Abuse of the Infinite

Deutsch & MacAskill

In my pursuit of the saving graces of rationality’s better influence on American society, I have been pulled in several directions. As much as I find Stoicism to be quite proper for me, it competes with a great number of other principled frameworks. But my aim here is to be brief. There are two gentlemen who stand for the beauty and light of reason whom I simply believe extrapolate too much. These two influential folks are William MacAskill and David Deutsch.

I have read Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity. For some reason whenever I think about it, I am brought to mind of a particularly rough section of pavement near the entrance to an oil refinery. It was on this stretch of ugly road, listening to the audiobook, that I contemplated from my bicycle seat his use of the metaphor of the Infinity Hotel. In particular, he described a waste disposal system that, according to some mathematical proof by a cat named Cantor, could work something like this:

Infinity Hotel has a unique, self-sufficient waste-disposal system. Every day, the management first rearrange the guests in a way that ensures that all rooms are occupied. Then they make the following announcement. ‘Within the next minute, will all guests please bag their trash and give it to the guest in the next higher-numbered room. Should you receive a bag during that minute, then pass it on within the following half minute. Should you receive a bag during that half minute, pass it on within the following quarter minute, and so on.’ To comply, the guests have to work fast – but none of them has to work infinitely fast, or handle infinitely many bags. Each of them performs a finite number of actions, as per the hotel rules. After two minutes, all these trash-moving actions have ceased. So, two minutes after they begin, none of the guests has any trash left.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (pp. 172-173). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Immediately I’m thinking two things.

1. Everybody’s never going to hear this command at the same time and comply immediately without question.

2. Aren’t you just the bastard who wants to make the announcement?

I don’t know why I became such a skeptical ass at that particular moment. Maybe I can go back and look at my time on Strava and place it into some other context - like I’m in this abandoned industrial side of town listening to this stuff and trying to get up this hill, and the road sucks. Maybe I was just pissed that my understanding of infinity, despite my math competence, is too elementary to grasp the truth of his thought experiment. Maybe I don’t like to be the subject of thought experiments. Or quite possibly, the professor is thinking something others before him have thought and found much to their despair that the good in mankind is not asymptotic to infinity.

It is in retrospect that I found myself grumbling the same kinds of gut rumbles when I listened to Lex Fridman’s recent podcast starring William MacAskill who just so happens to be the world’s most popular Oxford philosopher. He is the originator and guiding light of the Effective Altruism movement. It truly wasn’t until he was put under the blinding lights of a flurry of questions from one of my favorite brainiacs, Tyler Cowen, that I felt a bit of a firmer floor underneath my feet.

I must say that I like Deutsch more than MacAskill, who seems entirely too glib despite his quite erudite sophistication. He behaves as if he already has figured all of the limits of human creation of good and has designed a [ponzi] scheme of altruism that will greatly reward our immediate investments in goodthink. If only we get 1% better every year. OK, I’ve heard that one before:

Economies of Seduction

I have sympathies with the young folks who are determined to work out problems with AI alignment, and I realize that I stereotype the typical Effective Altruism devotee, (IE disposable money, disposable time, disposable sex drive, no kids, indoor personality). If all of this consideration of what is the best good for mankind must be crowdsourced from Silicon Valley urbanites, I think we just get more YIMBY. So yeah, I’m sour. I think MacAskill is overly impressed by all of his improperly scaled charts of metrics like this one.

Human existence lives in Mediocristan. Despite the fact that wealth and twitter followers exist in Extremistan, applying the latter to the former does not make humanity an order of magnitude better. Human evil and goodness reside in a single standard deviation bell curve. That’s what I’m saying. Or let me put in another way and borrow from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Human morality is like that. Only 11 miles up and down. Not infinite. Not even close. Or to paraphrase Deutsch, we are only at the beginning of infinity. We always will be.

When trauma surgeons and cops think the infinite hotel metaphor is best for the garbage collection of mankind’s trash, I promise I’ll reconsider.