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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

> The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature.

> AI isn't the problem, we are.

I think when we frame it as human _nature_, then yes, _we_ look like the problem.

But what if we frame it as human _culture_? Then _we_ aren't the problem, but rather our _behaviors/beliefs/knowledge/etc_ are.

If we focus on the former, we might just be essentially screwed. If we focus on the latter, we might be able to change things that seem like nature but might be more nurture.

Maybe that's a better framing: the base problem is human nurture?

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I think this is an important distinction. Yes, humans have some inbuilt weaknesses and proclivities, but humans are not required to live in or develop systems in which those weaknesses and proclivities are constantly exploited for the benefit/power of a few others. Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response. We are currently in a biological runaway state with extraction, but it's not the only way humans have of behaving.

> Throughout human history, there have been practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response.

has this ever been widespread in society? I think such people have always been few and far between?

The example that comes to mind is post-WW2 Germany, but that was apparently a hard slog to change the minds of the German people. I really doubt any organization could do something similar presenting an opposing viewpoint to the companies (and their resources) behind and using AI

you are living in it.

The default state is to have extremely poor hard working people and extremely rich not working ones.

No one would have dared to dream of the luxury working people enjoy today. It took some doing! We use to sell people not to long ago. Kids in coal mines. The work week was 6-7 days 12-14 hours. One coin per day etc

The fight isn't over, the owner class won the last few rounds but there remains much to take for either side.

what does "practices of contemplation, recognition of interdependence, and ways of increasing our capacity for compassion and thoughful response." have to do with luxury? it sounds like you're arguing for the opposite? scrolling Instagram isn't the contemplation I have in mind.

Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero.

Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global (truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of complete and irrevocable reform in our behavior, beliefs and knowledge. At the very least, this implies simply killing off a huge number of human beings who for whatever reason stand in the way. This is not (just) a hypothesis -- some versions of this have been tried and tested. *

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

Arguably, human nature hasn't changed much in thousands of years. But there has been plenty of change in human culture/nurture on a much smaller timescale. E.g., look at a graph of world literacy rates since 1800. A lot of human culture is an attempt to productively subvert or attenuate the worse parts of human nature.

Now, maybe the changes in this case would need to happen even quicker than that, and as you point out there's a history of bad attempts to change cultures abruptly. But it's nowhere near correct to say that the difficulty is equal.

In general I think concepts like politics, art, community, etc try to capture certain discrete ways we are all nurtured. Like I am not even sure you're point here, there is nothing more totalitarian than reducing people to their "nature", it is arguably its precise conceit if it has one, that such a thing is possible. And the fact that totalitarianism is constantly accompanied by force and violence seems to be the biggest critique you can make of all sorts of "human nature" reductions.

And like what is even the alternative here? What's your freedom of belief worth when your essentially just a behaviorist anyway?

> I think when we frame it as human _nature_, then yes, _we_ look like the problem.
But what if we frame it as human _culture_? Then _we_ aren't the problem, but rather our _behaviors/beliefs/knowledge/etc_ are.
If we focus on the former, we might just be essentially screwed. If we focus on the latter, we might be able to change things that seem like nature but might be more nurture.

Maybe that's a better framing: the base problem is human nurture?

This is about the same as saying that leaders can get better outcomes by surrounding themselves with yes-men.

Just because asserting a different set of facts makes the predicted outcomes more desirable, doesn't mean that those alternate facts are better for making predictions with. What matters is how congruent they are to reality.

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