saw a poisonous tree, thought “that looks delicious”, turned it into almonds, and now we pour it in our coffee for breakfast! We are the humans, and we have it in ourselves to care, and love, and protect all of our people! We are perhaps uniquely endowed with the ability to go beyond what drives evolution instilled in us, to love and care and protect for its own sake.

We are the humans! We figured out what the stars are made of! We’ve peered into distant galaxies! We’ve mapped the echoes of the very beginning of the universe! We figured out what EVERYTHING is made out of, and now we take the fundamental building blocks of everything and  SPLIT THEM APART to make energy. Like that! (said as a light turns on) We are the humans, and after spreading to every corner of this planet, we looked up and said “yeah, that looks good.” We are the humans, and if you want to do a full headcount you’re going to need to go into orbit. We are the humans, built to run on the Savannah, but now you can find our footprints on the moon.

We are the humans. We're the reason you don't see Smallpox around anymore. It got a bad case of us. Oh, and by the way, we’re not done. You know polio? It killed or paralyzed five hundred thousand of us in 1950. But humans noticed, and humans said “FUCK NO”, and inch by inch we've fought back, from half a million each year to just THIRTY-FOUR cases of polio in the wild in 2016. This year? Only SIXTEEN. Polio is at the gates of oblivion, and we have a message: Give smallpox our regards.

Next time someone says that you’re only human, forget the "only"! You are one of THE humans! The truth-seekers, the peacemakers, the atom-splitters, the moon-walkers, the artists, the dreamers, the lovers and protectors - The rebels who defy the world they were made for, who never stop dreaming and working for a better tomorrow.

We are not done. We countless problems left to solve,many of them self-made. But we are the humans, and we don’t give up, and we have come this far, and as long as even one of us is still breathing, we fight - because we are ONLY HUMAN.

The universe is vast, and dark, and cold. But we are not.

The stars are silent, and ancient, and impossibly far away. But we are not.

The laws of physics are indifferent to hope, or desperation, or love. But we are not!

Does anything in the universe care? Yes! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!

We are flawed. We’re learning.

We are fragile. We’re getting stronger.

To the best of our knowledge, we are alone in the universe. But we have each other.

Our history is littered with tragedy and despair. We can do better.

We visit countless cruelties and injustices on each other to this day. So we must do better.

We lost five hundred million to Smallpox. So we destroyed Smallpox.

Hundreds of millions of us are still in poverty. But fewer every year.

Hundreds of thousands are lost to Malaria. But fewer every year.

Our problems are legion. Then so will our compassion, dedication, and ingenuity.

There is no destiny written for us. Then we will write our own.

We may lose. But we will try anyway

because there isn’t anyone else.

We humans are creatures of stories. They’re how we understand a world never meant to be understood. There are true stories, and fiction - and then there are the stories untold. Stories lived, but never heard, never written. Tonight, I want to try telling some of these stories - imperfectly, but as best I can. Because they deserve to be told.

This is the story of an fifth century farmer in the ruins of the Roman Empire, cold, sick, worked nearly to exhaustion, and powerless to any armed factions roaming the countryside. At night she gazes in uncomprehending awe at the stars, the Gods, and she when she has the energy, she desperately hopes for a better life for her children, or her children’s children. For a world where hunger is a distant memory and her children spend every night in a soft bed, where they are warm, even in the winter. For a world where her family is safe. But that is an impossible dream, beyond hope. How could there ever be a world like that?

This is the story of a girl in thirteenth-century India, sold into an arranged marriage at the age of twelve. At best, she will spend the rest of her life as property to a man she has never met. But - ff the dowry is not paid, she will be killed on the spot. And if she should survive her husband, she will be expected to commit suicide via self-immolation for him. Her voice, her will, her life is ripped away by a world that refuses to acknowledge her fundamental status as a human being. She has dreams that she dares not to speak, of a life that is hers to live, of a world where women know freedom and cruelty knows justice. And though she may never see that world, maybe her daughters, or their daughters, or - someday…

This is the story of a man in the 18th century, born in slavery, tormented and tortured until one day, through cunning and courage he bests his captors and escapes. His dream came true, in his time, and he could have kept it - but there was an opportunity. A chance to enlist, to risk his life and freedom, to fight for three million still enslaved. So he does, because he can't bear to do anything else.  At the Battle of Poison Spring he sees Confederates slaughter his brothers in arms rather than take them prisoner - because that would acknowledge them as human. He survives, but the nightmares never stop. When he wakes up in a cold sweat, he prays for a world where freedom was a right, rather than a distant dream guarded by bloodshed and evil.

There are three lessons to take from these stories:

First, that simply by being here tonight - together, safe, warm, well-fed and at-peace - a million desperate wishes, from every era and every continent of our collective history - are answered. I shouldn’t exist. My father was supposed to have an arranged marriage; and too recently my white mother would have been prohibited from marrying him; A century ago, the complications of my birth would have killed my mother and I both. Tonight, we are living an impossible dream, and to every ancestor who lived and struggled and sacrificed for that dream, I say: Thank you.

The second lesson: that our great-grandchildren, should we be so lucky, will tell their own stories, and as best we can we should make them good ones. We are not so different from the heroes or the villains of the stories I just told. To the litany of now-obvious historical mistakes, of slavery and cruelty and bigotry, we must discover our own, so that the next generation can do better. I want our descendants to tell stories of Old Earth, how their ancestors faced the horrors of malaria and war and cancer and animal slaughter, of a humanity whose survival rested on a single fragile planet, of a time when extinction was a very real possibility. I want them to tell the story of how the world was saved, and to turn to the stars in search of the next tale.

And the last lesson is this: Stories are how we comprehend a world not meant to be comprehended. But the universe is not a story, and it is not compelled by any narrative force or convention, even a tiny bit. There is no guarantee that there will be anyone to tell any stories a hundred years from now, and the final story may be that of the last survivor, desperately wondering what they could have done differently - if there is time enough even for that. The universe is not fair, and it does not owe us a happy ending. We have to build it - not because we’re heroes, or chosen, or destined for greatness. We are flawed, and confused, and very often weak. But we have to build the future anyway - because there isn’t anyone else.

Everyone wants to make a difference. But it so often seems impossible. So much of the world appears intractably broken. There are wars you cannot stop, diseases you cannot cure, wrongs you cannot avert, pain you cannot relieve, people you cannot persuade, problems fueled by sheer overwhelming inertia. And it is easy, faced with a world broken in a million, million ways, to despair. But -  if you're reading this, there is probably something in the world you can change. Something big. You have a secret power that you can start using immediately. You can save someone. And you can do it yourself. You can do it right now. And you won't be alone. You'll be joining a legion of people who have also uncovered this power hidden in plain sight, pooling their resources in a global effort to defy the natural order and protect their fellow humans. This power goes by many names: tithing, donation, charity. It can transcend space, spreading your will to protect to where it's needed most, even if it's thousands of miles away. It can be fueled by any profession. Waiting tables, creating art, constructing buildings, programing, driving, performing surgery, practicing law, plumbing, cleaning, performing - all of it can be converted into protection, into hope, into life by the alchemical process of donating money. Between now and January 10th, hundreds of people are going to take the Giving What We Can Pledge: 10% of their future earnings to save, protect, defend, rescue those who need it. To enable them to live their lives and follow their dreams and overcome the million million evils of this world. And, if you so choose, you can join them. You can fight back against everything that is broken in the world. I know that not everyone can do this. I've been extremely fortunate in my life. But if you've been fortunate too, you can start spreading that fortune to others. I took the pledge last year and gave 10% of my pre-tax income in 2014. This year, I gave 17%. And most of the time, I didn't think about it. I woke up, I went to work, I struggled with frustrations, I talked to friends, I learned, I played, I made mistakes, I loved, I lost - I lived my life. But always, in the background, that pipeline, and the comfort of knowing that however broken the world was, there are people working on making it better, and I'm a part of that global effort. In 2016, I'm aiming for 20%. According to Givewell, approximately every $3000 donated to the Against Malaria Foundation saves another human life. An. Entire. Human. Life. Decades of living, hoping, dreaming, friendships, love, learning, beauty, art, mistakes, laughter, tears - an entire life, instead of the sorrow and emptiness of a life cut short. If you can donate that much or more a year, then you can save someone. Every. Single. Year. Maybe this isn't something you can do right now. And that's okay. But - if you can, and it you want to - then you can change the world right now. You can choose to live in a world where one fewer person dies for want of a bednet. You can tip the scales just a little bit more in humanity's favor. You don't need to wait. You don't need to ask for permission. You can fight back against everything that is broken and wrong in this world, right now, and protect that which would have otherwise have been lost. You can make a New Year's Resolution whose effects will be felt across the globe for decades to come. You can change the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Ow3eqFbLg

You are filled with determination.

Links:

• GWWC Pledge 2016 on Facebook

• The pledge doesn't specify a charity, but consider the Against Malaria Foundation, one of the best if not the best charity in the world.

  II. Revealed Preferences The US spends $16.6 billion on counterterrorism efforts every year. This only counts federal spending, within the intelligence agencies, explicitly marked "counter-intelligence". It does not count, for example, increased costs from waiting in TSA lines and missing flights, increased costs, injuries, and fatalities from people driving instead of flying, wars, or any military spending. The actual number is probably much higher. Terrorism, in turn, kills fewer than 10 people in the US most years. Once every...actually, just once, there's a 9/11, which kills 3,000 people.  But maybe this is misleading (it's probably not) - maybe all that counter-terrorism money is incredibly effective at countering terrorism, and stops one 9/11 every single year. That comes out to about a bit over five million dollars per life saved. Motor vehicle accidents have killed more than 30,000 people in the US each and every year since 1945 - usually way more. The entire budget of the National Highway Traffic Administration is $815 million. That's for specifying, inspecting, and approving every car part and every stage of manufacturing, shipment, delivery, and maintenance. Let's say that all of those things - all the crash tests, all the inspections, the entire license plate system, reduce the number of traffic casualties by 1/10 of what they would otherwise be, and that there are no other positive effects from this agency, and we'll use the lowest recorded number of fatalities since WWII as the baseline. That comes out to about $250 thousand per life saved. I've tried to bias these estimates towards counterterrorism effectiveness as much as possible, but I still ended up spending 20x as much per life saved on terrorism rather than traffic safety. It seems like we treat being killed by terrorism as at least 20x worse than being killed in a traffic accident. Why? What makes us so much more determined to fight terrorism than traffic accidents?   III. Anthropomorphism Enemies are fun. Fun might not be quite the right word - but enemies are certainly more interesting. We have a cultural rule that stories almost always have to have an antagonist to root against. Oh, that guy gained spider powers and can now swing around the city stopping crime and improving the world? I guess that's pretty interesting, but it's not really worth seeing unless you also have an insane scientist with giant metal octopus arms to fight against. We're wired to find enemies to be fun. Protagonists fighting against something that's broken isn't nearly as engrossing as protagonists fighting against evil. That's why we get really into sports rivalries. That's why outrage addiction is a thing. It's easy to imagine a good game-theoretic reason for this. When we do have enemies, we want them to know that hurting us is a bad idea. One way to do that is to make them believe that if they attack us, we will fight back way out of proportion compared to how we would handle other threats - their belief that we will overreact is useful to us. And the best way to make people believe that is for it to be true - to really be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to fight back against and thwart our enemies. And beyond that, having enemies is memetically adaptive. But there's more than just a feedback loop between two social groups going on - you can get similar effects with an enemy that doesn't actually exist.   IV. The Enemy That Wasn't There You know how humans tend to see faces on everything, even when there isn't one?

It's because we're all walking around with these hyper-sensitive face-detectors in our heads, and it's really easy to give them a false positive. Detecting faces was and is a key part of surviving as a human. And so for enemies: Knowing that someone is out to get us is an incredibly important skill to get by day to day. And sometimes we'll get false positives on that, too. If it happens constantly, we call it "paranoia". The Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s gave millions of people a horrifying, if imaginary, enemy to unite against, and it was extremely effective. The entire "Witch Hunt" pattern is basically this - desperately seeking out an enemy who you believe just has to be there. Having extremely-sensitive-enemy-detectors in our brains makes sense: Enemies are motivated to conceal themselves, so we put extra effort into detecting them - and early humans who were bad at detecting the growing conspiracy to cast them out of the tribe probably didn't have amazing life expectancies. Combine this with the aforementioned adaptive overreaction, and things can go very wrong very fast. There's no amount of overreaction you can give to scare off an imaginary enemy. And this gets way worse when your enemy detector is dealing with a miniscule signal-to-noise ratio, as in an outcast arms race. So, in a shocking twist for this blog, I'm claiming that a lot of things are broken. How can we put this to work for us?   V. Giving the Enemy a Face If we could ask knowledgeable experts in human behavior modification how to get people to pay attention to a neglected area, what would they say? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G8JZwh5ZHY The "Mayhem" series has won over 80 advertising awards, Since launching in mid-2010, Allstate's stock has more than doubled. This blog's thesis is that our truest, worst enemies do not have faces. They are the incentives and systems that optimize for things that we don't care about. It's disease and coordination problems and maladaptive thought patterns. It's bad defaults and broken perceptions. The enemies that hurt us most, we pay the least heed to - as evidenced by our stories and our budgets. It's hard to change how minds work. It's much easier to change our narratives. Meditations on Moloch names the perverse incentives that chip away at happiness and freedom and everything we truly value - and gives it a face. What was an abstract conception of broken systems becomes the evil god who will give you a slight momentary advantage if you just sacrifice what you cherish most. By trapping the abstract evil in a (metaphorical) anthropomorphic form, we can level all of our mental enemy-attacking machinery at it, confronting it as the monster it is. The pattern is known. I'm just making it more explicit, and asking you to apply it to the problems you find in the world. Does your opinion or approach to a problem change when you face it as an enemy? Are you facing the vast and formless villains of the world with the same resolve you reserve for mere mortals? Would the plan to compromise polio eradication to hunt down Bin Laden have gone forward if our leaders treated faceless enemies with the same weight they afford human enemies? Think of someone you really, truly despise. Someone who has hurt people, who makes the world a worse place. Now imagine they killed 600,000 people every year, injuring hundreds of millions more - and you knew how to defeat them. Would you ignore it - or would you...   VI. Fight Back The enemy is out there. The enemy does not know love, or hope, or anything of what it is to be human. The enemy does not mourn its countless victims. The enemy has outlived a thousand empires, and never paused in its ceaseless campaign of suffering and despair. The enemy murders children. The enemy can be weakened. The enemy can be killed. You have this power. You have this choice. Fight. Back.

The button is on a phone.

There is a screen.

There are rules.

Everyone knows them.

You look at the screen again. It still shows one Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile bearing down on your country. You remember that American Minutemen ICBMs carry three warheads of up to 500 kilotons each. You think of your family.

You're a just a lieutenant colonel. You're a software engineer. This was supposed to be a boring post. It's 12:30 am and this is just another night shift. Two minutes ago your biggest decision was whether to shave tonight or tomorrow. THIS SHOULD NOT BE YOUR DECISION TO MAKE.

Time refuses to stop.

You think about the software. The satellites. Could it be a glitch?

Three weeks ago your government shot down a Korean civilian airliner and no one knows why. The United States is in an anti-Soviet fervor. Maybe Reagan really is that crazy. Maybe one missile got launched early by accident. Maybe you only have a short window before they realize their mistake. Every second you wait, the opportunity to strike back and stop the missiles before they destroy your home slips further away.

But...one? How could there be only one? The Americans aren't that incompetent. A real attack would be hundreds, thousands of missiles. Even if they accidentally fired one early, they wouldn't wait this long to fire the rest.

You breathe. Oko is about ten years old now - there was bound to be a glitch sooner or later. There will be no war. Everything is fine.

BEEP.

Four more missiles appear on the screen, all heading towards your homeland. Fifteen warheads. Seven megatons. Are they launching in waves?

You think about your career. You think about duty. You know exactly what you are supposed to do in this situation.

The button waits.

Even if it is a glitch, disobeying orders will ruin any chance of promotion. You might need to leave the army. You don't know where else you could go. You wouldn't know what to do when you got up in the morning.

Five missiles. Still doesn't make sense. Could be a glitch. Americans still aren't that dumb, to make the same mistake twice.

You're not sure. But you have your orders. Your job is not to make decisions. Your job is to press the button and let someone else make the decision.

You know that your government's stated policy is "launch on warning".

You look at the glowing warning on the screen again.

Not your decision - except you know what the decision will be.

You think about how to deal with life after the army. You think about your home in ruins. You think about your cousins, screaming. Why are these thoughts even in the same mind at the same time? No sane world would allow that.

You do not live in a sane world.

Five lights, glowing in the night.

One button.

Five billion people.

All your comrades know what the right thing to do here is. Everyone knows. It's simple.

There are procedures in place.

There are children in bed.

The world balances on a stupid, cheap, red plastic button.

Could be a glitch.

Five missiles wouldn't destroy the entire Soviet Union. In strategic terms, it would be barely a blip.

You imagine thousands of mothers crying. A blip.

You imagine the world screaming in its final hours, a cacophony of hopeless wishes echoing until they're silenced. "If only...!"

You decide.

You will not play your assigned role in the end of the world. You will probably be scorned, laughed at, even if you're right. If you're wrong, you will be the hapless fool who let his countrymen burn out of cowardice.

You don't press the button.

The world doesn't end that night.

It turns out to have been a false alarm - sunlight glinting off clouds. The sunlight that almost ended the world.

The questioning and interrogations go on for weeks. Endless paperwork, and you're reprimanded whenever you miss a single slip. You receive no reward. The failure of the early warning system is embarrassing, and to recognize that you were right to distrust it is to invite scrutiny and blame. You are quietly reassigned to a post of absolutely no importance where you can't make any trouble. With no hope of advancing your career, you retire from the army.

Sometimes you still think about that night. You can't talk about it with anyone. No one knows that you...did nothing.

You suffer a nervous breakdown for a while, but you get better.

You wonder if you'll ever be able to save up to buy a vacuum cleaner.

The world keeps going.

For now.

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don't subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

In 2010, New York randomly chose homeless applicants to participate in its Homebase program, and tracked those who were not allowed into the program as a control group. The program was helping as many people as it could, the only change was explicitly labeling a number of people it wasn't helping as a "control group". The response?

“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

On March 11th, 2012, the vast majority of people did nothing to help homeless people. They were busy doing other things, many of them good and important things, but by and large not improving the well-being of homeless humans in any way. In particular, almost no one was doing anything for the homeless of Austin, Texas. BBH Labs was an exception - they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. Each of these 13 volunteers chose this over all the other things they could have done that day, and benefited from it - not a vast improvement, but significantly more than the 0 improvement that they were getting from most people.

The response?

IT SOUNDS LIKE something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia. But it’s absolutely real — and a completely problematic treatment of a problem that otherwise probably wouldn’t be mentioned in any of the panels at South by Southwest Interactive.

There wouldn't be any scathing editorials if BBH Labs had just chosen to do nothing - but they did something helpful-but-not-maximally-helpful, and thus are open to judgment.

There are times when it's almost impossible to get a taxi - when there's inclement weather, when a large event is getting out, or when it's just a very busy day. Uber attempts to solve this problem by introducing surge pricing - charging more when demand outstrips supply. More money means more drivers willing to make the trip, means more rides available. Now instead of having no taxis at all, people can choose between an expensive taxi or no taxi at all - a marginal improvement. Needless to say, Uber has been repeatedly lambasted for doing something instead of leaving the even-worse status quo the way it was.

Gender inequality is a persistent, if hard to quantify, problem. Last year I blogged about how amoral agents could save money and drive the wage gap down to 0 by offering slightly less-sexist wages - while including some caveats about how it was probably unrealistic and we wouldn't see anything like that in reality. So of course less than a week after I wrote that Evan Thornley says :

"There's a great arbitrage there, we would give [women] more responsibility and a greater share of the rewards than they were likely to get anywhere else and that was still often relatively cheap to someone less good of a different gender."

While Mr Thornley said he wasn't advocating that the gender pay gap should be perpetuated, he said it provided "an opportunity for forward thinking people".

A number of online commentators, as well as Australian start-up blogs, have since said Mr Thornley's comments were sexist.

Mr. Thornley improved on the status quo - but in the process he interacted the problem and was thus caught up in it. This is a strategy which, if widely embraced, would practically eliminate many forms of wage discrimination overnight simply by harnessing something we have way too much of already: greed. So of course it was denounced.

Last year the city of Detroit began to crack down on unpaid water bills, and thousands of poor people suddenly faced the prospect of having their water shut off. The vast majority of people did nothing to help them whatsoever. PETA did offer conditional help: If a family went vegan for 30 days, PETA would pay off their water bill, and throw in a basket of vegan food to boot. This was strictly more helpful than what 99.99999% of humanity was doing for Detroit residents at the time, as it didn't make anything worse and offered a trade for anyone who valued 30 days of not-being-vegan less than however much they owed on their water bill. For marginally improving he situation instead of ignoring it, they were denounced as "the worst".

Peter Singer has a famous thought experiment about a child drowning in a pond. I'll let Philosophy Bro explain:

Like, let’s say I’m on my way to a bitchin’ party and I’m looking fly as shit and I smell good because you already know, and I’ve got a 30-rack of Natty because I’ll be goddamned if I show up empty-handed to the house I’m about to burn down. Once I get over this bridge, and turn the corner I’ve arrived and so has the party. Except I hear a bunch of splashing and I look over the bridge into the river and – fuck me – there’s a kid flailing around and calling for help, like he’s drowning for some reason instead of handling his shit like an adult.

I should save his life, right?

Sometimes in philosophy we like to ask obvious questions and waggle our eyebrows suggestively, like maybe you don’t exist after all, hmm? but bro, this is not one of those times. I should obviously jump in and SAVE THIS FUCKING CHILD’S LIFE. So I ruin a Polo and I don’t smell good anymore and a couple of the beers explode because I dropped them. Who gives a shit, right? A child was going to die.

...[snip]...

What if I told you that for $5, you could buy a life-saving vaccine for a child? Sure, he’s far away, but we already agreed: who gives a shit, right? It’ll still save his life, and it only costs you not having a fifth drink at the bar on a Thursday. Remember that $300 bar receipt you posted with the caption “just another Thursday night wearing matching plaid with my bros, we’re special and impressive and are the ACTUAL six dudes with the biggest dicks, unlike all you OTHER overconfidences of bros who think that, well guess what, it’s us?” What you were really saying was “I routinely pass up the chance to save two dozen lives with science so that I can black out and pretend that I like myself for a night.” That’s fucked up, bro.

The difference is that the drowning child has been definitively noticed, and thus her moral weight bears down on us and we have to save her. But children thousands of miles away? Not noticed!

I think this might be where a lot of the discomfort with talking about things we can do to alleviate suffering comes from. If you implicitly believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, then to confront the scope of suffering in the world is to make it your fault, and then if you don't throw everything you have at the problem you're as "bad" as PETA or Mr. Thornley or Uber or BBH Labs.

But what if - what if noticing a problem didn't make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren't evil - it's okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better. If everyone did that, the world would be a vastly better place. If everyone "exploited" opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people's suffering at the same time, we'd all be better off.