Joe Carlsmith: belief

Transcript context

…I remember I was talking to somebody who at least is familiar with rationalist discourse. He was asking me what I was interested in these days? I was saying something about how this part of Roman history is super interesting. His first response was like, “Oh, you know, it's really interesting when you look at these secular trends of Roman times to what happened in the Dark Ages versus the Enlightenment.” For him, the story of that was just how it contributed to the big secular picture, the particulars didn't matter. There's no interest in that. It’s just like, “if you zoom out at the biggest level, what's happening here.” Whereas there's also the opposite failure mode when people study history. Dominic Cummings writes about this because he is endlessly frustrated with the political class in Britain. He'll say things like, “They study politics, philosophy and economics. A big part of it is just being really familiar with these poems and reading a bunch of history about the War of the Roses or something.” But he's frustrated that they have all these kings memorized, but they take away very little in terms of lessons from these episodes. It's almost like entertainment, watching Game of Thrones, for them. Whereas he thinks we're repeating certain mistakes that he's seen in history. He can generalize in a way they can’t. So the first one seems like a mistake. I think C.S. Lewis talks about it in one of the essays you cited. If you see through everything, you're really blind. If everything is transparent… I think there's kind of very little excuse for not learning history. I'm not saying I have learned enough history. Even when I try to channel some skepticism towards great works, I think that doesn't generalize to thinking it's not worth understanding human history. Human history is just so clearly crucial to understand. It's what structured and created all of the stuff. There's an interesting question about what's the level of scale at which to do that and how much should you be looking at details, looking at macro trends. That's a dance. It's nice for people to be at least attending to the macro narrative. There's some virtue in having a worldview, really building a model of the whole thing. I think that sometimes gets lost in the details. But obviously, the details are what the world is made of. If you don't have those, you don't have data at all. It seems like there's some skill in learning history. Well, this actually seems related to your post on sincerity. Maybe I'm getting the vibe of the piece right. Certain intellectuals have a vibe of shooting the shit. They're just trying out different ideas. How do these analogies fit together? Those seem closer to looking at the particulars and like, “Oh, this is just like that one time in the 15th century where they overthrew this king…” Whereas this guy who was like, “Oh, if you look at the growth models from a million years ago to now, here's what's happening.” That one has a more sincere flavor. Some people, especially when it comes to AI discourse, have a very sincere mode of operating. “I've thought through my bio anchors and I disagree with this premise. My effective compute estimate is different in this way. Here's how I analyze the scaling laws.” If I could only have one person to help me guide my decisions on AI, I might choose that person. But if I had ten different advisors at the same time, I might prefer the shooting-the-shit type characters who have these weird esoteric intellectual influences. They're almost like random number generators. They're not especially calibrated, but once in a while they'll be like, “Oh, this one weird philosopher I care about, or this one historical event I'm obsessed with has an interesting perspective on this.” They tend to be more intellectually generative as well. I think one big part of it is that if you are so sincere, you're like, “Oh, I’ve thought through this. Obviously, ASI is the biggest thing that's happening right now. It doesn't really make sense to spend a bunch of your time thinking about how the Comanches lived? What is the history of oil? How did Girard think about conflict? What are you talking about? Come on, ASI is happening in a few years.” But therefore, the people who go on these rabbit holes because they're just trying to shoot the shit, I feel are more generative.…

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