(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
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.
Why is the world not a monopoly. Why didn't one empire grow until it controlled the whole world, or one business expand to extinguish all competitors. This ultimately comes down to principle agent problems. Big businesses get dragged down by rent seekers. And in attempting to limit the number of rent seekers, they often throw out anyone that is not obviously productive. This can include people following more speculative strategies.
Empires can't expect the local ruler to actually work hard for the good of the empire as a whole. Empires have a harder job persisting when humans die off and are replaced. One leader can't mentally manage everything, and can't trust their subordinates.
All of these factors help allow small buisnesses to be proportionally as profitable as big ones. (Businesses form a size distribution where these factors balance the economies of scale.)
But in a world of AI or ems that didn't have principle agent problems (because they could duplicate themselves, and all duplicates work together), a monopoly is much more sustainable. A single human can't wield effective control over the world, they can't be watching everywhere. An AI can. And it can keep that power forever.
I liked Liu Cixin's 'Three Body Problem' trilogy on this. Its a little different in that humanity's long-term plans were survival driven but the ideas of competition between plans and plans taking acount of human competition in the future were central. Perhaps the problem with long-term thinking does not stem from its insincerity (signalling etc. as you describe) so much as from the difficulty of sharpening goals for 'What do we want?' over the inherently specific 'What must we accommodate'? The lack of rigour in specification in the former doesn't lead us to the level of detail needed to consider actual threats to their realization, including competition.
The consequences of the possibility of meeting advanced aliens are not billions of years in the future, because it takes time to prepare for the event, by gathering resources, performing research and developing. The effort is much the same if performed by an ecosystem of small competing organisms, or by a single huge organism directing its own evolution. Those two scenarios are ofthen thought to be quite different, but the alien race means that the resulting dynamics are quite similar. We still need similar attack and defense capabilities. With no local competition, we can't just defund the military and relax in pleasure gardens - we still have important work to do.
He did mention environmentalists, their view can be seen as indefinite and ongoing as long as ecosystems and biospheres remain unspoilt and I guess in the future solar systems remain mostly undisturbed they will feel satisfied and content or "rewarded" is that what you mean or something else?
You seem to presume that if you can show the existence of cooperation, you must be showing the absence of competition. But it is competition that has driven the creation of cooperative tendencies and mechanisms. They are not opposites. You may indeed cooperate with some "rivals", but you will almost never cooperate with all of them.
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 competitors.
Are you sure "competition" is the right framework for strategizing about these long-term, low-time preference ends? Competition in the economic sense is adversarial, whereas fertility, fiscal sustainability, and institutional quality are all far more related to "cooperation." Countries with fully-funded public pensions, or a big sovereign wealth funds that politicians are duty-bound not to touch, are characterized by a high level of inter-generational cooperation. Fertility is perhaps the most "long term" and self-sacrificial behavior the typical human can be expected to engage in, and while the evolutionary imperative of reproduction may be competitive in some ultimate sense, in practice having children represents a kind of transcendental cooperation between your distant ancestors and progeny. Human civilization itself only arose once language and culture came along, enabling us to coordinate through norms and rule following as if we were a hyper-social species in spite of our venial instincts.
Same with "institutional quality," i.e. competent bureaucracies that are permitted to act relatively autonomously and thus effectively. These arrangements are ultimately sustained by a high degree intra- and inter-generational social trust and cooperation. In contrast, when an organization is characterized by excessive attention to "competition," i.e. strategic maximizing, rules and process fill the void creating new frictions, like the substitution of patronage with competitive procurement laws.
Competitive constraints create boundary conditions for what's possible or likely. But even then, "attending to competition" could either mean thinking through the conditions of your rival's defeat, or thinking through the conditions under which you and rival will cooperate. The latter is more conducive to long-term survival, since the Nash equilibrium in most real world games is far from optimal. In finite vs infinite games sense, short-term views are thus competitive; long-term views are cooperative.
Everything is hard to predict in the long run. Competition doesn't seem harder to predict. In fact it seems easier to predict that what long-terms actually focus on.
Yes we will likely eventually meet aliens, though I estimate that to take a billion years. We are likely to face strong consequences of competition LONG before then.
Re firms, Robin seems to be thinking about competition in a larger sense - competition for capital, for skilled staff, for customer attention, for reputation.
Not just other firms in the same business.
Certainly many successful firms give little to no thought to other "competing" firms in the same industry - instead they focus on their product and service to customers, etc.
That doesn't mean they don't worry about competition for resources.
IMO, there exist ‘long-viewers’ who don’t worry about competition at all. Their focus is on building something - a country, a company - that they believe needs to exist. They are thinking about a wide variety of things like where the world is going, issues that need to be anticipated, how to make life better for many, as well as taking into consideration the nature of things. As an example, I believe the founders of the US were very much long-viewers who took into consideration a host of things such as unalienable rights, the tragedy of the commons, the tyranny of the majority, the fact that sociopaths exist, etc. The consequence of their long-view was they saw the need to create a constitutional republic - not a democracy - and went to great efforts to not just write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but the Federalist Papers and, within a short period of time, the Bill of Rights. In terms of companies, there are many examples of founders playing the long-game and my gut is the research would show that they gave little if any thought to the competition. Companies I’d put up for consideration would include Apple, Tesla, Boring Company, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ford, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Genentech. I’m confident there are companies that are so focused on where they want to be in five to ten years that they frankly aren’t even looking at their competition.
Agree with principles, contest the conclusion in two areas: 1) Long-term views constrained by difficulty of predicting nature of competition that far down the road. 2) The groups people form are more like weather-systems, ecosystems or sandstorms than agents with goals.
Interesting post. I agree with the commenters who could like some examples of the long-viewers you're thinking of, and the mistakes they're making. Perhaps also some exceptions that prove the rule, to really narrow down what you have in mind.
The people I know best who I would've described as "long-viewers" seem to imagine that prisoner's dilemmas will be more iterated than others do (though I don't think they'd describe it that way). This means, for example, being more concerned about certain types of fairness, and being less concerned about whether good deeds are noticed, since in the long run they will be. It means more cooperation, but not less competition -- their assumption is that a medium-to-high degree of cooperation will be the competitive equilibrium. One could think of, for example, a company that recalls a defective product -- expensive in the short run (both financially and reputationally), but perhaps a good move in the long run (if indeed the company turns out to have a long run).
And so I wonder if "long-viewer" brings to mind different examples for you. Maybe you're thinking of environmentalists and hippie dreamers? Or maybe those concerned with x-risk and AI safety? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around "long-viewers" as a coherent set with common features.
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.
Why is the world not a monopoly. Why didn't one empire grow until it controlled the whole world, or one business expand to extinguish all competitors. This ultimately comes down to principle agent problems. Big businesses get dragged down by rent seekers. And in attempting to limit the number of rent seekers, they often throw out anyone that is not obviously productive. This can include people following more speculative strategies.
Empires can't expect the local ruler to actually work hard for the good of the empire as a whole. Empires have a harder job persisting when humans die off and are replaced. One leader can't mentally manage everything, and can't trust their subordinates.
All of these factors help allow small buisnesses to be proportionally as profitable as big ones. (Businesses form a size distribution where these factors balance the economies of scale.)
But in a world of AI or ems that didn't have principle agent problems (because they could duplicate themselves, and all duplicates work together), a monopoly is much more sustainable. A single human can't wield effective control over the world, they can't be watching everywhere. An AI can. And it can keep that power forever.
I liked Liu Cixin's 'Three Body Problem' trilogy on this. Its a little different in that humanity's long-term plans were survival driven but the ideas of competition between plans and plans taking acount of human competition in the future were central. Perhaps the problem with long-term thinking does not stem from its insincerity (signalling etc. as you describe) so much as from the difficulty of sharpening goals for 'What do we want?' over the inherently specific 'What must we accommodate'? The lack of rigour in specification in the former doesn't lead us to the level of detail needed to consider actual threats to their realization, including competition.
The consequences of the possibility of meeting advanced aliens are not billions of years in the future, because it takes time to prepare for the event, by gathering resources, performing research and developing. The effort is much the same if performed by an ecosystem of small competing organisms, or by a single huge organism directing its own evolution. Those two scenarios are ofthen thought to be quite different, but the alien race means that the resulting dynamics are quite similar. We still need similar attack and defense capabilities. With no local competition, we can't just defund the military and relax in pleasure gardens - we still have important work to do.
He did mention environmentalists, their view can be seen as indefinite and ongoing as long as ecosystems and biospheres remain unspoilt and I guess in the future solar systems remain mostly undisturbed they will feel satisfied and content or "rewarded" is that what you mean or something else?
You seem to presume that if you can show the existence of cooperation, you must be showing the absence of competition. But it is competition that has driven the creation of cooperative tendencies and mechanisms. They are not opposites. You may indeed cooperate with some "rivals", but you will almost never cooperate with all of them.
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 competitors.
Are you sure "competition" is the right framework for strategizing about these long-term, low-time preference ends? Competition in the economic sense is adversarial, whereas fertility, fiscal sustainability, and institutional quality are all far more related to "cooperation." Countries with fully-funded public pensions, or a big sovereign wealth funds that politicians are duty-bound not to touch, are characterized by a high level of inter-generational cooperation. Fertility is perhaps the most "long term" and self-sacrificial behavior the typical human can be expected to engage in, and while the evolutionary imperative of reproduction may be competitive in some ultimate sense, in practice having children represents a kind of transcendental cooperation between your distant ancestors and progeny. Human civilization itself only arose once language and culture came along, enabling us to coordinate through norms and rule following as if we were a hyper-social species in spite of our venial instincts.
Same with "institutional quality," i.e. competent bureaucracies that are permitted to act relatively autonomously and thus effectively. These arrangements are ultimately sustained by a high degree intra- and inter-generational social trust and cooperation. In contrast, when an organization is characterized by excessive attention to "competition," i.e. strategic maximizing, rules and process fill the void creating new frictions, like the substitution of patronage with competitive procurement laws.
Competitive constraints create boundary conditions for what's possible or likely. But even then, "attending to competition" could either mean thinking through the conditions of your rival's defeat, or thinking through the conditions under which you and rival will cooperate. The latter is more conducive to long-term survival, since the Nash equilibrium in most real world games is far from optimal. In finite vs infinite games sense, short-term views are thus competitive; long-term views are cooperative.
Everything is hard to predict in the long run. Competition doesn't seem harder to predict. In fact it seems easier to predict that what long-terms actually focus on.
It seems far from obvious that good deeds today will be rewarded in the long run.
Yes we will likely eventually meet aliens, though I estimate that to take a billion years. We are likely to face strong consequences of competition LONG before then.
Re firms, Robin seems to be thinking about competition in a larger sense - competition for capital, for skilled staff, for customer attention, for reputation.
Not just other firms in the same business.
Certainly many successful firms give little to no thought to other "competing" firms in the same industry - instead they focus on their product and service to customers, etc.
That doesn't mean they don't worry about competition for resources.
IMO, there exist ‘long-viewers’ who don’t worry about competition at all. Their focus is on building something - a country, a company - that they believe needs to exist. They are thinking about a wide variety of things like where the world is going, issues that need to be anticipated, how to make life better for many, as well as taking into consideration the nature of things. As an example, I believe the founders of the US were very much long-viewers who took into consideration a host of things such as unalienable rights, the tragedy of the commons, the tyranny of the majority, the fact that sociopaths exist, etc. The consequence of their long-view was they saw the need to create a constitutional republic - not a democracy - and went to great efforts to not just write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but the Federalist Papers and, within a short period of time, the Bill of Rights. In terms of companies, there are many examples of founders playing the long-game and my gut is the research would show that they gave little if any thought to the competition. Companies I’d put up for consideration would include Apple, Tesla, Boring Company, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ford, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Genentech. I’m confident there are companies that are so focused on where they want to be in five to ten years that they frankly aren’t even looking at their competition.
Agree with principles, contest the conclusion in two areas: 1) Long-term views constrained by difficulty of predicting nature of competition that far down the road. 2) The groups people form are more like weather-systems, ecosystems or sandstorms than agents with goals.
Interesting post. I agree with the commenters who could like some examples of the long-viewers you're thinking of, and the mistakes they're making. Perhaps also some exceptions that prove the rule, to really narrow down what you have in mind.
The people I know best who I would've described as "long-viewers" seem to imagine that prisoner's dilemmas will be more iterated than others do (though I don't think they'd describe it that way). This means, for example, being more concerned about certain types of fairness, and being less concerned about whether good deeds are noticed, since in the long run they will be. It means more cooperation, but not less competition -- their assumption is that a medium-to-high degree of cooperation will be the competitive equilibrium. One could think of, for example, a company that recalls a defective product -- expensive in the short run (both financially and reputationally), but perhaps a good move in the long run (if indeed the company turns out to have a long run).
And so I wonder if "long-viewer" brings to mind different examples for you. Maybe you're thinking of environmentalists and hippie dreamers? Or maybe those concerned with x-risk and AI safety? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around "long-viewers" as a coherent set with common features.
Why don't self-described “long-viewers” attend much to competition?"
Don't they? Examples?