Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Win Friends and Influence People Ch. 2: The Bombshell, published by gull on January 30, 2024 on LessWrong.

This is where we start to get into the darker territory of Dark Arts.

Sadly, much of elite culture is downstream of this chapter too; someone pointed out to me that awareness of this might be rare among silicon valley software engineers; but sadly, it's not rare among silicon valley venture capitalists, nor in other major cities like NYC, London, and DC.

If you're even a little bit familiar with the current situation with elite opinion on AI safety (e.g. silicon valley venture capitalists, politicians, etc), you'll look at this chapter and think "ah, this chapter was read by millions of elites starting in the 1930s, that actually explains a lot about the current situation with AI".

I said that the previous chapter describes why humans are the lemmings of the primate family, but this chapter goes way further. As a species, we hyperfocus on anticipating this dynamic whenever an important situation comes up, instead of trying to survive.

The sheer lemminghood of our kind reminds me of this tweet by Wayne Burkett:

This actually goes really deep to the core of quite a lot of stuff, far too deep to develop in a single tweet, but basically it's something like this: everything is so big and abstracted and there are 5000 regulations for everything, now, so people raised in this society really believe on some kind of deep level that there is no such thing as autonomy and that businesses have all kinds of obligations to the customers they serve way beyond just offering a product at an attractive price.

In And Out, on these view isn't just some people who hung a sign and made some burgers and offered them for sale. It's an organization as old as the Earth, one that always has been and always will be, and they have to make burgers, they just have to, because that's what it in and out does and always has done and always must do.

When it is revealed to people that this actually is not at all what the universe is like, it's jarring, confusing, upsetting.

Just as In N' Out branch locations are each allowed to stop existing in a flexible universe, our civilization is also allowed to collapse and leave everyone to rot, just like Rome did; even if the vast majority of people both here and in Rome don't really feel like something like that would happen within their lifetimes.

If you want an example of what truly pragmatic object-level discussion looks like, the best example I'm currently aware of is the AI Timelines debate between Cotra of OpenPhil, Kokotajlo of OpenAI, and Erdil of Epoch.

How to Win Friends and Influence People Chapter 2:

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

Remember, there is no other way.

Of course, you can make someone want to give you his watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. YOU can make your employees give you cooperation - until your back is turned - by threatening to fire them. You can make a child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. But these crude methods have sharply undesirable repercussions.

The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

What do you want?

Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.

John Dewey, one of America's most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important." Remember that phrase: "the desire to be important." It is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in this book.

What do you want? Not many things, but the few that you do wish, you crave with an insistence that will not be de...