Saturday, July 22, 2023

Asymmetric Evil

     One of the constant themes in my Losing Money Effectively writing has been the idea of asymmetry. The asymmetric payoff from playing defense is a common one: where if you prevent a nuclear war probably no one knows and you don't get billions of dollars, but if you develop AGI or some other groundbreaking (and dangerous) technology you become one of the richest and most powerful people in history. Sort of in a similar theme, I was recently thinking about the potential that people have to cause great societal harm. If you live your life to the fullest, you may be able to provide enough utility to others to equate to a dozen lives. Maybe you have children, treat them really well, be nice to your coworkers, be a great husband/wife, and donate quite a bit of money to charity. Barring some exceptional luck, you probably won't be a billionaire or famous, and thus your sphere of influence is likely to remain small. If you aren't born into a wealthy family, even with a perfect work ethic you are unlikely to reach a high enough level of status to cause large levels of change.

    Unfortunately, being a good person doesn't change society, except for at the margins. Being a bad person, in contrast, can have a really, really negative impact. If you engineer a pandemic, or shoot up a public area, or assassinate the right person, you can cause quite a bit of harm over a large sphere of influence. Maybe you shoot JFK, but if you want to cause real long-term human suffering for thousands or even millions, shoot Lincoln or Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A motivated terrorist can kill quite a bit of people, and a small group proved in 2001 that with simple planning you can kill thousands of people and spark a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people. Nineteen terrorists, a hundred thousands deaths. There's not many nineteen person nonprofits that save hundreds of thousands of lives on their own.

    This is, of course, a massive problem. In a lot of ways, human society is built on trust. Trust that the overwhelming majority (99.999999% of people) are not evil, or at least not both smart and evil. The data seems to back this up for the most part, as I don't live in constant fear whenever I go to a concert or a public park. Sure, the fear may be there, but for the most part it is irrational. Still, I think this concept of asymmetric evil is a very understaffed problem. To prevent mass shootings there are advocates for gun control (which I support), but for increased anti-terrorism efforts we often see a decrease in human freedom. It's hard to be a serial killer in an authoritarian regime that tracks your every move, but that does not mean I'd trade aggregate human freedom for a world with a handful of less serial killers. Also, we saw with the Patriot Act that a lot of times these "safety" measures actually do more harm then good. 

    This is an important concern of mine, and I do think we could do a few things better. First, we in no way shape or form should trust sensitive technological information that could lead to mass deaths to the public domain. If the government finds out how to create a super virus, they should not open source that information. This seems obvious, but for some reason (looking at you Australian smallpox researchers), it has to be said. Next, we shouldn't trust any individual or small group of individuals with massive amounts of power. Any weapons of mass destruction plans should have the required redundancy attached, less we find ourselves in the world of Dr. Strangelove. Third, we should be very cognizant of how fragile society is. There are probably reasonably easy ways to trigger a societal collapse (financial meltdown, kill the right world leader and blame a different world power), so we should be extremely diligent when building institutions and planning for the worst case scenario. In the meantime, we should acknowledge that our "good person" impact will likely be small and continue to stay the course anyway.

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