The Mugwumpery

Every movement is a coalition of those who think it’s moral even if it won’t work, those who think it’ll have good results even if it’s not moral, those who think it’s good for them personally even if it’s not moral and won’t work. And those who aren’t sure those are 3 different things.

Crime is the default complaint in capitalist societies. When unemployment isn’t too high, inflation isn’t too high, there’s no war, no crisis, people complain about crime. Because crime is always there in the background. With rare exceptions, widespread perception of crime as a big problem is a sign that things are going pretty well.

Poverty is the default complaint in all other societies.

Beauty isn’t everything because inclusive fitness is a function of both genes and environment. Plus, you know, beauty has been Goodharted by evolution.

Apocryphally, Oscar Wilde said “A gentleman never gives offense unintentionally”. Perhaps there’s something to that.

I prefer my own definition: “A gentleman never obtains by force that which he can obtain with money”.

We don’t have to be polite about the dead. Because they can’t get back at us. (Unless they have vengeful living relatives.)

If we know nothing, we can’t assign a Bayesian prior. What do you do when you don’t have a prior? Seems to be the central problem here. And intrinsically unsolvable.

To get an LLM to give an opinion on a topic it’s trained not to (ex: politics), ask it what a hypothetical future superintelligence would think.

Ultimately good and bad are about what we think leads to survival and extinction. We disagree about consequences, so we disagree about values. Also there’s always the question “who’s survival?”; what’s good for you might be bad for me.