One nice thing about startups is that they mostly fail if they aren’t good. When MySpace stagnated there wasn’t one blessed successor, there were 100 different ones that had to fight it out. The winner is, modulo the usual capitalist alignment failure, a better company than MySpace was. Most of its competitors weren’t. From society’s perspective this filter is great, maybe the best thing about the whole startup ecosystem.
Cummings doesn’t seem to know this. Replacing the Pentagon with a new organization ABC Inc. is not the hard part (although it is pretty hard). What’s hard is to know that you should pick ABC Inc. and not DEF GmbH. Cummings thinks what makes startups good is their youth (he wants to sunset them after 15 years, for example), but that’s wrong: most young startups aren’t good, and fail. To make it work you need 100 successor Pentagons, and some way of making them compete.
Is that a serious blow to Cummings’ thesis, though? If your idea is, say, “we need a ministry of eduction but the current one is irrecoverably broken”, you don’t need to invent Google or Amazon to replace it. Depending on how bad the status quo is (which is partly an empirical question), any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. In which case his use of the term “startup” would be misleading, but the overall thesis would stay relatively intact.
That said, I am quite sympathetic to Chesterton’s Fence in this argument. In particular, trying to abolish and replace the Pentagon on day 1 of a new administration (as Cummings suggests in his essay) is… optimistic in a world where other nations can hear you say that.
Cummings seems to be making this same argument in the comments: the Pentagon is so unbelievably awful that its replacement doesn’t have to be good, you can pick its successor at random and expect to come up with something better. To believe this requires a lack of imagination, I think, an inability to appreciate how much scope for failure there really is. But this is not really a question we can settle empirically—we can only talk in vague terms about most of what the Pentagon does, and the counterfactuals are even less clear—so I won’t argue the point too much.
More seriously, not every young organization is a startup. A new bowling team is not a startup, a new group at Amazon working on a new service is not a startup, and when Camden NJ replaced its whole police force with an entirely different organization that was not a startup either. “Startup” has a lot of specific connotations which mostly don’t apply here. And yet, it’s the word that Cummings picked. Maybe he doesn’t know this stuff, even though it’s widely known to many people. Or maybe he does know, and used it anyway. I think this is why people keep coming up with Straussian readings of this essay: they have a sense that he’s not sincere about his intended methods and goals.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Cummings plans to help overthrow USG (and I don’t think Yarvin does either): he’s getting paid real money to rehash old grievances in front of a friendly audience, that’s all. Put him in the same bucket as Paul Krugman.
Any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. But it might also be worse, even if what’s already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn’t bet on there being many.
That seems like the crux of the issue. I can absolutely imagine a world where institutions have become sufficiently bad due to misaligned incentive structures that any random thing would be an improvement (though I would still not want to settle for random).
For instance, take Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” We might be in a situation where institutions that originally worked have increased in complexity to the point that they no longer work, in which case they might be unfixable and one would have to start over.
In any case, whether we actually live in that world seems like an empirical question, but when I compare the world of today to my sky-high expectations (from e.g. transhumanism), there are tons of institutions I would not call particularly functional.
Finally, some institutions are considered so bad by some people that they’d rather abolish them with no replacement than leave them as-is, in which case you wouldn’t even necessarily need the random thing to replace it. Zvi’s FDA Delenda Est stuff comes to mind.
I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I’m not sure it’s a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.
Again, that seems like a general argument to do nothing. Like, you could have justified not rebelling against slavery when slavery was a thing in the US.
Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I’m offered is “things are pretty bad so any change is probably good” I’m pretty comfortably replying “new things like this are usually pretty bad so there’s a real risk that the change makes things worse”. :-)
I think we don’t have the same way of imagining what a “random alternative” would be like. For example, I don’t imagine that a random alternative would be the kind generated by a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard in a reasonable amount of time. Or even the kind generated by an unexperienced child or teenager. I imagine whoever would have the chance to enact an alternative would be more likely to understand how not to “break society by mistake” than a randomly chosen person in the population.
I might be totally off making that analogy, but you seem to me like my aunt who’s afraid her computer is broken every time an unexpected window pops up in her browser. She sees her computer as something beyond comprehension, where changing even the tiniest thing could cause iredeemable damage. In reality, an experience computer user makes plenty of changes that would frighten her, but are safe. And her computer is full of useless stuff that were auto-installed by/with other stuff and slow it down.
I endorse Taran’s comment that’s a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.
Let’s run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large “mature” software system? It’s common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It’s also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.
The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.
I think there’s a difference because the legacy software doesn’t develop itself the way a bureaucracy does. It’s not made up out of actors that try to get more power for themselves.
I agree with Taran’s comment as well. I possibly underestimated how likely to fail an attempt at replacing the current system is. I just think the danger of letting the situation rot is underestimated too. The world is moving on, fast. To keep the software analogy, we’re keeping the same legacy software, but demanding it be used on new use cases every year. That’s not sustainable. I’m open to third options.
The original startup analogy might be a useful intuition pump here. Most attempts to displace entrenched incumbents fail, even when those incumbents aren’t good and ultimately are displaced. The challengers aren’t random in the monkeys-using-keyboard sense, but if you sample the space of challengers you will probably pick a loser. This is especially true of the challengers who don’t have a concrete, specific thesis of what their competitors are doing wrong and how they’ll improve on it—without that, VCs mostly won’t even talk to you.
But this isn’t a general argument against startups, just an argument against your ability to figure out in advance which ones will work. The standard solution, which I expect will apply to transhumanism as to everything else, is to try lots of different things, compare them, and keep the winners. If you are upstream of that process, deciding which projects to fund, then you are out of luck: you are going to fund a bunch of losers, and you can’t do anything about it.
If you can’t do that, the other common strategy is to generate a detailed model of both the problem space and your proposed improvement, and use those models to iterate in hypothesis space instead of in real life. Sometimes this is relatively straightforward: if you want the slaves to be free, you can issue a proclamation that frees them and have high confidence that they won’t be slaves afterward (though note that the real plan was much more detailed than that, and didn’t really work out as expected). Other times it looks straightforward but isn’t: sparrows are pests, but you can’t improve your rice yields by getting rid of them. Here, to me the plan does not even look straightforward: the Pentagon does a lot of different things and some of them are existentially important to keep around. If we draw one sample from the space of possible successors, as Cummings suggests, I don’t think we’ll get what we want.
One nice thing about startups is that they mostly fail if they aren’t good. When MySpace stagnated there wasn’t one blessed successor, there were 100 different ones that had to fight it out. The winner is, modulo the usual capitalist alignment failure, a better company than MySpace was. Most of its competitors weren’t. From society’s perspective this filter is great, maybe the best thing about the whole startup ecosystem.
Cummings doesn’t seem to know this. Replacing the Pentagon with a new organization ABC Inc. is not the hard part (although it is pretty hard). What’s hard is to know that you should pick ABC Inc. and not DEF GmbH. Cummings thinks what makes startups good is their youth (he wants to sunset them after 15 years, for example), but that’s wrong: most young startups aren’t good, and fail. To make it work you need 100 successor Pentagons, and some way of making them compete.
Is that a serious blow to Cummings’ thesis, though? If your idea is, say, “we need a ministry of eduction but the current one is irrecoverably broken”, you don’t need to invent Google or Amazon to replace it. Depending on how bad the status quo is (which is partly an empirical question), any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. In which case his use of the term “startup” would be misleading, but the overall thesis would stay relatively intact.
That said, I am quite sympathetic to Chesterton’s Fence in this argument. In particular, trying to abolish and replace the Pentagon on day 1 of a new administration (as Cummings suggests in his essay) is… optimistic in a world where other nations can hear you say that.
Cummings seems to be making this same argument in the comments: the Pentagon is so unbelievably awful that its replacement doesn’t have to be good, you can pick its successor at random and expect to come up with something better. To believe this requires a lack of imagination, I think, an inability to appreciate how much scope for failure there really is. But this is not really a question we can settle empirically—we can only talk in vague terms about most of what the Pentagon does, and the counterfactuals are even less clear—so I won’t argue the point too much.
More seriously, not every young organization is a startup. A new bowling team is not a startup, a new group at Amazon working on a new service is not a startup, and when Camden NJ replaced its whole police force with an entirely different organization that was not a startup either. “Startup” has a lot of specific connotations which mostly don’t apply here. And yet, it’s the word that Cummings picked. Maybe he doesn’t know this stuff, even though it’s widely known to many people. Or maybe he does know, and used it anyway. I think this is why people keep coming up with Straussian readings of this essay: they have a sense that he’s not sincere about his intended methods and goals.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Cummings plans to help overthrow USG (and I don’t think Yarvin does either): he’s getting paid real money to rehash old grievances in front of a friendly audience, that’s all. Put him in the same bucket as Paul Krugman.
Any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. But it might also be worse, even if what’s already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn’t bet on there being many.
That seems like the crux of the issue. I can absolutely imagine a world where institutions have become sufficiently bad due to misaligned incentive structures that any random thing would be an improvement (though I would still not want to settle for random).
For instance, take Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” We might be in a situation where institutions that originally worked have increased in complexity to the point that they no longer work, in which case they might be unfixable and one would have to start over.
In any case, whether we actually live in that world seems like an empirical question, but when I compare the world of today to my sky-high expectations (from e.g. transhumanism), there are tons of institutions I would not call particularly functional.
Finally, some institutions are considered so bad by some people that they’d rather abolish them with no replacement than leave them as-is, in which case you wouldn’t even necessarily need the random thing to replace it. Zvi’s FDA Delenda Est stuff comes to mind.
I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I’m not sure it’s a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.
Again, that seems like a general argument to do nothing. Like, you could have justified not rebelling against slavery when slavery was a thing in the US.
That’s not a good example, since the North already functioned without slavery.
You could use that as a general argument against about any change. Funny to find that on a transhumanist forum.
Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I’m offered is “things are pretty bad so any change is probably good” I’m pretty comfortably replying “new things like this are usually pretty bad so there’s a real risk that the change makes things worse”. :-)
I think we don’t have the same way of imagining what a “random alternative” would be like. For example, I don’t imagine that a random alternative would be the kind generated by a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard in a reasonable amount of time. Or even the kind generated by an unexperienced child or teenager. I imagine whoever would have the chance to enact an alternative would be more likely to understand how not to “break society by mistake” than a randomly chosen person in the population.
I might be totally off making that analogy, but you seem to me like my aunt who’s afraid her computer is broken every time an unexpected window pops up in her browser. She sees her computer as something beyond comprehension, where changing even the tiniest thing could cause iredeemable damage. In reality, an experience computer user makes plenty of changes that would frighten her, but are safe. And her computer is full of useless stuff that were auto-installed by/with other stuff and slow it down.
I endorse Taran’s comment that’s a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.
Let’s run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large “mature” software system? It’s common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It’s also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.
The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.
I think there’s a difference because the legacy software doesn’t develop itself the way a bureaucracy does. It’s not made up out of actors that try to get more power for themselves.
I agree with Taran’s comment as well. I possibly underestimated how likely to fail an attempt at replacing the current system is. I just think the danger of letting the situation rot is underestimated too. The world is moving on, fast. To keep the software analogy, we’re keeping the same legacy software, but demanding it be used on new use cases every year. That’s not sustainable. I’m open to third options.
The original startup analogy might be a useful intuition pump here. Most attempts to displace entrenched incumbents fail, even when those incumbents aren’t good and ultimately are displaced. The challengers aren’t random in the monkeys-using-keyboard sense, but if you sample the space of challengers you will probably pick a loser. This is especially true of the challengers who don’t have a concrete, specific thesis of what their competitors are doing wrong and how they’ll improve on it—without that, VCs mostly won’t even talk to you.
But this isn’t a general argument against startups, just an argument against your ability to figure out in advance which ones will work. The standard solution, which I expect will apply to transhumanism as to everything else, is to try lots of different things, compare them, and keep the winners. If you are upstream of that process, deciding which projects to fund, then you are out of luck: you are going to fund a bunch of losers, and you can’t do anything about it.
If you can’t do that, the other common strategy is to generate a detailed model of both the problem space and your proposed improvement, and use those models to iterate in hypothesis space instead of in real life. Sometimes this is relatively straightforward: if you want the slaves to be free, you can issue a proclamation that frees them and have high confidence that they won’t be slaves afterward (though note that the real plan was much more detailed than that, and didn’t really work out as expected). Other times it looks straightforward but isn’t: sparrows are pests, but you can’t improve your rice yields by getting rid of them. Here, to me the plan does not even look straightforward: the Pentagon does a lot of different things and some of them are existentially important to keep around. If we draw one sample from the space of possible successors, as Cummings suggests, I don’t think we’ll get what we want.
Exactly! Hes mistaken survival of the salient examples for some kind of intrinsic quality.