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:

1. I’m not especially into redistribution, beyond enabling poverty/harm insurance.

2. 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.

3. I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things. I’d privatize much of criminal law.

4. I think we’ve had way too much govt intervention for most purposes. Big business is good. Medicine & education are big wastes; don’t subsidize. But cryonics looks nice.

5. I’m not particular loyal to my nation or region, and I’m atheist. Elites tend to be better.

6. I generally expect and want much tech change, inducing much culture change.

7. There’s a good chance some UFOs are aliens. If so, they are likely here to domesticate us, so we obey their no-expansion rule. This is bad news.

8. Fertility decline is bad; let’s cut by giving parents transferable % of kids’ future tax payments. But this is only a symptom of deeper problem:

9. 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.

10. It would help to overcome recent taboos against promoting your culture in long run.

11. This view implies that 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.

12. 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 for that to make global coordination harder.

    B) Let capitalism own/run far more stuff (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).

13. I value future AI as our main descendants, and as in past I expect them to 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 efforts to align them or give them rights will 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. I’m now doing a poll to see which of these people like best.