Inbox: - Book: Knowledge Reality and Value strong rec Dwarkesh) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xKsIgv7tE - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xKsIgv7tE&t=3727s](Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress) ## Dwarkesh Patel interview Dwarkesh "best philosopher working today." Moral progress driven by a small fraction of society. Most people really don't care about morality. A few do. Government is just people, no reason they should be able to do things that you or I would find unacceptable if an individual did it. Bostrom VWH is strongest argument for keeping the state. Counter: But the state might be most likely to create the govt. Most wmds have been made by govt. ### Huemer on Vulnerable World Hypothesis vs Anarchism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xKsIgv7tE&t=3727s DP: The Nick Bostrom Vulnerable World Hypothesis: the idea is with every new technology you discover there's some small chance that it it allows us to destroy everything like it's a technology that allows one guy with 50 grand to destroy an entire city and in such a world you need strong government regulation in the sectors where this kind of technology is possible and without a government that regulates this kind of development it's almost guaranteed that something bad is going to happen MH: Yeah i mean in fact i think i had a blog post that was kind of about this right and um which you know which i i guess i view as the strongest argument for strong state um and yeah i i think it was titled you know something about the case for tyranny or something like that and then a bunch of people started arguing about whether i should have used the word tyranny there right like oh it's not necessarily tyrranical but it's just an argument that there needs to be somebody like monitoring individuals in a pretty close way right so like you know not not having much privacy and able to stop them right um so that might that might be the case if you're in a society in which one person has the ability to release a world destroying weapon. MH: right now uh right now that's not the case but yeah as technology advances that could definitely happen right because as technology advances like what just what what it means is that you can produce larger effects with smaller effort right DP: but then isn't the worry that by the time you get to that point you've already destroyed the state capacity to regulate that kind of stuff and so you might you might as well preserve the state and also for most of human history if there is going to be a human history that's going to be the state i mean if these weapons come around in 100 years and there's like a million years of humanity left then for most of it we're going to need a state anyways so what's the big benefit of doing anarcho-capitalism? MH: now yeah i mean you know that that might be right right like i mean like i think this is the strongest argument for keeping the state um but you know i think there is a like **there's an argument on the other side which is well actually the government is likely to be the ones who develop the deadly technology right** MH: so so far there's one technology that would plausibly be capable of killing everyone that's nuclear weapons and it was created by the government and has only ever been used by the government but in fact i think every weapon of mass destruction has been created by governors well most weapons have been created by governments right DP: but isn't that a bit like saying in like the year 1800 well everything good that's ever if you're an atheist an argument for atheism somebody could say well all the bridges and all the really cool things all the knowledge has been made by um religious people but you could respond well that's because there's been nobody else around right like if there's if there's not an anarcho-capitalist society where you're permitted to build nuclear weapons on your own then obviously everyone is religious then yeah all the good things are going to be created by religious people but not everyone is a government employee right you can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant they won't let you but if you can then you might MH: uh yeah so before the nuclear bomb was invented could could a private individual have invented it i don't know i mean after it was invented by the us government then the us government would stop anyone else from building them but before they you know before it had been discovered um i don't know why a private person couldn't have done it fair enough except that it's super expensive and you know no like it wasn't a person who had a good incentive to do it i guess but um anyway yeah so um you might think yeah but if we didn't have a government then maybe there would be more i don't know would there be more people who are trying to build weapons of mass destruction um i wouldn't think that i mean i mean i understand why governments are doing this right like they well there's this thing called war that happens between states and like and so they build all these standing armies and so they just they're constantly looking for bigger and more powerful weapons right and so like that's just like this constant um you know pro destruction destructive technology lobby right so i mean it just looks like that's the way to accelerate the time that we get the world destroying technology right DP: um okay but you know but um i'm not sure because um you might say yeah even though the government is going to create this technology like they're going to create the world's destroying technology sooner you might say but they're still safer right because like you know maybe private parties will develop that technology much later but when they do then someone is going to release it right unless there's a government to stop them MH: okay yeah but by the way like i'm i'm not sure that the government is going to stop it even if they're if they continue to exist right so like you know one of the things i'd be worried about now is genetic engineering of biological weapons so maybe somebody could engineer a virus that would be extremely dangerous and would cause the extinction of the species right like so you know that might happen just naturally but it's a lot more likely if somebody's trying to make it happen and that might just become cheaper and cheaper so you know you might think oh we need the government to stop that from happening although i'm not sure the government will actually stop it even if we have them right and and i think there's a fair chance the government will cause it because you know it might actually like hire people deliberately to create biological weapons so you know it's a little hard to say um you know **the alternative you might want is you might want sort of um distributed monitoring like people monitoring each other just regular people monitoring each other all the time rather than like a single central authority monitoring everyone else** yeah blockchain but for nuclear weapons i guess i mean i think is this neil stephenson's idea anyway i think i got this from some science fiction author right there should be everybody should be watching everyone else not one organization watching everyone else DP: is this from the book? MH: no, i just heard about this on the internet ## Gus Docker interview Effective inquirer movement in philosophy, analogous to effective altruism.