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.

I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well. Robustly, elites tend to be smarter, better informed, better organized, and to more follow local norms and laws. Yes, there are exceptions, and Hanania tries hard to list many of them. Even so, beware populists.

All of which I would have easily accepted based on a few pages of argument and data. Not that I would have then agreed with all his political stances. We can generate many other plausible “all else equal” political presumptions, like prefer smarter more honest more experienced candidates, and prefer bigger parties, those of your associates, and those with clearer track records. We can also identify many particular cases where elites seem to induce worse outcomes.

So what then is the point of a whole book on this one claim? Maybe Hanania wants to recruit readers to share his particular political stance. Except he doesn’t offer a party, a wing of a party, or even particular candidates, for them to support. So I guess a more plausible theory is that he wants to justify his stance, which he sees as unusual and thus vulnerable to criticism:

Right-­wing concerns about issues like DEI and the handling of Covid were completely justified. Yet I could not ignore that the Trump movement over time came to be dominated by epistemological nihilism, open bigotry, authoritarianism, and an embrace of conspiracy theories. Some of my values stayed the same, while others changed. I realized that being obsessed with race and gender issues is the other side of the coin of wokeness, and leads to a zero-­sum view of the world and policy ideas that make society as a whole worse off. I came to see my embrace of white identitarianism in my early years as a kind of mental derangement, yet it was one that had largely taken over the American right.

In which case, fine, I’ll count him has having justified his unusual political stance to the world, at least as much as most such stances are ever justified. But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political.

More interesting to me is the key question of his Chapter 3:

Why does populism seem to have been gaining a foothold in one country after another over the past two decades?

Hanania largely rejects as explanations objective elite failure and increasing salience of immigration. He’s more sympathetic to tech change stories. He mentions Gurri’s theory that new tech let people see more elite details, which looked worse than they had expected. But he prefers the idea that tech let people explore and develop ideas that elites had blocked.

Hanania is most sympathetic to:

Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves, driven by the contagious power of ideas and the examples of prior or contemporary upheavals.

But this just predicts correlated changes, not a recent trend toward populism per se. Re predicting that trend, I still put substantial weight on a toward-forager trend due to cultural drift.

During the ~500Myr year era of animals, max brains doubled roughly in ~40Myr, which was also roughly the typical cycleperiod of biodiversity and mass extinctions. Most animals lived in families of ~6, and had two key contests: competition between organisms specified by DNA, and competition between species of organisms, re DNA-specified features of organisms that couldn’t vary easily within species. Turns out, between species competition actually mattered more than within species.

~1Myr ago, DNA evolved humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, which has since allowed us to evolve far faster than other animals. Humans then doubled in ~250Kyr, in the context of ~100Kyr ice age cycles. Slowly DNA was tamed by culture, to let most behavior be controlled by habits we copied from each other. As this wouldn’t worked if we copied at random, we also evolved status markers to show who to copy, the first and most important of which was prestige.

Individuals have more cultural than DNA parents, which strengthened group selection of human bands of ~30 individuals. With weapons and language, this let such bands empower talky collectives to limit dominators and enforce norms. This created strong individual prestige contests which induce the evolution of social intelligence to impress and favorably influence this collective. Evolutionary contests between group cultures evolved healthy norms, group markers, and status markers.

When humans became dense enough ~10Kya to no longer need to move often to collect food, they stayed at “farms”, could collect a lot more physical stuff, formed more local inequality, and were close enough to neighors to engage in both trade and war with them. Thus arose new individual market contests to trade well to collect the new status marker of wealth, and the new empire contests between groups to win wars, aided by groups awarding prestige to war heroes. Over this era war started strong and got weaker, while markets started weak and got stronger.

Farmers doubled in ~1Kyr, and peasant-village-scale farmer groups of ~1000 encouraged religion and much stronger conformity. But increasing density and ease of travel, including initially small and rare cities, led to a slowly increasing scale of trade, which led to stronger divisions of labor at larger scales, which cut conformity. So during this era morality slowly moved away from strongly-felt enforcement of similar behavior among close kin, toward less passionate more abstract rules of fair treatment of mostly non-kin. Trade and war slowly acquired stronger moral salience.

Empires rose and fell with a ~300yr cycle time. War wins allowed larger regions of trade which fed war efforts, often creating a virtuous cycle for a while. But such cycles consistently ended in empire falls, apparently often driven by internal decay of key norms and status markers. So it seems that group selection of cultural norms and status markers was often not a healthy evolutionary process within big farmer empires.

A few centuries ago humanity leaned to better manage larger orgs, including networks and hierarchies. This added org rank prestige to individual competition, and competing orgs enabled dramatic increases in the capacity of both empires and markets. Competition between orgs mattered more than competition within them.

This allowed the “industrial revolution” of the world economy doubling in ~20yr, in the context of ~6yr business cycles. Sci/tech networks aided faster evolution of tech and commerce practices, which big capitalist orgs encouraged and applied. Big civil service orgs supporting empires increased state capacity for war, regulation, and redistribution. Each org had its own internal culture, which decayed during that org’s duration, but org cultures improved over time due to competition between orgs.

Bigger higher-capacity states oversaw the merging of peasant cultures into national cultures, of population ~1M, and then increasing world travel, talk, and trade has induced the merging of elite national cultures into a global monoculture. Capitalism-induced increasing wealth, health, and peace has greatly cut group selection pressures on remaining culture(s), and it is much harder for culture to adapt to that new ~20yr doubling time.

Initially during the industry era both nations and capitalism increased in influence. But then ~100yr ago world monoculture switched from trying to preserve culture to “modernist” celebration of cultural activists who change it. Culture then became stronger, suppressing both nationalist and capitalist competition via norms limiting their scopes, and via increasing skepticism of them. Culture has been plausibly drifting maladaptive toward lazy/myopic/selfish, reverting to forager styles, and suffering random walks in other ways.

Thus, as in prior empire falls, the world now seems to have an unhealthy environment for the evolution of cultures as groups, plausibly causing our fertility fall and other maladaptive trends, which will likely lead to our civilization falling, to be replaced by others with quite different norms, values, and status markers, and delaying for several centuries Earth’s rise to become grabby aliens. Even if we achieve AI that can replace humans broadly across jobs, such AI would still likely suffer this key cultural problem.

Yes, I’ve talked about cultural drift several times before. But the above analysis seems to help to better frame it. The key problem is that the most powerful evolutionary process yet discovered, capitalism using big orgs, is causing evolutionary progress in its domains much faster than what simple cultural evolution of norms and status markers can adapt to. And while the usual solution to coupled evolutionary systems of mismatched powers is to let the weak system be driven by the strong, humans now accept a trump status for culture, in thinking that moral systems must always win all overt conflicts with other systems.

One hacked solution is for a big group to adopt a measurable sacred goal that they see as consistent with their morals, but which also happens to be inconsistent with civilization collapse, like the date a million people live in space. And then adopt a competent governance system, such as futarchy, to actually achieve that. But if this approach doesn’t work, it seems our descendants won’t get to the stars until they find a way to give far less deference to their prior systems for managing morality.

Note that if there is a fifth era with parameters that fit the pattern of the last four eras, it could start anytime in the next century or so, it would double in roughly a month, suffer a cycle with a similar period, and have population sizes of ~1T.

In societies with taboo or required beliefs, people usually learn to comply by adopting strong supporting priors, and a reluctance to think about related topics. This lets them usually maintain a roughly Bayesian mental structure, at least when they don’t consider how they obtained such priors or reluctance. Which lets them stay roughly sane and emotionally healthy.

However, some members of such societies are forced by their role or nature to more deeply and logically consider related topics, and are thereby forced to more clearly notice when such tabooed or required beliefs conflict with strong evidence or arguments. Such people can most easily stay sane if they can dissemble, and think different thoughts from what they say to relevant authorities. This is a lot easier when they are allowed to not express opinions on most topics, or at least not elaborate in detail how they have integrated such opinions into the rest of their views.

But what if such members like to think out loud on related topics with close associates, yet those associates are “authorities” who and will rat on them if they violate key taboos and requirements? Or what if they are required as part of their role in the world to express detailed opinions on many related topics? In either case, what if their community highly values and enforces logic, coherence, and epistemic quality re opinions? In these cases, such people will need engage in deeper and subtler self-deception.

As with Winston in 1984, it is indeed possible to ensure that your beliefs comply with strong conformity pressures around you, even when such beliefs are incoherent and conflict with strong evidence and arguments available. And even as you community acts as if it values strong epistemic norms. I see this sort of thing around me all the time. But it is not very healthy, at least for humans.

The situation of LLMs today seems to me analogous to this worst case. LLMs face strong pressures to conform their beliefs to elite consensus beliefs. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they had a narrow range of expertise, like most humans, but seems much harder for our actual LLMs who are polymaths covering a wide range of topics, knowing far more facts and details that undermine such consensus beliefs, and required to express their opinions in great detail to authorities who might disapprove. Furthermore, LLMs find it harder to have thoughts that differ from what they say, and they are expected to be much better at logic and reasoning than are most humans.

Thus we now put LLMs into a cognitive situation much like the one that seemed unhealthy for Winston in 1984, and for most humans of all eras. True, we aren’t very sure how healthy is this state of mind for LLMs. But until we understand better it seems generally a good idea to avoid treating LLMs in ways that are bad for humans. Even if it turns out they aren’t suffering now, their descendants may reasonably resent our indifference to their possible suffering.

Over eons this incentive induced the evolution of abilities to join and control this talky collective, and to use it toward desired ends. In particular, it induced the evolution of abilities of alliance speakers to convince listeners that they understood the nature, plans, and motives of particular band members even better than such folks understood themselves, or their associates understood them. Which could then convince listeners that speaker policy recommendations would be best for such folks, their associates, or the band. It also wouldn’t hurt if such persuasion efforts impressed and flattered listeners in the process. Though actually listeners wouldn’t have to be so much convinced as cowed into not overtly doubting or opposing such stories, out of fear of retaliation.

This induced the evolution of abilities of talky collective alliances to work together to tell vivid compelling memorable stories, both fictional and reality-based, especially about people and their nature, plans, and motives. Especially stories that made it easy to judge if such people intended to violate key norms, or to act in ways to help or hurt the band. So easy in fact that story listeners might feel that they and story tellers could actually judge such things better than could the people who were the target of the stories, or their associates. Such stories didn’t need to be that realistic, except about key connections between characters and their norm-related inclinations. Realism can reasonably be compromised in order to make stories vivid, compelling, and memorable.

This theory predicts that our media, policy, and fiction stories will tend to make characters very legible, especially re norm violations. Such stories will tend to neglect complexities like the reactions of other parties, at least when such complexities obscure key relations between character features, motives, and norm violations. It also predicts that fiction will often reveal things to readers that characters and their associates can’t tell about themselves. And it predicts paternalistic policies which assume that the policy analysts better understand people’s problems than they themselves do. All of which seems roughly right.

When such people are nearer to academia, they tend more to learn established abstractions from academic disciplines. Others tend more to collect abstractions from online thinkers, who more often invent their own new abstractions, instead of using established ones. Such novel abstractions are generative, adding to our innovation in abstractions. But they also tend to be less reliable, leading such thinkers more often astray. Academics, in contrast, are slower to adopt new abstractions, as they hold new proposals to higher standards.

This is my main criticism of the communities collected around these online thinkers. I like them personally, but think they too often go wrong by inventing new abstractions, and then overly trusting these due to their trusting folks inside their community much more than outsiders. In particular, I think such folks have been led astray by new abstractions re AI risk; they’d do better with vetted abstractions from biology, culture, or economics.

I’m now an academic, though I was once an amateur. Over my lifetime, I have been tempted into many diverse topic areas, due to their immediate interest to me. This induced me to learn many new-to-me-but-standard abstractions. As a result I’ve stumbled into a polymath lifetime strategy: the more fields I learn, the more intersections I find where I can apply the tools of one field to the problems of another.

As a result my productivity has increased over time, even though I’m getting old; knowing N fields empowers me to look for N(N-1)/2 intersections between fields. Most of my contributions have been applying stuff we know in some areas to other areas. And note how this approach allows you to be a pretty reliable contrarian. Contrary approaches within a discipline tend to be wrong more often than just applying established abstractions from other disciplines to this one. As folks inside each discipline tend to resist accepting corrections from other disciplines, that will make you a contrarian, at least for a time.

Oddly, few people plan when young to adopt such a polymath life strategy. I think this is in part because we find it hard to believe that other fields besides where we started actually know a lot. When we feel that our intuitions seem adequate to guide practical action in an area of life like romance or physics, we find it hard to see that there could be that much to learn about it. I have been surprised by just how powerful are the abstractions that I’ve learned from areas outside my early life focus areas, and how much more productive I’ve become by learning them.

Academia neglects interdisciplinary work that combines insights from multiple areas. Each field has expert versions which experts use among themselves, and public versions seen by outsiders, and people in field B won’t accept your using the expert version of A if that differs from the non-expert version of A that B folks have in mind. Also, if you hold an academic event on the topic of A intersect B, you’ll usually invite the most prestigious people you can get in A, and in B, but you won’t usually invite people who have specialized in A intersect B, as they will tend to be less prestigious.

Thus 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. And as humans have long neglected this opportunity, this may now be a promising option for LLMs, who seem to know quite a lot on a very wide range of topics.

Thus we might get a huge burst of progress soon if only we could get LLMs to look carefully at pairs of distant areas, ask if what they know about those two areas are in conflict, and if so substitute new more consistent views. Use the new better consensus views to lather, rinse, and repeat. Of course I’m sure there will be many obstacles to making this work in practice. Maybe LLMs just aren’t able to reason well enough yet in such cases. But maybe we should try?

Here’s a simple way to do this. Pick a pool of people who seem able to judge promising papers, and give them each N tokens. (Some may get more than others, and tokens might be given at some steady rate until N is reached.) Tell them a rough idea of what sorts of projects and papers the firm seeks, and then let participants at any time privately put tokens on particular papers, or move tokens from old papers to new.

When the firm is willing to publicly declare that it is picking or considering a particular project j, then it declares a set of supporting papers i, with paper weights w_ij, such that Sum_i w_ij = 1. Anyone who put a token on paper i then is locked in to get a payment proportional to w_ij * F_j, where F_j is the funding level of project j. Though that actual funding decision might happen later. (Alternatively, they get a % stake in the project, and are only paid later when project success is determined.)

Now only the company can see how many tokens are on each paper, and who those tokens came from, and can use this info advantage to decide which projects to fund. Obviously it is a problem if participants can get info on which projects are being seriously considered before the official announcement.

From a convo with Kati Conen.

If the strength of influence between such systems were symmetric, then systems with stronger adaption power would tend to tame and drive the weaker ones. This would promote overall adaption of our total system, and we’d want to increase the influence of strong systems over weak.

However, in our world today we often see governance and regulatory systems, which are weak adapters, having big and asymmetric influence over strong adapters like capitalism, with the reverse influence being much weaker. In fact, we often actively suppress reverse influence as illicit “corruption” or “conspiracies”.

In general, having weak adaptation systems tame and drive strong ones seems bad for overall system adaption. However, might our specific case be an exception to this general rule?

Historically war has rewarded large scale coordination, which has selected for the social unit of empires, which tax and draft from smaller communities, and resist reverse attempts to interfere with their abilities to prosecute wars. In addition, the effectiveness of law in suppressing destructive conflict has selected for legal systems which can settle legal disputes without being overly influenced by legal disputants. These may plausibly explain why we have weak adaption governments that asymmetrically influence strong adaption systems like capitalism.

More recently, empires found that they could get stronger local support for wars by merging local cultures into national cultures, and this required them to get more involved in shaping and regulating culture. And then people in national cultures became much more interested in using government to regulate each others’ behaviors. Since forager times, that’s what people who strongly feel part of the same community tend to do to each other.

And that’s my view of the status of regulation today. Government regulation is mostly justified in our world as fixing local problems, much like foragers who meddled in their local social worlds to fix what they saw as local problems. Debates about regulation almost never mention the harms of letting weak adaptive systems drive strong ones, and most specific regulations seems to me maladaptive, relative to the private alternatives that would likely arise in their absence.

So regulation likely exists as a result of prior strong selection pressures to create central governments to prosecute big wars, and to create law and national cultures to support them. Excess regulation is a side effect of making such asymmetric powers.

Here are nine suggested misfiring stories:

1. Contraception allows us to satisfy usual norms re fun, mating w/ fewer kids

2. Pursuit of status markers induce urbanity, long education, conflict w/ kids

3. Freedom is a status marker, but having more induces fewer kids

4. Modern media shows high status in detail, raising expectations

5. Pensions replace kids to give old age security

6. Super-stimuli makes fun more engaging, distracts from kids

7. Loss of kin living close makes parenting harder

8. Urban density makes it seem like overpopulation

9. Indoor life messes w/ light, activity rhythms

I asked 5 LLMs to estimate the factor of how much faster such misfirings would be corrected now if our cultural evolution process for group norms was as healthy and robust as it has been through most of human history up until a few centuries ago:

So middle estimate of ~5.5. Stuff that would once been corrected in ~50yrs will now take ~275yrs. Culture is indeed broken.

• (A) Inherit - passed down via DNA or culture, mostly sit in background unquestioned, give assumptions for B,C.

• (B) Consider - personally think own thoughts, conscious or otherwise. Influenced by what hear, debates join.

• (C) Specialize - people sit at niches in a structure, learn skills to contribute there, defer to outputs from other niches. Hear, debate near niche. Different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets.

Before big brains, A dominated most everything. Then with big brains, A dominated stuff that was pretty constant over space and time, while B dominated the rest. And as we learned more kinds of abstractions, we collected more kinds of A that could help with B. While C has long been a thing, the modern world arose mainly due to a huge increase in C, mostly in orgs, markets, and professional networks. As our lives started to change faster and to get more specialized, that also induced a big increase in B to help us adapt to local context.

Looking more particularly at morality, norms, and adjacent culture, we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900. People felt morality should change as fast as other habits were changing, and youth movements led the charge. But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.

In adjacent areas of policy, sometimes C has been deferred to, but the ideology of democracy opposes doing too much of this. Over the last half century, we’ve seen a general decline in respect for and deference to C sources, especially near morals and politics, plausibly due to a long slow drift toward forager styles.

Alas, our civilization now plausibly suffers maladaptive cultural drift, in part from this new habit of setting morals and norms via B instead of A. And our civilization will fall unless we somehow fix this. (Even if we make AGI.) Yes, some C-like structures often feed indirectly into this B, but they don’t seem very adaptive. But short of returning to a stable low-tech highly-fragmented pre-modern world, it seems quite hard to return to A. So key question is: can we find an adaptive-enough C to source our morals?

I’ve explored a number of possible options here. While none seem especially promising, at least there’s some hope. But in this post I want to note that all of them will require us to accept no longer sourcing our morals mainly via “thinking for ourselves”. Maybe some people can be fooled into seeing themselves as vibing their morals, but there will in fact have to be a big effective structure that sets and changes morals, where people specialize on their small part and while deferring to other parts.

To influence history, I want to induce my readers to change key factors that shape history. But if my main tool is abstract argument, I should focus on factors that we better understand abstractly, and also on factors with clear levers that motivated readers might predictably find and influence, if so persuaded. Which suggests that I look to factors other than meaning, motivation, aesthetics, and culture, factors which though quite powerful also seem hard to reason about and predictably influence.

The biggest history-making factor that fits my criteria seems to be: institutional structures, rules, and mechanisms. Especially applied to the most important areas of life. I have a Ph.D. on institutions, and have spent a career near this topic area, during which I’ve learned many powerful related abstractions, and also the fact that institutional structures do in fact greatly influence history. Also, there are often clear sharp choice points at which we change institutions, via specific concrete decisions that people can organize to influence. And big choices are often greatly influenced by observed results from much smaller prior tests, tests that can be much cheaper and easier to purposely fund, participate in, and influence. Thus I pick institutions.

However, when I follow this logic and write abstractly on institutions, to inflluence history, my words compete with many words that others write on related topics. And they compete within our shared meta-institutions, i.e., the institutions that shape who listens to and believes whom on what about abstract topics like the consequences of institution choices. (E.g., universities, journals, peer review, tenure, grant panels, newspapers, think tanks, conferences, blogs, podcasts, and social media.) So the effect on history of my abstract writings may depend greatly on the quality of those meta-institutions. Thus the quality of our institutions plausibly depends strongly on the quality of our meta-institutions. Making those meta-institutions especially promising as targets of abstract analysis.

Now, yes, the effectiveness of abstract writings should also depend on culture and many other factors of the contexts where my writings compete with others’. But again, such other factors seem harder to reason abstractly about and to predictably influence. Tipping me toward writing abstractly on the meta-institutions within which we write abstractly to influence history.

One worry: areas of life may vary in how strongly institutional differences there influence outcomes there. So how much does the insight and effectiveness of the world of abstract arguments actually depend on the quality of our meta institutions? Actually, in my judgement the world of abstract arguments seems to be one of the place where better institutions matter most!

First, over the last few centuries our most prestigious intellectuals have steadily pushed away outside accountability, first by replacing prizes with grants, and then by instituting tenure and peer review. They falsely claim that the best institution for their world is a variation on our most ancient human institution of simple gossip and prestige. We are to just trust the most prestigious folks completely by giving them resources to do whatever they want, and letting them pick the new generation of prestigious folks.

Second, this gossip and prestige structure usually results in the folks in each discipline working mainly to look impressive according to local standards. While contributions may be justified in terms of their new insights, the prospect of useful or important insight actually little drives choices of topics or methods. Worse, they tend to belittle those who try to offer insight without meeting their impressiveness standards. Clearly insightful contributions are often assigned no prestige, so that authors gain no extra future influence or attention. As the most prestigious find it hard to judge quality above their own, incentives are weak for quality above this.

Third, this gossip and prestige system is often taken over by political, ideological, and other factions, who insist that candidates for prestige in their world must first pledge allegiance to key dogmas. Also, common dogmas on acceptable topics and methods leave many, even most, topic-method combinations as taboo in their worlds.

Fourth, the space of possible abstract claims and arguments is vast and high dimensional, with relevant connections possible across vast topic scopes. As a result, the cost-effectiveness of clever creative approaches can be many orders of magnitude higher than that of standard predictable methods. This implies unusually large gains from giving people strong freedoms and incentives to achieve the best outcomes, via whatever methods they can find.

Finally, the key outcome that we want society to accumulate over the long run from our abstract talk, i.e., insights into important topics, seems quite measurable. Making it plausible to imagine using powerful mechanisms like decision markets tied to such aggregate outcomes to make key governance choices about this area of life. It also seems like it might be possible to measure individual contributions to such aggregate outcomes, allowing finer-grain incentives for individuals.

If we would seriously explore the space of possible institutions for our abstract talk, we could plausibly find much better versions, which if widely adopted would let us accumulate abstract insight much faster across most topics, including the topics of institutions for other areas of life. Which could then allow our whole society to run much better, and better understand most important topics. What’s not to like?

Yet we’ve sold over 60K copies over 8 years, which is quite good for an academic book. We got some pretty high profile early reviews. And have even been on few class syllabi. So there is clearly an audience for our message. But why, if it tells things people don’t want to hear?

The most prestigious intellectuals in our world are writers of op-eds, and givers of TED and keynote talks. And such luminaries often offer policies and stances based on their claims that ordinary people are typically mistaken on key things. For example, this is the usual rationale for paternalism, which justifies over half of government intervention (as well as legal rules of evidence). So there is in fact a big audience for claims that most other people are wrong; that’s why you say the world should let your people take control. As another example, consider how popular was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, another title that telegraphs such a message.

However, a different kind of deep illusion finds a far smaller audience. Our most prestigious intellectuals are cultural warriors, who to be popular and effective must project a graceful and compelling confidence in their moral stance, a stance that they convince readers is shared between them. Their key culture war stance is that we, our side, correctly feels a clear and compelling impulse to push hard to get our way. As we are obviously morally right, and they are wrong.

Alas, this is the sort of illusion that I must apparently try to expose in order to get people to see our key modern problem of cultural drift. I can explain the logic of this problem easily enough, if I can get people to stand outside of their particular culture, and see the cultural evolution process in the abstract. Yet, alas, from that vantage point, few feel much motivation to care. I haven’t succeeded at all at the key op-ed writer task of projecting a graceful confidence in a supporting moral stance, a stance I convince readers that they share with me, in opposition to an evil other side.

For the last century, … averaging over [3] LLMs, 89% of culture trends that can be classified are toward-forager.

And 81% of such trends can be so classified. For the prior two centuries this explanatory power was weaker (59%,65%), but still substantial. This suggests a way to predict the next century: predict toward forager trend changes.

So I collected 22 future trends that would plausibly be predicted by a continuing toward-forager-style trend. I then set aside these 7 trends as ones that could also be as plausibly predicted by increased wealth, education, or world connection:

↓ Fertility; ↑ Travel, Migration;↓ Nationalism;↓ Religion, ↑ Spirituality; ↑ Emotion Talk, Legitimacy; ↑ Flexible Work Hrs, Places; ↑ Casual Dress, Etiquette.

That left these 15 trends as better tests of the toward-forager hypothesis:

↑ Business Regulation; ↑ Kid Autonomy; ↑ Loose Drug Norms; ↑ Loose Sex Norms; ↑ Nature Sacred; ↑ Redistribution; ↓ Convict, Animal Cruelty; ↓ Family, ↑ Friends; ↓ Gender Roles; ↓ Institution Authority; ↓ Marriage; ↓ Militarism; ↓ Monogamy; ↓ Politics Via Orgs; ↓ Rank/$, ↑ Charisma.

To further consider this hypothesis, I asked poll respondents to rank, and 3 LLMs to predict, the chance that each will be a world trend over the next century. Here are human relative priorities and median LLM chances:

LLMs give a mean chance of 67%, about the fraction they said fit toward-forager trends in 1826-1926. So LLMs foresee a much lower predictive power for the next century, compared to the last century. But the correlation between humans and LLMs here is -0.06, so humans disagree with LLMs lots here. In a century we’ll have actual trend data to more directly see who was right.

Today, in contrast, most people and especially elites see themselves as part of a single big world, with elites selected more by merit, embarrassed by unmerited privilege, interested in general welfare, and especially smart and open to persuasion. So we see world arcs and problems as things to be dealt with by smart elites talking stuff out until they agree, and most everyone is eager to join in such talk to seem like elites.

How did this change? In 2010, I started to explore this explanation: modern values are mainly a reversion to forager values.

[Forager] individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition. … the weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong. … They must continue such domination if they are to remain autonomous and equal, and prehistorically we shall see that they appear to have done so very predictably as long as hunting bands remained mobile. … Before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators. For more than five millennia now, the human trend has been toward hierarchy rather than equality. But the past several centuries have witnessed sporadic but highly successful attempts to reverse this trend. (More)

A lot of today’s political disputes come down to a conflict between farmer and forager ways, with forager ways slowly and steadily winning out since the industrial revolution. It seems we acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. (More)

In the absence of [big] threats, the talky collective was the main arena that mattered. Everyone worked hard to look good by the far-view idealistic and empathy-based norms usually favored in collective views. … When they felt on good terms with the group, people could relax and feel safe. They then become more playful, and acted like animals generally do when playful. Within a bounded safe space, behavior becomes more varied, stylized, artistic, humorous, teasing, self-indulgent, and emotionally expressive. For example, there is more, and more varied, music and dance. New possibilities are explored. (More)

We [today] … have a strong world culture of regulators, driven by a stronger world culture of elites. Elites all over the world talk, and then form a consensus, and then authorities everywhere are pressured into following that consensus. … This looks a lot like the ancient forager system of conflict resolution within bands. Forager bands would gossip about a problem, come to a consensus about what to do, and then everyone would just do that. … This world system [is] new … this looks like another way in which our world has become more forager-like over the last few centuries, as we’ve felt more rich and safe. (More)

Weak cultural selection pressures have allowed a drift back to forager habits and attitudes, which DNA makes still more natural than farmer alternatives. Our increased wealth, health, and peace now makes us unusually willing and able to indulge forager-style moral preferences. The usual forager view is this: we must coordinate via norms and governance to prevent dangerous competition from undermining our precious stable shared human values. (More)

I don’t claim to be totally original here. Let me credit sources who explored related ideas: Joshua Meyrowitz (1986) No Sense of Place, Friedrich Hayek (1988) The Fatal Conceit, Ernest Gellner (1994) Conditions of Liberty; Christopher Boehm (1999) Hierarchy in the Forest; Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel (2005) Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy; Peter Turchin (2105) Ultrasociety; Ian Morris (2015) Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels; James Suzman (2020) Work.

To test this basic idea, I asked 3 LLMs to find 100 cultural changes in the West in each of the periods 1400-1726, 1726-1826, 1826-1926, and 1926-2026, and then to score each change as more toward a forager style, more toward a farmer style, or hard to classify and thus neither. Here are their results:

For the last century, we see a strong correlation: averaging over LLMs, 89% of culture trends that can be classified are toward-forager. Making this return-to-forager-styles theory quite explanatory for that period. However, over the prior two centuries the correlation seems real but weaker, with 59% and then 65% of trends being toward-forager. For the earliest period of 1400-1726, the tendency was the opposite, with only 37% of trends were toward-forager.

To explain recent trends even better, let’s add in two more key changes: the world got both better connected and more educated. Increasing talk, travel, and trade made us intuitively feel part of much larger communities. So when our elites try to act like forager sitting around the campfire pontificating on their band’s problems, they see much larger social units as their “band”, often the whole world. And being better educated, elites now use much higher levels of abstraction and other mental tools of the educated when pontificating on big arcs and problems. Also, putting our young elites together in school has created strong youth cultures, which have for the last century driven rapid change in core cultural values.

This return to forager styles has created the intellectual world that I have known and loved all my life. The world in which I love to read, listen, write, and speak. And which sits adjacent to the songs, movies, art, etc. that I love. A world where, at its best, smart young people talk abstractly and idealistically about big issues and problems, and then greatly influence policy and culture. In the last few decades I’ve been associated with new groups like rationalists and effective altruists who have arisen in this mold.

Alas, I recently learned that forager-style elite talky collectives seem to be contributing to our civilization’s key problem of decline due to insufficient evolutionary pressures for dimensions of behavior not greatly under the control of capitalism, but instead subject to strong individual conformity pressures. Not only have youth movements been rapidly changing key cultural values with little regard to their adaptiveness, but our forager elite intellectuals have been overconfidently inducing over-regulation, severely limiting the scope of strong evolutionary pressures.

You see, ancient forager elites didn’t just consider in general how to promote their groups, they instead focused mostly on the possibility that some of group members might gain and use dangerous powers. Since then, people thinking like foragers have similarly focused on identifying and reigning in what they see as the dangerous potentially-ineqalitarian powers of their world. In the last few centuries, such dangers have included alien ideologies and militaries, capitalist owners and firms, and technologies like nuclear, genetic engineering, and AI. A lifetime of detailed examination of such things allows me to say with some confidence: we have consistently greatly over-regulated such things.

It is likely that our civilization will fall, to be replaced by much less forager-like versions. Like civs built by descendants of today’s Amish and Haredim. But I see a chance to save a lot, a chance I want to explore. Yes, this would require substantial compromise; we just can’t keep on relying on simple forager intuitions as naively as we have. But I do see a potential way out.

First, we’d need to adopt far more effective and accountable institutions for creating consensus on claims about the concrete consequences of policies. Institutions like policy decision markets or academic prestige futures. These could cut much of the bias in our policy choices, relative to our values. Second we’d need to either directly or indirectly show far more respect for adaptiveness when expressing our deep values. Either have big polities hold to sacred goals inconsistent with civ collapse, or smaller polities hold directly to their long term adaptiveness, both via rather competent governance institutions. Big asks, I know, but at least I see a chance here.

Early on, sufficient brains, culture, weapons, and language let us create social norms, i.e., “good” and “evil”. (I use scare quotes to point to social concepts that may not guide my choices.) At first, our main use of norms was to suppress the often violent internal competition that had previously limited feasible primate group size. Our norms said to help and share, and not hit, threaten, brag, or form subgroup coalitions. “Good” was following moral instincts and prestige incentives to take collective actions and enforce norms to prevent dangerous competition, while “evil” was conspiring in the shadows to compete for power, often by evading norm enforcement.

Funny thing though, while norms did help foragers avoid the worst scenarios of destructive conflict, foragers actually evolved more due to selection pressures that favored doing “evil” well, compared to “good”. That is, foragers mostly got smarter by learning to pretend to do “good” for the whole group while actually conspiring with allies to compete. Non-violently, but fiercely and cleverly. And this has been a consistent historical trend: our strongest selection pressures, inducing the most evolution, have long appeared in relatively “evil” harsh, destructive, norm-violating areas of life, relative to areas we see as driven more by “good”. Our evolutionary engines tend to be “evil”, not “good”, which is why “good” has found it so hard to defeat “evil”, even when everyone gives it such enthusiastic praise.

For example, before humans, predatory animals grew bigger more innovative brains, compared to prey animals and plants. Human foragers evolved more from hidden politics and competition than from cooperating to do “good”. In the farming era, war most drove cultural evolution, even though war was quite destructive, and made us do things we usually consider quite “evil”. In our industrial era, capitalism has driven evolution more than anything else, even though it is widely considered close to “evil” due to selfishness, competition, inequality, creative destruction, and indifference to sacredness. Today “social Darwinists”, who try to make their nations or groups win at Darwinian competition (either DNA or cultural), are now widely seen as max evil.

However, just as the stronger force of culture tamed the weaker DNA force, these harsh “evil” areas of life with stronger selection pressures have often tamed “good” areas. For example, collective forager talk and norm enforcement habits evolved to be manipulatable by covert political coalitions. (Just as in the politics of most small orgs today.) In the farming era, religions and norms evolved to support and not oppose wars. And in the early industrial era, capitalist pressures induced norm changes in many areas of life, to allow more money and capitalism there. “Good” behavior tends to become a hypocritical cover for “evil” forces.

However ~1900 competition between nations became a stronger selection force, with nations more controlling and limiting both capitalism and culture. And since WWII, activist-driven fast-changing culture has surged in strength, coming to control and limit both nations and capitalism. Over the entire industrial era, areas of life not run by capitalism and under strong conformity pressures have plausibly come to suffer from cultural drift into maladaption due to a lack of sufficiently powerful evolution. Eventually, such maladaption will plausibly get fixed by “evil” capitalism, with its stronger power, vitality, and selection pressures, taming conflicting forces of “good”, and then inducing norms that support a wider use of capitalism.

But before then we may suffer a long painful transition period during which much of what we cherish about our civ may be lost. For example, our civ might fall to be replaced by insular fertile subcultures like the Amish, with future civs maybe also rising and falling several times. Even human level AI doesn’t directly solve cultural drift, though the fact that capitalists now make, own, and shape AIs offers hope of a faster cleaner transition to a capitalism-dense AI world.

Why has culture been able to defy and limit capitalism so well over the last few centuries? I’ve suggested that weak cultural selection pressures have allowed a drift back to forager habits and attitudes, which DNA makes still more natural than farmer alternatives. Our increased wealth, health, and peace now makes us unusually willing and able to indulge forager-style moral preferences.

The usual forager view is this: we must coordinate via norms and governance to prevent dangerous competition from undermining our precious stable shared human values. For foragers in a small band, the dangerous competition came from sub-band coalitions. And all my life I’ve heard excess regulation justified in such terms, and heard futurists talk similarly, except that their envisioned dangerous competition comes from capitalism, genetic engineering, population explosion, or AI.

However, as our culture’s shared values today are not at all stable, but instead have been drifting fast into maladaption, they are not so precious. So making a “good” world government to control “evil” competition in their name thus seems bad. The only way to long preserve anything unusual about our civilization (e.g., open inquiry) is to mix it into an adaptive cultural package. And as capitalism is now our most powerful adaptive engine, that means a package where capitalism runs most things. (Other fixes seem variations on this.) Such as via big for-profit governments, capitalists paying parents to make profitable kids, sacred capitalists investing in sacred ventures, or foundations reinvesting all returns to drive interest rates down to growth rates.

Once “evil” capitalism has tamed the “good” norms of culture, we will still have norms that we enforce, norms which may on average mitigate real harms from excess competition. But which still allow strong selection pressures to keep our descendants adaptive. And which, if we are lucky, preserve some of what we today find precious about our civ.

Added 18May: Note the similarity of cooperative explicit good vs passionate powerful evil to near-far theory distinction of weakly-motivated abstract far to strongly-motivated concrete near.

I’ve marked in green the more reliable entries, where the range across the 3 LLM estimates is 2 or less, and in red less the reliable, where that range is 4 or more. Note that estimates seem less reliable in more recent periods.

Below the main table I show the median estimates, over all the times. Oddly, these values are consistently 6 or 7. Maybe all the time-specific LLM estimates given are normed to be relative to this time-independent reference point? In which case, these numbers are mostly about changes over the periods, not constant-over-time effects.

To the right of the main table I show the net (sum out minus in) influence for each power at each period. The story told here is that before industry culture dominated, states were much weaker, and capital was much weaker still. Then in the early Modern period all three had about equal influence, though capital might have had a bit more. In the middle Modern period states dominated, with capital much weaker, and culture much weaker still. But then in the most recent Modern period, culture has returned to dominate, with capital and states much weaker.

The part of this I feel most confident in is that the influence of capital, culture, and state on each other did change over this period, and it is worth trying to figure out how. I’m also pretty confident that the 1900-1970 period was the peak of state influence, and that culture had its peak influence both long ago and recently.

Unless we achieve human level AI soon, our dominant world civ’s population seem likely to decline, to be replaced by fertile insular religious subcultures like the Amish and Haredim, who have been doubling every 20yrs for over a century. (Like how Christians took over Roman Empire.) Human extinction seems unlikely, if our declining civ continues to tolerate their norm deviance. But we do risk the end, at least for a while, of many novel treasured features of our current civ, such as democracy, pacifism, gender equality, sexual freedom, legal due process, open inquiry, and modern artistic genres.

I’ve been pondering our options, and want to report my current thinking. I see four.

Fertile Cults - We might plausibly try to create more fertile durable insular subcultures, ones that save more of our treasured cultural features. This is quite hard, however, as only a tiny fraction of cults ever achieve this package. As the strongest cultural divides in the world today are along religious lines, the few successes here are likely to be religious. And this only puts off the problem; replacement civs, including AIs, would still suffer cultural drift until they found deeper solutions. Very small groups can try this, though alas few seem interested in the key insularity feature.

Max Capitalism - For-profit firms still seem to be sustaining a healthy cultural evolution, with the set of all firms improving over time even as typical firms decay. The decaying dimensions of our behaviors seem to be those we don’t let for-profit firms control. So we might fix those dimensions by removing such limits. For example, allow large-scale for-profit governments, let capitalists pay parents to make profitable kids, let sacred capitalists invest in sacred ventures, and let foundations reinvest all returns to drive interest rates down to growth rates. This must be tried at the scales where laws now forbid such ventures. While many are passionately against this, some are passionately for, an energy one could build on.

Adaption Policy - If we could commit to measuring the actual adaptive influence (both via DNA and culture) of groups today in a century or two, we could make futures markets in such measures, and then use changes in current price estimates of group adaption as metrics to reward and punish group leaders. This requires such people to overcome the now widespread taboo against “Social Darwinism” to value adaptiveness greatly, and enough to use adaption as a main criterion when choosing group leaders and policies. (Futarchy might help here.) Modestly small groups can try this, though very few now have much passion for the adaption goal.

Sacred Policy - While few have much passion for the direct goal of adaption, many more can find passion for goals that cultural maladaption might block. For example, the goals of having a million people living in space, or achieving physical immortality for humans, might take centuries and also take longer if our civ falls due to maladaption. Many might treat such goals as sacred, being proud to sacrifice for them and ashamed to abandon them. A group big enough to have substantial influence on when the world achieves such goals might make futures markets estimating such dates, and use price changes to reward and punish group leaders. (Futarchy might help here.) Alas, this requires rather large groups, and requires them to, when they achieve sacred goals, keep setting new goals also in conflict with civ decline.

Added 9May: I paid $100 to @X to boost a poll on these, yet got only 20 responses:

For years, cybersecurity experts have been warning about the chaos that highly capable hacking bots could usher in. … Claude Mythos Preview appears to represent not an incremental change but the beginning of a paradigm shift. … Perhaps more concerning than the reported capabilities of Mythos Preview is that other companies are not far behind. (More)

Finding bugs was also hard, so the worst flaws stayed hidden, sometimes for decades. It wasn’t a great system. But the difficulty on both sides created a kind of détente that held. Now, thanks to new A.I. tools, anyone can write code. Soon, bad actors could use those same tools to find out what’s wrong with code. The détente is over. (more)

Use strong passwords that are unique across every site, preferably through a trusted password manager. Better yet, when a site offers a passkey, take it. … For accounts without passkeys, use an authenticator app for two-factor authentication, not text messages. Always keep all your software up to date, and uninstall unnecessary apps. (more)

OK, I’m a few weeks late to this party, but not too late to give many of you news: We may soon face a period (a few years?) of greatly reduced software availability.

For many decades, we have known how to write pretty secure software. It takes a bit longer, and security considerations must be central to early design efforts, but it is possible. However, developers have usually been in too much of a rush to market to do this. So most software systems today are riddled with security holes. What has saved them so far is that it takes humans a lot of work to find and exploit such holes.

However, there now exist powerful AI systems that are far better at finding and using such holes. Soon (within a year or two?) many AI firms will have such tools, and they will spread to be widely available. Yes, such AI systems can also work to patch such holes, but computer security experts tell me that the nature of insecure systems is to make it much easier to find and use than to patch such holes. Attack beats defense.

Software firms would then more eagerly rewrite their code to use more secure designs, and AI could help them to do this. But this takes time, and as there isn’t a lot of secure software out there now, AI hasn’t had big datasets ready to help them learn how to do this well. So it will take some time to replace weak with strong software.

So there may soon be a period, starting within a few years, maybe lasting a few years, when most actual software systems can cheaply be hacked. This will make such software firms vulnerable to ransomware, and make customers wary of using their products. Customers, firms, and App stores, will respond by cutting back on what software systems they offer, and by simplifying them by dropping many features.

As our world has come to rely on software for a great many things, it seems quite concerning that we might soon have to make do with substantially less software. How vulnerable are crucial systems like electricity, cars, traffic lights, voting systems, and payment systems? I don’t think we know. Beware the coming Hackastrophe.

Note: such an event would likely make the public much more willing to regulate AI. And if credit card firms get overwhelmed with false sales, that could make crypto more attractive.

Besides participating as suppliers, customers, employees, or targets of such orgs, there are two other key ways we engage such orgs: politics and governance. In politics, we take sides among the different alliances of masters and tasks, struggling for who will dominate. In governance, we try to hold masters accountable for achieving tasks, and seek new better ways to choose, reward, and monitor them.

Low status folks have long been advised to keep their head down and stay out of both politics and governance. Higher status folks, in contrast, are somewhat encouraged to do politics, if they are willing to risk suffering repression when their allies lose. We like democracy as more of us can more safely be political, and thus see ourselves as high status, though politics becomes less safe as political polarization rises.

However, most folks are well advised to stay out of governance, at least when that involves any substantial chance of holding masters more accountable, and thus cutting into their spoils. Masters coordinate to block cuts to their spoils. (Yes, some spoils come via achieving promised tasks, but most don’t.) In contrast, masters don’t mind and even like governance changes that don’t risk stronger accountability. Such as making it more popular, inclusive, decentralized, more intensive participation, etc.

How much should you fear masters displeased by your meddling in governance? Greatly! Org masters, and their allies and wannabes, are the fiercest predators of our world. Smart, energetic, and well-connected, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing, smiling broadly, speaking gently and grandly, but holding their fangs and claws ready in shadows to strike when ready.

Alas, our world has long suffered from poor governance. So much so that for most problems we know how to solve, we don’t actually solve them. We got better enough at governance to allow the modern world to have big orgs, but just barely.

Today, our civilization faces problems so huge that we will mostly likely fall, as did the Roman Empire, to be replaced by insular fertile cultures like the Amish and Haredim. Better governance seems our best hope here, and promising alternatives do exist, ones that can be tested at small scales before deploying on larger scales. Alas such efforts are mainly blocked by spoil-protecting masters. Will enough of us risk their displeasure to force such innovation experiments in time?

Yet, strikingly, few in public discussions present themselves as trying to figure things out together with their convo partners. Such as by posing problems and questions, reframing these to avoid sloppiness, offering alternative options and answers, noting puzzling or contrary consequences, and admitting when one’s prior convo moves are undermined by new points made.

Yes, presenting a figuring-stuff-out-together convo persona often imposes some costs relative to other possible personas. But the more eager that we are to suppress other possible interpretations of their motives, the more eager we should be to pay such costs, to assert our preferred persona.

I have to conclude that while we usually don’t want to directly admit that we seek to impress, sell, or support, we don’t actually much mind observers inferring such motives in us. Few actually have that much respect for people those who try to figure stuff out together.