Links to Consider, 2/8

Bo Winegard on human inequality; Scott Alexander on the mutability of biology; Razib Khan interviews James Miller; Peter Wallison has a substack

Bo Winegard writes,

Suppose, for example, that we are confronted with the dilemma of two burning buildings inside which dwell twenty people. One building is full of convicted criminals; one is full of upstanding citizens. We can only save one of the buildings from conflagration. What do we do? Should we choose by chance, perhaps by flipping a coin? Or should we save the building full of upstanding citizens, condemning the twenty convicted criminals to certain (and painful) death? A robust version of moral equality does not provide a guide for choosing since all the people are “morally equal” and therefore equally worthy of our moral solicitude. On the other hand, common sense clearly recommends saving the upstanding community members and allowing the others to die.

I came up with another thought-experiment. If you could choose between saving the life of an Israeli baby and a Palestinian baby, would you presume moral equality? Or would you say that the Israeli baby is more likely to grow up to be an oppressor, and save the Palestinian baby? Or would you say that the Israeli baby is more likely to grow up to be a famous scientist or humanitarian, and save the Israeli baby?

Scott Alexander writes,

It’s not just that social factors explain a small percent of the variance and are hard to change, it’s that we only have tentative guesses about what they are.

By comparison, you can very clearly halve your children’s risk of schizophrenia through polygenic selection, which costs only a few hundred dollars if you’re already doing IVF. You don’t need to worry about whether your teenager will ignore your recommendation not to use marijuana, you don’t have to fiddle around with shaving a few points off the variance, and you don’t have to worry that you’re chasing correlational phantoms. Just pay a few hundred bucks and you’re done. And polygenic screening gets better every year. In a decade or two you can probably eliminate the risk entirely.

As usual, if you don’t read the whole post, you are missing out.

Razib Khan describes his podcast with James Miller, an economist who is a big believer in AI, bioetch, and the Singularity. Miller published a book on these topics 12 years ago, which predicted striking advances by 2030, so we’ve already covered 2/3 of that timespan.

While the computational innovation driving AI seems to have advanced on schedule, and the biological revolution has not taken off, the last section of Miller’s book focused on the economic impacts of the impending singularity. He still believes the next 10-20 years will be incredible, as our economy and way of life are both transformed for the good. Until that is, humans become obsolete in the face of the nearly god-like forms of AI that will emerge around 2050. Until then, Miller anticipates the next generation will see rapid changes as people make career shifts every half a decade or so as jobs become redundant or automated. If Singularity Rising proves correct, the next generation will be defined by what the economist Joseph Schumpeter termed “creative destruction.” If Miller is correct, it may be the last human generation.

I have not listened to the podcast. Every few years, I like to pull out Ray Kurzweil’s book from 1999, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and check out his forecasts. My impression is that some astonishing predictions have come true, but noticeably later than he foresaw. For example, Kurzweil wrote about the future of warfare,

Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle. Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices. Many of these flying weapons are the size of small birds, or smaller.

Seems uncanny, doesn’t it? That future seems almost here. But he made that forecast for 2009, and it is now 2024. Since he wrote the book, it has taken more than twice as long to reach the point where drones are widely-used weapons, and even now they are not yet dominant.

I can find many instances in which Kurzweil’s timeline proved to be too optimistic, and I cannot find any in which it is too pessimistic.

I give Ray the K a ton of credit just for being able to extrapolate as well as he did. But I see Kurzweil and Miller as overly bullish on the speed at which change takes place.

Peter Wallison writes,

Recently, [Donald Trump] told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that he believes he would have the power as President to direct Seal Team Six to kill a political opponent, and could not be tried for that crime unless he is first impeached and convicted before leaving office. This is a gross misreading of the Constitution, but Imagine the House and Senate voting impeachment for and convicting a President who claims the unrestricted power to kill them.

Peter’s politics are libertarian/conservative. I once met him, and he is nice in person. But he rubs people the wrong way with his opinions and the dogged way that he expresses them. He is not out to please anyone. He just says what he thinks.

After the financial crisis of 2008, Congress created an inquiry commission consisting of 6 members appointed by Democrats and 4 appointed by Republicans, including Wallison. The final report of the commission was signed only by the 6 Democrats. 3 Republicans filed a dissent together. [This example makes me question my own thinking that after the 2020 election a bipartisan commission on election integrity would have been constructive.]

Wallison characteristically did not go with his fellow Republicans and instead filed his own dissent. He also proceeded to write a lengthy book making his case for laying the blame for the crisis at the feet of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Wallison believes that Mr. Trump can and should be disqualified from running for President.

In 2021, Trump tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Constitution—or at least the constitutional means for electing a president—by pressing his Vice President to set aside the electoral votes of several states that Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won in the 2020 election. This, without question was an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution, the very language that Section 3 forbids.

…it doesn’t matter whether Mr. Trump was ever indicted for or convicted of an “insurrection” against the United States. The relevant language of Section 3 charges him with an insurrection against the Constitution, and it is the meaning of those words that determines the applicability of Section 3 to Mr. Trump’s actions.

He predicts that the Supreme Court will in fact vote to disqualify Mr. Trump. Maybe if it were a Wallison court. But I cannot picture John Roberts steering the court toward such a ruling.

substacks referenced above:

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Donald Trump Meets the Supreme Court

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James Miller: the end of world as we know it

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It's Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic

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Created unequal