Links to Consider, 7/8

Scott Alexander finds Bryan Caplan irritating; Aaron Renn questions secular conservatives; Freddie deBoer compares AI maximalism to late Victorian-era science hubris

Scott Alexander writes,

So clearly (says a hypothetical version of Caplan, whose answers I must rely on because the real Caplan has never addressed this objection) migraine headaches are a preference, not a disease! Some people just like locking themselves in dark rooms, clutching their head, and saying “oww oww oww” a lot! If other people call this a “disorder”, they’re choosing to stigmatize migraineurs; if migraineurs agree it’s a disorder, they’re just trying to escape responsibility for their antisocial choices.

I also think that Caplan is wrong in trying to reduce mental illness to a set of socially unapproved preferences.

Aaron Renn writes,

It’s very obvious that changes in economic structures are a key driver of changes in elites, something conservatives don’t want to face because of its Marxist associations. For example, the WASP elites as understood in the midcentury era emerged in the post-Civil War period in large part because of the emergence of large scale industrialization of a type that had heretofore been unknown. This led to the first wave of economic nationalization, which produced a nationalized elite.

…The Christian scions of the Roman pagan elite turned aside from the traditional Roman status system in favor of the church. Over time, this produced a parallel elite that would wield power. I’m not saying this is the answer, but it’s something worth looking at.

He worries that a secular conservative elite will end up turning toward authoritarian politics.

Pointer from Simon Cooke.

While I was exploring Renn’s substack, I found his essay on the instability and dangers of male-female friendships.

The ideal investment is one with small and capped downside but unlimited upside.  This is a positive asymmetry. The worst situation is a negative asymmetry where your upside is small and limited, but your downside is potentially huge.

I have expressed this point many times, but I had never considered applying it to male-female friendship. I was jarred by Renn’s opinion, which is

Consider the many possible negative outcomes – including potentially very negative outcomes – that could result from being friends with a woman:

• Falling for her romantically and finding your interest unrequited – moving from friend to friend zone.

• Spending years of your precious youth that you’ll never get back waiting patiently in the friend zone in the vain hope that she will want to date you, passing up opportunities to meet many other high-quality girls who might actually want to go out with you.

• Her falling for you romantically and you not being interested in her, putting you in an awkward and risky spot (if she doesn’t take your rejection well and decides to try to get revenge).

• Committing sexual sin, with the potential effect of destroying your marriage if you are a married man, getting her pregnant, etc.

• Getting into a major fight that ends the friendship, and also forces you out of your mutual circle of friends or even your church.

• Getting into a major fight and getting falsely accused of sexual harassment, etc. (Even if you are innocent, in a #MeToo world merely to be accused is to be convicted).

Oy. I get that a man can become attracted to a woman, and that all these awkward results are possible. But good luck working in a modern organization and ruling out having any woman friends. Also, see the story about a purported decline in male-female collaboration in academic economics.

Instead, I think it is best to be clear with yourself, and with your female friends, that you are going to repress any romantic impulses. I’ve maintained friendships with women for decades on those terms.

I believe it can help for an organization to spell out rules against office romance. I think that such rules make work relationships easier. Good fences make good neighbors, as it were. Bryan Caplan may disagree with me.

In an essay that I think deserves an award, Freddie deBoer writes,

this basic notion - that physics had more or less been solved by the late Victorian era - reflected a real current of opinion…

The late Victorian period also saw the British empire nearing its zenith, and the British empire thought of itself as coterminous with civilization…

I’m telling you all of this to establish a principle: don’t trust people who believe that they have arrived at the end of time, or at its culmination, or that they exist outside of it. Never believe anyone who thinks that they are looking at the world from outside of the world, at history from outside of history…

as in the Victorian era almost everyone seems sure that something epochal has happened. Suffice it to say that Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s pronouncement that advances in artificial intelligence will prove more profound than the discovery of fire or electricity was not at all exceptional in the current atmosphere. …It appears that, in a certain sense, AI enthusiasts want their projections for AI to be both science and fiction.

I disagree with deBoer when he makes this argument:

If you use Google’s MusicLM to generate music based on the prompt “upbeat techno,” you will indeed get music that sounds like upbeat techno. …The trouble, among other things, is that no human being could ever listen to as much music as was likely fed into major music-producing AI systems, calling into question how alike this process is to human songwriting. Nor is it clear if something really new could ever be produced in this way. After all, true creativity begins precisely where influence ends.

Instead, I think that creativity consists of recombination. Bob Dylan scandalized folk music audiences when he first played with a rock band.

The early Beatles combined hard rock rhythms with soft harmonies. I can imagine Chuck Berry coming up with “I Saw Her Standing There,” but not “Please Please Me.” I can imagine the Everly Brothers doing the opposite.

The Beatles went on to constantly reinvent themselves by bringing in other musical styles. An AI could do the same thing. If it tossed into its “upbeat techno” composition some inspiration from Beethoven or Paul Simon, it would be emulating human creativity.

Freddie goes on to write,

it’s worth noting why cognitive science has struggled for so many centuries to comprehend how thinking works: because thinking arose from almost 4 billion years of evolution. The iterative processes of natural selection have had 80 percent of the history of this planet to develop ... Is it really that hard to believe that we might not have duplicated its capabilities in 70 years of trying, in an entirely different material form?…

Talk of AI has developed in two superficially-opposed but deeply complementary directions: utopianism and apocalypticism. …the war is not between those predicting deliverance and those predicting doom, but between both of those and the rest of us who would like to see developments in predictive text and image generation as interesting and powerful but ultimately ordinary technologies. … remaining within the category of human tool, like the smartphone, like the washing machine, like the broom. Not a technology that transcends technology and declares definitively that now is over….

The bitter irony of the digital era has been that technologies that bring us communicatively closer have increased rather than decreased feelings of alienation and social breakdown. It’s hard to imagine how AI does anything other than deepen that condition. … there are no technological solutions to social problems…

the problems in human-computer interactions in education lie with the humans, not the computers, and thus can never be solved on the technology side

AI rapture reminds me of the days of Web rapture. In those days, I wrote,

What I call the problem of the last inch is the problem of getting information from the person’s eyeball into his or her brain…

Substacks referenced above:

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We’re All Evangelicals Now

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AI, Ozymandias

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Postliberalism, economic growth, cheating progressives, muslim mayors and Marx (etc.)

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Creating a New Elite

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Sure, Whatever, Let's Try Another Contra Caplan On Mental Illness