Implications of Civilizational Inadequacy (reviewing mazes/simulacra/etc) — LessWrong
This was written for the LessWrong Review, intended as a high level exploration of the 2020 posts on Moral Mazes, Simulacra, Coordination Theory, and Civilizational Adequacy. When reviewing LessWrong posts, fairly often my reaction is "Cool hypothesis bro, but, can we actually go out and verify it?". A lot of LessWrong posts explore interesting ideas, and those ideas match my intuitions. But lots of intuitive ideas turn out to be wrong, and sometimes people have different intuitions. It seemed good to have a step where we actually turned armchair philosophy into empirical claims. A year ago, I began two attempts at investigating some claims: Elizabeth and I made some attempt to run a Positly study on math / law-abidingness. We quickly ran into "Running a real, legit study is a pretty big time cost." (We ran one quick-and-dirty study that essentially boiled down to asking people 'are you good at math?' and 'do you do crimes?', which Eliezer specifically called out as Not A Good Approach