World federalism?
It seems kinda odd to me that I haven’t heard anything about world federalism or unification from rationalists. Given the concern about solving coordination problems and preventing existential risk it seems like a perfect fit. The thing that makes me most pessimistic about solving X-risk problems is our history of dealing with near X-risk; we basically blundered through the cold war and survived out of luck, and climate change efforts are irrevocably hampered by international coordination efforts. Going forward, the lack of an international body with regulatory powers makes AI X-risk much more scary to me. It’s going to be a difficult enough problem to solve without China or the US creating an AI without taking the proper safety precautions because they’re in a race with each other, or with some seasteading genius cracking the code.
I guess it’s just not popular because the solution seems insoluble? I certainly used to think about it a lot in my more idealistic younger days. AI X-risk you can create MIRI, and if you’re good enough plausibly you make a difference. You can even lobby national governments for space settlement, or whatever. But world federalism is all or nothing, and much more likely to be nothing because you’re weird anyway. Or maybe it’s just that I’m way out on the far end of rationalists into politics. Still, I think it’s odd that I’ve never even heard the concept here in rationalist-land.
“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
Problem is intractable, likely to corrupt those who work on it, does not assure a good outcome, requires incredible resource investment if a tractable approach is found.
And the optics are horrible.
I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.
[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as well]
World federalism is such an ugly idea. Its proponents strike me as exactly the kind of naive utopians deathspiraling around democracy I want to stay as far away from as possible, and its actual realization would be way more likely to be just a scaled-up version of the EU and the US federal government, possibly doing some useful coordination stuff while simultaneously enabling absolutely horrible conformity pressures with its political power, subject to democratic distortion of incentives.
I don’t think a world federation would be in any way able to limit itself to x-risks (and in fact x-risks would probably be on the agenda only way after all the bullshit), and instead would act as some kind of a mostly unfriendly singleton. Just looking at the things we have now makes me scream in horror internally at the thought of having more of the same, except there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We have drug laws, we have corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies, we have regulatory capture, we have morally backwards and intellectually bankrupt groups looting and bossing around people who could do way better than that if they were allowed to, and worst of all there’s no simple answer to all of that.
It’s obvious that the Bay Area is horribly dragged down by being subject to a government Alabama has any influence in and the excesses of each (one tending positive, another negative) are dramatically tempered by the influence of the other. The scary part is that it’s not obvious that having them go their separate ways would be a net positive because a lot of innocent people live in Alabama and having the federal government limit the abyssal depths their polity could otherwise plunge into might actually be worth the way it restricts the heights other places could reach. Everywhere I look it’s the same story; the enlightened areas altruistically trying to drag the backwards ones kicking and screaming into at least yesterday if not the proper present, even if their own situation suffers. The Obviously Correct way to do things would be to let the Bay Area influence Alabama, but not vice versa, and letting Iceland boss around Poland without the latter having a say in the former’s affairs but there’s just no way to ever make that happen.
In the absence of magical one-way unfairness of exactly the right kind all the remaining options are horrible; naive pro-secessionism sounds alluring until one remembers that the US literally fought a war within itself to stop one part of it from doing nasty and nonconsensual things to some of its population and is still wrangling with versions of those exact same issues to this day (and other very similar ones), but the only viable solution allows that one part to try to do nasty and nonconsensual things to the other parts’ population as well, and the world is just not ready (if it ever will be) for the level of individual liberation that would allow such horrors to be eradicated with a consistent meta-level rule without opening the door to different horrors.
And horrors there would be. I don’t believe for a second that actually existing world federalism could end up as the one type I just might find bearable (a global minarchy that’s basically x-risk management along with the UN’s most fundamental human rights treaties enforced with actual muscle behind them, and stopping people who try to start wars, and erring on the side of caution on these because even the most fundamental human rights treaties are prone to having glaring flaws, and then using that as an excuse to erode nation-state sovereignty enabling individual liberation) but instead there’s talk of all sorts of scary things. There’s world democracy, democracy for this, democracy for that, democracy for everything, economic democracy etc. which is basically the political equivalent of seeing a big and really impressive spaceship having some really important part of it held together with duct tape because nobody found anything better for the job, and thinking “you know what would make this spaceship even better? making it totally out of duct tape!”.
Democracy is to politics what duct tape is to engineering; something that’s occasionally really useful for patching things over with but never ever a terminal value and anyone who tells you otherwise should never be responsible for designing or maintaining anything important. Unfortunately, these world federalists seem to be exactly that kind of people. I suspect it’s some kind of a psychological thing. A certain kind of person who’s fundamentally agreeable to the majority might easily fall prey to the idea that the things that are wrong in the world are all the result of a minority imposing its will on the majority, but I’m minoritarian enough to recognize that the majority is actually really fucking scary and hostile and would destroy me the instant it had the opportunity to do so and is in fact constantly trying to make it happen even right now, and giving it any more power to do so is the exact last thing I want.
In fact, I’m pretty sure something like that is behind my desire to get really rich not-just-for-EA-purposes; in the unfair world we have now I could at least buy myself some degree of freedom, impunity and existential security when I’m definitely not guaranteed such things anywhere near to the same degree majority-agreeable people are, and anything that tries to take that opportunity away or even diminish it a little bit must be opposed at all costs unless it seriously gives me those things some other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a lot of strongly libertarian people were fundamentally weird and at least partially driven by a fear of the mob, and thus anyone who seriously wants to address economic inequality should address that thing as well, instead of just spouting the standard socialdemocratic jantelaw rhetoric that comes off as “we’re coming for not just your money but your lives and fundamental aspects of your identities as well”.
In the absence of such credible guarantees, a world federation would probably start accumulating unnecessary powers in exact the same ways national governments have done, and do all kinds of evil stuff like banning GMOs altogether, regulating sex work, crabbucketing economies, creating more market distortions for crony capitalists to capture and enforcing all kinds of oppressive shared sensibilities of dominant groups. It’s bad enough when the Swedish model of suppressing sex and drugs can be lobbied for internationally, and it would be even worse if they could just vote for it and enforce it everywhere. The vast majority of the global population is not WEIRD bonobo rationalists and even the present degree of subjecting the latter to the rule of the former is unbearable. At least now it’s possible (if rich and resourceful enough) to move somewhere else if the rule of one polity becomes too overbearing, but unifying a strong global government would make it all too likely to turn it into an unescapable situation.
This not the peace you had in mind? The one you waited for?
There is no land beyond this law, there is no place to go
(But it’s not like the standard opponents of world federalism are any better, national sovereignty is just as ugly and disgusting and oppressive with the way it always seems to repeat the same pattern of forcing extremely different cultures under the control of each other; prosperous cosmopolitan urban enlightened libertines really shouldn’t have to share polity with reactionary rural xenophobic conservatives who mostly mooch off the previous ones’ money while hypocritically espousing economic rightism themselves, but nation-states love to put boundaries in silly locations. It would be way better for places like Stockholm and Amsterdam to be together and separated from their spatially neighboring but culturally worlds-apart regions; nations are far less of a natural joint in reality than whatever-it-is that’s underlying the difference that seems to be popping up everywhere in extremely replicable ways. And the Bay Area should be independent even from the ‘better-than-most-but-still-not-the-bay-area’ places just to make sure its special nature stays as untarnished and incorruptible as possible.)
(via ilzolende)
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 30 notes · source: academicianzex · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from ilzolende and added:[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as...
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academicianzex reblogged this from mugasofer and added:Right. If you want to stop nuclear war, the ideal is something less than the Articles of Confederation, again, a classic...
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obiternihili reblogged this from argumate and added:There’s probably an uncharitably dismissive case about LW’s libertarian bent leading them to be so allergic to the word...
argumate reblogged this from mugasofer and added:I feel we have creeping world federalism anyway, just as a side-effect of globalisation, increased trade, the need for...
plain-dealing-villain reblogged this from academicianzex and added:Importantly, it’s unclear whether it’s even a good idea. Small countries seem to have more effective governments, and...
theungrumpablegrinch reblogged this from academicianzex and added:To be clear, the optics are the smallest part of the problem.
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hill-climber reblogged this from drethelin and added:@worldoptimization
thathopeyetlives reblogged this from ilzolende and added:We need a good enemy.
ilzolende reblogged this from theungrumpablegrinch and added:I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.@sinesalvatorem...
drethelin reblogged this from academicianzex and added:“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”