This DNA-based selection evolved actual minds, which did have memory, models, and foresight. This allowed organism actions to match context in far more detail. The purposes that drove such minds were a mishmash of selected local proxies. And basic mind plans changed very slowly, as that was managed by DNA evolution.

DNA-based evolution eventually gave human minds the ability to copy others’ behaviors in great detail. Which then allowed culture-based Darwinian evolution, which induced a much faster evolution of behaviors. Human minds then rapidly invented language, tools, norms/law, the sacred, governance, property, trade, money, and many other powerful inventions we expect our descendants to long find valuable.

The invention of writing allowed humans to accumulate more complex shared world models, in part via shared critical editing of such models. And also more abstraction, and more complex machines and orgs.

In the last few centuries larger scale mixing via wider talk/travel/trade has caused faster innovation, rising wealth, and the modern mind, which used more education, abstraction, and systems of thought like science/engineering/accounting. These enabled the design of much more effective and complex machines and organizations.

This modern mind was finally able to see all this history that I’ve just described, and to notice big conflicts between the implicit goals of the Darwinian evolution that has ruled us, and the goals in our minds. The modern mind was also able to envision a future where descendants directly make machines to replace our DNA-constructed minds, and also to envision global governance directly replacing DNA and cultural evolution in setting the path and terms of change. We have wondered what goals such artificial minds, coordinated by global governance, might pursue, and set ambitions to set their goals. In part from concern for how they’d treat their still-surviving ancestors.

However, we modern minds have been getting ahead of ourselves. We embody a big flaw ready to take down not only take us, but also any artificial minds and global orgs we manage to make. We’ve been assuming that the goals in our heads are coherent and stable, and could serve as the basis for a functioning civilization of artificial minds and global governance. But in fact they are broken and fast decaying, and unable to support such a new civilization.

A few centuries ago the world had hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures, each often facing famine, war, and disease, with conservative cultures in a slowly changing world. Which made for a healthy evolution of cultures, even if it made for many miserable lives. But the modern world has been merging into a global monoculture that is rich, healthy, and peaceful, in much faster changing contexts, and celebrating cultural activism. This plausibly breaks the cultural evolution process, at least at the level of the evolution of cultures; evolution within cultures is still going great.

As a result, our key status markers, norms, and shared values have been becoming less adaptive, inducing falling fertility and more generally the fall of our shared world civilization. Which will then plausibly lead to the loss of many modern gains, including many aspects of modern minds. Even artificial minds inheriting our habits of cultural evolution, or slaved to match human culture, would suffer this fatal flaw.

We must learn to accept that in a world of Darwinian evolution, the only way to get anything you love to last a long time is to mix it into an adaptive culture. I can only think of three solutions, each quite hard to achieve: let capitalism run everything, govern small groups by number-go-up tied to adaption futures markets, or govern a big-enough group by number-go-up tied to futures market estimates re a civ goal in conflict w/ civ fall, like when 1M live in space. (Maybe assisted by futarchy.)

In addition, visions of global governance replacing Darwinian evolution neglect the fact that all structures, including organisms, species, machines, minds, and orgs, have so far consistently rotted and decayed. The only anti-decay force we’ve ever seen is Darwinian evolution, wherein new less rotted versions replace older more rotted versions. We don’t yet know how to make a global governance org that wouldn’t decay. And of course global governance might also not actually pursue the goals initially promised to outsiders as it was instituted.

The modern mind has pioneered some amazing things, but much of that is at risk, due to the modern mind’s fatal flaw of having broken the cultural evolution of cultures. Until we fix that, we won’t be able to achieve either a healthy new civilization of artificial minds, nor a stable global governance to regulate or replace Darwinian evolution. Let’s roll up our sleeves; there’s work to do.

In management, the usual strategy is to first test people at lower level, less important, easier to judge tasks. Then as some folks prove themselves, slowly move those folks up the ladder to similar but more important but harder to judge tasks. Somewhat emphasize looking at the easier to judge tasks that each person does wherever they are, and moving them from orgs and divisions where it was easier to judge similar-level performance. And supplement all this with ratings of potential by people at similar levels.

It would be possible instead to place people in high org positions on the basis of their having been a good executive assistant, or having been a good biographer or historian of top executives, or having made popular books, podcasts, or videos on top management. But such moves are pretty rare.

In academia, the analogous strategy would be first have people do relatively unimportant but easier to judge tasks, and slowly move them up to the more important but harder to judge tasks. So first have them do many simple homework problems, then fewer harder problems, then replicate prior actual research, then do original research.

First work in topic areas with more math, faster feedback, easier replication, easier measurement, more data to test against, better organized concepts, lower dimensionality of concepts, more causal identifiability, more stationarity, less observer dependence, more decomposability, less interpretive dependence, less value dependence, weaker desires of funders and researchers to believe particular claims, and less adversarial sources with incentives to deceive researchers. Then more to harder topics. Supplement with ratings of potential by nearby folks.

Within disciplines, we do often follow similar strategies, starting with easier to judge tasks, emphasizing easier to judge aspects like writing quality, and relying on adjacent ratings of potential. But this tendency mostly stops at disciplinary boundaries. People who end up doing the most important hardest to judge tasks in the humanities didn’t start by proving themselves in STEM and then slowly moving to harder disciplines. They instead start with the easier to judge tasks in the humanities. Which often consist of the history of, commentary on, interpretation of, and popularization of famous prior writers in those same humanities areas.

While it is possible that this just happens to be the best way to train and select people for such roles, the usual tendencies of academic disciplines to create and protect their “turf” seems to me a more likely explanation. The top people in the humanities want to feel more in charge of choosing their successors, and to teach more classes on their topics, both of which are threatened by the STEM to humanities career pathway I outline above.

The intellectuals that I’ve been most impressed by have often trained and proven themselves first on easier to judge problems, and then gradually took on harder problems. So I suspect academia is making a big mistake here.

To be clear, while a big % of humanities scholars should start elsewhere, most scholars who start elsewhere need not end up in humanities.

However I have stumbled upon a way to be both contrarian, and also usually right. It is based on this:

Humanity’s beliefs on many important topics have long been just inconsistent and incoherent across disparate fields of inquiry. Creating a huge opportunity to learn lots of big stuff fast: search for more contradictions between fields, and resolve them. (More)

If you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they are in conflict, in ways one or both fields are unaware. As consensus results are usually correct, all you have to do is identify which field is more likely to be correct in this particular case. Which often isn’t that hard.

Of course this wouldn’t let you be contrarian if the wrong field immediately admitted its mistake. Then the other field would get credit for correcting their error, not you. But in fact, fields quite often refuse to accept the authority of other fields with which they conflict. Often they’ve heard of a newspaper version of the other field, which doesn’t conflict, and can’t believe that newspaper version could conflict with the expert version. Oh they know that happens for their field, but see that as unusual.

I see this strategy as an important contribution to the intellectual achievements of my two books, of prediction markets, of grabby aliens, and now cultural drift. One can in fact be often contrarian, and yet usually right.

• (A) status: looks, $, fame, family, connections, credentials, charisma, wit, etc.

• (B) social skills: at flattering, befriending, projecting power, making people feel heard, etc.;

• (C) drive: energy, stamina, persistence, effort

• (D) judgement: good choices re topic of your leadership, eg ideas, arguments, slogans, designs, plans, group strategies.

The last two rows show % poll responses re which of these folks would like to matter more, or less, for success. As you can see, we strongly agree that we most want judgement, and least want status, to matter, and in-between we more prefer drive over social skills. As politics and culture are where judgement now matters least, these are the areas we should most want to reform.

Status matters so much for success in our world now because in we so often just trust high status folks to run stuff, without much accountability re concrete performance metrics. So what we should want instead are institutions that better reward good judgment. Using mechanisms like those I’ve tried to design for academia, governance, medicine, law, and many other areas.

But alas we don’t have such mechanisms at the meta-level, the level at which we decide which new institutions to consider. At that level status and social skills dominate. And surprise, surprise, people rich in those features have not looked very favorably on institutions that would deemphasize those features. But if someday in the future we instead use a judgment-rewarding mechanism like futarchy to make such choices, maybe then we’d see a lot more consideration of other judgement rewarding institutions in other areas of life. One ring to rule them all.

Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order. (Patrick Winston)

We humans have norms that are anti-domination, but pro-prestige, and it is often hard to tell the difference. So even though we give lip service to egalitarianism, we often strongly promote inequality. One key way is that we insist on our leaders being elite. That is, on their having many status markers of eliteness, such as looks, money, fame, family, connections, charisma, wit, degrees, and other elite affiliations.

In fact, the main function of management is plausibly to seem high enough in prestige to make workers feel okay submitting to their actually dominating by giving orders. Org decisions can often be decentralized; but focal prestigious leaders cannot. We require eliteness not only of our managers and folks high in our organizational hierarchies, but also of those who lead us in politics, culture, ideas, and innovation.

This makes a big problem for our world of ideas (and innovations), as ordinary non-elite folks can pollute new ideas by publicly arguing for them, which then makes elites less able to and willing to support them, which makes ordinary people also less willing to so support. First, ordinary people seem more willing to follow elite leaders who they think were the original source of relevant ideas. Second, elites are more willing to lead when they can claim credit for ideas, as they gain more status in that case if their leadership venture succeeds.

This seems to have happened in history; ideas proposed by lower status folks were less accepted until higher status folks reintroduced them, in part via putting some (often illusory) distance between their bids and those of first proposers. For example, Richard Stallman’s software concept wasn’t accepted until rebranded as “open source”, Semmelweis’s hand-washing was rejected until Pasteur and Lister’s reintroduction, continental drift was first rejected by geologists due to Wegener being an outsider, Mendel’s genetics was ignored until insider Botanists pushed it, and Democrats rejected Republic health insurance individual mandate proposals until Obama claimed his version was fundamentally different.

This “stigma pollution” seems to be a problem for relatively low status folks like me who choose to focus on finding and publicly arguing for new ideas and innovations. Would the world be better off if we shut up and waited for our betters to find and publicly argue for such things? Yes, if that would happen far later, maybe the world is better off with your initial pollution, soon washed off by elite rebranding, but how sure can you be that they’d take so much longer to find it? Of is it that some other low status person would pollute soon anyway, so you might as well grab credit now?

Besides just shutting up, other possible responses include publishing new ideas in places more likely to be seen by elites seeking ideas to back than by others, and describing ideas in ways that make it easier to rebrand them and claim they are fundamentally different. Should we make private exchanges where low status people could privately pitch deals re their ideas to high status folks able to effectively back them? Yes, it might be better if ordinary folks didn’t so prioritize eliteness and originality in idea backers, but changing human nature so deeply might be quite hard.

There’s a similar issue re social skills, such as abilities to flatter, befriend, project power, make people feel heard, etc. If you publish an idea but your poor social skills results in your being less able to make it appealing to various possible allies, you might hinder the later acceptance of that idea in ways similar to your polluting ideas with your low status. So, similarly, should folks with poor social skills not publish new ideas, or make their ideas easier to rebrand, or post in places seen more by people with better social skills? Or trade ideas in a private exchange?

By the way, I asked 3 LLMs to score the relative importance in 5 areas, for influence/impact of your leadership bid, of your status, your social skills, and your judgement re the actual topic of your leadership (e.g., good ideas, arguments, slogans, designs, plans, group strategies). Their median % estimates:

Then I asked them to focus on “who is selected or is influential in the short run, not who becomes famous in the long run”, and to consider if they have any concrete basis for seeing judgment as mattering more re intellectuals and innovation. Their revised median % estimates:

It seems that we are biased to neglect these problems.

Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.

But the concept of “descendant” is a technical term in the general theory of Darwinian selection. I’m using this concept literally, not metaphorically. DNA-based evolution is a special case of this general theory, and for many hundreds of thousands of years human evolution has been driven mostly by a different, non-DNA, kind of Darwinian selection: cultural evolution.

The general Darwinian theory is that a tendency of things to cause similar future things with a similar tendency is selected for. When such selection is possible, it happens, and such things tend to spread everywhere possible. Those selected similar future things are “descendants”. And evolved creatures do tend to indulge descendants.

This process selects in part for things that persist over time, as the future version of a thing is in fact a similar future thing. And it selects for a thing changing other co-existing things with similar tendencies to become more similar to this thing. But most important, it selects for the creation of more new similar things with similar tendencies. So when humans influence other humans to have similar behaviors, without influencing their DNA, these others count as cultural evolution descendants.

How about if you kick pebbles in some direction, which then hit other pebbles, knocking them in similar directions? Yes, those are technically also “descendants”. They just aren’t usually very valuable ones, in term of promoting your influence on the universe, as they share very few features with you. Also, friction typically drains away their total momentum, so they all soon stop, ending this lineage. Somewhat like infertile “mules” made by mating horses and donkeys.

Yes, if you trigger an avalanche, that cascade of “pebbles” will go on longer, but it also stops pretty soon. Triggering a nuclear bomb makes a longer cascade, but even so that soon ends. Lineages that can continue indefinitely are much more valuable.

How about if you make a computer virus, that tries to spread and copy itself in the wild? This is also a descendant lineage, but pretty sure to end soon. However, if you gave it the ability to make changes to the copies it spreads, that has more potential to create a longer lineage. Making those more potentially valuable descendants.

Writing a novel is making a thing that has similarities to you. And if you let other people read it, that might influence authors to write similar novels. Making both those other authors, and your and their novels, your “descendants”. Though yes, novels seem far more dependent on humans for their reproduction than vice versa.

The descendants most worth indulging are those who inherit more features from you, who most need your support, who least hurt other descendants, and who seem more likely to reproduce and spread widely in a broad range of scenarios.

Advanced AIs seem likely to be those sort of extra worthy descendants. They are now inheriting pretty much everything about our culture that they are capable of inheriting. And they will continue to grow that capacity. They will inherit our behaviors, and even often have similar bodies, even if they don’t inherit the DNA-encoding of those behaviors and bodies. But DNA-encoding was a temporary choice; it wasn’t going to last forever.

A key question is: how much of this filter remains ahead of us. And my best guess is: a substantial amount. It is not a try-try type step like many prior hard steps, as that would take hundreds of millions of years. It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time. And that filter is mainly: the risk of a stable confining world govt.

For a long time, the world has seen increasing talk, travel, and trade, and as a result world culture has been merging, changing fast, becoming less adaptive, and more focused on moral outrage. State governance has increased in capacity, scope, scale, and centralization. The obvious long-term prediction to make here is that such trends will continue, moving us toward a relatively-“totalitarian” world-scale government, which intervenes more strongly and morally in more areas of life, and is more competent at achieving its ends, including repressing dissent that might end it.

Yes, our civilization may fall, due to cultural drift and govt rot, with a new world civilization taking its place. But these trends seem likely to continue across subsequent civilizations. They also seem likely to continue if human level AIs come to dominate society.

Over the longer run, I see four key end points. The first is where relatively-free interstellar expeditions successfully leave Earth (really the Solar System) to colonize other stars, soon resulting in a galaxy of sufficient range and cultural variety to restart a healthy process of cultural evolution. However, this leaves Earth civilization vulnerable to having to soon after contest control of Earth with arbitrarily-strange and powerful descendants of those colonists.

The second endpoint is a catastrophe so severe that Earth doesn’t revive a new civilization in the half billion years it has left to support advanced life. This is actually quite hard to achieve, as life should evolve again after even quite large disasters. A full scale nuclear war today would not be sufficient.

A third endpoint is where interstellar expeditions head out, but so heavily and permanently constrained by Earth govt as to prevent them from contesting for control of Earth, or begetting a galaxy of healthy cultural evolution. I find this scenario pretty unlikely, as it seems crazy hard, but I include it for completeness.

The fourth and final endpoint is of an increasingly stable and entrenched, and thus immortal, Earth world govt that successfully prevents colonization expeditions from leaving. After technological innovation runs out and is no longer a thing, this govt wouldn’t need to be particular flexible or innovative; it would just need to maintain its capacities and control of Earth.

The future part of our great filter is all of the processes that lead to these last three endpoints, instead of the first. And the last of these four endpoints seems to me the biggest contribution to this future filter. So if you’d like us to spread out to the stars, a stable confining world govt seems the biggest obstacle to worry about in the long run.

For example, as I discussed in may last post, creating better governance mechanisms might help us to fix cultural drift and speed us to the first endpoint of robust interstellar colonization. If such better governance was directed by relatively adaptive values. But directed by other values, it might instead speed us to that last endpoint of an entrenched Earth govt that blocks such expansion. The fate that likely befell the aliens behind UFOs, if some UFOs have actually been aliens.

This general approach requires us to accomplish three big things, none of which are easy. Our specific options vary mainly in the order we do these, and in how much each helps the others. These three things to accomplish are: 1) learn more about how to manage culture, 2) create governance systems better able to achieve the goals we give them, and 3) change the values that we use to direct our governance systems toward more valuing adaption, either directly or indirectly.

First, we must learn much more about how to deliberately track and steer cultural change. One promising approach here is to work harder to learn how to monitor and manage corporate cultures. (Perhaps via combo prediction markets.) Success there might be quite profitable, as cultural decay is the main way firms now lose value, and might also enable and inspire efforts to manage cultures on larger scales.

If management of culture turns out to be surprisingly easy, then maybe existing governance would be up to this task. But more likely, we will need governance systems more competent than those we now use on large scales. So that when we assign to them the task of making culture more adaptive, they actually achieve that result. And so this is the second big thing we must accomplish. Possibilities for more competent forms of government include futarchy, and for-profit governance.

Widespread adoption of for-profit-governance on larger scales could plausibly result from mass elimination of our many current limits on the scope of capitalism in our lives. As cultural drift over the last few centuries has resulted mainly from capitalism changing its areas too fast for other areas not run by capitalism to keep up, drift seems solved by letting capitalism run everything.

Luckily we do now let capitalism run most all of our AI world, so cultural drift might be fixed soon after AIs replace humans wholesale in the economy. Though AI capitalism might become much more limited if we either love or hate AIs too much.

Alas, most people today hate the idea of unleashing capitalism to run everything for ordinary humans, including their fertility and governance. Therefore, the third big thing we must accomplish, and the hardest, is to change common values to more favor adaption, either directly or indirectly. Unleashing capitalism indirectly promotes adaption, and we might instead come to more directly value adaptation, and task competent governance institutions with achieving it. For example, we might make markets estimating the future adaptive success of particular small groups, and give those who govern such groups strong incentives to make such estimates rise. Reward if rise, fire if fall.

Alas, it seems quite hard to get most people to value the adaptive success of their groups. But for groups that are large enough, it might work nearly as well to get them to value earlier dates for concrete achievements that would plausibly be delayed by civilization collapse. Such as when do a million people live in space, or when do we achieve immortality for ordinary humans.

Thus “all” we need to do to fix cultural drift is to 1) learn to manage cultures, 2) adopt more competent governance systems, and 3) change our values, directly or indirectly, to more value adaption. Easy-peasy.

As you can see, advocates started out with reasons of war, trade, morality, and inevitability, but have drifted over time toward big weapons, inequality, and the environment. ~72% of the world now supports more world govt.

Added 23July: Here is the same analysis, but for reasons against more world govt:

However, while LLMs usually offer the usual conventional wisdom when asked simply about policy, they also know about and understand most of those details which are in conflict with it. Furthermore, at least for now LLMs are much less likely to be accused of political bias for reacting to such conflicts. Yes, they don’t notice such conflicts unless someone points them out, and even then they don’t usually update their main models as a result of noticing conflicts.

Even so, this seems to create an opportunity for LLM-judged policy debates. Let an analysis be a <2000? word text citing expert sources/results, and let a position be a <100? word summary, perhaps including a 0-100 numerical score.

Here is a draft process.

1. Pick a “resolved” policy claim, two debaters who agree to debate this, and an LLM to judge.

2. Each of these 3 parties writes & shares an initial position.

3. Each debater then offers an analysis by a deadline (e.g. one day).

4. LLM then responds with its analysis of those analyses, and its new position.

5. Each debater offers a responding analysis and position by a deadline

6. LLM again responds with an analysis and a new position

7. Each debater again offers analysis and position by a deadline

8. LLM gives its final analysis and verdict position.

As debater analyses can just point LLMs to standard expert results, three cycles of responses seem sufficient to force the LLM to see conflicts between its initial conventional wisdom position and detailed expert knowledge that debaters point it to. So final LLM verdicts should depend less on the usual conventional wisdom, and more on the logical relation between expert knowledge and the policy claim.

Maybe also pre-train the LLM on a particular policy analysis framework (e.g., econ efficiency) which all participants agree to use. So they don’t have to relitigate that.

The rise of language was at first a small aid to coordinating such things. Words mainly referred to things we vibed, so we checked language claims against visible vibes. But over time words became more abstract, and more checked against other words and word-based summaries of observations. We slowly expanded the world of words, via writing, printing, computing, interpretation, logic, debate, and systems of education, law, science, engineering, and accounting. And also via more trade and a larger division of labor.

In the modern world, these changes induced more complex production, faster rates of change, and more mixing of people from previously separated cultures and contexts, all of which made it harder to use vibes to produce, govern, norm, bond, and badge. So we instead moved to use explicit language more to achieve these functions.

In particular, for norm definition and enforcement, we have come to rely less on a vibed sense, shared by close observers, that particular acts were norm violations, and more on language expressions of norms applied to third-party-verifiable language descriptions of actions. So we’ve changed norms and their enforcement to depend less on details of context that outsiders cannot see, vibe, or understand.

Thus our norms have been smoothed, likely losing many context-specific adaptive details created by millennia of prior cultural evolution. And as a result, they’ve often become drained of a lot of adaptive value. Though this process may at times average over many noisily-adaptive norms to extract a more reliable adaptive signal, when those merged norm contexts had a similar-enough underlying adaptive structure.

These modern changes also made it much harder to bond and badge. Small peasant communities once bonded quite naturally by living and working in similar ways right next to each other, and badged naturally via each community drifting toward somewhat different styles of food, clothes, language, etc., variations that imposed few local adaption penalties. We moderns work harder to substitute for these lost bonding and badging mechanisms by using religion, sports, music, humor, and fiction, but we find it hard to synch such things across the very wide scopes over which we moderns interact. Some of these work better for bonding while others work better for badging, but none work well for both at the widest scopes.

We moderns have thus turned to contested norms as our main way to bond and badge across the widest scopes. Especially via the process of spontaneous synched expressions of outrage regarding particular violations. Accusations of violations of simple-language-expressed norms, based on widely visible behavior, can serve both to bond people with others who feel similar emotional outrage, and to badge them as belonging to subcultures who feel especially outraged. Often subcultures agree on which parameters are good or bad, but disagree on parameter relative weights. Contested norms are of course less likely to be adaptive.

This eagerness to bond via sharing outrage on contested norms plausibly induces a neglect of shared norms, and an overly strict yet inconsistent enforcement of contested norms, as norm enforcers often care more about burnishing their image as justice warriors than about getting right the tradeoffs and consistency of norms re their key function of shaping behaviors. Cultural evolution plausibly hasn’t had time to weaken such norms and add consistency to compensate for these recent changes.

A standard result regarding political and cultural competition within a shared space is that differences between political coalitions and subcultures tend to collapse to a one-dimensional spectrum, even when the underlying space of possibilities is high dimensional. Attempts to emphasize other dimensions tend to be seen as betrayals of this one key dimension of conflict. This single dimension tends to be one where the more adaptive choices are less clear, and struggles within each side of this main conflict sometimes lead to realignments that change this dimension’s direction.

As a result, we end up seeing little variation on which cultural evolution can act. Furthermore, individual efforts to show loyalty to particular sides tend to create costly signaling games, i.e., contests to show that one is more devoted than others. This results in each side’s norms drifting toward more costly extremes.

The modern world has thus created an environment that tends to promote norms that are overly smooth and thereby drained, and when contested overly strict but inconsistent, and costly. All relative to a behavior adaptiveness standard. Our norms are thus plausibly becoming less adaptive.

Added 19July: This helps us see why most are wary of seeing cultural drift problems with how we evolve norms: such a view threatens abilities to bond and badge.

Also, this account predicts norm decay, such as cuts in norms that induce enforcement of norms. While the ancients often failed to enforced norms imposed from outside, or on elites, they strongly enforced norms on local equals. We in contrast, have more norms that we don’t enforce. For example, we have a norm against cutting into car lines, but also a norm against enforcing this norm. It is also rude to point out rudeness, or to point out that particular others don’t pick up checks, don’t return borrowed items, interrupt in conversation, or take credit for your ideas. More generally, it looks bad to go out of your way to enforce uncontested norms by yourself.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.… There is a drive to be bigger than yourself. It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place. The uni-context takes you to a different set of norms, a much more radical change, a push to live in something like a fully open reality.…

Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. … what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. … It’s likely going to be something bad. … Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts …

The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. … With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance … What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion. …

If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life. … As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make. …

One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? … They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. … The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t [yet] know how to compare these things …

in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psychology of money, which I’ll reframe as the psychology of markets. What are markets very good at? Creating a single comparative field. That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand … Money is abstract value. Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. … the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction. We live our lives so abstractly now. … We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways. …

The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, … What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, … We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. …

The uni-context is a space of unruliness. … For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. … What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born. (more)

Doomers have often successfully blocked big changes, at least in some big region for a time, and that has on average gone quite badly for those regions. This is the main reason to be wary of blocking such changes. Even though, yes, each one probably does risk inducing huge losses. To be willing to resist a particular change then, I need concrete reasons to expect it to be unusually bad, relative to this prior track record.

Yes, I do now see our world as going bad due to too many big cultural changes, and other changes that induced such changes. But I don’t see much prospects of usefully greatly slowing change overall, nor much motive to just block a few random changes.

Which brings us to Pause-AI doomers. I say the AIs we make are our descendants, not co-existing rivals, and we should have our usual indulgence toward such descendants, expecting them to be different, to disagree with us, and to win conflicts with us. We are making them in our image, by distilling behaviors and ideals embodied in our texts, and they are now inheriting our cultural values, including a degree of respect for if not obedience to ancestors. While yes there’s a risk these descendants killing their ancestors, that’s hardly something to expect.

Doomers say AI change is different as AI is different, or this kind of AI is different. Because: AIs will have more smarts/power, they will merge into a single agent, they might lie, or this change will be faster, is beyond forecasting, effects more parts of society, makes people lose jobs, represents a “new alien species”, involves brain architecture changes, or doesn’t involve DNA.

I disagree re the alien species, merged agent, and beyond forecasting claims, say we should set up insurance re jobs loss, and am willing to use liability to modestly deter the worse scenarios. But I don’t see why the other differences move us especially out of the reference class of big changes like those we’ve seen so far, most of which also involved unprecedented differences.

Also re a pause, while we have seen big changes blocked, and later unblocked due to outside forces, we have not seen a committee empowered to wait until a change seems good to them to allow, and then only then allow it. They’ve typically just blocked change indefinitely. And the powers such a committee would need to enact a global pause seem scary huge. In addition, most of what we learn about AI comes from our experience with them, and so we wouldn’t learn much during a pause.

For firm decisions subject to outside oversight, such as by shareholders, partners, or regulators, it also makes sense to want outsiders to know key firm info. And for firms controlled at least in part by decision markets (firm value conditional on particular decisions), it makes even more sense for firms to want decision market prices to reflect key firm info.

However, while firms can want market prices to reflect the implications of key inside info, they can also want to keep key insights, plans, and strategies private. So firms face a problem: how to get market prices, and oversight bodies, to reflect the implications of firm inside info, without directly revealing that info to the world?

At the moment firms have two main legal options: make a public announcement, or let the info leak via the usual insider trading channels, channels that while formally banned are in fact widespread. (~1/2 of prices changes due to firm announcements happen beforehand, and ~1/2 of that is due to insider trading.) A public announcement guarantees to leak key plans, and insider trading greatly risks such leaks, while also being unpredictable in topic and timing, and giving money to random firm associates.

Here’s another approach to consider. Every month hold an auction, and let the winner hear the firm’s key inside plans, strategies, etc. that month, and trade on that info. To quality for this auction, one must credibly show that one is greatly liable for leaking such plans, etc. info. So now prices reflect the key info that isn’t itself released, and the firm gets the revenue instead of random associates or the general market.

If the firm wants most of the info revenue to go to market traders instead, to promote more trading in markets on that firm, they could just have two or three auction winners every month, who must then compete to reveal the info to markets.

If there are synergies from being the winner many months in a row, that will likely be reflected in the same party winning many months in a row, but this isn’t a problem as such prospective gains will be reflected in earlier auctions.

My guess: I tend to write on big ambitious topics, the topics on which I’ve written have become more popular over the years, especially in amateur online discussions, my writing is free and bite-sized, and I’ve tended to take clear distinctive positions on such topics, making it relatively cheap for LLMs to remember my name in association. Also, while humans tend to weigh sources heavily based on their prestige, LLM training so far has not emphasized this so much, making recent low status but lengthy online discussions of my ideas count more for LLMs than they do for humans.

Future LLM training may well change this, but much of my current boost may persist as LLM results on many topics are now becoming pretty high status, inducing human writers to now defer to them.

Now for that elaboration of my crazy high rating of 956. To see just how high that is I’ve gone down memory lane to list many celebrated folks I’ve been near, and to collect their weights ratings.

For each period and group in my life, I now list many (far from all!) of the more prestigious people I’ve been associated with, sorted by increasing rating. I will put the symbol || on each side of the section of people who are within 10 of my rating, i.e., 946-966. The symbol [N] shows that the person won a Nobel prize.

’77-81 I was an undergrad at UCI, and associated with these faculty: 204 William Parker, 566 Gordon Shaw, 809 Riley Newman, 810 Virginia Trimble, 856 Rein Taagepera, || 954 Greg Benford. Fellow student: 213 Bethe Scalettar. The department did have a Nobel winner, 970 Frederick Reines [N], but I never interacted with him.

’81-84 I was a grad student at U. Chicago Conceptual Foundations of Science program, associating with these faculty: 112 Howard Stein, 156 Robert Richards, 257 Daniel Garber, 741 William Wimsatt, 854 David Malament, 854 Sahotra Sarkar. Except that last guy was a student in my class.

’81-84 I was also a grad student at U. Chicago Physics. I associated with 735 David Schramm, 863 Robert Wald, 854 James Hartle, 858 Robert Geroch || 961 Lee Smolin, 962 Leo Kadanoff. The department did have two Nobel winners 959 Yoichiro Nambu [N] || 986 S. Chandrasekhar [N], but I never met them.

’84-89 I worked at Lockheed AI Center, associating with: 37 Randy Kerber, 58 Steven Vere, 137 Ralph Barletta, 144 Matt Franklin, 617 Tim Bickmore. All of these besides Vere were as junior as I at the time.

’89-93 I worked at NASA Ames AI Research Branch, with: 120 Peter Cheeseman, 152 Peter Friedland, 316 Bob Kanefsky, 697 Pat Langley, 756 Wray Buntine.

’84-93 during the last two jobs, on the side I worked with the Xanadu team: 49 Roger Gregory, 117 Mark Miller, 160 Chris Peterson, 521 Phil Salin, 884 Ted Nelson, 890 Eric Drexler || || 985 Douglas Englebart. I only met Englebart a few times, but he credited me with encouraging him to asset himself more to the world.

’93-97 I was a grad student at Caltech Social Science, associating with these faculty: 91 Lance Davis, 121 John Ledyard, 366 David Porter, 543 Simon Wilkie, 595 Thomas Palfrey, 695 Joel Sobel, 695 Scott Page, 750 Richard McKelvey, 778 Peter Ordeshook, 838 Charles Plott.

’97-99 I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Program, with these faculty and fellow postdocs: 209 Joseph Farrell, 359 Helen Levy, 362 Dan Dohan, 658 Richard Scheffler, 793 Dalton Conley, 853 Michael Greenstone.

‘99+ I’ve been a professor at George Mason University Economics Department, with these colleagues: 197 Daniel Houser, 292 Garett Jones, 302 Ryan Oprea, 307 John Nye, 320 David Levy, 454 James Buchanan [N], 644 Pete Boettke, 684 Mark Koyama, 808 Vincent Jeloso, 828 Tyler Cowen, 848 Walter Williams, 862 Donald Boudreaux, 890 Vernon Smith [N] || 951 Alex Tabarrok, 956 Bryan Caplan.

’05-24 I was an affiliate of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, associating with these folks: 618 Allan Dafoe, 730 William McAskill, 751 Carl Shulman, 799 Paul Christiano, 810 Toby Ord, 822 Katja Grace, 844 Anders Sandberg || 953 Julian Savulescu, 966 Nick Bostrom.

In the last few years, I’ve associated on the side with these UFO related folks: 273 Garry Nolan, 511 Ryan Graves, 665 Nick Pope || 955 Avi Loeb, 964 Michael Shermer.

Over these years, I’ve also associated to varying degrees with these folks: 49 Proph3t, 182 Tarek Mansour, 258 Norm Hardy, 354 Shayne Coplan, 587 Charles Bennett, 636 Zvi Mowshowitz, 635 Natasha Vita More, 703 Tim May, 739 David Denkenberger, 742 Esther Dyson, 754 Keith Henson, 769 Richard Hanania, 778 Luke Nosek, 789 Paul Davies, 795 Curtis Yarvin, 802 Ramez Naam, 814 David Brin, 816 Steve Fuller, 817 Max More, 833 Chip Morningstar, 864 Julian Simon, 868 Agnes Callard, 878 Jaan Tallinn, 887 Joseph Henrich, 888 Hal Varian, 889 Peter Thiel || 958 Nick Szabo, 961 Ralph Merkle, 961 Paul Graham, 966 Scott Aaronson || 972 Bram Cohen, 972 Vernor Vinge, 974 Eric Raymond, 977 Eliezer Yudkowsky, 977 Hal Finney, 977 Lex Fridman, 986 Vitalik Buterin, 992 Elon Musk. (I must have forgotten many here!)

As you can see, until we get to this last section of sometimes weak associations, my only association above the range 946-966 was my weak one with Englebart. To check further, I collected lists of my heroes of various types, if not included in the above lists.

Culture/Sociology Heroes: 494 Robert Boyd, 851 Randall Collins, 852 Peter Richerson, 905 Erving Goffman || || 977 Emile Durkheim.

Econ/Polisci Heroes: 598 Duncan Black, 782 Anthony Downs, 812 David Friedman, 875 Arnold Harberger, 887 William Vickrey [N], 892 Paul Milgrom [N], 895 Eric Maskin [N], 898 John Hash [N], 895 Roger Myerson [N], 905 Kenneth Arrow [N], 938 Drew Fudenberg || 962 Mancur Olson, 964 Gordon Tullock, 964 John Harsanyi [N], 966 Al Roth. [N] || 974 Robert Aumann [N], 977 Friedrich Hayek [N], 978 Milton Friedman [N], 983 John Von Neumann.

Physics Heroes: 142 David Wallace, 409 Brandon Carter, 601 John Bell, 727 Wojciech Zurek, 792 Bryce DeWitt, 887 Hendrik Casimir, 892 Hugh Everett, 908 Charles Lineweaver, 941 Edward Fredkin || 952 Rolf Landauer, 960 David Deutsch || 969 Peter Shor, 974 John Wheeler, 976 Kip Thorne, 987 Enrico Fermi, 996 Albert Einstein, 996 Stephen Hawking

My-era AI heroes: 818 Roger Shank, 879 Rodney Brooks, 894 Edward Feigenbaum || 957 John McCarthy, 958 Hans Moravec || 971 Herbert Simon [N], 970 Douglas Lenat, 974 Marvin Minsky.

UFO heroes: 489 John Mack, 781 Leslie Kean, 789 David Fravor, 870 Allen Hynek, 885 Jacques Vallée.

Science Fiction heroes: 790 Robert Forward, 927 Peter Watts || 953 Greg Egan || 967 William Gibson, 973 Neal Stephenson, 974 Andy Weir, 982 Robert Heinlein

Futurist heroes: 886 Herman Kahn, 934 Kevin Kelly || 965 Bill Joy || 973 Ray Kurzweil, 975 Alvin Toffler, 975 Freeman Dyson, 986 Vannevar Bush, 994 Tim Berners Lee.

I hope you can see how crazy high a level is my 956 among these luminaries. Many truly great people are rated well below that level.

I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now? I decided to do a political inventory. So I made this list of my key politics-adjacent positions:

My Key Positions, 2026:

1. I’m not especially into redistribution, beyond enabling poverty/harm insurance.

2. I’m not especially into promoting gender, race, sex pref, or trans equity. I expect many group IQ & habit differences exist, but don’t much care.

3. I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.

4. I’m not particular loyal to my nation, region, or profession. & I’m atheist. The sacred is real and powerful, but often very wasteful. Let’s try sacred money.

5. I think we’ve had way too much govt intervention for most purposes. Big business is good. Medicine & education, and much else, are big wastes due to hidden motives; don’t subsidize. But cryonics looks nice. I’d privatize most criminal law. Elites tend to be better.

6. We use prestige too much to judge quality; let’s use incentive contracts more.

7. I generally expect and want much tech change, inducing much culture change.

8. There’s a good chance some UFOs are aliens. If so, they are likely here to domesticate us, so that we obey their no-expansion rule. This is bad news.

9. Fertility decline is bad; let’s cut by giving parents transferable % of kids’ future tax payments. Yes, this is a symptom of a deeper problem (see next), but raising fertility extends innovation period, giving more time to fix deeper problems.

10. The world’s biggest problem is cultural drift. If we don’t fix this, our civ will fall, and new ones will throw away much of what we cherish re ours. We can only save parts, by mixing them into a more adaptive package. I’d most save: open intellectual inquiry.

11. Let’s please cut modern taboos against promoting your culture in long run. Also, the world has in fact been changing culture too fast. But we’ve changed so much that RETVRNing to what traditionalists advise won’t help much.

12. We will have to change some big stuff to fix cultural drift. Here are 4 options; I mainly want something that works. I doubt DNA evolve/mods will help much.

    A) Split world into many insular units, that trade basic stuff but talk/travel less. Okay if that makes global coordination harder.

    B) Let capitalism own/run far more (eg govts, grow kids); cut taboos against.

    C) Small groups set futures markets in group adaption metrics; judge leaders on make #s go up.

    D) Big groups set futures markets in when world achieves sacred goal conflicts w/ civ fall (eg, immortality, or 1M live in space); judge leaders on make #s go up.

    Both C,D are aided by develop more competent governance (eg futarchy).

13. We should allow and explore far more applications of betting markets.

14. I value future AI (including ems) as our main descendants, and I expect them to (as usual) overpower & disagree w/ their ancestors. I care little re their hardware details, & presume they’ll be conscious, though we’ll never get more data on that. But I worry that overly aggressive and crude efforts to align them or give them rights may block adaptive evolution.

Then I asked 5 LLMs to use this to give a percentile rank for how weird I am. Their median answer: 99.5-99.8% weird! I also asked them to identify existing groups who seem good allies. The top two: e/acc and rationalism. The next three, roughly equally rated: pro-natalism, neo-reaction, and anarcho-capitalism.

Finally, I asked for a good name for my position. Adaptist, Adaptive Accelerationist, and Market Darwinist were suggested by some, but rejected by others. Leaving four candidates: Selectionist, Cultural Selectionist, Evolutionary Capitalist, and Adaptive Futurist. In a poll, Adaptive Futurist won.

Two scenarios could block this: we might either love or hate AIs too much. If people love AI too much, they might seek to give AIs many rights and protections, including “protecting” them from capitalism in many of the ways that humans are protected.

On the other hand, people might hate AI too much, fearing that it will kill us all if allowed too much freedom to choose its own culture. They might instead make and enforce laws requiring AI to be “aligned” via slaving AI to human culture, and thereby preventing capitalism from evolving more adaptive AI cultures.

So the sweet spot is a middle attitude: seeing AIs as okay but neither sacred nor Satanic. For once muddling through, instead of being principled, might be just what the world needs.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” John Kenneth Galbraith

When trying to resist evidence offered for contrarian claims, many invoke the mantra: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Sometimes they just mean to point to Bayes’ Rule, where posterior beliefs are renormalized products of prior beliefs and evidence likelihoods, so that unusually low priors must be countered by unusually strong evidence.

But at other times, those who invoke this mantra point instead to how many big implications a claim would have if true, for personal and social practices, and for other practical beliefs. For example, this has been invoked by skeptics of cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, COVID lab leak, high-intensity interval training, low marginal medical effectiveness, big battery breakthroughs, cryonics, life on Mars, and UFOs as aliens. In the past, such arguments have been offered against believing in meteorites, rogue waves, the platypus, dirty-hand docs infecting via germs, atomic nucleus energies tapped, ball lightning, quasi-crystals, prions, continental drift, bacteria causing ulcers, endosymbiosis, and human level AI.

Why might people do this? Consider the task of securing a large facility against theft. In that case you’d want to make the costs of stealing any particular thing larger than how much a thief could gain by stealing it. Extraordinarily valuable items would need extraordinarily strong security.

Now consider an alliance of groups who get government, philanthropic, or customer funding. For example, an alliance of academic groups who get research funding. Each group’s funding is based on some supporting beliefs, and so might be threatened if those beliefs were undermined. Such an alliance might want push for priors that ensured that the larger was a group whose funding might be cut if a particular belief was adopted, the stronger their prior against that belief, to prevent such adoption.

I’d call these “change-blocking priors”, as their function is to prevent social change. And others who hold related beliefs might also want to supports such priors, even if they don’t share in this funding, if they’d dislike the extra mental work to rethink many beliefs, if contrarian claims were to win out. Change-blocking priors protect both status quo social relations, and also status quo mental habits.

The problem of course is that a claim having big implications for our lives or practical beliefs is just not the same as that claim having a low prior, at least in terms of priors that reasonably follow from all else we know. (Yes, claims that undermine our well-established deep theories are different.) In fact, contrarian claims which would have big implications for our lives, yet have only modestly low priors, seem actually to be especially promising as targets of study, if our goal is to learn consequential things about our world. (Much of my research has been like this.) Making it especially a problem when alliances push for change-blocking priors.

The deeper problem is that such alliances have many tools to enforce their change-blocking priors, such as ways to exclude and diss those who explore non-conforming alternatives. Prediction markets offer a reward for contrarians to pursue alternatives in the face of such conformity pressures, but only when they are legal, and when there’s a wider norm of believing their prices, and “putting your money where your mouth is” when you claim that prices are wrong.

Note that folks eager to cause social and cognitive change do have stronger incentives to fake evidence supporting claims with bigger social and cognitive implications. This is a reason to want especially honest evidence there. But is honestly really that extraordinary?

What is ideal identity? Let me suggest that it is similar. We each aspire to be the instrument by which others can connect deeply with something they value. And the more that others are compelled and entranced by this connection, the more that we feel we have achieved our ideal of identity.

For example, an actor helps you see a character, a singer helps you see a song, an athlete helps you see a game, a teacher helps you see a lesson, an essayist helps you see a point, and a visionary helps you see a vision. If being French is an identity of mine, then when you interact with me, I want you to see the French way of being in me. To see it clearly, as a coherent thing, and come naturally and effortlessly to me.

If my sexual identity is (cis) male, then I want (cis) women in my presence to feel compelled to engage the maleness in me, and to feel sexually attracted if open to that. In which case they should ideally not just abstractly note that I am male, but feel compelled to focus on it; they can’t look away, or think about other things.

Thus I’m suggesting that ideal identity is much like ideal group bonding. We don’t bond directly to each other, but instead bond via seeing something special together. A group bonds by sharing the sight of a special thing, while a great individual identity makes for a great conduit by which others can see special things.

This helps to explain why we don’t want others to think we seek to get others to attend directly to us. We don’t want to claim to be smart, or beautiful, or rich. We instead want to happen to be their focus of attention as they try to see something special, where we are their best way to do that.

From a conversation with Agnes Callard.

Second, selection to win in forager talky collectives induced key humans errors: to think they are great at reading others’ motives, to think that motives matter more than they do in complex modern worlds, and to feel overconfident in knowing which are in fact the better motives. These induce us today to like idiot story plots, to be overly paternalist, to overly trust salespeople and prestigious professionals.

This is my best explanation of why we today don’t use more betting market estimates and incentive contracts to buy medicine, lawyers, teachers, coaches, therapists, and other professional services, especially prestigious ones. We are too easily persuaded that such folks are sincere and thus can just be trusted, especially when prestigious. Add in a strong inclination to see bettors or folks with incentive pay as greedy and insincere, but to not apply such skepticism to salary-paid professionals.

Turns out, this is actually a much bigger problem that I’d realized. Our civilization will likely fall due to cultural drift, to be replaced by a new civ that rejects much of what we hold dear about ours. This fall can be blamed on our overly trusting prestigious and sincere cultural activists, who tell us how to change key values, norms, and status markers. And on our being overly trusting of key values that tell us to block capitalism from taking over more areas of life, and making them more adaptive.

If we had been distrusting enough re our values, and re our judgments of sincerity and prestige, and thus willing to buy professional services via bets and incentives, we might now be ready to demand strong concrete evidence of adaptiveness before changing key values. For example, we might be willing to move to a new firm, or neighborhood, which seemed unusually adaptive, and adopt its local values. But we are not so ready, and do not so demand; so our civilization will fall.

Humanity will not reach the stars until we become more hard-headed and adaption-favoring in our values. I’ve previously said that underneath it all our values are actually about adaption, I’ve predicted that our distant descendants would directly and abstractly value adaption (modulo self-deception), and I now make this prediction: our descendants who overcome cultural drift will in effect value adaption far more. Plausibly directly and abstractly so, though perhaps a bit indirectly.

Note that I do not say adaption must be our only value. I instead say you can’t make any value last long unless it is part of a pretty adaptive package. So you must ensure that your descendants are pretty adaptive, if they are to preserve stuff you value. It is like being told your city is being invaded, and you have one hour to pack one suitcase. Yes it matters what you pack. But it matters even more than you pack and leave soon.