Long Views Are Competitive
(I thought I’d said this somewhere before, but this is closest I’ve found.)
In all human decisions, we face two main issues:
A) What do we want?
B) What must we accommodate?
When we are rich and our universe is mild, we can focus on that first consideration. But when we are poor, or in a harsh universe, we must attend more to the constraints that our universe imposes on our choices. (E.g., ems being poor let me say much about them in Age of Em, without knowing what they want.)
Compared to most animals, humans live a lot in artificial worlds, pursuing artificial ends. That is, rather than focusing on making sure that we have enough food and protection from elements and predators, we pursue art, stories, love, connection, honor, glory, etc. And we build artificial environments to help us better purse such artificial ends. In our minds, we do these things because they are more what we want, while we pursue food, protection, etc. more because we must accommodate starvation, predation, etc.
But of course at larger social and evolutionary levels, we humans want what we want because such wants helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. Because cultures and genes must accommodate a competitive environment of other cultures and genes. In fact, evolving cultures and genes focus overwhelming on such accommodation; they have nothing else they want.
Our evolved habits don’t now have individual humans attending much to the long term future. We sit in equilibria where collective action problems discourage such attention. For example, as each kid shares only half our genes, they get only half as much of our attention. But someday, I predict, our descendants will take much longer views, and more directly take long run constraints into account in their decisions. Such as from competition.
Today, some people claim to take long views. But such people seem to focus overwhelmingly on debating what they collectively want, and attend little to the constraints that the universe imposes on such long term plans. Especially competition; most self-described “long-viewers” today assume that competition can be controlled and overruled, so that they need not consider it as a constraint on their plans.
This seems completely wrong to me. It seems obvious that it is easier to focus on what you want when your focus is short term.
For example, if your personal focus is only on the next 24 hours, you need to make sure you don’t put a plastic bag on your head, or fall off a cliff. But you don’t need to work, eat, or even drink. You can mostly make art, fall in love, etc. with abandon. You can even freely betray your associates to achieve such ends. If your focus is on the next decade, in contrast, you need to attend more to working, eating, drinking, and preserving your relationships. You will be competing with other workers for jobs, and with other people for relations.
For another example, if we look at the level of a nation focusing on a two year pandemic, one needn’t worry much about excessive borrowing, failing to teach students, or eroding public confidence in its institutions. In contrast, those seeking to help their nation prosper over a century should worry about its fertility, debt, savings rates, and institution quality, and especially about how these compare to foreign rivals.
A firm with a mildly higher cost of production can be pretty sure to stay in business for the next year, but is less likely to stay in the black for decades. Similarly, the longer a species has a persistent disadvantage relative to a rival, the less likely it is to survive that rival.
People who really cared a lot more than most do about the long term future should therefore focus more than do most on competition. On how competitive constraints will limit what they can achieve. On what competitive units will exist and to which they should ally themselves in order to achieve their ends. And what their strategy will be to win these competitions. (Yes, such strategies will likely include some kinds of cooperation.)
So why don’t self-described “long-viewers” attend much to competition? Probably because they mainly use long-term talk as a way to signal values to associates. Just as in most politics, science fiction, and futurism.
I expect intergroup competition will prevent a total return to subsistence for humanity. It is true that our current world has little intergroup competition. This era began in 1945 when the 5 most powerful continent spanning empires formed the Security Council. Their main act has been to prevent expansionist wars between states. While in the short term the end to expansionist wars has averted tremendous suffering, it had obvious benefits for the 5 main partiers. The five empires stopped any new empires from forming. You don't need a degree to understand why the five crime families collude to stop new families starting, or why the 5 empires would collude to stop new empires.The unfortunate long run effect is that intergroup competition at the state level declined greatly after 1945. Lebanon may be a terrible country at producing economic growth, public legitimacy, or effective state institutions (the key resources of war and other competition). But Lebanon survives as a zombie state because norms against conquest are strongly enforced by the security council. As a result we no longer face strong competitive pressures at both levels.RH has claimed that in the future competitive pressures will force *individuals* to subsistence levels (setting aside AI for the moment). For individuals to reach subsistence levels in the long run requires one of the following1. The cartel of conquest capacity in the security council must continue *even when most humans live subsistence lives*2. Those states where humans live at subsistence levels are the most competitive states -OR- not one state ever solves the subsistence problemThe first scenario is pretty obvious. Most states degrade as society approaches subsistence. However, the security council maintains its capacity to coordinate, wield violence and control nuclear weapons and continues the anti-conquest international norm. Maybe Japan solves the subsistence problem for a while but Japan's solution cannot spread because they are not actually competing with other states.In the second scenario, at least one state should solve the subsistence problem. For example if every member of a society is a clone of past members (taken from say 2100), evolution toward competition would not occur. Or if a successful one child policy was implemented. Suppose that Japan, China and New Zealand (the big three) successfully institute such policies, but the other countries do not. The Big Three have huge advantages over other countries: surpluses not put toward subsistence and a population more genetically disposed to rule following and altruism. With the security council long defunct as an institution, the interstate competition is back on the menu.There have been past epochs where some states possessed such advantages and no security council existed. Consider 1650-1914, when European empires dominated the glove. Or the dawn of the iron age. Or the spread of Catholicism and Islam respectively. The result was usually some form of domination of the stronger states. In the short term that domination greated tremendous human suffering. But in the long term it spread those more competitive institutions around the globe (see Karl Marx "On British Imperialism in India). In conclusion I find a future of subsistence level human to human competition implausible because group level competition should eradicate it except in extreme scenarios. Of course AI or Age of Em futures face very different rules.
Suppose you were highly uncertain about how much competition there would be. In a high competition world, everything settles out in the same equilibrium, whatever we do now. There is only one nash equilibria, or a few that are largely similar.
We have an opportunity to influence the low competition worlds.As such, we focus on the low competition worlds.