back to indexDaniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction | Lex Fridman Podcast #191
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The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the
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Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
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He is interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals
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and as collectives at all scales.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, NetSuite, Four Sigmatic, Magic Spoon, and
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a
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We took a long walk the day before our conversation.
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I really enjoyed meeting him, just on a basic human level.
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We talked about the world around us with words that carried hope for us individual ants actually
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contributing something of value to the colony.
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These conversations are the reasons I love human beings, our insatiable striving to lessen
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the suffering in the world.
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But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time
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and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends, and creating something that is far greater
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than the sum of our parts.
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I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few new friends
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and in random bars in my travels across this country.
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Where a conversation leaves me with a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation
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of this too short, too beautiful life.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
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If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history, just watching us, and we're
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tasked with summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say?
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What do you think they would write up in that summary?
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Like it has to be pretty short, less than a page.
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Like in Hitchhiker's Guide, there's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences.
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How would you summarize, sorry, how would the aliens summarize, do you think, all of
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human civilization?
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My first thoughts take more than a page.
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They'd probably distill it.
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Because if they watched, well, I mean, first, I have no idea if their senses are even attuned
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to similar stuff to what our senses are attuned to, or what the nature of their consciousness
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is like relative to ours.
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So let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to
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get here from wherever they are.
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That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment.
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And then if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria.
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They saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the antikytheria
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mechanism, and then that technology got lost.
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They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.
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So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things.
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There's a giant commotion that destroys a lot of things.
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Yeah, and it's usually self induced.
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They would have seen that.
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And so as they're looking at us now, as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the
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full globalization, anthropocene, exponential tech age, still making our decisions relatively
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similarly to how we did in the stone age as far as rivalry game theory type stuff, I think
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they would think that this is probably most likely one of the planets that is not going
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to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves up in the technological
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And if we are going to, we're going to need some major progress rapidly in the social
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technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical technologies so that we are safe
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vessels for the amount of power we're getting.
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Actually, Hitchhiker's Guide has an estimation about how much of a risk this particular thing
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poses to the rest of the galaxy.
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And I think, I forget what it was, I think it was medium or low.
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So their estimation was, would be that this species of ant like creatures is not going
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There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation.
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The fundamental nature of their behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed.
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They have not learned in any fundamental way how to control and properly incentivize or
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properly do the mechanism design of games to ensure long term survival.
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And then they move on to another planet.
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Do you think there is, in a slightly more serious question, do you think there's some
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number or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there?
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Yes, would be hard to think otherwise.
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I know, I think Bostrom had a new article not that long ago on why that might not be
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the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of end story on it.
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But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets just that we're aware of just galactically
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and also like when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same six
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primary atoms, I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary aspects of
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its energy metabolism, we get to think about that the building blocks might be more different.
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So the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different.
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It seems really unlikely not to mention interesting things that we've observed that are still
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As you had guests on your show discussing Tic Tac and all the ones that have visited.
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Well, let's dive right into that.
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What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of there being hundreds of thousands, probably
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millions of witnesses of UFOs of different kinds on Earth, most of which I presume are
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conjured up by the human mind through the perception system.
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Some number might be true, some number might be reflective of actual physical objects,
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whether it's you know, drones or testing military technology that secret or otherworldly technology.
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What do you make sense of all of that, because it's gained quite a bit of popularity recently.
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There's some sense in which that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of otherworldly
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creatures as a way to escape the dreariness of our of the human condition.
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But in another sense, it could be it really could be something truly exciting that science
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should turn its eye towards.
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So what do you where do you place it?
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Speaking of turning eye towards this is one of those super fascinating, actually super
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consequential possibly topics that I wish I had more time to study and just haven't
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allocated so I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as
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So what I'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment.
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While we know there are plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we
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can fully write off, we have other better explanations for them.
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What we're interested in is the ones that we don't have better explanations for and
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then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is, but holding it as unidentified
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and being being curious and earnest.
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I think the the tic tac one is quite interesting and made it in major media recently.
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But I don't know if you ever saw the Disclosure Project, a guy named Steven Greer organized
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a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial flight people who had direct observation and
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classified information disclosing it at a CNN briefing.
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And so you saw high ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots all describing things that
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they saw on radar with their own eyes or cameras, and also describing some phenomena that had
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some consistency across different people.
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And I find this interesting enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it.
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And specifically, we can ask the question, how much of it is natural phenomena, ball
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lightning or something like that?
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And this is why I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who
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are trained in being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to
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I think the thing then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft?
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Is it some kind of, you know, human craft?
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The interesting thing that a number of them describe is something that's kind of like
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right angles at speed, or not right angles, acute angles at speed, but something that
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looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes sense for us.
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I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in really deep underground
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Now one could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram?
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Or would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it?
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And so I don't know.
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I think there's enough, I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated psyop, is it as
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interesting and ridiculous in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary
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So it's up there on the interesting topics.
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To me there's, if it is at all alien technology, it is the dumbest version of alien technology.
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It's so far away, it's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien technology.
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These are like crappy drones that just floated or even like space to the level of like space
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junk because it is so close to our human technology.
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We talk about it moves in ways that's unlike what we understand about physics, but it still
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has very similar kind of geometric notions and something that we humans can perceive
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with our eyes, all those kinds of things.
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I feel like alien technology most likely would be something that we would not be able to
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Not because they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be beyond the
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cognitive capabilities of us humans.
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Just as you were saying, as per your answer for alien summarizing Earth, the starting
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assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar cognitive capabilities,
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and that very well may not be the case.
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Let me ask you about staying in aliens for just a little longer because I think it's
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a good transition in talking about governments and human societies.
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Do you think if a US government or any government was in possession of an alien spacecraft or
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of information related to alien spacecraft, they would have the capacity, structurally
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would they have the processes, would they be able to communicate that to the public
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effectively or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing with it, both to try
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to preserve military secrets, but also because of the incompetence that's inherent to bureaucracies
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Well, we can certainly see when certain things become declassified 25 or 50 years later that
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there were things that the public might have wanted to know that were kept secret for a
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very long time for reasons of at least supposedly national security, which is also a nice source
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of plausible deniability for people covering their ass for doing things that would be problematic
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and other purposes.
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There are, there's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was
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recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using, I believe, electron microscopy
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and a couple other methods and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was
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something we didn't currently have the ability to do, was not naturally occurring.
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So there, I've heard some things and again, like I said, I'm not going to stand behind
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any of these because I haven't done the level of study to have high confidence.
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I think what you said also about would it be super low tech alien craft, like would
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they necessarily move their atoms around in space or might they do something more interesting
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than that, might they be able to have a different relationship to the concept of space or information
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or consciousness or one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate
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and turn in a way that looks non inertial, but also disappear.
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So there's a question as to like the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and it
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could be possible to, some people run a hypothesis that they create intentional amounts of exposure
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as an invitation of a particular kind, who knows, interesting field.
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We tend to assume like SETI that's listening out for aliens out there, I've just been
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recently reading more and more about gravitational waves and you have orbiting black holes that
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orbit each other, they generate ripples in space time on my, for fun at night when I
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lay in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they, not the
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low magnitude they are when they reach earth, but get closer to the black holes because
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it will basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time.
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So it's actually ripples through space time that they generate.
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Why is it that you couldn't use that, it travels the speed of light, travels at a speed which
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is a very weird thing to say when you're morphing space time, you could argue it's faster than
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the speed of light.
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So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black holes and
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to orbit them, to force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples in space
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time, whatever the hell that means, somehow combined with wormholes.
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So if you're able to communicate through, like we don't think of gravitational waves
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as something you can communicate with because the radio will have to be a very large size
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and very dense, but perhaps that's it, perhaps that's one way to communicate, it's a very
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And that would explain, like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics
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that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale.
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I think you just jumped up the Kardashev scale so far that you're not just harnessing the
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power of a star, but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes.
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That's way above my physics pay grade to think about including even non rotating black hole
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versions of transwarp travel.
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I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that, I think he has better ideas
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My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability
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to get to other habitable planets in time.
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And even more than that, in the list of possible solutions of how to improve human civilization,
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orbiting black holes is not on the first page for you.
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Not on the first page.
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I bet you did not expect us to start this conversation here, but I'm glad the places
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I am excited on a much smaller scale of Mars, Europa, Titan, Venus, potentially having very
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like bacteria like life forms, just on a small human level, it's a little bit scary, but
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mostly really exciting that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans
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all around us, teaming, having little societies and whether there's properties about that
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kind of life that's somehow different than ours.
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I don't know what would be more exciting if those colonies of single cell type organisms,
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what would be more exciting if they're different or they're the same?
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If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe, there's life forms like
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us, something like us everywhere.
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If they're different, that's also really exciting because there's life forms everywhere that
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That's a little bit scary.
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I don't know what's scarier actually.
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I think both scary and exciting no matter what, right?
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The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us
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to open our aperture on what life and consciousness and self replicating possibilities could look
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The question on are they different or the same, obviously there's lots of life here
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that is the same in some ways and different in other ways.
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When you take the thing that we call an invasive species is something that's still pretty the
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same hydrocarbon based thing, but co evolved with co selective pressures in a certain environment,
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we move it to another environment, it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because
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it's just different enough that it messes up the self stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem.
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So the question of are they, would they be different in ways where we could still figure
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out a way to inhabit a biosphere together or fundamentally not fundamentally the nature
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of how they operate and the nature of how we operate would be incommensurable is a deep
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Well, we offline talked about mimetic theory, right?
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It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even, we can coexist on
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different planes, it seems like a good thing.
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If we're close enough together to where we'd be competing, then it's, you're getting into
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the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things to where we would, one
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of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without even accidentally.
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If we just had a self replicating single celled kind of creature that happened to not work
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well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because he either output
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something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated
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faster and mutated faster, that it wouldn't be a mimetic theory, conflict theory kind
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It would just be a Von Neumann machine, a self replicating machine that was fundamentally
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incompatible with these kinds of self replicating systems with faster OODA loops.
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For one final time, putting your alien God hat on and you look at human civilization,
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do you think about the 7.8 billion people on earth as individual little creatures, individual
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little organisms, or do you think of us as one organism with a collective intelligence?
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What's the proper framework through which to analyze it again as an alien?
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So that I know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way before
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the industrial revolution, before the agricultural revolution when there were half a billion
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people and no telecommunications connecting them?
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I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about your conclusions.
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It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time, but I was
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nevertheless asked it the same way.
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Well, let's go back further and smaller than rather than just a single human or the entire
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human species, let's look at a relatively isolated tribe.
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In the relatively isolated, probably sub Dunbar number, sub 150 people tribe, do I look at
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that as one entity where evolution is selecting for based on group selection or do I think
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of it as 150 individuals that are interacting in some way?
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Well, could those individuals exist without the group?
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The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection and individual
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humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever aren't what was
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And so I think the or is the wrong frame.
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I think it's individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of.
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They're also dependent upon and being affected by the group that they're part of.
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And so this now starts to get deep into political theories also, which is theories that orient
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towards the collective at different scales, whether a tribal scale or an empire or a nation
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state or something, and ones that orient towards the individual liberalism and stuff like that.
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And I think there's very obvious failure modes on both sides.
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And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them.
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The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how
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to have a virtuous process between those.
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So a good social system would be one where the organism of the individual and the organism
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of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each other.
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So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned.
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But there is nevertheless an individual.
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They're not, it's a matter of degrees, I suppose, but what defines a human more, the social
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network within which they've been brought up, through which they've developed their
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intelligence or is it their own sovereign individual self?
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What's your intuition of how much, not just for evolutionary survival, but as intellectual
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beings, how much do we need others for our development?
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I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of sapient
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I think the vast majority of sapient history is tribal, like depending upon your early
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human model, 200,000 or 300,000 years of homo sapiens and little tribes, where they depended
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upon that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal.
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I think they, and our whole evolutionary genetic history is in that environment and the amount
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of time we've been out of it is relatively so tiny.
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And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more and the big kind
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of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money, to be
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able to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone.
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It's almost like disintermediating our sense of need, even though you're in my ability
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to talk to each other using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions
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of people over six continents to be able to run the supply chains that made all the stuff
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that we depend on, but we don't notice that we depend upon them.
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They all seem fungible.
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If you take a baby, obviously that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom.
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Are we dependent upon each other, right, without two parents at minimum and they depended upon
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But if we take that baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies.
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So if we let it grow up for a little while, the minimum amount of time where it starts
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to have some autonomy and then we put it out in the wild, and this has happened a few times,
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it doesn't learn language and it doesn't learn the small motor articulation that we learn.
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It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up having that is socialized.
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So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us.
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Is it possible that it affects basically 99.9 or maybe the whole thing?
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The whole thing is the connection between us humans and that we're no better than apes
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without our human connections.
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Because thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society
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and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental.
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I just have to object to the no better than apes, because better here I think you mean
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a specific thing, which means have capacities that are fundamentally different than.
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I think apes also depend upon troops.
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And I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends
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up having heaps of problems.
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We can come back to it.
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But when we say what is unique about Homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals
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we currently inhabit the biosphere with, and I'm saying it that way because there were
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other early hominids that had some of these capacities, we believe.
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Our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of the results
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of a certain type of capacity for abstraction.
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And other animals will use tools, but they don't evolve the tools they use.
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They keep using the same types of tools that they basically can find.
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So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to, and it'll even notice
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that a sharper rock will cut it better.
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And experientially it'll use the sharper rock.
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And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the
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But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is sharper
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What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to invent a sharper thing?
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That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract representation, which
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makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways.
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So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection
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of what we are as a species.
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I wonder if that coordination, that connection is actually the thing that gives birth to
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consciousness, that gives birth to, well, let's start with self awareness.
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More like theory of mind.
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You know, I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other mammals that have
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a very crude theory of mind.
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Maybe dogs, something like that.
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But actually dogs probably has to do with that they co evolved with humans.
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See it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the
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way we think about it.
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Is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness.
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I have an inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures.
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That doesn't come with the hardware and the software in the beginning.
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That's learned as an effective tool for communication almost.
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I think we think that consciousness is fundamental.
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And maybe it's not, there's a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion
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of consciousness is consciousness.
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That it is just a facade we use to help us construct theories of mind.
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You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being.
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And that experience, you want to richly experience it as an individual person so that I could
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empathize with your experience.
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I find that notion compelling.
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Mostly because it allows you to then create robots that become conscious not by being
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quote unquote conscious but by just learning to fake it till they make it.
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Present a facade of consciousness with the task of making that facade very convincing
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to us humans and thereby it will become conscious.
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Have a sense that in some way that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing
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Is there some element of that that you find convincing?
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This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the
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We went from aliens to consciousness.
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This is not the trajectory I was expecting nor you, but let us walk a while.
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We can walk a while and I don't think we will do it justice.
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So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self reflective awareness?
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What do we mean by awareness, qualia, theory of mind?
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There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly different things and subjectivity,
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I don't remember exactly the quote, but I remember when reading when Sam Harris wrote
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the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it and then there was some writing back and
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forth between the two because normally they're on the same side of kind of arguing for critical
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thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy of science against supernatural ideas.
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And here Dennett believed there is something like free will.
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He is a determinist compatibilist, but no consciousness and a radical element of this.
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And Sam was saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no free will.
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And that's like the most fundamental kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on, but
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neither of them could say it was because the other one didn't understand the philosophy
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of science or logical fallacies.
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And they kind of spoke past each other and at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said
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something that I thought was quite insightful, which was to the effect of it seems, because
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they weren't making any progress in shared understanding, it seems that we simply have
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different intuitions about this.
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And what you could see was that what the words meant, right at the level of symbol grounding,
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might be quite different.
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One of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that what is being
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referenced and then also different associations of what the words mean.
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This is why when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Peirce said the first philosophy
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has to be semiotics, because if you don't get semiotics right, we end up importing different
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ideas and bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using.
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And then it's very hard to do epistemology or ontology together.
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So, I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're going to get very far is I think we
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would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words and fundamental concepts.
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Well, and also allowing our minds to drift together for a time so that our definitions
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of these terms align.
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I think there's some, there's a beauty that some people enjoy with Sam that he is quite
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stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that definition.
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So in his mind, he can sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by a term
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like free will and consciousness.
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And you're right, he's very specific in fascinating ways that not only does he think that free
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will is an illusion, he thinks he's able, not thinks, he says he's able to just remove
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himself from the experience of free will and just be like for minutes at a time, hours
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at a time, like really experience as if he has no free will, like he's a leaf flowing
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And given that, he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental.
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So here's this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating and yet has no ability
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to control and make any decisions for itself.
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It's only a, the decisions have all been made.
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There's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem.
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So that's a particular kind of meditative experience and the people in the Vedantic
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tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences
link |
and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different.
link |
There are other types of phenomenal experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure
link |
agency and, you know, like the Catholic theologian but evolutionary theorist Teilhard de Chardin
link |
describes this and that rather than a creator agent God in the beginning, there's a creative
link |
impulse or a creative process and he would go into a type of meditation that identified
link |
as the pure essence of that kind of creative process.
link |
And I think the types of experience we've had and then one, the types of experience
link |
we've had make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding.
link |
The other thing is the types of experiences we have can't not be interpreted through
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our existing interpretive frames and most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown
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even to us, some of them.
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And so this is a tricky, this is a tricky topic.
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So I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it but I want to come back to
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what the impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness and how does
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it relate to us as social beings and how does it relate to the possibility of consciousness
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Right, you're keeping us on track which is, which is wonderful, you're a wonderful hiking
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Let's go back to the initial impulse of what is consciousness and how does the social impulse
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connect to consciousness?
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Is consciousness a consequence of that social connection?
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I'm going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly like it's a long
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hard thing to argue and we can totally do it another time if you want.
link |
I don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks.
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Obviously a lot of people do, obviously the philosophy of science orients towards that
link |
in not absolutely but largely.
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I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first person, of qualia as experience,
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sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology, but the felt sense, not the we say emotion
link |
and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern.
link |
But all of the physical stuff, the third person stuff has position and momentum and charge
link |
and stuff like that that is measurable, repeatable.
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I think of the nature of first person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to
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each other, not reducible to each other.
link |
They're different kinds of stuff.
link |
So I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite used to thinking about from
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subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on.
link |
I think about a similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from
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the way Whitehead talked about kind of prehension or proto qualia in earlier phases of self
link |
organization into higher orders of it and that there's correspondence, but that neither
link |
like the idealists do we reduce third person to first person, which is what idealists do,
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or neither like the physicalists do we reduce first person to third person.
link |
Obviously Bohm talked about an implicate order that was deeper than and gave rise to the
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explicate order of both.
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Nagel talks about something like that.
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I have a slightly different sense of that, but again, I'll just kind of not argue how
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that occurs for a moment and say, so rather than say, does consciousness emerge from,
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I'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with.
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So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increased complexity
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within the nature of first person and third person co evolving.
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Do I think that it seems relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper
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phenomenology, more complex, where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion to social
link |
awareness to abstract cognition to self reflexive abstract cognition?
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But I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness.
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I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to
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increased complexity and the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal.
link |
We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case.
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So would I say that obviously the sapient brain is pretty unique and a single sapient
link |
now has that, right?
link |
Even if it took sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain.
link |
So the group made it now that brain is there.
link |
Now if I take that single person with that brain out of the group and try to raise them
link |
in a box, they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain.
link |
But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship can have
link |
interesting things emerge.
link |
So do I think that the human biology, types of human consciousness and types of social
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interaction all co emerged and co evolved?
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As a small aside, as you're talking about the biology, let me comment that I spent,
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this is what I do, this is what I do with my life.
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This is why I will never accomplish anything is I spent much of the morning trying to do
link |
research on how many computations the brain performs and how much energy it uses versus
link |
the state of the art CPUs and GPUs arriving at about 20 quadrillion.
link |
So that's two to the 10 to the 16 computations.
link |
So synaptic firings per second that the brain does.
link |
And that's about a million times faster than the let's say the 20 thread state of the
link |
arts Intel CPU, the 10th generation.
link |
And then there's similar calculation for the GPU and all ended up also trying to compute
link |
that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about.
link |
And then what does that mean in terms of calories per day, kilocalories?
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That's about for an average human brain, that's 250 to 300 calories a day.
link |
And so it ended up being a calculation where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations
link |
that are fueled by something like depending on your diet, three bananas.
link |
So three bananas results in a computation that's about a million times more powerful
link |
than the current state of the art computers.
link |
Now, let's take that one step further.
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There's some assumptions built in there.
link |
The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation.
link |
Two, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than
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synaptic firings that we have to factor.
link |
So I'm forgetting his name right now.
link |
There's a very famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of
link |
the pioneering work on glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge
link |
amount of the thinking, not just neurons.
link |
And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and what consciousness
link |
You look at Damasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what we would consider consciousness
link |
or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely, happening in endocrine
link |
process involving lots of other cells and signal communication.
link |
You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show and even though the Penrose
link |
Hammerhoff conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that that might be
link |
the case where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum
link |
computation of microtubules?
link |
I'm not arguing for any of those.
link |
I'm arguing that we don't know how big the unknown unknown set is.
link |
Well, at the very least, this has become like an infomercial for the human brain.
link |
At the very, but wait, there's more.
link |
At the very least, the three bananas buys you a million times.
link |
At the very least.
link |
At the very least.
link |
That's impressive.
link |
And then you could have, and then the synaptic firings we're referring to is strictly the
link |
electrical signals.
link |
That could be the mechanical transmission of information, there's chemical transmission
link |
of information, there's all kinds of other stuff going on.
link |
And then there's memory that's built in, that's also all tied in.
link |
Not to mention, which I'm learning more and more about, it's not just about the neurons.
link |
It's also about the immune system that's somehow helping with the computation.
link |
So the entirety and the entire body is helping with the computation.
link |
So the three bananas.
link |
It could buy you a lot.
link |
It could buy you a lot.
link |
But on the topic of sort of the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness, I
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think few things are as beautiful and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain,
link |
just looking at systems where simple rules create incredible complexity.
link |
Incredible complexity emerges.
link |
So one of the simplest things to do that with is cellular automata.
link |
And there's, I don't know what it is, and maybe you can speak to it, we will certainly
link |
talk about the implications of this, but there's so few things that are as awe inspiring to
link |
me as knowing the rules of a system and not being able to predict what the heck it looks
link |
And it creates incredibly beautiful complexity that when zoomed out on, looks like there's
link |
actual organisms doing things that operate on a scale much higher than the underlying
link |
So with cellular automata, that's cells that are born and die.
link |
Born and die and they only know about each other's neighbors.
link |
And there's simple rules that govern that interaction of birth and death.
link |
And then they create, at scale, organisms that look like they take up hundreds or thousands
link |
of cells and they're moving, they're moving around, they're communicating, they're sending
link |
signals to each other.
link |
And you forget at moments at a time before you remember that the simple rules on cells
link |
is all that it took to create that.
link |
It's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system that generalizes
link |
the behavior of the large organisms.
link |
We can only come up, we can only hope to come up with the thing, the fundamental physics
link |
or the fundamental rules of that system, I suppose.
link |
It's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems.
link |
It seems like we can't really in a nice way, like economics tries to do, to predict how
link |
this whole thing will unroll.
link |
But it's beautiful because of how simple it is underneath it all.
link |
So what do you make of the emergence of complexity from simple rules?
link |
What the hell is that about?
link |
Well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration, can be computer
link |
It's a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really amazing types of
link |
And the whole field of complexity science and some of the subdisciplines like Stigma
link |
G are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone signal do ant colonies
link |
do this amazing thing where what you might describe as the organizational or computational
link |
capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual ant is doing.
link |
I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automata as I would
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Unfortunately, in terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't, like ET's more
link |
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not read the
link |
whole thing or his newer work since.
link |
But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of emergent phenomena that can come from cellular
link |
automata and that one of them is kind of interesting and looks a lot like complexity rather than
link |
just chaos or homogeneity or self termination or whatever.
link |
I think this is very interesting.
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It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating on a similarly small set of rules
link |
and or that human consciousness is.
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I'm not that reductionist oriented.
link |
So if you look at, say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the cofounders, Stuart Kaufman, his
link |
work, you should really get him on your show.
link |
So a lot of the questions that you like, one of Kaufman's more recent books after investigations
link |
and some of the real fundamental stuff was called Reinventing the Sacred and it had to
link |
do with some of these exact questions in kind of non reductionist approach, but that is
link |
not just silly hippie ism.
link |
And he was very interested in highly non ergodic systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior
link |
over a small period of time and predict what the behavior of subsets over a longer period
link |
And then going further, someone who spent some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind
link |
of made a whole new field that you should have on, Dave Snowden, who some people call
link |
the father of anthro complexity or what is the complexity unique to humans.
link |
And he says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't
link |
Like we don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using Stigma
link |
G like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really
link |
doesn't work for trying to make sense of the Sistine Chapel and Picasso and general relativity
link |
creation and stuff like that.
link |
And it's because the termites are not doing abstraction, forecasting deep into the future
link |
and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in
link |
the moment and evolutionary code from history.
link |
That's really different, right?
link |
Like making choices now that can factor deep modeling of the future.
link |
And with humans, our uniqueness one to the next in terms of response to similar stimuli
link |
is much higher than it is with a termite.
link |
One of the interesting things there is that their uniqueness is extremely low.
link |
They're basically fungible within a class, right?
link |
There's different classes, but within a class they're basically fungible and their system
link |
uses that very high numbers and lots of loss, right?
link |
Lots of death and loss.
link |
But do you think the termite feels that way?
link |
Don't, don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness?
link |
Perhaps it doesn't, it just, isn't there some sense in which this emergence just creates
link |
different higher and higher levels of abstraction where every, at every layer, each organism
link |
That we're all equally dumb but at different scales?
link |
No, I think uniqueness is evolving.
link |
I think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other than cells of the same type
link |
And I think that cells are more similar to each other than humans are.
link |
And I think that highly K selected species are more unique than R selected species.
link |
So they're different evolutionary processes.
link |
The R selected species where you have a whole, a lot of death and very high birth rates,
link |
and not looking for as much individuality within or individual possible expression to
link |
cover the evolutionary search space within an individual.
link |
You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game.
link |
So yeah, I would say there's probably more difference between one orca and the next than
link |
there is between one Cape buffalo and the next.
link |
Given that, it would be interesting to get your thoughts about memetic theory where we're
link |
imitating each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness.
link |
How much truth is there to that?
link |
How compelling is this worldview to you of Girardian memetic theory of desire where maybe
link |
you can explain it from your perspective, but it seems like imitating each other is
link |
the fundamental property of the behavior of human civilization.
link |
Well, imitation is not unique to humans, right?
link |
So a certain amount of learning through observing is not unique to humans.
link |
Humans do more of it.
link |
It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a moment.
link |
Monkeys can learn new behaviors, new...
link |
We've even seen teaching an ape sign language and then the ape teaching other apes sign
link |
So that's a kind of mimesis, right?
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Kind of learning through imitation.
link |
And that needs to happen if they need to learn or develop capacities that are not just coded
link |
by their genetics, right?
link |
So within the same genome, they're learning new things based on the environment.
link |
And so based on someone else learn something first and so let's pick it up.
link |
How much a creature is the result of just its genetic programming and how much it's
link |
learning is a very interesting question.
link |
And I think this is a place where humans really show up radically different than everything
link |
And you can see it in the neoteny, how long we're basically fetal.
link |
That the closest ancestors to us, if we look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's
link |
fur while she moves around day one.
link |
And obviously we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes.
link |
The fact that it takes a human a year to be walking and it takes a horse 20 minutes and
link |
you say how many multiples of 20 minutes go into a year, like that's a long period of
link |
helplessness that wouldn't work for a horse, right?
link |
Like they or anything else.
link |
And not only could we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before we
link |
can move our head volitionally.
link |
So it's like why are we embryonic for so long?
link |
Obviously it's like it's still fetal on the outside, had to be because couldn't keep growing
link |
inside and actually ever get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright.
link |
So here's a place where there's a coevolution of the pattern of humans, specifically here
link |
our neoteny and what that portends to learning with our being tool making and environment
link |
modifying creatures, which is because we have the abstraction to make tools, we change our
link |
environments more than other creatures change their environments.
link |
The next most environment modifying creature to us is like a beaver.
link |
And then we're in LA, you fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid going
link |
on forever in all directions.
link |
And we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the surface of the earth is changing
link |
more from human activity than geological activity and then beavers and you're like, okay, wow,
link |
we're really in a class of our own in terms of environment modifying.
link |
So as soon as we started tool making, we were able to change our environments much more
link |
We could put on clothes and go to a cold place.
link |
And this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment.
link |
We functioned like apex predators, polar bear can't leave the Arctic and the lion can't
link |
leave the Savannah and an orca can't leave the ocean.
link |
And we went and became apex predators in all those environments because of our tool creation
link |
We could become better predators than them adapted to the environment or at least with
link |
our tools adapted to the environment.
link |
So in every aspect towards any organism in any environment, we're incredibly good at
link |
becoming apex predators.
link |
And nothing else can do that kind of thing.
link |
There is no other apex predator that, you see the other apex predator is only getting
link |
better at being a predator through evolutionary process that's super slow and that super slow
link |
process creates co selective process with their environment.
link |
So as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the slow prey, the genes of
link |
the fast prey and breed and the prey becomes faster.
link |
And so there's this kind of balancing and we in because of our tool making, we increased
link |
our predatory capacity faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it.
link |
As a result, we start outstripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools
link |
and going and becoming apex predator everywhere.
link |
This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories because we're not an apex predator.
link |
We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that.
link |
Like just for an example, the top apex predator in the world, an orca.
link |
An orca can eat one big fish at a time, like one tuna, and it'll miss most of the time
link |
And we can put a mile long drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school
link |
We can deplete the entire oceans of them.
link |
That's not an orca.
link |
That's not an apex predator.
link |
And that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures.
link |
We can extinct species.
link |
We can devastate whole ecosystems.
link |
We can make built worlds that have no natural things that are just human built worlds.
link |
We can build new types of natural creatures, synthetic life.
link |
So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now, but we're
link |
still behaving as apex predators and little gods that behave as apex predators causes
link |
a problem kind of core to my assessment of the world.
link |
So what does it mean to be a predator?
link |
So a predator is somebody that effectively can mine the resources from a place.
link |
So for their survival, or is it also just purely like higher level objectives of violence
link |
and what is, can predators be predators towards the same, each other towards the same species?
link |
Like are we using the word predator sort of generally, which then connects to conflict
link |
and military conflict, violent conflict in this base of human species.
link |
Obviously we can say that plants are mining the resources of their environment in a particular
link |
way, using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and nitrogen and
link |
carbon out of the air and like that.
link |
And we can say herbivores are being able to mine and concentrate that.
link |
So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator.
link |
Predator is generally being defined as mining other animals, right?
link |
We don't consider herbivores predators, but animal, which requires some type of violence
link |
capacity because animals move, plants don't move.
link |
So it requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get away.
link |
We'll go back to the Gerard thing and then we'll come back here.
link |
Why are we neotenous?
link |
Why are we embryonic for so long?
link |
Because are we, did we just move from the Savannah to the Arctic and we need to learn
link |
If we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that.
link |
Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain
link |
or are we texting?
link |
What is the adaptive behavior?
link |
Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago are doing pretty much the same stuff.
link |
And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then change our environment so quickly
link |
and other animals are largely the result of their environment, but we're environment modifying
link |
so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we can learn the environment
link |
we're in, learn the language, right?
link |
Which is going to be very important to learn the tool making.
link |
And so we have a very long period of relative helplessness because we aren't coded how to
link |
behave yet because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful
link |
to that particular time.
link |
So our mimesis is not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is really unique.
link |
And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right?
link |
Is because we are less just the result of the genetics and that means the kind of learning
link |
through history that they got coded in genetics and more the result of, it's almost like our
link |
hardware selected for software, right?
link |
Like if evolution is kind of doing these, think of as a hardware selection, I have problems
link |
with computer metaphors for biology, but I'll use this one here, that we have not had hardware
link |
changes since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different.
link |
And that's all changes in software, right?
link |
Changes on the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're doing with these brains and minds
link |
and bodies and social groups and like that.
link |
And so, now, Gerard specifically was looking at when we watch other people talking, so
link |
we learn language, you and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today or it would
link |
take a lot of work, we'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff, but a baby learns
link |
it instantly without anyone even really trying to teach it just through mimesis.
link |
So it's a powerful thing.
link |
They're obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their
link |
attention is allocated to that.
link |
But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of stuff
link |
One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want.
link |
And they learn what to want.
link |
They learn desire by watching what other people want.
link |
And so, intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want and if we can't have
link |
what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict.
link |
So the mimesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict and that then the conflict
link |
energy within a group of people will build over time.
link |
This is a very, very crude interpretation of the theory.
link |
Can we just pause on that?
link |
For people who are not familiar and for me who hasn't, I'm loosely familiar but haven't
link |
internalized it, but every time I think about it, it's a very compelling view of the world.
link |
Whether it's true or not, it's quite, it's like when you take everything Freud says as
link |
truth, it's a very interesting way to think about the world and in the same way, thinking
link |
about the mimetic theory of desire that everything we want is imitation of other people's wants.
link |
We don't have any original wants.
link |
We're constantly imitating others.
link |
And so, and not just others, but others we're exposed to.
link |
So there's these little local pockets, however defined local, of people imitating each other.
link |
And one that's super empowering because then you can pick which group you can join.
link |
What do you want to imitate?
link |
It's the old like, whoever your friends are, that's what your life is going to be like.
link |
That's really powerful.
link |
I mean, it's depressing that we're so unoriginal, but it's also liberating in that if this holds
link |
true, that we can choose our life by choosing the people we hang out with.
link |
Thoughts that are very compelling that seem like they're more absolute than they actually
link |
are end up also being dangerous.
link |
We want to, I'm going to discuss here where I think we need to amend this particular theory.
link |
But specifically, you just said something that everyone who's paid attention knows is
link |
true experientially, which is who you're around affects who you become.
link |
And as libertarian and self determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody I
link |
think knows that if you got put in the maximum security prison, aspects of your personality
link |
would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there, right?
link |
You would become different.
link |
If you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same genetics,
link |
like just there's no real question about that.
link |
And that even today, if you hang out in a place with ultra marathoners as your roommates
link |
or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens
link |
to your fitness is pretty clear, right?
link |
Like the behavioral science of this is pretty clear.
link |
So the whole saying we are the average of the five people we spend the most time around.
link |
I think the more self reflective someone is and the more time they spend by themselves
link |
in self reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true.
link |
So one of the best things someone can do to become more self determined is be self determined
link |
about the environments they want to put themselves in, because to the degree that there is some
link |
self determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment
link |
that is predisposing you in bad directions.
link |
Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want.
link |
In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things for those
link |
Or perhaps also there's probably interesting ways to play with this.
link |
You could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension
link |
in all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want,
link |
because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're
link |
free to choose whichever one.
link |
If there's enough tension, as opposed to everybody aligned like a flock of birds.
link |
Yeah, I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced.
link |
So if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self empowerment and someone who's extremely
link |
oriented to kind of empathy and compassion, both the dialectic of those is better than
link |
either of them on their own.
link |
If you have both of them inhabiting, being inhabited better than you by the same person
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and spending time around that person will probably do well for you.
link |
I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools,
link |
which is I think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and
link |
their not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem solving communication and
link |
civic capacity, capacity to participate as a citizen with other people and making the
link |
world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time.
link |
And so in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis.
link |
So maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other
link |
And one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice.
link |
And so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they
link |
make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody.
link |
The other side saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by their environment who would
link |
choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland.
link |
So we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions
link |
So you have a thesis and an antithesis.
link |
And then Hegel's ideas, you have a synthesis, which is a kind of higher order truth that
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understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do.
link |
And so it is actually at a higher order of complexity.
link |
So the first part would be, can I steel man each of these?
link |
Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of it are like, totally, you got
link |
And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where I can try to see and feel
link |
the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would?
link |
Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it,
link |
And I'm not going to go back to war with them.
link |
I'm going to go to finding solutions that could actually work at a higher order.
link |
If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war.
link |
And but then the higher order thing would be, well, it seems like the individual does
link |
affect the commons and the collective and other people.
link |
It also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically.
link |
And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself up
link |
by his bootstraps.
link |
But I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently
link |
than most people born into the Hamptons.
link |
And so unless you want to argue that and have you take your child from the Hamptons and
link |
put them in the ghetto, then like, come on, be realistic about this thing.
link |
So how do we make, we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals, right?
link |
The welfare argument.
link |
But we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better.
link |
We don't want individuals where their self expression and agency fucks the environment
link |
and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever.
link |
So can we make it to where individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning
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other individuals?
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Can we make it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty,
link |
That would be the synthesis.
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So the thing that I'm coming to here is if people have that as a frame, and sometimes
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it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right?
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Can I steel man each view?
link |
This is not just, can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them?
link |
Am I actively trying to inhabit other people's perspective?
link |
Then can I really try to essentialize it and argue the best points of it, both the sense
link |
making about reality and the values, why these values actually matter?
link |
Then just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek, is there a higher order
link |
set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense making
link |
of all of them simultaneously?
link |
Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it and I want to be seeking progressively
link |
So this is perspective seeking, driving perspective taking, and then seeking synthesis.
link |
I think that that one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing.
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Would you put a title of dialectic synthesis on that process because that seems to be such
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a part, so like this rigorous empathy, like it's not just empathy.
link |
It's empathy with rigor, like you really want to understand and embody different worldviews
link |
and then try to find a higher order synthesis.
link |
Okay, so I remember last night you told me when we first met, you said that you looked
link |
in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had suffered in some ways that they had suffered
link |
and so you could trust them.
link |
Empathy pathos, right, creates a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy.
link |
So empathy is actually feeling the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of
link |
I don't want to fuck them anymore.
link |
I don't want to hurt them.
link |
I don't want to behave, I don't want my proposition to go through when I go and inhabit the perspective
link |
of the other people if they feel that's really going to mess them up, right?
link |
And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion, which is I generally
link |
I have a generalized care, but I don't know what it's like to be them.
link |
I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly and that there's a humility you
link |
have to have, which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it.
link |
My most rigorous attempt, mine, to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it.
link |
I have no question that if I was actually a woman, it would be different than my best
link |
I have no question if I was actually black, it would be different than my best guesses.
link |
So there's a humility in that which keeps me listening because I don't think that I
link |
know fully, but I want to, and I'm going to keep trying better to.
link |
And then I want to accross them, and then I want to say, is there a way we can forward
link |
together and not have to be in war?
link |
It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds, that could reconcile
link |
the partial sensemaking that everyone holds, and that could offer a way forward that is
link |
more agreeable than the partial perspectives at war with each other.
link |
But so the more you succeed at this empathy with humility, the more you're carrying the
link |
burden of other people's pain, essentially.
link |
Now, this goes back to the question of do I see us as one being or 7.8 billion.
link |
I think if I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much because I don't
link |
have the bandwidth.
link |
I don't have the capacity.
link |
If I don't feel like I can do something about a particular problem in the world, it's hard
link |
to feel it because it's just too devastating.
link |
And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic because they just don't feel the
link |
So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency,
link |
I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared
link |
burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in benefit of.
link |
So this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems
link |
in society from a cellular automata perspective.
link |
So if you have a bunch of little agents behaving in this way, my intuition, there'll be interesting
link |
complexities that emerge, but my intuition is it will create a society that's very different
link |
and recognizably better than the one we have today.
link |
Oh, wait, hold that question because I want to come back to it, but this brings us back
link |
to Gerard, which we didn't answer.
link |
The conflict theory.
link |
Because about how to get past the conflict theory.
link |
You know the Robert Frost poem about the two paths and you never have enough time to return
link |
back to the other?
link |
We're going to have to do that quite a lot.
link |
We're going to be living that poem over and over again, but yes, how to...
link |
Let's return back.
link |
So the rest of the argument goes, you learn to want what other people want, therefore
link |
fundamental conflict based in our desire because we want the thing that somebody else has.
link |
And then people are in conflict over trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention,
link |
physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is.
link |
And then we learn the conflict by watching.
link |
And so then the conflict becomes metic.
link |
And we become on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side or the communist or capitalist
link |
side or the left or right politically or whatever it is.
link |
And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds up so much that some type
link |
of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is that we're going to blame.
link |
And you know, Gerard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount
link |
Let's blame a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were.
link |
But if we all believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy.
link |
It's a really interesting concept, by the way.
link |
I mean, you beautifully summarized it, but the idea that there's a scapegoat, that there's
link |
this kind of thing naturally leads to a conflict and then they find the other, some group that's
link |
the other that's either real or artificial as the cause of the conflict.
link |
Well, it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Gerard is the mimesis of
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And how do we attack that?
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How do we attack that it's our own desire?
link |
So this now gets to something more like Buddha said, right, which was desire is the cause
link |
Gerard and Buddha would kind of agree in this way.
link |
So but that's that explains I mean, again, it's a compelling description of human history
link |
that we do tend to come up with the other.
link |
okay, kind of I just I just had such a funny experience with someone critiquing Gerard
link |
the other day in such an elegant and beautiful and simple way.
link |
It's a friend who's grew up Aboriginal Australian, is a scholar of Aboriginal social technologies.
link |
He's like, nah man, Gerard just made shit up about how tribes work.
link |
Like we come from a tribe, we've got tens of thousands of years, and we didn't have
link |
increasing conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone.
link |
We'd have a little bit of conflict and then we would dance and then everybody'd be fine.
link |
We'd dance around the campfire, everyone would like kind of physically get the energy out,
link |
we'd look in each other's eyes, we'd have positive bonding, and then we're fine.
link |
And nobody, no scapegoats.
link |
I think that's called the Joe Rogan theory of desire, which is, he's like, all all of
link |
human problems have to do with the fact that you don't do enough hard shit in your day.
link |
So maybe, maybe just dance it because he says like doing exercise and running on the treadmill
link |
gets gets all the demons out and maybe just dancing gets all the demons out.
link |
So this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea that seems too explanatory
link |
and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're stuck with the fact that
link |
conflict is inexorable because human, because mimetic desire and therefore, how do we deal
link |
with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence?
link |
Well, no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish, meaning it's only true in certain
link |
conditions and other conditions it's not true.
link |
So the deeper question is under which conditions is that true?
link |
Under which conditions is it not true?
link |
What do those other conditions make possible and look like?
link |
And in general, we should stay away from really compelling models of reality because there's
link |
something about, about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think
link |
It's not that we stay away from them.
link |
It's that we know that the model of reality is never reality.
link |
That's the key thing.
link |
Humility again, it goes back to just having the humility that you don't have a perfect
link |
There's an ep, the, the model of reality could never be reality.
link |
The process of modeling is inherently information reduction and I can never show that the unknown
link |
unknown set has been factored.
link |
It's back to the cellular automata.
link |
You can't, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
link |
Like when you realize it's unfortunately, sadly impossible to, to create a model of
link |
cellular automata, even if you know the basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy,
link |
what how that system will evolve, which is fascinating mathematically.
link |
I think about it quite a lot.
link |
It's very annoying.
link |
Wolfram has this rule 30, like you should be able to predict it.
link |
It's so simple, but you can't predict what's going to be like, there's a, there's a problem
link |
he defines, like try to predict some aspect of the middle, middle column of the system,
link |
just anything about it.
link |
What's going to happen in the future.
link |
And you can't, you can't, it sucks because then we can't make sense of this world in
link |
a real, in a reality, in a definitive way.
link |
It's always like in the striving, like it, we're always striving.
link |
I don't think this sucks.
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That so that's a feature, not a bug.
link |
Well, that's assuming a designer.
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I would say I don't think it sucks.
link |
I think it's not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty.
link |
So you're a, so you're, you're disagree Jordan Pearson should clean up your room.
link |
You like the rooms messy.
link |
It's a, it's essential for the, for beauty.
link |
It's not, it's not that it's okay.
link |
I take, I have no idea if it was intended this way.
link |
And so I'm just interpreting it a way I like the commandment about having no false idols
link |
to me, the way I interpret that that is meaningful is that re reality is sacred to me.
link |
I have a reverence for reality, but I know my best understanding of it is never complete.
link |
I know my best model of it is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity
link |
by reducing the complexity of it to a set of stuff that I could observe and then a subset
link |
of that stuff that I thought was the causal dynamics and then some set of, you know, mechanisms
link |
that are involved.
link |
And what we find is that it can be super useful, like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic
link |
curves and all kinds of super useful stuff.
link |
And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening at the cosmological
link |
scale or at a quantum scale.
link |
And at each time, what we're finding is we excluded stuff.
link |
And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics and the
link |
other kind of fundamental laws.
link |
So models can be useful, but they're never true with a capital T, meaning they're never
link |
an actual real full, they're never a complete description of what's happening in real systems.
link |
They can be a complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was
link |
the result of applying a model.
link |
So the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing, but I would argue
link |
that the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing.
link |
And I would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated, which is
link |
a distinction Dave Snowden made well in defining the difference between simple, complicated,
link |
complex and chaotic systems.
link |
But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex
link |
system, it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model.
link |
Can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated?
link |
Complicated means we can fully explicate the phase space of all the things that it can
link |
We can program it.
link |
All human, not all, for the most part, human built things are complicated.
link |
They don't self organize.
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They don't self repair.
link |
They're not self evolving and we can make a blueprint for them where, sorry, for human
link |
systems, for human technologies, human technologies, that are basically the application of models
link |
And engineering is kind of applied science, science as the modeling process.
link |
And but with humans are complex, complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological
link |
type stuff, it more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated than
link |
it has or our explanation can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown
link |
unknown set where we keep finding like, oh, it's just the genome.
link |
Oh, well now it's the genome and the epigenome and then a recursive change on the epigenome
link |
because of the proteome.
link |
And then there's mitochondrial DNA and then viruses affected and fuck, right?
link |
So it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing.
link |
So on Facebook, you know how you can list your relationship as complicated?
link |
It should actually say it's, it's complex.
link |
That's the more accurate description.
link |
You self terminating is a really interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit.
link |
First of all, what is a self terminating system?
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And I think you have a sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that human civilization is a currently
link |
is, is a self terminating system.
link |
Why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of what soft self terminating
link |
Okay, so if we look at human societies historically, human civilizations, it's not that hard to
link |
realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore.
link |
So they had a life cycle, they died for some reason.
link |
So we don't still have the early Egyptian empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any of
link |
So they, they terminated, sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside
link |
Sometimes it seems like they self terminated.
link |
When we look at Easter Island, it was a self termination.
link |
So let's go ahead and take an island situation.
link |
If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources
link |
can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there, that system is going to self
link |
It's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's
link |
no resources left and then you get a, so now if I'm utilizing the resources faster than
link |
they can replicate or faster than they can replenish and I'm actually growing our population
link |
in the process, I'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources, I might get
link |
an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather
link |
than do an S curve or some other kind of thing.
link |
So self terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing
link |
its own substrate, that is debasing what it depends upon.
link |
So you're right that if you look at empires, they rise and fall throughout human history,
link |
but not this time, bro.
link |
This one's going to last forever.
link |
I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed, we can't ensure
link |
And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed
link |
outcome with somewhat decent probability.
link |
So we're, it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island, we're a clever
link |
bunch and we keep coming up, especially when on the horizon there is a termination point,
link |
we keep coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster, of avoiding collapse, of constructing.
link |
This is where technological innovation, this is where growth comes in, coming up with different
link |
ways to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources
link |
or get a lot more from the resources we have.
link |
So there's some sense in which there's a human ingenuity is a source for optimism about the
link |
future of this particular system that may not be self terminating.
link |
If there's more innovation than there is consumption.
link |
So overconsumption of resources is just one way I think can self terminate.
link |
We're just kind of starting here.
link |
But there are reasons for optimism and pessimism then they're both worth understanding and
link |
there's failure modes on understanding either without the other.
link |
As we mentioned previously, there's what I would call naive techno optimism, naive techno
link |
capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't
link |
want to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff and we know the
link |
proponents of those models and this stuff is going to kind of keep getting better.
link |
Of course there are problems, but human ingenuity rises to its supply and demand will solve
link |
the problems, whatever.
link |
Would you put Rick or as well in that, or in that bucket, is there some specific people
link |
you have in mind or naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just have
link |
an optimism that's blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses.
link |
I don't think that anyone who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive.
link |
But there might be.
link |
It's a platonic ideal.
link |
There might be a bias in the nature of the assessment.
link |
I would also say there's kind of naive techno pessimism and there are critics of technology.
link |
I mean, you read the Unabomber's Manifesto on why technology can't not result in our
link |
self termination, so we have to take it out before it gets any further.
link |
But also if you read a lot of the X risk community, you know, Bostrom and friends, it's like our
link |
total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up.
link |
And so I think that there are, we have to hold together where our positive possibilities
link |
and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities
link |
to be realized long term, all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen.
link |
Any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from
link |
So how do we ensure that none of them happen?
link |
If we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse.
link |
So again, Collapse Theory, it's worth looking at books like The Collapse of Complex Societies
link |
by Joseph Tainter.
link |
It does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for internal institutional decay, civilizational
link |
Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how
link |
institutional decay and the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of
link |
more internally parasitic on itself.
link |
Obviously Jared Diamond made a more popular book called Collapse.
link |
And as we were mentioning, the anticatheria mechanism has been getting attention in the
link |
It was like a 2000 year old clock, right?
link |
And does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress?
link |
And from a society that was relatively technologically advanced.
link |
So what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, why did previous societies
link |
Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't
link |
just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate
link |
the failures as a whole?
link |
Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self
link |
And can we solve those and have that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that
link |
is not self terminating?
link |
And can we then be able to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and
link |
see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those?
link |
Not just resilience, but antifragility.
link |
And I would say for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the
link |
risk space well and have adequate solutions for it.
link |
So can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the underlying sources of catastrophic
link |
failures of the system and overconsumption that's built in into self terminating systems?
link |
So both the overconsumption, which is like the slow death, and then there's the fast
link |
death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things.
link |
AGI, biotech, bioengineering, nanotechnology, nano, my favorite nanobots.
link |
Nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that I could just know that
link |
I would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them without
link |
sufficiently thinking about the negative consequences.
link |
I would definitely be, I would be podcasting all about the negative consequences, but when
link |
I go back home, I'd be, I'd just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant
link |
of ape, no offense to apes.
link |
I want to backtrack on my previous comments about, negative comments about apes.
link |
That I have that sense of excitement that would result in problems.
link |
So sorry, a lot of things said, but what's, can we start to pull it a thread because you've
link |
also provided a kind of a beautiful general approach to this, which is this dialectic
link |
synthesis or just rigorous empathy, whatever, whatever word we want to put to it, that seems
link |
to be from the individual perspective as one way to sort of live in the world as we tried
link |
to figure out how to construct non self terminating systems.
link |
So what, what are some underlying sources?
link |
First I have to say, I actually really respect Drexler for emphasizing Grey Goo and engines
link |
of creation back in the day to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the
link |
risks of the nanotech as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be.
link |
There's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and
link |
don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks because they get to market first.
link |
And then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is
link |
to the commons or wherever happen to have it.
link |
Other people are going to have to solve those, but now they have the power and capital associated.
link |
The person who looked at the risks and tried to do better design and go slower is probably
link |
not going to move into positions of as much power influences quickly.
link |
So this is one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the bad game theoretic dispositions
link |
in the system relative to its own stability.
link |
And the key aspect to that, sorry to interrupt, is the externalities generated.
link |
What flavors of catastrophic risk are we talking about here?
link |
What's your favorite flavor in terms of ice cream?
link |
So mine is coconut.
link |
Nobody seems to like coconut ice cream.
link |
So ice cream aside, what are you most worried about in terms of catastrophic risk that will
link |
help us kind of make concrete the discussion we're having about how to fix this whole thing?
link |
I think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of orient everyone to
link |
We don't have to go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of civilization.
link |
But to just recognize that for all of human history, as far as we're aware, there were
link |
existential risks to civilizations and they happened, right?
link |
Like there were civilizations that were killed in war, tribes that were killed in tribal
link |
warfare or whatever.
link |
So people faced existential risk to the group that they identified with.
link |
It's just those were local phenomena, right?
link |
It wasn't a fully global phenomena.
link |
So an empire could fall and surrounding empires didn't fall.
link |
Maybe they came in and filled the space.
link |
The first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk, not from like a solar
link |
flare or something that we couldn't control, but from something that humans would actually
link |
create at a global level was World War II and the bomb.
link |
Because it was the first time that we had tech big enough that could actually mess up
link |
everything at a global level that could mess up habitability.
link |
We just weren't powerful enough to do that before.
link |
It's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have done it.
link |
We just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect.
link |
And so it's important to get that there's the entire world before World War II where
link |
we don't have the ability to make a nonhabitable biosphere, nonhabitable for us.
link |
And then there's World War II and the beginning of a completely new phase where global human
link |
induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing.
link |
And that was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way,
link |
which is, you know, when you study history, it's amazing how big a percentage of history
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is studying war, right, and the history of war, as you said, European history and whatever.
link |
It's generals and wars and empire expansions.
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And so the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time where they
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weren't engaged in war or preparation for war or something like that was – humans
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don't have a good precedent in the post tribal phase, the civilization phase of being able
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to solve conflicts without war for very long.
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World War II was the first time where we could have a war that no one could win.
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And so the superpowers couldn't fight again.
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They couldn't do a real kinetic war.
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They could do diplomatic wars and Cold War type stuff and they could fight proxy wars
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through other countries that didn't have the big weapons.
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And so mutually assured destruction and like coming out of World War II, we actually realized
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that nation states couldn't prevent world war.
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And so we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states, which
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was the whole Bretton Woods world, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the globalization
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trade type agreements, mutually assured destruction that was how do we have some coordination
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beyond just nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers.
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And it was pretty successful given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower
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We've had lots of proxy wars during that time.
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We've had Cold War.
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And I would say we're in a new phase now where the Bretton Woods solution is basically over
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Can you describe the Bretton Woods solution?
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So the Bretton Woods, the series of agreements for how the nations would be able to engage
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with each other in a solution other than war was these IGOs, these intergovernmental organizations
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and was the idea of globalization.
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Since we could have global effects, we needed to be able to think about things globally
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where we had trade relationships with each other where it would not be profitable to
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war with each other.
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It'd be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other.
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So our own self interest was gonna drive our non war interest.
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And so this started to look like, and obviously this couldn't have happened that much earlier
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either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive global
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industrial supply chains and ship stuff around quickly.
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But like we were mentioning earlier, almost all the electronics that we use today, just
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basic cheap stuff for us is made on six continents, made in many countries.
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There's no single country in the world that could actually make many of the things that
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we have and from the raw material extraction to the plastics and polymers and the et cetera.
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And so the idea that we made a world that could do that kind of trade and create massive
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GDP growth, we could all work together to be able to mine natural resources and grow
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With the rapid GDP growth, there was the idea that everybody could keep having more without
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having to take each other's stuff.
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And so that was part of kind of the Bretton Woods post World War II model.
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The other was that we'd be so economically interdependent that blowing each other up
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would never make sense.
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That worked for a while.
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Now it also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster, the unrenewable use of resource and
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turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain.
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So obviously that faster GDP growth meant the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting
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down of the trees and the climate change and the mining, toxic mining tailings going into
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the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things.
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That's the overconsumption side of the risk that we're talking about.
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And so the answer of let's do positive GDP is the answer rapidly and exponentially obviously
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accelerated the planetary boundary side.
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And that started to be, that was thought about for a long time, but it started to be modeled
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with the Club of Rome and limits of growth.
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But it's just very obvious to say if you have a linear materials economy where you take
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stuff out of the earth faster, whether it's fish or trees or oil, you take it out of the
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earth faster than it can replenish itself and you turn it into trash after using it
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for a short period of time, you put the trash in the environment faster than it can process
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itself and there's toxicity associated with both sides of this.
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You can't run an exponentially growing linear materials economy on a finite planet forever.
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That's not a hard thing to figure out.
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And it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply because
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of interest and then fractional reserve banking and to then be able to keep up with the growing
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monetary supply, you have to have growth of goods and services.
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So that's that kind of thing that has happened.
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But you also see that when you get these supply chains that are so interconnected across the
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world, you get increased fragility because a collapse or a problem in one area then affects
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the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues being local, right?
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So we got to see with COVID and an issue that started in one part of China affecting the
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whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened before Bretton Woods, right?
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Before international travel, supply chains, you know, that whole kind of thing and with
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a bunch of second and third order effects that people wouldn't have predicted, okay,
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we have to stop certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants, but the countries doing
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agriculture depend upon fertilizer they don't produce that is shipped into them and depend
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upon pesticides they don't produce.
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So we got both crop failures and crops being eaten by locusts in scale in Northern Africa
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and Iran and things like that because they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in.
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So then you get massive starvation or future kind of hunger issues because of supply chain
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So you get this increased fragility and cascade dynamics where a small problem can end up
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leading to cascade effects.
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And also we went from two superpowers with one catastrophe weapon to now that same catastrophe
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weapon is there's more countries that have it, eight or nine countries that have it,
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and there's a lot more types of catastrophe weapons.
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We now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that can hit infrastructure targets
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with bio, with in fact every new type of tech has created an arms race.
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So we have not with the UN or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations, we haven't
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been able to really do nuclear de proliferation.
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We've actually had more countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes, the race to
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hypersonics and things like that.
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And every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race.
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And so you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with
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Two agents, it's much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced.
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But the ability to monitor and say if these guys shoot, who do I shoot?
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Do I shoot everybody?
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And so you get a three body problem.
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You get a very complex type of thing when you have multiple agents and multiple different
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types of catastrophe weapons, including ones that can be much more easily produced than
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Nukes are really hard to produce.
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There's only uranium in a few areas.
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uranium enrichment is hard, ICBMs are hard, but weaponized drones hitting smart targets
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There's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture them
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is going way, way down to where even non state actors can have them.
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And so when we talk about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech,
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what that means is decentralized catastrophe weapon capacity.
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And especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised, frantic,
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whatever for different reasons.
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So I would say where the Bretton Woods world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with
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lots of different agents, having lots of different types of catastrophe weapons you can't put
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mutually assured destruction on, where you can't keep doing growth of materials economy
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in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries and where the fragility dynamics
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are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk.
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So now we're, so like there was all the world until world war II and world war II is just
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from a civilization timescale point of view is just a second ago.
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It seems like a long time, but it is really not.
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We get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up
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the military capacity for much, much, much worse war the entire time.
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And then now we're at this new phase where the things that allowed us to make it through
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the nuclear power are not the same systems that will let us make it through the next
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So what is this next post Bretton Woods?
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How do we become safe vessels, safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology
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is a key question when we're thinking about X risk.
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And I'd like to try to answer the how a few ways, but first on the mutually assured destruction.
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Do you give credit to the idea of two superpowers now blowing each other up with nuclear weapons
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to the simple game theoretic model of mutually assured destruction or something you've said
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previously this idea of inverse correlation, which I tend to believe between the, now you
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were talking about tech, but I think it's maybe broadly true.
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The inverse correlation between competence and propensity for destruction.
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So the better, the, the, the bigger your weapons, not because you're afraid of a mutually assured
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self destruction, but because we're human beings and there's a deep moral fortitude
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there that somehow aligned with competence and being good at your job that like, it's
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very hard to be a psychopath and be good at killing at scale.
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Do you share any of that intuition?
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I think most people would say that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Napoleon were
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effective people that were good at their job that were actually maybe asymmetrically good
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at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented
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towards certain types of destruction or pretty willing to, maybe they would say they were
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oriented towards empire expansion, but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction
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in the name of it.
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What are you worried about?
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The Genghis Khan, or you could argue he's not a psychopath.
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That are you worried about Genghis Khan, are you worried about Hitler or are you worried
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about a terrorist who is, has a very different ethic, which is not even for, it's not trying
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to preserve and build and expand my community.
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It's more about just the destruction in itself is the goal.
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I think the thing that you're looking at that I do agree with is that there's a psychological
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disposition towards construction and a psychological disposition more towards destruction.
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Obviously everybody has both and can toggle between both and oftentimes one is willing
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to destroy certain things.
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We have this idea of creative destruction, right?
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Willing to destroy certain things to create other things and utilitarianism and trolley
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problems are all about exploring that space and the idea of war is all about that.
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I am trying to create something for our people and it requires destroying some other people.
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Sociopathy is a funny topic because it's possible to have very high fealty to your in group
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and work on perfecting the methods of torture to the out group at the same time because
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you can dehumanize and then remove empathy.
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And I would also say that there are types.
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So the reason, the thing that gives hope about the orientation towards construction and destruction
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being a little different in psychology is what it takes to build really catastrophic
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tech, even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a nuke, a small group of people
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could do it, takes still some real technical knowledge that required having studied for
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a while and some then building capacity and there's a question of is that psychologically
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inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization meaningfully?
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A little bit, I think.
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I think it's actually, I mean, this is the conversation I had like with, I think offline
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with Dan Carlin, which is like, it's pretty easy to come up with ways that any competent,
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I can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a lot of people and it's pretty easy, like I
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alone could do it and there's a lot of people as smart or smarter than me, at least in their
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creation of explosives.
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Why are we not seeing more insane mass murder?
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I think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this and it does have to do
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with some deeply pro social types of characteristics in humans but when you're dealing with very
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large numbers, you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena and so then you start to say,
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well, what's the probability that X won't happen this year, then won't happen in the
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next two years, three years, four years and then how many people are doing destructive
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things with lower tech and then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they
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didn't have to figure out how to build.
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So when I can get commercial tech and maybe I don't understand tech very well but I understand
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it well enough to utilize it, not to create it and I can repurpose it.
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When we saw that commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the Ukrainian munitions
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factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage, that was just home tech,
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that's just simple kind of thing.
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And so the question is not does it stay being a small percentage of the population?
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The question is can you bind that phenomena nearly completely and especially now as you
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start to get into bigger things, CRISPR gene drive technologies and various things like
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that, can you bind it completely long term over what period of time?
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Not perfectly though, that's the thing.
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I'm trying to say that there is some, let's call it, that's a random word, love, that's
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inherent and that's core to human nature that's preventing destruction at scale.
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And you're saying yeah but there's a lot of humans, there's going to be eight plus billion
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and then there's a lot of seconds in the day to come up with stuff, there's a lot of pain
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in the world that can lead to a distorted view of the world such that you want to channel
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that pain into the destruction, all those kinds of things and it's only a matter of
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time that any one individual can do large damage, especially as we create more and more
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democratized decentralized ways to deliver that damage even if you don't know how to
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build the initial weapon.
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But the thing is it seems like it's a race between the cheapening of destructive weapons
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and the capacity of humans to express their love towards each other and it's a race that
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so far, I know on Twitter it's not popular to say but love is winning, okay?
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So what is the argument that love is going to lose here against nuclear weapons and biotech
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and AI and drones?
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Okay I'm going to comment the end of this to a how love wins so I just want you to know
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that that's where I'm oriented.
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That's the end, okay.
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But I'm going to argue against why that is a given because it's not a given, I don't
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believe and I think that it's…
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This is like a good romantic comedy so you're going to create drama right now but it will
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end in a happy ending.
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Well it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well
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enough and take responsibility to shift it.
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Do I believe like there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic sci fi than protopic
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sci fi and the some protopic sci fi usually requires magic is because – or at least
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magical tech, right, dilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff because it's very hard
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to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books with exponential
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type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up, that make good enough
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choices as stewards of their environment and their commons and each other and etc.
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So like it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think
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of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up.
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And when I say blow ourselves up I mean the environmental versions, the terrorist versions,
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the war versions, the cumulative externalities versions.
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And I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow of thought but why is it easier?
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Could it be a weird psychological thing where we either are just more capable to visualize
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explosions and destruction and then the sicker thought which is like we kind of enjoy for
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some weird reason thinking about that kind of stuff even though we wouldn't actually
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It's almost like some weird, like I love playing shooter games, you know, first person shooters
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and like especially if it's like murdering zombies and doom, you're shooting demons.
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I play one of my favorite games Diablo is like slashing through different monsters and
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the screaming and pain and the hellfire and then I go out into the real world to eat my
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coconut ice cream and I'm all about love.
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So like can we trust our ability to visualize how it all goes to shit as an actual rational
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I think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse fantasy
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and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination but I don't think
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that's the whole of it.
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I think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space and the difference in the
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probabilities that there's a lot of ways I could try to put the 70 trillion cells of
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your body together that don't make you.
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There's not that many ways I can put them together that make you.
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There's a lot of ways I could try to connect the organs together that make some weird kind
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of group of organs on a desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human and you
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can kill an adult human in a second but you can't get one in a second.
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It takes 20 years to grow one and a lot of things happen right.
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I could destroy this building in a couple of minutes with demolition but it took a year
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or a couple of years to build it.
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This is just an example.
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He doesn't mean it.
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There's a gradient where entropy is easier and there's a lot more ways to put a set
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of things together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order
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When we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare,
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an arms race that drives that in all these directions, and when we look at a history
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of environmental destruction and exponentially more powerful tech that makes exponential
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externalities multiplied by the total number of agents that are doing it and the cumulative
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effects, there's a lot of ways the whole thing can break, like a lot of different ways.
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And for it to get ahead, it has to have none of those happen.
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And so there's just a probability space where it's easier to imagine that thing.
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So to say how do we have a protopic future, we have to say, well, one criteria must be
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that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks.
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So can we understand – can we inventory all the catastrophic risks?
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Can we inventory the patterns of human behavior that give rise to them?
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And could we try to solve for that?
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And could we have that be the essence of the social technology that we're thinking about
link |
to be able to guide, bind, and direct a new physical technology?
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Because so far, our physical technology – like we were talking about the Genghis Khan's
link |
like that, that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments and also
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social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes.
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But we have things that don't look like warfare, like Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
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And it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource
link |
to the world, and it did.
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And the second order effects of that are climate change and all of the oil spills that have
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happened and will happen and all of the wars in the Middle East over the oil that have
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been there and the massive political clusterfuck and human life issues that are associated
link |
with it and on and on, right?
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And so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can have a narrow focus
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on what I'm trying to construct but be affecting a lot of other things through second and third
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order effects I'm not taking responsibility for.
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You often on another tangent mentioned second, third, and fourth order effects.
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Which is really fascinating.
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Like starting with the third order plus it gets really interesting because we don't
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even acknowledge like the second order effects.
link |
But like thinking because those it could get bigger and bigger and bigger in ways we were
link |
So how do we make those?
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So it sounds like part of the thing that you are thinking through in terms of a solution
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how to create an anti fragile, a resilient society is to make explicit acknowledge, understand
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the externalities, the second order, third order, fourth order, and the order effects.
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How do we start to think about those effects?
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Yeah, the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing.
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The externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at minimum
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it's not our intention.
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Maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware of it but it is a side effect
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of what our intention is.
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It's not the intention itself.
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There are catastrophic risks from both types.
link |
The direct application of increased technological power to a rivalrous intent which is going
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to cause harm for some out group, for some in group to win.
link |
But the out group is also working on growing the tech and if they don't lose completely
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they reverse engineer the tech, up regulate it, come back with more capacity.
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So there's the exponential tech arms race side of in group, out group rivalry using
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exponential tech that is one set of risks.
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And the other set of risks is the application of exponentially more powerful tech not intentionally
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to try and beat an out group but to try to achieve some goal that we have but to produce
link |
a second and third order effects that do have harm to the commons, to other people, to environment,
link |
to other groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem we were originally
link |
trying to solve with the thing we were building.
link |
When Facebook was building a dating app and then building a social app where people could
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tag pictures, they weren't trying to build a democracy destroying app that would maximize
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time on site as part of its ad model through AI optimization of a newsfeed to the thing
link |
that made people spend most time on site which is usually them being limbically hijacked
link |
more than something else which ends up appealing to people's cognitive biases and group identities
link |
and creates no sense of shared reality.
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They weren't trying to do that but it was a second order effect and it's a pretty fucking
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powerful second order effect and a pretty fast one because the rate of tech is obviously
link |
able to get distributed to much larger scale much faster and with a bigger jump in terms
link |
of total vertical capacity than that's what it means to get to the verticalizing part
link |
of an exponential curve.
link |
So just like we can see that oil had the second order environmental effects and also social
link |
and political effects.
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War and so much of the whole like the total amount of oil used has a proportionality to
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total global GDP and this is why we have this the petrodollar and so the oil thing also
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had the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial complex
link |
and things like that.
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But we can see the same thing with more current technologies with Facebook and Google and
link |
So I don't think we can run and the more powerful the tech is, we build it for reason X, whatever
link |
Maybe X is three things, maybe it's one thing, right?
link |
We're doing the oil thing because we wanna make cars because it's a better method of
link |
individual transportation, we're building the Facebook thing because we're gonna connect
link |
people socially in a personal sphere.
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But it interacts with complex systems, with ecologies, economies, psychologies, cultures,
link |
and so it has effects on other than the thing we're intending.
link |
Some of those effects can end up being negative effects, but because this technology, if we
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make it to solve a problem, it has to overcome the problem.
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The problem has been around for a while, it's gonna overcome in a short period of time.
link |
So it usually has greater scale, greater rate of magnitude in some way.
link |
That also means that the externalities that it creates might be bigger problems.
link |
And you can say, well, but then that's the new problem and humanity will innovate its
link |
Well, I don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't keep up with exponential
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curves like that, nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities forever.
link |
And this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking, well, no,
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I think we're totally screwed unless we can make a benevolent AI singleton that rules all
link |
Guys like Ostrom and others thinking in those directions, because they're like, how do humans
link |
try to do multipolarity and make it work?
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And I have a different answer of what I think it looks like that does have more to do with
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love, but some applied social tech aligned with love.
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That's good, because I have a bunch of really dumb ideas I'd prefer to hear.
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I'd like to hear some of them first.
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I think the idea I would have is to be a bit more rigorous in trying to measure the amount
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of love you add or subtract from the world in second, third, fourth, fifth order effects.
link |
It's actually, I think, especially in the world of tech, quite doable.
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You just might not like, the shareholders may not like that kind of metric, but it's
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pretty easy to measure.
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That's not even, I'm perhaps half joking about love, but we could talk about just happiness
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and well being, long term well being.
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That's pretty easy for Facebook, for YouTube, for all these companies to measure that.
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They do a lot of kinds of surveys.
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There's very simple solutions here that you could just survey how, I mean, servers are
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in some sense useless because they're a subset of the population.
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You're just trying to get a sense, it's very loose kind of understanding, but integrated
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deeply as part of the technology.
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Most of our tech is recommender systems.
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Most of the, sorry, not tech, online interactions driven by recommender systems that learn very
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little data about you and use that data based on, mostly based on traces of your previous
link |
behavior to suggest future things.
link |
This is how Twitter, this is how Facebook works.
link |
This is how AdSense or Google AdSense works, this is how Netflix, YouTube work and so on.
link |
And for them to just track as opposed to engagement, how much you spend in a particular video,
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a particular site, is also track, give you the technology to do self report of what makes
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you feel good, what makes you grow as a person, of what makes you, you know, the best version
link |
of yourself, the Rogan idea of the hero of your movie.
link |
And just add that little bit of information.
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If you have people, you have this like happiness surveys of how you feel about the last five
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days, how would you report your experience.
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You can lay out the set of videos.
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It's kind of fascinating, I don't know if you ever look at YouTube, the history of videos
link |
It's very embarrassing for me.
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Like it'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that I don't want anyone to
link |
know about, which is, which is, which will be like, I don't know, maybe like five videos
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in a row where it looks like I watched the whole thing, which I probably did about like
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how to cook a steak, even though, or just like with the best chefs in the world cooking
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steaks and I'm just like sitting there watching it for no purpose whatsoever, wasting away
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my life or like funny cat videos or like legit, that's always a good one.
link |
And I could look back and rate which videos made me a better person and not.
link |
And I mean, on a more serious note, there's a bunch of conversations, podcasts or lectures
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I've watched, which made me a better person and some of them made me a worse person.
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And honestly, not for stupid reasons, like I feel dumber, but because I do have a sense
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that that started me on a path of, of not being kind to other people.
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For example, I'll give you a, for my own, and I'm sorry for ranting, but maybe there's
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some usefulness to this kind of exploration of self.
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When I focus on creating, on programming, on science, I become a much deeper thinker
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and a kinder person to others.
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When I listen to too many, a little bit is good, but too many podcasts or videos about
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how, how our world is melting down or criticizing ridiculous people, the worst of the quote
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unquote woke, for example.
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All there's all these groups that are misbehaving in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted
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The more I watch, the more I watch criticism of them, the worse I become.
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And I'm aware of this, but I'm also aware that for some reason it's pleasant to watch
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And so for, for me to be able to self report that to the YouTube algorithm, to the systems
link |
around me, and they ultimately try to optimize to make me the best person, the best version
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of myself, which I personally believe would make YouTube a lot more money because I'd
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be much more willing to spend time on YouTube and give YouTube a lot more, a lot more of
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That's a, that's great for business and great for humanity because it'll make me a kinder
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It'll increase the love quotient, the love metric, and it'll make them a lot of money.
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I feel like everything's aligned.
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And so you, you should do that not just for YouTube algorithm, but also for military strategy
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and whether you go to war or not, because one externality you can think of about going
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to war, which I think we talked about offline is we often go to war with kind of governments
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with a, with, not with the people.
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You have to think about the kids of countries that see a soldier and because of what they
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experienced the interaction with the soldier, hate is born.
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When you're like eight years old, six years old, you lose your dad, you lose your mom,
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you lose a friend, somebody close to you that want a really powerful externality that could
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be reduced to love, positive and negative is the hate that's born when you make decisions.
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And that's going to take fruition that that little seed is going to become a tree that
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then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about.
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So but in my sense, it's possible to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does
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this add to the world.
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All that to say, do you have ideas of how we practically build systems that create a
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resilient society?
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There were a lot of good things that you shared where there's like 15 different ways that
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we could enter this that are all interesting.
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So I'm trying to see which one will probably be most useful.
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Pick the one or two things that are least ridiculous.
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When you were mentioning if we could see some of the second order effects or externalities
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that we aren't used to seeing, specifically the one of a kid being radicalized somewhere
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else, which engenders enmity in them towards us, which decreases our own future security.
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Even if you don't care about the kid, if you care about the kid, it's a whole other thing.
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Yeah, I mean, I think when we saw this, when Jane Fonda and others went to Vietnam and
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took photos and videos of what was happening, and you got to see the pictures of the kids
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with napalm on them, that like the antiwar effort was bolstered by that in a way it couldn't
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have been without that.
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Until we can see the images, you can't have a mere neuron effect in the same way.
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And when you can, that starts to have a powerful effect.
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I think there's a deep principle that you're sharing there, which is that if we can have
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a rivalrous intent where our in group, whatever it is, maybe it's our political party wanting
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to win within the US, maybe it's our nation state wanting to win in a war or an economic
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war over resource or whatever it is, that if we don't obliterate the other people completely,
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they don't go away, they're not engendered to like us more, they didn't become less smart.
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So they have more enmity towards us and whatever technologies we employed to be successful,
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they will now reverse engineer, make iterations on and come back.
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And so you drive an arms race, which is why you can see that the wars were over history
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employing more lethal weaponry.
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And not just the kinetic war, the information war and the narrative war and the economic
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war, like it just increased capacity in all of those fronts.
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And so what seems like a win to us on the short term might actually really produce losses
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And what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably more aligned with
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everyone else because we inter affect each other.
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And I think the thing about globalism, globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which
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we affect each other and the rate at which we affect the biosphere that we're all affected
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by is that this kind of proverbial spiritual idea that we're all interconnected and need
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to think about that in some way, that was easy for tribes to get because everyone in
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the tribes so clearly saw their interconnection and dependence on each other.
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But in terms of a global level, the speed at which we are actually interconnected, the
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speed at which the harm happening to something in Wuhan affects the rest of the world or
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a new technology developed somewhere affects the entire world or an environmental issue
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or whatever is making it to where we either actually all get, not as a spiritual idea,
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just even as physics, right?
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We all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that and see
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how to make it through more effectively together or failures anywhere end up becoming decreased
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quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere.
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Don't you think people are beginning to experience that at the individual level?
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So governments are resisting it.
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They're trying to make us not empathize with each other, feel connected.
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But don't you think people are beginning to feel more and more connected?
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Like isn't that exactly what the technology is enabling?
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Like social networks, we tend to criticize them, but isn't there a sense which we're
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experiencing, you know?
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When you watch those videos that are criticizing, whether it's the woke Antifa side or the QAnon
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Trump supporter side, does it seem like they have increased empathy for people that are
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outside of their ideologic camp?
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I may be conflating my own experience of the world and that of the populace.
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I tend to see those videos as feeding something that's a relic of the past.
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They figured out that drama fuels clicks, but whether I'm right or wrong, I don't know.
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But I tend to sense that that is not, that hunger for drama is not fundamental to human
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beings that we want to actually, that we want to understand Antifa and we want to empathize.
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We want to take radical ideas and be able to empathize with them and synthesize it all.
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Okay, let's look at cultural outliers in terms of violence versus compassion.
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We can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in group violence, bigger out group
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violence, and there's some variance in them and variance at different times based on the
link |
scarcity or abundance of resource and other things.
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But you can look at say, Janes, whose whole religion is around nonviolence so much so
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that they don't even hurt plants, they only take fruits that fall off them and stuff.
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Or to go to a larger population, you could take Buddhists, where for the most part, with
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a few exceptions, for the most part across three millennia and across lots of different
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countries and geographies and whatever, you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't
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The whole spectrum of genetic variance that is happening within a culture of that many
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people and head traumas and whatever, and nobody hurts bugs.
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And then you look at a group where the kids grew up as child soldiers in Liberia or Darfur
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were to make it to adulthood, pretty much everybody's killed people hand to hand and
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killed people who were civilian or innocent type of people.
link |
And you say, okay, so we were very neotenous, we can be conditioned by our environment and
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humans can be conditioned where almost all the humans show up in these two different
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It doesn't mean that the Buddhists had no violence, it doesn't mean that these people
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had no compassion, but they're very different Gaussian distributions.
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And so I think one of the important things that I like to do is look at the examples
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of the populations, what Buddhism shows regarding compassion or what Judaism shows around education,
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the average level of education that everybody gets because of a culture that is really working
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on conditioning it or various cultures.
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What are the positive deviance outside of the statistical deviance to see what is actually
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possible and then say, what are the conditioning factors and can we condition those across
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a few of them simultaneously and could we build a civilization like that becomes a very
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interesting question.
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So there's this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent, large groups of humans
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become violent, they become irrational, specifically those two things, rivalrous and violent and
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And so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions,
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they need ruled somehow.
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And that not getting that is some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't understand human
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This gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing.
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I think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda that is useful for the
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classes that control to popularize the idea that most people are too violent, lazy, undisciplined
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and irrational to make good choices and therefore their choices should be sublimated in some
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I think that if we look back at these conditioning environments, we can say, okay, so the kids
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that go to a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like Exeter
link |
Academy, there's still a Gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric,
link |
but on average, they become senators and the worst ones become high end lawyers or whatever.
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And then I look at the inner city school with a totally different set of things and I see
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a very, very differently displaced Gaussian distribution, but a very different set of
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conditioning factors.
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And then I say the masses, well, if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses
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got to go to Exeter and have that family and whatever, would they still be the masses?
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Could we actually condition more social virtue, more civic virtue, more orientation towards
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dialectical synthesis, more empathy, more rationality widely?
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Would that lead to better capacity for something like participatory governance, democracy or
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republic or some kind of participatory governance?
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Is it necessary for it actually?
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And is it good for class interests?
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By the way, when you say class interests, this is the powerful leading over the less
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powerful, that kind of idea.
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Anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power doesn't necessarily benefit from decreasing
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those asymmetries of power and kind of increasing the capacity of people more widely.
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And so, when we talk about power, we're talking about asymmetries in agency, influence and
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Do you think that hunger for power is fundamental to human nature?
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I think we should get that straight before we talk about other stuff.
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So like this pick up line that I use at a bar often, which is power corrupts and absolute
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power corrupts, absolutely.
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Is that true or is that just a fancy thing to say?
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In modern society, there's something to be said, have we changed as societies over time
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in terms of how much we crave power?
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That there is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned
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one way or the other, yes, but you can see that Buddhist society does a very different
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thing with it at scale, that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types
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of sociopathic behavior and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions.
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And so, it's like, is eating the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment
link |
that give us more dopamine hit because they were rare and they're not anymore, salt,
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Is there something pleasurable about those where humans have an orientation to overeat
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Well, the fact that there is that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese
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and die of obesity, right?
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Like it's possible to have a particular impulse and to be able to understand it, have other
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ones and be able to balance them.
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And so, to say that power dynamics are obligate in humans and we can't do anything about it
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is very similar to me to saying like everyone is going to be obligately obese.
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So, there's some degree to which the control of those impulses has to do with the conditioning
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And the culture that creates the environment to be able to do that and then the recursion
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So, if we were to, bear with me, just asking for a friend, if we're to kill all humans
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on Earth and then start over, is there ideas about how to build up, okay, we don't have
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to kill, let's leave the humans on Earth, they're fine and go to Mars and start a new
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Is there ways to construct systems of conditioning, education of how we live with each other that
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would incentivize us properly to not seek power, to not construct systems that are of
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asymmetry of power and to create systems that are resilient to all kinds of terrorist attacks,
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to all kinds of destructions?
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Is there some inclination?
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Of course, you probably don't have all the answers, but you have insights about what
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It's just rigorous practice of dialectic synthesis as essentially conversations with assholes
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of various flavors until they're not assholes anymore because you become deeply empathetic
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with their experience.
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So, there's a lot of things that we would need to construct to come back to this, like
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what is the basis of rivalry?
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How do you bind it?
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How does it relate to tech?
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If you have a culture that is doing less rivalry, does it always lose in war to those who do
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And how do you make something on the enactment of how to get there from here?
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So what's rivalry?
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Well, is rivalry bad or good?
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So is another word for rivalry competition?
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Yes, I think roughly, yes.
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I think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here.
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Good for some things, bad for other things.
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Bad for some contexts and others.
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Let me give you an example that relates back to the Facebook measuring thing you were mentioning
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First, I think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction and what
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I want to get to in a moment, but it's not, the devil is in the details here.
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So I enjoy praise, it feeds my ego, I grow stronger.
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So I appreciate that.
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I will make sure to include one piece every 15 minutes as we go.
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So it's easier to measure, there are problems with this argument, but there's also utility
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So let's take it for the utility it has first.
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It's harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort.
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We can measure with technology that the shocks in a car are making the car bounce less, that
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the bed is softer and, you know, material science and those types of things.
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And happiness is actually hard for philosophers to define because some people find that there's
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certain kinds of overcoming suffering that are necessary for happiness.
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There's happiness that feels more like contentment and happiness that feels more like passion.
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Is passion the source of all suffering or the source of all creativity?
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Like there's deep stuff and it's mostly first person, not measurable third person stuff,
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even if maybe it corresponds to third person stuff to some degree.
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But we also see examples of some of our favorite examples as people who are in the worst environments
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who end up finding happiness, right, where the third person stuff looks to be less conducive
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and there's some Victor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, whatever.
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But it's pretty easy to measure comfort and it's pretty universal.
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And I think we can see that the Industrial Revolution started to replace happiness with
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comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for.
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And we can see that when increased comfort is given, maybe because of the evolutionary
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disposition that expending extra calories when for the majority of our history we didn't
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have extra calories was not a safe thing to do.
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When extra comfort is given, it's very easy to take that path, even if it's not the path
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that supports overall well being long term.
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And so, we can see that, you know, when you look at the techno optimist idea that we have
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better lives than Egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever, what they're largely looking
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at is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation systems are
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and things like that, in which case there's massive improvement.
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But we also see that in some of the nations where people have access to the most comfort,
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suicide and mental illness are the highest.
link |
And we also see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones that
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are in materially lame environments.
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And so, there's a very interesting question here, and if I understand correctly, you do
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cold showers, and Joe Rogan was talking about how he needs to do some fairly intensive kind
link |
of struggle that is a non comfort to actually induce being better as a person, this concept
link |
of hormesis, that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases its adaptive
link |
capacity, and that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to
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do with its adaptive capacity, its overall resilience, health, well being, which requires
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a decent bit of discomfort.
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And yet, in the presence of the comfort solution, it's very hard to not choose it, and then
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as you're choosing it regularly, to actually down regulate your overall adaptive capacity.
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And so, when we start saying, can we make tech where we're measuring for the things
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that it produces beyond just the measure of GDP or whatever particular measures look like
link |
the revenue generation or profit generation of my business, are all the meaningful things
link |
measurable, and what are the right measures, and what are the externalities of optimizing
link |
for that measurement set, what meaningful things aren't included in that measurement
link |
set, that might have their own externalities, these are some of the questions we actually
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have to take seriously.
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Yeah, and I think they're answerable questions, right?
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Progressively better, not perfect.
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Right, so first of all, let me throw out happiness and comfort out of the discussion, those seem
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like useless, the distinction, because I said they're useful, well being is useful, but
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I think I take it back.
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I propose new metrics in this brainstorm session, which is, so one is like personal growth,
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which is intellectual growth, I think we're able to make that concrete for ourselves,
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like you're a better person than you were a week ago, or a worse person than you were
link |
I think we can ourselves report that, and understand what that means, it's this grey
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area, and we try to define it, but I think we humans are pretty good at that, because
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we have a sense, an idealistic sense of the person we might be able to become.
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We all dream of becoming a certain kind of person, and I think we have a sense of getting
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closer and not towards that person.
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Maybe this is not a great metric, fine.
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The other one is love, actually.
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Like if you're happy or not, or you're comfortable or not, how much love do you have towards
link |
your fellow human beings?
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I feel like if you try to optimize that, and increasing that, that's going to have, that's
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How many times a day, sorry, if I can quantify, how many times a day have you thought positively
link |
of another human being?
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Put that down as a number, and increase that number.
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I think the process of saying, okay, so let's not take GDP or GDP per capita as the metric
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we want to optimize for, because GDP goes up during war, and it goes up with more healthcare
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spending from sicker people, and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality
link |
Addiction drives GDP awesomely.
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By the way, when I said growth, I wasn't referring to GDP.
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I'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use, and why it's not an adequate metric,
link |
because we're exploring other ones.
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So the idea of saying, what would the metrics for a good civilization be?
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If I had to pick a set of metrics, what would the best ones be if I was going to optimize
link |
And then really try to run the thought experiment more deeply, and say, okay, so what happens
link |
if we optimize for that?
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Try to think through the first, and second, and third order effects of what happens that's
link |
positive, and then also say, what negative things can happen from optimizing that?
link |
What actually matters that is not included in that or in that way of defining it?
link |
Because love versus number of positive thoughts per day, I could just make a long list of
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names and just say positive thing about each one.
link |
It's all very superficial.
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Not include animals or the rest of life, have a very shallow total amount of it, but I'm
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optimizing the number, and if I get some credit for the number.
link |
And this is when I said the model of reality isn't reality.
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When you make a set of metrics that we're going to optimize for this, whatever reality
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is that is not included in those metrics can be the areas where harm occurs, which is why
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I would say that wisdom is something like the discernment that leads to right choices
link |
beyond what metrics based optimization would offer.
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Yeah, but another way to say that is wisdom is a constantly expanding and evolving set
link |
Which means that there is something in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important
link |
that isn't part of that metric set.
link |
So there's a certain kind of connection, discernment, awareness, and this is an iterative game theory.
link |
There's a girdles and completeness theorem, right?
link |
Which is if the system, if the set of things is consistent, it won't be complete.
link |
So we're going to keep adding to it, which is why we were saying earlier, I don't think
link |
it's not beautiful.
link |
And especially if you were just saying one of the metrics you want to optimize for at
link |
the individual level is becoming, right?
link |
That we're becoming more.
link |
Well, that then becomes true for the civilization and our metric sets as well.
link |
And our definition of how to think about a meaningful life and a meaningful civilization.
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I can tell you what some of my favorite metrics are.
link |
Well love is obviously not a metric.
link |
It's like you can bench.
link |
It's a good metric.
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I want to optimize that across the entire population, starting with infants.
link |
So in the same way that love isn't a metric, but you could make metrics that look at certain
link |
The thing I'm about to say isn't a metric, but it's a, it's a consideration because I
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thought about this a lot.
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I don't think there is a metric, a right one.
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I think that every metric by itself without this thing we talked about of the continuous
link |
improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer.
link |
I think that's why what the idea of false idol means in terms of the model of reality
link |
not being reality.
link |
Then my sacred relationship is to reality itself, which also binds me to the unknown
link |
To the known, but also to the unknown.
link |
And there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown that creates an epistemic humility
link |
that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing I know, but to learn new stuff.
link |
And to be open to perceive reality directly.
link |
So my model never becomes sacred.
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My model is useful.
link |
So the model can't be the false idol.
link |
And this is why the first verse of the Tao Te Ching is the Tao that is nameable is not
link |
The naming then can become the source of the 10,000 things that if you get too carried
link |
away with it can actually obscure you from paying attention to reality beyond in the
link |
It sounds a lot, a lot like Stephen Wolfram, but in a different language, much more poetic.
link |
I can imagine that.
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No, I'm referring, I'm joking, but there's a echoes of cellular automata, which you can't
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You can't construct a good model cellular automata.
link |
You can only watch in awe.
link |
I'm distracting your train of thought horribly and miserably making it different.
link |
By the way, something robots aren't good at and dealing with the uncertainty of uneven
link |
You've been okay so far.
link |
You've been doing wonderfully.
link |
So what's your favorite metrics?
link |
So I know you're not a robot.
link |
So one metric, and there are problems with this, but one metric that I like to just as
link |
a thought experiment to consider is because you're actually asking, I mean, I know you
link |
ask your guests about the meaning of life because ultimately when you're saying what
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is a desirable civilization, you can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful
link |
human life and to say what is a good civilization because it's going to be in relationship to
link |
And then you have whatever your answer is, how do you know what is the epistemic basis
link |
for postulating that?
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There's also a whole nother reason for asking that question.
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I don't, I mean, that doesn't even apply to you whatsoever, which is, it's interesting
link |
how few people have been asked questions like it.
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The joke about these questions is silly, right?
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It's funny to watch a person and if I was more of an asshole, I would really stick on
link |
It's a silly question in some sense, but like we haven't really considered what it means.
link |
Just a more concrete version of that question is what is a better world?
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What is the kind of world we're trying to create really?
link |
Have you really thought,
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I'll give you some kind of simple answers to that that are meaningful to me, but let
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me do the societal indices first because they're fun.
link |
We should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's important to come back to.
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Are you reminding me to ask you about the meaning of life?
link |
Let me jot that down.
link |
So because I think I stopped tracking it like 25 open threads.
link |
One index that I find very interesting is the inverse correlation of addiction within
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The more a society produces addiction within the people in it, the less healthy I think
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the society is as a pretty fundamental metric.
link |
And so the more the individuals feel that there are less compulsive things in compelling
link |
them to behave in ways that are destructive to their own values.
link |
And insofar as a civilization is conditioning and influencing the individuals within it,
link |
the inverse of addiction.
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Compulsive behavior that is destructive towards things that we value.
link |
I think that's a very interesting one to think about.
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That's a really interesting one.
link |
And this is then also where comfort and addiction start to get very close.
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And the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is the ability to be exposed
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to hypernormal stimuli and not go down the path of desensitizing to other stimuli and
link |
needing that hypernormal stimuli, which does involve a kind of hormesis.
link |
So I do think the civilization of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort.
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And I think that's what the sweat lodge and the vision quest and the solo journey and
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the ayahuasca journey and the Sundance were.
link |
I think it's even a big part of what yoga asana was, is to make beings that are resilient
link |
and strong, they have to overcome some things.
link |
To make beings that can control their own mind and fear, they have to face some fears.
link |
But we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma.
link |
And yet we can see that the most fucked up people we know had childhoods of a lot of
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But some of the most incredible people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma, whether
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or not they happened to make it through and overcome that or not.
link |
So how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the resilience and the whatever
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that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people?
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A certain kind of ritualized discomfort that not only has us overcome something by ourselves,
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but overcome it together with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the
link |
other people are there.
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So it's both a resilience of the individuals and a resilience of the bonding.
link |
So I think we'll keep getting more and more comfortable stuff, but we have to also develop
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resilience in the presence of that for the anti addiction direction and the fullness
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of character and the trustworthiness to others.
link |
So you have to be consistently injecting discomfort into the system, ritualize.
link |
I mean, this sounds like you have to imagine Sisyphus happy.
link |
You have to imagine Sisyphus with his rock, optimally resilient from a metrics perspective
link |
So we want to constantly be throwing rocks at ourselves.
link |
You didn't have to frequently, periodically, and there's different levels of intensity,
link |
different periodicities.
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Now, I do not think this should be imposed by states.
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I think it should emerge from cultures.
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And I think the cultures are developing people that understand the value of it.
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So there is both a cultural cohesion to it, but there's also a voluntaryism because the
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people value the thing that is being developed and understand it.
link |
And that's what conditioning, it's conditioning some of these values.
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Conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty, but when we recognize
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the language that we speak and the words that we think in and the patterns of thought built
link |
into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned in us just
link |
based on where we're born, you can't not condition people.
link |
So all you can do is take more responsibility for what the conditioning factors are.
link |
And then you have to think about this question of what is a meaningful human life?
link |
Because we're, unlike the other animals born into environment that they're genetically
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adapted for, we're building new environments that we were not adapted for, and then we're
link |
becoming affected by those.
link |
So then we have to say, well, what kinds of environments, digital environments, physical
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environments, social environments would we want to create that would develop the healthiest,
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happiest, most moral, noble, meaningful people?
link |
What are even those sets of things that matter?
link |
So you end up getting deep existential consideration at the heart of civilization design when you
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start to realize how powerful we're becoming and how much what we're building it in service
link |
Before I pull it, I think three threads you just laid down, is there another metric index
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that you're interested in?
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There's one more that I really like.
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There's a number, but the next one that comes to mind is I have to make a very quick model.
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Healthy human bonding, say we were in a tribal type setting, my positive emotional states
link |
and your positive emotional states would most of the time be correlated, your negative emotional
link |
And so you start laughing, I start laughing, you start crying, my eyes might tear up.
link |
And we would call that the compassion compersion axis.
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I would, this is a model I find useful.
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So compassion is when you're feeling something negative, I feel some pain, I feel some empathy,
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something in relationship.
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Compersion is when you do well, I'm stoked for you, right?
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Like I actually feel happiness at your happiness.
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I like compersion.
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Yeah, the fact that it's such an uncommon word in English is actually a problem culturally.
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Because I feel that often, and I think that's a really good feeling to feel and maximize
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That's actually the metric I'm going to say is the compassion compersion axis is the thing
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I would optimize for.
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Now, there is a state where my emotional states and your emotional states are just totally
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And that is like sociopathy.
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I don't want to hurt you, but I don't care if I do or for you to do well or whatever.
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But there's a worse state and it's extremely common, which is where they're inversely coupled.
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Where my positive emotions correspond to your negative ones and vice versa.
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And that is the, I would call it the jealousy sadism axis.
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The jealousy axis is when you're doing really well, I feel something bad.
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I feel taken away from, less than, upset, envious, whatever.
link |
And that's so common, but I think of it as kind of a low grade psychopathology that we've
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The idea that I'm actually upset at the happiness or fulfillment or success of another is like
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a profoundly fucked up thing.
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No, we shouldn't shame it and repress it so it gets worse.
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We should study it.
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Where does it come from?
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And it comes from our own insecurities and stuff.
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But then the next part that everybody knows is really fucked up is just on the same axis.
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It's the same inverted, which is to the jealousy or the envy is the, I feel badly when you're
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The sadism side is I actually feel good when you lose or when you're in pain, I feel some
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happiness that's associated.
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And you can see when someone feels jealous, sometimes they feel jealous with a partner
link |
and then they feel they want that partner to get it, revenge comes up or something.
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So sadism is really like jealousy is one step on the path to sadism from the healthy compassion
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So, I would like to see a society that is inversely, that is conditioning sadism and
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jealousy inversely, right?
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The lower that amount and the more the compassion conversion.
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And if I had to summarize that very simply, I'd say it would optimize for conversion.
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Which is because notice that's not just saying love for you where I might be self sacrificing
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and miserable and I love people, but I kill myself, which I don't think anybody thinks
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Happiness where I might be sociopathically happy where I'm causing problems all over
link |
the place or even sadistically happy, but it's a coupling, right?
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That I'm actually feeling happiness in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where
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I, my own agentic desire to get happier wants to support you too.
link |
That's actually speaking of another pickup line.
link |
That's quite honestly what I, as a guy who is single, this is going to come out very
link |
ridiculous because it's like, oh yeah, where's your girlfriend, bro?
link |
But that's what I look for in a relationship because it's like, it's so much, it's so,
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it's such an amazing life where you actually get joy from another person's success and
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they get joy from your success.
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And then it becomes like you don't actually need to succeed much for that to have a, like
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a loop, like a cycle of just like happiness that just increases like exponentially.
link |
So like just be, just enjoying the happiness of others, the success of others.
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So this, this is like the, let's call this, cause the first person that drilled this into
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my head is Rogan, Joe Rogan.
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He was the embodiment of that cause I saw somebody who is a successful, rich and nonstop
link |
I mean, you could tell when somebody is full of shit and somebody is not really genuinely
link |
enjoying the success of his friends.
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That was weird to me.
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That was interesting.
link |
And I mean, the way you're kind of speaking to it, the reason Joe stood out to me is I
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guess I haven't witnessed genuine expression of that often in this culture of just real
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I mean, part of that has to do, there hasn't been many channels where you can watch or
link |
listen to people being their authentic selves.
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So I'm sure there's a bunch of people who live life with compersion.
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They probably don't seek public attention also, but that was, yeah, if there was any
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word that could express what I've learned from Joe, why he's been a really inspiring
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figure is that compersion.
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And I wish our world was, had a lot more of that cause then it may, I mean, my own, sorry
link |
to go in a small tangent, but like you're speaking how society should function.
link |
But I feel like if you optimize for that metric in your own personal life, you're going to
link |
live a truly fulfilling life.
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I don't know what the right word to use, but that's a really good way to live life.
link |
You will also learn what gets in the way of it and how to work with it that if you wanted
link |
to help try to build systems at scale or apply Facebook or exponential technologies to do
link |
that, you would have more actual depth of real knowledge of what that takes.
link |
And this is, you know, as you mentioned that there's this virtuous cycle between when you
link |
get stoked on other people doing well and then they have a similar relationship to you
link |
and everyone is in the process of building each other up.
link |
And this is what I would say the healthy version of competition is versus the unhealthy version.
link |
The healthy version, right, the root, I believe it's a Latin word that means to strive together.
link |
And it's that impulse of becoming where I want to become more, but I recognize that
link |
there's actually a hormesis.
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There's a challenge that is needed for me to be able to do that.
link |
But that means that, yes, there's an impulse where I'm trying to get ahead.
link |
Maybe I'm even trying to win, but I actually want a good opponent and I want them to get
link |
ahead too because that is where my ongoing becoming happens and the win itself will get
link |
boring very quickly.
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The ongoing becoming is where there's aliveness and for the ongoing becoming, they need to
link |
And that's the strive together.
link |
So, in the healthy competition, I'm stoked when they're doing really well because my
link |
becoming is supported by it.
link |
Now this is actually a very nice segue into a model I like about what a meaningful human
link |
life is, if you want to go there.
link |
I have three things I'm going elsewhere with, but if we were first, let us take this short
link |
stroll through the park of the meaning of life.
link |
Daniel, what is a meaningful life?
link |
I think the semantics end up mattering because a lot of people will take the word meaning
link |
and the word purpose almost interchangeably and they'll think kind of, what is the meaning
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What is the meaning of human life?
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What is the meaning of life?
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What's the meaning of the universe?
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And what is the meaning of existence rather than nonexistence?
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So, there's a lot of kind of existential considerations there and I think there's some
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cognitive mistakes that are very easy, like taking the idea of purpose.
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Which is like a goal?
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Which is a utilitarian concept.
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The purpose of one thing is defined in relationship to other things that have assumed value.
link |
And to say, what is the purpose of everything?
link |
Well, purpose is too small of a question.
link |
It's fundamentally a relative question within everything.
link |
What is the purpose of one thing relative to another?
link |
What is the purpose of everything?
link |
And there's nothing outside of it with which to say it.
link |
We actually just got to the limits of the utility of the concept of purpose.
link |
It doesn't mean it's purposeless in the sense of something inside of it being purposeless.
link |
It means the concept is too small.
link |
Which is why you end up getting to, you know, like in Taoism, talking about the nature of
link |
Rather, there's a fundamental what where the why can't go deeper is the nature of it.
link |
But I'm going to try to speak to a much simpler part, which is when people think about what
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is a meaningful human life.
link |
And kind of if we were to optimize for something at the level of individual life, but also,
link |
how does optimizing for this at the level of the individual life lead to the best society
link |
for insofar as people living that way affects others and long term, the world as a whole?
link |
And how would we then make a civilization that was trying to think about these things?
link |
Because you can see that there are a lot of dialectics where there's value on two sides,
link |
individualism and collectivism or the ability to accept things and the ability to push harder
link |
And there's failure modes on both sides.
link |
And so, when you were starting to say, okay, individual happiness, you're like, wait, fuck,
link |
sadists can be happy while hurting people.
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It's not individual happiness, it's love.
link |
But wait, some people can self sacrifice out of love in a way that actually ends up just
link |
creating codependency for everybody.
link |
Or okay, so how do we think about all those things together?
link |
This kind of came to me as a simple way that I kind of relate to it is that a meaningful
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life involves the mode of being, the mode of doing and the mode of becoming.
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And it involves a virtuous relationship between those three and that any of those modes on
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their own also have failure modes that are not a meaningful life.
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The mode of being, the way I would describe it, if we're talking about the essence of
link |
it is about taking in and appreciating the beauty of life that is now.
link |
It's a mode that is in the moment and that is largely about being with what is.
link |
It's fundamentally grounded in the nature of experience and the meaningfulness of experience.
link |
The prima facie meaningfulness of when I'm having this experience, I'm not actually asking
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what the meaning of life is, I'm actually full of it.
link |
I'm full of experiencing it.
link |
The momentary experience, the moment.
link |
So taking in the beauty of life.
link |
Being is adding to the beauty of life.
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I'm going to produce some art, I'm going to produce some technology that will make life
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easier and more beautiful for somebody else.
link |
I'm going to do some science that will end up leading to better insights or other people's
link |
ability to appreciate the beauty of life more because they understand more about it or whatever
link |
it is or protect it, right?
link |
I'm going to protect it in some way.
link |
But that's adding to or being in service of the beauty of life through our doing.
link |
And becoming is getting better at both of those.
link |
Being able to deepen our being, which is to be able to take in the beauty of life more
link |
profoundly, be more moved by it, touched by it, and increasing our capacity with doing
link |
to add to the beauty of life more.
link |
So I hold that a meaningful life has to be all three of those.
link |
And where they're not in conflict with each other, ultimately it grounds in being, it
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grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness of experience.
link |
And then my doing is ultimately something that will be able to increase the possibility
link |
of the quality of experience for others.
link |
And my becoming is a deepening on those.
link |
So it grounds an experience and also the evolutionary possibility of experience.
link |
And the point is to oscillate between these, never getting stuck on any one or I suppose
link |
in parallel, well you can't really, attention is a thing, you can only allocate attention.
link |
I want moments where I am absorbed in the sunset and I'm not thinking about what to
link |
And then the fullness of that can make it to where my doing doesn't come from what's
link |
in it for me because I actually feel overwhelmingly full already.
link |
And then it's like how can I make life better for other people that don't have as much opportunities
link |
How can I add something wonderful?
link |
How can I just be in the creative process?
link |
And so I think where the doing comes from matters and if the doing comes from a fullness
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of being, it's inherently going to be paying attention to externalities or it's more oriented
link |
to do that than if it comes from some emptiness that is trying to get full in some way that
link |
is willing to cause sacrifices other places and where a chunk of its attention is internally
link |
And so when Buddha said desire is the cause of all suffering, then later the vow of the
link |
Bodhisattva which was to show up for all sentient beings in universe forever is a pretty intense
link |
thing like desire.
link |
I would say there is a kind of desire, if we think of desire as a basis for movement
link |
like a flow or a gradient, there's a kind of desire that comes from something missing
link |
inside seeking fulfillment of that in the world.
link |
That ends up being the cause of actions that perpetuate suffering.
link |
But there's also not just non desire, there's a kind of desire that comes from feeling full
link |
at the beauty of life and wanting to add to it that is a flow this direction.
link |
And I don't think that is the cause of suffering.
link |
I think that is, you know, and the Western traditions, right, the Eastern traditions
link |
focused on that and kind of unconditional happiness outside of them, in the moment outside
link |
The Western tradition said, no, actually, desire is the source of creativity and we're
link |
here to be made in the image and likeness of the creator.
link |
We're here to be fundamentally creative.
link |
But creating from where and in service of what?
link |
Creating from a sense of connection to everything and wholeness in service of the well being
link |
of all of it is very different.
link |
Which is back to that compassion, compersion axis.
link |
Being, doing, becoming.
link |
It's pretty powerful.
link |
You could potentially be algorithmatized into a robot just saying, where does death come
link |
Being is forgetting, I mean, the concept of time completely.
link |
There's a sense to doing and becoming that has a deadline built in, the urgency built
link |
Do you think death is fundamental to this, to a meaningful life?
link |
Acknowledging or feeling the terror of death, like Ernest Becker, or just acknowledging
link |
the uncertainty, the mystery, the melancholy nature of the fact that the ride ends.
link |
Is that part of this equation or it's not necessary?
link |
Okay, look at how it could be related.
link |
I've experienced fear of death.
link |
I've also experienced times where I thought I was going to die that felt extremely peaceful
link |
And it's funny because we can be afraid of death because we're afraid of hell or bad
link |
reincarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have or we're projecting
link |
some kind of sentient suffering.
link |
But if we're afraid of just non experience, I noticed that every time I stay up late enough
link |
that I'm really tired, I'm longing for deep sleep and non experience, right?
link |
Like I'm actually longing for experience to stop.
link |
And it's not morbid, it's not a bummer.
link |
And I don't mind falling asleep and sometimes when I wake up, I want to go back into it
link |
and then when it's done, I'm happy to come out of it.
link |
So when we think about death and having finite time here, and we could talk about if we live
link |
for a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that, it would still be
link |
The one bummer with the age we die is that I generally find that people mostly start
link |
to emotionally mature just shortly before they die.
link |
But if I get to live forever, I can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever.
link |
And if life continues and consciousness and sentience and people appreciating beauty and
link |
adding to it and becoming continues, my life doesn't, but my life can have effects that
link |
continue well beyond it, then life with a capital L starts mattering more to me than
link |
My life gets to be a part of and in service to.
link |
And the whole thing about when old men plant trees, the shade of which they'll never get
link |
I remember the first time I read this poem by Hafez, the Sufi poet, written in like 13th
link |
century or something like that, and he talked about that if you're lonely, to think about
link |
him and he was kind of leaning his spirit into yours across the distance of a millennium
link |
and would comfort you with these poems and just thinking about people a millennium from
link |
now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if they'd be lonely
link |
and could he offer something that could touch them.
link |
And it's just fucking beautiful.
link |
And so like the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends
link |
what's in it for me.
link |
And death forces you to that.
link |
So not only does death create the urgency of doing, you're very right, it does have
link |
a sense in which it incentivizes the compersion and the compassion.
link |
And the widening, you remember Einstein had that quote, something to the effect of it's
link |
an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are separate things.
link |
There's this one thing we call universe and something about us being inside of a prison
link |
of perception that can only see a very narrow little bit of it.
link |
But this might be just some weird disposition of mine, but when I think about the future
link |
after I'm dead and I think about consciousness, I think about young people falling in love
link |
for the first time and their experience, and I think about people being awed by sunsets
link |
and I think about all of it, right?
link |
I can't not feel connected to that.
link |
Do you feel some sadness to the very high likelihood that you will be forgotten completely
link |
by all of human history, you, Daniel, the name, that which cannot be named?
link |
Systems like to self perpetuate, egos do that.
link |
The idea that I might do something meaningful that future people will appreciate, of course
link |
there's like a certain sweetness to that idea.
link |
But I know how many people did something, did things that I wouldn't be here without
link |
and that my life would be less without, whose names I will never know.
link |
And I feel a gratitude to them, I feel a closeness, I feel touched by that, and I think to the
link |
degree that the future people are conscious enough, there is a, you know, a lot of traditions
link |
have this kind of are we being good ancestors and respect for the ancestors beyond the names.
link |
I think that's a very healthy idea.
link |
But let me return to a much less beautiful and a much less pleasant conversation.
link |
You mentioned prison.
link |
Back to X risk, okay.
link |
You mentioned something about the state.
link |
So what role, let's talk about companies, governments, parents, all the mechanisms that
link |
can be a source of conditioning.
link |
Which flavor of ice cream do you like?
link |
Do you think the state is the right thing for the future?
link |
So governments that are elected democratic systems that are representing representative
link |
Is there some kind of political system of governance that you find appealing?
link |
Is it parents, meaning a very close knit tribes of conditioning that's the most essential?
link |
And then you and Michael Malice would happily agree that it's anarchy, or the state should
link |
be dissolved or destroyed or burned to the ground if you're Michael Malice, giggling,
link |
holding the torch as the fire burns.
link |
So which which is it is the state can state be good?
link |
Or is the state bad for the conditioning of a beautiful world, A or B?
link |
This is like an SPT test.
link |
You like to give these simplified good or bad things.
link |
Would I like the state that we live in currently, the United States federal government to stop
link |
No, I would really not like that.
link |
I think that would be not quite bad for the world in a lot of ways.
link |
Do I think that it's a optimal social system and maximally just and humane and all those
link |
And I wanted to continue as is.
link |
No, also not that.
link |
But I am much more interested in it being able to evolve to a better thing without going
link |
through the catastrophe phase that I think it's just non existence would give.
link |
So what size of state is good in a sense like do we should we as a human society as this
link |
world becomes more globalized?
link |
Should we be constantly striving to reduce the we can we can put on a map like right
link |
now, literally, like the the centers of power in the world, some of them are tech companies,
link |
some of them are governments, should we be trying to as much as possible to decentralize
link |
the power to where it's very difficult to point on the map, the centers of power.
link |
And that means making the state however, there's a bunch of different ways to make the government
link |
much smaller, that could be reducing in the United States, reducing the funding for the
link |
government, all those kinds of things, their set of responsibilities, the set of powers,
link |
it could be, I mean, this is far out, but making more nations, or maybe nations not
link |
in the space that are defined by geographic location, but rather in the space of ideas,
link |
which is what anarchy is about.
link |
So anarchy is about forming collectives based on their set of ideas, and doing so dynamically
link |
not based on where you were born, and so on.
link |
I think we can say that the natural state of humans, if we want to describe such a thing,
link |
is to live in tribes that were below the Dunbar number, meaning that for a few hundred thousand
link |
years of human history, all of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that size.
link |
And whenever it would get up to that size, it would end up cleaving.
link |
And so it seems like there's a pretty strong, but there weren't individual humans out in
link |
the wild doing really well, right?
link |
So we were a group animal, but with groups that had a specific size.
link |
So we could say, in a way, humans were being domesticated by those groups.
link |
They were learning how to have certain rules to participate with the group, without which
link |
you'd get kicked out.
link |
But that's still the wild state of people.
link |
And maybe it's useful to do as a side statement, which I've recently looked at a bunch of
link |
papers around Dunbar's number, where the mean is actually 150.
link |
If you actually look at the original papers, it's a range.
link |
It's really a range.
link |
So it's actually somewhere under a thousand.
link |
So it's a range of like two to 500 or whatever it is.
link |
But like you could argue that the, I think it actually is exactly two, the range is two
link |
to 520, something like that.
link |
And this is the mean that's taken crudely.
link |
It's not a very good paper in terms of the actual numerically speaking.
link |
But it'd be interesting if there's a bunch of Dunbar numbers that could be computed for
link |
particular environments, particular conditions, so on.
link |
It is very true that they're likely to be something small, you know, under a million.
link |
But it'd be interesting if we can expand that number in interesting ways that will change
link |
the fabric of this conversation.
link |
I just want to kind of throw that in there.
link |
I don't know if the 150 is baked in somehow into the hardware.
link |
We can talk about some of the things that it probably has to do with.
link |
Up to a certain number of people.
link |
And this is going to be variable based on the social technologies that mediate it to
link |
We'll talk about that in a minute.
link |
Up to a certain number of people, everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately.
link |
So let's go ahead and just take 150 as an average number.
link |
Everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly,
link |
it's your extended family and you're stuck living with them and you know who they are
link |
and there's no anonymous people.
link |
There's no just them and over there.
link |
And that's one part of what leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the
link |
individual and good for the whole has a coupling.
link |
Also below that scale, everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing.
link |
There's not groups that are very siloed.
link |
And as a result, it's actually very hard to get away with bad behavior.
link |
There's a force kind of transparency.
link |
And so you don't need kind of like the state in that way.
link |
But lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead.
link |
Sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen.
link |
And so there's a conditioning environment where the individual is behaving in a way
link |
that is aligned with the interest of the tribe is what gets conditioned.
link |
When it gets to be a much larger system, it becomes easier to hide certain things from
link |
the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of anonymous people.
link |
I would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that number of people, we
link |
could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a really
link |
Do we not migrate?
link |
Do we, you know, something like that?
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Do we get rid of this person?
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And why would I want to agree to be a part of a larger group where everyone can't be
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part of that council?
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And so I am going to now be subject to law that I have no say in if I could be part of
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a smaller group that could still survive and I get a say in the law that I'm subject to.
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So I think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the Dunbar number two is we can
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look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding them together and has cleaving
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And if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy, that civilization will last.
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And so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving energy within the society,
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things we can do to increase the binding energy.
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I think naturally we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size kind
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That ended with a few things.
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It ended with people having migrated enough that when you started to get resource wars,
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you couldn't just migrate away easily.
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And so tribal warfare became more obligated.
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It involved the plow and the beginning of real economic surplus.
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So there were a few different kind of forcing functions.
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But we're talking about what size should it be, right?
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What size should a society be?
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And I think the idea, like if we think about your body for a moment as a self organizing
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complex system that is multi scaled, we think about...
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Our body is a wonderland.
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Our body is a wonderland, yeah.
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That's a John Mayer song.
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But yes, so if we think about our body and the billions of cells that are in it.
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Well, you don't have...
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Think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have all the tens of trillions of cells
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in it with no internal organization structure, right?
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Just like a sea of protoplasm.
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And so you have cells and tissues, and then you have tissues and organs and organs and
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organ systems, and so you have these layers of organization, and then obviously the individual
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in a tribe in a ecosystem.
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And each of the higher layers are both based on the lower layers, but also influencing
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I think the future of civilization will be similar, which is there's a level of governance
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that happens at the level of the individual.
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My own governance of my own choice.
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I think there's a level that happens at the level of a family.
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We're making decisions together, we're inter influencing each other and affecting each
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other, taking responsibility for the idea of an extended family.
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And you can see that like for a lot of human history, we had an extended family, we had
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a local community, a local church or whatever it was, we had these intermediate structures.
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Whereas right now, there's kind of like the individual producer, consumer, taxpayer, voter,
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and the massive nation state global complex, and not that much in the way of intermediate
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structures that we relate with, and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics,
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all impersonalized, made fungible.
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And so, I think that we have to have global governance, meaning I think we have to have
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governance at the scale we affect stuff, and if anybody is messing up the oceans, that
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matters for everybody.
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So, that can't only be national or only local.
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Everyone is scared of the idea of global governance because we think about some top down system
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of imposition that now has no checks and balances on power.
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I'm scared of that same version, so I'm not talking about that kind of global governance.
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It's why I'm even using the word governance as a process rather than government as an
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imposed phenomena.
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And so, I think we have to have global governance, but I think we also have to have local governance,
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and there has to be relationships between them that each, where there are both checks
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and balances and power flows of information.
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So, I think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance
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at the level of nation states because I think nation states are largely fictitious things
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that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that.
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I think cities are based on real things that will keep being real where the proximity of
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certain things together, the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of
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So, you look at like Jeffrey West's work on scale and finding that companies and nation
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states and things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return
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of, of production per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the
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But the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita, but it's not designed, it's kind
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of this organic thing, right?
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So, there should be governance at the level of cities because people can sense and actually
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have some agency there, probably neighborhoods and smaller scales within it and also verticals
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and some of it won't be geographic, it'll be network based, right?
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Networks of affinities.
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So, I don't think the future is one type of governance.
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Now, what we can say more broadly is say, when we're talking about groups of people
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that inner affect each other, the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how
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to coordinate our choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase
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total productive capacity in a way that's good for everybody, division of labor and
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specialty so we all get more better stuff and whatever.
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But it's a, it's a coordination of our choice making.
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I think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination
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of choice making, so they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave and an internal
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war comes about or whatever, or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their
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resources or whatever.
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Or it can fail on the side of trying to get order via imposition, via force, and so it
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fails on the side of oppression, which ends up being for a while functionalish for the
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thing as a whole, but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of revolt
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or because it can't innovate enough or something like that.
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And so, there's this like toggling between order via oppression and chaos.
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And I think the idea of democracy, not the way we've implemented it, but the idea of
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it, whether we're talking about a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy, liquid
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democracy, a republic or whatever, the idea of an open society, participatory governance
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is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with
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chaos and infighting and inability to coordinate, and we're also not stuck with oppression?
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And what would it take to have emergent order?
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This is the most kind of central question for me these days because if we look at what
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different nation states are doing around the world and we see nation states that are more
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authoritarian that in some ways are actually coordinating much more effectively.
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So for instance, we can see that China has built high speed rail not just through its
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country but around the world and the US hasn't built any high speed rail yet.
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You can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where we've had increasing
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economic inequality happening.
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You can see like that if there was a single country that could make all of its own stuff
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if the global supply chains failed, China would be the closest one to being able to
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start to go closed loop on fundamental things.
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Belt and Road Initiative, supply chain on rare earth metals, transistor manufacturing
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that is like, oh, they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways.
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In the last call it 30 years.
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And that's imposed order.
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And we can see that if in the US, let's look at why real quick.
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We know why we created term limits so that we wouldn't have forever monarchs.
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That's the thing we were trying to get away from and that there would be checks and balances
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on power and that kind of thing.
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But that also has created a negative second order effect, which is nobody does long term
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planning because somebody comes in who's got four years, they want reelected.
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They don't do anything that doesn't create a return within four years that will end up
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getting them elected, reelected.
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And so the 30 year industrial development to build high speed trains or the new kind
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of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get invested in.
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And then if you have left versus right, where whatever someone does for four years, then
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the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years.
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And most of the energy goes into campaigning against each other.
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This system is just dissipating as heat, right?
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Like it's just burning up as heat.
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And the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting because they
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got rid of those people can actually coordinate better.
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But I would argue it has its own fail states eventually and dystopic properties that are
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not the thing we want.
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So the goal is to accomplish, to create a system that does long term planning without
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the negative effects of a monarch or dictator that stays there for the long term and accomplish
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that through not doing the imposition of a single leader, but through emergence.
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So that perhaps, first of all, the technology in itself seems to maybe disagree a lot for
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different possibilities here, which is make primary the system, not the humans.
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So the basic, the medium on which the democracy happens, like a platform where people can
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make decisions, do the choice making, the coordination of the choice making, where emerges
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some kind of order to where like something that applies at the scale of the family, the
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family, the city, the country, the continent, the whole world, and then does that so dynamically,
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constantly changing based on the needs of the people, sort of always evolving.
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And it would all be owned by Google.
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Is there a way to, so first of all, you're optimistic that you could basically create
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the technology can save us technology at creating platforms by technology, I mean, like software
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network platforms that allows humans to deliberate, like make government together dynamically
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without the need for a leader that's on a podium screaming stuff.
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That's one and two.
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If you're optimistic about that, are you also optimistic about the CEOs of such platforms?
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The idea that technology is values neutral, values agnostic, and people can use it for
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constructive or destructive purposes, but it doesn't predispose anything.
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It's just silly and naive.
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Technology elicits patterns of human behavior because those who utilize it and get ahead
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end up behaving differently because of their utilization of it, and then other people,
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then they end up shaping the world or other people race to also get the power of the technology
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and so there's whole schools of anthropology that look at the effect on social systems
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and the minds of people of the change in our tooling.
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Marvin Harris's work called cultural materialism looked at this deeply, obviously Marshall
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McLuhan looked specifically at the way that information technologies change the nature
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of our beliefs, minds, values, social systems.
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I will not try to do this rigorously because there are academics will disagree on the subtle
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details but I'll do it kind of like illustratively.
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You think about the emergence of the plow, the ox drawn plow in the beginning of agriculture
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that came with it where before that you had hunter gatherer and then you had horticulture
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kind of a digging stick but not the plow.
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Well the world changed a lot with that, right?
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And a few of the changes that at least some theorists believe in is when the ox drawn
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plow started to proliferate, any culture that utilized it was able to start to actually
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cultivate grain because just with a digging stick you couldn't get enough grain for it
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to matter, grain was a storable caloric surplus, they could make it through the famines, they
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could grow their population, so the ones that used it got so much ahead that it became obligate
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and everybody used it, that corresponding with the use of a plow, animism went away
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everywhere that it existed because you can't talk about the spirit of the buffalo while
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beating the cow all day long to pull the plow, so the moment that we do animal husbandry
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of that kind where you have to beat the cow all day, you have to say it's just a dumb
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animal, man has dominion over earth and the nature of even our religious and spiritual
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You went from women primarily using the digging stick to do the horticulture or gathering
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before that, men doing the hunting stuff to now men had to use the plow because the upper
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body strength actually really mattered, women would have miscarriages when they would do
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it when they were pregnant, so all the caloric supply started to come from men where it had
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been from both before and the ratio of male female gods changed to being mostly male gods
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Obviously we went from very, that particular line of thought then also says that feminism
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followed the tractor and that the rise of feminism in the West started to follow women
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being able to say we can do what men can because the male upper body strength wasn't differential
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once the internal combustion engine was much stronger and we can drive a tractor.
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So I don't think to try to trace complex things to one cause is a good idea, so I think this
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is a reductionist view but it has truth in it and so the idea that technology is values
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agnostic is silly.
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Technology codes patterns of behavior that code rationalizing those patterns of behavior
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and believing in them.
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The plow also is the beginning of the Anthropocene, right, it was the beginning of us changing
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the environment radically to clear cut areas to just make them useful for people which
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also meant the change of the view of where the web of life were just a part of it, etc.
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So all those types of things.
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That's brilliantly put, by the way, that was just brilliant.
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But the question is, so it's not agnostic, but...
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So we have to look at what the psychological effects of specific tech applied certain ways
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are and be able to say it's not just doing the first order thing you intended, it's doing
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like the effect on patriarchy and animism and the end of tribal culture in the beginning
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of empire and the class systems that came with that.
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We can go on and on about what the plow did.
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The beginning of surplus was inheritance, which then became the capital model and like
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So we have to say when we're looking at the tech, what are the values built into the way
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the tech is being built that are not obvious?
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Right, so you always have to consider externalities.
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And the externalities are not just physical to the environment, they're also to how the
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people are being conditioned and how the relationality between them is being conditioned.
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So the question I'm asking you, so I personally would rather be led by a plow and a tractor
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than Stalin, okay?
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That's the question I'm asking you.
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In creating an emergent government where people, where there's a democracy that's dynamic,
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that makes choices, that does governance at like a very kind of liquid, there's a bunch
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of fine resolution layers of abstraction of governance happening at all scales, right?
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And doing so dynamically where no one person has power at any one time that can dominate
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and impose rule, okay?
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That's the Stalin version.
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I'm saying isn't the alternative that's emergent empowered or made possible by the plow and
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the tractor, which is the modern version of that, is like the internet, the digital space
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where we can, the monetary system where you have the currency and so on, but you have
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much more importantly, to me at least, is just basic social interaction, the mechanisms
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of human transacting with each other in the space of ideas, isn't?
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So yes, it's not agnostic, definitely not agnostic.
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You've had a brilliant rant there.
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The tractor has effects, but isn't that the way we achieve an emergent system of governance?
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Yes, but I wouldn't say we're on track.
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You haven't seen anything promising.
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It's not that I haven't seen anything promising, it's that to be on track requires understanding
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and guiding some of the things differently than is currently happening and it's possible.
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That's actually what I really care about.
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So you couldn't have had a Stalin without having certain technologies emerge.
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He couldn't have ruled such a big area without transportation technologies, without the train,
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without the communication tech that made it possible.
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So when you say you'd rather have a tractor or a plow than a Stalin, there's a relationship
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between them that is more recursive, which is new physical technologies allow rulers
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to rule with more power over larger distances historically.
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And some things are more responsible for that than others.
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Like Stalin also ate stuff for breakfast, but the thing he ate for breakfast is less
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responsible for the starvation of millions than the train.
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The train is more responsible for that and then the weapons of war are more responsible.
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So some technology, let's not throw it all in the, you're saying like technology has
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a responsibility here, but some is better than others.
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I'm saying that people's use of technology will change their behavior.
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So it has behavioral dispositions built in.
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The change of the behavior will also change the values in the society.
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It's very complicated, right?
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It will also, as a result, both make people who have different kinds of predispositions
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with regard to rulership and different kinds of new capacities.
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And so we have to think about these things.
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It's kind of well understood that the printing press and then in early industrialism ended
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feudalism and created kind of nation states.
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So one thing I would say as a long trend that we can look at is that whenever there is a
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step function, a major leap in technology, physical technology, the underlying techno
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industrial base with which we do stuff, it ends up coding for, it ends up predisposing
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a whole bunch of human behavioral patterns that the previous social system had not emerged
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And so it usually ends up breaking the previous social systems, the way the plow broke the
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tribal system, the way that the industrial revolution broke the feudal system, and then
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new social systems have to emerge so they can deal with the new powers, the new dispositions,
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whatever with that tech.
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Obviously, the nuke broke nation state governance being adequate and said, we can't ever have
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So then it created this international governance apparatus world.
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So I guess what I'm saying is that the solution is not exponential tech following the current
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path of what the market incentivizes exponential tech to do, market being a previous social
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I would say that exponential tech, if we look at different types of social tech, so let's
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just briefly look at that democracy tried to do the emergent order thing, right?
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At least that's the story, and which is, and this is why if you look, this important part
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It's kind of doing it.
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It's just doing it poorly.
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You're saying, I mean, that's, it is emergent order in some sense.
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I mean, that's the hope of democracy versus other forms of government.
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I mean, I said at least the story because obviously it didn't do it for women and slaves
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It doesn't do it for all classes equally, et cetera.
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But the idea of democracy is that, is participatory governance.
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And so you notice that the modern democracies emerged out of the European enlightenment
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and specifically because the idea that a lot of people, some huge number, not a tribal
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number, a huge number of anonymous people who don't know each other, are not bonded
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to each other, who believe different things, who grew up in different ways, can all work
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together to make collective decisions, well, that affect everybody, and where some of them
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will make compromises and the thing that matters to them for what matters to other strangers.
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That's actually wild.
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Like it's a wild idea that that would even be possible.
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And it was kind of the result of this high enlightenment idea that we could all do the
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philosophy of science and we could all do the Hegelian dialectic.
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Those ideas had emerged, right?
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And it was that we could all, so our choice making, because we said a society is trying
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to coordinate choice making, the emergent order is the order of the choices that we're
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making, not just at the level of the individuals, but what groups of individuals, corporations,
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nations, states, whatever do.
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Our choices are based on, our choice making is based on our sense making and our meaning
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Our sense making is what do we believe is happening in the world, and what do we believe
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the effects of a particular thing would be.
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Our meaning making is what do we care about, right, our values generation, what do we care
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about that we're trying to move the world in the direction of.
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If you ultimately are trying to move the world in a direction that is really, really different
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than the direction I'm trying to, we have very different values, we're gonna have a
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And if you think the world is a very different world, right, if you think that systemic racism
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is rampant everywhere and one of the worst problems, and I think it's not even a thing,
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if you think climate change is almost existential, and I think it's not even a thing, we're gonna
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have a really hard time coordinating.
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And so, we have to be able to have shared sense making of can we come to understand
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just what is happening together, and then can we do shared values generation, okay?
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Maybe I'm emphasizing a particular value more than you, but I can take your perspective
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and I can see how the thing that you value is worth valuing, and I can see how it's affected
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So, can we take all the values and try to come up with a proposition that benefits all
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of them better than the proposition I created just to benefit these ones that harms the
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ones that you care about, which is why you're opposing my proposition?
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We don't even try in the process of crafting a proposition currently to see, and this is
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the reason that the proposition we vote on, it gets half the votes almost all the time.
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It almost never gets 90% of the votes, is because it benefits some things and harms
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We can say all theory of trade offs, but we didn't even try to say, could we see what
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everybody cares about and see if there is a better solution?
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How do we fix that try?
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I wonder, is it as simple as the social technology of education?
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I mean, the proposition crafting and refinement process has to be key to a democracy or participatory
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governance, and it's not currently.
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But isn't that the humans creating that situation?
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So one way, there's two ways to fix that.
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One is to fix the individual humans, which is the education early in life, and the second
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is to create somehow systems that...
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So I understand the education part, but creating systems, that's why I mentioned the technologies
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is creating social networks, essentially.
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Yes, that's actually necessary.
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Okay, so let's go to the first part and then we'll come to the second part.