Aug 11, 2023·edited Aug 11, 2023Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
The theme that struck me most about this long, engaging chapter was slavery.
"There was no such comradeship among this crew as he had found aboard Shadow when he first went to Roke. The crewmen of Andradean and Gontish ships are partners in the trade, working together for a common profit, whereas traders of Osskil use slaves and bondsmen or hire men to row... Since half this crew were bondsmen, forced to work, the ship’s officers were slavemasters, and harsh ones. They never laid their whips on the back of an oarsman who worked for pay or passage; but there will not be much friendliness in a crew of whom some are whipped and others are not" (ch. 6).
"'The Terrenon...will tell you that name.' 'And the price?' 'There is no price. I tell you it will obey you, serve you as your slave.'"
The second quote, about there being no price since using the Terrenon is as easy as slavery, was jarring for me, as it probably was for Ged as well.
Slavery obviously exacts a price from the enslaved person. It also comes at the price of the morals of the slaver and slaveholder. A more subtle price of moral injury, a disorientation or callousness, may be paid by anyone who witnesses or is complicit in and feels powerless against the injustices of slavery.
And lastly, as we see among the oarsmen, society pays a price for slavery, in the form of division.
I wonder to what degree slavery is responsible for the "dour" Osskilian culture. The Terrenon wants Ged, and later on his gebbeth, to "become a slave of the Stone." It has already enslaved Lord Benderesk and Serret. The man in grey also had "a queer beaten look about him, the look almost of a sick man, or a prisoner, or a slave" (ch. 6).
It's sometimes said: "Poverty is the natural state of the world. The real question is: Why is anyone rich?" I do not actually believe slavery is the natural state of the world. I think violating others' human rights so flagrantly is too unpleasant (for the human slaveholders) for slavery to become widespread, in the absence of strong systemic incentives that warp society into blessing it.
Still, I think it's worth asking, given that slavery happens in Osskil (and, it's been mentioned, in Kargad, the South Reach, and Pendor), why does it not happen in many other places in Earthsea such as the Andrades and Gont? We can't entirely blame the Terrenon, which does not suffer human pangs of empathy, because regions other than Osskil engage in slavery. Though perhaps the Terrenon has a very long arm of influence, or something similar to it is influencing each of the other slaving territories.
Why not slavery? Are the strong systemic incentives that have warped some Earthsea societies into blessing it absent from other societies, and why? Or is it sometimes that the non-slaving societies have a stronger cultural defense against it? Why are "pirates, slavetakers, [and] war-makers hated by all that dwelt in the southwest parts of Earthsea" (ch. 5), rather than joined?
I don't expect to find answers to these questions in this book, but it's worth asking them about the real world too. How can we shore up our cultural defenses against systemic incentives toward bad things?
I wish I had a real-life story about disarmament, but the best example I can think of comes from a sci-fi story (http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i31&article=_003). In it, a clan of aliens finds a colony of humans on their planet, and the colony is built right over top of the aliens’ unhatched and vulnerable children. So a stand-off ensues in which the leaders of both sides really want to find a peaceful resolution, but the competing interests and difficulty of establishing good faith between utterly different species makes it complicated. There’s actually a couple scenes where one character stands unarmed before another, using their vulnerability to ask the other to stand down. And it more or less works — not without injuries, but they do avoid an all-out war. It’s a compelling story.
More directly related to Earthsea, it’s encouraging that Ged isn’t tempted by the power of the Stone, even at a time when he thinks he’s lost all his own power. Earlier in life, he wasn’t properly afraid of either raw power or evil magic. He’s paid a high price to learn the lesson about not messing around with evil magic, but it does seem like he’s learned it.
Coordination can also help everyone decide to set down their popular but corrosive weapons at once.
Here's a list of useful but dangerous technologies we've collectively restricted in the past, compiled as a proof of concept for why it's worth attempting to use policy to slow down strong AI:
"If the apparent economic incentives are large, are technologies unavoidable?
"It doesn’t look like it to me. Here are a few technologies which I’d guess have substantial economic value, where research progress or uptake appears to be drastically slower than it could be, for reasons of concern about safety or ethics:
"1. Huge amounts of medical research, including really important medical research e.g. The FDA banned human trials of strep A vaccines from the 70s to the 2000s, in spite of 500,000 global deaths every year. A lot of people also died while covid vaccines went through all the proper trials.
"2. Nuclear energy
"3. Fracking
"4. Various genetics things: genetic modification of foods, gene drives, early recombinant DNA researchers famously organized a moratorium and then ongoing research guidelines including prohibition of certain experiments (see the Asilomar Conference)
"5. Nuclear, biological, and maybe chemical weapons (or maybe these just aren’t useful)
"6. Various human reproductive innovation: cloning of humans, genetic manipulation of humans (a notable example of an economically valuable technology that is to my knowledge barely pursued across different countries, without explicit coordination between those countries, even though it would make those countries more competitive. Someone used CRISPR on babies in China, but was imprisoned for it.)
"7. Recreational drug development
"8. Geoengineering
"9. Much of science about humans? I recently ran this survey, and was reminded how encumbering ethical rules are for even incredibly innocuous research. As far as I could tell the EU now makes it illegal to collect data in the EU unless you promise to delete the data from anywhere that it might have gotten to if the person who gave you the data wishes for that at some point. In all, dealing with this and IRB-related things added maybe more than half of the effort of the project. Plausibly I misunderstand the rules, but I doubt other researchers are radically better at figuring them out than I am.
"10. There are probably examples from fields considered distasteful or embarrassing to associate with, but it’s hard as an outsider to tell which fields are genuinely hopeless versus erroneously considered so. If there are economically valuable health interventions among those considered wooish, I imagine they would be much slower to be identified and pursued by scientists with good reputations than a similarly promising technology not marred in that way. Scientific research into intelligence is more clearly slowed by stigma, but it is less clear to me what the economically valuable upshot would be.
"11. (I think there are many other things that could be in this list, but I don’t have time to review them at the moment. This page [link] might collect more of them in future.)
"It seems to me that intentionally slowing down progress in technologies to give time for even probably-excessive caution is commonplace."
This line will stick with me for a very long time: "He had almost yielded [to the stone], but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul."
I think a lot about people who participate in mundane evil and how they make excuses for their participation. I'm reading Into the Bright Sunshine by Samuel Freedman at the moment, a wonderful biography of Hubert Humphrey focusing on his early life & career. It's as much a biography of the communities he lived in (South Dakota, Louisiana, Minneapolis) as it is his life, and is focused on how he got to be the voice at the 1948 Democratic convention speaking in favor of human rights and desegregation - a speech that directly led to the Dixiecrats walking out and the Democratic party becoming the party of civil rights.
The biography pays close attention to how racist and anti-semitic Minneapolis was and how people casually accepted it and excused it and defended it as the way things were and how they worked. There was also a significant and blatantly fascist faction in the city that took the quiet beliefs and amplified them, justified them and nurtured them. Yet even many people who looked upon the fascists with some horror (like my great grandparents) would also quietly believe there was a substantial truth in what they said rather than rejecting it wholesale - and they were incentivized to do so! These 'quiet' beliefs permeated workplaces, social clubs, etc., and if you didn't agree you might very well be shunned. But both loud and quiet - that's consent. And Humphrey again and again withheld his consent from this evil (and was criticized for being bombastic, irritable, radical, etc as a result!).
I see something similar in the consent to evil demonstrated by the "right" these days. I think you're spot on that Ohio Issue 1 was an assent to the Terrenon. I see similar dishonesty & bad policy present in the other "pro-life" legislation that has swept the South & West. On this though, I'm a cynic. I see a clear line between the fascists of early 20th century Minneapolis (and their German mentors) and the rise of fascism today - it's all the same stream, stemming from the same anti-pluralistic idea: the only good nation is a homogenous Christian one. The fear used to dehumanize the opposition back then was anti-semitism & interracial marriage. Now it's anti-semitism, abortion and trans rights. But it's the same story. I see the "right" implementing the classic 20th century fascist political communications playbook: dehumanize the opposition, consolidate power, then trigger a crisis, silence the majority.
The goal isn't to end abortion, it's to destroy our democracy. I put the odds of a constitutional crisis triggered by one of these abortion laws at 70/30. The defeat of Issue 1 is only a minor setback.
I appreciate that you proffer odds for your prediction!
Without any memories of US constitutional crises myself, I was skeptical of your prediction. So I looked around to see what others think.
The largest related prediction market I could find is this: 409 bettors on Metaculus predict, in aggregate, that there is a 56% chance a new amendment (on any topic) to the US Constitution will be ratified by 2050. That is higher than I would naively guess. Maybe you could make some (fake) money!
I also noticed a small bump in those odds around May-June 2022 when Roe v. Wade was overturned, but it smoothed out, suggesting the bettors don't think abortion is a major contributor to this question. The odds have remained remarkably constant since the market was opened in early 2021.
I'm so happy you're interested in going down this rabbit hole with me! The constitutional crisis I'm most worried about is a fracturing along state lines that can't be resolved (or can't be without delegitimizing the supreme court). For instance, a minor leaves Texas to get an abortion in Minnesota and then Texas seeks to prosecute the person who drove her (who is now in Minnesota). Minnesota law explicitly protects them, but what about Texas law? what if Trump decides to intervene? Or we wind up having drastically different laws leading to essentially two separate/contradictory regulatory frameworks, and companies fracture based on different laws in different states, one Walgreens Red, one Walgreens Blue? Not exactly a constitutional crisis, until we have a civil-war-esque irrevocable split.
Ah, in that second article there's a much broader range of things that qualify as a constitutional crisis than I was thinking of. It sounds like SCOTUS resolves some of those things regularly.
But I hear you that you worry about problems SCOTUS couldn't rule on while remaining popular/legitimate.
The theme that struck me most about this long, engaging chapter was slavery.
"There was no such comradeship among this crew as he had found aboard Shadow when he first went to Roke. The crewmen of Andradean and Gontish ships are partners in the trade, working together for a common profit, whereas traders of Osskil use slaves and bondsmen or hire men to row... Since half this crew were bondsmen, forced to work, the ship’s officers were slavemasters, and harsh ones. They never laid their whips on the back of an oarsman who worked for pay or passage; but there will not be much friendliness in a crew of whom some are whipped and others are not" (ch. 6).
"'The Terrenon...will tell you that name.' 'And the price?' 'There is no price. I tell you it will obey you, serve you as your slave.'"
The second quote, about there being no price since using the Terrenon is as easy as slavery, was jarring for me, as it probably was for Ged as well.
Slavery obviously exacts a price from the enslaved person. It also comes at the price of the morals of the slaver and slaveholder. A more subtle price of moral injury, a disorientation or callousness, may be paid by anyone who witnesses or is complicit in and feels powerless against the injustices of slavery.
And lastly, as we see among the oarsmen, society pays a price for slavery, in the form of division.
I wonder to what degree slavery is responsible for the "dour" Osskilian culture. The Terrenon wants Ged, and later on his gebbeth, to "become a slave of the Stone." It has already enslaved Lord Benderesk and Serret. The man in grey also had "a queer beaten look about him, the look almost of a sick man, or a prisoner, or a slave" (ch. 6).
It's sometimes said: "Poverty is the natural state of the world. The real question is: Why is anyone rich?" I do not actually believe slavery is the natural state of the world. I think violating others' human rights so flagrantly is too unpleasant (for the human slaveholders) for slavery to become widespread, in the absence of strong systemic incentives that warp society into blessing it.
Still, I think it's worth asking, given that slavery happens in Osskil (and, it's been mentioned, in Kargad, the South Reach, and Pendor), why does it not happen in many other places in Earthsea such as the Andrades and Gont? We can't entirely blame the Terrenon, which does not suffer human pangs of empathy, because regions other than Osskil engage in slavery. Though perhaps the Terrenon has a very long arm of influence, or something similar to it is influencing each of the other slaving territories.
Why not slavery? Are the strong systemic incentives that have warped some Earthsea societies into blessing it absent from other societies, and why? Or is it sometimes that the non-slaving societies have a stronger cultural defense against it? Why are "pirates, slavetakers, [and] war-makers hated by all that dwelt in the southwest parts of Earthsea" (ch. 5), rather than joined?
I don't expect to find answers to these questions in this book, but it's worth asking them about the real world too. How can we shore up our cultural defenses against systemic incentives toward bad things?
I wish I had a real-life story about disarmament, but the best example I can think of comes from a sci-fi story (http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i31&article=_003). In it, a clan of aliens finds a colony of humans on their planet, and the colony is built right over top of the aliens’ unhatched and vulnerable children. So a stand-off ensues in which the leaders of both sides really want to find a peaceful resolution, but the competing interests and difficulty of establishing good faith between utterly different species makes it complicated. There’s actually a couple scenes where one character stands unarmed before another, using their vulnerability to ask the other to stand down. And it more or less works — not without injuries, but they do avoid an all-out war. It’s a compelling story.
More directly related to Earthsea, it’s encouraging that Ged isn’t tempted by the power of the Stone, even at a time when he thinks he’s lost all his own power. Earlier in life, he wasn’t properly afraid of either raw power or evil magic. He’s paid a high price to learn the lesson about not messing around with evil magic, but it does seem like he’s learned it.
As far as *unilaterally* setting down a popular but corrosive weapon, Petrov Day is coming up on September 26!
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fr8MEigHzJeFQkctL/petrov-day-is-september-26
Coordination can also help everyone decide to set down their popular but corrosive weapons at once.
Here's a list of useful but dangerous technologies we've collectively restricted in the past, compiled as a proof of concept for why it's worth attempting to use policy to slow down strong AI:
"If the apparent economic incentives are large, are technologies unavoidable?
"It doesn’t look like it to me. Here are a few technologies which I’d guess have substantial economic value, where research progress or uptake appears to be drastically slower than it could be, for reasons of concern about safety or ethics:
"1. Huge amounts of medical research, including really important medical research e.g. The FDA banned human trials of strep A vaccines from the 70s to the 2000s, in spite of 500,000 global deaths every year. A lot of people also died while covid vaccines went through all the proper trials.
"2. Nuclear energy
"3. Fracking
"4. Various genetics things: genetic modification of foods, gene drives, early recombinant DNA researchers famously organized a moratorium and then ongoing research guidelines including prohibition of certain experiments (see the Asilomar Conference)
"5. Nuclear, biological, and maybe chemical weapons (or maybe these just aren’t useful)
"6. Various human reproductive innovation: cloning of humans, genetic manipulation of humans (a notable example of an economically valuable technology that is to my knowledge barely pursued across different countries, without explicit coordination between those countries, even though it would make those countries more competitive. Someone used CRISPR on babies in China, but was imprisoned for it.)
"7. Recreational drug development
"8. Geoengineering
"9. Much of science about humans? I recently ran this survey, and was reminded how encumbering ethical rules are for even incredibly innocuous research. As far as I could tell the EU now makes it illegal to collect data in the EU unless you promise to delete the data from anywhere that it might have gotten to if the person who gave you the data wishes for that at some point. In all, dealing with this and IRB-related things added maybe more than half of the effort of the project. Plausibly I misunderstand the rules, but I doubt other researchers are radically better at figuring them out than I am.
"10. There are probably examples from fields considered distasteful or embarrassing to associate with, but it’s hard as an outsider to tell which fields are genuinely hopeless versus erroneously considered so. If there are economically valuable health interventions among those considered wooish, I imagine they would be much slower to be identified and pursued by scientists with good reputations than a similarly promising technology not marred in that way. Scientific research into intelligence is more clearly slowed by stigma, but it is less clear to me what the economically valuable upshot would be.
"11. (I think there are many other things that could be in this list, but I don’t have time to review them at the moment. This page [link] might collect more of them in future.)
"It seems to me that intentionally slowing down progress in technologies to give time for even probably-excessive caution is commonplace."
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/lets-think-about-slowing-down-ai
This line will stick with me for a very long time: "He had almost yielded [to the stone], but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul."
I think a lot about people who participate in mundane evil and how they make excuses for their participation. I'm reading Into the Bright Sunshine by Samuel Freedman at the moment, a wonderful biography of Hubert Humphrey focusing on his early life & career. It's as much a biography of the communities he lived in (South Dakota, Louisiana, Minneapolis) as it is his life, and is focused on how he got to be the voice at the 1948 Democratic convention speaking in favor of human rights and desegregation - a speech that directly led to the Dixiecrats walking out and the Democratic party becoming the party of civil rights.
The biography pays close attention to how racist and anti-semitic Minneapolis was and how people casually accepted it and excused it and defended it as the way things were and how they worked. There was also a significant and blatantly fascist faction in the city that took the quiet beliefs and amplified them, justified them and nurtured them. Yet even many people who looked upon the fascists with some horror (like my great grandparents) would also quietly believe there was a substantial truth in what they said rather than rejecting it wholesale - and they were incentivized to do so! These 'quiet' beliefs permeated workplaces, social clubs, etc., and if you didn't agree you might very well be shunned. But both loud and quiet - that's consent. And Humphrey again and again withheld his consent from this evil (and was criticized for being bombastic, irritable, radical, etc as a result!).
I see something similar in the consent to evil demonstrated by the "right" these days. I think you're spot on that Ohio Issue 1 was an assent to the Terrenon. I see similar dishonesty & bad policy present in the other "pro-life" legislation that has swept the South & West. On this though, I'm a cynic. I see a clear line between the fascists of early 20th century Minneapolis (and their German mentors) and the rise of fascism today - it's all the same stream, stemming from the same anti-pluralistic idea: the only good nation is a homogenous Christian one. The fear used to dehumanize the opposition back then was anti-semitism & interracial marriage. Now it's anti-semitism, abortion and trans rights. But it's the same story. I see the "right" implementing the classic 20th century fascist political communications playbook: dehumanize the opposition, consolidate power, then trigger a crisis, silence the majority.
The goal isn't to end abortion, it's to destroy our democracy. I put the odds of a constitutional crisis triggered by one of these abortion laws at 70/30. The defeat of Issue 1 is only a minor setback.
I appreciate that you proffer odds for your prediction!
Without any memories of US constitutional crises myself, I was skeptical of your prediction. So I looked around to see what others think.
The largest related prediction market I could find is this: 409 bettors on Metaculus predict, in aggregate, that there is a 56% chance a new amendment (on any topic) to the US Constitution will be ratified by 2050. That is higher than I would naively guess. Maybe you could make some (fake) money!
I also noticed a small bump in those odds around May-June 2022 when Roe v. Wade was overturned, but it smoothed out, suggesting the bettors don't think abortion is a major contributor to this question. The odds have remained remarkably constant since the market was opened in early 2021.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3616/will-a-new-amendment-to-the-us-constitution-be-ratified-by-2050/
I'm so happy you're interested in going down this rabbit hole with me! The constitutional crisis I'm most worried about is a fracturing along state lines that can't be resolved (or can't be without delegitimizing the supreme court). For instance, a minor leaves Texas to get an abortion in Minnesota and then Texas seeks to prosecute the person who drove her (who is now in Minnesota). Minnesota law explicitly protects them, but what about Texas law? what if Trump decides to intervene? Or we wind up having drastically different laws leading to essentially two separate/contradictory regulatory frameworks, and companies fracture based on different laws in different states, one Walgreens Red, one Walgreens Blue? Not exactly a constitutional crisis, until we have a civil-war-esque irrevocable split.
Here are a couple further reads:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/20/federalism-constitution-state-laws-00106876
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/constitutional-crisis/
Ah, in that second article there's a much broader range of things that qualify as a constitutional crisis than I was thinking of. It sounds like SCOTUS resolves some of those things regularly.
But I hear you that you worry about problems SCOTUS couldn't rule on while remaining popular/legitimate.