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by throwaway27448 61 days ago
Well what other tools do we have? Waiting for the market to fix things is also destructive and harms orders of magnitude more people than violent direct action does; democracy is wildly ineffective compared to violence even at its most optimistic; what else remains? Fleeing the planet?
2 comments
handoflixue 61 days ago
Giving this a less glib response: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866 goes in to some detail, but Eliezer has always had a fairly clear call for action, which is international regulation. And in particular, he makes the point that random acts of violence are actively counterproductive to his goal.

We walked out of the Cold War alive. Humanity has faced extinction before, and despite it all, we walked away alive last time. It's not unreasonable to think we can do it again.

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handoflixue 61 days ago
> Well what other tools do we have?

I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:

"How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."

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throwaway27448 61 days ago
Ok, I don't think anyone suggested killing puppies. Are you going to take this topic seriously or just dodge the question?
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handoflixue 61 days ago
The point is that violence isn't actually a tool, just like killing puppies isn't an actual solution.

I can know "this doesn't work" without knowing exactly what does work. "Violence is the only tool we have, so we have to use it" is the sort of logic that leads to the Holocaust.

If you want my own personal observations: Over the past few centuries, we've managed women's suffrage, black suffrage, gay marriage, etc. largely without violence, so clearly there are processes out there for progress. We fixed the Ozone Hole without killing people. I don't think murder was involved at all in finding recent AIDS medication, or GLP-1.

There are tons of examples of successful social progress in the past few decades that don't involve violence. Conversely, I struggle to name any terrorists that accomplished their goals by bombing scientists.

If nothing else, we can make violence a lot more legible by embodying it in a legal process, and bringing society onto the same page about it's necessity.

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