From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 28 2002 - 00:57:40 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Eliezer writes
>
>>Saddam Hussein is a threat to the world chiefly because of how free and
>>open societies respond to him as an irritant. Ashcroft is a direct threat
>>to the Singularity; Saddam Hussein is an indirect threat who wouldn't be a
>>threat at all without the likes of Ashcroft.
>
> What would you guess the probability to be that
> Saddam Hussein has or will soon have an atomic
> bomb, and that such weapons as are at his
> disposal could end up being used against
> American cities? (Of course, I realize that
> you are an amateur as are all the rest of us
> on this list.)
If one American city gets nuked - as horrible as that would be - the
resulting physical damage would not directly stop the Singularity or, in
all probability, slow it down, unless it was a direct hit on Silicon
Valley. The tremendous psychic damage to the survivors would slow down
the Singularity and raise the existential risk level, and the chief reason
for that is people like Ashcroft.
Without an actual species-killer biovirus or a strategic nuclear arsenal,
Hussein is not a *direct* threat to the Singularity. He is a threat only
because of the response he can provoke from people like Ashcroft.
>>Let's take 9/11 as an example. Which did more damage,
>>the loss of the World Trade Center or the massive social
>>reaction to the loss of the World Trade Center?
>
> The former did more damage to people, the latter did
> more damange to the United States.
Which did more damage to the Singularity? It seems pretty obvious to me.
>>It isn't true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself,
>>but certainly fear is doing a lot more damage than anything else.
>
> Debating policy is one thing, debating how people
> should feel is another. I totally agree with you
> that people should not feel so *personally*
> threatened. The odds of being victimized by an
> airplane hijacking or dying in the first one or
> two attacks on the U.S. from WMD is not large.
>
> I think that people are feeling that their nation
> is attacked, and it's those people who support the
> administration and an effort to get Saddam Hussein
> first.
So what? Are they right, or wrong, in doing so?
Of course I understand the emotions. Giving those emotions right-of-way
in my cognition is an entirely separate issue.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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