The following is a conversation with Daniel Schmacktenberger, a founding member of the
Consilience Project that is aimed at improving public sense-making and dialogue.
He is interested in understanding how we humans can be the best version of ourselves as individuals
and as collectives at all scales. Quick mention of our sponsors, Groud News,
Netsuite, FourSigmatic, Magic Spoon, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this
podcast. As a side note, let me say that I got a chance to talk to Daniel on and off the mic
for a couple of days. We took a long walk the day before our conversation. I really enjoyed
meeting him just on a basic human level. We talked about the world around us with words that carried
hope for us individual ants actually contributing something of value to the colony. These conversations
are the reasons I love human beings. Our insatiable striving to lessen the suffering in the world.
But more than that, there's a simple magic to two strangers meeting for the first time
and sharing ideas, becoming fast friends and creating something that is far greater than
the sum of our parts. I've gotten to experience some of that same magic here in Austin with a few
new friends and in random bars in my travels across this country where a conversation leaves me with
a big stupid smile on my face and a new appreciation of this too short, too beautiful life. This is
the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Daniel Schmacktenberger.
If aliens were observing Earth through the entire history just watching us and we're tasked with
summarizing what happened until now, what do you think they would say? What do you think they would
write up in that summary? Like it has to be pretty short, less than a page. Like in The Tracker's Guide,
there's I think like a paragraph or a couple sentences. How would you summarize, sorry,
how would the aliens summarize? Do you think all of human civilization?
My first thoughts take more than a page. They'd probably distill it because if they watched,
well, I mean first I have no idea if their senses are even attuned to similar stuff to what our
senses are attuned to or what the nature of their consciousness is like relative to ours. And so
let's assume that they're kind of like us, just technologically more advanced to get here from
wherever they are. That's the first kind of constraint on the thought experiment. And then
if they've watched throughout all of history, they saw the burning of Alexandria. They saw that
2,000 years ago in Greece, we were producing things like clocks, the antikytheria mechanism,
and then that technology got lost. They saw that there wasn't just a steady dialectic of progress.
So every once in a while, there's a giant fire that destroys a lot of things.
There's a giant like commotion that destroys a lot of things.
Yeah, and it's usually self-induced. They would have seen that. And so as they're looking at us
now as we move past the nuclear weapons age into the full globalization anthropocene exponential
tech age, still making our decisions relatively similarly to how we did in the Stone Age as
far as rivalry game theory type stuff, I think they would think that this is probably most likely
one of the planets that is not going to make it to being intergalactic because we blow ourselves
up in the technological adolescence. And if we are going to, we're going to need some
major progress rapidly in the social technologies that can guide and bind and direct the physical
technologies so that we are safe vessels for the amount of power we're getting.
Actually, Haytrackers Guide has an estimation about how much of a risk this particular thing
poses to the rest of the galaxy. And I think, I forget what it was, I think it was medium or low.
So their estimation would be that this species of ant-like creatures is not going to survive long.
There's ups and downs in terms of technological innovation. The fundamental nature of their
behavior from a game theory perspective hasn't really changed. They have not learned in any
fundamental way how to control and properly incentivize or properly do the mechanism design
of games to ensure long-term survival. And then they move on to another planet. Do you
think there is in a more slightly more serious question, do you think there's
some number or perhaps a very, very large number of intelligent alien civilizations out there?
Yes, would be hard to think otherwise. I know, I think Posterum had a new article not that long
ago on why that might not be the case, that the Drake equation might not be the kind of in-story
on it. But when I look at the total number of Kepler planets, just that we're aware of just
galactically and also when those life forms were discovered in Mono Lake that didn't have the same
six primary atoms that I think it had arsenic replacing phosphorus as one of the primary
aspects of its energy metabolism, we get to think about that the building blocks might be
more different. So the physical constraints even that the planets have to have might be more different.
It seems really unlikely not to mention interesting things that we've observed that
are still unexplained as you've had guests on your show discussing tic-tac.
Oh, the ones that have visited. Yeah.
Well, let's dive right into that. What do you make sense of the rich human psychology of
there being hundreds of thousands, probably millions of witnesses of UFOs of different
kinds on earth, most of which I presume are conjured up by the human mind through the perception
system. Some number might be true. Some number might be reflective of actual physical objects,
whether it's, you know, drones or testing military technology that's secret or other
worldly technology. What do you make sense of all that because it's gaining quite a bit of popularity
recently? There is some sense of which that's that's us humans being hopeful and dreaming of other
worldly creatures as a way to escape the juroriness of our of the human condition. But in another sense,
it could be it really could be something truly exciting that science should turn its eye towards.
So where do you place it? Speaking of turning eye towards this is one of those super fascinating,
actually super consequential, possibly topics that I wish I had more time to study and just
haven't allocated. So I don't have firm beliefs on this because I haven't got to study it as much
I want. So what I'm going to say comes from a superficial assessment. While we know there are
plenty of things that people thought of as UFO sightings that we can fully write off, we have
other better explanations for them. What we're interested in is the ones that we don't have
better explanations for and then not just immediately jumping to a theory of what it is,
but holding it as unidentified and being being curious and earnest. I think the the tic-tac one
is quite interesting and made it in major media recently. But I don't know if you ever saw the
disclosure project. I named Stephen Greer organized a bunch of mostly US military and some commercial
flight people who had direct observation and classified information disclosing it at a CNN
briefing. And so you saw high ranking generals, admirals, fighter pilots, all describing things
that they saw on radar with visual, with their own eyes or cameras, and also describing some
phenomena that had some consistency across different people. And I find this interesting
enough that I think it would be silly to just dismiss it. And specifically, we can ask the
question how much of it is natural phenomena, ball lightning or something like that. And this is why
I'm more interested in what fighter pilots and astronauts and people who are trained in
being able to identify flying objects and atmospheric phenomena have to say about it.
I think the thing, then you could say, well, are they more advanced military craft?
Is it some kind of, you know, human craft? The interesting thing that a number of them describe
is something that's kind of like right angles at speed, or not right angles, acute angles at speed,
but something that looks like a different relationship to inertia than physics makes
sense for us. I don't think that there are any human technologies that are doing that even in
really deep underground black projects. Now, one could say, okay, well, could it be a hologram?
What would it show up on radar if radar is also seeing it? And so I don't know. I think there's
enough, I mean, and for that to be a massive coordinated PSYOP is as interesting and ridiculous
in a way as the idea that it's UFOs from some extra planetary source. So it's up there on the
interesting topics. To me, if it is at all alien technology, it is the dumbest version of alien
technology. It's so far away, it's like the old, old crappy VHS tapes of alien technology. These
are like crappy drones that just floated, or even like spaced to the level of like space junk.
Because it is so close to our human technology, we talk about it moves in ways that's that's
unlike what we understand about physics, but it still has very similar kind of geometric notions
and something that we humans can perceive with our eyes, all those kinds of things. I feel like
alien technology, most likely would be something that we would not be able to perceive, not because
they're hiding, but because it's so far advanced that it would be much, it would be beyond the
cognitive capabilities of us humans. Just as you were saying, as per your answer for alien summarizing
earth, it's the starting assumption is they have similar perception systems, they have similar
cognitive capabilities, and that very well may not be the case. Let me ask you about
staying in aliens for just a little longer, because I think it's a good transition talking
about governments and human societies. Do you think if a US government or any government was in
possession of an alien spacecraft or of information related to alien spacecraft, they would
have the capacity, structurally would they have the processes, would they be able to
communicate that to the public effectively, or would they keep it secret in a room and do nothing
with it, both of to try to preserve military secrets, but also because of the incompetence
that's inherent to bureaucracies, or either? We can certainly see when certain things become
declassified 25 or 50 years later that there were things that the public might have wanted to know
that were kept secret for a very long time, for reasons of at least supposedly national security,
which is also a nice source of plausible deniability for people covering their
ass for doing things that would be problematic and other purposes.
There are, there's a scientist at Stanford who supposedly got some material that was
recovered from Area 51 type area, did analysis on it using I believe electron microscopy and a
couple other methods, and came to the idea that it was a nanotech alloy that was something we
didn't currently have the ability to do was not naturally occurring. So there, I've heard some
things, and again, like I said, I'm not going to stand behind any of these because I haven't done
the level of study to have high confidence. I think what you said also about would it be
super low tech alien craft? Like would they necessarily move their atoms around in space?
Or might they do something more interesting than that? Might they be able to
have a different relationship to the concept of space or information or consciousness? Or
one of the things that the craft supposedly do is not only accelerate and turn in a way that looks
not inertial, but also disappear. So there's a question as to, like the two are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. And it could be possible to, some people run a hypothesis that they create
intentional amounts of exposure as an invitation of a particular kind. Who knows, interesting field.
We tend to assume like SETI, that's listening out for aliens out there. I've just been recently
reading more and more about gravitational waves, and you have orbiting black holes
that orbit each other. They generate ripples in space time on my, for fun at night, when I lay
in bed, I think about what it would be like to ride those waves when they not, not the
not, not the low magnitude they are as it, when they reach earth, but get closer to the black holes,
because it'll basically be shrinking and expanding us in all dimensions, including time. So it's
actually ripples through space time that they generate. Why is it that you couldn't use that?
It travels at speed of light. It travels at speed, which is a very weird thing to say when you're,
when you're morphing space time. It's, it's, it's, it's, you could argue it's faster than
the speed of light. So if you're able to communicate by, to summon enough energy to generate black
holes and to orbit the, to, to force them to orbit each other, why not travel as the ripples
in space time? Whatever the hell that means, somehow combined with wormholes. So if you're
able to communicate through, like we don't think of gravitational waves as something you can
communicate with, because the, the radio will be, have to be the size, a very large size and very
dense, but perhaps that's it. You know, perhaps that's one way to communicate. It's a very effective
way. And that would explain, like we wouldn't even be able to make sense of that, of the physics
that results in an alien species that's able to control gravity at that scale. I think you just
jumped up the Kardashev scale so far, that you're not just harnessing the power of a star,
but harnessing the power of mutually rotating black holes. I, I, that's way above my physics
pay grade to think about, including even non-rotating black hole versions of transwarp travel.
I think, you know, you can talk with Eric more about that. I think he has better ideas on it
than I do. My hope for the future of humanity mostly does not rest in the near term on our ability
to get to other habitable planets in time. And even more than that, in the list of possible
solutions of how to improve human civilization, orbiting black holes is not in the, on the first
page for you. And not on the first page. Okay. I bet you did not expect us to start this
conversation here, but I'm glad the places it went. I am excited under my smaller scale
of Mars, Europa, Titan, Venus, potentially having very, like bacteria like life forms,
just on a, on a small human level. It's a little bit scary, but mostly really exciting
that there might be life elsewhere in the volcanoes and the oceans all around us,
teaming, having little societies and whether there's properties about that kind of life
that's somehow different than ours. I don't know what would be more exciting if
those colonies of single cell type organisms, what would be more exciting if they're different or
they're the same? If they're the same, that means through the rest of the universe,
there's life forms like us, something like us everywhere. If they're different, that's also
really exciting because there's life forms everywhere. They're not like us. That's a little
bit scary. I don't know what's scarier actually. I think both scary and exciting, no matter what,
right? The idea that they could be very different is philosophically very interesting for us to
open our aperture on what life and consciousness and self-replicating possibilities could look like.
The question on, are they different or the same? Obviously, there's lots of life here that is
the same in some ways and different in other ways. When you take the thing that we call an
invasive species, it's something that's still pretty the same hydrocarbon-based thing, but
co-evolved with co-selective pressures in a certain environment, we move it to another environment,
it might be devastating to that whole ecosystem because it's just different enough that it
messes up the self-stabilizing dynamics of that ecosystem. The question of, would they be
different in ways where we could still figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere together,
or fundamentally not? Fundamentally, the nature of how they operate and the nature of how we
operate would be incommensurable is a deep question. We offline talked about memetic
theory. It seems like if there were sufficiently different where we would not even, we can coexist
on different planes, it seems like a good thing. If we're close enough together to where we'd be
competing, then you're getting into the world of viruses and pathogens and all those kinds of things
to where one of us would die off quickly through basically mass murder without
even accidentally. If we just had a self-replicating single celled kind of creature that happened to
not work well for the hydrocarbon life that was here that got introduced because either output
something that was toxic or utilized up the same resource too quickly and it just replicated faster
and mutated faster. It wouldn't be a memetic theory, conflict theory kind of harm. It would just be
a von Neumann machine, a self-replicating machine that was fundamentally incompatible with these
kinds of self-replicating systems with faster outer loops.
For one final time, putting your alien flash god hat on and you look at human civilization,
do you think about the 7.8 billion people on earth as individual little creatures,
individual little organisms, or do you think of us as one organism with a collective intelligence?
What's the proper framework through which to analyze it again as an alien?
So that I know where you're coming from, would you have asked the question the same way
before the industrial revolution, before the agricultural revolution when there were half
a billion people and no telecommunications connecting them?
I would indeed ask the question the same way, but I would be less confident about
your conclusions. It would be an actually more interesting way to ask the question at that time,
but I would nevertheless ask it the same way, yes.
Well, let's go back further and smaller then. Rather than just a single human or the entire
human species, let's look at a relatively isolated tribe. In the relatively isolated,
probably sub Dunbar number, sub kind of 150 people tribe, do I look at that as one entity
where evolution is selecting for based on group selection, or do I think of it as 150 individuals
that are interacting in some way? Well, could those individuals exist without the group? No.
The evolutionary adaptiveness of humans was involved critically group selection,
and individual humans alone trying to figure out stone tools and protection and whatever
aren't what was selected for. And so I think the or is the wrong frame. I think it's
individuals are affecting the group that they're a part of. They're also dependent upon and being
affected by the group that they're part of. And so this now starts to get deep into political
theories also, which is theories that orient towards the collective at different scales,
whether a tribal scale or an empire or a nation state or something, and ones that orient towards
the individual liberalism and stuff like that. And I think there's very obvious failure modes on
both sides. And so the relationship between them is more interesting to me than either of them.
The relationship between the individual and the collective and the question around how to have
a virtuous process between those. So a good social system would be one where the organism of the
individual and the organism of the group of individuals is they're both synergistic to each
other. So what is best for the individuals and what's best for the whole is aligned.
But there is nevertheless an individual. It's a matter of degrees, I suppose, but
what defines a human more, the social network within which they've been brought up,
through which they've developed their intelligence, or is it their own sovereign
individual self? What's your intuition of how much, not just for evolutionary survival,
but as intellectual beings, how much do we need others for our development?
Yeah. I think we have a weird sense of this today relative to most previous periods of
sapien history. I think the vast majority of sapien history is tribal, like depending upon your early
human model, two or 300,000 years of homo sapiens in the little tribes, where they depended upon
that tribe for survival and excommunication from the tribe was fatal. I think our whole evolutionary
genetic history is in that environment. And the amount of time we've been out of it is relatively
so tiny. And then we still depended upon extended families and local communities more. And the big
kind of giant market complex where I can provide something to the market to get money, to be able
to get other things from the market where it seems like I don't need anyone. It's almost
like disintermediating our sense of need, even though your and my ability to talk to each other
using these mics and the phones that we coordinated on took millions of people over six
continents to be able to run the supply chains. It made all the stuff that we depend on, but we
don't notice that we depend upon them. They all seem fungible. If you take a baby, obviously,
that you didn't even get to a baby without a mom, was it dependent or dependent upon each other,
right, without two parents at minimum? And they depended upon other people. But if we take that
baby and we put it out in the wild, it obviously dies. So if we let it grow up for a little while,
the minimum amount of time where it starts to have some autonomy, and then we put it out in the
wild, and this has happened a few times, it doesn't learn language. And it doesn't learn the
small motor articulation that we learn. It doesn't learn the type of consciousness that we end up
having that is socialized. So I think we take for granted how much conditioning affects us.
It's possible that it affects basically 99.9, or maybe the whole thing. The whole thing is
the connection between us humans. And that we're no better than apes without our human connections.
Because that thinking of it that way forces us to think very differently about human society
and how to progress forward if the connections are fundamental. I just have to object to the
know better than apes because better here, I think you mean a specific thing, which means
have capacities that are fundamentally different than I think apes also depend upon troops.
And I think the idea of humans as better than nature in some kind of ethical sense ends up
having heaps of problems. We'll table that, we can come back to it. But when we say what is unique
about Homo sapien capacity relative to the other animals we currently inhabit the biosphere with,
and I'm saying it that way because there were other early hominids that had some of these capacities.
We believe our tool creation and our language creation and our coordination are all kind of
the results of a certain type of capacity for abstraction. And other animals will use tools,
but they don't evolve the tools they use. They keep using the same types of tools that they
basically can find. So a chimp will notice that a rock can cut a vine that it wants to and it'll
even notice that a sharper rock will cut it better and experientially it'll use the sharper rock.
And if you even give it a knife, it'll probably use the knife because it's experiencing the
effectiveness. But it doesn't make stone tools because that requires understanding why one is
sharper than the other. What is the abstract principle called sharpness to then be able to
invent a sharper thing? That same abstraction makes language and the ability for abstract
representation, which makes the ability to coordinate in a more advanced set of ways.
So I do think our ability to coordinate with each other is pretty fundamental to the selection
of what we are as a species. I wonder if that coordination, that connection is actually the
thing that gives birth to consciousness. That gives birth to, well, let's start with self-awareness.
It's more like theory of mind.
Theory of mind. Yeah. I suppose there's experiments that show that there's other
mammals that have a very crude theory of mind. I'm not sure. Maybe dogs, something like that.
But actually, dogs probably has to do with that they co-evolved with humans.
See, it'd be interesting if that theory of mind is what leads to consciousness in the way we think
about it, is the richness of the subjective experience that is consciousness. I have an
inkling sense that that only exists because we're social creatures. That doesn't come
with the hardware and the software in the beginning. That's learned as an effective
tool for communication almost. I think we think that consciousness is fundamental.
And maybe it's not. There's a bunch of folks kind of criticize the idea that the illusion
of consciousness is consciousness. That it is just a facade we use to help us construct theories of
mind. You almost put yourself in the world as a subjective being. And that experience,
you want to reach the experience as an individual person so that I could empathize with your
experience. I find that notion compelling, mostly because it allows you to then create robots that
become conscious not by being, quote unquote, conscious, but by just learning to fake it
till they make it. Present a facade of consciousness with the task of
making that facade very convincing to us humans. And thereby, it will become conscious. I have a
sense that in some way, that will make them conscious if they're sufficiently convincing
to humans. Is there some element of that that you find convincing?
This is a much harder set of questions and deep end of the pool than starting with the
aliens was. We went from aliens to consciousness. This is not the trajectory I was expecting,
nor you. But let us walk a while. We can walk a while and I don't think we will do it justice.
So what do we mean by consciousness versus conscious self-reflective awareness? What do we
mean by awareness, qualia, theory of mind? There's a lot of terms that we think of as slightly
different things and subjectivity, first person. I don't remember exactly the quote,
but I remember when reading, when Sam Harris wrote the book Free Will and then Dennett critiqued it.
And then there was some writing back and forth between the two, because normally they're on
the same side of kind of arguing for critical thinking and logical fallacies and philosophy
of science against supernatural ideas. And here, Dennett believed there is something like Free Will.
He is a determinist, compatibleist, but no consciousness, a radical limitivist. And Sam was
saying, no, there is consciousness, but there's no Free Will. And that's like the most fundamental
kinds of axiomatic senses they disagreed on. But neither of them could say it was because
the other one didn't understand the philosophy of science or logical fallacies. And they kind
of spoke past each other. And at the end, if I remember correctly, Sam said something that I
thought was quite insightful, which was to the effect of it seems, because they weren't making
any progress in shared understanding. It seems that we simply have different intuitions about this.
And what you could see was that what the words meant, right at the level of symbol grounding,
might be quite different. One of them might have had deeply different enough life experiences that
what is being referenced, and then also different associations of what the words mean. This is why
when trying to address these things, Charles Sanders Perse said the first philosophy has to
be semiotics, because if you don't get semiotics right, we end up importing different ideas and
bad ideas right into the nature of the language that we're using. And then it's very hard to do
epistemology or ontology together. So I'm saying this to say why I don't think we're going to get
very far is I think we would have to go very slowly in terms of defining what we mean by words
and fundamental concepts. And also allowing our minds to drift together for time. So there are
definitions of these terms aligned. I think there's a beauty that some people enjoy with Sam,
that he is quite stubborn on his definitions of terms without often clearly revealing that
definition. So in his mind, he can sense that he can deeply understand what he means exactly by a
term like free will and consciousness. And you're right, he's very, he's very specific in fascinating
ways that not only does he think that free will is an illusion, he thinks he's able, not thinks,
he says he's able to just remove himself from the experience of free will and just be like for
minutes at a time, hours at a time, like really experiences if he has no free will. Like he's a
leaf flowing down the river. And given that, he's very sure that consciousness is fundamental.
So here's this conscious leaf that's subjectively experiencing the floating. And yet there's no
ability to control and make any decisions for itself. It's only the decisions have all been
made. There's some aspect to which the terminology there perhaps is the problem.
So that's a particular kind of meditative experience. And the people in the Vedantic
tradition and some of the Buddhist traditions thousands of years ago described similar experiences
and somewhat similar conclusions, some slightly different. There are other types of phenomenal
experience that are the phenomenal experience of pure agency. And like the Catholic theologian,
but evolutionary theorist Therese Deschardin describes this, and that rather than a creator
agent God in the beginning, there's a creative impulse or a creative process. And he would go
into a type of meditation that identified as the pure essence of that kind of creative process.
And I think the types of experiences we've had, and then one the types of experiences we've had
make a big deal to the nature of how we do symbol grounding. The other thing is the types of
experiences we have can't not be interpreted through our existing interpretive frames.
And most of the time our interpretive frames are unknown even to us, some of them. And so this is
a tricky, this is a tricky topic. So I guess there's a bunch of directions we could go with it,
but I want to come back to what the impulse was that was interesting around what is consciousness
and how does it relate to us as social beings? And how does it relate to the possibility of
consciousness with it, AIs? Right, you're keeping us on track, which is, which is wonderful. You're
a wonderful hiking partner. Okay, yes. Let's go back to the initial impulse of what is consciousness
and how does the social impulse connect to consciousness? Is consciousness a consequence
of that social connection? I'm going to state a position and not argue it because it's honestly,
like it's a long, hard thing to argue, and we can totally do it another time if you want.
I don't subscribe to consciousness as an emergent property of biology or neural networks.
Obviously, a lot of people do, obviously, the philosophy of science orients towards that in
not absolutely, but largely. I think of the nature of first person, the universe of first
person, of qualia as experience, sensation, desire, emotion, phenomenology, but the felt
sense, not the, we say emotion and we think of a neurochemical pattern or an endocrine pattern.
But all of the physical stuff, the third person stuff has position and momentum and
charge and stuff like that that is measurable, repeatable. I think of the nature of first
person and third person as ontologically orthogonal to each other, not reducible to each other.
They're different kinds of stuff. I think about the evolution of third person that we're quite
used to thinking about from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to on and on. I think about a
similar kind of and corresponding evolution in the domain of first person from the way Whitehead
talked about kind of prehension or proto qualia in earlier phases of self-organization and to higher
orders of it and that there's correspondence, but that neither like the idealists do we reduce
third person to first person, which is what idealists do, or neither like the physicalists
or do we reduce first person to third person. Obviously, Bohm talked about an implicate order
that was deeper than and gave rise to the explicate order of both. Nagel talks about
something like that. I have a slightly different sense of that, but again, I'll just kind of not
argue how that occurs for a moment and say, so rather than say, does consciousness emerge from,
I'll talk about do higher capacities of consciousness emerge in relationship with.
So it's not first person as a category emerging from third person, but increased complexity
within the nature of first person and third person co-evolving. Do I think that it seems
relatively likely that more advanced neural networks have deeper phenomenology, more complex,
where it goes just from basic sensation to emotion, to social awareness, to abstract cognition,
to self-reflexive abstract cognition. Yeah, but I wouldn't say that's the emergence of consciousness.
I would say it's increased complexity within the domain of first person corresponding to
increased complexity and the correspondence should not automatically be seen as causal.
We can get into the arguments for why that often is the case. So what I say that obviously,
the sapien brain is pretty unique and a single sapien now has that, right? Even if it took,
sapiens evolving in tribes based on group selection to make that brain. So the group
made it. Now that brain is there. Now, if I take a single person with that brain out of the group
and try to raise them in a box, they'll still not be very interesting even with the brain.
But the brain does give hardware capacities that if conditioned in relationship
can have interesting things emerge. So do I think that the human biology, types of human
consciousness and types of social interaction all co-emerged and co-evolved? Yes.
As a small aside, as you're talking about the biology, let me comment that I spent,
this is what I do. This is what I do with my life. This is why we'll never accomplish anything,
is I spent much of the morning trying to do research on how many computations the brain
performs and how much energy it uses versus the state of the ERCPUs and GPUs. Arriving at
about 20 quadrillion, so that's 2 to the 10 to the 16 computations, so synaptic firings per second
that the brain does. And that's about a million times faster than the, let's say the 20 thread
state of the arts Intel CPU, the 10th generation. And then there's similar calculation for the
GPU and all ended up also trying to compute that it takes 10 watts to run the brain about.
And then what does that mean in terms of calories per day? Kilo calories, that's about
for an average human brain, that's 250 to 300 calories a day. And so it ended up being a calculation
where you're doing about 20 quadrillion calculations that are fueled by something
like, depending on your diet, three bananas. So three bananas results in a computation that's
about a million times more powerful than the current state of the art computers.
Now let's take that one step further. There's some assumptions built in there.
The assumption is that one, what the brain is doing is just computation.
Two, the relevant computations are synaptic firings and that there's nothing other than
synaptic firings that we have to factor. So I'm forgetting his name right now. There's a very
famous neuroscientist at Stanford just passed away recently who did a lot of the pioneering work on
glial cells and showed that his assessment glial cells did a huge amount of the thinking,
not just neurons. And it opened up this entirely different field of like what the brain is and
what consciousness is. You look at Demasio's work on embodied cognition and how much of what
we would consider consciousness or feeling is happening outside of the nervous system completely,
happening in endocrine process involving lots of other cells and signal communication.
You talk to somebody like Penrose who you've had on the show and even though the Penrose-Hammerhoff
conjecture is probably not right, is there something like that that might be the case
where we're actually having to look at stuff happening at the level of quantum computation
of microtubules? I'm not arguing for any of those. I'm arguing that we don't know how big
the unknown unknown set is. Well, at the very least, this has become like an infomercial for
the human brain. But wait, there's more. At the very least, the three bananas buys you a million
times power. At the very least. That's impressive. And then the synaptic firings we're referring to
is strictly the electrical signals. That could be the mechanical transmission of information,
like this chemical transmission of information. There's all kinds of other stuff going on and
there's memory that's built in that's also all tied in. Not to mention, which I'm learning more
and more about, it's not just about the neurons. It's also about the immune system that's somehow
helping with the computation. So the entirety and the entire body is helping with the computation.
So the three bananas. It could buy you a lot. It could buy you a lot. But on the topic of sort of
the greater degrees of complexity emerging in consciousness, I think few things are as beautiful
and inspiring as taking a step outside of the human brain. Just looking at systems or simple rules
create incredible complexity, not create incredible complexity emerges. So one of the simplest things
to do that with is cellular automata. And there's, I don't know what it is, and maybe you can speak
to it. We can certainly, we will certainly talk about the implications of this, but
there's so few things that are as awe inspiring to me as knowing the rules of a system and not
being able to predict what the heck it looks like. And it creates incredibly beautiful complexity
that when zoomed out on looks like there's actual organisms doing things that operate on a scale
much higher than the underlying mechanism. So with cellular automata, that's cells that are born
and die, born or die, and they only know about each other's neighbors. And there's simple rules
that govern that interaction of birth and death. And then they create at scale organisms that
look like they take up hundreds or thousands of cells, and they're moving, they're moving around,
they're communicating, they're sending signals to each other. And you forget at moment at a time
before you remember that the simple rules on cells is all that it took to create that.
It's sad in that we can't come up with a simple description of that system
that generalizes the behavior of the large organisms. We can only come up, we can only hope
to come up with the thing, the fundamental physics or the fundamental rules of that system, I suppose.
It's sad that we can't predict everything we know about the mathematics of those systems. It seems
like we can't really in a nice way like economics tries to do to predict how this whole thing will
unroll. But it's beautiful because how simple it is underneath it all. So what do you make
of the emergence of complexity from simple rules? What the hell is that about?
Yeah. Well, we can see that something like flocking behavior, the murmuration can be
computer coded. It's not a very hard set of rules to be able to see some of those really
amazing types of complexity. And the whole field of complexity science and some of the
sub-disciplines like Stigmergy are studying how following fairly simple responses to a pheromone
signal do ant colonies do this amazing thing where what you might describe as the organizational
or computational capacity of the colony is so profound relative to what each individual
ant is doing. I am not anywhere near as well versed in the cutting edge of cellular automatas.
I would like, unfortunately, in terms of topics that I would like to get to and haven't like
E.T.'s more Wolfram's a new kind of science. I have only skimmed and read reviews of and not
read the whole thing or his newer work since. But his idea of the four basic kind of categories of
emergent phenomena that can come from cellular automata and that one of them is kind of interesting
and looks a lot like complexity rather than just chaos or homogeneity or self-termination or whatever.
I think this is very interesting. It does not instantly make me think that biology is operating
on a similarly small set of rules or that human consciousness is. I am not that reductionistly
oriented. If you look at, say, Santa Fe Institute, one of the co-founders, Stuart Kaufman, his work,
you should really get him on your show. A lot of the questions that you like, one of Kaufman's
more recent books after investigations and some of the real fundamental stuff was called
Reinventing the Sacred and it had to do with some of these exact questions in kind of non-reductionist
approach, but that is not just silly hippieism. He was very interested in highly non-argodic
systems where you couldn't take a lot of behavior over a small period of time and predict what the
behavior of subsets over a longer period of time would do. Then going further, someone who spent
some time at Santa Fe Institute and then kind of made a whole new field that you should have on,
Dave Snowden, who some people call the father of anthro-complexity, or what is the complexity
unique to humans. He says something to the effect of that modeling humans as termites really doesn't
cut it. We don't respond exactly identically to the same pheromone stimulus using stigmergy,
like it works for flows of traffic and some very simple human behaviors, but it really doesn't work
for trying to make sense of the Sistine Chapel and Picasso and general relativity creation and
stuff like that. It's because the termites are not doing abstraction forecasting deep into the
future and making choices now based on forecasts of the future, not just adaptive signals in the
moment and evolutionary code from history. That's really different. Making choices now that can
factor deep modeling of the future. With humans, our uniqueness won to the next in terms of response
to similar stimuli is much higher than it is with a termite. One of the interesting things there is
that their uniqueness is extremely low. They're basically fungible within a class, right? There's
different classes, but within a class they're basically fungible and their system uses that
very high numbers and lots of loss, right? Do you think the termite feels that way?
Don't you think we humans are deceiving ourselves about our uniqueness? Perhaps
it doesn't just, isn't there some sense in which this emergence just creates different
higher and higher levels of abstraction where every layer, each organism feels unique?
Is that possible? That we're all equally dumb but at different scales?
No, I think uniqueness is evolving. I think that hydrogen atoms are more similar to each other
than cells of the same type are, and I think that cells are more similar to each other than
humans are. I think that highly K-selected species are more unique than R-selected species,
so they're different evolutionary processes. The R-selected species where you have a whole,
a lot of death and very high birth rates, you're not looking for as much individuality within
or individual possible expression to cover the evolutionary search space within an individual.
You're looking at it more in terms of a numbers game. So, yeah, I would say there's probably
more difference between one orca and the next than there is between one Cape buffalo and the next.
Given that it would be interesting to get your thoughts about mimetic theory where we're imitating
each other in the context of this idea of uniqueness, how much truth is there to that,
how compelling is this worldview to you of Gerardian mimetic theory of desire where maybe
you can explain it from your perspective, but it seems like imitating each other is the fundamental
property of the behavior of human civilization. Well, imitation is not unique to humans,
all right? Monkeys imitate. So, a certain amount of learning through observing is
not unique to humans. Humans do more of it. It's actually kind of worth speaking to this for a
moment. Monkeys can learn new behaviors, new, we've even seen teaching an ape sign language,
and then the ape teaching other apes sign language. So, that's a kind of mimesis,
right? Kind of learning through imitation. And that needs to happen if they need to learn or
develop capacities that are not just coded by their genetics, right? So, within the same genome,
they're learning new things based on the environment. And so, based on someone else,
learn something first. And so, let's pick it up. How much a creature is the result of just its
genetic programming and how much it's learning is a very interesting question. And I think this is
a place where humans really show up radically different than everything else. And you can see
it in the in the neoteny, how long we're basically fetal. That the closest ancestors to us, if we
look at a chimp, a chimp can hold on to its mother's fur while she moves around day one.
And obviously, we see horses up and walking within 20 minutes. The fact that it takes a human a year
to be walking, and it takes a horse 20 minutes, and you say, how many multiples of 20 minutes go
into a year? That's a long period of helplessness that it wouldn't work for a horse, right? Or
anything else. And not only can we not hold on to mom in the first day, it's three months before
we can move our head volitionally. So, it's like, why are we embryonic for so long? Basically,
it's still fetal on the outside, had to be, because couldn't keep growing inside and actually ever
get out with big heads and narrower hips from going upright. So, here's a place where there's
a co-evolution of the pattern of humans. Specifically, here are our neoteny and what that
portends to learning with our being toolmaking and environment modifying creatures, which is
because we have the abstraction to make tools, we change our environments more than other
creatures change their environments. The next most environment modifying creature tusks is
like a beaver. And then you wear an LA, you fly into LAX and you look at the just orthogonal grid
going on forever in all directions. And we've recently come into the Anthropocene where the
surface of the earth is changing more from human activity than geological activity,
and then beavers. And you're like, okay, wow, we're really in a class of our own in terms of
environments modifying. So, as soon as we started toolmaking, we were able to change our
environments much more radically. We could put on clothes and go to a cold place.
And this is really important because we actually went and became apex predators in every environment.
We functioned like apex predators, but polar bear can't leave the Arctic. And the lion can't
leave the savanna and an orca can't leave the ocean. And we went and became apex predators in
all those environments because of our tool creation capacity. We could become better predators than
them adapted to the environment or at least with our tools adapted to the environment.
So, in every aspect towards any organism in any environment, we're incredibly good at
becoming apex predators. Yes. And nothing else can do that kind of thing. There is no other apex
predator that... You see, the other apex predator is only getting better at being a predator through
evolutionary process that's super slow, and that super slow process creates co-selective
process with their environment. So, as the predator becomes a tiny bit faster, it eats more of the
slow prey, the genes of the fast prey, and breed, and the prey becomes faster. And so,
there's this kind of balancing. Because of our tool making, we increased our predatory capacity
faster than anything else could increase its resilience to it. As a result, we started out
stripping the environment and extincting species following stone tools and going and becoming
apex predator everywhere. This is why we can't keep applying apex predator theories because we're
not an apex predator. We're an apex predator, but we're something much more than that.
Like just for an example, the top apex predator in the world, an orca. An orca can eat one big fish
at a time, like one tuna, and it'll miss most of the time, or one seal. And we can put a mile-long
drift net out on a single boat and pull up an entire school of them, right? We can deplete
the entire oceans of them. That's not an orca, right? Like, that's not an apex predator.
And that's not even including that we can then genetically engineer different creatures. We can
extinct species. We can devastate whole ecosystems. We can make built worlds that have no natural
things that are just human-built worlds. We can build new types of natural creatures,
synthetic life. So we are much more like little gods than we are like apex predators now,
but we're still behaving as apex predators. And little gods that behave as apex predators
cause us a problem, kind of core to my assessment of the world.
So what does it mean to be a predator? So a predator is somebody that effectively
can mine the resources from a place, so for their survival? Or is it also just purely,
like higher level objectives of violence? And what is, can predators be predators towards
the same, each other towards the same species? Like, are we using the word predator sort of
generally, which then connects to conflict and military conflict, violent conflict in this
space of human species? Obviously, we can say that plants are mining the resources of their
environment in a particular way using photosynthesis to be able to pull minerals out of the soil and
nitrogen and carbon out of the air and like that. And we can say herbivores are being able
to mine and concentrate that. So I wouldn't say mining the environment is unique to predator.
Predator is generally being defined as mining other animals, right? We don't consider herbivores
predators, but animal, which requires some type of violence capacity because animals move,
plants don't move. So requires some capacity to overtake something that can move and try to get
away. We'll go back to the George thing, then we'll come back here. Why are we neoteness? Why
are we embryonic for so long? Because are we, did we just move from the savanna to the arctic and
we need to learn new stuff? If we came genetically programmed, we would not be able to do that.
Are we throwing spears or are we fishing or are we running an industrial supply chain or are we
texting? What is the adaptive behavior? Horses today in the wild and horses 10,000 years ago
are doing pretty much the same stuff. And so since we make tools and we evolve our tools and then
change our environment so quickly and other animals are largely the result of their environment,
but we're environment modifying so rapidly, we need to come without too much programming so we
can learn the environment we're in, learn the language, right? Which is going to be very important
learn the toolmaking and so we have a very long period of relative helplessness because we aren't
coded how to behave yet because we're imprinting a lot of software on how to behave that is useful
to that particular time. So our mimesis is not unique to humans, but the total amount of it is
really unique. And this is also where the uniqueness can go up, right? Is because we are less just the
result of the genetics and that means the kind of learning through history that they got coded
in genetics and more the result of it's almost like our hardware selected for software, right?
Like if evolution is kind of doing these think of as a hardware selection, I have problems with
computer metaphors for biology, we'll use this one here, that we have not had hardware changes
since the beginning of sapiens, but our world is really, really different. And that's all
changes in software, right? Changes in on the same fundamental genetic substrate, what we're
doing with these brains and minds and bodies and social groups and like that. And so,
now, Gerard specifically was looking at when we watch other people talking so we learn language,
you and I would have a hard time learning Mandarin today or it would take a lot of work,
we'd be learning how to conjugate verbs and stuff, but a baby learns it instantly without anyone
even really trying to teach it just through memesis. So, it's a powerful thing. They're
obviously more neuroplastic than we are when they're doing that and all their attention is allocated
to that. But they're also learning how to move their bodies and they're learning all kinds of
stuff through memesis. One of the things that Gerard says is they're also learning what to want
and they learn what to want, they learn desire by watching what other people want.
And so, intrinsic to this, people end up wanting what other people want. And if we can't
have what other people have without taking it away from them, then that becomes a source of conflict.
So, the memesis of desire is the fundamental generator of conflict and then the conflict
energy within a group of people will build over time. This is a very, very crude interpretation
of the theory. Can we just pause on that for people who are not familiar and for me who
hasn't, I'm loosely familiar but haven't internalized it. But every time I think about it, it's a very
compelling view of the world. Whether it's true or not, it's quite, it's like when you take everything
Freud says as truth, it's a very interesting way to think about the world and in the same way,
thinking about the memetic theory of desire, that everything we want
is imitation of other people's wants. We don't have any original wants. We're constantly imitating
others. And so, and not just others, but others we're exposed to. So, there's these like little
local pockets, however, defined local of people like imitating each other. And one that's super
empowering because then you can pick which group you can join. Like, what do you want to imitate?
It's the old like, you know, whoever your friends are, that's what your life is going to be like.
That's really powerful. I mean, it's depressing that we're so unoriginal, but it's also
liberating in that if this holds true, that we can choose our life by choosing the people we
hang out with. So, okay, thoughts that are very compelling, that seem like they're more absolute
than they actually are, end up also being dangerous. We want communism. I'm going to discuss here
where I think we need to amend this particular theory. But specifically, you just said something
that everyone who's paid attention knows is true experientially, which is who you're around affects
who you become. And as libertarian and self-determining and sovereign as we'd like to be,
everybody, I think, knows that if you got put in the maximum security prison,
aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there, right? You would
become different. If you grew up in Darfur versus Finland, you would be different with your same
genetics. Just no real question about that. And even today, if you hang out in a place with
ultramarathoners as your roommates or all people who are obese as your roommates,
the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is pretty clear, right? Like the
behavioral science of this is pretty clear. So, the whole saying we are the average of the five
people we spend the most time around. I think the more self-reflective someone is and the more
time they spend by themselves in self-reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true.
So, one of the best things someone can do to become more self-determined is be self-determined
about the environments they want to put themselves in. Because to the degree that there is some
self-determination and some determination by the environment, don't be fighting an environment that
is predisposing you in bad directions. Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing
the things that you want. In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive
things for those around you. Or perhaps also, there's probably interesting ways to play with
this. You could probably put yourself like form connections that have this perfect tension in
all directions to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want. Because
the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're free to choose
whichever one. So, if there's enough tension as opposed to everybody aligned like a flock of birds,
yeah, I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced. So, if you have
someone who is extremely oriented to self-empowerment and someone who's extremely oriented to kind of
empathy and compassion, both, the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own.
If you have both of them being inhabited better than you by the same person, spending time around
that person will probably do well for you. I think the thing you just mentioned is super
important when it comes to cognitive schools, which is, I think one of the fastest things
people can do to improve their learning. And they're not just cognitive learning, but they're
meaningful problem-solving communication and civic capacity. Capacity to participate as a
citizen with other people and making the world better is to be seeking dialectical synthesis
all the time. And so, in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis.
So, maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist kind of communism on the other side.
And one is arguing that the individual is the unit of choice. And so, we want to increase the
freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices, it'll produce
a better whole for everybody. The other side is saying, well, the individuals are conditioned by
their environment. Who would choose to be born into Darfur rather than Finland? So, we actually
need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions the
individuals. So, you have a thesis and an antithesis. And then Hegel's idea is you have a synthesis,
which is a kind of higher-order truth that understands how those relate in a way that
neither of them do. And so, it is actually at a higher order of complexity. So, the first part
would be, can I steelman each of these? Can I argue each one well enough that the proponents of
it are like, totally, you got that? And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it where
I can try to see and feel the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would?
Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people because there's truth in it, right?
And I'm not going to go back to war with them. I'm going to go to finding solutions that could
actually work at a higher order. If I don't go to a higher order, then there's war. But then the
higher-order thing would be, well, it seems like the individual does affect the commons and the
collective and other people. It also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least
statistically. And I can cherry pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto and pulled himself
up by his bootstraps. But I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up
differently than most people born into the Hamptons. And so, unless you want to argue that and have
take your child from the Hamptons and put them in the ghetto, then like, come on, be realistic about
this thing. So how do we make, we don't want social systems that make weak dependent individuals,
right, the welfare argument, but we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to
do better. We want, we don't want individuals where their self-expression and agency fucks the
environment and everybody else and employs slave labor and whatever. So can we make it to where
individuals are creating holes that are better for conditioning other individuals? Can we make
it to where we have holes that are conditioning increased agency and sovereignty, right? That
would be the synthesis. So the thing that I'm coming to here is, if people have that as a frame,
and sometimes it's not just thesis and antithesis, it's like eight different views, right? Can I
steal man each view? This is not just can I take the perspective, but am I seeking them? Am I actively
trying to inhabit other people's perspective? Then can I really try to essentialize it and
argue the best points of it, both the sense making about reality and the values, why these values
actually matter? Then just like I want to seek those perspectives, then I want to seek, is there a
higher order set of understandings that could fulfill the values of and synthesize the sense
making of all of them simultaneously? Maybe I won't get it, but I want to be seeking it,
and I want to be seeking progressively better ones. So this is perspective seeking,
driving perspective taking, and then seeking synthesis. I think that one cognitive disposition
might be the most helpful thing. Would you put a title of dialectic synthesis on that process?
Because that seems to be such a part, so like this rigorous empathy, like it's not just empathy,
it's empathy with rigor, like you really want to understand and embody different worldviews,
and then try to find a higher order synthesis. Okay, so I remember last night you told me,
when we first met, you said that you looked in somebody's eyes and you felt that you had
suffered in some ways that they had suffered, and so you could trust them. Shared pathos creates
a certain sense of kind of shared bonding and shared intimacy. So empathy is actually feeling
the suffering of somebody else and feeling the depth of their sentience. I don't want to fuck
them anymore. I mean, I hurt them. I don't want to behave, and I don't want my proposition to go
through when I go and inhabit the perspective of the other people, if they feel that's really
going to mess them up. And so the rigorous empathy, it's different than just compassion,
which is I generally care. Like I have a generalized care, but I don't know what it's
like to be them. I can never know what it's like to be them perfectly, and that there's a
humility you have to have, which is my most rigorous attempt is still not it. My most rigorous
attempt mine to know what it's like to be a woman is still not it. I have no question that if I was
actually a woman, it would be different than my best guesses. I have no question if I was actually
black, it'd be different than my best guesses. So there's a humility in that which keeps me
listening, because I don't think that I know fully, but I want to, and I'm going to keep trying better
to. And then I want to across them. And then I want to say, is there a way we can forward together
and not have to be in war? It has to be something that could meet the values that everyone holds,
that could reconcile the partial sense making that everyone holds, and it could offer a way forward
that is more agreeable than the partial perspectives that were with each other.
But the more you succeeded this empathy with humility, the more you're carrying the burden
of other people's pain, essentially. Now, this goes back to the question of, do I see it as one
being or 7.8 billion? I think if I'm overwhelmed with my own pain, I can't empathize that much,
because I don't have the bandwidth, I don't have the capacity. If I don't feel like I can do
something about a particular problem in the world, it's hard to feel it, because it's just too
devastating. And so a lot of people go numb and even go nihilistic, because they just don't feel
the agency. So as I actually become more empowered as an individual and have more sense of agency,
I also become more empowered to be more empathetic for others and be more connected to that shared
burden and want to be able to make choices on behalf of and in benefit of.
So this way of living seems like a way of living that would solve a lot of problems in society,
from a cellular automata perspective. So if you have a bunch of little like little agents behaving
in this way, my intuition, there'll be interesting complexities that emerge, but my intuition is
it will create a society that's very different and recognizably better than the one we have today.
Okay. Hold that question, because I want to come back to it, but this brings us back to
Jard, which we didn't answer, the conflict theory. Yes. Because about how to get past the conflict
theory. Yes. You know the Robert Frost poem about the two paths you never had enough time to return
back to the other? We're going to have to do that quite a lot. We're going to be living that poem
over and over again. But yes, how to let's return back. Okay. So the rest of the argument goes,
you learn to want what other people want. Therefore, fundamental conflict based in our
desire because we want the thing that somebody else has. And then people are in conflict over
trying to get the same stuff, power, status, attention, physical stuff, a mate, whatever it is.
And then we learn the conflict by watching. And so then the conflict becomes a medic. So we become
on the Palestinian side of the Israeli side of the communist, the capitalist side of the left
to right politically or whatever it is. And until eventually the conflict energy in the system builds
up so much that some type of violence is needed to get the bad guy, whoever it is that we're going
to blame. And Jard talks about why scapegoating was kind of a mechanism to minimize the amount of
violence. Let's blame a scapegoat as being more relevant than they really were. But if we all
believe it, then we can all kind of calm down with the conflict energy. It's a really interesting
concept, by the way. I mean, you beautifully summarized it, but the idea that there's a scapegoat,
that there's this kind of thing naturally still conflict. And then they find the other, some
group that's the other, that's either real or artificial as the cause of the conflict.
Well, it's always artificial because the cause of the conflict in Jard is the memesis of desire
itself. And how do we attack that? How do we attack that it's our own desire? So this now gets to
something more like Buddha said, which was desire is the cause of suffering. Jard and Buddha would
kind of agree in this way. But that explains, I mean, again, it's a compelling description of
human history that we do tend to come up with the other. Okay, kind of. I just had such a funny
experience with someone critiquing Jard the other day in such an elegant and beautiful and simple
way. It's a friend who's grew up Aboriginal Australian. He's a scholar of Aboriginal
social technologies. And he's like, nah, man, Jard just made shit up about how tribes work,
like we come from a tribe, we've got tens of thousands of years, and we didn't have increasing
conflict and then scapegoat and kill someone, we'd have a little bit of conflict, and then we
would dance, and then everybody'd be fine. Like we'd dance around the campfire, everyone would
like kind of physically get the energy out, we'd look in each other's eyes, we'd have positive
bonding, and then we're fine. And nobody, no scapegoats. And I think that's called the Joe
Rogan theory of desire, which is he's like all all of human problems have to do with the fact
that you don't do enough hard shit in your day. So maybe maybe just dance it because he says like
doing exercise and running on that treadmill gets gets all the demons out and maybe just
dance and gets all the demons out. So this is why I say we have to be careful with taking an idea
that seems too explanatory and then taking it as a given and then saying, well, now that we're
stuck with the fact that conflict is inexorable because human, because mimetic desire and therefore
how do we deal with the inexorability of the conflict and how to sublimate violence? Well,
no, the whole thing might be actually gibberish, meaning it's only true in certain conditions
and other conditions. It's not true. So the deeper question is under which conditions is
that true? Under which conditions is it not true? What do those other conditions make possible and
look like? And in general, we should stay away from really compelling models of reality because
there's something about our brains that these models become sticky and we can't even think
outside of them. So it's not that we stay away from them. It's that we know that the model of
reality is never reality. That's the key thing. Humility again, it goes back to just having
the humility that you don't have a perfect model of reality. The model of reality could never be
reality. The process of modeling is inherently information reduction. And I can never show
that the unknown unknown set has been factored. Back to the cellular automata. You can't,
you can't put the genie back in bottle. Like when you realize it's unfortunately,
sadly impossible to create a model of cellular automata, even if you know the
basic rules that predict to even any degree of accuracy what, how that system will evolve.
Which is fascinating mathematically. Sorry. I think about it quite a lot. It's very annoying.
Wolfram has this rule 30. Like you should be able to predict it. It's so simple. But you
can't predict what's going to be, like there's a problem he defines. They try to predict some
aspect of the middle, middle column of the system. Just anything about it or what's
going to happen in the future. And you can't, you can't. It sucks. Because then we can't make
sense of this world in a real, in a reality, in a definitive way. It's always like in the
striving. Like we're always striving. Yeah, I don't think this sucks. So that's a feature, not a bug?
Well, that's assuming a designer. I would say I don't think it sucks. I think it's
not only beautiful, but maybe necessary for beauty.
The mess. So you're, so you're, you're just a great Jordan Peterson. You should clean up your
room. See, you like the rooms messy. It's, it's essential for the, for beauty.
It's not, it's not that it's okay. I take, I have no idea if it was intended this way. And so I'm
just interpreting it a way I like the commandment about having no false idols. To me, the way I
interpret that is meaningful is that reality is sacred to me. I have a reverence for reality.
But I know my best understanding of it is never complete. I know my best model of it
is a model where I tried to make some kind of predictive capacity by reducing the complexity
of it to a set of stuff that I could observe. And then a subset of that stuff that I thought was
the causal dynamics and then some set of, you know, mechanisms that are involved. And what we
find is that it can be super useful. Like Newtonian gravity can help us do ballistic curves and all
kinds of super useful stuff. And then we get to the place where it doesn't explain what's happening
at the cosmological scale or at a quantum scale. And at each time, what we're finding is
we exclude itself. And it also doesn't explain the reconciliation of gravity with quantum mechanics
and the other kind of fundamental laws. And so models can be useful, but they're never true
with a capital T, meaning they're never an actual real full, they're never a complete description
of what's happening in real systems. They can be a complete description of what's happening in an
artificial system that was the result of applying a model. So the model of a circuit board and the
circuit board are the same thing. But I would argue that the model of a cell and the cell are
the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing. And I would say this is key to what
we call complexity versus the complicated, which is a distinction Dave Snowden made well
in defining the difference between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems.
But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex system,
it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model.
Can you elaborate on the complex versus the complicated? Complicated means we can fully
explicate the phase space of all the things that it can do. We can program it. All human,
not all, for the most part, human built things are complicated. They don't self-organize.
They don't self-repair. They're not self-evolving. And we can make a blueprint for them.
Sorry, for human systems? For human technologies.
For human technologies. Sorry, it's okay. So not a lot. They're basically the application of models.
And engineering has kind of applied science as the modeling process.
But humans are complex.
Complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological type stuff. It more has generator
functions and even those can't be fully explicated than it has or our explication can't prove that
it has closure of what would be in the unknown, unknown set where we keep finding like, oh,
it's just the genome. Oh, well, now it's the genome and the epigenome and then a recursive
change on the epigenome because of the proteome and then there's mitochondrial DNA and then
virus is affected and fuck, right? So it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing.
So on Facebook, you know how you can list your relationship as complicated? It should actually
say it's complex. It's the more accurate description. You, self-terminating is a really
interesting idea that you talk about quite a bit. First of all, what is a self-terminating system?
And I think you have a sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that human civilization as it currently
is, is a self-terminating system. Why do you have that intuition combined with the definition of
what self-terminating means? Okay, so if we look at human societies historically, human civilizations,
it's not that hard to realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't
exist anymore. So they had a life cycle. They died for some reason. So we don't still have the early
Egyptian empire or Inka or Maya or Aztec or any of those, right? And so they terminated. Sometimes
it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war. Sometimes it seems like they
self-terminate. When we look at Easter Island, it was a self-termination. So let's go ahead and
take an island situation. If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island
faster than the resources can replicate themselves and there's a finite space there,
that system is going to self-terminate. It's not going to be able to keep doing that thing
because you'll get to a place of there's no resources left. And then you get, so now if I'm
utilizing the resources faster than they can replicate or faster than they can replenish.
And I'm actually growing our population in the process. I'm even increasing the rate of the
utilization of resources. I might get an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse
the exponential curve rather than do an S curve or some other kind of thing.
So self-terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing
its own substrate, that is debasing what it depends upon. So you're right that if you look at empires,
they rise and fall throughout human history, but not this time, bro. This one's gonna last forever.
I like that idea. I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed,
we can't ensure that. And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can
have that be a designed outcome with some what decent probability.
So we're, it's sort of in terms of consuming the resources on the island, we're a clever bunch
and we keep coming up, especially when on the horizon, there is a termination point. We keep
coming up with clever ways of avoiding disaster, of avoiding collapse, of constructing, this is
where technological innovation, this is where growth comes in, coming up with different ways
to improve productivity and the way society functions such that we consume less resources
or get a lot more from the resources we have. So there's some sense in which there's a human
ingenuity is a source for optimism about the future of this particular system that may not
be self-terminating if there's more innovation than there is consumption.
So overconsumption of resources is just one way I think can self-terminate. We're just
kind of starting here, but there are reasons for optimism and pessimism then they're both
worth understanding and there's failure modes on understanding either without the other.
As we mentioned previously, there's what I would call naive techno-optimism, naive
techno-capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't want
to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff and we know the proponents of
those models and that stuff is going to kind of keep getting better. Of course there are problems,
but human ingenuity rises to it, supply and demand will solve the problems, whatever.
Would you put Raker as well in that or in that bucket? Is there some specific people you have
in mind or naive optimism is truly naive to where you're essentially just having optimism that's
blind to any kind of realities of the way technology progresses? I don't think that anyone
who thinks about it and writes about it is perfectly naive. Gotcha. It's a platonic ideal.
There might be a bias in the nature of the assessment. I would also say there's kind of
naive techno-pessimism and there are critics of technology. I mean, you read the Unabomber's
manifesto on why technology can't not result in our self-termination, so we have to take it out
before it gets any further. But also if you read a lot of the ex-risk community, you know,
Bostrom and Friends, it's like our total number of existential risks and the total probability of
them is going up. I think that we have to hold together where our positive possibilities and
our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say, for the positive possibilities to be
realized long term, all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen. Any of the catastrophic
risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from occurring. So how do we ensure
that none of them happen? If we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse. So,
again, collapse theory. It's worth looking at books like The Collapse of Complex Societies by
Joseph Tainter. It does an analysis of that many of the societies fell for internal institutional
decay, civilizational decay reasons. Baudrillard in Simulation and Simulacra looks at a very
different way of looking at how institutional decay and the collective intelligence of a system
happens and it becomes kind of more internally parasitic on itself. Obviously, Jared Diamond
made a more popular book called Collapse. And as we were mentioning, the anti-Catharia mechanism
has been getting attention in the news lately, but it's like a 2,000-year-old clock, right,
like metal gears. And does that mean we lost like 1,500 years of technological progress?
And from a society that was relatively technologically advanced.
So what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, why did previous societies fail?
Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that
isn't just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate
the failures as a whole? Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns
that would make a system self-terminating? And can we solve those and have that be the
kernel of a new civilizational model that is not self-terminating? And can we then be able
to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and see that we actually have
resilience in the presence of those, not just resilience, but antifragility? And I would say
for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the risk space well
and have adequate solutions for it. So can we try to dig into some basic intuitions about the
underlying sources of catastrophic failures of the system and overconsumption that's built
in into self-terminating systems? So both the overconsumption, which is like the slow death,
and then there's the fast death of nuclear war and all those kinds of things, AGI, biotech,
bioengineering, nanotechnology, my favorite nanobots.
Nanobots are my favorite because it sounds so cool to me that I could just
know that I would be one of the scientists that would be full steam ahead in building them
without sufficiently thinking about the negative consequence. I would definitely be,
I would be podcasting all about the negative consequences, but when I go back home, I'd be,
I just in my heart know the amount of excitement is a dumb descendant of ape, no offense to apes.
So I want to backtrack on my previous comments about negative comments about apes,
that I have that sense of excitement that would result in problems. So sorry, a lot of things
said, but what's, can we start to pull it a thread? Because you've also provided kind of a beautiful,
general approach to this, which is this dialectic synthesis or just rigorous empathy, whatever,
whatever word we want to put to it, that seems to be from the individual perspective is one way to
sort of live in the world as we try to figure out how to construct non-self-terminating systems.
So what, what are some underlying sources? Yeah, first I have to say, I actually really respect
Drexler for emphasizing gray goo and engines of creation back in the day,
to make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the risks of the the nanotech
as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be.
There's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and
don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks, because they get to market first and then
they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is to the commons or
wherever happened to have it. Other people are going to have to solve those, but now they have
the power and capital associated. The person who looked at the risks and tried to do better
design and go slower is probably not going to move into positions of as much power influence as
quickly. So this is one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the bad game theoretic
dispositions in the system relative to its own stability. And the key aspect of that, sorry to
interrupt, is the externalities generated. Yes. What flavors of catastrophic risk are we talking
about here? What's your favorite flavor in terms of ice cream? Mine is coconut. Nobody seems to
like coconut ice cream. So ice cream aside, what do you most worry about? There's a catastrophic
risk that will help us kind of make concrete the discussion we're having about how to fix this
whole thing. Yeah. I think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of
orient everyone to it. We don't have to go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of
civilization, but to just recognize that for all of human history, as far as we're aware,
there were existential risks to civilizations. And they happened, right? Like there were
civilizations that were killed in war that tribes that were killed in tribal warfare or whatever.
So people faced existential risk to the group that they identified with. It's just those were
local phenomena, right? It wasn't a fully global phenomena. So an empire could fall
and surrounding empires didn't fall. Maybe they came in and filled the space.
The first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk, not from like a solar flare
or something that we couldn't control, but from something that humans would actually create at
a global level was World War II in the bomb. Because it was the first time that we had tech
big enough that could actually mess up everything at a global level that could mess up habitability.
We just weren't powerful enough to do that before. It's not that we didn't behave in ways that would
have done it. We just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect. And so it's important
to get that there's the entire world before World War II, where we don't have the ability to make a
non habitable biosphere, non habitable for us. And then there's World War II and the beginning
of a completely new phase where global human induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing.
And that was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way,
which is when you study history, it's amazing how big a percentage of history is studying war,
right, in the history of wars. You study European history and whatever. It's generals and wars and
empire expansions. And so the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time
where they weren't engaged in war or preparation for war or something like that was humans don't
have a good precedent in the post-tribal phase, the civilization phase of being able to solve
conflicts without war for very long. World War II was the first time where we could have a war that
no one could win. And so the superpowers couldn't fight again. They couldn't do a real kinetic war.
They could do diplomatic wars and cold war type stuff and they could fight proxy wars through
other countries that didn't have the big weapons. And so mutually assured destruction and like coming
out of World War II, we actually realized that nation states couldn't prevent world war. And so
we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states, which was the whole
Bretton Woods world, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the globalization trade type
agreements, mutually assured destruction, that was how do we have some coordination beyond just
nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers. And it was
pretty successful given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower war.
We've had lots of proxy wars during that time. We've had, you know, cold war.
And I would say we're in a new phase now where the Bretton Woods solution is basically over,
almost over.
Can you describe the Bretton Woods solution?
Yeah. So the Bretton Woods, the series of agreements for how the nations would be able
to engage with each other in a solution other than war was these IGOs, these intergovernmental
organizations, and was the idea of globalization. Since we could have global effects, we needed
to be able to think about things globally, where we had trade relationships with each other, where
it would not be profitable to war with each other, it'd be more profitable to actually be able to
trade with each other. So our own self-interest was going to drive our non-war interest.
And so this started to look like, and obviously this couldn't have happened
that much earlier either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive
global industrial supply chains and ship stuff around quickly. But like we were mentioning earlier,
almost all the electronics that we use today, just basic cheap stuff for us, is made on six
continents, made in many countries. There's no single country in the world that could actually
make many of the things that we have and from the raw material extraction to the plastics
and polymers and the, you know, et cetera. And so the idea that we made a world that could do that
kind of trade and create massive GDP growth, we could all work together to be able to mine
natural resources and grow stuff. With the rapid GDP growth, there was the idea that everybody
could keep having more without having to take each other's stuff. And so that was part of kind
of the Bretton Woods post World War II model. The other was that we would be so economically
interdependent that blowing each other up would never make sense. That worked for a while. Now,
it also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster, the unrenovable use of resource and
turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain. So obviously,
that faster GDP growth meant the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting down of the trees and
the climate change and the mining, toxic mining tailings going into the water and the mountaintop
removal mining and all those types of things. That's the consumption side of the risk that
we're talking about. And so the answer of let's do positive GDP is the answer rapidly and exponentially
obviously accelerated the planetary boundary side. And that was thought about for a long time,
but it started to be modeled with the Club of Rome and limits of growth. But it's just very
obvious to say, if you have a linear materials economy where you take stuff out of the earth
faster, whether it's fish or trees or or or you take or oil and you take it out of the earth
faster than it can replenish itself. And you turn it into trash after using it for a short
period of time, you put the trash in the environment faster than it can process itself.
And there's toxicity associated with both sides of this. You can't run an exponentially growing
linear materials economy on a finite planet forever. That's not a hard thing to figure out.
And it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply
supply, because of interest and then fractional reserve banking, and to then be able to keep
up with the growing monetary supply, you have to have growth of goods and services. And so that's
that kind of thing that has happened. But you also see that when you get these supply chains
that are so interconnected across the world, you get increased fragility because a collapse or
problem in one area then affects the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues
being local. So we got to see with COVID and an issue that started in one part of China,
affecting the whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened
before Bretton Woods, before international travel supply chains, that whole kind of thing.
And with a bunch of second and third order effects that people wouldn't have predicted,
we have to stop certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants. But the
countries doing agriculture depend upon fertilizer they don't produce that is shipped
into them and depend upon pesticides they don't produce. So we got both crop failures and crops
being eaten by locusts in scale in Northern Africa and Iran and things like that because
they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in. So then you get massive starvation or future kind of
hunger issues because of supply chain shutdowns. So you get this increased fragility and cascade
dynamics where a small problem can end up leading to cascade effects. And also we went from two
superpowers with one catastrophe weapon to now that same catastrophe weapon is there's
more countries that haven't, eight or nine countries that haven't. And there's a lot more
types of catastrophe weapons. We now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that
can hit infrastructure targets with bio with that every new type of tech has created an arms race.
So we have not with the UN or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations,
we haven't been able to really do nuclear deproliferation. We've actually had more
countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes, the race to hypersonics and things like that.
And every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race. And so
you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with two agents.
Two agents, it's a much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced. But the ability
to monitor and say, if these guys shoot, who do I shoot? Do I shoot them? Do I shoot everybody?
Do I? And so you get a three body problem, you get a very complex type of thing when you have
multiple agents and multiple different types of catastrophe weapons, including ones that can be
much more easily produced than nukes. Nukes are really hard to produce. There's only uranium in
a few areas, uranium enrichment is hard, ICBMs are hard, but weaponized drones hitting smart targets
is not so hard. There's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture
them is going way, way down to where even non state actors can have them. And so when we talk
about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech, what that means is decentralized
catastrophe weapon capacity. And especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling
disenfranchised, frantic, whatever for different reasons. So I would say where the Bretton Woods
world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with lots of different agents, having lots of different
types of catastrophe weapons, you can't put mutually assured destruction on, where you can't
keep doing growth of the materials economy in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries
and where the fragility dynamics are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk. So now
we're so like there was all the world until World War II. And World War II is just from a civilization
timescale point of view is just a second ago. It seems like a long time, but it is really not.
We get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up the military
capacity for much, much, much worse war the entire time. And then now we're at this new phase
where the things that allowed us to make it through the nuclear power are not the same systems that
will let us make it through the next stage. So what is this next post Bretton Woods? How do we
become safe vessels, safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology
is a key question when we're thinking about X-Risk.
Okay. So I'd like to try to answer the how a few ways, but first on the mutually assured
destruction, do you give credit to the idea of two superpowers not blowing each other up with
nuclear weapons to the simple game theoretic model of mutually assured destruction, or
something you've said previously, this idea of inverse correlation, which I tend to believe
between now you were talking about tech, but I think it's maybe broadly true the inverse correlation
between competence and propensity for destruction. So the better the bigger your weapons, not because
you're afraid of mutually assured self-destruction, but because we're human beings, and there's a deep
moral fortitude there that's somehow aligned with competence and being good at your job,
that like it's very hard to be a psychopath and be good at killing at scale. Do you share any of
that intuition? Kind of. I think most people would say that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan
and Napoleon were effective people that were good at their job, that were actually maybe asymmetrically
good at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented
towards certain types of destruction or pretty willing to, maybe they would say they were oriented
towards empire expansion, but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction in the name of
it. What are you worried about? The Genghis Khan, or you could argue he's not a psychopath,
that are you worried about Genghis Khan, are you worried about Hitler, or are you worried about
a terrorist who has a very different ethic, which is not even for, it's not trying to preserve and
build and expand my community, it's more about just destruction in itself is the goal. I think
the thing that you're looking at that I do agree with is that there's a psychological disposition
towards construction, and a psychological disposition more towards destruction, obviously
everybody has both and can toggle between both, and oftentimes one is willing to destroy certain
things. We have this idea of creative destruction, right, willing to destroy certain things to create
other things, and utilitarianism and trolley problems are all about exploring that space,
and the idea of war is all about that, and I am trying to create something for our people,
and it requires destroying some other people. Sociopathies is a funny topic because it's
possible to have very high fealty to your in-group and work on perfecting the methods of torture
to the out-group at the same time because you can dehumanize and then remove empathy. I would also
say that there are types, so the reason, the thing that gives hope about the orientation
towards construction and destruction being a little different in psychology is what it takes
to build really catastrophic tech, even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a
new, a small group of people could do it, takes still some real technical knowledge
that required having studied for a while and some then building capacity, and there's a question of
is that psychologically inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization, meaningfully?
A little bit, a little bit, I think. I think a lot. I think it's actually, I mean,
this is the conversation I had, I think offline with Dan Carlin, which is like, it's pretty easy
to come up with ways that any competent, I can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a lot of people,
and it's pretty easy, like I alone can do it, and there's a lot of people as smart or smarter than
me, at least in their creation of explosives. Why are we not seeing more insane mass murder?
I think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this, and it does have to
do with some deeply pro-social types of characteristics in humans, but when you're
dealing with very large numbers, you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena, and so then
you start to say, well, what's the probability that X won't happen this year, then won't happen in
the next two years, three years, four years, and then how many people are doing destructive things
with lower tech, and then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they didn't have
to figure out how to build. So when I can get commercial tech, and maybe I don't understand
tech very well, but I understand it well enough to utilize it, not to create it, and I can repurpose
it. When we saw that commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the Ukrainian
munitions factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage, that was just
home tech, that was just simple kind of thing, and so the question is not what is does it stay
being a small percentage of the population? The question is, can you bind that phenomena
nearly completely, and especially now as you start to get into bigger things,
CRISPR gene drive technologies and various things like that, can you bind it completely
long term over what period of time? Not perfectly though, that's the thing. I'm trying to say that
there is some, let's call it a random word, love, that's inherent in that's core to human nature,
that's preventing destruction at scale, and you're saying, yeah, but there's a lot of humans,
there's going to be eight plus billion, and then there's a lot of seconds in the day to come up
with stuff, there's a lot of pain in the world that can lead to a distorted view of the world
such that you want to channel that pain into the destruction, all those kinds of things, and it's
only a matter of time that anyone individual can do large damage, especially as we create more and
more democratized, decentralized ways to deliver that damage, even if you don't know how to build
the initial weapon, but the thing is, it seems like it's a race between the cheapening of destructive
weapons and the capacity of humans to express their love towards each other, and it's a race
that so far, I know on Twitter, it's not popular to say, but love is winning. So what is the argument
that love is going to lose here against nuclear weapons and biotech and AI and drones?
Okay, I'm going to comment the end of this to a how love wins, so I just want you to know that
that's where I'm oriented. That's the end, okay. But I'm going to argue against why that is a given,
because it's not a given, I don't believe, and I think- This is like a good romantic comedy,
so you're going to create drama right now, but it will end in a happy ending.
Well, it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well enough
and take responsibility to shift it. Do I believe, there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic
sci-fi than protopic sci-fi, and the sum of protopic sci-fi usually requires magic is because,
or at least magical tech, right, dilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff, because
it's very hard to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books
with exponential type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up,
that make good enough choices as stewards of their environment and their commons and each
other and etc. So it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think
of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up. When I say blow ourselves
up, I mean the environmental versions, the terrorist versions, the war versions, the cumulative
externalities versions. I'm sorry if I'm interrupting your flow of thought, but why is it easier?
Could it be a weird psychological thing where we either are just more capable to visualize
explosions and destruction, and then the sicker thought, which is like we kind of enjoy for
some weird reason thinking about that kind of stuff, even though we wouldn't actually act on it.
It's almost like some weird, like I love playing shooter games, you know, first person shooters,
and like especially if it's like murdering, doing a doom, you're shooting demons. I play one of my
favorite games, Diabolus, like slashing through different monsters and the screaming and pain
and the hellfire, and then I go out into the real world to eat my coconut ice cream and I'm all
about love. Can we trust our ability to visualize how it all goes to shit as an actual rational
way of thinking? I think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse
fantasy and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination, but I don't think
that's the whole of it. I think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space
and the difference in the probabilities that there's a lot of ways I could try to put the 70
trillion cells of your body together that don't make you. There's not that many ways I can put
them together that make you. There's a lot of ways I could try to connect the organs together that
make some weird kind of group of organs on a on a desk, but that doesn't actually make a functioning
human. And you can kill an adult human in a second, but you can't get one in a second. It takes 20
years to grow one and a lot of things to happen, right? I could destroy this building in a couple
minutes with demolition, but it took a year or a couple years to build it. There is...
I'm down cold. This is just an example. It doesn't mean it.
There's a gradient where entropy is easier and there's a lot more ways to put a set of things
together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order synergies. And so
when we look at a history of war and then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare,
an arms race that drives out in all these directions, and when we look at a history
of environmental destruction and exponentially more powerful tech that makes exponential
externalities multiplied by the total number of agents that are doing it in the cumulative effects,
there's a lot of ways the whole thing can break, like a lot of different ways.
And for it to get ahead, it has to have none of those happen. And so there's just a probability
space where it's easier to imagine that thing. So to say, how do we have a pro-topic future?
We have to say, well, one criteria must be that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks.
So can we inventory all the catastrophic risks? Can we inventory the patterns of human behavior
that give rise to them? And could we try to solve for that? And could we have that be the essence
of the social technology that we're thinking about to be able to guide, bind, and direct a new
physical technology? Because so far our physical technology, like we were talking about the Genghis
Khans and like that, that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments and
also social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes.
But we have things that don't look like warfare, like Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
And it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource to the
world. And it did. And the second order effects of that are climate change and all of the oil
spills that have happened and will happen and all of the wars in the Middle East over the oil that
have been there and the massive political clusterfuck and human life issues that are associated
with it and on and on, right? And so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can
have a narrow focus on what I'm trying to construct, but be affecting a lot of other things through
second and third order effects I'm not taking responsibility for. And you often on another
tangent mentioned second, third, and fourth order effects. And order. Cascading. Which is really
fascinating. Like starting with the third order plus it gets really interesting because we don't
even acknowledge like the second order effects. Right. But like thinking because those it could
map it could get bigger and bigger and bigger in ways we're not anticipating. So how do we make
those? So it sounds like part of the part of the thing that you are thinking through in terms of
a solution how to create an anti fragile, a resilient society is to make explicit
acknowledge, understand the externalities, the second order, third order, fourth order,
and the order effects. How do we start to think about those effects?
Yeah, the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing.
Right. The externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at
minimum, it's not our intention. Right. Maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware
of it, but it is a side effect of what our intention is. It's not the intention itself.
There are catastrophic risks from both types. The direct application of increased technological
power to a rival risk intent, which is going to cause harm for some out group for some in group
to win, but the out group is also working on growing the tech. And if they don't lose completely,
they reverse engineer the tech upregulated come back with more capacity. So there's the
exponential tech arms race side of in group out group rivalry using exponential tech that is one
set of risks. And the other set of risks is the application of exponentially more powerful tech,
not intentionally to try and beat an out group, but to try to achieve some goal that we have,
but to produce a second and third order effects that do have harm to the commons to other people,
to environment, to other groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem
we were originally trying to solve with the thing we were building. When Facebook was
building a dating app and then building a social app where people could tag pictures,
they weren't trying to build a democracy destroying app that would maximize time on site
as part of its ad model through AI optimization of a news feed to the thing that made people spend
most time on site, which is usually them being limbically hijacked more than something else,
which ends up appealing to people's cognitive biases and group identities and creates no
sense of shared reality. They weren't trying to do that, but it was a second order effect.
And it's a pretty fucking powerful second order effect. And the pretty fast one,
because the rate of tech is obviously able to get distributed to much larger scale,
much faster and with a bigger jump in terms of total vertical capacity, then that's what it
means to get to the verticalizing part of an exponential curve. So just like we can see
that oil had these second order environmental effects and also social and political effects,
war and so much of the whole, like the total amount of oil used has a proportionality to
total global GDP. And this is why we have this, the petrodollar and so the oil thing also had
the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial complex and
things like that. But we can see the same thing with more current technologies with Facebook and
Google and other things. So I don't think we can run, and the more powerful the tech is,
we build it for reason X, whatever reason X is. Maybe X is three things, maybe it's one thing,
right? We're doing the oil thing because we want to make cars because it's a better method of
individual transportation. We're building the Facebook thing because we're going to connect
people socially in the personal sphere. But it interacts with complex systems with ecologies,
economies, psychologies, cultures. And so it has effects on other than the thing we're intending.
Some of those effects can end up being negative effects. But because this technology, if we
make it to solve a problem, it has to overcome the problem. The problem has been around for
a while, it's going to overcome in a short period of time. So it usually has greater scale, greater
rate of magnitude in some way. That also means that the externalities that it creates might be
bigger problems. And you can say, well, but then that's the new problem and humanity will innovate
its way out of that. Well, I don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't keep
up with exponential curves like that, nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities forever.
And this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking, well,
no, I think we're totally screwed. And unless we can make a benevolent AI singleton that rules all
of us, you know, guys like Bostrom and others thinking in those directions, because they're
like, how do humans try to do multipolarity and make it work? And I have a different answer of
what I think it looks like that does have more to do with love, but some applied social tech
align, align with love. Because I have a bunch of really dumb ideas. I prefer to hear. I'd like to
hear some of them first. I think the idea I would have is to be a bit more rigorous in
trying to measure the amount of love you add or subtract from the world
in the second, third, fourth, fifth order effects. It's actually, I think, especially in the world
of tech, quite doable. You know, you just might not like, you know, the shareholders may not like
that kind of metric, but it's pretty easy to measure. Like, that's not even perhaps half
joking about love, but we could talk about just happiness and well being long term well being.
That's pretty easy for Facebook for YouTube for all these companies to measure that.
They do a lot of kinds of surveys. They could do, I mean, there's very simple solutions here
that you could just survey how, I mean, servers are, in some sense, useless because they're
a subset of the population. You're just trying to get a sense of very loose kind of understanding,
but integrated deeply as part of the technology. Most of our tech is recommender systems. Most
of the, sorry, not tech, online interaction is driven by recommender systems that learn
very little data about you and use that data mostly based on traces of your previous behavior to
suggest future things. This is how Twitter, Facebook works. This is how adsense for Google,
adsense works is how Netflix, YouTube work and so on. And for them to just track as opposed to
engagement, how much you spend in a particular video, a particular site is also track, give you
the technology to do self-report of what makes you feel good, what makes you grow as a person,
of what makes you the best version of yourself, the Rogan idea of the hero of your own movie.
And just add that little bit of information. If you have people, you have this happiness
surveys of how you feel about the last five days. How would you report your experience?
You can lay out the set of videos. This is kind of fascinating to me. I don't know if you ever
look at YouTube, the history of videos you've looked at. It's fascinating. It's very embarrassing
for me. Like, it'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that I don't want anyone to
know about, which would be like, I don't know, maybe like five videos in a row where it looks
like I watched the whole thing, which I probably did, about like how to cook a steak, even though,
or just like the best chefs in the world cooking steaks. And I'm just like sitting there watching
it for no purpose whatsoever, wasting away my life, or like funny cat videos or like legit,
that's always a good one. And I could look back and rate which videos made me a better person
and not. And I mean, on a more serious note, there's a bunch of conversations, podcasts,
or lectures I've watched, which made me a better person and some of them made me a worse person.
Quite honestly, not for stupid reasons like I feel dumber, but because I do have a sense
that that started me on a path of not being kind to other people. For example, I'll give you,
for my own, and I'm sorry for ranting, but maybe there's some usefulness to this kind of exploration
of self. When I focus on creating, on programming on science, I become a much deeper thinker and
a kinder person to others. When I listen to too many, a little bit is good, but too many
podcasts or videos about how our world is melting down, or criticizing ridiculous people,
the worst of the quote unquote woke, for example, there's all these groups that are misbehaving
in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted by power. The more I watch criticism
of them, the worse I become. I'm aware of this, but I'm also aware that for some reason it's
pleasant to watch those sometimes. For me, to be able to self-report that to the YouTube algorithm,
to the systems around me, and they ultimately try to optimize to make me the best version of
myself, which I personally believe would make YouTube a lot more money because I'd be much more
willing to spend time on YouTube and give YouTube a lot more of my money. That's great for business
and great for humanity because it'll make me a kinder person. It'll increase the love quotient,
the love metric, and it'll make them a lot of money. I feel like everything's aligned,
and so you should do that not just for YouTube algorithm, but also for military strategy,
and whether to go to war or not, because one externality you can think of about going to war,
which I think we talked about offline, is we often go to war with governments, not with the
people. You have to think about the kids of countries that see a soldier and because of
what they experience the interaction with the soldier, hate is born. When you're like eight
years old, six years old, you lose your dad, you lose your mom, you lose a friend, somebody close
to you, that one really powerful externality that could be reduced to love, positive and negative,
is the hate that's born when you make decisions, and that's going to take fruition that that little
seed is going to become a tree that then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about.
In my sense, it's possible to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does this add to the
world. All that to say, do you have ideas of how we practically build systems that create
resilient society? There are a lot of good things that you shared where there's 15 different ways
that we could enter this that are all interesting, so I'm trying to see which one will probably be
most useful. Pick the one or two things that are least ridiculous. When you were mentioning
if we could see some of the second-order effects or externalities that we aren't used to seeing,
specifically the one of a kid being radicalized somewhere else, which engenders enmity in them
towards us, which decreases our own future security. Even if you don't care about the kid,
if you care about the kid, it's a whole other thing. I think when we saw this, when Jane Fonda
and others went to Vietnam and took photos and videos of what was happening, and you got to
see the pictures of the kids with napalm on them, that the anti-war effort was bolstered by that
in a way it couldn't have been without that. Until we can see the images, you can't have a
mere neuron effect in the same way. When you can, that starts to have a powerful effect.
I think there's a deep principle that you're sharing there, which is that if we can have
a rivalrous intent where our in-group, whatever it is, maybe it's our political party wanting to
win within the US, maybe it's our nation state wanting to win in a war or an economic war over
resource or whatever it is, that if we don't obliterate the other people completely, they don't
go away. They're not engendered to like us more. They didn't become less smart, so they have more
enmity towards us, and whatever technologies we employed to be successful, they will now reverse
engineer, make iterations on, and come back. You drive in arms race, which is why you can see
that the wars were over history employing more lethal weaponry, and not just the kinetic war,
the information war, and the narrative war, and the economic war. It just increased capacity in
all of those fronts. What seems like a win to us on the short term might actually really produce
losses in the long term, and what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably
more aligned with everyone else because we inter-affect each other. I think the thing about
globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which we affect each other and the rate at
which we affect the biosphere that we're all affected by is that this kind of proverbial
spiritual idea that we're all interconnected and need to think about that in some way that was easy
for tribes to get because everyone in the tribe so clearly saw their interconnection independence
on each other. But in terms of a global level, the speed at which we are actually interconnected,
the speed at which the harm happening to something in Wuhan affects the rest of the world, or a new
technology developed somewhere affects the entire world, or an environmental issue, or whatever,
is making it to where we either actually all get, not as a spiritual idea, just even as physics,
right? We all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that
and see how to make it through more effectively together, or failures anywhere in that becoming
decreased quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere.
Don't you think people are beginning to experience that at the individual level? So governments are
resisting it. They're trying to make us not empathize with each other, feel connected,
but don't you think people are beginning to feel more and more connected? Isn't that exactly what
the technology is enabling? Like social networks, we tend to criticize them, but isn't there a sense
which we're experiencing? When you watch those videos that are criticizing, whether it's the
woke Antifa side or the QAnon Trump supporter side, does it seem like they have increased empathy
for people that are outside of their ideologic camp? Not at all. So I may be conflating my own
experience of the world and that of the populace. I tend to see those videos
as feeding something that's a relic of the past. They figured out that drama fuels clicks,
but whether I'm right or wrong, I don't know, but I tend to sense that hunger for drama is not
fundamental to human beings, that we want to understand Antifa and we want to empathize.
We want to take radical ideas and be able to empathize with them and synthesize it all.
Okay, let's look at cultural outliers in terms of violence versus compassion.
We can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in-group violence,
bigger out-group violence, and there's some variants in them in variants of different
times based on the scarcity or abundance of resource and other things. But you can look at, say,
Jains, whose whole religion is around non-violence so much so that they don't even hurt plants,
they only take fruits that fall off them and stuff. Or to go to a larger population,
you take Buddhists, where for the most part, with a few exceptions, for the most part,
across three millennia and across lots of different countries and geographies and whatever,
you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't hurt bugs. The whole spectrum of genetic
variants that is happening within a culture of that many people and head traumas and whatever,
and nobody hurts bugs. And then you look at a group where the kids grow up as child soldiers
in Liberia or Darfur, were to make it to adulthood pretty much everybody's killed people, hand to
hand, and killed people who were civilian or innocent type of people. And you say, okay, so
we were very neoteness, we can be conditioned by our environment, and humans can be conditioned
where almost all the humans show up in these two different bell curves. It doesn't mean that the
Buddhists had no violence, it doesn't mean that these people had no compassion, but they're very
different Gaussian distributions. And so I think one of the important things that I like to do is
look at the examples of the populations with Buddhism shows regarding compassion or what
Judaism shows around education, the average level of education that everybody gets because of a
culture that is really working on conditioning it or various cultures. What are the positive deviants
out of this statistical deviance to see what is actually possible? And then say, what are the
conditioning factors? And can we condition those across a few of them simultaneously?
And could we build a civilization like that becomes a very interesting question. So there's
this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent, large groups of humans become violent,
they become irrational, specifically those two things, rivalrous and violent and irrational.
And so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions,
they need ruled somehow. And not getting that as some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't
understand human nature yet. This gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing.
I think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda that is useful for the classes that
control to popularize the idea that most people are too violent, lazy, undisciplined and irrational
to make good choices. And therefore their choices should be sublimated in some kind of way. I think
that if we look back at these conditioning environments, we can say, okay, so the kids
that go to a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like Exeter Academy,
there's still a Gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric.
But on average, they become senators. And the worst ones become high end lawyers or whatever.
And then I look at the inner city school with a totally different set of things. And I see a very,
very differently displaced Gaussian distribution, but a very different set of conditioning factors.
So then I say the masses. Well, if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses got to
go to Exeter and have that family and whatever, would they still be the masses? Could we actually
condition more social virtue, more civic virtue, more orientation towards dialectical synthesis,
more empathy, more rationality widely? Yes. Would that lead to better capacity for something like
participatory governance, democracy or republic or some kind of participatory governance?
Yes. Yes. Is it necessary for it actually? Yes. And is it good for class interests? Not really.
By the way, when you say class interests, this is the powerful leading over the less
powerful, that kind of idea. Anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power
doesn't necessarily benefit from decreasing those asymmetries of power and kind of increasing
the capacity of people more widely. And so when we talk about power, we're talking about asymmetries
in agency, influence and control. You think that hunger for power is fundamental to human nature?
I think we should get that straight before we talk about other stuff. So this pickup line that
I use at a bar often, which is power crops and absolute power crops, absolutely. Is that true
or is that just a fancy thing to say in modern society? There's something to be said,
have we changed as societies over time in terms of how much we crave power?
That there is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned
one way or the other. Yes. But you can see that Buddhist society does a very different thing
with it at scale, that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types of sociopathic
behavior, and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions. And so it's like,
is eating the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment that give us more
dopamine hit because they were rare and they're not anymore, salt, fat, sugar? Is there something
pleasurable about those where humans have an orientation to overeat if they can? Well,
the fact that there is that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese and I
have obesity. It's possible to have a particular impulse and to be able to understand it,
have other ones and be able to balance them. And so to say that power dynamics are obligate
in humans and we can't do anything about it is very similar to me to saying like
everyone is going to be obligately obese. Yes. So there's some degree to which the control,
those impulses has to do with the conditioning early in life. Yes. And the culture that creates
the environment to be able to do that and then the recursion on that. Okay. So if we were to
bear with me, just asking for a friend, if we're to kill all humans on earth and then start over,
is there ideas about how to build up? Okay, we don't have to kill it. Let's leave the humans
on earth. They're fine and go to Mars and start a new society. Is there ways to construct systems
of conditioning, education of how we live with each other that would incentivize us properly,
to not seek power, to not construct systems that are of asymmetry of power and to create
systems that are resilient to all kinds of terrorist attacks, to all kinds of destructions?
I believe so. So is there some inclinings? Of course, you probably don't have all the answers,
but do you have insights about what that looks like? I mean, is it just rigorous practice of
dialectic synthesis as essentially conversations with assholes of various flavors until they're
not assholes anymore because you've become deeply empathetic with their experience?
Okay, so there's a lot of things that we would need to construct to come back to this. What is
the basis of rivalry? How do you bind it? How does it relate to tech? If you have a culture that is
doing less rivalry, does it always lose in war to those who do war better? And how do you make
something on the enactment of how to get there from here? Great, great. So what's rivalry? Is
rivalry bad or good? So is another word for rivalry competition?
Yes, I think roughly, yes. I think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here.
Good for some things, bad for other things, good for some contexts and others, even that.
Let me give you an example that relates back to the Facebook measuring thing you were mentioning
a moment ago. First, I think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction
and what I want to get to in a moment, but the devil is in the details here.
I enjoy praise. It feeds my ego. I grow stronger, so I appreciate that.
I will make sure to include one piece every 15 minutes as we go. Thank you.
Thank you. So it's easier to measure their problems with this argument,
but there's also utility to it. So let's take it for the utility it has first.
It's harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort.
We can measure with technology that the shocks in a car are making the car bounce less,
that the bed is softer and material science and those types of things. Happiness is actually hard
for philosophers to define because some people find that there are certain kinds of overcoming
suffering that are necessary for happiness. There's happiness that feels more like contentment
and happiness that feels more like passion. Is passion the source of all suffering or
the source of all creativity? There's deep stuff and it's mostly first person,
not measurable third person stuff, even if maybe it corresponds to third person stuff to some degree.
But we also see examples of some of our favorite examples as people who are in the worst environments
who end up finding happiness, right? Where the third person stuff looks to be less conducive
and there's some Victor Frankel, Nelson Mandela, whatever. But it's pretty easy to measure comfort.
It's pretty universal. And I think we can see that the Industrial Revolution started to replace
happiness with comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for. And we can see that when
increased comfort is given, maybe because of the evolutionary disposition that expending extra calories
when for the majority of our history, we didn't have extra calories was not a safe thing to do.
Who knows why? When extra comfort is given, it's very easy to take that path, even if it's not the
path that supports overall well-being long term. And so we can see that when you look at the
techno-optimist idea that we have better lives than Egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever,
what they're largely looking at is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation
systems are and things like that, in which case, there's massive improvement. But we also see that
in some of the nations where people have access to the most comfort, suicide and mental illness of
the highest. And we also see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones
that are in materially lame environments. And so there's a very interesting question here. And
if I understand correctly, you do cold showers. And Joe Rogan was talking about how he needs to
do some fairly intensive kind of struggle that is a non-comfort to actually induce being better
as a person, this concept of hormesis, that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases
its adaptive capacity and that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to
do with its adaptive capacity, its overall resilience, health well-being, which requires a
decent bit of discomfort. And yet in the presence of the comfort solution, it's very hard to not
choose it. And then as you're choosing it regularly to actually down regulate your overall adaptive
capacity. And so when we start saying, can we make tech where we're measuring for the things that it
produces beyond just the measure of GDP or whatever particular measures look like the revenue generation
or profit generation of my business? Are all the meaningful things measurable? And what are the
right measures? And what are the externalities of optimizing for that measurement set? What
meaningful things aren't included in that measurement set that might have their own externalities?
These are some of the questions we actually have to take seriously.
Yeah. And I think they're answerable questions, right?
Progressively better, not perfect.
Right. So first of all, let me throw out happiness and comfort out of the discussion.
Those seem like useless. The distinction, because I said they're useful, well-being is useful, but
I think I take it back. I propose new metrics in this brainstorm session, which is, so one is like
personal growth, which is intellectual growth. I think we're able to make that concrete for
ourselves. Like you're a better person than you were a week ago or a worse person than you were
a week ago. I think we can ourselves report that and understand what that means. It's this gray area
and we try to define it, but I think we humans are pretty good at that because we have a sense,
an idealistic sense of the person we might be able to become. We all dream of becoming a certain
kind of person and I think we have a sense of getting closer and not towards that person.
Maybe this is not a great metric. Fine. The other one is love, actually.
Fuck if you're happy or not, or you're comfortable or not. How much
love do you have towards your fellow human beings? I feel like if you try to optimize that
and increasing that, that's going to have, that's a good metric.
How many times a day, sorry, if I can make quantify, how many times a day have you thought
positively of another human being? Just put that down as a number and increase that number.
I think the process of saying, okay, so let's not take GDP or GDP per capita as the metric we
want to optimize for because GDP goes up during war and it goes up with more health care spending
from sicker people and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality of life.
Addiction drives GDP awesomely. By the way, when I say growth, I wasn't referring to GDP.
I know. I'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use and why it's not
an adequate metric because we're exploring other ones. The idea of saying, what would the metrics
for a good civilization be? If I had to pick a set of metrics, what would the best ones be?
If I was going to optimize for those and then really try to run the thought experiment more
deeply and say, okay, so what happens if we optimize for that? Try to think through the
first and second and third order effects of what happens that's positive and then also say,
what negative things can happen from optimizing that? What actually matters that is not included
in that or in that way of defining it? Because love versus number of positive thoughts per day,
I could just make a long list of names and just say positive thing about each one. It's all very
superficial. Not include animals with the rest of life, have a very shallow total amount of it,
but I'm optimizing the number and if I get some credit for the number. This is when I
said the model of reality isn't reality. When you make a set of metrics, they were going to optimize
for this. Whatever reality is that is not included in those metrics can be the areas where harm
occurs, which is why I would say that wisdom is something like the discernment that leads to
right choices beyond what metrics-based optimization would offer. Yeah, but another way to say that is
wisdom is constantly expanding and evolving set of metrics. Which means that there is something
in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important that isn't part of that metric set.
So there's a certain kind of connection, discernment, awareness, and this is-
The iterative game theory.
There's the girdles in completeness theorem, which is if the set of things is consistent,
it won't be complete. So we're going to keep adding to it, which is why we were saying earlier,
I don't think it's not beautiful. And especially if you were just saying one of the metrics you
want to optimize for at the individual level is becoming, that we're becoming more, well,
that then becomes true for the civilization and our metric sets as well. And our definition of
how to think about a meaningful life and a meaningful civilization. I can tell you what
some of my favorite metrics are. What's that?
Well, love is obviously not a metric. How much you can bench?
Yeah, it's a good metric. Yeah, I want to optimize that across the entire population,
starting with infants. So in the same way that love isn't a metric, but you could make metrics
that look at certain parts of it. The thing I'm about to say isn't a metric, but it's a
consideration. Because I thought about this a lot. I don't think there is a metric, a right one.
I think that every metric by itself without this thing we talked about of the continuous
improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer. I think that's why what the idea of false idle
means in terms of the model of reality, not being reality, then my sacred relationship
is to reality itself, which also binds me to the unknown forever, to the known, but also to the
unknown. And there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown that creates an epistemic
humility that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing I know, but to learn new stuff
and to be open to perceive reality directly. So my model never becomes sacred. My model is useful.
So the model can't be the false idle. Correct. And this is why the first verse of the Tao Te Ching
is the Tao that is nameable is not the eternal Tao. The naming then can become the source of
the 10,000 things that if you get too carried away with it can actually obscure you from paying
attention to reality beyond in the models. It sounds a lot like Stephen Wolfram, but in a
different language, much more poetic. I can't imagine that. No, I'm referring. I'm joking.
But there's echoes of cellular phenomena, which you can't name. You can't construct a good model
cellular phenomena. You can only watch in awe. I apologize. I'm distracting your train of thought
horribly and miserably, making a difference. By the way, something robots aren't good at
and dealing with the uncertainty of uneven ground. You've been okay so far. You've been
doing wonderfully. So what's your favorite metrics? Okay, so I know you're not. So I have a
fascinating term test. So one metric and there are problems with this, but one metric that I like
to just as a thought experiment to consider is because you're actually asking where I mean,
I know you ask your guests about the meaning of life because ultimately when you're saying,
what is a desirable civilization? You can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful human
life and to say what is a good civilization because it's going to be in relationship to that.
And then you have whatever your answer is. How do you know what is the epistemic basis
for postulating that? There's also a whole nother reason for asking that question. I don't,
I mean, that doesn't even apply to you whatsoever, which is it's interesting how few people have been
asked questions like it. We joke about these questions as silly. It's funny to watch a person
and if I was more of an asshole, I would really stick on that question. It's a silly question
in some sense, but like we haven't really considered what it means. Just a more concrete
version of that question is what is what is a better world? What is the kind of world we're
trying to create? Really? Have you really thought about that? I'll give you some kind of simple
answers to that that are meaningful to me, but let me do the societal indices first because they're
fun. We should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's important to come back to.
Are you reminding me to ask you about the meaning of life? Noted. Let me jot that down.
Because I think I stopped tracking it like 25 open threads. Okay.
Let it all burn. One index that I find very interesting is the inverse correlation of
addiction within the society. The more a society produces addiction within the people in it,
the less healthy I think the society is as a pretty fundamental metric and so the more the
individuals feel that there are less compulsive things in compelling them to behave in ways that
are destructive to their own values and insofar as a civilization is conditioning and influencing
the individuals within it, the inverse of addiction. Globally defined, addiction.
Compulsive behavior that is destructive towards things that we value.
Yeah. I think that's a very interesting one to think about. That's a really interesting one,
yeah. And this is then also where comfort and addiction start to get very close.
And the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is the ability to be exposed to
hypernormal stimuli and not go down the path of desensitizing to other stimuli and needing
that hypernormal stimuli, which does involve a kind of hormesis. So I do think the civilization
of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort. Ritualized discomfort.
I think that's what the sweat lodge and the vision quest and the solo journey and the
ayahuasca journey and the Sundance were. I think it's even a big part of what Yoga Asana was,
is to make beings that are resilient and strong, they have to overcome some things.
To make beings that can control their own mind and fear, they have to face some fears.
But we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma. And yet we can see that the most
fucked up people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma. But some of the most incredible people
we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma, whether or not they happen to make it through and overcome
that or not. So how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the resilience and
the whatever that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people? A certain kind of
ritualized discomfort that not only has us overcome something by ourselves, but overcome it together
with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the other people are there. So it's
both a resilience of the individuals and a resilience of the bonding. So I think we'll
keep getting more and more comfortable stuff, but we have to also develop resilience in the
presence of that for the anti-addiction direction and the fullness of character
and the trustworthiness to others. So you have to be consistently injecting discomfort into the
system, ritualize. I mean, this sounds like you have to imagine Sisyphus happy. You have to imagine
Sisyphus with his rock, optimally resilient from a metrics perspective in society. So we want to
constantly be throwing rocks at ourselves. Not constantly. You didn't have to... Frequently.
Periodically. Periodically. Yes. And there's different levels of intensity, different period
of disease. Now, I do not think this should be imposed by states. I think it should emerge from
cultures. And I think the cultures are developing people that understand the value of it. So there
is both a cultural cohesion to it, but there's also a voluntarism because the people value
the thing that is being developed to understand it. And that's what conditioning. It's conditioning
some of these values in. Conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty,
but when we recognize the language that we speak and the words that we think in, and the patterns
of thought built into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned
in us just based on where we're born, you can't not condition people. So all you can do is take
more responsibility for what the conditioning factors are. And then you have to think about
this question of what is a meaningful human life? Because we're, unlike the other animals born into
environment that they're genetically adapted for, we're building new environments that we were not
adapted for. And then we're becoming affected by those. So then we have to say, well, what kinds
of environments, digital environments, physical environments, social environments, would we want
to create that would develop the healthiest, happiest, most moral, noble, meaningful people?
What are even those sets of things that matter? So you end up getting deep existential consideration
at the heart of civilization design when you start to rise how powerful we're becoming and how much
what we're building it in service towards matters. Before I pull it, I think three threads, you just
lay down. Is there another metric index a year? I'll tell you one more that I really like.
There's a number, but the next one that comes to mind is
I have to make a very quick model.
A healthy human bonding. Say, we were in a tribal type setting.
My positive emotional states and your positive emotional states would most of the time be
correlated, your negative emotional states in mind. And so you start laughing, I start laughing,
you start crying, my eyes might tear up. And we would call that the compassion,
compersion access. I would, this is a model I find useful. So compassion is when you're feeling
something negative, I feel some pain, I feel some empathy, something in relationship.
Compersion is when you do well, I'm stoked for you. Right? Like, I actually feel happiness.
You're right, I don't like compersion. Yeah, the fact that it's such an
uncommon word in English is actually a problem culturally. Because I feel that often and I
think that's a really good feeling to feel and maximize for actually. That's actually the metric
I'm going to say is the compassion, compersion access is the thing I would optimize for. Now,
there is a state where my emotional states and your emotional states are just totally decoupled.
And that is like sociopathy. I don't want to hurt you, but I don't care if I do or for you to do
well or whatever. But there's a worst state and it's extremely common, which is where they're
inversely coupled, where my positive emotions correspond to your negative ones and vice versa.
And that is the, I would call it the jealousy, sadism access. The jealousy access is when you're
doing really well, I feel something bad. I feel taken away from, less than upset, envious, whatever.
And that's so common. But I think of it as kind of a low grade psychopathology that we've just
normalized. The idea that I'm actually upset at the happiness or fulfillment or success of another
is like a profoundly fucked up thing. Now, we shouldn't shame it and repress it so it gets worse.
We should study it. Where does it come from? And it comes from our own insecurities and stuff.
But then the next part that everybody knows is really fucked up is just on the same axis. It's
the same inverted, which is to the jealousy or the envy is that I feel badly when you're doing well.
The sadism side is I actually feel good when you lose. Or when you're in pain, I feel some
happiness that's associated. And you can see when someone feels jealous, sometimes they feel jealous
with a partner and then they feel they want that partner to get revenge comes up or something.
So sadism is really like jealousy is one step on the path to sadism from the healthy compassion
conversion access. So I would like to see a society that is inversely, that is conditioning
sadism and jealousy inversely, right, the lower that amount and the more the compassion
conversion. And if I had to summarize that very simply, I'd say it would optimize for conversion.
Which is because notice, that's not just saying love for you where I might be self-sacrificing
and miserable and I love people, but I kill myself, which I don't think anybody thinks a great
idea or happiness where I might be sociopathically happy where I'm causing problems all over the
place or even sadistically happy. But it's a coupling, right, that I'm actually feeling happiness
in relationship to yours and even in causal relationship where I, my own agentic desire
to get happier wants to support you too. That's actually speaking of another pickup line.
That's quite honestly what I, this is a guy who's single. This is going to come out very
ridiculous because it's like, oh yeah, where's your girlfriend, bro? But
that's what I look for in a relationship because it's like, it's so much, it's so,
it's such an amazing life where you actually get joy from another person's success and they get
joy from your success. And then it becomes like, you don't actually need to succeed much for that
to have like a loop, like a cycle of just like happiness that just increases like exponentially.
It's weird. So like just be just enjoying the happiness of others, the success of others.
So this, this is like the, let's call this because the first person that drilled this
into my head is Rogan, Joe Rogan. He was the embodiment of that because I saw somebody who is
successful, rich, and nonstop, true. I mean, you could tell when somebody's full of shit and
somebody's not really genuinely enjoying the success of his friends. That was weird to me.
That was interesting. And I mean, the way you're kind of speaking to it, the reason Joe stood out
to me is I guess I haven't witnessed genuine expression of that often in this culture.
I've just real joy for others. I mean, part of that has to do with, there hasn't been many channels
where you can watch or listen to people being their authentic selves. So I'm sure there's
a bunch of people who live life with compersion. They probably don't seek public attention also,
but that was, yeah, if there was any word that could express what I've learned from Joe and why
he's been a really inspiring figure is that compersion. And I wish our world
had a lot more of that. Because then, I mean, my own, sorry to go into small tangent, but like,
you're speaking how society should function. But I feel like if you optimize for that metric in
your own personal life, you're going to live a truly fulfilling life. I don't know what the
right word to use, but that's a really good way to live life. You will also learn what gets in the
way of it and how to work with it that if you wanted to help try to build systems at scale or apply
Facebook or exponential technologies to do that, you would have more actual depth of real knowledge
of what that takes. And this is, you know, as you mentioned that there's this virtuous cycle
between when you get stoked on other people doing well, and then they have a similar relationship
to you and everyone is in the process of building each other up. And this is what I would say the
healthy version of competition is versus the unhealthy version. The healthy version, right,
the root, I believe it's a Latin word that means to strive together. And it's that impulse of
becoming where I want to become more. But I recognize that there's actually a hormesis,
there's a challenge that is needed for me to be able to do that. But that means that, yes,
there's an impulse where I'm trying to get ahead, maybe I'm even trying to win, but I actually want
to go to opponent. And I want them to get ahead too, because that is where my ongoing
becoming happens. And the win itself will get boring very quickly. The ongoing becoming is
where there's aliveness. And for the ongoing becoming, they need to have it too. And that's
the strive together. So in the healthy competition, I'm stoked when they're doing really well,
because my becoming is supported by it. Now, this is actually a very nice segue into
a model I like about what a meaningful human life is, if you want to go there.
Let's go there. I have three things I'm going elsewhere with, but if we were first,
let us take a short stroll through the park of the meaning of life. Daniel, what is a meaningful life?
I think the semantics end up mattering, because a lot of people will take the word meaning and
the word purpose almost interchangeably. And they'll think kind of what is the meaning of my life,
what is the meaning of human life, what is the meaning of life, what's the meaning of the universe,
and what is the meaning of existence rather than non-existence. So there's
a lot of kind of existential considerations there. And I think there's some cognitive
mistakes that are very easy, like taking the idea of purpose, which is like a goal, which is
a utilitarian concept. The purpose of one thing is defined in relationship to other things that
have assumed value. And to say, what is the purpose of everything? Well, purpose is too small of a
question. It's fundamentally a relative question within everything. What is the purpose of one
thing relative to another? What is the purpose of everything? And there's nothing outside of it
with which to say it. You actually just got to the limits of the utility of the concept of purpose.
It doesn't mean it's purposeless in the sense of something inside of it being purposeless. It
means the concept is too small, which is why you end up getting to, you know, like in Taoism,
talking about the nature of it. Rather, there's a fundamental what where the why can't go deeper
is the nature of it. But I'm going to try to speak to a much simpler part, which is when
people think about what is a meaningful human life and kind of if we were to optimize for something
at the level of individual life. But also, how does optimizing for this at the level of the
individual life lead to the best society for insofar as people living that way affects others
and long term the world as a whole? And how would we then make a civilization that was trying to
think about these things? Because you can see that there are a lot of dialectics where there's
value on two sides, individualism and collectivism or the ability to accept things and the ability
to push harder and whatever. And there's failure modes on both sides. And so when you were starting
to say, okay, individual happiness, you're like, wait, fuck, sadists can be happy while hurting
people, it's not individual happiness, it's love. But wait, some people can self sacrifice out of love
in a way that actually ends up just creating codependency for everybody. Or, okay, so how do
we think about all those things together? One, like, this kind of came to me as a simple way
that I kind of relate to it is that a meaningful life involves the mode of being, the mode of doing
and the mode of becoming. And it involves a virtuous relationship between those three. And
that any of those modes on their own also have failure modes that are not a meaningful life.
The mode of being, the way I would describe it, if we're talking about the essence of it,
is about taking in and appreciating the beauty of life that is now,
it's a mode that is in the moment, and that is largely about being with what is.
It's fundamentally grounded in the nature of experience and the meaningfulness of experience,
the prima facia meaningfulness of when I'm having this experience.
I'm not actually asking what the meaning of life is. I'm actually full of it. I'm full of
experiencing it. The momentary experience. Yes. So taking in the beauty of life,
doing is adding to the beauty of life. I'm going to produce some art. I'm going to produce some
technology that will make life easier, more beautiful for somebody else. I'm going to
do some science that will end up leading to better insights or other people's ability to
appreciate the beauty of life more because they understand more about it or whatever it is,
or protect it, right? I'm going to protect it in some way, but that's adding to
or being in service of the beauty of life through our doing. And becoming is getting
better at both of those. Being able to deepen our being, which is to be able to take in the beauty
of life more profoundly, be more moved by it, touched by it, and increasing our capacity with
doing to add to the beauty of life more. And so I hold that a meaningful life has to be all three
of those. And where they're not in conflict with each other, ultimately, it grounds in being,
it grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness of experience. And then my doing is ultimately
something that will be able to increase the possibility of the quality of experience for
others. And my becoming is a deepening on those. So it grounds an experience and also the evolutionary
possibility of experience. And the point is to oscillate between these, never getting stuck on
any one. Yeah. Where I suppose in parallel, well, you can't really, attention is a thing
you can only allocate attention. I want moments where I am absorbed in the sunset and I'm not
thinking about what to do next. And then the fullness of that can make it to where my doing
doesn't come from what's in it for me, because I actually feel overwhelmingly full already.
And then it's like, how can I make life better for other people that don't have as much opportunities
I had? How can I add something wonderful? How can I just be in the creative process? And so I think
where the doing comes from matters. And if the doing comes from a fullness of being, it's inherently
going to be paying attention to externalities. Or it's more oriented to do that than if it comes
from some emptiness that is trying to get full in some way that is willing to cause sacrifices
other places and where a chunk of its attention is internally focused. And so when Buddha said
desires the cause of all suffering, then later, the vow of the Bodhisattva, which was to show up
for all sentient beings in universe forever, is a pretty intense thing like desire. I would say
there is a kind of desire, if we think of desire as a basis for movement, like a flow or a gradient,
there's a kind of desire that comes from something missing inside seeking fulfillment of that. And
fulfillment of that in the world, that ends up being the cause of actions that perpetuate suffering.
But there's also not just non-desire, there's a kind of desire that comes from feeling full
at the beauty of life and wanting to add to it. That is a flow this direction. And I don't think
that is the cause of suffering. I think that is, you know, and the Western traditions, right? The
Eastern traditions focused on that and kind of unconditional happiness outside of them in the
moment outside of time. Western traditions said no, actually, desire is the source of creativity.
And we're here to be made in the image and likeness of the Creator. We're here to be fundamentally
creative, but creating from where and in service of what? Creating from a sense of connection to
everything and wholeness and service of the well-being of all of it is very different.
Which is back to that compassion, compersion axis. Being, doing, becoming. It's pretty powerful.
Also could potentially be algorithmatized into a robot, just saying.
Where does death come into that? Being is forgetting, I mean, the concept of time completely.
There's a sense to doing and becoming that has a deadline built in, the urgency
built in. Do you think death is fundamental to this, to a meaningful life?
Acknowledging or feeling the terror of death, like Ernest Becker, or just acknowledging the
uncertainty, the mystery, the melancholy nature of the fact that the right ends.
Is that part of this equation or not necessary? Okay, look at how it could be related. I've
experienced fear of death. I've also experienced times where I thought I was gonna die. It felt
extremely peaceful and beautiful. And it's funny because we can be afraid of death because we're
afraid of hell or bad reincarnation or the bardo or some kind of idea of the afterlife we have,
or we're projecting some kind of sentient suffering. But if we're afraid of just non-experience,
I noticed that every time I stay up late enough that I'm really tired,
I'm longing for deep sleep and non-experience, right? Like I'm actually longing for experience to
stop. And it's not morbid. It's not a bummer. And I don't mind falling asleep. And sometimes
when I wake up, I want to go back into it. And then when it's done, I'm happy to come out of it.
So when we think about death and having finite time here, and we could talk about if we live for
a thousand years instead of a hundred or something like that, it would still be finite time.
The one bummer with the age we die is that I generally find that people mostly start to
emotionally mature just shortly before they die. But if I get to live forever,
I can just stay focused on what's in it for me forever. And if life continues and consciousness
and sentience and people appreciating beauty and adding to it and becoming continues,
my life doesn't. But my life can have effects that continue well beyond it.
Then life with a capital L starts mattering more to me than my life.
My life gets to be a part of and in service to. And the whole thing about when old men plant trees,
the shade of which they'll never get to be in. I remember the first time I read this poem by
Huff as the Sufi poet written in like 13th century or something like that. And he talked about that
if you're lonely to think about him and he was kind of leaning his spirit into yours across the
distance of a millennium and would come for you with these poems and just thinking about people,
a millennium from now and caring about their experience and what they'd be suffering if
they'd be lonely and could he offer something that could touch them. And it's just fucking beautiful.
And so like the most beautiful parts of humans have to do with something that transcends what's
in it for me. And death forces you to that. So not only does death create the urgency, it
urgency of doing, you're very right. It does have a sense in which it incentivizes the
compersion and the compassion. And the widening, you remember Einstein had that quote,
something to the effect of it's an optical delusion of consciousness to believe there are
separate things. There's this one thing we call universe and something about us being
inside of a prison of perception that can only see a very narrow little bit of it.
But this might be just some weird disposition of mine. But when I think about the future after
I'm dead and I think about consciousness, I think about young people falling in love for
the first time and their experience and I think about people being awed by sunsets and I think about
all of it, right? I can't not feel connected to that. Do you feel some sadness to the very
high likelihood that you will be forgotten completely by all of human history? You, Daniel,
the name that, that which cannot be named? Systems like to self perpetuate.
Egos do that. The idea that I might do something meaningful that future people appreciate, of
course, there's like a certain sweetness to that idea. But I know how many people did something,
did things that I wouldn't be here without and that my life would be less without whose names
I will never know. And I feel a gratitude to them. I feel a closeness. I feel touched by that. And I
think to the degree that the future people are conscious enough, there is a, you know, a lot
of traditions have this kind of, are we being good ancestors and respect for the ancestors
beyond the names? I think that's a very healthy idea. But let me return to a much less beautiful
and much less pleasant conversation. You mentioned prison. Back to ex risk. Okay.
And conditioning. You mentioned something about the state.
So what role, let's talk about companies, governments, parents,
all the mechanisms that can be a source of conditioning. Which flavor of ice cream do you
like? Do you think the state is the right thing for the future? So governments that are elected
democratic systems that are representing representative democracy. Is there some kind
of political system of governance that you find appealing? Is it parents?
Meaning a very close knit tribes of conditioning. That's the most essential. And then you and
Michael Malis would happily agree that it's anarchy where the state should be dissolved or
destroyed or burned to the ground if you're Michael Malis giggling, holding the torch
as the fire burns. So which, which is it? Is the state, can the state be good?
Or is the state bad for the condition of a beautiful world? A or B? This is like an SPT
test. You like to give these simplified good or bad things. Would I like the state that we live
in currently the United States federal government to stop existing today? No, I would really not
like that. I think that would be not quite bad for the world in a lot of ways. Do I think that it's a
optimal social system and maximally just and humane and all those things and I want to continue as is?
No, also not that. But I am much more interested in it being able to evolve to a better thing
without going through the catastrophe phase that I think it's just non-existence would give.
So what size of state is good? In a sense like do we, should we as a human society as this world
becomes more globalized, should we be constantly striving to reduce the, we can, we can put on a
map like right now literally like the, the centers of power in the world. Some of them are tech
companies. Some of them are governments. Should we be trying to as much as possible decentralize
the power to where it's very difficult to point on the map, the centers of power. And that means
making the state, however, there's a bunch of different ways to make the government much smaller
that could be reducing in the United States, reducing the the funding for the government,
all those kinds of things. There's a set of responsibilities, the set of powers, it could be,
I mean, this is far out, but making more nations or maybe nations not in the space that are defined
by geographic location, but rather in the space of ideas, which is what Anarchy is about. So Anarchy
is about forming collectives based on their set of ideas and doing so dynamically not based on
where you were born and so on. I think we can say that the natural state of humans, if we want to
describe such a thing, was to live in tribes that were below the Dunbar number, meaning that for a
few hundred thousand years of human history, all of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that
size. And whenever it would get up to that size, it would end up cleaving. And so it seems like
there's a pretty strong, but there weren't individual humans out in the wild doing really well,
right? So we were a group animal, but with groups that had a specific size. So we could say,
in a way, humans were being domesticated by those groups. They were learning how to have
certain rules to participate with the group without which you'd get kicked out. But that's
still the wild state of people. And maybe it's useful to do as a side statement, which I've
recently looked at a bunch of papers around Dunbar's number, where the mean is actually 150. If you
actually look at the original papers, it's a range. It's really a range. So it's actually somewhere
under a thousand. So it's a range of like two to 500 or whatever it is. But like, you could argue
that the, I think it actually is exactly two, two, the range is two to five hundred and 20,
something like that. And this is the mean that's taken crudely. It's not a very good paper in terms
of the actual numerical, numerically speaking. But it'd be interesting if there's a bunch of
Dunbar numbers that could be computed for particular environments, particular conditions and so on.
It is very true that they're likely to be something small, you know, under a million.
But it'd be interesting if we can expand that number in interesting ways that will
change the fabric of this conversation. I just want to kind of throw that in there. I don't know
if the 150 is baked in somehow into the hardware. We can talk about some of the things that it
probably has to do with up to a certain number of people. And this is going to be variable based
on the social technologies that mediate it to some degree. We can talk about that in a minute.
Up to a certain number of people, everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately.
So let's go ahead and just take 150 as a, as an average number.
Everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly,
it's your extended family. And you're stuck living with them. And you know who they are.
And there's no anonymous people. There's no just them and over there. And that's one part of what
leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the individual and good for the whole has a
coupling. Also below that scale, everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing.
There's not groups that are very siloed. And as a result, it's actually very hard to get away
with bad behavior. There's a force kind of transparency. And so you don't need kind of
like the state in, in that way. But lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead.
Sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen. And so there's a conditioning
environment where the individuals behaving in a way that is aligned with the interest of the tribe
is what gets conditioned. When it gets to be a much larger system, it becomes easier to hide
certain things from the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of
anonymous people. I would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that
number of people, we could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a
really big decision. Do we migrate? Do we not migrate? Do we, you know, some something like
that? Do we get rid of this person? And why, why would I want to agree to be a part of a larger
group where everyone can't be part of that council? And so I am going to now be subject to law that
I have no say in if I could be part of a smaller group that could still survive. And I get a say
in the law that I'm subject to. So I think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the
Dunbar number two is we can look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding
them together and has cleaving energy. And if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy,
that civilization will last. And so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving
energy within the society, things we can do to increase the binding energy. I think naturally
we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size, kind of tribalism,
that ended with a few things. It ended with people having migrated enough that when you
started to get resource wars, you couldn't just migrate away easily. And so tribal warfare became
more obligated. It involved the plow in the beginning of real economic surplus. There were,
so there were a few different kind of forcing functions. But we're talking about what size
should it be, right? What size should a society be? And I think the idea, like if we think about
your body for a moment as a self-organizing complex system that is multi-scaled, we think about
our body is a wonderland. Our body is a wonderland. Yeah. You have. That's a John Mayer song. I
apologize. But yes, so if we think about our body and the billions of cells that are in it.
Well, you don't have, like think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have
all the tens of trillions of cells in it with no internal organization structure,
right? Just like a sea of protoplasm. Pure democracy. And so you have cells and tissues.
And then you have tissues and organs and organs and organ systems. And so you have these layers
of organization. And then obviously the individual in a tribe in a ecosystem. And each of the higher
layers are both based on the lower layers, but also influencing them. I think the future of
civilization will be similar, which is there's a level of governance that happens at the level
of the individual, my own governance of my own choice. I think there's a level that happens
at the level of a family. We're making decisions together. We're inter influencing each other
and affecting each other, taking responsibility for the idea of an extended family. And you can
see that like for a lot of human history, we had an extended family. We had a local community,
a local church or whatever it was. We have these intermediate structures. Whereas right now,
there's kind of like the individual producer consumer taxpayer voter and the massive nation
state global complex. And not that much in the way of intermediate structures that we relate
with and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics all impersonalized made fungible. And
so I think that we have to have global governance, meaning I think we have to have
governance at the scale we affect stuff. And if anybody is messing up the oceans,
that matters for everybody. So that can't only be national or only local. Everyone is scared
of the idea of global governance, because we think about some top down system of imposition
that now has no checks and balances on power. I'm scared of that same version. So I'm not talking
about that kind of global governance. It's why I'm even using the word governance as a process
rather than government as an imposed phenomena. And so I think we have to have global governance,
but I think we also have to have local governance. And there has to be relationships
between them that each where there are both checks and balances and power flows of information.
So I think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance
at the level of nation states, because I think nation states are largely fictitious things
that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that. I think cities are
based on real things will keep being real, where the proximity of certain things together,
the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of those things.
So you look at like Jeffrey West's work on scale and finding that companies and nation states and
things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return of production
per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the tribal scale,
but the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita. But it's not designed.
It's kind of this organic thing, right? So there should be governance at the level of cities,
because people can sense and actually have some agency there, probably neighborhoods and smaller
scales within it and also verticals. And some of it won't be geographic. It'll be network based,
right? Networks of affinities. So I don't think the future is one type of governance.
Now, what we can say more broadly is say, when we're talking about groups of people that
interaffect each other, the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how to coordinate our
choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase total productive capacity
in a way that's good for everybody, division of labor and specialties. So we all get more
better stuff and whatever. But it's a it's a coordination of our choice making.
I think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination
of choice making. So they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave and an internal
war comes about or whatever, or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their resources
or whatever. Or it can fail on the side of trying to get order via imposition via force.
And so it fails on the side of oppression, which ends up being for a while, functional ish for
the thing as a whole, but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of
revolt or because it can't innovate enough or something like that. And so there's this like
toggling between order via oppression and chaos. And I think the idea of democracy,
not the way we've implemented it, but the idea of it, whether we're talking about
a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy, liquid democracy,
republic or whatever, the idea of an open society, participatory governance,
is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with chaos
and infighting and inability to coordinate. And we're also not stuck with oppression.
And what would it take to have emergent order? This is the most kind of central question for
me these days, because if we look at what different nation states are doing around the world,
and we see nation states that are more authoritarian, that in some ways are actually
coordinating much more effectively. So for instance, we can see that China has built high
speed rail not just through its country, but around the world and the US hasn't built any
high speed rail yet. You can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where
we've had increasing economic inequality happening. You can see that if there was a single country
that could make all of its own stuff, if the global supply chains failed, China would be the
closest one to being able to start to go closed loop on fundamental things.
Belt and Road Initiative, supply chain on rare earth metals, transistor manufacturing that
is like, oh, they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways.
In the last call at 30 years, and that's imposed order, imposed order. And we can see that if
in the US, if now let's look at why real quick, we know why we created term limits so that we
wouldn't have forever monarchs. That's the thing we were trying to get away from and that there
would be checks and balances on power and that kind of thing. But that also has created a negative
second order effect, which is nobody does long term planning. Because somebody comes in who's
got four years, they want reelected, they don't do anything that doesn't create a return within
four years that will end up getting them elected, reelected. And so the 30 year industrial development
to build high speed trains or the new kind of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get
invested in. And then if you have left versus right, where whatever someone does for four years,
then the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years. And most of the energy goes into
campaigning against each other. This system is just dissipating as heat, right? Like it's just
burning up as heat. And the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting
because they got rid of those people can actually coordinate better. But
I would argue it has its own fail states eventually and dystopic properties that are not the thing
we want. So the goal is to accomplish, to create a system that does long term planning without
the negative effects of a monarch or dictator that stays there for the long term. And
accomplish that through not doing the imposition of a single leader, but through emergent. So
that perhaps first of all, the technology in itself seems to maybe disagree, allow for
different possibilities here, which is make primary the system, not the humans. So the
basic, the medium on which the democracy happens, like a platform where people can
make decisions, do the choice making, the coordination of the choice making,
where emerges some kind of order to where like something that applies at the scale of the family,
the extended family, the city, the country, the continent, the whole world, and then does that
so dynamically, constantly changing based on the needs of the people sort of always evolving.
And it would all be owned by Google. Like doesn't this, is there a way to, so first of all,
you're optimistic that you could basically create, that technology can save us. Technology
at creating platforms by technology, I mean like software network platforms that allows humans to
deliberate, like make government together dynamically without the need for a leader that's
on a podium screaming stuff. That's one. And two, if you're optimistic about that,
are you also optimistic about the CEOs of such platforms?
The idea that technology is values neutral, values agnostic, and people can use it for
constructive or destructive purposes, but it doesn't predispose anything. It's just silly and naive.
Technology elicits patterns of human behavior because those who utilize it and get ahead
end up behaving differently because of their utilization of it. And then other people,
then they end up shaping the world or other people race to also get the power of the technology. And
so there's whole schools of anthropology that look at the effect on social systems and the minds
of people of the change in our tooling. Marvin Harris's work called cultural materialism looked
at this deeply. Obviously, Marshall McLuhan looked specifically at the way that information
technologies change the nature of our beliefs, minds, values, social systems. I will not try
to do this rigorously because there are, academics will disagree on the subtle details, but I'll
do it kind of like illustratively. You think about the emergence of the plow, the ox-drawn plow in
the beginning of agriculture that came with it, where before that you had hunter gather
and then you had horticulture, kind of a digging stick, but not the plow. Well, the world changed
a lot with that, right? And a few of the changes that at least some theorists believe in is when
the ox-drawn plow started to proliferate any culture that utilized, it was able to start to
actually cultivate grain because just with a digging stick, you couldn't get enough grain for it to
matter. Grain was a storable caloric surplus. They could make it through the famines. They could
grow their populations. So the ones that used it got so much ahead that it became obligate and
everybody used it. That corresponding with the use of a plow, animism went away everywhere
that it existed because you can't talk about the spirit of the buffalo while beating the cow all
day long to pull a plow. So the moment that we do animal husbandry of that kind, we have to beat
the cow all day. You have to say it's just a dumb animal. Man has dominion over earth and the nature
of even our religious and spiritual ideas change. You went from women primarily using the digging
stick to do the horticulture or gathering before that, men doing the hunting stuff, to now men had
to use the plow because the upper body strength actually really mattered. Women would have miscarriages
when they would do it when they were pregnant. So all the caloric supply started to come from men
where it had been from both before and the ratio of male-female gods changed to being mostly male
gods following that. Obviously we went from that particular line of thought then also says that
feminism followed the tractor and that the rise of feminism in the west started to follow women
being able to say we can do what men can because the male upper body strength wasn't differential
once the internal combustion engine was much stronger and we can drive a tractor. So I don't
think to try to trace complex things to one cause is a good idea. So I think this is a reductionist
view but it has truth in it. And so the idea that technology is value is agnostic is silly.
Technology codes patterns of behavior that code rationalizing those patterns of behavior and
believing in them. The plow also is the beginning of the Anthropocene. It was the beginning of us
changing the environment radically to clear-cut areas to just make them useful for people which
also meant the change of the view of where the web of life were just a part of it etc. So all those
types of things. So that's brilliantly put but by the way that was just brilliant but the question
is so it's not agnostic but. So we have to look at what the psychological effects of specific
tech applied certain ways are and be able to say it's not just doing the first order thing you
intended. It's doing like the effect on patriarchy and animism and the end of tribal culture in the
beginning of empire and the class systems that came with that. We can go on and on about what the
plow did. The beginning of surplus was inheritance which then became the capital model and like lots
of things. So we have to say when we're looking at the tech how is what are the values built into
the way the tech is being built that are not obvious. Right. So you always have to consider
externalities. Yes and the externalities are not just physical to the environment they're also to
how the people are being conditioned and how the relationality between them is being conditioned.
The question I'm asking you so I personally would rather be led by a plow and a tractor than Stalin.
Okay that's the question I'm asking you is in creating an emergent government where people
where there's a democracy that's dynamic that makes choices that does governance at
like a very kind of liquid like there's a bunch of fine resolution layers of abstraction
of governance happening at all scales. Right. And doing so dynamically where no one person
has power at any one time that can dominate and impose rule. Okay. That's the Stalin version.
I'm saying isn't there the alter the isn't the alternative that's emergent empowered or made
possible by the plow and the tractor which is the modern version of that is like the internet
the digital space where we can the monetary system where you have the current currency and so on
but you have much more importantly to me at least is just basic social interacting the
mechanisms of human transacting with each other in the space of ideas isn't so yes it's not agnostic
definitely not agnostic you've had a brilliant rant there the tractor has effects but isn't
that the way we achieve an emergent system of governance. Yes but I wouldn't say we're on track.
You haven't seen anything promising but it's not that I haven't seen anything promising
is that to be on track requires understanding and guiding some of the things differently than
is currently happening and it's possible that's actually what I really care about. So
you couldn't have had a Stalin without having certain technologies emerge he couldn't have ruled
such a big area without transportation technologies without the train without the
communication tech that made it possible so when you say you'd rather have a tractor or a plow
than a stall and there's a relationship between them that is more recursive which is new physical
technologies allow rulers to rule with more power over larger distances historically and
but some things are more responsible for that than others like Stalin also ate
stuff for breakfast but the thing he ate for breakfast is less responsible for the starvation
of millions than the train the train is more responsible for that and then the weapons of war
are more responsible so some technology like let's not throw it all in the you're saying like
technology has a responsibility here but some is better than others. I'm saying that people's use
of technology will change their behavior so it has behavioral dispositions built in the change of
the behavior will also change the values in the society. It's very complicated right. It will also
as a result both make people who have different kinds of predispositions with regard to rulership
and different kinds of new capacities and so we have to think about these things. It's kind of
well understood that the printing press and then in early industrialism ended feudalism and created
kind of nation states so one thing I would say as a long trend that we can look at is that whenever
there is a step function a major leap in technology physical technology the underlying techno industrial
base with which we do stuff it ends up coding for it ends up predisposing a whole bunch of human
behavioral patterns that the previous social system what had not emerged to try to solve
and so it usually ends up breaking the previous social systems the way the plow broke the tribal
system the way that the industrial revolution broke the feudal system and then new social
systems have to emerge so they can deal with that the new powers the new dispositions whatever with
that tech obviously the nuke broke nation state governance being adequate and said we can't ever
have that again so then it created this in international governance apparatus world so
so I guess what I'm saying is that the solution is not exponential tech following the current
path of what the market incentivizes exponential tech to do market being a previous social tech
I would say that exponential tech if we look at different types of social tech so let's just
briefly look at that democracy tried to do the emergent order thing right at least that's the
story and which is and this is why if you look at this important part to build first it's kind of
doing it it's just doing it poorly you're saying I mean that's it is emergent order in some sense
I mean that's the hope of democracy versus other forms of government correct I mean I said at least
the story because obviously it didn't do it for women and slaves early on it doesn't do it for all
classes equally etc but the the idea of democracy is that is participatory governance and so you
notice that the modern democracy is emerged out of the European Enlightenment and specifically
because the idea that a lot of people some huge number not a tribal number a huge number of anonymous
people who don't know each other are not bonded to each other who believe different things we
grew up in different ways can all work together to make collective decisions well that affect
everybody and where some of them will make compromises and the thing that matters to them
for what matters to other strangers that's actually wild like it's a wild idea that that would even
be possible and it was kind of the result of this high enlightenment idea that we could all
do the philosophy of science and we could all do the Hegelian dialectic those ideas had emerged
right and it was that we we could all so our choice making because we said a society is
trying to coordinate choice making the emergent order is the order of our of the choices that
we're making not just at the level of the individuals but what groups of individuals
corporations nation states whatever do our choices are based on our choice makings based
on our sense making and our meaning making our sense makings what do we believe is happening
in the world and what do we believe the effects of a particular thing would be our meaning makings
what do we care about right our values generation what do we care about that we're trying to move
the world in the direction of if you ultimately are trying to move the world in a direction that
is really really different than the direction I'm trying to we have very different values
we're gonna have a hard time and if you think the world is a very different world right if you
think that systemic racism is rampant everywhere and one of the worst problems and I think it's
not even a thing if you think climate change is almost existential and I think it's not even a
thing we're gonna have a really hard time coordinating and so we have to be able to
have shared sense making of can we come to understand just what is happening together
and then can we do shared values generation okay maybe I'm emphasizing a particular value more
than you but I can see how though I can take your perspective and I can see how the thing that you
value is worth valuing and I can see how it's affected by this thing so can we take all the
values and try to come up with a proposition that benefits all of them better than the proposition
I created just to benefit these ones that harms the ones that you care about which is why you're
opposing my proposition yeah we don't even try in the process of crafting a proposition currently
to see and this is a reason that the proposition when we vote on it gets half the vote almost all
the time it almost never gets 90% of the votes is because it benefits some things and harms other
things we can say all theory of trade-offs but we didn't even try to say could we see what everybody
cares about and see if there is a better solution so how do we fix that try I wonder is it is it
as simple as the social technology education well no it's that the proposition crafting and
refinement process has to be key to a democracy or part of the government and it's not currently
but it's the isn't that the humans creating that situation so one way there's two ways to fix that
is the one is to fix the individual humans which is the education early in life and the second is
to create somehow systems that yeah it's both so I understand the education part but creating
systems that's why that's why I mentioned the technologies is creating yes social networks
essentially yes that's actually necessary okay so let's go to the first part and then we'll come to
the second part so democracy emerged as an enlightenment era idea that we could all do
a a dialectic and come to understand what other people valued and so that we could actually come
up with a cooperative solution rather than just fuck you we're going to get our thing in war
right and that we could sense make together we could all apply the philosophy of science and
you weren't going to stick to your guns on what the speed of sound is if we measured it and we
found out what it was and there's a unifying element of the objectivity in that way and so this
is why I believe Jefferson said if you could give me a perfect newspaper and a broken government or
in paraphrasing or a broken government perfect newspaper I wouldn't hesitate to take the perfect
newspaper because if the people understand what's going on they can make build a new government
if they don't understand what's going on they can't possibly make good choices and Washington
I'm paraphrasing again first president said the number one aim of the federal government should
be the comprehensive education of every citizen in the science of government science of government
was the term of art think about what that means right science of government would be
game theory coordination theory history it wouldn't call game theory yet history sociology
economics right all the things that lead to how we understand human coordination I think it's so
profound that he didn't say the number one aim of the federal government is rule of law
and he didn't say it's protecting the border from enemies because if the number one aim was to
protect the border from enemies it could do that as military dictatorship quite effectively and if
the goal was rule of law it could do it as a dictatorship as a police state and so if the
number one goal is anything other than the comprehensive education of all the citizens
in the science of government it won't stay democracy long you can see so both education
and the fourth estate the fourth estate being the so education can I make sense of the world am I
trained to make sense of the world the fourth estate is what's actually going on currently
the news do I have good unbiased information about it those are both considered prerequisite
institutions for democracy to even be a possibility and then at the scale it was initially suggested
here the town hall was the key phenomena where there wasn't a special interest group crafted a
proposition and the first thing I ever saw was the proposition to know anything about it and I
got to vote yes or no it was in the town hall we all got to talk about it and the proposition could
be crafted in real time through the conversation which is why there was that founding father
statement that voting is the death of democracy voting fundamentally is polarizing the population
in some kind of sublimated war but the and we'll do that as the last step but what we want to do
first is to say how does the thing that you care about that seems damaged by this proposition how
could that turn into a solution to make this proposition better where this proposition still
tends to the thing it's trying to tend to and tends to that better can we work on this together
in the inner town hall we could have that as the scale increased we lost the ability to do that
now as you mentioned the internet could change that the fact that we had representatives that
had to ride a horse from one town hall to the other one to see what the colony would do that
we stopped having this kind of developmental propositional development process when the town
hall ended the fact that we have not used the internet to recreate this is somewhere between
insane and aligned with class interests i would push back to say that the internet has those things
it just has a lot of other things i feel like the internet has places where that encouraged
synthesis of competing ideas and sense making which is what we're talking about is just that it's
also flooded with a bunch of other systems that perhaps are out competing it under current incentives
perhaps has to do with capitalism in the market is the linux is awesome right and wikipedia and
places where you have and they have problems but places where you have open source sharing of
information vetting of information towards collective building is that building something like
like how much has that affected our court systems or our policing systems or our military systems
or first of all i think a lot but not not enough i i think that's something i told you offline yesterday is
perhaps there's a whole another discussion but i i don't think we're quite quantifying the impact
on the world of the positive impact of wikipedia you said the policing the i mean i just i just
think the amount of empathy that like knowledge i think can't help but lead to empathy just knowing
okay just knowing okay i'll give you some pieces of information knowing how many people died in
various awards that already that delta when you have millions of people have that knowledge
it's like it's a little like slap in the face like oh like my boyfriend or girlfriend breaking
up with me is not such a big deal when millions of people were tortured you know like just a little
bit and when a lot of people know that because of wikipedia or the effect their second order
effect of wikipedia which is it's not that necessarily people read wikipedia it's like
youtubers who don't really know stuff that well will thoroughly read a wikipedia article and
create a compelling video describing that wikipedia article that then millions of people watch and
they understand that holy shit a lot of there was such first of all there was such a thing as world
war two and world war one okay like they can at least like learn about it they can learn about
that this was like recent they can learn about slavery they can learn about all kinds of injustices
in the world and that i think has a lot of effects to our to the way whether you're a police officer
a lawyer a judge in the jury or just a regular civilian citizen the way you approach the
every other communication you engage in even if the system of that communication is very much flawed
so i think there's a huge positive effect on wikipedia that's my case for wikipedia
so you should donate to wikipedia i mean i'm a huge fan but there's very few systems like it
which is sad to me so i think it's it would be a useful exercise for any listener of the show
to really try to run the dialectical synthesis process with regard to a topic like this and take
the um techno concern perspective with regard to uh information tech that folks like tristan harris
take and say what are all of the things that are getting worse and what and are any of them
following an exponential curve and how much worse how quickly could that be and then and do that
fully without mitigating it then take the techno-optimist perspective and see what things are getting
better in a way that Kurzweil or diamandis or someone might do and try to take that perspective
fully and say are some of those things exponential what what could that portend and then try to hold
all that at the same time and i think there are ways in which depending upon the metrics we're
looking at things are getting worse on exponential curves and better on exponential curves for
different metrics at the same time which which i hold is the destabilization of previous system
and either an emergence to a better system or collapse to a lower order are both possible
and so i want my optimism not to be about my assessment i want my assessment to be just as
fucking clear as it can be i want my optimism to be what inspires the solution process on that
clear assessment so i never i never want to apply optimism in the sense making right i
want to just try to be clear if anything i want to make sure that the challenges are really well
understood but that's in service of an optimism that there are good potentials even if i don't
know what they are that are worth seeking right there's kind of a there is a some sense of optimism
that's required to even try to innovate really hard problems but then i want to take my pessimism and
red team my own optimism to see is that solution not going to work does it have second order effects
and then not get not get upset by that because i then come back to how to make it better so
that just a relationship between optimism and pessimism and the dialectic of how they how they
can work so when i of course we can say that wikipedia is a pretty awesome example of a thing
thing we can look at the places where it has limits or has failed where um on a celebrity
topic or corporate interest topic you can pay wikipedia editors to edit more frequently and
various things like that but you can also see where there's a lot of information that was kind
of decentralized created that is good information that is more easily accessible to people than
everybody buying their own encyclopedia britannica or walking down to the library and that can be
updated in real time faster and i think you're very right that the business model is a big difference
because wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation it is a it's tending to the information
commons and it doesn't have an agenda other than tending to the information commons and i think
the two masters issue is a tricky one when i'm trying to optimize for very different kinds of
things um where i have to sacrifice one for the other and i can't find synergistic satisfies
which one and if i have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholder uh profit maximization and you
know what what does that end up creating i think the ad model that silicon valley took um i think
jaren lanie or i don't know if you've had him on the show but he has interesting assessment of
the nature of the ad model um silicon valley wanting to support capitalism and entrepreneurs to
make things but uh also the belief that information should be free and also the network dynamics where
the more people you got on you got increased value per user per capita as more people got on so you
didn't want to do anything to slow the rate of adoption um some places actually you know pay
pal paying people money to join the network because the uh value of the network would be
there'd be a metcalf like dynamic proportional to the square of the total number of users
so um the ad model made sense of how do we make it free but also be a business get everybody on
but not really thinking about what it would mean to and this is now the whole idea that if you
aren't paying for the product you are the product um if the if they have a fiduciary responsibility
to their shareholder maximize profit their customer is the advertiser the user who it's
being built for is to do behavioral mod for them for advertisers that's a whole different thing
than that same type of tech could have been if applied with a different business model or
different purpose um i think there's because facebook and google and other information and
communication platforms end up harvesting data about user behavior that allows them to model
who the people are in a way that gives them more sometimes specific information and behavioral
information than even a therapist or a doctor or a lawyer or a priest might have in a different
setting they basically are accessing privileged information there should be a fiduciary responsibility
and in normal fiduciary law if there's this principal agent thing if you are a uh principal
and i'm an agent on your behalf i don't have a game theoretic relationship with you right if
you're sharing something with me and i'm the priest or i'm the therapist i'm never going to use that
information to try to sell you a used car or whatever the thing is but facebook is gathering
massive amounts of privileged information and then using it to modify people's behavior for a behavior
that they didn't sign up for wanting the behavior but what the corporation did so i think this is
an example of the physical tech evolving in the context of the previous social tech where it's
being shaped in particular ways and here unlike wikipedia that evolved for the the information
commons this evolved for fulfilling particular agentic purpose most people when they're on
facebook think it's just a tool that they're using they don't realize it's an agent right it is a
corporation with a profit motive and um and as i'm interacting with it it has a goal for me different
than my goal for myself and i might want to be on for a short period of time its goal is maximize
time on site and so there's a rivalry that is take but where there should be a fiduciary contract
i think that's actually a huge deal and i think if we said could we apply facebook like technology
to develop people's citizenry capacity right to develop their personal health and well-being
in habits as well as their cognitive understanding the complexity with which they can process
the health of their relationships that would be amazing to start to explore and this is now
the thesis that we started to discuss before is every time there is a major step function in the
physical tech it absolutes the previous social tech and the new social tech has to emerge
what i would say is that when we look at the nation state level of the world today the
more top-down authoritarian nation states are as the exponential tech started to emerge the digital
technology started to emerge they were in a position for better long-term planning and
better coordination and so the authoritarian state started applying the exponential tech
intentionally to make more effective authoritarian states and that's everything from like an internet
of things surveillance system going into machine learning systems to the sesame credit system to
all those types of things and so they're upgrading their social tech using the exponential tech
otherwise within a nation state like the u.s but democratic open societies the
countries the states are not directing the technology in a way that makes a better open
society meaning better emergent order they're saying well the corporations are doing that and
the state is doing the relatively little thing it would do aligned with the previous corporate law
that no longer is relevant because there wasn't fiduciary responsibility for things like that
there wasn't antitrust because this creates functional monopolies because of network dynamics
right where youtube has more users than bimio and every other video player together amazon has a
bigger percentage of market share than all of the other markets together you get one big dog per
vertical because of network effect which is a kind of organic monopoly that the previous antitrust
law didn't even have a place that wasn't a thing anti monopoly was only something that emerged in
the space of government contracts so um so what we see is that the new exponential technology is
being directed by authoritarian nation states to make better authoritarian nation states and by
corporations to make more powerful corporations the powerful corporations when we think about the
scottish enlightenment when the idea of markets was being advanced the modern kind of ideas of
markets the biggest corporation was tiny compared to what the biggest corporation today is so the
asymmetry of it relative to people was tiny and the asymmetry now in terms of the total
technology it employs total amount of money total amount of information processing is so
many orders of magnitude and rather than there be demand for an authentic thing that creates a
basis for supply as supply started to get way more coordinated and powerful and the demand
wasn't coordinated because you don't have a labor union of all the customers working together
but you do have a coordination on the supply side supply started to recognize that it could
manufacture demand it could make people want shit that they didn't want before that maybe
wouldn't increase their happiness in a meaningful way might increase addiction addiction is a very
good way to manufacture demand and so as soon as manufactured demand started through this is the
cool thing and you have to have it for status or whatever it is the intelligence of the market
was breaking now it's no longer a collective intelligence system that is up regulating real
desire for things that are really meaningful you're able to hijack the lower angels of our
nature rather than the higher ones the addictive patterns drive those and have people want shit
that doesn't actually make them happier make the world better and so we really also have to
we have to update our theory of markets because a behavioral econ showed that Homo economicus
the rational actor is not really a thing but particularly at greater and greater scale can't
really be a thing voluntarism isn't a thing or if my corporate if my company doesn't want to
advertise on facebook i just will lose to the companies that do because that's where all the
fucking attention is and so then i can say it's voluntary but it's not really if there's a functional
monopoly same if i'm gonna sell on amazon or things like that so um what i would say is that
these corporations are becoming more powerful than nation states in some ways and they are also
debasing the integrity of the nation states the open societies so the democracies are getting
weaker as a result of exponential tech and the kind of new tech companies that are kind of a new
feudalism tech feudalism because it's not a democracy inside of a tech company or the supply
and demand relationship when you have manufactured demand and kind of monopoly type functions
and so we have basically a new feudalism controlling exponential tech and authoritarian
nation states controlling it and those attractors are both shitty and so i'm interested in the
application of exponential tech to making better social tech that makes emergent order possible
and where then that emergent order can bind and direct the exponential tech in fundamentally
healthy not x-risk oriented directions i think the relationship of social tech and physical
tech can make it i think we can actually use the physical tech to make better social tech but
it's not given that we do if we don't make better social tech then i think the physical
tech empowers really shitty social tech that is not a world that we want i don't know if it's a
road we want to go down but i tend to believe that the market will create exactly the thing
you're talking about which i feel like there's a lot of money to be made in creating a social tech
that creates a better citizen that creates a better human being
this uh the your description of facebook and so on which is a system that creates
addiction which manufacturers demand is not obviously inherently the consequence of the
markets like i feel like that's the first stage of us like baby deer trying to figure out how to
use the internet i i feel like there's much more money to be made with something that creates
compersion and love honestly i mean i i really from we can have this i can make the business
case for it i don't know i don't think we want to really have that discussion but don't do you
have some hope that that's the case and i guess if not then how do we fix the system of markets that
works so well for the united states for so long like i said every social tech worked for a while
like tribalism worked well for two or three hundred thousand years i think social tech has to keep
evolving the social technologies with which we organize and coordinate our behavior have to
keep evolving as our physical tech does um so i think the thing that we call markets of course
we can try to say oh even biology runs on markets and but the thing that we call markets the underlying
theory homo economicist demand driving supply that thing broke it broke with scale in particular
um and a few other things so it needs updated in a really fundamental way um i think there's
something even deeper than making money happening that in some ways will obsolete money making
i think capitalism is not about business
so if you think about business i'm gonna produce a good or a service that people want and bring it
to the market so that people get access to that good or service that's the world of business
but that's not capitalism capitalism is the management and allocation of capital which
financial services was a tiny percentage of the total market has become a huge
percentage of the total market it's a different creature so if i was in business and i was producing
a good or service and i was saving up enough money that i started to be able to invest that money and
gain interest or do things like that i could start realizing i'm making more money on my money than i'm
making on producing the goods and services so i stopped even paying attention to goods and services
and start paying attention to making money on money and how do i utilize capital to create more
capital and capital gives me more optionality because i can buy anything with it than a particular
good or service that only some people want um capitalism more capital ended up meaning more
control i could put more people under my employment i could buy larger pieces of land novel access to
resource mines and put more technology under my employment so it meant increased agency and also
increased control i think attentionalism is even more powerful so rather than enslave people
where the people kind of always want to get away and put in the least work they can
there's a way in which economic servitude was just more profitable than slavery right
have the people work even harder voluntarily because they want to get ahead and nobody has
to be there to whip them or control them or whatever this is a cynical take but a meaningful
take um so people so capital is a being a way to influence human behavior right and yet
where people still feel free in some meaningful way they they're not feeling like uh they're
going to be punished by the state if they don't do something it's like punished by the market
be a homelessness or something but the market is this invisible thing i can't put an agent on
so it feels like free and so if if you want to affect people's behavior and still have them feel
free capital ends up being a way to do that but i think affecting their attention is even deeper
because if i can affect their attention i can both affect what they want and what they believe
and what they feel and we statistically know this very clearly facebook has done studies that
based on changing the feed it can change beliefs emotional dispositions etc and so i think there's
a way that the the harvest and directing of attention is even a more powerful system than
capitalism it is effective in capitalism to generate capital but i think it also generates
influence beyond what capital can do and so do we want to have some groups utilizing that type
of tech to direct other people's attention if so um towards what towards what metrics of what a good
civilization and good human life would be what's the oversight process what is the
transparency i can i can i can answer all the things you're mentioning uh i i can build i
guarantee you if i am not such a lazy ass i'll be part of the many people doing this as transparency
and control i get to giving control to individual people okay so maybe the corporation has coordination
on its goals that all of its customers or users together don't have so there's some asymmetry
where it's uh asymmetry of its goals but maybe i could actually help all of the customers to
coordinate almost like a labor union or whatever by informing and educating them adequately about
the effects the externalities on them if this is not toxic waste going into the ocean of the
atmosphere it's their their minds their beings their families their relationships um such that
they will in group change their behavior and um i think the i one way of saying what you're saying
i think is that you think that you can rescue homo economicus from uh the the rational actor
that will pursue all the goods and services and choose the best one at the best price the kind
of rand von mises hayek that you can rescue that from dan arielli and behavioral econ that says
that's actually not how people make choices they make it based on status hacking largely
whether it's good for them or not in the long term and the large asymmetric corporation can run
propaganda and narrative warfare that hits people's status buttons and their limbic hijacks and
their lots of other things in ways that they can't even perceive that are happening um they're not
paying attention to that the site is employing psychologists and split testing and whatever
else so you're saying i think we can recover homo economicus and not just through a single
like mechanism technology there's there's the uh not to keep mentioning the guy but platforms like
georogan and so on that that make help make viral the ways that the education of negative
externalities can become viral in this world so interestingly i actually agree with you that
i got him that we four and a half hours in that we can that can do some good all right well see
what you're talking about is the application of tech here broadcast tech where you can speak to a
lot of people and that's not going to be strong enough because the different people need spoken
to differently which means it has to be different voices that get amplified to those audiences more
like facebook's tech but nonetheless we'll start with broadcast tech plants the first seed and then
the word of mouth is a powerful thing you need to do the first broadcast shotgun and then it like
lands a catapult of whatever i don't know what the right weapon is but then it just spreads the word
of mouth through all kinds of tech including facebook so let's come back to the fundamental
thing the fundamental thing is we want to kind of order at various scales from the conflicting
parts of ourselves actually having more harmony than they might have to family extended family
local all the way up to global we want emergent order where our choices
have more alignment right we want that to be emergent rather than imposed or rather than
we want fundamentally different things or make totally different sense of the world where
warfare of some kind becomes the only solution emergent order requires us in our choice making
requires us being able to have related sense making and related meaning making processes
can we apply digital technologies and exponential tech in general to try to increase the capacity
to do that where the technology called a town hall the social tech that we'd all get together
and talk obviously is very scale limited and it's also oriented to geography rather than
networks of aligned interest can we build new better versions of those types of things and
going back to the idea that a democracy or participatory governance depends upon comprehensive
education in the science of government which include being able to understand things like
asymmetric information warfare on the side of governments and how the people can organize
adequately can you utilize some of the technologies now to be able to support increased comprehensive
education of the people and maybe comprehensive informatness so both fixing the decay in both
education in the fourth estate that have happened so the people can start self organizing to then
influence the corporations the nation states to do different things and or build new ones
themselves yeah fundamentally that's the thing that has to happen we the exponential tech gives
us a novel problem landscape that the world never had the nuke gave us a novel problem landscape
and so that required this whole Bretton Woods world the exponential tech gives us novel problem
landscape our existing problem solving processes aren't doing a good job we have had more countries
get nukes we haven't a nuclear deep proliferation we haven't achieved any of the UN sustainable
development goals we haven't kept any of the new categories of tech for making arms races so our
global coordination is not adequate to the problem landscape so we need fundamentally better problem
solving processes a market or a state is a problem solving process we need better ones that can do
the speed and scale of the current issues right now speed is one of the other big things is that
by the time we regulated DDT out of existence or cigarettes not for people under 18 they'd
already killed so many people and we let the market do the thing but as Elon has made the
point that won't work for AI by the time we recognize afterwards that we have an auto
poetic AI that's a problem you won't be able to reverse it that there's a number of things that
when you're dealing with tech that is either self replicating and disintermediate humans to keep
going doesn't need humans to keep going or you have tech that just has exponentially fast effects
your regulation has to come early it can't come after the effects have happened the negative
effects have happened if because the negative effects could be too big too quickly so we
basically need new problem solving processes that do better at being able to internalize
externality solve the problems on the right time scale and the right geographic scale
and those new processes to not be imposed have to emerge from people wanting them
and being able to participate in their development which is what I would call kind of a new cultural
enlightenment or renaissance that has to happen where people start understanding the new power
that exponential tech offers the way that it is actually damaging current governance structures
that we care about and creating an extra-risk landscape but could also be redirected
towards more protopic purposes and then saying how do we rebuild new social institutions what are
adequate social institutions where we can do participatory governance at scale and time
and how can the people actually participate to build those things I the the solution that I
see working requires a process like that and the result maximizes love so again Elon would be right
that love is the answer let me take it back from the scale of societies to the scale that's far
far more important which is the scale of family you've written a blog post about your dad we have
various flavors of relationships with our fathers what have you learned about life when your dad
well people can read the blog post and see a lot of individual things that I learned that I really
appreciated if I was to kind of summarize at a high level I had a really incredible dad like
very very unusually a positive set of experiences he was committed we were homeschooled and he was
committed to work from home to be available and like prioritize fathering in a really deep way
and you know as a super gifted super loving very unique man he also had his unique issues that
were part of what crafted the unique brilliance and those things often go together and I say that
because I think I had had some unusual gifts and also some unusual difficulties and I think
it's useful for everybody to know their path probably has both of those but
if I was to say kind of at the essence of one of the things my dad taught me across a lot of
lessons was like a the intersection of self-empowerment ideas and practices that self-empower towards
collective good towards some virtuous purpose beyond the self and he both said that a million
different ways taught it in a million different ways when we were doing construction and he was
teaching me how to build a house we were putting the wires to the walls before the drywall went on
he made sure that the way that we put the wires through is beautiful like the that the height
of the holes was similar that we twisted the wires in a particular way that and it's like
and it's like no one's ever going to see it and he's like if a job's worth doing it's worth
doing well and excellence is its own reward and those types of ideas and if there was a really
shitty job to do he'd say see the job do the job stay out of the misery just don't indulge
any negativity do the things that need done and so there's like a there's an empowerment and a
nobility together um and yeah extraordinarily fortunate is there ways you think you could have
been a better son is there things you regret it's an interesting question let me first say
just as a bit of a criticism that uh what kind of man do you think you are not wearing a suit
and tie a real man should exactly uh i grew with your dad on that point you mentioned offline that
he suggested a real man should wear a suit and tie but outside of that is there ways you could
have been a better son maybe next time on your show i'll wear a suit and tie my dad would be happy
about that um please
i can answer the question later in life not early um i had just a huge amount of respect
and reverence for my dad when i was young so i was asking myself that question a lot so i
warned a lot of things i knew that i wasn't seeking to apply um
there was a phase when i went through my kind of individuation differentiation
where i had to make him excessively wrong about too many things um i don't think i had to but i did
and he had a lot of kind of non-standard model beliefs about things whether
early uh kind of ancient civilizations or ideas on evolutionary theory or alternate
models of physics and and um and they weren't irrational but they didn't all have the standard
of epistemic proof that i would need and i went through and some of more kind of spiritual
ideas as well i went through a phase in my early 20s where i kind of had that the attitude that
Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens has that can kind of be um like excessively certain and sanctimonious
applying their reductionist philosophy of science to everything and kind of brutally dismissive
i'm embarrassed by that phase um not to say anything about those men and their
path but for myself and so during that time i was more dismissive of my dad's epistemology
than i would have liked to have been i gotta correct that later apologize for it but that's
the first thought that came to mind you've written the following i've had the experience countless
times making love watching a sunset listening to music feeling the breeze that i would sign up for
this whole life and all of its pains just to experience this exact moment this is a kind
of worldless knowing it's the most important and real truth i know that experience itself
is infinitely meaningful and pain is temporary and seen clearly even the suffering is filled
with beauty i have experienced countless lives worth of moments worthy of life such an unreasonable
fortune a few words of gratitude from you beautifully written is there some beautiful moments now you
have uh experienced countless lives worth of those moments but there are some things that um
if you could uh in your darker moments you can go to to relive to remind yourself that the whole
ride is worthwhile maybe skip the making love part we don't know about that i mean i i feel
i feel unreasonably fortunate that it is a such a humongous list because i mean i feel
fortunate to have like had exposure to practices and philosophies in a way of seeing things it
makes me see things that way so i can take responsibility for seeing things in that way
and not taking for granted really wonderful things but i can't take credit for being exposed
to the philosophies that even gave me that possibility um you know it's not just with
my wife it's with every person who i really love when we're talking i look at their face i in the
context of a conversation feel overwhelmed by how lucky i am to get to know them and like
that there's never been someone like them in all of history and there never will be again and they
might be gone tomorrow i might be gone tomorrow and like i get this moment with them and when you
take in the uniqueness of that fully and the beauty of it it's overwhelmingly beautiful
and you know i remember the first time i did a big dose of mushrooms and i was looking at a tree
for a long time and i was just crying with overwhelming how beautiful the tree was and
it was a tree outside the front of my house that i'd walk by a million times and never looked at
like this and it wasn't the dose of mushrooms where i was hallucinating like where the tree was
purple like the tree still looked like if i had to describe it say it's green and it has leaves
looks like this but it's way fucking more beautiful like like capturing than it normally was and i'm
like why is it so beautiful if i would describe it the same way and i realized i had no thoughts
taking me anywhere else yeah like what it seemed like the mushrooms were doing was just actually
shutting the narrative off that would have me be distracted so i could really see the tree
and then i'm like fuck when i get off these mushrooms i'm gonna practice seeing the tree
because it's always that beautiful and i just miss it and so i practice being with it and
quieting the rest of the mind and then being like wow and and if it's not mushrooms like people
have peak experiences where they'll see life and how incredible it is it's always there
it's funny that i had this exact same experience and the on quite a lot of mushrooms just sitting
alone and looking at a tree and exactly as you described it appreciating the beauty undistorted
beauty of it and it's funny to me that here's two humans very different with very different journeys
where at some moment in time both looking at a tree like idiots for hours and just in awe and
happy to be alive and yeah and uh even just that moment alone is is worth living for but you did
say humans and we have a moment together as two humans and you mentioned shots well i have to ask
what uh what are we looking at when i went to go get a smoothie before coming here i got you a keto
smoothie that you didn't want because you're not just keto but fasting but i saw the thing with
you and your dad where you did uh shots together yeah and this place happened to have shots of
um ginger turmeric cayenne juice of some kind and so i with some himaly and i didn't necessarily
plan it for being on the show but i just brought it wow but we can we can do it that way i think
we should we shall uh we shall toast like heroes daniel it's a huge honor what do we toast to we
toast to this moment this this this unique moment that we get to share together i'm very grateful
to be here in this moment with you and uh yeah i'm grateful that you invited me here we met for
the first time and i will never be the same for the good and the bad but i am
that is really interesting that feels way healthier than the vodka my dad and i were drinking
so i feel like a better man already daniel this is one of the best conversations i've ever had
i can't wait to have many more likewise this is uh it's been an amazing experience thank you for
wasting all your time today i want to say in terms of what you're mentioning about
like the that you work in machine learning and the optimism that wants to look at the issues
but wants to look at how this increased technological power could be applied to solving them and that
even thinking about the broadcast of like can i help people understand the issues better and help
organize them like fundamentally you're you're oriented like wikipedia what i see to really try
to tend to the information commons without another agentic interest distorting it and for you to be
able to get guys like lee smolen and roger pennrose and like the the greatest thinkers of
that are alive and you know have them on the show and most people would never be exposed to them and
talk about it in a way that people can understand uh i think it's an incredible service i think
you're doing great work so i was really happy to hear from you thank you daniel thanks for
listening to this conversation with daniel schmacktenberger and thank you to ground news net
suite for sigmatic magic spoon and better help check them out in the description to support this
podcast and now let me leave you with some words from albert einstein i know not with what weapons
world war three will be fought but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones
thank you for listening and hope to see you next time