I think I have less despair than you because some of what we see around us that you’re interpreting as the universal way of things, I’m interpreting as the result of specific policy decisions within the current global imperium, which are different from the way things have been at other times and places. In particular, the Post-WWII corporate environment is one in which scale doesn’t just allow organizations to field large armies (which still need tactical intelligence, effective command structures, mobilization capacity, and competently administered logistics, all of which are corroded by too much of the sort of internal decay Werewolfism is one variety of). It also lets them leverage a superstructure of state authority to defend themselves against potential rivals via regulatory capture.
Hmm. I would be interested in a sketch of a situation which you think would output a different strategic equilibrium.
It seems to me that “competent people are rare, and the world is big” to be a very general problem that applies across most domains.
(Your other comment about how the Jewish people were able to survive as a culture does point to some very interesting things, but I’m not sure they resolve the things I’m most worried about. It’s good enough to create pockets of goodness, but the actual problem is that Hell Exists and Must Be Destroyed and you actually need to be powerful enough to destroy hell. A longterm strategy only works if it eventually allows you to grow faster than hell)
I would be interested in a sketch of a situation which you think would output a different strategic equilibrium.
I don’t think I fully understand what you’re asking, but here’s a partial answer.
I think that the US North before the Civil War but decreasingly between then and WWII had a different equilibrium, in which people could viably just be landholders who improved their lot through, well, improving their lot. The Puritan states especially tended towards this. Merchants and artisans were also a thing, but a single whaling expedition was kind of a big venture compared with most things, and most business didn’t occur at scale. The rise of major government expenditures (direct wartime expenses and indirect mobilization-related ones like railroads) changed that, as did the central controls put in place between the World Wars to manage the disruptions this caused, which naturally were designed to accommodate powerful incumbent stakeholders.
If you read accounts of economic life from that time, it really doesn’t look like “competent people are rare, and the world is big,” it looks like “ultra-competent people are gold, most people are good enough at something to get by, there are lots of different types of people with their own weirdness going on, and the world is very messy and diverse.” Moby Dick definitely gives me this sense.
I’m very torn. I fully agree with Raemon’s concerns, and might even go further: competent people are rare, and fully goal-aligned people are nonexistent. Looking at accounts from previous times is an existence proof of different equilibria, but does not imply that they’re available today.
And if you look closer, those previous equilibria were missing some features that we hold dear today, such as fairly long periods at the beginning and end of life where economic production isn’t a driving need, some amount of respect for people very different from ourselves, and a knowledge that the current equilibrium isn’t permanent.
The part I’m torn on is that I deeply support experimenting and thinking on these topics, and I very much hope that my predictions are incorrect. This is a case where investing mental energy on a low-probability high-payoff topic seems justified.
More generally there have been lots of times and places where some people have been playing the game of scale-to-maximum, and people not playing that game have often had to adjust for its existence, but can often do quite a lot anyway, including weird bank-shot projects like Christianity and Buddhism that end up scaling a bunch, across borders, without having any sort of army or centralized infrastructure for quite a while. Things that don’t scale can engineer things that do. Obviously none of the past attempts have been good enough to permanently solve the problem, but you can look at how much deliberation went into them vs level of alignment and impact. To me, it looks like a Dunbar group that is modeling this situation explicitly has a pretty decent chance of building something much better, which in turn should improve the rate at which we get chances to try things.
Agreed that Jews aren’t anything like a full answer here, just another important example to bear in mind when considering the space of what’s possible.
I think I have less despair than you because some of what we see around us that you’re interpreting as the universal way of things, I’m interpreting as the result of specific policy decisions within the current global imperium, which are different from the way things have been at other times and places. In particular, the Post-WWII corporate environment is one in which scale doesn’t just allow organizations to field large armies (which still need tactical intelligence, effective command structures, mobilization capacity, and competently administered logistics, all of which are corroded by too much of the sort of internal decay Werewolfism is one variety of). It also lets them leverage a superstructure of state authority to defend themselves against potential rivals via regulatory capture.
Hmm. I would be interested in a sketch of a situation which you think would output a different strategic equilibrium.
It seems to me that “competent people are rare, and the world is big” to be a very general problem that applies across most domains.
(Your other comment about how the Jewish people were able to survive as a culture does point to some very interesting things, but I’m not sure they resolve the things I’m most worried about. It’s good enough to create pockets of goodness, but the actual problem is that Hell Exists and Must Be Destroyed and you actually need to be powerful enough to destroy hell. A longterm strategy only works if it eventually allows you to grow faster than hell)
I don’t think I fully understand what you’re asking, but here’s a partial answer.
I think that the US North before the Civil War but decreasingly between then and WWII had a different equilibrium, in which people could viably just be landholders who improved their lot through, well, improving their lot. The Puritan states especially tended towards this. Merchants and artisans were also a thing, but a single whaling expedition was kind of a big venture compared with most things, and most business didn’t occur at scale. The rise of major government expenditures (direct wartime expenses and indirect mobilization-related ones like railroads) changed that, as did the central controls put in place between the World Wars to manage the disruptions this caused, which naturally were designed to accommodate powerful incumbent stakeholders.
If you read accounts of economic life from that time, it really doesn’t look like “competent people are rare, and the world is big,” it looks like “ultra-competent people are gold, most people are good enough at something to get by, there are lots of different types of people with their own weirdness going on, and the world is very messy and diverse.” Moby Dick definitely gives me this sense.
I’m very torn. I fully agree with Raemon’s concerns, and might even go further: competent people are rare, and fully goal-aligned people are nonexistent. Looking at accounts from previous times is an existence proof of different equilibria, but does not imply that they’re available today.
And if you look closer, those previous equilibria were missing some features that we hold dear today, such as fairly long periods at the beginning and end of life where economic production isn’t a driving need, some amount of respect for people very different from ourselves, and a knowledge that the current equilibrium isn’t permanent.
The part I’m torn on is that I deeply support experimenting and thinking on these topics, and I very much hope that my predictions are incorrect. This is a case where investing mental energy on a low-probability high-payoff topic seems justified.
More generally there have been lots of times and places where some people have been playing the game of scale-to-maximum, and people not playing that game have often had to adjust for its existence, but can often do quite a lot anyway, including weird bank-shot projects like Christianity and Buddhism that end up scaling a bunch, across borders, without having any sort of army or centralized infrastructure for quite a while. Things that don’t scale can engineer things that do. Obviously none of the past attempts have been good enough to permanently solve the problem, but you can look at how much deliberation went into them vs level of alignment and impact. To me, it looks like a Dunbar group that is modeling this situation explicitly has a pretty decent chance of building something much better, which in turn should improve the rate at which we get chances to try things.
Agreed that Jews aren’t anything like a full answer here, just another important example to bear in mind when considering the space of what’s possible.