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Conversations with Coleman
The Power of Gods with Daniel Schmachtenberger [S2 Ep.16]
01:34:08
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. His writing is focused on ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a focus on catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. Daniel and I spend a lot of time talking about the effect of new technology on our ability to problem solve as a society, the disadvantages of democracy relative to autocracy, how much of our behavior can be attributed to human nature and how much to culture and much more. #Ad Hiring is one of those things you don’t want to mess up. You can find the right people to help you complete your vision with Indeed. Indeed is the jobsite that makes hiring as easy as 1, 2, 3. Post, screen,...
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SA.
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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of the Consilience Project aimed at improving public sense making and dialogue. His writing is focused on ways of improving the health and development of individuals in society, with a focus on catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. Daniel and I spend a lot of time talking about the effect of new technology on our ability to problem solve as a society. We talk about the disadvantages of democracy relative to autocracy. We talk about how much of our behavior can be attributed to human nature and how much to culture and much more. So without further ado, Daniel Schmachtenberger okay Daniel, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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Thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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B
Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. But before we start, can you give my audience a sense of who you are and what you do?
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I think that will come across in the conversation. Hopefully I can say a few things I'm interested in. I've been interested since I was young in all the things that seemed like problems in the world that mattered that were not getting better with the current problem solving processes we had that looked like environmental problems and social problems. And I'm particularly interested in why it is that we haven't made more progress with the Sustainable Development Goals or nuclear disarmament or preventing arms races and then why catastrophic risks of lots of types actually increase in the total number of types of catastrophic risk available and increase in probability. Seems that there are some underlying coordination failures and game theoretic dynamics that make our problem solving capacities not adequate to the problems we currently face. And so it seems like rather than more of the problem solving processes we just need more green tech or more laws within nation state governments or things like that that there is some deeper analysis of what gives rise to the nature of why our tech causes environmental and social issues or the way we utilize it does, and catastrophic risks, why we don't solve those, and what new civilizational capacities might need to be that are adequate to the scope of the technological capacities that we now are stuck with the effects of and thus have to govern better.
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So someone might hear that and feel the tone you're operating in is a bit pessimistic. Right. What do you say to someone who says, well, yes, we have huge problems as a species to contend with, coronavirus being the most current salient example, but look how quickly we came up with a vaccine relative to what we thought was possible in the past. Right. Are we not. Is technology just not despite some of its side effects? Clearly isn't something going right if we're able to use technology to come up with a solution to say, a global pandemic much more quickly than we thought was possible?
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Yeah, I would say there are many schools of thought, but I'll simplify it into two opposing schools of thought. When it comes to technological progress, and particularly the exponentiation and technological process that has started happening with the industrial revolution and then has really picked up since the digital revolution, there is the idea that technology and capitalism and basically the results of modernity have delivered us from. And even longer than that kind of this Western idea of the dialectic of progress has made the quality of life continuously better still problems, but roughly on the whole better. And that any new problem is just the source of the new challenge that human ingenuity will rise to and we'll figure out solutions. And we're problem solving creatures. So of course there's always going to be problems, but our problem solving capacity will keep rising. And that's as it should be. And great. And very few people would want to trade places with a previous time in history not knowing what position you'd be born into. So we should keep focusing on problems, but in a more kind of optimistic way. I would say that's kind of one school highly oversimplified. There's another group which is most of the existential risk world that is looking at the unique issues that AI risk poses that are nothing like the world ever had to face before. The unique set of risks that can come from biotech and the ability to engineer self replicating technology that might be fundamentally incommensurable with the life that is here now and how cheap and distributed that technology is becoming. Crispr gene drives being universally available Now. And so what does it mean to have distributed catastrophic weapon technology and the unique set of issues made possible by cyberattacks, by exponential tech mediated disinformation campaigns, nanotech, et cetera, and then also 8 billion people and the cumulative effects of externality and unrenewable use of resource and pollution that are hitting planetary boundaries. And the collision of all of this. And that there is a existential risk landscape unlike anything the world ever looked at or tended to. The founding fathers didn't have to think of these things. Even the Bretton woods world didn't have to think of these things. And that it seems like there's pretty much no way we could make it through. Because if you look at the way humans have been historically, pick any empire, pick any kind of time period, and say, give people that use power that way exponentially more powerful, where they either directly use it to harm others in war, or use it in ways that indirectly and maybe even unintentionally cause harm to environments or externalities in some way. And let's just exponentiate externality or exponentiate war. We just don't seem like good enough stewards of that much power. And this is why most of the sci fi is dystopian, is it's actually hard to come up with protopian sci fi, where you think about people that are like the people we have been, that have that much decentralized power, that don't blow everything up even accidentally. So then you say, well, if it's not decentralized, then that's a different fail state. And that goes kind of Orwellian autocratic. So I would say both of these are schools of looking at the novelty of the tech space that we have and the relationship of that with the dynamics of how we have made choices. And both individual conflict theory, group conflict theory, those types of things. If I was to say, let's step back and look at both of those, because there's truth in both of those narratives, really important truth in both those narratives. You can see really good argumentation from people you've had on Steven Pinker and Kurzweil Diamandis on one camp. You can go talk to Nick Bostrom or Eliezer Yudkowski or others on that camp. And you can see that it's become a more popular conversation recently, not just in academic circles, with folks like Elon Musk saying AI risk is the number one biggest risk to the world and that AI has passed the point of our ability to probably prevent it becoming an existential Risk. So neuralink is a hope to find a solution by the necessity of merging us with AI. That's now part of a popular conversation. What I would say is if we take a long arc on human history and we say Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years and the thing that we call civilization has been around for something like 10,000 years. We only got the possibility of global catastrophic risk in World War II for the first time. Self induced human tech induced global catastrophic risk. World War II seems like a long time ago for people who were born after it, where it's just history, but it's a sliver of a, a moment in evolutionary time. And that was the first time. And it is important to get that when we look at previous civilizations, none of them still exist in the form that they were when they were a major empire, whatever the Roman Empire, the Egyptian, the Mayan, the Aztec, the whatever. It is the precedent that civilization self end up falling and mostly through self terminating processes. They end up having internal infighting overwhelm their ability to defend their boundaries well, or they actually environmentally outstripped their environments and then went through collapse dynamics. So it's just whenever you had a civilization fall previously, it was a local issue, it was a local civilization with a boundary and there were lots of other civilizations around it. World War II, we got a weapon that we couldn't really viably use in war. Recognizing that multiple sides would use it and have anybody win. It was the first time of having a really unwinnable war and the ability to actually destroy the biosphere's ability to support life if we used it. So I would say if people aren't paying enough attention to how bright a light bright align that is of everything before and everything after. It's really important to get that because before that when you study history, so much of the history you study is the history of major kingdoms or empires warring with each other. And after that the major empires can't war and make it through. So we have to come up with some solution other than war. And so the Bretton woods world, the Post World War II, how do we figure this out? World said, okay, nation state governments aren't enough to prevent World War. We realize that. We realized that World War I made the league of nations, it wasn't strong enough. So we've got to make a stronger thing. We'll make a United nations, but we also have to make these other intergovernmental organizations, a World bank and IMF set of trade treaties. And let's make it to where there's so much economic interdependence across the nations that it's more profitable to do trade with each other than it is to war. And where the supply chains are such that almost everything we use comes from six continents. So if we blow somebody else up, it messes up our own supply chains and it binds us. It binds the game theory to being more useful to cooperate than it is to war. So then that enters a new phase. And also one of the key things in that Bretton woods world was it will allow us the application of these vast industrial technologies across the whole world, coordinating the division of labor across it, that we can increase global GDP growth much faster. So everybody, every nation, whatever, can increase its wealth without having to take it from somebody else. And if you have to take it from someone else, because you don't have a positive sum game, the negative sum game or zero sum games go rivalrous faster. So that was the idea. But then fast forward 75 years and we didn't have major empires war, we had a cold war and we had proxy wars. And we go from having a major part of that was mediated by that. There was only one type of catastrophic weapon that couldn't be used and there were only two superpowers that had it. So you could do mutually assured destruction, they could monitor and have that set up with AI weapons, with cyber weapons, on infrastructure targets, with Bio Nano, etc. And other things. We now have dozens of catastrophic weapons that dozens of actors, including non state actors have. You can't put mutual issued destruction on a system like that. So that whole system that kind of kept us safe after World War II can't keep doing that. And we got such a complicated global supply chain through globalization that we got to see with COVID like one part of the world shuts down because of a local issue and you get cascading failures across the whole world. And that was still a relatively small issue. And so then we start to look at the fragility dynamics that come from that. As opposed to have local collapse, stay local, when the whole system is radically interconnected, you also get fragility dynamics. And then we're also hitting because of that positive sum GDP happening through unrenewable extraction of resources, humans utilizing them and then turning them into trash. You can't run an exponential linear materials economy on a finite planet long term. So we're also hitting planetary boundaries. Not just climate change, but species extinction, overfishing of the oceans, plastics, dead zones in the oceans, blah blah blah. So many things like that. So we're now kind of at the end of the Bretton woods world where we can't do mutually assured destruction, the fragility is too high, we can't keep positive sum growth dynamics with linear materials economy. And yet we also can't go back to the previous thing where we war with catastrophic war tech. And so it's like what is next? So what I would say is that the tech space does make a change in quantity. Basically a nuke is just a way bigger spear, if you want to think of it very fundamentally in terms of there's some in group out group dynamics and some ability to use kinetic weapons to advance capacities. But at a certain point changes in quantity become changes in quality or changes in type, meaning the same type of governance no longer works. What I would say is that we have had changes in magnitude of issues and speed rate of issues, such that the previous governance capacities, whether we're talking about markets, governments, IGOs, whatever, aren't adequate to the scope of them. And that doesn't mean nothing could be. It means we have to innovate in the social tech space of what is the social technology that is adequate to govern the amount of power that physical technology gives us.
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So what I've just heard you say in summary is that there was essentially a break in history at World War II for the purposes of this topic and that related to the technology of nuclear weaponry. But now we're facing a world that's even one notch scarier than that in that we're facing problems similar to what we face with nuclear weaponry, but on all fronts, on the artificial intelligence front, on the biotech front. And those problems are actually quite a bit tougher epistemologically because nuclear bombs are fairly easy to understand relative to, for example, the problem of artificial intelligence in the abstract. Right? We really don't know. Even the smartest people who spent spend all their time worrying about this still don't really know what artificial intelligence is going to look like a hundred years from now. But you know, the problem of just brute force violence is rather. Right? Like you can make a nuclear bomb that's a thousand times as powerful as the most powerful one that exists now. And I understand the nature of that threat, right? It's just, I just picture an explosion, but bigger, right? I'm not even sure what to picture exactly with the problem of artificial intelligence. And that makes preempting it that much harder. It also makes it more difficult to actually worry about it on an emotional level.
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Right?
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It's easy when you're watching a movie. And they reduce the threat of artificial intelligence to something personified, something intuitively scary to humans, like killer robots or. It's an anthropomorphization of the problem of artificial intelligence. But the true threats are, I think, abstract, more abstract than that, but nevertheless scary. And so where does the idea of sense making and the breakdown of sense making institutions fit into your view of the problem?
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A
Yeah, I want to take one detour first because you actually said something super important about the fact that the bomb is in some ways simpler than the issues that we face right now. Or at least simpler to imagine or kind of wrap our heads around forecasting. It's also the case that nuclear bombs are really, really hard to make because there's not that many places in the world that have uranium. And then it's really hard to enrich uranium. And as a result, it can't be easily distributed technology. It takes advanced nation state level capacity to make it so that you are limiting the number of agents that can play with this thing. And you can also monitor them so the agents that can mess with it can spy on each other. And so you can start to have something like mutually assured destruction be a little bit easier because it's so hard to make them. And so where are the uranium mines? Where's the stuff going? Radioactive tracers, that kind of thing. When we start talking about putting a thermite bomb on a homemade drone, homemade thermite bomb or whatever, it can happen in a garage or cyber attacks on infrastructure targets, this is now can happen in a basement thing. It's very different. So having catastrophic tech that is not that hard to make, that is decentralizable, is very different. That's one thing. Also, when there's just one type of catastrophic tech, maybe there's different delivery mechanisms that can come from a sub or a plane or whatever, but it's one type. The mitigation strategies or the prevention of war strategies are different than when you have multiple different types. And the forecasting of how could one of these get first attack without triggering the other ones becomes nearly impossible to figure out. So it's actually really worth thinking through all of that. And if you read, say, a book like the Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel's still alive. You should get him on your show. It would be actually really incredible to have him on your show if he hasn't been yet. And talk about how many times we went into countdown sequence based on computer glitches or errors during mitra shared destruction and how fantastic it is that we're here at all. You also think about, okay, so making nukes was actually a pretty hard thing to do, figuring out how to split atoms. But yeah, it's still less complicated than the other type of tech and the tech mitigation we're talking about. But notice what the Manhattan Project was. It was, let's get all the best minds in the world, let's create an unlimited black budget and figure this thing out. We don't have something like a Manhattan Project tending to the existential risks of today. We have something like, at best, little bitty academic orgs like the Cambridge center for the Study of Existential Risk or the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute that have nowhere near that kind of concentration of brain trust, national support, funding, whatever. So that's another big thing of why is it that society can't coordinate adequately to recognize a major risk and be able to give the adequate degree of investment needed? Because if you want to take that argument that as we get new problems, we get better problem solving capacity, we can say, well, the last biggest set of problems we had was way smaller than these and had way more problem solving capacity put towards it. So what's going on? There is an important.
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I think one thing to think about is the role of the politicization of information and how that makes everything more difficult to solve. So, for instance, I remember in March of 2020, early March, when the first Covid numbers, the fatality rate numbers, were just coming out from various parts of the world and we were all looking at those cruise ships and wondering what exactly the disease we were dealing with. I remember at the time reading articles about sort of trying to piece together a picture of what this disease was and having no semblance of a worry in my mind that the article was distorted by political bias in either direction because we hadn't yet decided who was on what side of the COVID issue. There were no sides yet. They were not drawn. You know, there were people worrying, for instance, that Trump was going to use a kind of alarmism about COVID to institute the authoritarian policies that he's always wanted to institute from the beginning and force the whole nation into lockdown. That was a plausible idea or worry that many people had. That's how. And that's. I only say that just to show that people really did not know where the left and the right were going to come down on this issue. And I remember the feeling of relief just knowing that I can read an article about an extremely important topic and not worry that political bias is really infecting it in either direction. And even then, the epistemological problems of figuring out what is true were immense. Is the fatality rate 0.1% or 5%? Right. That's the question people were asking at that time. And it was a very difficult question. Now, fast forward a month, the political lines have been drawn and now you have to devote brain space when you're watching TV or reading an article to trying to unspin it. Because now we've just imported all of the machinery of toxic partisanship and confirmation bias and everything into this issue. Right. And I could palpably feel the shift. And it occurred to me how much better off would we be if we could treat every problem in civilization, if we could treat climate change and AI, particularly climate change like coronavirus in the first week before it was politicized. So where does the politicization of information fit into this problem for you?
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Yeah, I mean, it's pretty central when we talk about governance and the original thesis that we need fundamentally better types of governance for the scale and magnitude of consequentiality and speed of the types of things we're governing on today. Governance is about coordinated choice making. How do, especially if it's not autocratic, if it's going to be a democracy or republic or an open society of some kind, how do we coordinate choice making across a lot of different people, businesses, agents? And our choice making is informed by both our sense making and our values or our meaning making. So what do we think is actually going on and what do we think a solution to what's going on might look like? What will the effect of that thing be? So that's both sense making and then forecasting, and then the meaning maker and the values generation is what is it that we care about that we're trying to make a choice in the service of? And so if we want anything like an open society, we have to be able to coordinate our sense making and our values with each other to be able to have something like coordinated choice making emerge. And so that means that we have to have something like an epistemic commons, right? A commons where we can make sense of things together and we're oriented to be able to have clear sense making together. And we see that that isn't happening. And there's a number of historical reasons why that isn't happening. We can see that fourth estate has undergone massive erosion for a number of reasons, as has the quality of education relative to training citizens to be able to have adequate civic engagement for the complexity of the issues we face. This is actually an important point, if we step back a little bit, is we say, what is the role of education for any civilization? The role of education is that for that civilization there's different ways we can talk about it. This is not the only meaningful way, but one meaningful way for that civilization to continue to function. There's a lot of tasks that have to happen, there's a lot of knowledge and problem solving capacities. And so the role of education is to be able to train up new generations and have intergenerational knowledge transfer of everything that is needed for the tasks of that society to be able to happen. And so you can think of it as a kind of social transmission or social autopoiesis. But in an open society, as opposed to a closed society, if we have some type of autocracy, everyone doesn't have to be engaged in the choice making of the society as a whole. They just have to be able to carry out a labor function or whatever specific function within that they have. If we have an open society where people are supposed to be engaged in a governance process of formed by the people, which means that the choices that are happening at the macro scale of that nation or whatever group it is, they have to be able to understand well enough to contribute to the choice making of, then the education in that society has to not just prepare them for their role in the market or the workforce, but also prepare them for their role as a citizen to be able to engage in governance. And so whether I'm voting on a proposition or whether I'm voting on a representative who's going to vote on a proposition, do I understand the propositions and the pros and cons well enough of what the DOE has to do with regard to the grid and energy policy, or what the DoD has to do with regard to military capacity, there's a big educational load required, there's a larger educational load required to develop citizens capable of doing open society. And I think people can understand why the idea of democracy is actually a kind of radical idea, which is the idea that you can have some very large number of people, most of whom will never meet each other, who have different life experiences and want different things and different worldviews, different religions that are all going to somehow coordinate together effectively to run something like shared infrastructure, as opposed to have a king or a parliament or some small group of people do it, or a tribe where everybody coordinates together, but it's a small number of people where everyone can Be in a single conversation, everybody can know each other and compromising for people that you know as a different creature. And this is why modern democracies emerged following the enlightenment of modernity and the idea that there was some basis by which we could all come to make sense of the world together. The philosophy of science and the Hegelian dialectic, we could all independently come to assess base reality and come to similar understanding about it. And through something like a Hegelian dialectic, we could understand each other's values and say, is there a value or is there a proposition that can meet everybody's values better? And can there be a recognition that if this thing is not the optimal thing you want, it's still better, this system as a whole, than autocracy or warfare between us separating. And this is where we go back to all the founding founders of the U.S. the statements that they made. Like, I think it was Jefferson that said, if I could have a perfect newspaper and a broken government, or a perfect government and a broken newspaper, I would take a perfect newspaper. Because if the people could all be well educated about what is actually going on in the world, they can make a new government. If the people aren't well educated, they can't possibly be engaged in good choice making. And so whoever's effective at predatory rule will end up ruling. And I think the quote that is most interesting to me was, I'm going to paraphrase one of George Washington where he said something to the effect of the number one aim of the federal government has to be the comprehensive education of every citizen in the science of government. And I think it was such a key insight to say the number one aim of the federal government after just fighting revolutionary war, is not to protect its boundaries and after creating a government as opposed to a pure laissez faire market so that it could institute rule of law. The number one aim wasn't even rule of law because you can protect your boundaries effectively with a military dictatorship and you can institute rule of law well with a dictatorship. But if it's truly going to be a democracy, if every citizen isn't comprehensively educated into the science of government, everything that they would need to understand to participate in governing well and the civic virtue to actually do so, it's not going to stay a democracy. And we can see for a bunch of reasons how both the educational system and the fourth estate that would mediate their ongoing informantness have decayed to a place that is nowhere near adequate. We don't have anything like government of foreign by the people, people don't understand most anything government is engaging in, nor could they, or are they particularly oriented to it. So the idea of a republic is mostly not even a good simulation anymore. It's mostly just a vestigial story. And so then the question we have to ask is if we want something like an open society as opposed to an autocratic society, and we can see autocracy on the rise in other parts of the world and it actually being more effective at a number of things. If we want something like an open society, what would it take to have an open society coordinate effectively in the presence of these types of issues we face and coordinate more effectively than autocratic ones do, to not have the world be seated to that structure. And at the foundation of what it would take is something like the capacity to have shared sense making across the space and shared values generation to orient towards shared coordination. And so then really key becomes what does it take to do that? What does it take to create systems and a culture that doesn't pollute the epistemic commons, that doesn't culture war that works towards communication, that is seeking to bring about shared understanding first rather than subgroups, strategic aims.
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Yeah, so this is a huge problem, obviously. And it's a problem that is unique to America. Not, not unique in the sense that we're, we're the only place that faces it. But it's. So on the one hand, you have a country like China or any other autocracy where, you know, I know some people from China and mostly what they say about political conversations is that they just don't happen.
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Right.
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People just for the most part don't discuss it. There's just boundary on what topics you can talk about. And within that boundary you feel quite free in fact, and in some sense freer than Americans are to speak. But there just is a hard and fast boundary about what you can talk about in polite conversation. And that boundary is more or less chosen by the Communist Party.
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Right.
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So that doesn't exist in America. Obviously, to the extent that there are boundaries on what you can talk about in polite conversation, those boundaries are imposed from the bottom up in some sense, or at minimum not from the government, from the elite, by elite cues and by sort of the consensus of people with a certain status that have blue checkmarks on Twitter and so forth. And the related problem is that in many European countries they are premised on the notion of a single ethnicity with shared values. And certain problems don't arise in that context. Right. The problem is in Europe has been that, you know, different nations go to war with one another. And to the extent that nations go to war within themselves different ethnic groups, that has in many cases been solved by simply creating nations that have one ethnicity with one religion. So there is a substantial set of a substantial body of agreement about values to begin with, right? There's a kind of unity. And then in the case of China, where that unity is sort of imposed from the top down, right? So those are two ways you can get to unity, through autocracy or through just forming a nation that already has a substantial amount of unity to begin with because the nation is a natural outgrowth of what was once an actual tribe of people. And then in America you have a totally different case where we have freedom, we don't have autocracy, but we are extremely far from a single tribe, right. We're lots of different tribes with deep disagreement on values. And that's a problem that is very difficult to see how we make progress on. And it seems in my lifetime I've only seen it get worse as a result of social media and the way we consume information now where you just get a personalized menu of events and opinions that are perfectly crafted so as to either confirm what you already believe or give you the worst impression of what the other side thinks about an issue so that you can dismiss them entirely. And on various measures of polarization, this problem has been been getting worse. And so it is a deep question to ask how do we update Democracy for the 21st century? For a 21st century multi ethnic nation that is committed to freedom and doesn't want to become an autocracy, doesn't want to impose unity from the top down, but nevertheless can't fall back on what works in other places that are also free, which is just having a sort of natural unity.
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A
Oh man, you touched like eight different things that. Be nice if we can get into hopefully come back and close some of these loops on the social media thing you mentioned. I'm not going to start there, but we should come back and double click on it because it's actually a really, it's a fundamental part. I believe you had Tristan Harris on recently. So we won't repeat that. It's a good one for people to listen to, I'm imagining, but there's a couple pieces in terms of that are all of the structures made in modernity were made on broadcast media, meaning some central broadcast ability through a newspaper, through following the printing press, which then turned into radio, which then turned into television, which meant we could make sure, everybody got similar messages. And so as soon as we moved to a decentralized kind of media where everybody could broadcast, and then there's way more answers than anyone can possibly look at. So then whoever controls the search algorithm or the recommendation algorithm is actually curating the information space. That's actually not just a change in magnitude, that's a change in type. That's a change in type in a very fundamental way of the nature of the technological infrastructure that is mediating, civilization changing and then the new civilization, the social tech needing to change and having not changed yet. So that's a big one I'd like to come back to. But the most fundamental thing that you said is you can see examples where there is a certain kind of order that doesn't seem super top down imposed, it seems more bottom up or kind of culturally supported, where there is some kind of depth of shared culture that creates enough binding energy to overcome the cleaving energy between the differences of the people. You can think about what's going to hold a number of people together being a ratio of the cleaving and binding energy of that population, right? And when we study the history of sapiens, we can see that for the most part, for a few hundred thousand years, the groups never got beyond a certain size, right? Famously the Dunbar number. And it's a big question as to why. But we see this in all other animals, right? Like chimpanzee troops are of a certain size, they get a little bit bigger and then they end up cleaving. And it similarly has to do with where does the bonding energy between them provide enough benefits to overcome the cleaving energy between competing interests. But the fact that there's something like 200,000 plus years of human activity with brains similar to the brains that we have that never got above 150 people is like, oh, there's something very deep there to look at. And this is why many social philosophers talk about the fundamentally tribal nature of humans from an evolutionary bio standpoint and why it's important to understand that there's a lot of ways we can think about the Dunbar number. One way is up to that number of people. I can know everyone very well, I can know everyone intimately. And we can actually all sit around, we can all participate in a single conversation, we can have a tribal council where if there's a big decision to make, everybody's voice could be heard within, just literally mediated by the ability to speak. And everybody hear it without a microphone or tech of some kind. And the time that it takes for all the voices to be heard to actually make a decision. And so if I'm going to live in a society where I'm going to be subjugated to the choices or be responsible to mediate the choices, I want to have a say in it. If we start to get to a situation where there's so many people they can't all have a say, then why would I just not cleave and go make a smaller group? So then the question of why did we start? When did the Dunbar number end? Mostly has to do with a time period around the beginning of agriculture, movement from hunter gatherer, largely nomadic cultures to agriculture and a number of critical changes that occurred around then. But some of them have to do with up till that point, human populations would, the population would actually outstrip the resource of an area and then they would move. And so you'd get this migration. And this is why we can see that humans, wherever they started, ended up becoming apex predators across every single environment on the planet where no other animal did that. That's a very uniquely human thing because we could make ourselves adapted to different environments through tools, clothes and other kinds of tools. Once population starts to outstrip an area and you can't move anymore because we've done all the moving that's possible, then tribal warfare becomes an obligate situation to deal with resource scarcity. Once any group starts tribal warfare, all the other ones have to do it in an obligate way or they die by default. Now you start getting a tribal warfare race, a kind of multipolar trap or arms race. Now it makes sense for two smaller groups to unify together because they have more binding energy, which is they're going to die on their own. And so I'm willing to give up some of my choice making freedom. I'm willing to be a part of a group I don't have as much of a say in because the group that I have more say in on my own is going to die from some larger militarized group. Now as soon as that group gets larger than the other group gets larger, they both increase their weaponry, they increase their ability to do division of labor and coordinate and stores of resources and those types of things. And we call that kind of the evolution of empire. So it's important to understand that the, and this is actually why when Machiavelli talks about the enemy hypothesis that the idea that humans are tribal and they will keep breaking down to smaller tribal scales unless there is a unifying force. And the unifying force is Almost always an enemy doesn't have to be. But there's actually social theory argument on this. I would say it doesn't have to be, but that generally what will unify a group of people together with a shared identity involves what is outside of that identity that needs them to be bound together. And so, yeah, this is an important idea, is that you can have a shared identity, which we call a culture that has everybody kind of police each other or create order with each other in a distributed way. And so that when we look at Japan or Singapore or the Nordic countries and look at the relatively lower crime, higher education, et cetera, and try to apply that to some huge diverse country like the US we can see that they have certain cultural prerequisites in place we don't have. That's like a hard and really important problem. And it's why there are some people who are proponents of the idea the US Actually needs to break up into some smaller entities that can have more cultural homogeneity. I think that is a definitely impossible way to do it, because all of the states say we tried to separate it into a red nation and a blue nation or whatever subsets of nations. All the states have nukes. None of the forces in Europe or whatever, when we were dealing with European rise did. And so do you want groups that have so much enmity and antipathy with each other that they can't participate together and have to plead? Both having nukes with no defensible airspace in between them sharing a border, That's a problematic situation to think about. So you either get order because of some shared cultural basis, or you get order because it's imposed, or you don't get order and you get chaos, and the thing breaks down because of chaos. So if we say that civilizations fail either because of too much chaos or order that comes the wrong way through imposition. Those are the two different failure modes. So what we need is emergent order. The emergent order actually has to be at the level of culture before being at the level of institution. It has to be ultimately the fact that humans are making choices based on what they value and what they care about and how they make sense of the world. And if the order is not arising from within them, it's imposed on them. And then that imposition has to be mediated by a monopoly of violence of some kind and becomes its own failure state. So the question of how do we get emergent order in a situation like the US or the globe? If we want to think about where we have authentically global issues that we need to coordinate on, because no country can deal with ocean dead zones or species extinction or climate change or exponential tech media risk on its own. How do you get emergent order between people that have very different histories and different conditioning? That's one way of framing what I would say is the essential question we have to figure out right now.
- [44:19]
B
Yeah, So I want to zero in on this idea of the US Breaking into smaller countries, not as a serious suggestion, but as a tool for thinking about what some of the problems are. So if you, for instance, take the idea, been in the news lately and defined last summer, of the police killing unarmed US Citizens, particularly African Americans, and consider how important the raw size of the United States is to this particular problem, to a problem that results in riots and lives lost and businesses destroyed and so forth. Consider if America were identical in every respect, but the size of Canada, roughly one tenth the size by population. That just means any bad thing related to one person harming another would happen one tenth as often. Right? Just if there are, say, 40 unarmed Americans killed every year, then just, you know, there are four in this hypothetical version of America, that's just one tenth the size, right? So it's just four stories a year as opposed to 40, and just fewer opportunities per unit time to become outraged about something. And the important thing here is that anything that happens anywhere in America feels like it happens here in the relevant sense. Right? So if something happens a thousand miles away in a different state, that can cause a riot outside my apartment. Right. Because it is conceptually, it happened here in the sense that is relevant for the rest of Americans. And so many of the problems we face are, if not a direct result, but then exacerbated by the size of the country. We're trying to do something in this country that has never been done before, which is have a population of a third of a billion people that are not culturally the same. We've had, for all intents and purposes, open borders longer than any other nation has ever tried to have open borders for. And I'm speaking not about our current immigration policy, but about the long run US history, right? We let Europe come in in the 19th century and until the 1920s or so, and then since 1965, we've pretty much let the world come in relative to at least border policies in other nations such as Japan and China and so forth. And so we're trying to have a massive country. We're trying to have a country that, relative to most nations on earth, has a very liberal border Policy. We're trying to be a nation of immigrants and immigrants from very different places with very different values from one another. And we're also trying to have no autocracy and freedom. Right? So this is a very difficult problem. It's a problem most countries haven't even approached with a ten foot pole because they'd be so worried about the results. Right. And it's obviously a problem. It's a challenge that we suffer from in many ways. It's also, I think, a challenge we should feel proud for attempting, however imperfectly, because most places on earth have just not attempted it. They've said, well, fuck it, we're just going to close the borders. We're not even going to try and we're going to remain a certain size, which is fine. It's just that often it's one thing for someone to look at the problems of divisiveness facing America right now from a different country and wonder what the hell is going on here. But I think it's crucial to recognize the context that we're trying something that most places simply don't try. For good reason. But it occurs to me, a country like Singapore, which you mentioned, the way that they deal with race relations there is just totally different. Obviously it's a city state and it's many ways not analogous, but they have three major ethnicities there and they have a quota system where they actually, from the top down, don't allow residential segregation. Right. They don't allow, you know, you cannot have a situation there like you have in New York with Hasidic Jews, for instance, all living in one neighborhood, or with blacks and whites heavily clustered in certain neighborhoods because they don't allow it. They enforce integration by policy and they found that that's a stable equilibrium. But whether or not that would work in America is a moot point because it could never be done. Right. We have a taste for freedom here culturally, for not being told where you can and can't live that people in other places of the world simply don't have. If you never had freedom and democracy, there's nothing built in, I think, to the human spirit that necessarily favors it. So I chalk that all up to you as elements to think about in this problem. Is there anything in there that you want to react to?
- [50:20]
A
Well, when you say what we're trying to do here is novel, so of course we have some novel problems. And yet the problems are the result of a meaningful set of intents and experiment. I wouldn't even say there was a clear set of Intents because when you look at the number of people who were here at the time of the founding of the nation, and if you even look at in those writings with the forecast of the most people that would ever come about, it was nothing like what has happened. So the intent has been a kind of evolutionary force over this time period. And for instance, when you think about the ideas in early formation of the United States democracy, the town hall was a central idea. And the idea that the people who locally lived in an area were largely affecting each other more than anything else because transportation was slow and communications were slow and the total population was small enough that everybody could pretty much fit into a town hall and be part of a conversation. So civic duty was not mostly voting on a representative. It was actually being able to be in a situation where the sense making that anyone had could be heard. Someone was like no, that's not the situation. I've been out on the border, here's what's going on. Everyone's sense making could be heard. And rather than just getting to vote on a pre crafted proposition where both voting for it is good for some things and damages other things, which is why almost every proposition gets half of the vote, Almost no propositions get 90% of the vote is because they're almost all based on theory of trade offs that seem beneficial to some subset of things and harmful to another. But nobody was involved in crafting the proposition outside of usually some special interest group that wasn't even trying to look at how does this benefit everyone? That was actually alien to the core idea of why democracy might work. The idea of why it might work is can we actually have a conversation first to come up with what everybody thinks is going on and what matters. To come up with a proposition in a real time conversation that seems like the best proposition that meets everybody everybody's needs simultaneously. And then voting is a last step. If we can't all just come to a shared agreement that that makes sense as a way of sublimating the rivalry or warfare. So as soon as you get to too much scale and you can't do that anymore, then you have to over depend on representatives. Then the people who are representing have their own set of interests that become and as it gets to a larger and larger scale, almost no representative is really talking with the people in a meaningful way. And so whose interests are they representing? The idea that the state is going to institute law that allows the market to do the good things the market does, but where there's unhealthy market incentive Predatory aspects. There's going to be rule of law that binds it. You can only have a state bind the market if the people are binding the state. Otherwise you end up getting regulatory capture. And we can see that that has happened across the board. Well, how do the people bind the state when it gets to that big of a s, that much information, that much complexity, we can't all fit into a town hall. And that's a fundamental question. We can see that some of the founding thoughts on why we needed representatives had to do with who rides a horse from this area to meet with the other town halls and figure out what the state's going to do. And it's like, so when we see what Audrey Tang has done in Taiwan with working on creating a digital democracy, someone else would be fantastic for your show. She hasn't been on. Can we create a town hall? Can we use the kinds of exponential tech that Facebook and YouTube are using that end up destroying democracy? Could we use them to mediate democracy where we were able to actually have everyone be well educated on the issues we're able to assess? Do these people even. Can they state the pros and cons on a specific proposition? It doesn't have to show leaning. It just shows that there's actual understanding of these, of the issues before they voted on it. Is there ways for them to vote directly on things? Are there ways to be able to track what representatives are doing and the financial accounting and the relationships between the commercial sector and the state better? This is where I'm saying the radical increase in scale in particular debased some of the ideas upon which democracy seemed like it would even make sense or be possible. So now you have to rethink. How do we have everyone be educated enough about the issues and be able to understand the other positions on the issues well enough and participate in proposition creation, not just choice making on a proposition that is bad. Yes or no, how do we redo that utilizing the digital technologies and other new technologies we have that both make it more consequential to do that and also possible?
- [55:07]
B
Well, yeah, I guess there's a fundamental problem which is that much of the reason people are interested in issues is because those issues are terrain in a battle that exists. The analogy I sometimes think of is people get into sports usually first through rooting for a team and then through learning about the sport, becoming interested in the sport because they care about one side winning in a war. It's a rarer person who first gets interested in baseball neutral to who wins, and then only later begins rooting for a particular team. Right. So much of the reason people want to become educated about any particular issue is because it's already terrain in the culture war that they can fight for.
- [56:07]
A
Right.
- [56:07]
B
People first look for the fight and then want to get informed in the context of the fight, which is totally natural. I'm not claiming to be exempt from this. This is something I experience in my own psychology and I see in society in general and other people. And so it's easy for me to be pessimistic about the possibility of finding a tech based solution to a problem that seems inherent in our psychology. Can you talk me out of that pessimism?
- [56:45]
A
So the question you bring up is a kind of real politic critique or question of is human nature inexorably the thing we're up against? So if you read Machiavelli, reread the 48 Laws of Power or anything that is kind of doing a real politic assessment of patterns of human behavior Historically, the argument can be made that humans are intrinsically and maybe there's a Gaussian distribution based on their genetics or their whatever it is something of how much of this. But that as a the distribution as a whole, humans are either innately too irrational or too rivalrous or both. To be able to have something like adequate sense making and adequate integrative values to be able to have an emergent order and culture beyond an in group that is unified against an out group, that would be the, the question that we are kind of bound to. If there isn't a big enough out group, we will never be able to get the binding energy. We will go tribal on each other. And this is one of the arguments about one of the things that happened in the US Obviously the US has had rivalry for a long time. The Civil War was a good example. There have been plenty of examples across partisanship or class or race or region. But we can also see that there was a kind of patriotism and reunification associated with World War II and for a little while afterwards. And when we look at the intensity of partisanship in the US today, where even when I was a kid, the senators on the floor that would be arguing with each other would go out to lunch together afterwards. And that doesn't happen. It's like what happened in that time period. Part of it has to do with the social media thing, part of it has to do with things that occurred in broadcast media. There's a number of things. One of the arguments that many people brought up is that it intensified after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Wall came down and the end of the Cold War, because the Cold War created a binding energy for the US to all be on the same side adequately against a threatening enough external enemy. And that when it came down and China didn't look anything like it does today, and Russia didn't even have Putin yet organizing them in a more strategic way, there wasn't a big enough enemy to unify the US against itself. The US Was the number one biggest force and the number two, number three biggest force that the left and right turned against each other as the largest source of energy to extract or predatory advantage to incur. And then that has continued as China has moved into a total different position. And that's occurring in other parts of the world. There's this question of, can people be unified at a scale much larger than tribal without an external enemy, or is that innate to us? We can see Jane Goodalls and Jimmy Carter's and Martin Luther King's and Carl Sagans and people that seem to have a more universal ethic. There's a question of is that conditionable across a population widely, or are those people naturally outliers for some reason will always be outliers, and that trying to think about conditioning qualities like that more widely is folly. Eric Weinstein and I had a conversation a couple years ago on his podcast, and this was the heart of the thing that we talked about, because he and I had a fairly similar assessment of the catastrophic risk landscape that exponential tech under current kinds of rival risk and irrational governance creates. And we each had a thought on how to overcome that, and they were different. And he made a joke that was fun. He's like, well, I think your solution requires changing human nature, but I'll indulge you on that because mine requires breaking the speed of light. And his solution was, no, I think we are too rivalrous. We have to be able to have civilizations work that have some intrinsically shared value base. If they're too close to someone else that doesn't have enough shared value base, they won't care. And if they will end up wanting the other one's resource at a certain point. So we need to be able to inhabit planets that are far enough apart that war is unfeasible. And you can see how someone smart thinking well about these things could be like, well, maybe that's the case. Maybe that is actually a necessary thing. And I don't know if my sense of it is what will end up being right, because obviously we don't have the basis to be able to say that with much certainty. But I'll tell you why I think it is one of the postmodern critiques of modernity that was right is that the idea that there is an unbiased objective assessment of the world is dangerous. That when we're doing. Because in a complex situation, which things I pick to measure, even if I'm measuring and repeating measurement and getting it right and not messing that up anywhere, just by cherry picking out of the data of a very large set or even cherry picking what I do the science to measure on, I can get something that is true but not representative and then argue as if it's representative or decontextualize the facts or Lakoff frame the interpretation that there's a pragmatics in addition to the kind of semantics and that we can see this more in the social sciences where there's increased complexity with the whole early social science in the US of why blacks were a genetically lower race than the US and thus the Declaration of Independence didn't pertain to them. And yet we weren't morally corrupt or the science of phrenology or things like that and be like, yeah, that was just political vested interest gibberish, guising itself in something that sounded sciency. And it's not anything like real objective science. Well, I think the answer isn't you throw out science and say that there is no way to come to truth. Because if that's the case, all there is is power and then we're actually stuck in that thing. We need to just correct for it. So we don't say that anyone can be unbiased, but we say we can seek bias correction. We can seek to be able to take all of the perspectives well, not just performatively, but really seek to inhabit them and then seek to identify where there's true signal and seek to synthesize them. And so is it possible to do bias correction better towards shared sense making that never has 100% confidence, but an increasingly, well, epistemically grounded confidence. The reason I say this is because a lot of the social science that we have I think is problematic in this way. I think it's after the thing called empire and then even the thing called industrial revolution and capitalism had taken over, which was not the evolutionary history of humans in mostly tribal environments. And it created a source of conditioning, but it was fairly ubiquitous conditioning. And since it was ubiquitous, we just said, oh, this is human nature. And then where we would see something like an indigenous tribe that was different it could be thrown out as a statistical outlier. So I'm actually very interested in studying statistical outliers to something that is not innate but is ubiquitous conditioning to say what is possible in human nature. So specifically I'm interested in positive deviance on the Gaussian distribution saying cultures that have a particular trait that would be desirable more than statistically average. And so looking at things like Buddhism and Jainism and more nonviolence based religions, Buddhism is an interesting example of a number of people that have fluctuated, but a lot of people, 10 million people over a few millennia, over different languages and different periods of time, that had different economics, war, et cetera, where the majority of the population all wouldn't hurt bugs. And you're like, what? And didn't mediate war. I'm not romanticizing that there were never exceptions, but compared to most other populations, it's like something pretty novel and interesting was happening there. And we can see that it's related directly to the ideas of Buddhist religion and the nature of how they did. Conditioning of humans, particularly early childhood around nonviolence, compassion, kindness, empathy, those types of things. And we can similarly look at areas in Liberia or Darfur or other places where you have child soldiers, where you pretty much aren't going to make it to adulthood without being a murderer. It's just not a possibility. And so I see that human nature makes almost everyone a murderer or almost nobody hurts bugs. Both possible under the right conditioning environments. I see that conditioning people. You can't not be conditioning people. People are going to learn Mandarin or they're going to learn English, or they're going to learn Navajo or whatever language. Because innate to sapiens. And this is really important to understand the closest relatives to us. Like a horse is up and standing in 10 or 20 minutes and it takes a human a year. That's a really long period of helplessness. Why are we embryonic or neotenous for long? So, so long. And even our closest relatives, like chimpanzees, they can hold onto their mom's fur while she moves around the first day and we can't even move our head volitionally for three months. And it's like, okay, so why are we so developmentally dependent for so long? And then why do we also have this abstract language and abstract understanding of tool making principle that is unique? Well, because we make tools that modify our environment so much. Where most other creatures were evolved to be fit to an environment, but we would then change the environment to something we didn't evolve to be Fit to. We have to be able to change ourselves pretty rapidly. So I don't want to genetically be oriented to throw spears. Well, if throwing spears isn't adaptive anymore and being able to code or text is. So I want to come in with not very much code, some code, but the capacity to imprint the new novel environment we're in because we're migrating and changing our own environments. So conditioning is a bigger deal for humans than it is for other things. It's unavoidable. So then the question is, and most of the conditioning that we have studied in social science is post industrialization. And all of it that we've been able to study in the historical period was post empire, which was post tribal warfare, and not the actual evolutionary environment of humans long term. And so we have to say, okay, well, within the conditioning environment of obligate warfare, humans behave these ways. Is that the only way humans could behave under any conditioning environment? I think it's a very important question. When we look at the level of education and, yeah, the level of education on the Gaussian distribution of the Jewish population, it's very different than lots of other populations in the same country those Jews are inhabiting. And it has to do with certain cultural values that affect how they do child rearing and parenting and culture and school. So then the question of could we develop higher rationality and a higher universal ethics in the population largely so that people were actually seeking to understand perspectives other than their own, seeking to be able to inhabit the perspectives and the values of other people, and then seeking a solution that we could actually coordinate towards recognizing that if we just beat the other side, unless we beat them completely, they don't exist on the planet anymore. They don't go away. They're still political actors. They're pissed off and have more enmity, and they're going to reverse engineer whatever political weapon or economic weapon or narrative weapon or physical weapon we just used and come back. So we either bind ourselves to not just war, but escalating war and arms race, including cultural arms races, or we say, how do we. And if under exponential tech that becomes catastrophic, which I argue it does, then either we figure out how to understand each other and coordinate with each other, or we move into escalating rivalry that eventually self terminates. So then I would say our capacity to do that is obligate. So then is it possible? I hope so, and I think so.
- [69:09]
B
The point you make about the importance of culture is well taken. I do worry one thing that's also true, which makes it more Difficult is that certain cultural memes have advantages over others.
- [69:24]
A
Right?
- [69:24]
B
Like the, you know, there's a reason that outliers are outliers. Presumably in the case of the Buddhists and the child soldiers, while both of those are possible, there must be some reason why the moderate alternative of neither being so nonviolent so as to not want to kill bugs, nor being so violent so as to raise your 6 year olds as murderers, there must be some reason why the moderate approach has out propagated the extremes in the space of possible ways to raise one's children. And presumably there's something unscalable about the extremes relative to the cultural memes that have in fact scaled. Right?
- [70:24]
A
Okay, yes and no. The child soldier situation is an extreme that's very shortsighted even in terms of rivalry. It's not figuring out how to do agriculture so that people can feed themselves well enough that they can grow their population or how to advance their technological capacity to do warfare better long term or whatever. So it's just not even doing group rivalry. Well, the nonviolent civilizations mostly made it as long as they stayed out of the way of the more violent ones. And to some degree, if they figured out how to be effective diplomats between them so they could offer some Bible service. But otherwise it's actually a very interesting part of the story is that we have the history of those who made it through. And those who made it through usually made it through by winning at war, some kind of war, maybe economic war, maybe culture war, largely kinetic war. And so were there cultures that actually provided for a higher quality of life for their people and more harmony with their environment and just didn't make it through warfare. But the warfare thing leads to arms race, meaning continuously larger warfare that once you start to get to the verticalizing part of that curve itself, self terminates. And this is one of the things we can see in evolution is that there are animals where evolution is selecting for something that is adaptive to an environment that's about to end. The animal will be adapted in the immediate term. This one just survived better in this environment. It was better able to reproduce, but it's doubling down on certain genetic capacities that if the environment changes a tiny bit, it goes extinct. And so there is a certain shortsightedness and blindness to that kind of evolution. And I would say mimetically, even more so than genetically. And so there's a lot of things that win in the short term, meaning they are selected for that self terminate in the long term, or not even all that long term. And then this becomes one of the big traps that humanity is in is if we want to do the right long term thing, but we can't get everyone to do it and anyone else does the short term advantage thing that gives them so much advantage that they beat us in the medium term. How do we avoid that? And this is both the arms race and the tragedy of the commons. If I'm not going to overfish because I want to leave fisheries, but we're in shared ocean area and anyone else overfishes, I can't actually protect the fish. I can't protect the fish population of the ocean by not fishing. All I'm doing is saying the other people who don't have the same ethic as me end up overfishing. They grow their population faster and use their larger population in war against us. So fuck it, I'm actually going to try and get all the fish even though I don't need them and I can figure out a better way and actually have to race to get it faster than they do. That trap is the thing we actually have to figure out how to overcome. And it's the same with don't really want to build AI weapons because the idea of autonomous AI weapons is a pretty scary bad idea. We'll probably all die from that. But I certainly don't want to let the other guy get them first. And I can't guarantee that they aren't doing it in some secret project. So I'm not going to sign a treaty to not do it. Or if I sign a treaty, I'm going to assume that they're lying about it in secret. So we're also going to sign it while lying about it. And everybody knows that. Then we all race to build the AI weapon that increases the risk of existential harm to everybody. And this is the, this is the Great Filter hypothesis on coming into exponential tech. Why don't we have more encounters with advanced alien nations? One of the answers to the Fermi Paradox is when they get to this level of tech, they pretty much self extinct everywhere. Their rivalry within the planet has them use the powerful tech that would be necessary to go interplanetary against each other before they actually get successfully interplanetary. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not true. It's a fun thought experiment. I would say if we want to make it through that Great Filter, then we have to say how do we have the level of technological power we're developing and be good stewards of it? Adequately good stewards. Because if we look at Any previous civilization be like they did a lot of fucked up things with the power they had in any of them. If we multiply those fucked up things by exponentially more powerful, is that viable? What would it take for us to be to hold the power? And so like I'll say it mythopoetically and I'm not, I'm not saying it literally, I'm not going to train Jesus Mumble. I'm just mythopoetically. If we have the power of gods, if you don't have something like the love and wisdom and prudence of gods to guide that, that power ends up leading to self destruct. And there's a lot of myth that are, you know, it's kind of looking along those lines. And so you were asking, will technological solutions work? Humans have both the capacity. Our abstraction gave us the capacity for physical tech because rather than just using a sharp rock, we could, like a chimp would do, we could experience that one rock was sharper than the other and understand why. There's an abstract principle called sharpness and we can make something even sharper. Right. That abstraction of principle allowed us to not just use tools, but evolve making better tools. It's also what allowed abstract language and coordination. So techne, just ways of doing things abstractly. Understand better ways of doing things applies to physical tech, but also social tech, a market or an educational system or a culture or religion. Government is a social technology of how do we have a better way of doing things together. I'm saying that the exponential tech, physical tech that we have mandates better social tech and that we're having more advancement in the physical tech than we are in the social tech. That the previous types of social tech are inadequate to hold the power of this physical tech. But this physical tech also makes possible evolutions in social tech that weren't possible before. So it's both possible and obligate. And that when the founders of the US were coming up with this system, they weren't having to think about ocean dead zones and planetary boundaries, or catastrophic weapons or Facebook creating hypernormal stimuli, doubling down on tribalism and group bias. There's nothing in the Constitution that is trying to think about how to solve those problems. There's nothing in the Scottish Enlightenment and the theory of markets that had to deal with those problems. There's nothing in Marx's critique of it that even had those problems as things or in the Bretton woods world. It just had the first of the exponential problems. Not exponential, existential. So what I would say is we have A novel problem landscape and as associated with our physical tech, but our physical tech directed by our social tech. Our social tech needs to make a jump. To be able to safely guide our physical tech and the inquiry around what that is. We need something a lot like the Scottish Enlightenment or the Enlightenment of modernity that ended up giving rise to not just the US but modern democracies as a whole. That is thinking through and those followed the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and saying, whoa, we had a change in our technoindustrial base that is actually debasing those previous principles of our social technology. So what is the new set of social capacities adequate to this? I'm saying we're at a new place where we have to actually have a step function in cultures. Because if our problems need fundamentally better problem solving than we currently have. We haven't argued that yet explicitly, but what I'll basically say is this. We define problems typically in a somewhat simple to try to make it tractable way. The problem is climate change and too much CO2. The problem is systemic racism and institutions that have these policies or whatever it is. And then so let's take the CO2 situation. We can come up with a solution to that narrowly defined problem that ends up externalizing harm to some other thing. We can say, okay, well, we can get the CO2 down by planting a whole bunch of plants and using nitrogen fertilizer that's going to sequester CO2, but the nitrogen is going to create nitrogen runoff in dead zones in the ocean faster. Or we're going to do a carbon tax, but only the countries that ratify it are going to do it. And so if the west does and China doesn't, and so there's a slowdown in GDP in the west and not in China, and China then uses that for near term advantage geopolitically, militarily. Then in trying to solve climate change, we ceded the 21st century to technologically empowered autocracy or whatever. So the problem isn't climate change. The problem is climate change and the dead zones and oceans and the great game of geopolitical power and its relationship to gdp. And they're so interconnected that either our current problem solving methods that don't factor, that either solve a problem and externalize harm to another problem, often that is worse, or just increasing the complexity of the problem landscape, or somebody else realizes that our solution is going to cause some other problem and so they fight us. And now we're stuck in political infighting where almost all of the energy goes into Just heat. And we can't actually implement large scale solutions if we can't coordinate on them. And so how can we find what it is that everybody cares about and how the different problems connect adequately to be able to come up with propositions that have the least unnecessary theory of trade offs are the best synergistic satisfiers that people can coordinate towards. I would say that is the minimum set of problem solving adequate to the problem solving landscape that we are coming into.
- [80:24]
B
Yeah. So I like this distinction you make between physical tech and social tech and that helps me understand exactly what the problem is. As you stated. I'm curious what improved social tech might look like. Is there anyone doing work right now concretely that you see and you say, well, that's a step in the right direction, or are you still in the stage of only being able to really envision what a solution would be in the abstract?
- [81:03]
A
I'd actually like to give a couple examples of how changes in physical tech change social tech both of the better and the worst historically a couple of times. Because this is not actually an abstract idea, it's an idea we have a lot of concrete understanding about, then we're being able to apply that to the current landscape. I'm going to give simplified narratives of topics that the top academics debate nuances of. There's a lot of nuance in here, but I think the points are at least adequately illustrative. Animal husbandry and agriculture was a massive tech shift. The agricultural revolution was okay. Rather than doing hunting and gathering, we can now create massive surplus of grains, which are the first really storable thing. And that means that we can make it through famines, we can grow our populations, we can start to get into storage and surplus. So we can see that the thing that we call civilization and the development of the plow are very closely related. There's a lot of people that have looked at the way that that physical technology preceded changes in the social text. Because until you had surplus, you didn't have to deal with the question of who gets the surplus and what is the governance system that mediates this surplus until you had enough surplus that when someone dies they could actually pass it on. All the laws regarding inheritance didn't have to come into play the same way in a very different way than it would have been in a tribal setting. So there's lots of things that the physical tech brought about that were different. Until you had a lot of surplus, there wasn't that much reason to raid and were another culture or another tribe because they didn't have much stored of value that you could extract. But also the division of labor roughly around gender, that is not absolute, but is a statistically generally accepted thing that men would do the hunting, women would do more of the gathering than women would do. Men would do more of the hunting, women would do the horticulture with the digging stick. As soon as it went from the horticulture and the digging stick to the agriculture and the plow, men's upper body strength on the plow actually made a huge difference over women doing the plow. When women would use the plow, they would miscarry. And so men moved to providing almost all the caloric surplus, women moved into the home. And you started to see changes in gender relationships associated with the change in tech and the way that the tech itself. The idea is that the tech is not totally values neutral. The tech ends up predisposing patterns of human behavior in certain ways. And so then some people argued that the rise of feminism largely followed the internal combustion engine, the kind of women's liberation movement, because then for the first time, men's upper body strength didn't matter because she could drive a tractor as well as he could drive a tractor and the tractor could out pull the plow oxen situation. So much that the first wave feminism women can do what men could do was mediated by a change in tech. So we can see those are not complete arguments or a lot of other cultural factors and things going on. But folks like Marvin Harris and cultural materialism worked on seeing. And McLuhan specifically, who worked on Marvin Harris, was looking at how physical tech in general affects social tech. McLuhan Specifically, how the information and communications tech ends up affecting society's minds values. We saw obviously that the printing press gave rise to the Lutheran revolution. The idea that everybody could have their own Bible and didn't need to have. They could study the scripture directly and didn't need a priest to mediate it. But also the idea of a newspaper and democracy, the idea that everybody could read what was going on and they could all learn to read, have an educational system, and then they could all come to the town hall and debate the thing that was a change in physical tech that made a new social tech possible. Could you have done democracy before? There was the ability to get everybody the news that was not at scale. You could at a tribal kind of scale, but at a larger scale. If the people don't all have access to information, how can they participate in choice making? Then as we were mentioning with social Media and the conversation that you'd have with folks like Tristan, the change to decentralized rather than one to many broadcast that both the newspaper and then the news was now the many to many information proliferation where then there's a billion search results for anything. So how do I decide which ones to look at? Well, whatever comes up in the first three pages of Google or on the top of my YouTube search or in my Facebook feed is going to be what I look at. The AIs that can comb through all those things and show me a specific subset ends up determining what I'm going to pay attention to in the information landscape. Those technologies are actually businesses. Those businesses have an agentic motive of their own to grow profitability. They do that through ads. They do that through maximizing our time on site, which improves ad revenue. And our time on site is optimized by certain types of content over others. And it mostly ends up being that it's optimized for the content. That creates limbic hijacks for me, emotional hijacks of some kind. Because if I stay in a real rational place, I usually recognize I don't want to spend that much time on Facebook. So hyper normal stimuli, things that are outraging, things that appeal to my existing biases maximize time on site. So existing biases on all sides get increased and in group out, group identity gets increased. Not even because Facebook wants to do that. It's just the nature of the algorithm optimizing for time on site associated with the business model and that thing. So that's an example of physical tech. Now that is a democracy ruining thing because it's actually replacing people reading news where at least two different people's news feed in a very red area and a very blue area in the US might have not a single thing in common. And the reporting on each issue is very, very slanted. And then it's selecting for the ones that the people are going to pay attention to. And so can you run a democracy where there is no shared reality basis at all? No. Now that's an example of physical tech changing social tech in a downward oriented direction in some critical ways. That doesn't mean there aren't also upward oriented directions. So then the question starts to become if we want to, we can see how the changes in physical tech made possible and even forced changes in social process social tech historically, and not just social tech, but the nature of even how I identify and the nature of minds, things like patriarchy and religions with male gods following the plow. Like these are Very fundamental changes. So then what we want to start saying is what are the necessary requisites of social tech adequate to hold exponential tech? What would new types of social technologies need to be? Oh, this is the thread that we lost earlier. If the problems need new problem solving capacities, which they do, because we can't keep narrowly defined problems that are this radically interconnected with this scope of consequence, then we need new institutions and social capacities to solve them. Those new institutions and social capacities are either enforced by a few people who understand them, or they have to arise from the people. If they are to be emergent, if they are to be commensurate with a new type of open society. The people have to understand the problem space and what is needed for it, and care about it and be willing to take a responsibility in mediating it. That's a kind of cultural revolution or cultural renaissance or enlightenment. That I would say, is the necessary thing that has to happen right now to give rise to new social institutions and problem solving capacities adequate to the problem solving landscape we're in right now. If we take the problems and say, what would necessary solutions require? What would it require? Well, it would require the ability to have shared sense making. It require the ability to take the various values and actually hold them together and look for propositions that could meet them all better. It would take coordinate processes that coordinate choice making. Well, then we can start to say, well, if we need social tech that does that, and that also means that develop humans that have the capacity to do that. How could we apply the new physical tech? We have to develop people and societies in that way.
- [89:19]
B
I've reached the end of my allotted time for this conversation, but there's a lot more we could talk about. And I'll have to have you on again at some point to get to those things. But this has been a great conversation. I'd like to point my audience in the direction of your Consilience project. Could you talk about that briefly?
- [89:40]
A
Yeah. Thank you. I am one of the members of a new project called the Consilience Project that is working on these topics, working on how do we articulate what is novel about the problem space today? Clearly enough. And it's not narrowly defined problems and it's not gross generalizations that don't end up giving rise to adequate solutions. But how do we identify how the problems are interconnected and what gives rise to them? The kind of systemic incentives and coordination challenges and like that well enough that we can identify what would necessary criteria of adequate solutions look like. And so there Starts to get to be a whole culture that is able to think about the problems much better and recognize the need to operate towards them, take responsibility towards them much better, and start to prototype new civilizational systems, new collective coordination capacities adequate to the fact that we have fully globalized supply chains, globalized tech, existential tech, et cetera. And that if we want those new capacities to emerge from the people, it has to be people understanding the issues, working to develop the capacities in themselves, and working to develop the right kind of good faith relationships with others that can prototype these capacities. So Consilience project is a place where there's a publishing set of things we're going to do and a kind of movement facilitating set of things that we aim to do. The publishing thing is there's papers that are basically explaining the fundamental aspects of social theory that we think are necessary to consider to develop new adequate social systems and the problem space. Then there's the application of that social theory to situational assessments of what's going on in the current world, where people can both understand the theory in an instantiated way and understand the problems with deeper insights that could give rise to more adequate thinking about solutions. And then there's this kind of meta news thing we developed, which is a kind of forensic method to be able to show where there is highly polarized belief about something Covid viral origins or climate change or systemic racism or whatever it is. How do we identify the different views and how do we identify how those views came to be? Both it involves mistakes and partiality and active kind of narrative warfare and distortion. And then what would synthesizing what we can identify as both the values and the sense making across those look like? So this is if we're going to be trying to do sense making, we also have to show where the breakdowns in sense making occur and help develop in people the capacity to notice narrative warfare, information warfare, both intentional and unintentional, that messes up the epistemic commons well so that they can participate more effectively. So those are the kind of publishing efforts and the movement building efforts. Are anyone that is seeking to improve journalism or improve public education, or fix the social media algorithms, or try to take what Taiwan is doing in digital democracy and iterate on it, or apply blockchain to government accounting or whatever it is that would be part of fundamentally new adequate social systems? How do we identify the ones that are doing really good work and signal boost them and rather than having it just look like a journalism project or an education project, be part of a fundamentally new civilization design movement that is starting to occur. Those are roughly the things we're interested in and paying attention to.
- [93:25]
B
So not the big stuff. Just doing some casual stuff at the Consilience Project.
- [93:30]
A
This stuff that I think, like you, I just don't know how not to think about. And so we're thinking about similar issues because I think attention and conscience mandates it.
- [93:43]
B
Absolutely. All right. Well, it's been a pleasure, Daniel. I'll have to have you back till next time.
- [93:47]
A
Thank you, Coleman.
- [93:52]
B
If you appreciate the work I do, the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website, ColemanHughes.org, and to subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you'll never miss my new content. As always, thanks for your support.