My Politics
Not sure why I didn’t notice before, but I’ve just realized that my key ask re cultural drift, namely let’s try to save cherished parts of our culture from being discarded by successor civs, violates key modern taboos! While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future. To most, this seems tribal, anti-universalist, nationalistic, exclusionary, anti-progress, and like wanting to control future people.
I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now? I decided to do a political inventory. So I made this list of my key politics-adjacent positions:
My Key Positions, 2026:
I’m not especially into redistribution, beyond enabling poverty/harm insurance.
I’m not especially into promoting gender, race, sex pref, or trans equity. I expect many group IQ & habit differences exist, but don’t much care.
I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.
I’m not particular loyal to my nation, region, or profession. & I’m atheist. The sacred is real and powerful, but often very wasteful. Let’s try sacred money.
I think we’ve had way too much govt intervention for most purposes. Big business is good. Medicine & education, and much else, are big wastes due to hidden motives; don’t subsidize. But cryonics looks nice. I’d privatize most criminal law. Elites tend to be better.
We use prestige too much to judge quality; let’s use incentive contracts more.
I generally expect and want much tech change, inducing much culture change.
There’s a good chance some UFOs are aliens. If so, they are likely here to domesticate us, so that we obey their no-expansion rule. This is bad news.
Fertility decline is bad; let’s cut by giving parents transferable % of kids’ future tax payments. Yes, this is a symptom of a deeper problem (see next), but raising fertility extends innovation period, giving more time to fix deeper problems.
The world’s biggest problem is cultural drift. If we don’t fix this, our civ will fall, and new ones will throw away much of what we cherish re ours. We can only save parts, by mixing them into a more adaptive package. I’d most save: open intellectual inquiry.
Let’s please cut modern taboos against promoting your culture in long run. Also, the world has in fact been changing culture too fast. But we’ve changed so much that RETVRNing to what traditionalists advise won’t help much.
We will have to change some big stuff to fix cultural drift. Here are 4 options; I mainly want something that works. I doubt DNA evolve/mods will help much.
A) Split world into many insular units, that trade basic stuff but talk/travel less. Okay if that makes global coordination harder.
B) Let capitalism own/run far more (eg govts, grow kids); cut taboos against.
C) Small groups set futures markets in group adaption metrics; judge leaders on make #s go up.
D) Big groups set futures markets in when world achieves sacred goal conflicts w/ civ fall (eg, immortality, or 1M live in space); judge leaders on make #s go up.
Both C,D are aided by develop more competent governance (eg futarchy).
We should allow and explore far more applications of betting markets.
I value future AI (including ems) as our main descendants, and I expect them to (as usual) overpower & disagree w/ their ancestors. I care little re their hardware details, & presume they’ll be conscious, though we’ll never get more data on that. But I worry that overly aggressive and crude efforts to align them or give them rights may block adaptive evolution.
Then I asked 5 LLMs to use this to give a percentile rank for how weird I am. Their median answer: 99.5-99.8% weird! I also asked them to identify existing groups who seem good allies. The top two: e/acc and rationalism. The next three, roughly equally rated: pro-natalism, neo-reaction, and anarcho-capitalism.
Finally, I asked for a good name for my position. Adaptist, Adaptive Accelerationist, and Market Darwinist were suggested by some, but rejected by others. Leaving four candidates: Selectionist, Cultural Selectionist, Evolutionary Capitalist, and Adaptive Futurist. In a poll, Adaptive Futurist won.
Robin, I like to read your takes because they are very different from what most other people come up with. But the LLMs are not gaslighting you: some of your views are pretty weird, and the combination of them even weirder. A few things that stood out to me:
1. There is a tension between wanting to preserve the old (culture) and usher in the new (technology).
2. There is another tension between wanting to reduce government intervention in some areas (like medicine and education) while increasing government intervention in others (like child rearing).
3. You selectively want to preserve some liberalist values (like open intellectual inquiry) while not caring about others (like liberty, democracy, and civil rights).
>>> 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to make your culture persist
Why do you think they are correct? Taboo to the average American? European? People under 30?
Or are you saying to is taboo to make your specific cultural beliefs persist?
I ask because it doesn't seem, in general, like a taboo to me. In fact, seems like most people I know what their culture to persist