pinker

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THIEL DIALOG 6 26

harvard

shillenberger

bailled uatx

effect altruism

FIRE bd w larry summers, eail desantis CRT

ggl 6 26

[### Chancellor Zimmer Resigns From University of Austin ...

Chicago Maroon

https://chicagomaroon.com › news › uchicago-chancell...](https://chicagomaroon.com/28726/news/uchicago-chancellor-robert-zimmer-resigns-university-austin/)

UChicago's chancellor and former president Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the University of Austin (UATX) Advisory Board.Read more

AI Overview

Robert J. Zimmer, the late former president and chancellor of the University of Chicago, briefly joined the advisory board of the newly founded University of Austin (UATX) in November 2021 but resigned just days later.

Chicago Maroon +1

The Context of His Involvement

Zimmer was a highly prominent, nationwide champion of academic freedom and campus free speech. Under his leadership, the University of Chicago established the Chicago Principles, a gold-standard framework for free expression adopted by dozens of universities. Because UATX was explicitly launched to counter what its founders called a "rising tide of illiberalism" in higher education, Zimmer initially agreed to serve in an advisory capacity to support its focus on civil discourse and open inquiry.

University of Chicago News +4

Reason for Resignation

Zimmer resigned from the UATX advisory board on November 11, 2021, only three days after the new institution was publicly announced.

Chicago Maroon

According to an official statement released through UChicago News, Zimmer stepped down due to the highly critical rhetoric UATX used against existing academic institutions:

Chicago Maroon

"While the new organization’s commitment to a liberal arts education and free expression reflects topics that are very important to me... the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views."

Chicago Maroon

Zimmer preferred to defend free expression and institutional neutrality from within existing universities rather than aligning with an outside venture structured around ideological opposition to mainstream academia. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker also stepped down from the UATX advisory board during the exact same week.

Grokipedia +1

(Note: Robert J. Zimmer later passed away on May 23, 2023, at the age of 75).

Chicago Maroon +1

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pro nuke libtard? lomborgian delayism? // ggl talk?

https://www.nytimes.com › interactive › 2021 › 09 › 06 › magazine › steven-pinker-interview.html

Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong

Sep 6, 2021Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong By David Marchese

Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya In our uncertain age, which can so often feel so dark and disturbing, Steven Pinker...

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https://stevenpinker.com/

retweet shermer?

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mystery solved!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-steven-pinker-sam-harris-and-the-epidemic-of-annoying-white-male-intellectuals

no lnx

The problem with Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals

Written by Phil Torres / Salon October 20, 2019

In a recent article for Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson describes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker as “the most annoying man in the world” because Pinker is the type of person who constantly insists he’s “Just Being Reasonable” while he is actually “being extremely goddamn unreasonable.” Although Robinson’s article was a bit harsh in tone, it gestures at something very real: we’re in the midst of an epidemic of “intellectuals,” almost entirely white men, who claim to embody Reason and Rationality while flagrantly and habitually succumbing to the same tribalistic tendencies that they identify as the Ultimate Enemy.

My own experience with Pinker and his ilk exemplifies the problem. Last January, I published an article here at Salon that summarized some extremely detailed criticisms that I wrote of Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now!” More specifically, I examined a few pages in the book’s “Existential Threats” chapter, one line or passage at a time, since my own research focuses onexistential threats (that is, threats to civilization and humanity) and thus I have some knowledge of the topic.

Although Pinker is widely known, or at least was at one point, as a clear-headed, objective intellectual of the highest caliber, his chapter on “existential threats” was overflowing with quotes taken out of context, misrepresented ideas, false dichotomies, blatantly inaccurate claims, poor reasoning, dubious citations, condescending straw-man attacks and cockamamie ad hominems. If the chapter had been a first-year undergraduate term paper, and if the professor were an exceptionally easy grader who habitually dished out A’s for poorly researched papers, Pinker’s chapter might have received a C.

(The popularity of poor scholarship seems to be on the rise, incidentally. Just consider the egregious mistakes made by Jared Diamond in his most recent book, “Upheaval.”)

What was most telling, though, was the response to my article. For example, the founding editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, tweeted this in response to my critique:

Where @RichardDawkins had his fleas (The Dawkins Delusion etc.), @sapinker has his cockroaches (theoleaginous Phil Torres desperate for attention), artfully squashed here:

Shermer then linked to a blog post by Jerry Coyne, which contained a response from Pinker. Before getting to that, though, Shermer’s tweet is notable for a couple of reasons. First, not only does it contain a personal attack, but the personal attack is overtly uncivil. That’s a bit humorous given that Shermer, as well as Pinker, are famous for accusing progressives, especially those who care about women and people of color, of “incivility.” For example, in May of this year, Pinker tweeted:

Are you concerned about the growing illiberalism, incivility, intellectual conformity, and repression of debate in today’s universities? Join us at the meeting of the society set up to encourage viewpoint diversity and constructive debate on campuses. I’ll be giving the keynote.

But Pinker did nothing to call out Shermer for his patently crude, puerile behavior, which has also included calling people he disagrees with (seriously) “namby-pamby bedwetters” and (seriously) “losers.” This is perhaps unsurprising when one realizes the Pinker has unwaveringly supported Shermer despite multiple women accusing Shermer of sexual harassment, assault and even rape. To my knowledge, Pinker has made no effort to contact any of Shermer’s purported victims. And why would he? What does truth have to do with standing by your comrades? Instead, Pinker has repeatedly de-emphasized the issue of rape in society and college campuses by tendentiously pointing to opinions that support his preferred views rather than by honestly examining the totality of evidence, which gives a quite different perspective. All of this is very worrisome, tribalistic behavior. But it gets worse.

Back to the blog that Shermer references. The particular post was published by Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago who has become something of Pinker’s bulldog, defending him against any and all criticisms no matter what, with (almost) no questions asked. One of the most recent examples is Coyne coming to Pinker’s defense after a picture emerged of Pinker with Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex-trafficker who recently killed himself in a New York jail cell.

Coyne quickly dismissed criticisms of Pinker hanging out with Epstein as mere slander and character assassination, writing that suggestions that Pinker should have known better “disturbed me so much — since Pinker is a friend whose character I respect.” The problem is that Pinker appears in the photo with Epstein and he tweeted out an affidavit defending Epstein after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes, which happened in 2008. That is inexcusable and gross — but not to Coyne, whose allegiance is rooted not in evidence but loyalty.

So it should be no surprise that Coyne tore into my critique of the “existential threats” chapter, inaccurately calling it a “hit piece.” Indeed, by any reasonable account, the article was a substantive critique of shoddy scholarship. In fact, I was in touch with four scholars or writers whose work Pinker misrepresents within just a few pages of the chapter. All of them were unhappy with the quality of Pinker’s work, so it’s not like this was just me being a grump.

For example, the political economist Eric Zency, whom Pinker incorrectly describes as an engineer, was livid that Pinker had used a line from one of his papers to mean the exact opposite of what Zency had intended. In an email to me about Pinker’s misuse of his quote, Zency remarked, “How this guy managed to become a public intellectual in fields so far removed from his expertise is something to wonder at.” I agree.

Pinker also wrote a response to my critique, but it only further justifies the view that Pinker is — or has become, sadly — an ideologue who can’t acknowledge when he’s wrong. Just consider that the second sentence of his response makes an ad hominem claim that I’m “trying to make a career out of warning people about the existential threat that AI [i.e., artificial intelligence] poses to humanity. Since [‘Enlightenment Now’] evaluates and dismisses that threat, it poses an existential threat to Phil Torres’s career.”

This is obvious nonsense. First of all, the same thing could be said about Pinker: Since his career these days is based on claiming that things have been going quite well for humanity, convincing people that AI poses an existential threat itself could be seen as an existential threat to Pinker’s reputation. How Pinker and Coyne both missed this obvious flaw suggests that they weren’t wearing their critical-thinking hats. The aim of Pinker’s comment was to discredit a critique without having to engage with its substance.

Once again, I contacted four scholars or writers who affirmed errors in a small handful of pages in Pinker’s chapter. I have no doubt that if someone were to find the same problems in a chapter written by, say, Reza Aslan or Linda Sarsour, both of whom are loathed by the Pinker-Coyne crew, they’d be hailing the critique as proof that Aslan and Sarsour are intellectual frauds.

Pinker then defended one of his most flagrant mistakes: classifying a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, Stuart Russell, as someone who isn’t worried about AI.The exact opposite is true! Pinker then doubled down, insisting that his description of Russell was accurate, even though Russell himself told me in an email, which I quote in my article, that he’d “seen this [mention in Pinker’s book] and I agree it’s an incorrect characterization.” So, you have Pinker on one side refusing to acknowledge that he incorrectly characterized a person who says he has been incorrectly characterized. This led Julia Galef, a notable “effective altruist” who hosts the Rationally Speaking podcast and has knowledge of the relevant issues, to tweet:

I’m frustrated Steven Pinker won’t admit an error in Enlightenment Now.

Summary:

– Pinker names Stuart Russell as an expert who’s skeptical of AI risk

– Someone points out that’s exactly backwards; Russell is one of the main experts warning about AI risk

– Pinker doubles down

She concludes that the “point is it’s bad that Pinker got this fact wrong and won’t admit it.” This encapsulates the central problem: Pinker and his ilk don’t acknowledge errors when they make them; they are ideologues rather than truth-seekers, willing to bend the facts, launch personal attacks and censor critics to “win” debates. At exactly the moment in history when we need true intellectual leadership, people who exemplify intellectual honesty and integrity, the most, we get stubborn tribespeople.

But the problem is hardly confined to those mentioned above: Shermer, Coyne and Pinker. Consider another “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) luminary, Sam Harris, one of the most famous atheists in the world because of his book “The End of Faith.” Previously, I never had any reason to believe that Harris was racist — but I do now. He has spent a massive amount of time and energy defending Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve,” which argues that black people are inherently inferior to white people.

Over and over again, ad nauseam, Harris has used his large platform to suggest that Murray isn’t a junk scientist peddling cowardly racist memes, but someone who’s been victimized by those anti-truth progressives. Even more, Harris apparently believes Murray’s claim that blacks are genetically dumber than whites. In a podcast with Josh Zepps, Harris opines the following with a wholly unjustified degree of epistemic confidence:

As bad luck would have it, but as you’d absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you’re gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews, and African Americans, and Hawaiians … you’re gonna take populations who differ genetically — and we know they differed genetically, that’s not debatable — and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it’s normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85.

In other words: black people are dumber than white people. Why? Because of genetic evolution, meaning that IQ is in the genes and the genes of white people are, well, just plain better. What a bold stance, especially amid the ongoing rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and Europe!

In all seriousness, the irresponsibility of being a public intellectual with a large following and spouting unsupported claims with the sort of certainty you might expect from someone reciting the second law of thermodynamics is shocking. If Pinker is annoying, as Robinson claims, then Harris is intolerably obnoxious, constantly demeaning people for not being Rational and Reasonable while simultaneously making an intellectual fool of himself with claims like those above.

Other examples could be adduced, but I don’t have an extra 20,000 words to spare. The point is that the entireIDW movement is annoying.It’s really, really annoying — its champions misrepresent positions without their (mostly white male) audience knowing, and then proceed to “embarrass” the opposition. They embrace unsupported claims when it suits their narrative. They facilely dismiss good critiques as “hit jobs” and level ad hominem attacks to undercut criticism. And they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong. I am annoyed, like Robinson, mostly because I expected so much better from the most popular “intellectuals” of our time.

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9 25

In an article for the New York Timespublished Sunday, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, argued that modern political outrage operates according to what he calls mob logic, a form of communal outrage grounded in shared expectations and social coordination.

Pinker began by describing how theassassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk elicited an intense wave of symbolic reactions: Kirk was sanctified as a martyr, and dissenters were attacked for failing to show proper devotion.

The response, he contended, aligns with the phenomenon that economist Thomas Schelling and anthropologist John Tooby termed “common knowledge,” in which an event becomes a shared social signal that everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on.

According to Pinker, communal outrage follows a predictable sequence:

A public attack is framed as targeting a person because of group identity. The story spreads rapidly — sometimes amplified or distorted. The victim becomes a symbolic figure for the group. The incident is treated as an intolerable violation, and doubt or questioning is stigmatized.

IFrame Content

The group then retaliates disproportionately, often targeting perceived enemies regardless of their actual involvement.

Pinker sees the post‑Kirk reaction as a textbook case: political leaders threatened reprisals, agencies pressured media, and public figures called for broad retribution. Meanwhile, private citizens demanded firings and punishments of anyone whose statements deviated from the sanctified narrative.

*The psychologist distinguished communal outrage from calculated revenge. He noted that revenge is targeted, proportional and strategic. Communal outrage, by contrast, solves a coordination dilemma — the problem of how a group acts in concert when multiple strategies exist but only one can succeed. Outrage becomes a focal point: a visible, unanimous act that signals dominance and enforces internal solidarity, he argued.

He identified two coordination problems that outrage resolves:

Dominance contest, when a group that fails to defend a member signals weakness and invites further attacks. A conspicuous rebuttal reasserts status in the face of the audience of rivals.

Internal cohesion, which means Individuals may hesitate to act unless they see others doing so. An outrage incident makes public the moment to unite and act together.

Pinker drew parallels with historical episodes of communal outrage — from the U.S. battleship Maine explosion, to the Reichstag fire, to the Arab Spring, to the reaction sparked by George Floyd’s killing — and notes that the outcomes differ depending on how the incident is framed and how “outrage entrepreneurs” shape the narrative.

"It’s often been pointed out that Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement have a chronic sense of being disrespected. Mr. Trump fumed for decades about being looked down on by coastal elites, and his pique has grown with each investigation, indictment and impeachment. For many of his followers, these insults merged with a smoldering resentment at the creeping takeover by leftist values in public life, from government mandates to popular entertainment," Pinker wrote.

He added: "Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront."

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no lnx many

What the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle can teach us about "longtermism"

I'm not surprised that longtermism led to fraud, corruption and disaster. I'm mostly surprised it wasn't worse

By ÉMILE P. TORRES

Contributing Writer

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2022

[Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, testifies during the House Financial Services Committee hearing titled Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States, in Rayburn Building on Wednesday, December 8, 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Everybody's talking about Sam Bankman-Fried, effective altruism (EA), and the ideology known as "longtermism"that many effective altruists, including Bankman-Fried, accept. The tidal wave of bad press triggered by the catastrophic collapse of Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX comes at the worst time for the longtermist community: William MacAskill, the poster boy of longtermism and a moral "adviser" to Bankman-Fried, went on a media blitz after his book "What We Owe the Future" came out last summer, even making an appearance on "The Daily Show." The reputational damage to longtermism caused by recent events has been significant, and it's unclear whether the movement, which had become immensely powerful over the past few years, can bounce back.

Critics of longtermism, like myself, saw this coming from miles away. Not, specifically, the implosion of Bankman-Fried's empire, but something very bad — something that would cause serious harm to real people — in the name of longtermism. For years, I have been warning that longtermism could "justify" actions much worse than fraud, which Bankman-Fried appears to have committed in his effort to "get filthy rich, for charity's sake." Even some within or adjacent to the longtermist community have noted the ideology's potential dangers, yet none of the community's leaders have taken such warnings seriously. To the contrary, critics have been habitually dismissed as attacking a "straw man," or of putting forward their critiques in "bad faith." One hopes the FTX debacle will prompt some serious reflection on why, and how, the longtermist ideology is playing with fire.

Understanding "longtermism": Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic

It's useful to distinguish, right off the bat, between "moderate" and "radical" longtermism. Moderate longtermism is what MacAskill defends in his book, while radical longtermism is what one finds in all the founding documents of the ideology, including multiple papers by Nick Bostrom and the PhD dissertation of Nick Beckstead. The latter is also what MacAskill claims he's most "sympathetic" with, and thinks is "probably right." Why, then, does MacAskill's book focus on the moderate version? As a previous Salon article of mine explains in detail, the answer is quite simply marketing. Radical longtermism is such an implausible view that trying to persuade the public that it's true would be a losing game. The marketing strategy was thus to present it in more moderate form, which Alexander Zaitchik of the New Republic aptly describes as a "gateway drug" to the more radical position

Over and over again throughout history, the combination of utopianism and the utilitarian mode of moral reasoning — the belief that ends justify means — has been disastrous.

If taken literally by those in power, radical longtermism could be profoundly dangerous. The reason — and this is something that every politician and journalist needs to understand — is that it combines what can only be described as a techno-utopian vision of the future, in which humanity creates astronomical amounts of value by colonizing space and simulating vast numbers of digital people, with a broadly utilitarian mode of moral reasoning. Over and over again throughout history, the combination of these two ingredients — utopianism and the belief that ends justify the means — has been disastrous. As Steven Pinker, who appears somewhat aligned with effective altruism (MacAskill even gave a guest lecture on longtermism in one of Pinker's classes), writes in "The Better Angels of Our Nature":

Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or — projecting into the indefinite future — infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.

Is longtermism really utopian? Yes, in a couple of senses. On the one hand, many of its foundational texts explicitly imagine a future in which our descendants use advanced technologies to radically enhance themselves, thus creating a superior race of "posthumans." Such beings may be immortal, superintelligent and have perfect control over their emotions. An example comes from Bostrom's "Letter from Utopia," in which he writes, pretending to be a posthuman from the future: "How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you mystified? With what words could I convey the wonder? My pen, I fear, is as unequal to the task as if I had tried to use it against a charging war elephant." From there, the "letter" takes readers through a phantasmagoria of wonders, describing our posthuman progeny as living in "surpassing bliss and delight."

Other leading longtermists like Toby Ord share this general vision. In his 2020 book "The Precipice," Ord waxes poetic about how reengineering the human organism could enable us to transform "existing human capacities — empathy, intelligence, memory, concentration, imagination." It could even augment our sensorium by adding new modalities like echolocation and magnetoreception. "Such uncharted experiences exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own," he declares. "What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater?" Furthermore, reengineering human beings isn't just something we might consider doing in the future — it may be integral to fully realizing our "vast and glorious" longterm "potential" in the universe. In his words: "Rising to our full potential for flourishing would likely involve us being transformed into something beyond the humanity of today." Similarly, he declares that "forever preserving humanity as it is now may also squander our legacy, relinquishing the greater part of our potential."

MacAskill also touches on this idea in "What We Owe the Future," writing that "eutopia," which translates as "good place," is "a future that, with enough patience and wisdom, our descendants could actually build — if we pave the way for them." While he doesn't claim that "a wonderful future is likely," he does contend that it's "not just a fantasy, either."

On the other hand, radical longtermists imagine our descendants colonizing space and creating huge computer simulations in which trillions upon trillions of digital people "live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments," quoting Bostrom. Why would these people be happy? No one explains. Maybe they'll have access to digital Zoloft. In the longtermist view, the more "happy" people who exist in the future, the greater the amount of "value," and the more value, the better the universe will become. This is why longtermists are obsessed with calculating how large the posthuman population could be. For example, Bostrom estimates some 1058 digital people in the future — that's a 1 followed by 58 zeros — while MacAskill and his longtermist colleague Hilary Greaves note that there could be 1045 in the Milky Way galaxy alone. It follows that there could be literally astronomical amounts of value in the far future — amounts that utterly dwarf the value humanity has so far created, or that exists right now.

So what lies ahead, if we play our cards right, is a techno-utopian world among the heavens full of unfathomable quantities of goodness. The stakes are thus absolutely enormous. This is where the idea of "existential risk" enters the picture. Longtermists define this as, essentially, any event that would prevent us from realizing this glorious future, and this is why radical longtermism implies that the single most important task for humanity is reducing existential risk. As Bostrom writes, "for standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three, and four should … be to reduce existential risk," the fifth being to colonize space. Here it's worth noting that the EA community is overwhelmingly utilitarian — at least 70 percent or so — and its leading luminaries, such as MacAskill and Ord, "describe themselves as having more credence in utilitarianism than any other positive moral view." Bankman-Fried is also a utilitarian who, in his own words, aimed "to maximize every cent I can and aggregate net happiness in the world."

Having outlined the longtermist ideology, its danger can be understood as twofold: first, it leads adherents to ignore, neglect and minimize current-day suffering. If a problem doesn't pose an existential risk, then it shouldn't be one of our top four (or five) global priorities. Second, it could end up justifying, in the eyes of true believers, harmful actions for the sake of the greater cosmic good — namely, creating a multi-galactic civilization full of 1058 posthumans in vast computer simulations spread throughout the universe. Let's consider these in turn.

In one of the foundational texts of longtermism, published in 2013, Bostrom writes that

unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy. If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy.

What are these "feel-good projects" that we must not "fritter away" our resources on? As Peter Singer, who considers himself an effective altruist, notes, this would include charitable causes like "donating to help the global poor" and reducing "animal suffering." This was, in fact, made explicit by Greaves in an interview on the longtermist philosophy.Quoting her in full:

There's a clear case for transferring resources from the affluent Western world to the global poor. But longtermist lines of thought suggest that something else would be better still. There are a lot of candidates for potentially very high value longtermist interventions. … The most clear-cut one, I think, is reducing risks of premature human extinction. … Even if we can do anything that reduces the probability of premature human extinction by a tiny amount, in expected value terms, that is, when you average across your uncertainty, the contribution of that kind of intervention could be massive — much greater, even, than the best things we can do in the area of global poverty.

What does Greaves mean by "premature extinction"? This refers to any extinction event that occurs before we've created Utopia and flooded the universe with "value."On the longtermist view, then, we shouldn't spend money on global poverty: Those resources should instead go to ensuring that we realize our "longterm potential." After all, when one takes a truly cosmic perspective on our place in a universe that could remain habitable for literally trillions of years to come, all the suffering caused by global poverty becomes virtually imperceptible.

In the longtermist view, we shouldn't spend money on global poverty: When one takes a truly cosmic perspective on our place in the universe, the suffering caused by poverty becomes virtually imperceptible.

This is why Bostrom writes the following about the worst horrors in human history, including the two world wars: "Tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things — from the perspective of humankind as a whole — even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life." Why? Because "they haven't significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species." Elsewhere, he describes "an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States" — which studies show could literally kill more than 5 billion people — as "a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind," so long as it doesn't cause our complete extinction.

It's this perspective — the cosmic vantage point — that yields a profoundly callous view of current-day suffering. Sure, global poverty is bad, but it's not going to prevent our descendants from becoming radically enhanced posthumans, colonizing space and simulating enormous numbers of digital people, which is what really matters.Or consider climate change, which the longtermist Jaan Tallinn, who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, says "is not going to be an existential risk unless there's a runaway scenario." A runaway scenario, which would cause our extinction, is very unlikely.

The clear implication of Tallinn's statement is that we shouldn't be too concerned about non-runaway climate change. Of course it will cause profound harm, especially to people in the global South, but in the grand scheme of things the suffering of such people will amount to nothing more than "mere ripples." John Halstead, another longtermist, echoes this idea in an unpublished document that's been highly influential among longtermists. "It's hard to come up with ways in which climate change could be a direct ex risk," he concludes ("ex risk" is short for "existential risk"). So let's not get too worked up about it: There are bigger fish to fry. As I have noted elsewhere, it is impossible to read the longtermist literature and not come away with a rosy picture of the climate crisis.

The longtermist perspective on humanity's vast future is also what leads Nick Beckstead to the astonishing claim that we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over saving the lives of those in poor countries. Because this conclusion is so shocking, I will quote the passage in full:

[S]aving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards — at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards — saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

As this shows, one of the dangers of radical longtermism is that it inclines advocates to ignore the cries of the most disadvantaged people. Their suffering is bad, for sure, but the failure to create a much, much bigger amount of value in the very far future would be orders of magnitude worse. To make this more concrete, consider that there are 1.3 billion people today in multidimensional poverty. Now compare this with the 1058 digital people who could exist in the future. For longtermists, could exist implies should exist, assuming that such lives would be better than miserable. If you crunch the numbers, the better thing to do would be to focus on all these future people, not those struggling to survive today. What matters most, Beckstead argues, is that we focus on the trajectory of civilization over "the coming millions, billions, and trillions of years."

The second danger is that true believers of radical longtermism could be inclined to commit harms for the sake of creating a techno-utopian paradise among the stars full of astronomical value. What exactly is off the table given longtermism's vision of the future? What means cannot be justified by such a "vast and glorious" end? Bostrom himself has written that we should keep preemptive violence as a "last-resort" option to neutralize threats that could prevent a posthuman civilization from existing. He's also dabbled with the idea of implementing a mass global surveillance system to monitor the actions of everyone on the planet, in order to prevent "civilizational destruction," which could pose an existential risk. This was published in a journal specifically for policymakers. Or consider a real-world scenario outlined by Olle Häggström, who is generally sympathetic with longtermism. Referencing Bostrom's claim that minuscule reductions in existential risk are morally equivalent to literally billions of actual human lives, Häggström writes:

I feel extremely uneasy about the prospect that [Bostrom's claim] might become recognised among politicians and decision-makers as a guide to policy worth taking literally. It is simply too reminiscent of the old saying "If you want to make an omelette, you must be willing to break a few eggs," which has typically been used to explain that a bit of genocide or so might be a good thing, if it can contribute to the goal of creating a future utopia. Imagine a situation where the head of the CIA explains to the US president that they have credible evidence that somewhere in Germany, there is a lunatic who is working on a doomsday weapon and intends to use it to wipe out humanity, and that this lunatic has a one-in-a-million chance of succeeding. They have no further information on the identity or whereabouts of this lunatic. If the president has taken Bostrom's argument to heart, and if he knows how to do the arithmetic, he may conclude that it is worthwhile conducting a full-scale nuclear assault on Germany to kill every single person within its borders.

To my knowledge, there are no radical longtermists out there today actively calling for something like this. But as Singer explains in his critique of longtermism,

Marx's vision of communism as the goal of all human history provided Lenin and Stalin with a justification for their crimes, and the goal of a "Thousand-Year Reich" was, in the eyes of the Nazis, sufficient reason for exterminating or enslaving those deemed racially inferior. … I am not suggesting that any present exponents of the hinge of history idea would countenance atrocities. But then, Marx, too, never contemplated that a regime governing in his name would terrorize its people.

The crucial point here is that all the ingredients needed to "justify" atrocities are present in the longtermist ideology — indeed, they lie at its very core. These ideas and assertions, arguments and conclusions, are right there in the canonical longtermist literature. All that's missing is a situation in which extreme actions appear necessary to safeguard our posthuman future of astronomical value, and someone who, finding themselves in this situation, takes the core claims of the literature seriously. It is entirely possible that such a situation will arise in the future, and that such a person will find themselves in it, spellbound and driven by fantastical visions of Utopia among the stars.

All the ingredients needed to "justify" atrocities are present in longtermist ideology. All that's missing is a situation in which extreme actions appear necessary to safeguard our posthuman future of astronomical value.

This is why I've become increasingly alarmed by the clout and influence that longtermism has acquired over the past five years. Elon Musk calls it "a close match for my philosophy." A UN Dispatch article reports that "the foreign policy community in general and the United Nations in particular are beginning to embrace longtermism." The ideology is pervasive in the tech industry, motivating much of the research on how to create superintelligent computers that might someday replace us. It's the worldview that Bankman-Fried was passionate about, and which may have led him to believe that a little fraud — assuming he committed fraud, which, again, seems probable — might be OK, since it's for the greater cosmic good. In fact, Bankman-Fried told the New Yorker earlier this year that he was never interested in helping the global poor; his "all-in commitment" was to longtermism. He thus established the FTX Future Fund, which included MacAskill and Beckstead on its team, to support longtermist research projects.

These are the two primary reasons that radical longtermism is so worrisome: It minimizes all sub-existential problems facing humanity and it could potentially inspire acts of terror and violence in the name of the greater cosmic good. Singer nicely summarizes these dual concerns in writing that

the dangers of treating extinction risk as humanity's overriding concern should be obvious. Viewing current problems through the lens of existential risk to our species can shrink those problems to almost nothing, while justifying almost anything that increases our odds of surviving long enough to spread beyond Earth.

It is of paramount importance that journalists, politicians, policymakers, businesspeople and the voting public understand this worldview. Much of my article here has outlined the core ideas of longtermism using the movement's own words — this was, of course, on purpose, because critics are often dismissed as exaggerating what radical longtermists really think. We aren't exaggerating: The radical longtermist worldview really is this bizarre, philosophically dubious and potentially dangerous.

The collapse of FTX has caused immense harm to many people — some, apparently, have lost more than half their wealth — and seriously damaged the "brand" of longtermism. What surprises me most isn't that a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme run by a utilitarian longtermist imploded, but that the first major blunder involving longtermism wasn't even worse. If this ignominious debacle doesn't take the longtermist ideology down entirely, it should at least provoke an extended reflection by the movement's leaders on whether they should have listened to its critics long ago.

from Émile P. Torres on philosophy and the future

Selling "longtermism": How PR and marketing drive a controversial new movement

"White Psychodrama" and the culture wars: A self-reinforcing cycle, going nowhere

Soup on the van Gogh: The painting's fine, and the kids are all right

By ÉMILE P. TORRES

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to civilization and humanity. They have published on a wide range of topics, including machine superintelligence, emerging technologies and religious eschatology, as well as the history and ethics of human extinction. Their forthcoming book is "Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation" (Routledge). For more, visit their website and follow them on Twitter." For more, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.

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As young people rightly demand real solutions to climate change, the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels by 2050 — but how. Beyond decarbonizing today’s electric grid, we must use clean electricity to replace fossil fuels in transportation, industry and heating. We must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries and extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And still more electricity will be needed to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by midcentury.

Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.

Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early. A few lucky countries with abundant hydroelectricity, like Norway and New Zealand, have decarbonized their electric grids, but their success cannot be scaled up elsewhere: The world’s best hydro sites are already dammed.

Small wonder that a growing response to these intimidating facts is, “We’re cooked.”

But we actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.

David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.

They did this with nuclear power. And they did it fast, taking advantage of nuclear power’s intense concentration of energy per pound of fuel. France replaced almost all of its fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power nationwide in just 15 years; Sweden, in about 20 years. In fact, most of the fastest additions of clean electricity historically are countries rolling out nuclear power.

This is a realistic solution to humanity’s greatest problem. Plants built 30 years ago in America, as in France, produce cheap, clean electricity, and nuclear power is the cheapest source in South Korea. The 98 U.S. reactors today provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity generation. So why don’t the United States and other countries expand their nuclear capacity? The reasons are economics and fear.

New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. The first product off any assembly line is expensive — it cost more than $150 million to develop the first iPhone — but costs plunge as they are built in quantity and production kinks are worked out.

Yet as a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put it, while France has two types of reactors and hundreds of types of cheese, in the United States it’s the other way around. In recent decades, the United States and some European countries have created ever more complicated reactors, with ever more safety features in response to public fears. New, one-of-a-kind designs, shifting regulations, supply-chain and construction snafus and a lost generation of experts (during the decades when new construction stopped) have driven costs to absurd heights.

These economic problems are solvable. China and South Korea can build reactors at one-sixth the current cost in the United States. With the political will, China could replace coal without sacrificing economic growth, reducing world carbon emissions by more than 10 percent. In the longer term, dozens of American start-ups are developing “fourth generation” reactors that can be mass-produced, potentially generating electricity at lower cost than fossil fuels. If American activists, politicians and regulators allow it, these reactors could be exported to the world in the 2030s and ’40s, slaking poorer countries’ growing thirst for energy while creating well-paying American jobs. Currently, fourth-generation nuclear power receives rare bipartisan agreement in Congress, making it a particularly appealing American policy to address climate change. Congress recently passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act by big margins. Both parties love innovation, entrepreneurship, exports and jobs. This approach will need a sensible regulatory framework. Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open-?ended, all-or-nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.

All this, however, depends on overcoming an irrational dread among the public and many activists. The reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.

By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. (Even if we accepted recent claims that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.)

Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs, and they have not contributed to weapons proliferation, thanks to robust international controls: 24 countries have nuclear power but not weapons, while Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons but not power.

Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change, we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground. It’s a far easier environmental challenge than the world’s enormous coal waste, routinely dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last forever.

Despite its demonstrable safety, nuclear power presses several psychological buttons. First, people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind. Second, the thought of radiation activates the mind-set of disgust, in which any trace of contaminant fouls whatever it contacts, despite the reality that we all live in a soup of natural radiation. Third, people feel better about eliminating a single tiny risk entirely than minimizing risk from all hazards combined. For all these reasons, nuclear power is dreaded while fossil fuels are tolerated, just as flying is scary even though driving is more dangerous.

Despite these challenges, psychology and politics can change quickly. As the enormity of the climate crisis sinks in and the hoped-for carbon savings from renewables don’t add up, nuclear can become the new green. Protecting the environment and lifting the developing world out of poverty are progressive causes. And the millennials and Gen Z’s might rethink the sacred values their boomer parents have left unexamined since the Doobie Brothers sang at the 1979 No Nukes concert.

If the American public and politicians can face real threats and overcome unfounded fears, we can solve humanity’s most pressing challenge and leave our grandchildren a bright future of climate stability and abundant energy. We can dispatch, once and for all, the self-fulfilling prophesy that we’re cooked.

Joshua S. Goldstein, professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Staffan A. Qvist, a Swedish energy engineer, are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and is the author of “Enlightenment Now.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nuclear-power.html<...Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.

By Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker

Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard.

April 6, 2019
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As young people rightly demand real solutions to climate change, the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels by 2050 — but how. Beyond decarbonizing today’s electric grid, we must use clean electricity to replace fossil fuels in transportation, industry and heating. We must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries and extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And still more electricity will be needed to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by midcentury.

Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.

Small wonder that a growing response to these intimidating facts is, “We’re cooked.”

This is a realistic solution to humanity’s greatest problem. Plants built 30 years ago in America, as in France, produce cheap, clean electricity, and nuclear power is the cheapest source in South Korea. The 98 U.S. reactors today provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity generation. So why don’t the United States and other countries expand their nuclear capacity? The reasons are economics and fear.

This approach will need a sensible regulatory framework. Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to spend a billion dollars or more on an open-ended, all‑or‑nothing licensing process without any certainty of outcomes.” We need government on the side of this clean-energy transformation, with supportive regulation, streamlined approval, investment in research and incentives that tilt producers and consumers away from carbon.

All this, however, depends on overcoming an irrational dread among the public and many activists. The reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.

By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. (Even if we accepted recent claims that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.)

Opinions are also driven by our cultural and political tribes. Since the late 1970s, when No Nukes became a signature cause of the Green movement, sympathy to nuclear power became, among many environmentalists, a sign of disloyalty if not treason....Despite these challenges, psychology and politics can change quickly. As the enormity of the climate crisis sinks in and the hoped-for carbon savings from renewables don’t add up, nuclear can become the new green. Protecting the environment and lifting the developing world out of poverty are progressive causes. And the millennials and Gen Z’s might rethink the sacred values their boomer parents have left unexamined since the Doobie Brothers sang at the 1979 No Nukes concert.[snark]

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles.

frats?

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10. Steven Pinker, interview with Julia Belluz, Vox

Julia Belluz: You wrote a very optimistic book about the trend toward less violence on earth. But it feels like we’ve seen a lot of violence here in the U.S. since then. ... How do you put all this in context?

Steven Pinker: News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on. The data show—since The Better Angels of Our Nature was published—rates of violence continue to go down.

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