Many of our institutions are prodigiously wasteful. Under the feel-good veneer of win-win cooperation— teaching kids, healing the sick, celebrating creativity—our institutions harbor giant, silent furnaces of intra-group competitive signaling, where trillions of dollars of wealth, resources, and human effort are being shoveled in and burned to ash every year, largely for the purpose of showing off. Now our institutions do end up achieving many of their official, stated goals, but they’re often rather inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving other purposes no one is eager to acknowledge. (
Maybe all advanced life in the universe have these things in common: Evolution by Natural Selection, Genes, language, and wasteful bureaucracies. Perhaps there are interstellar DMVs with long lines of exasperated aliens waiting to get stickers for their spaceships!
My question is why are institutions so wasteful. I guess it’s because they can be. They get tax-payer money irregardless of efficiency. It’s a case of I scratch your back, you scratch mine, reciprocal altruism in a way. We all do little, but still reap the benefits.But, would that be universal in institutions across the universe?
Hanson’s book the Elephant in the Brain looks like an interesting read that will provide answers for this!
I wonder if Dawkins the Selfish Gene provides a deeper analysis too. Our genes influence us to pass them on in selfish and unselfish ways, and we may not even be consciously aware of it.
It might be that if all life had to evolve in a “pure replicator” kind of environment, it would have cognitive biases very like ours, which serve as survival and reproduction heuristics. But are there other kinds of evolutionary dynamics which would lead to different kinds of psychology? Is there any theoretical work on this idea?
One problem with this kind of argument is AI. If you think a superhuman AI can be made using deep conceptual insight, programming skill and a moderate amount of computing power.
Given modern information tech, it is hard to suppress an idea. Its hard enough to stop a single specific digital file. Even harder to stop an abstract idea that can be rephrased into different words. Especially if that idea has proponents trying to spread it. Technical mathematial research is also not on the top of most governments ban list. Computing power is one of the things that is currently not heavily regulated. It is in general very hard to ban people from running certain types of code, because reading code is hard and obfuscating it is easy. And the government code censor bureaucrats are unlikely to be experts in cutting edge AI techniques.
In short, stopping AI research seems very hard to do for a competent government that deliberately wanted to do so. Even more so for a moloch run fubar government.
Doing AI research is a unilateral action. One thing you can't say about inefficiency furnaces is that they force perfect short term competition, leaving no human in them any slack. There are also at least, short term incentives towards having slightly better AI than the competition.
I don't think inefficiency furnaces should be that hard for a superhuman AI to take over either.
I'm reminded of the following quote from "The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov:
"Any system like Eternity which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach."
But notice that although London has fully automated trains, they only run on one, fairly unimportant line. All the other lines have drivers, at great expense and with occasional huge disruption. Adopting the more efficient technology would upset important elites, so it doesn't happen. And this situation has persisted for decades.
Usually when I talk about the Fermi Paradox with someone I'll get a response like, "Well, what if aliens just don't want to expand or explore?" Then I'll say, "Then we might not see them. But that requires ALL aliens to feel that way. If there was one that didn't, they would take over the galaxy."
This feels like the same response. Even if bureaucratic stagnation was limited for some civilizations, would it be limiting for *all*? Seems hard to accept.
Beyond that, there are many examples in our not-so-distant past of organizations calcifying and preventing progress. The Guild era and hereditary monarchies seriously stifle progress. But once new regions opened up for expansion and exploration, productivity boomed. I assume it will be the same way for space.
This article was published on my birthday. I happen to find it for a homework assignment. This perspective is like a better worded version of my thoughts. I will definitely continue reading these articles 💯
I'm not sure about aliens, but it seems to me that the main challenge facing humanity is that our intellect evolved in the setup of social conflict - in other words, it's not a tool to find the truth, merely to manipulate other humans. It's not even clear how we may overcome this challenge, as we will be prone to reject any artificial intelligence that is differently structured (see the current debate on how to "avoid bias in AI").
The structure and features of human intellect explain most of the unsatisfactory outcomes Robin describes (and many others).
Alien intelligences may have different origins - for example, their natural environment may be so difficult that it paid to develop high intelligence to deal with it.
OP, please tag this "signaling" or "status" or something like that because it has to do with how social conflicts make things inefficient.
Incidentally, I've felt the effects of dysfunctional institutions directly. When I visited London and Paris in 2016 (not sure about exact date; two separate trips), the thing that stood out to me the most was not the tourist attractions or the different culture (although those definitely stood out to me), but the fact that they have absolutely rad public transportation system (fully automated trains! sanitary train stops! proper ticketing systems!), to which my hometown's public transportation system in MA, USA sucks by comparison.
If aliens are 100M light years away in space and travel at 0.1c, we’d still have 900M years to watch them coming. As I understand it, we’re more likely to observe inefficient aliens if they’re sufficiently more common than grabby aliens.
It was explained in previous posts of Robin. If they are moving with the speed close to the speed of light, the wave of exploration is almost unobservable, as it will be observed only shortly before arrival. Given the median distance of 1 GYR to grabby aliens and random arrival time, it is very unlikely that we live just before arrival.
Maybe all advanced life in the universe have these things in common: Evolution by Natural Selection, Genes, language, and wasteful bureaucracies. Perhaps there are interstellar DMVs with long lines of exasperated aliens waiting to get stickers for their spaceships!
My question is why are institutions so wasteful. I guess it’s because they can be. They get tax-payer money irregardless of efficiency. It’s a case of I scratch your back, you scratch mine, reciprocal altruism in a way. We all do little, but still reap the benefits.But, would that be universal in institutions across the universe?
Hanson’s book the Elephant in the Brain looks like an interesting read that will provide answers for this!
I wonder if Dawkins the Selfish Gene provides a deeper analysis too. Our genes influence us to pass them on in selfish and unselfish ways, and we may not even be consciously aware of it.
It might be that if all life had to evolve in a “pure replicator” kind of environment, it would have cognitive biases very like ours, which serve as survival and reproduction heuristics. But are there other kinds of evolutionary dynamics which would lead to different kinds of psychology? Is there any theoretical work on this idea?
One problem with this kind of argument is AI. If you think a superhuman AI can be made using deep conceptual insight, programming skill and a moderate amount of computing power.
Given modern information tech, it is hard to suppress an idea. Its hard enough to stop a single specific digital file. Even harder to stop an abstract idea that can be rephrased into different words. Especially if that idea has proponents trying to spread it. Technical mathematial research is also not on the top of most governments ban list. Computing power is one of the things that is currently not heavily regulated. It is in general very hard to ban people from running certain types of code, because reading code is hard and obfuscating it is easy. And the government code censor bureaucrats are unlikely to be experts in cutting edge AI techniques.
In short, stopping AI research seems very hard to do for a competent government that deliberately wanted to do so. Even more so for a moloch run fubar government.
Doing AI research is a unilateral action. One thing you can't say about inefficiency furnaces is that they force perfect short term competition, leaving no human in them any slack. There are also at least, short term incentives towards having slightly better AI than the competition.
I don't think inefficiency furnaces should be that hard for a superhuman AI to take over either.
This is the Straussian reading of "Plan 9 From Outer Space".
Unless they had already reached the stars before that point.
I'm reminded of the following quote from "The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov:
"Any system like Eternity which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach."
Seems you missed the paragraph starting "Yes, if aliens …"
But notice that although London has fully automated trains, they only run on one, fairly unimportant line. All the other lines have drivers, at great expense and with occasional huge disruption. Adopting the more efficient technology would upset important elites, so it doesn't happen. And this situation has persisted for decades.
These FUBAR situations are fractal.
Usually when I talk about the Fermi Paradox with someone I'll get a response like, "Well, what if aliens just don't want to expand or explore?" Then I'll say, "Then we might not see them. But that requires ALL aliens to feel that way. If there was one that didn't, they would take over the galaxy."
This feels like the same response. Even if bureaucratic stagnation was limited for some civilizations, would it be limiting for *all*? Seems hard to accept.
Beyond that, there are many examples in our not-so-distant past of organizations calcifying and preventing progress. The Guild era and hereditary monarchies seriously stifle progress. But once new regions opened up for expansion and exploration, productivity boomed. I assume it will be the same way for space.
This article was published on my birthday. I happen to find it for a homework assignment. This perspective is like a better worded version of my thoughts. I will definitely continue reading these articles 💯
I'm not sure about aliens, but it seems to me that the main challenge facing humanity is that our intellect evolved in the setup of social conflict - in other words, it's not a tool to find the truth, merely to manipulate other humans. It's not even clear how we may overcome this challenge, as we will be prone to reject any artificial intelligence that is differently structured (see the current debate on how to "avoid bias in AI").
The structure and features of human intellect explain most of the unsatisfactory outcomes Robin describes (and many others).
Alien intelligences may have different origins - for example, their natural environment may be so difficult that it paid to develop high intelligence to deal with it.
OP, please tag this "signaling" or "status" or something like that because it has to do with how social conflicts make things inefficient.
Incidentally, I've felt the effects of dysfunctional institutions directly. When I visited London and Paris in 2016 (not sure about exact date; two separate trips), the thing that stood out to me the most was not the tourist attractions or the different culture (although those definitely stood out to me), but the fact that they have absolutely rad public transportation system (fully automated trains! sanitary train stops! proper ticketing systems!), to which my hometown's public transportation system in MA, USA sucks by comparison.
Enjoy the show.
Our prediction is more like 0.75c.
If aliens are 100M light years away in space and travel at 0.1c, we’d still have 900M years to watch them coming. As I understand it, we’re more likely to observe inefficient aliens if they’re sufficiently more common than grabby aliens.
It was explained in previous posts of Robin. If they are moving with the speed close to the speed of light, the wave of exploration is almost unobservable, as it will be observed only shortly before arrival. Given the median distance of 1 GYR to grabby aliens and random arrival time, it is very unlikely that we live just before arrival.