Change Favors The Robust, Not The Radical

There are futurists who like to think about the non-immediate future, and there are radicals who advocate for unusual policies, such as on work, diet, romance, governance, etc. And the intersection between these groups is larger than you might have expected by chance; futurists tend to be radicals and radicals tend to be futurists. This applies to me, in that I’ve both proposed a radical futarchy, and have a book on future ems.

The usual policies that we adopt in our usual world have a usual set of arguments in their favor, arguments usually tied to the details of our usual world. So those who want to argue instead for radical policies must both argue against the usual pro-arguments, and then also offer a new set of arguments in favor of their radical alternatives, arguments also tied to the details of our world. This can seem like a heavy burden.

So many who favor radical policies prefer to switch contexts and reject the relevance of the usual details of our world. By invoking a future where many things change, they feel they can just dismiss the usual arguments for the usual policies based on the usual details of our world. And at this point they usually rest, feeling their work is done. They like being in a situation where, even if they can’t argue very strongly for their radical policies, others also can’t argue very strongly against such policies. Intellectual stalemate can seem a big step up from the usual radical’s situation of being at a big argumentative disadvantage.

But while this may help to win (or at least not lose) argument games, it should not actually make us favor radical policies more. It should instead shift our attention to robust arguments, ones can apply over a wide range of possibilities. We need to hear positive arguments for why we should expect radical policies to work well robustly across a wide range of possible futures, relative to our status quo policies.

In my recent video discussion with James Hughes, he criticized me for assuming that many familiar elements of our world, such as property, markets, inequality, sexuality, and individual identities, continue into an em age. He instead foresaw an enormous hard-to-delimit range of possibilities. But then he seemed to think this favored his radical solution of a high-regulation high-redistribution strong global socialist government which greatly limits and keeps firm control over autonomous artificial intelligences. Yet he didn’t offer arguments for why this is a robust solution that we should expect to work well in a very wide variety of situations.

It seems to me that if we are going to focus on the axis of decentralized markets vs. more centralized and structured organizations, it is markets that have proven themselves to be the more robust mechanism, working reasonably well in a very wide range of situations. It is structured organizations that are more fragile, and fail more quickly as situations change. Firms go out of business often when their organizations fail to keep up with changing environments; decentralized markets disappearing because they fail to serve participants happens far less often.