“The value of that innovation will go away when that goal goes away.”
Hmmm…
You seem deliberately to be avoiding the compounding effects of the growth of wealth.
Yes, ceteris paribus, what you write is true. But ceteris is rarely paribus.
I’m just restating the Cowen Stubborn Attachments thesis, really. The best thing we can do for our descendants is sustainably grow what makes us all wealthy.
So a “rocket booster” that only adds value for 50 years, but makes society fantastically more productive and wealthy during those 50 years, likely is much more valuable over the next, say, 500 years than something which delivers less value the first 50 but continues to add non-zero value “forever”.
This is not to deny the value of “adaptiveness”, since I fully agree that adaptiveness is necessary for delivering “sustainable”.
I don't think I agree with this (or at least I don't fully understand). The best innovation is adaptive - yes. But goals are just a mechanism. It is quite feasible to create an innovation in pursuit of a narrow goal that turns out to have wide application. It is also possible to innovate without any goal to pursue.
"And they will less help your descendants pursue all the goals that you share with them."
I think I agree with everything you wrote, but the final framing seems to elide the question of to what extent future beings are "our descendants". It seems to me that there's a tough tradeoff here between producing fewer descendants that share our idiosyncratic goals, and producing more reproductively successful, but more different from us, descendants.
It also elides the possibility (which I think you rightly find scary) of coordinating to control physical and memetic reproduction at all levels, so that we might be able to "pick winners" by criteria different than what is most competitively fit.
There's perhaps a spiritual choice here. I think we both agree that the future will be dominated by those who are adaptive, or maybe to some extent by those who are agentic. We're all of course not perfectly adaptive or agentic. My instinct is to think of myself as agentic, make myself more so, and to maybe try to align with some future coalition of the agentic. But this might mean, as you pointed out to me, sacrificing all sorts of innovation, learning, growth and diversity, which I clearly value and is what brought us almost everything good we have.
It seems to me that your instinct is to think of yourself as part of the adaptive coalition, and to embrace the necessary change. But of course this might mean sacrificing all of the idiosyncratic, non-competitive things we might happen to value. These things are (almost by definition) fragile, hard to justify, and not likely to stand the test of time on their own. Embracing change means that you're always on the "right side of history", but maybe for a very weak definition of "you".
Is this maybe the grand question of how our civilization turns out: Amish vs Locusts? What is stable at the highest level? Maybe it's not so stark: We can also argue that even the Amish are ossified Locusts, who adapted for all of history until they froze their values and culture. And that to be successful, locusts still need to work to conserve their own agency (e.g. even just by fighting cancer, infection, and aging).
I agree there's a possibility to coordinate to control what becomes adaptive to some degree. I fear we are not ready to handle it anytime soon. This post was indeed trying to call attention to the tradeoff between trying to promote likely maladaptive values vs promoting adaption.
>Cultural evolution endowed you with habits and goals in order to try to make your culture and its elements more adaptive.
Seems dubious. Traditional cultures behaved with the assumption that they were already in an adaptive equilibrium, and mostly tried to instill conformity and obedience. Useful innovations were rare. Whereas, once Enlightenment got going, they were quickly and soundly outcompeted by a culture prone to maladaptive long-term drift, which you've been discussing at some length, so it doesn't look like cultural evolution is up to the task yet.
Yes, and that approach isn't applicable to our predicaments, because there's no longer an equilibrium-ish baseline. Clearly, we also don't have any other workable approaches yet, so it's an exciting new frontier going forward...
Why think that: "each human goal is the result of cultural evolution"? Human goals include having sex, staying warm, avoiding pain and avoiding hunger. Those predate cultural evolution are are pretty clearly linked to DNA genes instead.
Cool idea, it's worth remembering that all innovations must be adaptive - useful - to survive. You're right about general application having a wider impact too.
There's a different way to view it though. It's easier to focus on a small, specific problem and it's more likely you'll actually finish, rather than allowing mission creep to cause procrastination. Once you've created one innovation, you can move onto the next one. The more innovations you create, the more likely one of them will turn out to have much more impact than anticipated. Or they can compound I to something truly outstanding.
> And none of your goals cannot be promoted very far into the future unless there are creatures in that future who hold them, and can thus promote them there.
You confused yourself with a double-negative there: "cannot" should be "can", or "none of" should be removed.
“The value of that innovation will go away when that goal goes away.”
Hmmm…
You seem deliberately to be avoiding the compounding effects of the growth of wealth.
Yes, ceteris paribus, what you write is true. But ceteris is rarely paribus.
I’m just restating the Cowen Stubborn Attachments thesis, really. The best thing we can do for our descendants is sustainably grow what makes us all wealthy.
So a “rocket booster” that only adds value for 50 years, but makes society fantastically more productive and wealthy during those 50 years, likely is much more valuable over the next, say, 500 years than something which delivers less value the first 50 but continues to add non-zero value “forever”.
This is not to deny the value of “adaptiveness”, since I fully agree that adaptiveness is necessary for delivering “sustainable”.
I don't think I agree with this (or at least I don't fully understand). The best innovation is adaptive - yes. But goals are just a mechanism. It is quite feasible to create an innovation in pursuit of a narrow goal that turns out to have wide application. It is also possible to innovate without any goal to pursue.
> People pursue goals
I'm skeptical 🤔
"And they will less help your descendants pursue all the goals that you share with them."
I think I agree with everything you wrote, but the final framing seems to elide the question of to what extent future beings are "our descendants". It seems to me that there's a tough tradeoff here between producing fewer descendants that share our idiosyncratic goals, and producing more reproductively successful, but more different from us, descendants.
It also elides the possibility (which I think you rightly find scary) of coordinating to control physical and memetic reproduction at all levels, so that we might be able to "pick winners" by criteria different than what is most competitively fit.
There's perhaps a spiritual choice here. I think we both agree that the future will be dominated by those who are adaptive, or maybe to some extent by those who are agentic. We're all of course not perfectly adaptive or agentic. My instinct is to think of myself as agentic, make myself more so, and to maybe try to align with some future coalition of the agentic. But this might mean, as you pointed out to me, sacrificing all sorts of innovation, learning, growth and diversity, which I clearly value and is what brought us almost everything good we have.
It seems to me that your instinct is to think of yourself as part of the adaptive coalition, and to embrace the necessary change. But of course this might mean sacrificing all of the idiosyncratic, non-competitive things we might happen to value. These things are (almost by definition) fragile, hard to justify, and not likely to stand the test of time on their own. Embracing change means that you're always on the "right side of history", but maybe for a very weak definition of "you".
Is this maybe the grand question of how our civilization turns out: Amish vs Locusts? What is stable at the highest level? Maybe it's not so stark: We can also argue that even the Amish are ossified Locusts, who adapted for all of history until they froze their values and culture. And that to be successful, locusts still need to work to conserve their own agency (e.g. even just by fighting cancer, infection, and aging).
I agree there's a possibility to coordinate to control what becomes adaptive to some degree. I fear we are not ready to handle it anytime soon. This post was indeed trying to call attention to the tradeoff between trying to promote likely maladaptive values vs promoting adaption.
>Cultural evolution endowed you with habits and goals in order to try to make your culture and its elements more adaptive.
Seems dubious. Traditional cultures behaved with the assumption that they were already in an adaptive equilibrium, and mostly tried to instill conformity and obedience. Useful innovations were rare. Whereas, once Enlightenment got going, they were quickly and soundly outcompeted by a culture prone to maladaptive long-term drift, which you've been discussing at some length, so it doesn't look like cultural evolution is up to the task yet.
Traditional cultures bet that changes would only rarely be adaptive, and so set a high bar for them. They were right, until they weren't.
Yes, and that approach isn't applicable to our predicaments, because there's no longer an equilibrium-ish baseline. Clearly, we also don't have any other workable approaches yet, so it's an exciting new frontier going forward...
Why think that: "each human goal is the result of cultural evolution"? Human goals include having sex, staying warm, avoiding pain and avoiding hunger. Those predate cultural evolution are are pretty clearly linked to DNA genes instead.
Culture had the option to modify those, and chose not to so change.
Cool idea, it's worth remembering that all innovations must be adaptive - useful - to survive. You're right about general application having a wider impact too.
There's a different way to view it though. It's easier to focus on a small, specific problem and it's more likely you'll actually finish, rather than allowing mission creep to cause procrastination. Once you've created one innovation, you can move onto the next one. The more innovations you create, the more likely one of them will turn out to have much more impact than anticipated. Or they can compound I to something truly outstanding.
> And none of your goals cannot be promoted very far into the future unless there are creatures in that future who hold them, and can thus promote them there.
You confused yourself with a double-negative there: "cannot" should be "can", or "none of" should be removed.
fixed; thanks