- The strength of us vs. them
- Dividing the world into Us and Them is deeply hardwired into our brains
- Not just a human characteristic - other primates make similar distinctions
- Us vs. them characterizations can be made extremely quickly (50ms)
- The nature of Us
- People who comprise the ingroup are seen as more wise, more moral, more worthy, etc.
- Being a member of an ingroup carries with it moral obligations to help other members of the ingroup
- Seeing outgroup members lose appears to activate the same dopamine pathways as seeing ingroup members win
- The nature of Them
- The initial feeling that characterizes the outgroup as bad is pre-rational
- Rational cognitions about outgroups can be emotionally and subconsciously manipulated
- Emotions about foreign countries can be manipulated by subliminally flashing images of fearful people
- Activating disgust (by making people sit near smelly garbage) makes them more socially conservative
- Women are more hostile to outgroup men when they’re ovulating
- Even a small visible reminder of the existence of the outgroup can make members of the ingroup more hostile
- The Heterogeneity of Them
- Our brains treat different outgroups differently
- Anger, disgust, and ridicule are all emotions that we feel towards outgroups
- Not every outgroup triggers all three emotions
- Cold and/or incompetent
- We classify outgroups along two axes: emotional warmth and competence
- Warmth: is the individual or group benevolent or malevolent
- Competence: is the individual or group competent at carrying out their objectives
- The axes can be primed independently
- Each combination of warmth and competence produces different emotions
- High warmth/high competence: ingroup pride
- Low warmth/high competence: envy/resentment
- High warmth/low competence: pity
- Low warmth/low competence: disgust
- Outgroup categorizations aren’t static, and the most interesting reactions occur when people see an outgroup move from one category to another
- High warmth/high competence to high warmth/low competence: protectiveness
- High warmth/high competence to low warmth/high competence: betrayal
- High warmth/high competence to low warmth/low competnece: disgust and bafflement
- Low warmth/low competence to low warmth/high competence: fear
- Low warmth/low competence to high warmth/low competence: (temporary) acknowledgement
- Low warmth/high competence to low warmth/low competence: gleeful gloating - most efforts of genocide/ethnic cleansing start by turning a low warmth/high competence outgroup into a low warmth/low competence one
- Multiple Us-es
- We constantly shift which category we consider most relevant when considering ingroup/outgroup distinctions
- Racial classifications can be overridden by other group affiliations
- Looking for a particular feature or characteristic seesm to prevent us from making ingroup/outgroup distinctions as quickly
- Rapid recategorizations can occur even in times of great stress (i.e. war)
- Masonic symbols can trump Union/Confederate distinctions in the Civil War
- WW 1 “Christmas Truce”
- Knowledge of classics brought together British and German officers in World War 2
- Lessening the Impact of Us/Them-ing
- Contact - needs to be done carefully, can make ingroup/outgroup distinctions worse if done poorly
- Approach the implicit - show people their biases and they’re more likely to override their implicit ingroup/outgroup considerations
- Replace essentialism with individuation
- Flatten hierarchies
- Saturation
- People have trouble maintaining the same activity for hours at a time
- This is true of even “fun” activities like Netflix or video games
- The problem with getting off-schedule is less about not doing work as it is about getting sucked into dark spirals that waste time
- Doing things that aren’t work but are ways of resetting are valuable for breaking those spirals
- Cultivating Feeling
- Feeling is a loose label used for the category of things that involve getting in touch with your body’s sensations
- How can we be more generative and synthesize existing information by putting in mental effort?
- Really boring activities, like lying on the ground can help reset hedonic treadmills so that even relatively unpleasant work becomes not so unpleasant
- A lot of the reason various unhealthy behaviors hare compelling is because they have variable rewards
- People’s desired attitudes affect behavior more than their real attitudes
- People are likely to seek out information that confirms their desired attitude
- When presented with flawed evidence for or against their desired attitude, people are more likely to accept the evidence that favors their desired attitude
- People are willing to change the objects of their desired attitude in order to make those objects easier to like (i.e. adding cream and sugar to coffee)
- However, there are limits - at some point we can’t force ourselves to like something that we wish we’d like
- Humans, and only humans perform abstract reasoning
- But what is the evolutionary reason for humans to have this ability?
- Many argue that abstract reasoning improves individual cognitive performance, thus allowing individuals that have it to better adapt
- However, Mercier and Sperber argue that the primary purpose of reason is persuasion
- Logic exists because it’s effective at getting other people to agree with the person using logic
- Bostrom worries about the future as being like “Disneyland Without Children”
- The future might be populated by many agents, but all of whom lack some defining characteristic X, which makes us human
- While this is mainly seen as a concern for a future with ems, this is also a concern with biological evolution (on a longer timescale)
- Two scenarios in which X is lost
- Case A: single step in which X is lost
- Maybe X is inherently unobservable, so we don’t know we have to preserve it
- Maybe people only care about X when they’re thinking abstractly, so they don’t take actions to preserve it
- Both of these can be fixed by conducting research into what makes us human, and then ensuring that those parts are preserved in any uploading technology
- Case B: X is slowly eroded over a long period of time
- Can we coordinate to ensure that no one starts down the slippery slope of losing their humanity?
- Humanity coordinated to ban CFCs and stop acid rain
- Global coordination has been significantly less successful at stopping global warming or preventing nuclear proliferation
- Success requires widespread agreement on what X is, plus easy and cheap detection and enforcement
- With ems, detecting violations will be difficult, as an em with slightly less X will behave almost identically to an em with 100% X
- Will need to be able to inspect virtually all software
- Maybe we can limit ems with reduced X to a limited portion of the population (much like we handle crime in today’s society)
- Failure scenarios
- Dispute over what X is and whether it should be preserved
- If even a small number of ems don’t have X, it’s possible for them to outreproduce a larger initial population of ems that do have X
- Everyone values X, but X-less ems are used for labor
- Less of a concern with UBI that ensures that people have a decent life even if they don’t perform labor
- All work/no fun
- End up sacrificing X to ensure that our descendants will be a significant fraction of the future population
- Doesn’t seem like a very urgent failure mode
- Instructions for fun appear to be small in comparison to the instructions for intelligence
- Relatively low cost of preserving fun makes it more likely that there will be a global agreement to preserve fun
- How urgent is it?
- Do we need to implement a program to find and preserve the essential characteristics of humanity?
- If X is lost as a result of uploading, we do, but it is unlikely that initial uploads will lose X
- Enforcement
- The age of ems can be postponed by banning uploads
- However, the first uploads will probably be recognizably human, so this isn’t a good reason to oppose uploading