Smart, funny people create good times

Good times attract unfunny morons

Unfunny morons create bad times

Bad times attract smart, funny people

Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.

Alright.

Well I could be, and I really really want to be, incredibly sarcastic and dismissive, because I genuinely believe that you’ve missed the mark incredibly hard, and your eminently reasonably and good request that people not medicalise assholery in general would, in this case, imply not mentioning the fact that people abuse prescription drugs and act like assholes. Alcoholics act like assholes, so do cokeheads, and so do people who abuse prescription medications which are, at the appropriate dosage, a perfectly good and fine support and indeed lifeline for managing whatever condition they may have. And this is just the truth: one of the central reasons that you have alternatives to Adderall, such as the drug which you personally are prescribed, is that there are risks associated with Adderall even for patients with nothing but good intentions.

But I also know it’s bad and counter-productive for me to both try to explain that I think I’m actually being quite reasonable and be sarcastic and dismissive like that.

So instead, I’d like to ask you, first, for a little charity. I’m going to copy paste my original comment below, and point out that it does not say that Adderall is what “makes the eas racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts” (your words, my emphasis on “makes”). Then I’m going to point out what I think it does say:

they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

Adderall

So Jax isn’t here saying “what makes them racist, cultish, or even overly verbose debating club dropouts?” What she’s asking is how are they able to go around in circles amongst themselves talking about this shit, without acknowledging that the ideas they entertain have real world consequences. The joke I’m making focuses narrowly on this point: they’re able to waste all of this time (given that they’re already eas) going round in circles, and denying that words have effects, because they (very very famously!) have a cultural problem with prescription drug abuse. The joke categorically does not attribute their racism or cultishness to Adderall.

Now, the joke does attribute their combined dissociation from real world consequences and their verbosity - specifically, their energy for verbosity - to abuse of Adderall. That’s a stretch, but it’s in the nature of a one-word joke to generalise a little! I need my reader to have a modicum of charity here, in imagining that I am aware that there are other things going on with these people. You, in fact, should be more than aware of this, because I replied to you in another context just the other day with three quite long paragraphs giving an analysis of Yudkowsky and scientific racism in LessWrong which didn’t once mention prescription drugs of any kind.

And the joke is a little inter-textual: the word “abuse” does not appear next to “Adderall”. Again, I need a little charity from my reader to make the joke work, but I think it’s actually a really reasonable amount of charity. I think, personally, that on SneerClub at least, where I am a frequent commenter, people are generally aware that the abuse of prescription ADHD medication (and other, similar, drugs) is a famous problem amongst rationalists/EAs. At least on SneerClub, I think, people can be trusted to know the difference between attributing behaviours to Adderall outright, and attributing behaviours to its abuse. In this context, I think we can in this case safely skirt discourses of medicalisation that I wholeheartedly agree exist in lots of places.

So this is where I think you’re just wrong: I think that you’re misusing the warning label we rightly put on discourses of medicalisation. And I think misusing those warning labels is generally not a good thing. I think that you do a disservice to me personally, and I think you do a disservice to people’s collective ability to communicate and socialise with one another if you call them out on bare associations between the names of drugs, bad behaviours, and discourses of medicalisation.

Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).

Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.

Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.

For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.

Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.

Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

I don’t have the source article, my full title is all one quote from the latest issue of the London Review of Books. But I’ve seen it before multiple times - it’s out there and findable

I understand that you’re olive branching me here, but I don’t accept “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess”. Trends are analysable, and the sources of projections are equally analysable. A book that’s ten years old is far better than (a) 30-year old (and more) newspaper-level stuff, without citations, about backyard anthrax, (b) nothing, and (c) two links to tangentially related reports, and you’ve brought those three.

I am seriously concerned about the confluence of two things: (1) how closely your comments here mirror, right down to the level of language, press releases and opinion columns paraphrasing press releases, some of them (the anthrax stuff) extremely old hat; (2) the level of outrage and confidence you bring to the table when challenged on this and similar. Phrases like “How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess” are press release language - they have absolutely no place in serious discussion, but they have a powerful rhetorical effect which allows them to displace serious analysis, and that displacement furthers specific, analysable, interpretable sectoral and political interests.

The same goes for “bio tech revolution” - you are never clear, in any of this, what that actually entails. What you do is cite possibility and unknowability, in a manner innovated precisely by sectoral and political interests from the 1950s onward. You have no detail of any value, and you write off actual detail with speculation and glib remarks about the age of the detail you’re given - that is a political innovation to which you have allowed yourself to be susceptible. You may also try on Naomi Oreskes for size as an author who grapples with this in both directions.

I expressly put “CBRN groups” in scare quotes to tag along with my line at the bottom “I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts…but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility”

You, however, have me saying “cbrn is made up to self justify” - of course if I had said any such thing, then one counter-example would have sufficed. Although actually it wouldn’t have sufficed, because in this context we’re talking about terroristic or otherwise chaotic release of a novel weapon. We’re not talking at all about bad powerful people deliberately employing chemical weapons they already have, for which of course CBRN is a worthy use and “genuine attempt at being ready”.

“CBRN groups”, here, operates at the level of rhetoric, and that’s what I tried to draw attention to. The context in which “CBRN groups” the rhetorical and political device emerged was that in which Bill Clinton could become so enthused by a sci-fi novel about bioterrorism that he had its author up in front of the senate testifying as an expert on the subject. So on reflection, I should have deferred to Eisenhower’s original formulation: the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Edit: you could always try Alex Wellerstein for the aggressively obvious historical counter-point to this whole fantasy. In his Restricted Data he provides a useful companion to Barriers to Bioweapons in a chapter discussing the notorious “backyard atomic bomb built from declassified material” cases. But because it’s a work of history we learn the most salient fact of all: the only way anyone believed that the backyard bomb designs were viable was because somebody wanted them to believe it, or because they had some reason to want to believe it themselves.

Without that ingredient it was plain that the actual know-how was just not there, however that fact was fundamentally obscured by the desire to believe, and so people saw viability where there was none: plugging holes in their imaginary with meaningless verbiage about risk and but-what-if?

I think what’s going miss here is that “CBRN groups” is very obviously and primarily shit made up by the military-industrial complex to justify itself after the Cold War

I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts at being ready just in case, but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility

or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing

This remarkable sleight of hand sticks out. The argument from the (or rather this particular) GWAS camp goes “we are detecting the genes, contrary to expectations”. There isn’t any positive assumption in favour of that camp, so failure to thus far detect the gene is supposed to motivate against its existence.

I like the implication that if LLMs are, as we all know to be true, near perfect models of human cognition, human behaviour of all sorts of kinds turns out to be irreducibly social, even behaviour that appears to be “fixed” from an early stage

There are too many comments in here going for the stringy lean detail and not pointing out magnificent conceptual errors like this