It’s important to remember that the culture we grew up in is deeply nihilistic at its core. People expect Moloch, assume Moloch as a given, even defer to Moloch. If you read enough about business and international affairs (not news articles, those don’t count, not for international affairs at least, I don’t know about business), and then read about dath ilan, it becomes clear that our world is ruled by Moloch cultists who nihilistically optimized for career advancement.
Humans are primates; we instinctively take important concepts and turn them into dominance/status games, including that concept itself; resulting in many people believing that important concepts do not exist at all.
So it makes sense that Moloch would be an intensely prevalent part of our civilization, even ~a century after decision theory took off and ~4 centuries after mass literacy took off.
Some of the first people to try to get together and have a really big movement to enlighten and reform the world was the Counter Culture movement starting in the 60′s, which overlapped with the Vietnam Antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement.
The Counter Culture movement failed because they were mainly a bunch of inept teens and 20-somethings; not just lacking knowledge of decision theory or economics or Sequence-level understanding of heuristics/biases, but also because they lived in a world where social psychology and thinking-about-society were still in infancy. Like the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution before them, they started out profoundly confused about the direction to aim for and the correct moves to make (see Anna Salamon’s Humans are not Automatically Strategic).
The Antiwar movement permanently damaged the draft-based American military apparatus, permanently made western culture substantially more cosmopolitan than the conformist 1950s, but their ignorance and ineptitude and blunders were so immense that they shrank the Overton window on people coming together and choosing to change the world for the better.
Since then, there hasn’t been a critical mass behind counter culture or societal reform, other than Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Occupy Wall Street, and the Jan 6th Riots, which only got that many people due to heavily optimizing for memetic spread among the masses via excessively simple messages, and prevailing on already-popular sentiment such post-2008 anger at banking institutions, and likely only getting that far due to the emergence of the social media paradigm (which governments are incentivized to hijack).
Game theory didn’t take off until the 1950s, when it was basically absorbed by the US military, just like how economics was absorbed by the contemporary equivalent of Wall Street (and remains absorbed to this day). I’m pretty sure that the entire 20th century came and went with nearly none of them spending an hour a week thinking about solving the coordination problems facing the human race, so that the world could be better for them and their children. Even though virtually all of them would prefer to live in a world where all of the decision theorists, economists, and mathematicians spent an hour a week thinking about practical ways to solve humanity’s coordination problems and kill off Moloch one piece at a time. Everyone prefers to live in a world not dominated by nihilism and nihilists.
I think that’s never been tried for real, and therefore it can happen in the 21st century. I think that gets things like prediction markets invented from scratch, and I don’t know how many discoveries on the level of prediction markets are required for a coordination takeoff to become feasible (it’s plausible that prediction markets alone could be enough once the wheat-to-chaff ratio passes a specific critical mass).
I think that could get us to a world like dath ilan, not exactly the same obviously, but a world where people found galaxy-brained ways to facilitate enough elite cooperation to back a world they prefer (e.g. for their kids). It’s a question of how many discoveries are needed for a critical mass, or how far each discovery needs to be implemented, e.g. a sufficient wheat-to-chaff ratio for prediction markets to pass a critical mass specific to prediction markets, or for readers of the Sequences to write the CFAR handbook and for the readers of the CFAR handbook to write the next iteration and so on.
A big part of understanding the culture of futility is understanding how traumatic it is when the bad guys win. When SBF, the Luke Skywalker of crypto, and CZ, the Darth Vader of crypto, go head to head and CZ emerges victorious. Then CZ says “Ha! serves you right for being an idiotic do-gooder” and everyone cheers.
The point is that it feels futile to everyone in these intense ways, but it’s not, because the 21st century will be transformative, and the pace and outcome of each transformation are each their own technical details (like prediction markets reaching a critical mass in their wheat-to-chaff ratio, or LLM chatbot therapists being sufficiently competent at advising and empowering people in the ways described in Anna Salamon’s Humans are not Automatically Strategic).
People strongly prefer the good guys in charge, it’s just that they’ve been clueless about how to even begin to make this possible, and this clueless idiocy has been consistent. And the triumph of nihilism has also been consistent, until now.
I wouldn’t call this optimism; instead, I would call it doubting that there is a >90% chance that the culture of nihilism will maintain its grip on elite culture throughout the 2020s.
It’s important to note that people already thought about this. Maybe as early as Nietzsche and Marx, although like Sigmund Freud, Nietzche and Marx started out without the shoulders of giants to stand on, let alone a dying planet where the correct policies are fairly obvious (e.g. universal cryonics so that everyone everywhere realizes they have skin in the game, instead of mandatory guaranteed death right now, where they shrug and say “everything sucks lol” because there’s nothing else to say) and it’s just a strategic question of getting people to pass those obviously-correct policies.
Decision theory really did take off in the 1950s; if aliens were watching during the 1950s and were following this logic, they might have predicted good odds that the 1950s decision theory takeoff would have been enough for the monkeys to start getting good at working together. If not that, then they might have predicted it for when the collective action problem started getting taught to every single social science major. Sufficiently intelligent aliens will know what it looks like when a critical mass of agents, in any species of genetically diverse intelligent life, looks evil in the face and rejects it. If they were observing, they would immediately be able to see that our world revolves around the fact that such a thing hasn’t happened yet (and might never).
However, a coordination takeoff is all about acceleration (the acceleration of humans). It makes sense to think that reading dath ilan, a world where Moloch was vanquished, is needed to provide a frame of reference for a firm understanding of the intensity of Moloch in our civilization. Are there even a dozen people on a single college campus anywhere (e.g. Berkeley) who have read about dath ilan? Is a single one of those dozen seriously thinking about what a coordination takeoff would look like, instead of skilling up for alignment research?
If the answer to both of those questions is no, then reaching the critical mass for a coordination takeoff might be low hanging fruit.
Don’t sleep on Coordination Takeoffs
It’s important to remember that the culture we grew up in is deeply nihilistic at its core. People expect Moloch, assume Moloch as a given, even defer to Moloch. If you read enough about business and international affairs (not news articles, those don’t count, not for international affairs at least, I don’t know about business), and then read about dath ilan, it becomes clear that our world is ruled by Moloch cultists who nihilistically optimized for career advancement.
Humans are primates; we instinctively take important concepts and turn them into dominance/status games, including that concept itself; resulting in many people believing that important concepts do not exist at all.
So it makes sense that Moloch would be an intensely prevalent part of our civilization, even ~a century after decision theory took off and ~4 centuries after mass literacy took off.
Some of the first people to try to get together and have a really big movement to enlighten and reform the world was the Counter Culture movement starting in the 60′s, which overlapped with the Vietnam Antiwar movement and the Civil Rights movement.
The Counter Culture movement failed because they were mainly a bunch of inept teens and 20-somethings; not just lacking knowledge of decision theory or economics or Sequence-level understanding of heuristics/biases, but also because they lived in a world where social psychology and thinking-about-society were still in infancy. Like the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution before them, they started out profoundly confused about the direction to aim for and the correct moves to make (see Anna Salamon’s Humans are not Automatically Strategic).
The Antiwar movement permanently damaged the draft-based American military apparatus, permanently made western culture substantially more cosmopolitan than the conformist 1950s, but their ignorance and ineptitude and blunders were so immense that they shrank the Overton window on people coming together and choosing to change the world for the better.
As soon as lots of people acquired an incredibly primitive version of the understandings now held by the EA, rationalist, and AI safety communities, those people started the Counter Culture movement of the 1960s in order to raise the sanity waterline above the deranged passivity of the 1950s conformist culture. And they botched it so hard, in so many ways, that everyone now cringes at the memory; the Overton window on changing the world was fouled up, perhaps intractably. Major governments and militaries also became predisposed to nip similar movements in the bud, such as the use of AI technology to psychologically disrupt groups of highly motivated people.
Since then, there hasn’t been a critical mass behind counter culture or societal reform, other than Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Occupy Wall Street, and the Jan 6th Riots, which only got that many people due to heavily optimizing for memetic spread among the masses via excessively simple messages, and prevailing on already-popular sentiment such post-2008 anger at banking institutions, and likely only getting that far due to the emergence of the social media paradigm (which governments are incentivized to hijack).
Game theory didn’t take off until the 1950s, when it was basically absorbed by the US military, just like how economics was absorbed by the contemporary equivalent of Wall Street (and remains absorbed to this day). I’m pretty sure that the entire 20th century came and went with nearly none of them spending an hour a week thinking about solving the coordination problems facing the human race, so that the world could be better for them and their children. Even though virtually all of them would prefer to live in a world where all of the decision theorists, economists, and mathematicians spent an hour a week thinking about practical ways to solve humanity’s coordination problems and kill off Moloch one piece at a time. Everyone prefers to live in a world not dominated by nihilism and nihilists.
I think that’s never been tried for real, and therefore it can happen in the 21st century. I think that gets things like prediction markets invented from scratch, and I don’t know how many discoveries on the level of prediction markets are required for a coordination takeoff to become feasible (it’s plausible that prediction markets alone could be enough once the wheat-to-chaff ratio passes a specific critical mass).
I think that could get us to a world like dath ilan, not exactly the same obviously, but a world where people found galaxy-brained ways to facilitate enough elite cooperation to back a world they prefer (e.g. for their kids). It’s a question of how many discoveries are needed for a critical mass, or how far each discovery needs to be implemented, e.g. a sufficient wheat-to-chaff ratio for prediction markets to pass a critical mass specific to prediction markets, or for readers of the Sequences to write the CFAR handbook and for the readers of the CFAR handbook to write the next iteration and so on.
A big part of understanding the culture of futility is understanding how traumatic it is when the bad guys win. When SBF, the Luke Skywalker of crypto, and CZ, the Darth Vader of crypto, go head to head and CZ emerges victorious. Then CZ says “Ha! serves you right for being an idiotic do-gooder” and everyone cheers.
And this is what happens every time. The bad guys are predisposed to victory. This happened to everyone every time, because our civilization is moloch-dominated, even though nobody wants it to be that way (by definition of Moloch). This kind of thing shapes people’s identities in extraordinarily powerful ways.
The point is that it feels futile to everyone in these intense ways, but it’s not, because the 21st century will be transformative, and the pace and outcome of each transformation are each their own technical details (like prediction markets reaching a critical mass in their wheat-to-chaff ratio, or LLM chatbot therapists being sufficiently competent at advising and empowering people in the ways described in Anna Salamon’s Humans are not Automatically Strategic).
People strongly prefer the good guys in charge, it’s just that they’ve been clueless about how to even begin to make this possible, and this clueless idiocy has been consistent. And the triumph of nihilism has also been consistent, until now.
There are probably fewer than 500 people on earth currently prepared to think about a coordination takeoff at a level similar to us, who read stuff on the same level as the Sequences and FDT/UDT and tuning cognitive strategies/feedbackloopfirst rationality and CFAR’s stuff and dath ilan stuff in order to even begin to get a sense of what is possible, and that number of people can go up surprisingly fast.
I wouldn’t call this optimism; instead, I would call it doubting that there is a >90% chance that the culture of nihilism will maintain its grip on elite culture throughout the 2020s.
It’s important to note that people already thought about this. Maybe as early as Nietzsche and Marx, although like Sigmund Freud, Nietzche and Marx started out without the shoulders of giants to stand on, let alone a dying planet where the correct policies are fairly obvious (e.g. universal cryonics so that everyone everywhere realizes they have skin in the game, instead of mandatory guaranteed death right now, where they shrug and say “everything sucks lol” because there’s nothing else to say) and it’s just a strategic question of getting people to pass those obviously-correct policies.
Decision theory really did take off in the 1950s; if aliens were watching during the 1950s and were following this logic, they might have predicted good odds that the 1950s decision theory takeoff would have been enough for the monkeys to start getting good at working together. If not that, then they might have predicted it for when the collective action problem started getting taught to every single social science major. Sufficiently intelligent aliens will know what it looks like when a critical mass of agents, in any species of genetically diverse intelligent life, looks evil in the face and rejects it. If they were observing, they would immediately be able to see that our world revolves around the fact that such a thing hasn’t happened yet (and might never).
However, a coordination takeoff is all about acceleration (the acceleration of humans). It makes sense to think that reading dath ilan, a world where Moloch was vanquished, is needed to provide a frame of reference for a firm understanding of the intensity of Moloch in our civilization. Are there even a dozen people on a single college campus anywhere (e.g. Berkeley) who have read about dath ilan? Is a single one of those dozen seriously thinking about what a coordination takeoff would look like, instead of skilling up for alignment research?
If the answer to both of those questions is no, then reaching the critical mass for a coordination takeoff might be low hanging fruit.