Overcoming Bias

“The science in Project Hail Mary is all pretty firmly grounded. There’s some BS all the way down at the quantum level, where Astrophage cell membranes can keep neutrinos in… But outside of that, everything else just follows established physics and science.” - Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary

Unrealistic science fiction can be great, but folks should sometimes point out the the unrealism of particular stories, especially stories that are very popular, and widely said to be realistic, including by their authors.

Other have pointed to implausible physics and politics, but after reading two dozen reviews, I don’t find anyone else mentioning my three comments on Project Hail Mary:

Rare Event: In the story, a big dimming of our Sun and a dozen nearby stars happens over decades. This must be a very rare sort of event, or we’d have noticed this scenario before out there among the stars. It also can’t last that long or spread that far each time, before reverting to the usual star appearance.

Close Alien: Our hero meets an alien from a star roughly 20 lightyears from Earth, who is at a very similar level of tech development to us. For example, they haven’t yet discovered radiation or relativity. Say no more than a century different. In a 14Gyr old universe that level of time correlation seems crazy unlikely. Also, to have aliens that close be typical, our universe must be chock full of civilizations. Which then must quite reliably die fast to produce our empty looking universe.

Similar Alien: They have different bodies and sensors, but once they manage to talk, our hero and alien get along better than would two random humans from human history. The alien’s culture is much like our hero’s culture, which is quite different from most other human cultures in history. This is worse than most historical fiction, which puts modern hero characters in old worlds.

The world has invested lots in AI over the last few years, and many expect a crash soon. Most attempts to use AI in firms seem to be failing. But is that just what we should expect from early applications? When should we look where for clearer evidence that recent AI is or is not going to justify its investment?

Since 2023, it has been widely reported that LLMs seem quite good at coding, and that this seems their most promising application area. Global spending on software is ~$1-2T/yr, so potential big saving there soon might plausibly justify last year’s ~$0.5T/yr AI investment.

For many decades the demand for software has been large and elastic. Most firms have many software projects they’d like to do, which they don’t do mainly due to cost. And market leaders tend to be firms whose software investments went well. So if the total cost of software fell by a factor of two, total spending on software should more than double. That’s supply and demand. And AI getting a big cut of that increased spending soon might justify its investment.

Of course fielding useful software involves many tasks, including identifying opportunities, securing funding, overseeing projects, defining requirements, marketing, user support, and writing, testing, and maintaining code. Just making code writing much cheaper doesn’t obviously make total software cost much cheaper. Much depends on just how many of these other tasks can be made cheaper as well.

If AI is going to have a big impact, when should we expect to see it? Software projects typically take ~6-9 months from conception to delivery, though orgs can take 1-3 years to reorganize workflows, incentives, etc. to accommodate new techs. Legacy software may not be replaced for up to 3-10 years.

So it seems that one should expect to see substantial AI-driven changes to the scale of the software industry within roughly 3 years of a widespread consensus that AI makes it much cheaper. Which is about now if that consensus happened 3 years ago. Or in about 3 years if that happened one year ago.

The number of U.S. software workers increased by ~50% in the last decade, probably mostly due to falling costs. So we should expect an even faster growth in software spending if AI is in fact causing a big increase in the rate at which its costs fall.

And if we don’t see such a big increase in the next few years, that will suggests that AI does not actually cut software costs nearly as much as advocates hope. Which is of course the usual scenario for hyped new techs. And should lead to a crash.

Of course that’s the short run; we might still plausibly see a “general purpose tech” impact that takes several decades to play out, as we’ve seen previously for techs like steam, electricity, personal computers, and the internet.

I recently said our civ will fall if we do not finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life. Especially our fast activism-driven evolution of values, morals, and norms.

But watching a documentary on early activist H.D. Thoreau brought home to me just how huge an ask this seems. Our modern world has come to deeply adore and revere changing its morals fast via youth movements, and a great many features of our modern world support this new pattern.

For example, youths are generally more risk-taking, emotionally expressive, eager to impress potential mates, less invested in prior arrangements, and better able to bond together into groups. Which attracts youths to the chance to skip the usual dues to rise fast in status as leaders of new tightly-bonded emotional youth movements.

Helping further, we legitimized fashions, seeing those who first adopt new popular changes as more virtuous. And we put kids together in high school and college, where they have more time for activism, bond into their own youth cultures, and are taught to see the world more abstractly and thus morality more simply and universally. Also, better communication tech has let them coordinate faster across wider distances.

Finally, the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest.

All of this has created a perfect storm encouraging youth to repeatedly make and join new internal-feelings-driven moral crusades, movements maximally suspicious of opposing older adults with ties of interest and habits to the existing order.

Could we apply industry to more strongly to manage this process? For example, by paying big orgs to create, suppress, and influence such movements to achieve key metrics. Yes, big orgs do substantially influence youth movements today, but mostly from behind the scenes. And these are mostly not for-profit orgs, and our world is pretty hostile to for-profit orgs operating outside their usual scopes, especially in sacred areas like moral activism. Social media feed algorithms seem to be the main form of this now, but I doubt they could do that much more than they do now.

We should do our best to try, but damn does this look hard.

In The Fatal Conceit (1988), F.A. Hayek argued that cultural evolution has bequeathed to us a capitalist “extended order” of money, property rights, and competitive markets, all with matching morals, and that socialism is bad because it appeals instead to dysfunctional moral instincts that this order had suppressed, while flattering us into thinking that we can apply reason well to more things than we actually can. Socialism replaces many capitalist choices with choices from deliberate “rational” bureaucratic government agencies. Capitalism, in contrast, typically makes use of more info than can our reason, and was also designed using more info.

Hayek, however, seems fine with using reason to choose within big firms, and he admits that cultural evolution (a) has often induced simpler societies to prevent such capitalism, (b) has often induced governments to greatly hinder capitalism in their later civilization periods, and (c) seems a proximate cause of the recent rise of interest in socialism. So why not estimate that the levels of capitalism and reason use that we seem to be drifting toward are in fact the most adaptive? Why see all that as a mistake?

Hayek seems to actually rely here not on cultural evolution, but instead on his theoretical economic analysis, together with empirical correlations between capitalism and places and periods that have had especially large wealth and growth. Which allows him to conclude that allowing cultural evolution to push us far enough away from capitalism now would plausibly result in the fall of our civilization, causing many deaths and much suffering. Which would be bad more because suffering is bad, and less because cultural evolution would go awry.

Behind Hayek’s argument there, however, seems to be a judgment that our modern world looks especially vulnerable to appeals to deeply embedded ancient moral instincts, and to flattery about our abilities to reason. However, as he never says this explicitly, Hayek never offers arguments for why we should expect to be more vulnerable to such things now.

This is where I offer cultural drift analysis as a complement to Hayek’s story. At the level of cultural features that we can only vary effectively in large groups, over the last few centuries our civilization has drifted toward less variety, weaker selection pressures, and faster rates of change of culture and environments. All of which does plausibly make us more vulnerable to flattery and simplistic moral appeals undermining our commitments to morals supporting capitalism.

However, such analysis also predicts that these same forces make us vulnerable to many more fatal conceits, i.e., to decay in many other key features of our shared culture. Does Hayek also fear and warn against excess trust in reason and moral instincts there? Is it feasible for us to reason well enough to usefully overturn other non-capitalist morals that we have inherited from cultural evolution? Hayek said:

Rebellion against private property and the family was, in short, not restricted to socialists. … Limits of space as well as insufficient competence forbid me to deal in this book with the second of the traditional objects of atavistic reaction that I have just mentioned: the family. I ought however at least to mention that I believe that new factual knowledge has in some measure deprived traditional rules of sexual morality of some of their foundation, and that it seems likely that in this area substantial changes are bound to occur. (p.51) …

Nor do I dispute that reason may, although with caution and in humility, and in a piecemeal way, be directed to the examination, criticism and rejection of traditional institutions and moral principles. … I wish neither to deny reason the power to improve norms and institutions nor even to insist that it is incapable of recasting the whole of our moral system in the direction now commonly conceived as `social justice’. We can do so, however, only by probing every part of a system of morals. (p.8)

So Hayek is relatively open to rationality overturning traditional morals in one big area of life, and is in principle open in many other areas. So let me say this clearly: our usual styles of rational analysis deployed over the last few centuries seem to have been quite inadequate to the task of changing morals while preserving or enhancing their cultural adaptability. Maybe we could up our game, but that does look quite hard.

Years ago I noticed that when my kids tried out a new game, those who won more wanted to play it again. And parents often try to make sure kids win at stuff they want kids to do more. We come to like things in part due to seeing ourselves win at them.

Nations seem similar. Yes, nations value some activities more, and engage in those more as a result. But nations often double-down on stuff after seeing themselves as win at it in ways that they personally respect, and expect others to respect. Nations continue to do that stuff lots in part to remind the world of how grateful it should be for their contribution.

For example, the US has seen itself as pioneering and greatly advancing democracy, free speech, medicine, higher education, basic research, legal due process, mass production, mass media, space exploration, entrepreneurship, the internet, and global military suppression of nazism, communism, and terrorism. This helps explain continued record US spending on medicine, education, military, and legal process.

Other nations act similarly. For example, Britain doubles down on law, parliaments, and anti-racism. France doubles down on liberties and fancy food. India doubles down on yoga and spirituality, Russia on war, sacrifice, and anti-decadence, and China on development.

If you want a nation to do more of X, maybe praise what they’ve already done on X.

Last week I realized that today’s rapid cultural evolution, mediated greatly by youth movements, seems encouraged by the common modern norm favoring “authenticity”. Youths ask their hearts how society should change. So I just read two books on the subject, Lionel Trilling (1972) Sincerity and Authenticity, and Charles Taylor (1991) Ethics of Authenticity. I also read Rousseau (1755) Discourse on Inequality, as many call that the first modern advocacy of authenticity.

Authenticity having your behaviors driven from within you, instead of letting others influence them. Follow your heart, you do you, go with your gut, that sort of thing. It is such a widely accepted norm that the authors who write books on it don’t actually argue for it much; they instead use it to argue for other stuff. My reading was a waste.

But, why exactly is authenticity such a good thing? Yes, there’s this quote about me, “Robin Hanson is more like himself than anybody else I know.” And, yes, my webpage has long said: “I’m not a joiner; I rebel against groups with ‘our beliefs’.” So as a matter of practice I seem to be authentic. Yet I still don’t see why it’s good, per se.

The modern world changes faster, and gives us more options, which puts a premium on agency; we can’t just ride along with our slowly changing peasant village anymore. But that means you need make choices, not that they need to come from within.

We’ve long taken controlling more as a sign of status, so others controlling you lowers your status. But what would this effect be stronger in the modern world?

Maybe in the modern world imitation and social pressures have become easier to see. In the old stable peasant village you acted like everyone else, but so did everyone, and you were not noticeably following any particular other visible models. However, in the modern world choices are more varied and contested, and so we can more easily see who in particular is pressuring or influencing who else in particular.

That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, except that looking too obviously “try hard”, like you are trying to choose actions to impress and please others, shows an unimpressive lack of confidence. Just as the most impressive dancers make their dancing look “effortless”, maybe the most impressive social displays are those that seem to come naturally, with little noticeable effort.

Cultural evolution says that most everything that comes from inside of you was stuff that went there before, from your prior cultural exposures. But seeing you trying to please and conform looks quite different to observers than your seeming to just do stuff from within, even though all of that stuff inside resulted from your prior efforts to please and conform, perhaps as a child. It is like the difference between a dancer who is visibly struggles to do her dance routine, and one for who the routine looks effortless, enjoyable, and even invented on the spot.

Do you love something historically-unusual about today’s culture? Like maybe democracy, rock music, gender equality, cosmology, or open inquiry? Enough to work to help it last long into the future? If so, read on; if not, this essay isn’t for you.

The Bible tells of how, freed from slavery in Egypt (~1270BC), the Israelites reached the promised land in a bit over a year, but then turned away out of fear, and wandered 40 more years before entering. Humanity is now doing something similar. A few centuries ago, we saw great promise but also threats in industry, so we put only one foot there, leaving the other in our ancient system of tradition and cultural evolution.

Alas this won’t work. We could stay standing either with both feet in culture, or with both in industry, but with our feet split civilization will soon fall. Most likely to be replaced by insular religious groups the Amish or Haredim, who will then discard most historically-unusual features of today’s world mono-culture. So to save such features, we must try to move our other foot into industry. Or bust. Let me explain.

The biggest change humanity has seen in at least 10Kyrs was the “industrial revolution” in the last few centuries. Its core cause was our finding better ways to organize and optimize effort. These included (a) math in accounting, engineering, and science, (b) new ways to structure hierarchical and professional organizations, and (c) capitalist societies. The peak in industrial optimization has been big competing for-profit orgs seeking to max key numbers that drive customer choices, in areas where professionals found powerful formal abstractions. Numbers like the cost of cloth, the strength of steel, or the speed of cars.

We have allowed many modern choices to be set by such powerfully-optimizing industrial orgs. Which is why we are rich and powerful. But even in the rich most industrialized West we retain two other spheres of life which are each just as large as this industrial sphere.

One non-industry sphere is where we LARP industrial styles of specialization, procedure, and formality, but don’t actually release much of the power of industrial optimization. For example, in academia and medicine we let prestigious professionals judge quality, which results in great inefficiently and rising spending. And in much of law and government we mistakenly trust prestige, specialization, and process to work without capitalist incentives, and even to well-regulate the capitalists. We have numbers to use to let industry optimize such areas, but don’t let them.

The other non-industry sphere of life is where we pointedly resist industry-style optimization. A century or two ago we saw huge productivity gains in shipyards, plantations, and factories. But saw also how they cut individuality, variety, and enchantment, and fostered inequality, regimentation, and instrumentality. So we have worked to limit the scope of what we’ve called “totalitarian” “dehumanizing” industry.

Socialist and communist regimes tried to cut out only the capitalism part, and most other regimes have limited industry via redistribution and regulation. The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices, even as modernism LARPed industry levels of change as “innovation”. And “little boxes” ridicule, and laws, have pushed ordinary folks into spending their increased wealth on variety, instead of cost-effective industrial dorm-like lifestyles.

Alas, we have been accumulating a cultural deft, and our behaviors in these non-industry spheres become more maladaptive. Before industry, the main way humans kept their behaviors adaptive was via cultural evolution, which required high cultural variety and selection pressures, and low rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. But modern industry (a) increased rates of social environment change, (b) increased travel, talk, and trade, which has cut cultural variety, and (c) caused far higher levels of wealth, health, and security, which has cut selection pressures. In addition, the modernism cultural turn induced far higher rates of cultural drift.

So we face a stark choice. We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc. For a while the world loses industry, and when that maybe later returns it is without most of what we cherish about our current world culture. And then it likely falls as well later. Like the Israelites staying away from the promised land.

Or we can try to enter that promised land, by applying industry more to the life areas which we have so far blocked, accepting that will also change and sometimes destroy things we now like about our lives in those areas. Such as by freeing capitalism more to run academia, education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.

Or you might change your mind about my first questions above, and decide that you don’t actually much care about the distant future. I don’t have good news here; you can either use this info to better choose carefully, or stick your head in the sand.

Oh, and if you think AI will save us, ask yourself: why would an AI culture modeled after human culture better avoid the problem of a broken cultural evolution process?

I asked a set of polls, and 3 LLMs (ChatGPT,Claude,Gemini) to rate the relative explanatory power of the following 16 causes of cultural change for the two periods 1700-1900 and 1900-2025. I asked polls re picking 1 of 4 causes, and asked LLMs to think of 50 culture changes in each period, score each cause on a 0-10 scale re each change, and then add up scores per cause. (I also asked Grok, but its rounded sums suggested that it lied about generating detailed scores.)

• Elite Youth Culture - Rise of high school and college, youth culture and movements; changes had to appeal to elite youths.

• Lazy/Myopic/Selfish/Pleas - Revert to be more lazy, myopic, selfish, pleasure-oriented.

• Forager Reversion - Revert to forager styles: more art, leisure, democracy, and equality, and less religion, fertility, and domination.

• Individualism, Authentic - Rise in status of individualism, authenticity: think for yourself, follow your heart, be true to yourself.

• Innovate, Explore, Create - Rise in status of innovation, exploration, creativity.

• Abstract Concept, Reason - Rise in status of more abstract concepts and reasoning.

• Rich, Safe, Trade/Talk - Stuff that appeals more to people who are richer and safer, with more/wider talk/travel/trade.

• Merging Culture Appeal - Stuff accessible to and can appeal to the wide range of cultures merging in this period.

• Fashion/Elite Displace - Rise in fashion as change process; changes must appeal to elites seeking to displace other elites.

• Media/Word Legibile - Legibility of change symbols to spread via words and mass media.

• Big Org/Inst. Codify - New stuff can be seen and codified by our new large orgs and institutions.

• Sounds Good, Short-Run - Prefer stuff that sounds good and shows visible short-run gains.

• Visible Sacrifice - Visible sacrifices show allegiance; we figure we value what we’ve seen recent big visible sacrifices for.

• Lose Religion/Fragment - Loss of religion and traditions as core cultural glues induce fragmentation, divergence.

• Low War/Internal Polarize - Less war and outside threats make more wealth inequality, stronger internal conflict, polarization.

• Adapt Tech/Demography - Sensible adaptation to other behavior changes, not of culture type, eg, tech, demographic, and business practices.

Here are priority out of 100 poll scores, and median of the 3 LLM sum scores:

Scores don’t vary that much, correlations between sources are weak, and I overall disagree a lot with them. From which I conclude that either this is quite hard to figure out, and/or there really were quite a few strong causes.

Humans have inherited many ancient values mainly encoded in DNA. These are mostly negative values, about avoid things like death, pain, hunger, cold, injury, boredom, confusion, loneliness, etc. Our main ancient positive values are social, about wanting allies, respect, sex, progeny, etc.

But we are quite reluctant to admit that social values are our main positive values. So our cultures give us other varied “sacred” positive values to focus on and aspire to. While these sacred values seem to function in practice mainly to help us achieve our social values, it is important to us that we not see them this way. So each culture gives its members distinctive high positive values. Like their versions of freedom, purity, honor, justice, equality, art, exploration, and inquiry.

However, when our culture shows us several different such grand values, or we are exposed to different subcultures, how do we rank such values? Yes, we have a norm that sacred values don’t conflict. But we are at times forced to see that two values do in fact conflict, which we then resolve this by deciding that the lower one can’t really be sacred. To do this, we need a way to pick which value is higher.

George Simmel, “founding figure of sociology”, in 1900 published The Philosophy of Money, wherein he argued (quotes below) that a common human heuristic is that we judge our highest values to be those that we, or people like us, have recently sacrificed the most to achieve, via suffering those negatives that we usually try to avoid.

For example, Christians see the great value of God’s love in the sacrifice of his son Christ, and the value of Christianity in the sacrifices of martyrs, monks, and soldiers in religions wars. Citizens see the great value of their nation in the many harsh wars to promote that nation. Professionals see the value of their profession in the sacrifice of potential, years of practice, and hours per day of devoted work. Activists see the value of their causes in the suffering of advocates at the hands of opponents. We have record levels of spending on education, medicine, and legal process, and record levels of confidence in the high value of such spending.

You see, we humans aren’t satisfied to just enjoy tasty nutritious easily-prepared food. But foodies can hope that expensive ingredients, difficult preparation methods, and exceptional skilled cooks may deliver sensory nuance, harmony of composition, craft appreciation, place authenticity, novelty, and narrative. Enough of that and they hope to rise above the mundane to touch the sacred.

And we can’t just be entertained by engaging stories amid pleasing views in movies. But cinéphiles can hope that movie-makers’ artistic excellence and deep insight into human nature, obtained at great personal cost, can be combined with viewers’ careful attention, multiple viewings, literacy, and tolerance for ambiguity to let them see deeply, access serious emotions, encounter other minds and worlds, and join the community of those who “get it”. Which rises above the mundane to touch the sacred.

Now if we had some independent and strong grip on our greatest values, then we might only sacrifice for them when and to the degree that such sacrifice actually best achieved those values. But when we don’t have much of a way to tell which are our greatest values, but instead infer our values to be whatever we most sacrifice for, this can create self-reinforcing cycles that create great suffering.

For example, if we see that our greatest sacrifices lately have been for religion, we try harder to push more of us to be more strictly religious, via more personal sacrifice, and to convert outsiders, which cases suffering via conflict. If our greatest sacrifices have been wars to promote our nations, religions, or ideologies, then we get more eager to promote such things via new wars.

If our greatest sacrifices recently have been in culture wars, we get more eager to push for faster bigger cultural change, especially along the dimensions where we have faced opposition. For example, high levels of social conflict and sacrifice induced by recent “defund the police” initiatives on one side, and by anti-immigrant efforts on the other side, was probably part of the appeal of both approaches.

This makes me better appreciate ancient societies that spent huge fractions of their available labor on monumental architecture, and also that did lots of human sacrifice.

The longer the period where we have not seen great sacrifices lately, the more we fear that we have become decadent, selfish, profane, and have lost touch with higher values and deeper meanings. And the more eager we become to induce and join big sacrifice activities. For example, WWI ended an unusually long period of European peace and prosperity, and saw an unusually great enthusiasm for war on all sides.

Today we have also seen an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. I predict this will not last. We will come more see ourselves as out of touch with our grand values, and become more open and even eager for actions that induce new regimes of great sacrifice. Periodic high rates of sacrifice will probably continue for as long as we humans (or our AI descendants) use sacrifice as our key indicator of our top grand values. We really need to find a better way to find and affirm our highest values.

Those Simmel quotes:

Even superficial psychological observation discloses instances in which the sacrifice not only increases the value of the desired object but actually brings it about. This process reveals the desire to prove one’s strength, to overcome difficulties, or even simply to be contrary. The necessity of proceeding in a roundabout way in order to acquire certain things is often the occasion, and often also the reason, for considering them valuable. In human relations, and most frequently and clearly in erotic relations, it is apparent that reserve, indifference or rejection incite the most passionate desire to overcome these barriers, and are the cause of efforts and sacrifices that, in many cases, the goal would not have seemed to deserve were it not for such opposition. …

Moral merit always signifies that opposing impulses and desires had to be conquered and sacrificed in favour of the morally desirable act. If such an act is carried out without any difficulty as a result of natural impulse, it will not be considered to have a subjective moral value, no matter how desirable its objective content. Moral merit is attained only by the sacrifice of lower and yet very tempting goods, and it is the greater the more inviting the temptations and the more comprehensive and difficult the sacrifice. Of all human achievements the highest honour and appreciation is given to those that indicate, or at least seem to indicate, a maximum of commitment, energy and persistent concentration of the whole being, and along with this, renunciation, sacrifice of everything else, and devotion to the objective idea.

Most people today are confident that the US in 1860 having ~4M slaves (out of its 31M population) was a big moral mistake. But who exactly is to blame for this mistake? I broke the causal path into these 8 steps:

1. Africa Wars - African nations/tribes go to war against each other. Sometimes in part to grab slaves.

2. Enslave Losers - African war winners enslave losers instead of killing them. Other options more risked revenge.

3. Sell to Traders - African war winners sell slaves to African slave traders

4. Sell to Non-Africans - African slave traders move slaves to coast (~10-20% die on way), sell to Non-Africans

5. Move to US - European slave traders move ~4% of African slaves to US (~10-15% die on way), sell them there

6. US farmers buy - US farmers buy slaves, work them

7. Let slaves have kids - US farmers let slaves live long, and have kids. This was unusual in history of slavery.

8. Treat kids as slaves - US farmers treat kids of slaves as also slaves. If this were not allowed, they’d not have allowed step 7.

Polls with 4009 responses rated which of these were the worse moral mistakes, relative to a max of 100:

It seems that respondents put most blame here on people who choose to enslave over to kill or stop from existing. Even though when directly asked they say that slavery is not as bad an outcome as death or non-existence.

An ancient forager norm tells us to resist domination. And with mere words and other cheap public actions, we do. But when actions are more private, deniable, or expensive, we don’t.

For example, around powerful people we typically more laugh and agree, interrupt less, and are more deferential, polite and flattering. We are ingratiating and conformist to bosses, and less likely to criticize them to other people. And famously:

Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. (More)

I’ve written many times before on the subject of blackmail. As the main effect of anti-blackmail laws is to allow rich celebrities to more easily evade norms and laws, my best explanation for such laws is a widespread desire to give them what they want. The most telling evidence is that we allow exactly the same transaction, as an NDA, if initiated by the rich celebrity, but criminalize it if initiated by a poor observer of their transgressions. Which seems to me pretty clear evidence of who the policy is intended to benefit.

While elite people and institutions typically practice strong internal meritocracy, they often push less prestigious rivals toward more egalitarian inclusion. For example, elite universities push for inclusive community colleges, elite policy think tanks push for easy-access elections and participatory civic processes, and cultural elites push more participatory arts and culture. Pushing rivals toward egalitarianism undermines them, to the advantage of their elite competitors.

Elite journalists have long pushed their lesser competitors to have more “citizen journalism”. And recently journalists have complained loudly about their newly risen competitor of prediction markets. They complain that such markets are in poor taste, sensational, unethical, induce manipulation and sabotage efforts, undermine respect for proper authorities, and tempt people to waste their time and energy. All of which are of course also issues with journalism.

But their loudest complaints, at least lately, have been about inequality. “Insider trading”, by people who know more than others, is said to be blatantly unfair, discourages participation by know-nothings, and tempts people to reveal secrets they have promised to keep. All of which are of course also problems with journalism. But with the usual hypocrisy, they propose forbidding government officials from trading in markets, but not from talking to journalists. And banning markets, but not journalist reports, on important world events.

Elites usually admire and celebrate elite journalists, who have elite insight, connections, and go to elite events. As they can get the story first, and understand it better. But elite traders who know more than others, that’s shameful!

A common motive for studying “egalitarian” primitive social practices is a hope of supporting something like the following narrative:

We humans evolved to see ourselves as naturally egalitarian. This is shown by the highly egalitarian practices of modern foragers, who represent our best guess of typical ancestral practices until roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern non-egalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness. We should thus move government policy toward more financial redistribution, to make more equality.

We have good reasons to doubt this narrative. Yes, there are many social processes common in human societies that often substantially cut particular kinds of inequality. Such as sharing, risk-pooling, reputation-building, status-leveling, consensus collective decisions, and mobility. However,

1. the main motives for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality,

2. each such process only cuts a few types of inequality, not inequality in general, &

3. societies have varied greatly in which processes they supported, and in their details.

This suggests that humans do not in fact have a general moral norm of egalitarianism.

Yes, cultural evolution, our best theoretical account of the origin and shaping of such processes, does suggest that such processes were once often adaptive, and that part of their adaptive benefit was often to cut inequality. However, the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive.

We thus have at best only rather weak reasons to expect modern alienation, stress, conflict, or unhappiness today to result from our using such processes less. And no concrete reason to expect that reviving such practices would be adaptive on net. Given our weak data on cross-cultural happiness or meaning, we also have little evidence to suggest that such policies would help much today with such outcomes.

The personal lives of Olympic medalists seem overwhelmingly devoted to practicing their sport; a dreary life. In contrast, prestigious firms today have norms that discourage such complete career devotion:

Employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. Such as topics of interest, limited money, or the needs of a spouse or family. A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.

Yet for extracurriculars, you are not supposed to connect those to your career plans, as “nerds” do. You must instead do something with no practical value, but that is prestigious. Like varsity athletes in lacrosse or crew, sports that are too expensive for ordinary folks to pursue. Excess interest in ideas marks you as a “boring” “tool”. (More)

We can see this as elites using norms to coordinate to prevent their lives being totally filled with career competition. Yes, they also compete in non-career activities, but at least they get a change of pace. Common norms among elites through history can be seen as similarly trying to limit how people could achieve high status. To limit which sorts of people could compete, which activities they would do, and how much of their time would be spent on those.

This is how I now think about this key modern change:

Early in the Industrial Revolution, many noted the great productivity that resulted from very regimented and organized workplaces like shipyards and factories. They then expected and feared that such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting. Novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We warned of this coming totalitarianism.

But what happened instead is that we have spent most of our increased wealth on not regimenting our non-work lives. Instead of such things being arranged and regimented efficiently by big orgs, as in our work lives, we instead each make pretty autonomous and artisanal choices. For example, instead of wearing standard uniforms, living in dorms with shared bathrooms, and eating at cafeterias, we each vary and duplicate all this at great expense. (More)

Though we allowed big competitive orgs to achieve high levels of efficiency and innovation in many key areas, we have so far coordinated to discourage people from using such orgs to achieve max competitive advantage in their non-work lives.

How could this have worked? Imagine you sold a big fraction of your future income to a for-profit “style agent” org, to which you gave the power to substantially influence where you live, what car you drive, what clothes you wear, how you do your hair and face, and what are your hobbies. They would do this in consultation with you, to best complement your abilities and ambitions, but also to max your career income, so they can max their cut of it.

Such firms would plausibly produce max income people, except that such folks’ status would fall too far when others learned that their lives had been managed this way. As we made strong norms ridiculing such regimented and managed lives. So while modern rates of cultural evolution have greatly increased in areas where we’ve allowed strong selection, we’ve prevented such strong selection in other areas.

The modern world thus has a big split, variously described as STEM vs humanities, quantitative vs qualitative, competition vs cooperation, profane vs sacred, and work vs. leisure. I’ll call them “system” vs “soul”. In the system areas, people and orgs frequently choose according to a low dimensional set of concrete metrics, driving big competitive orgs that used modern systems of concepts, analysis, and organization to make those “numbers go up”. Like how phone companies compete to make their phones cheap, light, long-lasting, wide-ranged, big-screened, and high computing.

In the remaining soul areas, in contrast, choices are made mostly by individuals pressured to use vibes to express their individuality, creativity, and authenticity. Like in friendship, love, parenting, art, entertainment, prestige, community, and voting. Or by folks who defer to specialists who aren’t monitored well enough to drive them to complete strongly to produce or innovate in either the soul or system areas where they claim expertise. Like priests who claim to produce religious soul, or education and medicine experts who claim to produce income or health.

Long ago both system and soul areas changed slowly together, such change being driven mainly by simple adaptive cultural evolution. And there was enormous variety in such things around the world. But then a few centuries ago system areas developed much stronger ways to select for adaptive change. Which greatly increased our long distance interaction via more talk, travel, and trade. Which caused a global convergence in all areas of culture.

At first, soul areas of culture tried to make minimal adjustments to accommodate system changes, but then around 1900, at the “modernism” transition, soul area folk decided that the one thing they agreed on was that prior soul styles were no good. So they switched to eagerly seeking change, via exploring many possibilities and following cultural activists supported by youth movements.

A rationale for this was to help soul areas adapt to fast changing system areas. And some soul changes did do this. But most were not tracking adaptive pressures, and so overall this change has led to our soul culture drifting to into increasing maladaption. Which is the key problem that will cause our civ to fall, and future civs that replace us to also fall, until we either slow system evolution way down, or find ways to induce fast adaptive soul changes.

Financial debt is money you must repay, and technical debt is accumulated when insufficient maintenance costs are paid counter the usual tendencies of complex systems like software to rot. Let me now use the term “macro cultural debt” to describe the costs that cultures that must eventually repay when key parts of them decay into maladaption. Like the “org culture debt” from the org culture literature. For over a century now we have been accumulating big cultural debt in our soul areas.

Maybe we could invent new ways to drive strong cultural evolution in soul areas. I’ve been exploring how futarchy might help. But until we find new better methods, the obvious solution is to allow the proven metric-driven for-profit orgs that have done so well in system areas to take more control over soul areas, such as via for-profit orgs that manage governance, parenting, and style (as outlined above). Early visions expressed in novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We may well be have been surprisingly prescient.

I get that I’m not painting a pretty or inspiring picture here. But my first allegiance is to tell the truth. If you don’t want descendant cultures to be as different from us today as we are from most random past cultures, but instead want some precious parts of our present soul culture to last far into the future, then we will need to find a way to package such precious parts with an overall adaptive cultural package. So we will need to somehow induce sufficient adaptive cultural evolution in most parts of soul culture.

For many decades I’ve thought about how to reform areas of life via finding ways to measure the long term outcomes people want from each area, and then paying providers for achieving those outcomes. As soon I’ll be at an event where we will be talking about how to reform news, let me take a stab at doing that for news.

If what news customers want is to read the articles that others read, so they can discuss them together, then readers could pay proportional to how many others will read the same article.

If what customers want from news is a feeling of enjoyment from reading, we might just frequently give consumers two new articles, have them rate which they liked more, estimate personal ELO ratings from such tests, and pay news providers more for higher rated articles.

If what news customers want from news is info to predict the big picture future of humanity, we might test LLMs on their ability to predict such things, then pay for each article based on how much such LLM predictions improve by reading that article.

If, in addition to the above, news customers just want accurate articles, that make fewer false claims, we could just evaluate random articles for accuracy, and pay more for more accurate sources.

Sure there are many details re making each of these approaches work better. But the main problem seems to me to be that customers just don’t like such approaches. Most would feel ashamed to make cultural choices using more mechanical numerical mechanisms. Especially if explicit strong financial incentives were involved. Re culture, self-respecting folks follow their vibes.

For example, few seem interested in my many proposals to reform crime, health, career planning, and other areas of life via strong incentives tied to numerical metrics. And I’ve seen many visibly show me how much less they think less of me from learning that I rely heavily on MetaCritic to pick movies and TV shows.

To solve cultural drift, we are going to have to somehow recruit the same level of intense effort and accuracy that modernity has achieved in tech, science, and business practice to other areas of life now more dominated by norms and vibes. But a big obstacle to that is our norms and vibes against such things.

Added 27Feb: Of course I should mention a big way that news might change soon: it might include far more prediction market prices.

“Info institutions” solicit contributions, aggregate them into info summaries, and distribute such summaries to audiences. Examples include gossip, courts, journalism, academia, social media, speculative markets, and official reports of orgs (such as govts and churches). Such institutions often dis their competitors. For example, most have long dissed gossip, the oldest. Early journalists were dissed by governments and churches. Recently, academics and journalists have dissed social media.

Lately, journalists have been dissing prediction markets, with complaints that can be made about most info institutions. For example:

• Prestige - Its bad if people get info they enjoy, vs what prestigious folks say is good for them.

• Waste - People might enjoy it so much they waste time and money on it.

• Money - This involves money, which could change incentives.

• Privacy - Sometimes it is bad to spread more info. For example, info on candidate chances on election day.

• Secrets - People who had promised to keep secrets might be induced instead to reveal them.

• Sabotage - Participants might push changes to the world to make their takes more accurate.

On these complaints I say: treat the various info institutions alike. For example, if you want to ban govt officials from trading in prediction markets, for fear they’d reveal secrets, then also ban them from talking to reporters, or from gossiping. If you want to ban sports betting due to possible waste, then ban sports news and entertainment too. If you want to promote democracy by protecting political speech in gossip, journalism, and social media, then protect political prediction markets also.

For some kinds of complaints, we have good evidence that prediction markets are in fact superior to other info institutions:

• Errors - In particular cases, predictions have been wrong.

• Vagueness - In particular cases, it was unclear to some what exactly was being claimed.

• Manipulation - Folks might offer biased contributions to distort audience actions.

Prediction markets have been consistently more accurate than other sources on the same topics at same time with similar resources. And an expectation of manipulation attempts on average makes such markets more accurate. If these issues are important, we should be willing to tolerate doing worse on other problems, to do better on these.

People hate to be given direct orders, especially if they will have to visibly follow such orders, and especially if they feel rivalrous with those who give the orders. And most of our ancestors managed to avoid this despised scenario most of the time.

Sure, at times kids, servants, and soldiers had to take specific orders, and wives also sometimes. But most of what most people had to do was quite routine and scripted, requiring no new explicit orders. And many of the explicit orders given were by overlords whom the ordered didn’t feel very rivalrous with, like masters ordering servants, or generals ordering troops.

Modern workers, in contrast, are frequently given novel orders, and by people much more similar to them. For example, people of a similar age and class, who were once at the same level as them, and who compete with them for mates and associates. Orders where it is far from clear to the person ordered that such orders are actually better choices for the enterprise or society as a whole.

In fact, a key function of modern schools seems to be to habituate us to such orders. Schools grade students more frequently than adults get graded, and far more than is optimal for student learning. Historically, times and places with smart unschooled adults have found it hard to get such folks to function well in modern workplaces.

Most of our ancestors would be ashamed of us if they saw how servile we are at work; their pride would not have accepted such clear and frequent ranking and domination. But what we gained from this submission is great wealth, including health and security, and they would envy us for those.

Early in the Industrial Revolution, many noted the great productivity that resulted from very regimented and organized workplaces like shipyards and factories. They then expected and feared that such regimentation would spread to all the rest of their lives, including their food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, and parenting. Novels like Pictures of a Socialist Future and We warned of this coming totalitarianism.

But what happened instead is that we have spent most of our increased wealth on not regimenting our non-work lives. Instead of such things being arranged and regimented efficiently by big orgs, as in our work lives, we instead each make pretty autonomous and artisanal choices. For example, instead of wearing standard uniforms, living in dorms with shared bathrooms, and eating at cafeterias, we each vary and duplicate all this at great expense. But we can afford to do so, at least for now.

Compared to our ancestors, who had similar levels of domination, routine, and poverty in their work and non-work lives, we have become schizophrenic. At work, we are far more dominated and constrained by our bosses and orgs, though they often avoid giving very direct orders. However, outside work we are far more autonomous, rich, and vibe-driven. Which we like.

Now instead of seeing all this as a fundamental modern tradeoff, some are foolish enough to think that we could be similarly autonomous, rich, and vibey at work, if only we would rebel against capitalism. But even the least capitalist modern societies have also had big orgs, and roughly this same split between regimented productive work and relatively free and inefficient non-work.

This work vs non-work split also correlates roughly to where we have healthy vs unhealthy cultural evolution today. Even though many maladaptive norms limit how firms can innovate to make work more productive, capitalist competition has been driving firms to be more productive overall. But our vibe-driven and norm-intensive artisanal non-work practices re food, clothes, homes, friends, lovers, parenting, etc. have been drifting into maladaption.

But such maladaptive culture just can’t last, however much we enjoy it. Sorry, just defying selection pressures was never going to be stable in the long run. And this seems to me to be our most fundamental modern mistake, which our descendants must eventually solve. But how?

My default scenario is that our main world civ falls, to be replaced by insular fertile groups like the Amish and Haredim. Groups whose non-work lives are strongly set by their conservative religious cultures, which do not give individuals much room for rich autonomous artisanal non-work lives. Yes, they may find it harder to organize work as efficiently, and as they grow they may well fall into the modern pattern again, likely resulting in at least one repeat of our civ’s rise and fall.

Another scenario is that we allow capitalist orgs to own and run more people, things, and areas of life. Yes, humans seem quite opposed to this at present, but humans may well start out AIs (or ems) in this sort of situation, and allow that to continue as they grown in power and ability. Perhaps realizing some versions of what many have long feared as totalitarian dystopias.

I’ve outlined other scenarios for making culture more adaptive, but I’ve described those at higher levels of abstraction, as ways to search for more concrete answers. So these may well also result in something like such scenarios.

If you don’t like such options, I sincerely invite you, implore you actually, to help us find more better alternatives.

I was once an AI researcher, and since then I’ve been both an economist and a futurist for many decades. For most of that time, I’ve been one of the few who most specialized in thinking about the social impact of future AI. Furthermore, recent events haven’t actually taught us that much more about this topic. So listen when I tell you: most issues that people have with AI are actually issues they have with the future, even without AI. Except that AI might accelerate the schedule. Seven examples:

1. People who invent something new must typically pay for the resources that they consume in this process, and any negative externalities they thereby impose. Like how AI data-centers must pay for electricity, water, and noise pollution. Then such inventors gain some intellectual property rights over future versions of what they invent. Those who back such ventures must risk capital, to gain a chance of future rewards, both of which may be taxed or subsidized at some rate. Nations have to decide how much to favor local competitors, due to possible military, economic, and prestige gains for the nation. All of these issues are being considered today re AI.

2. We’ve long had to make difficult judgements about how to allocate credit and data rights between bosses and subordinates, tool users and makers, and the inspired and the inspiring. Sometimes we must adjust our crude proxies for quality when it becomes too easy to fake such proxies. Recent AI advances force us to yet again reconsider our policies re these divisions. Such as re whether AI “slop” is art, if students can use AI to complete assignments, and who to credit between AI makers and users.

3. Over history, human environments have continued to drift away from those where humans first evolved. As a result, we notice more “alienation”, and more seek connection to those “natural” environments. But we should expect the future to become even stranger and less comforting to our deep instincts. AI is and seems strange, and seems likely to accelerate our drift into strangeness.

4. We don’t really know much about which kinds of physical systems produce “hard problem” type consciousness, though we each feel confident that our physical brain does this often while we live. We have some priors, but almost no data. So there has always been a risk that as we change stuff about our bodies and its environment, we might stop being conscious. Such as by changing foods, brain tools, etc. The further we go in using tech to modify our bodies and worlds, the larger this risk becomes. AI may undergo more such changes faster, forcing us to wonder which AIs and AI-augmented humans are actually conscious.

5. Mostly via culture, humans have long accumulated more abilities, which has increased how many humans Earth can support. We have also increased the rates at which we can so innovate. In the last thousand years, we have not much increased the rate at which we can grow the human population, but we have greatly increased the rate at which we can grow wealth. As a result, we’ve seen increasing wealth per person. But we should expect this situation to end eventually, with a return to subsistence wages, once we find better techs for growing population faster. And as we have ways to grow the population of AIs (and ems) very fast, then when AIs can replace most all human labor, human wages should fall to AI subsistence levels, which is well below human levels. Humans today should thus want to insure against the risk of suddenly losing their jobs during their work years.

6. In history, descendants consistently grew in capabilities relative to their still-living ancestors, and eventually became powerful enough to win most conflicts with such ancestors. Descendants have also consistently changed their priorities, norms, and values over time, even when ancestors disapproved. Even so, ancestors typically sacrificed greatly to enable and support descendant prosperity. These trends have all continued strongly even as both lifespans and rates of cultural change have greatly increased, which has resulted in a much wider range of conflicting values being around at the same time. Our default expectation should be that this trend continues into the future, including for AIs, who will literally be descended from us, and inherit many features from us; they will change their priorities, and win conflicts with human ancestors. Preventing this requires ancestors to acquire unprecedented powers over descendants.

7. Up until a few centuries ago, most human culture was quite adaptive, due to high variety, strong selection pressures, reluctance to change, and slow rates of environmental change. Then the rise of strong capitalist selection pressures induced far faster rates of change in tech, work, and business, and the new big capitalist orgs made work far more regimented and less autonomous. While many feared that non-work lives would soon be similarly regimented, we spent our increased wealth on preventing this from happening. So our non-work lives, such as love, friendship, parenting, and governance, have remained relatively autonomous and artisanal. But as a result, non-work culture has been drifting into maladaption, due to greatly fallen variety and selection pressures, and increased rates of internal and environmental change. We should expect that eventually our non-work culture must become adaptive again, likely via becoming more constrained by large capitalist orgs. Strong selection pressures for subsistence wage AIs (or ems) could make this happen sooner.

Added 21Feb: Note that if I’m right that our AI issues are really just future issues, there is less point in thinking about AI in particular, compared to the future in general.

A common immature attitude to desire is to assume that you are entitled to what you passionately desire, and to then cry if you don’t get it, to pressure others to give it to you. If you still don’t get it, a common response is to then declare that you’ve given up on the entire category, and just don’t care anymore.

For example, you fall in love with someone who rejects you, and then declare you are done with love, and will just live alone. Or you want a career as an actor, but then fail there, and so declare that jobs don’t matter, they are just a paycheck. Or you try to elect socialist utopian, who then betrays your hopes, so you decide it’s all corrupt, and you might as well elect partisans on your side.

A more mature stance, adopted by the wiser and more experienced, is to admit that you care a lot, but even so you can’t always get your favorite outcomes. Thus you must search carefully for the best feasible options. (LLMs confirm this overall story: 1,2,3.)

Regarding culture, the most common attitude I see is naive entitlement. Such folks fully embraced the aesthetic and moral views of their childhood, schools, associates, and entertainment sources. They see the views of folks from other times and places as just wrong, and expect history to prove their judgements right. They are typically disappointed when later generations reject many of their cultural truths.

The second most common attitude I see is among folks who have come to realize that cultures change greatly over time, and that the reasons they were given to embrace their local cultures don’t really stand up to scrutiny. In response to evidence that their culture is likely to decay and be replaced by very different ones, such folks often express indifference. They don’t care much which cultures win in the long run.

These both seem, to me, immature stances on cultures. A more mature stance is to admit that the future won’t preserve your culture by default, and that in fact it might not preserve very much of it. But then to ask what you most value in your culture, and to search for ways to preserve those best features. Even if you maybe can’t save much.

Folks with a mature stance on cultural desire are ready to help me think about how to fix cultural drift.

Time for a status update on cultural drift. I’ve been pondering solutions, and now see at best only three weakly promising options. The other possible approaches seem to me at best only modest supplements to these three best solutions.

The first solution is for some rather large polity to adopt a very competent form of governance (e.g. futarchy) tied to an ex post measurable sacred goal correlated greatly with the capacity of our main world civ over the next few centuries. Citizens should see this goal as sacred so that they are proud to sacrifice for it, and ashamed to abandon it. Polls suggest some possible goals: the date when a million people live in space, or when we achieve physical immortality. This approach requires that that we find, prove, and adopt a competent form of governance, tie it to such a sacred goal, and do so for polity so large that its actions have a substantial influence on the overall chance of our main world civ achieving this goal. Yes, this seems a long shot. Futarchy to help firm cultures seems a good training ground.

The second solution requires groups where members somehow become strongly attached to the goal of group adaption itself, even though few today feel much attachment to it, or see it as remotely sacred. Yes, that seems harder, especially given the modern taboo on “social Darwinism”, but an advantage of this approach is it that can work for much smaller groups. We’d create a way to measure ex post group adaptive success in a few centuries, make market estimates today of those future measures, and then reward/punish group leaders as those estimates rise/fall. This requires substantially competent governance, and could fail if the world too strongly shares many maladaptive global norms and status markers. Yes this also seems a long shot.

While I have separate posts on the above two approaches, this is my first post on the third solution: more capitalism. Which, yes, also seems a long shot. The parts of our world that are driven by capitalism today, such as tech and commerce, seem to have healthy cultural evolution, even though they are subject to many maladaptive global norms. So the idea here is to get more parts of our world to be more driven by capitalism.

Yes, many other parts of our world, such as marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, and art, are mostly “voluntary”, but that’s not “capitalism” for my purposes here. Just as kings of old who “owned” nations were also not very “capitalist”. The issue here isn’t what choices are voluntary, or who owns what, but which behaviors are strongly directed by for-profit ventures who use the powerful tricks we’ve learned over recent centuries to manage such orgs. Tricks like as stock price signals, hostile takeovers, boards of directors, CEOs with stock options, clear performance metrics for employees, standardized job roles, and so on. These tricks, added to basic capitalist freedoms and incentives, are what let capitalism be so powerful today at enforcing and evolving adaptive behaviors.

Some examples of how capitalism might drive more behaviors:

• We might pay lots to parents. For example, we could give them a transferable right to a percentage of the future tax revenue that those kids pay as adults. While parents might try to manage this by themselves, investors and for profit ventures such as boarding schools seem likely to get involved to advice, shape, and manage parenting in big ways.

• We could have capitalist governance of towns, cities, or larger sized government units. This could induce much stronger adaptive incentives re policies that governments set or influence. For example, they might make citizenship transferable.

• We could change bequest and charity laws to let organizations that pay low tax rates primarily hold assets and reinvest their returns. If allowed to persist for generations, such orgs would accumulate most of the world’s capital. As a result, the world would have far more capital, investment rates of return would fall to econ growth rates, and capitalism would care lot more about the long term future.

• Making hostile takeovers of firms much easier would greatly increase competitive pressures to make firms efficient.

• Heath and life insurers, merged together, could let people buy only cost-effective medicine.

• Crime vouchers could help clients be cost-effective at avoiding committing crimes, and at punishing them if they do commit crime.

• Tax career agents could help guide key life choices, such as re education, careers, or even marriages.

Note that, like the second approach above, this approach could also fail if the world too strongly shares maladaptive global norms and status markers.

While this third “capitalist” approach seems more “libertarian” than the other two, I fear it doesn’t seem libertarian enough to excite most self-identified libertarians, who likely prefer the current artisanal non-capitalist ways that we manage marriage, parenting, sex, friendship, art, etc.

What about the other approaches I’ve discussed before? AI/ems would strengthen selection pressures, but not directly address other drift issues. Spreading across stars would induce variety at the largest scales but not address within system drift. Nationalism, recently risen and now falling, seems too weak to drive sufficient competition. Deep multiculturalism seems very hard, unpopular, and only addresses the variation issue. These can at best supplement the main three approaches.

Added 15Feb: A poll finds this approach to be most favored:

Let me emphasize that all these approaches require a group or polity using them be sufficiently insular re a wider world culture’s norms and status markers.