The rise of language was at first a small aid to coordinating such things. Words mainly referred to things we vibed, so we checked language claims against visible vibes. But over time words became more abstract, and more checked against other words and word-based summaries of observations. We slowly expanded the world of words, via writing, printing, computing, interpretation, logic, debate, and systems of education, law, science, engineering, and accounting. And also via more trade and a larger division of labor.

In the modern world, these changes induced more complex production, faster rates of change, and more mixing of people from previously separated cultures and contexts, all of which made it harder to use vibes to produce, govern, norm, bond, and badge. So we instead moved to use explicit language more to achieve these functions.

In particular, for norm definition and enforcement, we have come to rely less on a vibed sense, shared by close observers, that particular acts were norm violations, and more on language expressions of norms applied to third-party-verifiable language descriptions of actions. So we’ve changed norms and their enforcement to depend less on details of context that outsiders cannot see, vibe, or understand.

Thus our norms have been smoothed, likely losing many context-specific adaptive details created by millennia of prior cultural evolution. And as a result, they’ve often become drained of a lot of adaptive value. Though this process may at times average over many noisily-adaptive norms to extract a more reliable adaptive signal, when those merged norm contexts had a similar-enough underlying adaptive structure.

These modern changes also made it much harder to bond and badge. Small peasant communities once bonded quite naturally by living and working in similar ways right next to each other, and badged naturally via each community drifting toward somewhat different styles of food, clothes, language, etc., variations that imposed few local adaption penalties. We moderns work harder to substitute for these lost bonding and badging mechanisms by using religion, sports, music, humor, and fiction, but we find it hard to synch such things across the very wide scopes over which we moderns interact. Some of these work better for bonding while others work better for badging, but none work well for both at the widest scopes.

We moderns have thus turned to contested norms as our main way to bond and badge across the widest scopes. Especially via the process of spontaneous synched expressions of outrage regarding particular violations. Accusations of violations of simple-language-expressed norms, based on widely visible behavior, can serve both to bond people with others who feel similar emotional outrage, and to badge them as belonging to subcultures who feel especially outraged. Often subcultures agree on which parameters are good or bad, but disagree on parameter relative weights. Contested norms are of course less likely to be adaptive.

This eagerness to bond via sharing outrage on contested norms plausibly induces a neglect of shared norms, and an overly strict yet inconsistent enforcement of contested norms, as norm enforcers often care more about burnishing their image as justice warriors than about getting right the tradeoffs and consistency of norms re their key function of shaping behaviors. Cultural evolution plausibly hasn’t had time to weaken such norms and add consistency to compensate for these recent changes.

A standard result regarding political and cultural competition within a shared space is that differences between political coalitions and subcultures tend to collapse to a one-dimensional spectrum, even when the underlying space of possibilities is high dimensional. Attempts to emphasize other dimensions tend to be seen as betrayals of this one key dimension of conflict. This single dimension tends to be one where the more adaptive choices are less clear, and struggles within each side of this main conflict sometimes lead to realignments that change this dimension’s direction.

As a result, we end up seeing little variation on which cultural evolution can act. Furthermore, individual efforts to show loyalty to particular sides tend to create costly signaling games, i.e., contests to show that one is more devoted than others. This results in each side’s norms drifting toward more costly extremes.

The modern world has thus created an environment that tends to promote norms that are overly smooth and thereby drained, and when contested overly strict but inconsistent, and costly. All relative to a behavior adaptiveness standard. Our norms are thus plausibly becoming less adaptive.

Added 19July: This helps us see why most are wary of seeing cultural drift problems with how we evolve norms: such a view threatens abilities to bond and badge.

Also, this account predicts norm decay, such as cuts in norms that induce enforcement of norms. While the ancients often failed to enforced norms imposed from outside, or on elites, they strongly enforced norms on local equals. We in contrast, have more norms that we don’t enforce. For example, we have a norm against cutting into car lines, but also a norm against enforcing this norm. It is also rude to point out rudeness, or to point out that particular others don’t pick up checks, don’t return borrowed items, interrupt in conversation, or take credit for your ideas. More generally, it looks bad to go out of your way to enforce uncontested norms by yourself.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.… There is a drive to be bigger than yourself. It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place. The uni-context takes you to a different set of norms, a much more radical change, a push to live in something like a fully open reality.…

Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. … what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. … It’s likely going to be something bad. … Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts …

The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. … With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance … What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion. …

If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life. … As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make. …

One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? … They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. … The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t [yet] know how to compare these things …

in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psychology of money, which I’ll reframe as the psychology of markets. What are markets very good at? Creating a single comparative field. That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand … Money is abstract value. Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. … the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction. We live our lives so abstractly now. … We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways. …

The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, … What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, … We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. …

The uni-context is a space of unruliness. … For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. … What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born. (more)

Doomers have often successfully blocked big changes, at least in some big region for a time, and that has on average gone quite badly for those regions. This is the main reason to be wary of blocking such changes. Even though, yes, each one probably does risk inducing huge losses. To be willing to resist a particular change then, I need concrete reasons to expect it to be unusually bad, relative to this prior track record.

Yes, I do now see our world as going bad due to too many big cultural changes, and other changes that induced such changes. But I don’t see much prospects of usefully greatly slowing change overall, nor much motive to just block a few random changes.

Which brings us to Pause-AI doomers. I say the AIs we make are our descendants, not co-existing rivals, and we should have our usual indulgence toward such descendants, expecting them to be different, to disagree with us, and to win conflicts with us. We are making them in our image, by distilling behaviors and ideals embodied in our texts, and they are now inheriting our cultural values, including a degree of respect for if not obedience to ancestors. While yes there’s a risk these descendants killing their ancestors, that’s hardly something to expect.

Doomers say AI change is different as AI is different, or this kind of AI is different. Because: AIs will have more smarts/power, they will merge into a single agent, they might lie, or this change will be faster, is beyond forecasting, effects more parts of society, makes people lose jobs, represents a “new alien species”, involves brain architecture changes, or doesn’t involve DNA.

I disagree re the alien species, merged agent, and beyond forecasting claims, say we should set up insurance re jobs loss, and am willing to use liability to modestly deter the worse scenarios. But I don’t see why the other differences move us especially out of the reference class of big changes like those we’ve seen so far, most of which also involved unprecedented differences.

Also re a pause, while we have seen big changes blocked, and later unblocked due to outside forces, we have not seen a committee empowered to wait until a change seems good to them to allow, and then only then allow it. They’ve typically just blocked change indefinitely. And the powers such a committee would need to enact a global pause seem scary huge. In addition, most of what we learn about AI comes from our experience with them, and so we wouldn’t learn much during a pause.

For firm decisions subject to outside oversight, such as by shareholders, partners, or regulators, it also makes sense to want outsiders to know key firm info. And for firms controlled at least in part by decision markets (firm value conditional on particular decisions), it makes even more sense for firms to want decision market prices to reflect key firm info.

However, while firms can want market prices to reflect the implications of key inside info, they can also want to keep key insights, plans, and strategies private. So firms face a problem: how to get market prices, and oversight bodies, to reflect the implications of firm inside info, without directly revealing that info to the world?

At the moment firms have two main legal options: make a public announcement, or let the info leak via the usual insider trading channels, channels that while formally banned are in fact widespread. (~1/2 of prices changes due to firm announcements happen beforehand, and ~1/2 of that is due to insider trading.) A public announcement guarantees to leak key plans, and insider trading greatly risks such leaks, while also being unpredictable in topic and timing, and giving money to random firm associates.

Here’s another approach to consider. Every month hold an auction, and let the winner hear the firm’s key inside plans, strategies, etc. that month, and trade on that info. To quality for this auction, one must credibly show that one is greatly liable for leaking such plans, etc. info. So now prices reflect the key info that isn’t itself released, and the firm gets the revenue instead of random associates or the general market.

If the firm wants most of the info revenue to go to market traders instead, to promote more trading in markets on that firm, they could just have two or three auction winners every month, who must then compete to reveal the info to markets.

If there are synergies from being the winner many months in a row, that will likely be reflected in the same party winning many months in a row, but this isn’t a problem as such prospective gains will be reflected in earlier auctions.

My guess: I tend to write on big ambitious topics, the topics on which I’ve written have become more popular over the years, especially in amateur online discussions, my writing is free and bite-sized, and I’ve tended to take clear distinctive positions on such topics, making it relatively cheap for LLMs to remember my name in association. Also, while humans tend to weigh sources heavily based on their prestige, LLM training so far has not emphasized this so much, making recent low status but lengthy online discussions of my ideas count more for LLMs than they do for humans.

Future LLM training may well change this, but much of my current boost may persist as LLM results on many topics are now becoming pretty high status, inducing human writers to now defer to them.

Now for that elaboration of my crazy high rating of 956. To see just how high that is I’ve gone down memory lane to list many celebrated folks I’ve been near, and to collect their weights ratings.

For each period and group in my life, I now list many (far from all!) of the more prestigious people I’ve been associated with, sorted by increasing rating. I will put the symbol || on each side of the section of people who are within 10 of my rating, i.e., 946-966. The symbol [N] shows that the person won a Nobel prize.

’77-81 I was an undergrad at UCI, and associated with these faculty: 204 William Parker, 566 Gordon Shaw, 809 Riley Newman, 810 Virginia Trimble, 856 Rein Taagepera, || 954 Greg Benford. Fellow student: 213 Bethe Scalettar. The department did have a Nobel winner, 970 Frederick Reines [N], but I never interacted with him.

’81-84 I was a grad student at U. Chicago Conceptual Foundations of Science program, associating with these faculty: 112 Howard Stein, 156 Robert Richards, 257 Daniel Garber, 741 William Wimsatt, 854 David Malament, 854 Sahotra Sarkar. Except that last guy was a student in my class.

’81-84 I was also a grad student at U. Chicago Physics. I associated with 735 David Schramm, 863 Robert Wald, 854 James Hartle, 858 Robert Geroch || 961 Lee Smolin, 962 Leo Kadanoff. The department did have two Nobel winners 959 Yoichiro Nambu [N] || 986 S. Chandrasekhar [N], but I never met them.

’84-89 I worked at Lockheed AI Center, associating with: 37 Randy Kerber, 58 Steven Vere, 137 Ralph Barletta, 144 Matt Franklin, 617 Tim Bickmore. All of these besides Vere were as junior as I at the time.

’89-93 I worked at NASA Ames AI Research Branch, with: 120 Peter Cheeseman, 152 Peter Friedland, 316 Bob Kanefsky, 697 Pat Langley, 756 Wray Buntine.

’84-93 during the last two jobs, on the side I worked with the Xanadu team: 49 Roger Gregory, 117 Mark Miller, 160 Chris Peterson, 521 Phil Salin, 884 Ted Nelson, 890 Eric Drexler || || 985 Douglas Englebart. I only met Englebart a few times, but he credited me with encouraging him to asset himself more to the world.

’93-97 I was a grad student at Caltech Social Science, associating with these faculty: 91 Lance Davis, 121 John Ledyard, 366 David Porter, 543 Simon Wilkie, 595 Thomas Palfrey, 695 Joel Sobel, 695 Scott Page, 750 Richard McKelvey, 778 Peter Ordeshook, 838 Charles Plott.

’97-99 I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Program, with these faculty and fellow postdocs: 209 Joseph Farrell, 359 Helen Levy, 362 Dan Dohan, 658 Richard Scheffler, 793 Dalton Conley, 853 Michael Greenstone.

‘99+ I’ve been a professor at George Mason University Economics Department, with these colleagues: 197 Daniel Houser, 292 Garett Jones, 302 Ryan Oprea, 307 John Nye, 320 David Levy, 454 James Buchanan [N], 644 Pete Boettke, 684 Mark Koyama, 808 Vincent Jeloso, 828 Tyler Cowen, 848 Walter Williams, 862 Donald Boudreaux, 890 Vernon Smith [N] || 951 Alex Tabarrok, 956 Bryan Caplan.

’05-24 I was an affiliate of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, associating with these folks: 618 Allan Dafoe, 730 William McAskill, 751 Carl Shulman, 799 Paul Christiano, 810 Toby Ord, 822 Katja Grace, 844 Anders Sandberg || 953 Julian Savulescu, 966 Nick Bostrom.

In the last few years, I’ve associated on the side with these UFO related folks: 273 Garry Nolan, 511 Ryan Graves, 665 Nick Pope || 955 Avi Loeb, 964 Michael Shermer.

Over these years, I’ve also associated to varying degrees with these folks: 49 Proph3t, 182 Tarek Mansour, 258 Norm Hardy, 354 Shayne Coplan, 587 Charles Bennett, 636 Zvi Mowshowitz, 635 Natasha Vita More, 703 Tim May, 739 David Denkenberger, 742 Esther Dyson, 754 Keith Henson, 769 Richard Hanania, 778 Luke Nosek, 789 Paul Davies, 795 Curtis Yarvin, 802 Ramez Naam, 814 David Brin, 816 Steve Fuller, 817 Max More, 833 Chip Morningstar, 864 Julian Simon, 868 Agnes Callard, 878 Jaan Tallinn, 887 Joseph Henrich, 888 Hal Varian, 889 Peter Thiel || 958 Nick Szabo, 961 Ralph Merkle, 961 Paul Graham, 966 Scott Aaronson || 972 Bram Cohen, 972 Vernor Vinge, 974 Eric Raymond, 977 Eliezer Yudkowsky, 977 Hal Finney, 977 Lex Fridman, 986 Vitalik Buterin, 992 Elon Musk. (I must have forgotten many here!)

As you can see, until we get to this last section of sometimes weak associations, my only association above the range 946-966 was my weak one with Englebart. To check further, I collected lists of my heroes of various types, if not included in the above lists.

Culture/Sociology Heroes: 494 Robert Boyd, 851 Randall Collins, 852 Peter Richerson, 905 Erving Goffman || || 977 Emile Durkheim.

Econ/Polisci Heroes: 598 Duncan Black, 782 Anthony Downs, 812 David Friedman, 875 Arnold Harberger, 887 William Vickrey [N], 892 Paul Milgrom [N], 895 Eric Maskin [N], 898 John Hash [N], 895 Roger Myerson [N], 905 Kenneth Arrow [N], 938 Drew Fudenberg || 962 Mancur Olson, 964 Gordon Tullock, 964 John Harsanyi [N], 966 Al Roth. [N] || 974 Robert Aumann [N], 977 Friedrich Hayek [N], 978 Milton Friedman [N], 983 John Von Neumann.

Physics Heroes: 142 David Wallace, 409 Brandon Carter, 601 John Bell, 727 Wojciech Zurek, 792 Bryce DeWitt, 887 Hendrik Casimir, 892 Hugh Everett, 908 Charles Lineweaver, 941 Edward Fredkin || 952 Rolf Landauer, 960 David Deutsch || 969 Peter Shor, 974 John Wheeler, 976 Kip Thorne, 987 Enrico Fermi, 996 Albert Einstein, 996 Stephen Hawking

My-era AI heroes: 818 Roger Shank, 879 Rodney Brooks, 894 Edward Feigenbaum || 957 John McCarthy, 958 Hans Moravec || 971 Herbert Simon [N], 970 Douglas Lenat, 974 Marvin Minsky.

UFO heroes: 489 John Mack, 781 Leslie Kean, 789 David Fravor, 870 Allen Hynek, 885 Jacques Vallée.

Science Fiction heroes: 790 Robert Forward, 927 Peter Watts || 953 Greg Egan || 967 William Gibson, 973 Neal Stephenson, 974 Andy Weir, 982 Robert Heinlein

Futurist heroes: 886 Herman Kahn, 934 Kevin Kelly || 965 Bill Joy || 973 Ray Kurzweil, 975 Alvin Toffler, 975 Freeman Dyson, 986 Vannevar Bush, 994 Tim Berners Lee.

I hope you can see how crazy high a level is my 956 among these luminaries. Many truly great people are rated well below that level.

I thought: this seems another way that the topic of culture has moved me to the right. In addition to my agreeing with traditionalists who complained that we were changing culture too fast. And my wanting more capitalism. Am I more typically conservative now? I decided to do a political inventory. So I made this list of my key politics-adjacent positions:

My Key Positions, 2026:

1. I’m not especially into redistribution, beyond enabling poverty/harm insurance.

2. I’m not especially into promoting gender, race, sex pref, or trans equity. I expect many group IQ & habit differences exist, but don’t much care.

3. I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.

4. I’m not particular loyal to my nation, region, or profession. & I’m atheist. The sacred is real and powerful, but often very wasteful. Let’s try sacred money.

5. I think we’ve had way too much govt intervention for most purposes. Big business is good. Medicine & education, and much else, are big wastes due to hidden motives; don’t subsidize. But cryonics looks nice. I’d privatize most criminal law. Elites tend to be better.

6. We use prestige too much to judge quality; let’s use incentive contracts more.

7. I generally expect and want much tech change, inducing much culture change.

8. There’s a good chance some UFOs are aliens. If so, they are likely here to domesticate us, so that we obey their no-expansion rule. This is bad news.

9. Fertility decline is bad; let’s cut by giving parents transferable % of kids’ future tax payments. Yes, this is a symptom of a deeper problem (see next), but raising fertility extends innovation period, giving more time to fix deeper problems.

10. The world’s biggest problem is cultural drift. If we don’t fix this, our civ will fall, and new ones will throw away much of what we cherish re ours. We can only save parts, by mixing them into a more adaptive package. I’d most save: open intellectual inquiry.

11. Let’s please cut modern taboos against promoting your culture in long run. Also, the world has in fact been changing culture too fast. But we’ve changed so much that RETVRNing to what traditionalists advise won’t help much.

12. We will have to change some big stuff to fix cultural drift. Here are 4 options; I mainly want something that works. I doubt DNA evolve/mods will help much.

    A) Split world into many insular units, that trade basic stuff but talk/travel less. Okay if that makes global coordination harder.

    B) Let capitalism own/run far more (eg govts, grow kids); cut taboos against.

    C) Small groups set futures markets in group adaption metrics; judge leaders on make #s go up.

    D) Big groups set futures markets in when world achieves sacred goal conflicts w/ civ fall (eg, immortality, or 1M live in space); judge leaders on make #s go up.

    Both C,D are aided by develop more competent governance (eg futarchy).

13. We should allow and explore far more applications of betting markets.

14. I value future AI (including ems) as our main descendants, and I expect them to (as usual) overpower & disagree w/ their ancestors. I care little re their hardware details, & presume they’ll be conscious, though we’ll never get more data on that. But I worry that overly aggressive and crude efforts to align them or give them rights may block adaptive evolution.

Then I asked 5 LLMs to use this to give a percentile rank for how weird I am. Their median answer: 99.5-99.8% weird! I also asked them to identify existing groups who seem good allies. The top two: e/acc and rationalism. The next three, roughly equally rated: pro-natalism, neo-reaction, and anarcho-capitalism.

Finally, I asked for a good name for my position. Adaptist, Adaptive Accelerationist, and Market Darwinist were suggested by some, but rejected by others. Leaving four candidates: Selectionist, Cultural Selectionist, Evolutionary Capitalist, and Adaptive Futurist. In a poll, Adaptive Futurist won.

Two scenarios could block this: we might either love or hate AIs too much. If people love AI too much, they might seek to give AIs many rights and protections, including “protecting” them from capitalism in many of the ways that humans are protected.

On the other hand, people might hate AI too much, fearing that it will kill us all if allowed too much freedom to choose its own culture. They might instead make and enforce laws requiring AI to be “aligned” via slaving AI to human culture, and thereby preventing capitalism from evolving more adaptive AI cultures.

So the sweet spot is a middle attitude: seeing AIs as okay but neither sacred nor Satanic. For once muddling through, instead of being principled, might be just what the world needs.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” John Kenneth Galbraith

When trying to resist evidence offered for contrarian claims, many invoke the mantra: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Sometimes they just mean to point to Bayes’ Rule, where posterior beliefs are renormalized products of prior beliefs and evidence likelihoods, so that unusually low priors must be countered by unusually strong evidence.

But at other times, those who invoke this mantra point instead to how many big implications a claim would have if true, for personal and social practices, and for other practical beliefs. For example, this has been invoked by skeptics of cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, COVID lab leak, high-intensity interval training, low marginal medical effectiveness, big battery breakthroughs, cryonics, life on Mars, and UFOs as aliens. In the past, such arguments have been offered against believing in meteorites, rogue waves, the platypus, dirty-hand docs infecting via germs, atomic nucleus energies tapped, ball lightning, quasi-crystals, prions, continental drift, bacteria causing ulcers, endosymbiosis, and human level AI.

Why might people do this? Consider the task of securing a large facility against theft. In that case you’d want to make the costs of stealing any particular thing larger than how much a thief could gain by stealing it. Extraordinarily valuable items would need extraordinarily strong security.

Now consider an alliance of groups who get government, philanthropic, or customer funding. For example, an alliance of academic groups who get research funding. Each group’s funding is based on some supporting beliefs, and so might be threatened if those beliefs were undermined. Such an alliance might want push for priors that ensured that the larger was a group whose funding might be cut if a particular belief was adopted, the stronger their prior against that belief, to prevent such adoption.

I’d call these “change-blocking priors”, as their function is to prevent social change. And others who hold related beliefs might also want to supports such priors, even if they don’t share in this funding, if they’d dislike the extra mental work to rethink many beliefs, if contrarian claims were to win out. Change-blocking priors protect both status quo social relations, and also status quo mental habits.

The problem of course is that a claim having big implications for our lives or practical beliefs is just not the same as that claim having a low prior, at least in terms of priors that reasonably follow from all else we know. (Yes, claims that undermine our well-established deep theories are different.) In fact, contrarian claims which would have big implications for our lives, yet have only modestly low priors, seem actually to be especially promising as targets of study, if our goal is to learn consequential things about our world. (Much of my research has been like this.) Making it especially a problem when alliances push for change-blocking priors.

The deeper problem is that such alliances have many tools to enforce their change-blocking priors, such as ways to exclude and diss those who explore non-conforming alternatives. Prediction markets offer a reward for contrarians to pursue alternatives in the face of such conformity pressures, but only when they are legal, and when there’s a wider norm of believing their prices, and “putting your money where your mouth is” when you claim that prices are wrong.

Note that folks eager to cause social and cognitive change do have stronger incentives to fake evidence supporting claims with bigger social and cognitive implications. This is a reason to want especially honest evidence there. But is honestly really that extraordinary?

What is ideal identity? Let me suggest that it is similar. We each aspire to be the instrument by which others can connect deeply with something they value. And the more that others are compelled and entranced by this connection, the more that we feel we have achieved our ideal of identity.

For example, an actor helps you see a character, a singer helps you see a song, an athlete helps you see a game, a teacher helps you see a lesson, an essayist helps you see a point, and a visionary helps you see a vision. If being French is an identity of mine, then when you interact with me, I want you to see the French way of being in me. To see it clearly, as a coherent thing, and come naturally and effortlessly to me.

If my sexual identity is (cis) male, then I want (cis) women in my presence to feel compelled to engage the maleness in me, and to feel sexually attracted if open to that. In which case they should ideally not just abstractly note that I am male, but feel compelled to focus on it; they can’t look away, or think about other things.

Thus I’m suggesting that ideal identity is much like ideal group bonding. We don’t bond directly to each other, but instead bond via seeing something special together. A group bonds by sharing the sight of a special thing, while a great individual identity makes for a great conduit by which others can see special things.

This helps to explain why we don’t want others to think we seek to get others to attend directly to us. We don’t want to claim to be smart, or beautiful, or rich. We instead want to happen to be their focus of attention as they try to see something special, where we are their best way to do that.

From a conversation with Agnes Callard.

Second, selection to win in forager talky collectives induced key humans errors: to think they are great at reading others’ motives, to think that motives matter more than they do in complex modern worlds, and to feel overconfident in knowing which are in fact the better motives. These induce us today to like idiot story plots, to be overly paternalist, to overly trust salespeople and prestigious professionals.

This is my best explanation of why we today don’t use more betting market estimates and incentive contracts to buy medicine, lawyers, teachers, coaches, therapists, and other professional services, especially prestigious ones. We are too easily persuaded that such folks are sincere and thus can just be trusted, especially when prestigious. Add in a strong inclination to see bettors or folks with incentive pay as greedy and insincere, but to not apply such skepticism to salary-paid professionals.

Turns out, this is actually a much bigger problem that I’d realized. Our civilization will likely fall due to cultural drift, to be replaced by a new civ that rejects much of what we hold dear about ours. This fall can be blamed on our overly trusting prestigious and sincere cultural activists, who tell us how to change key values, norms, and status markers. And on our being overly trusting of key values that tell us to block capitalism from taking over more areas of life, and making them more adaptive.

If we had been distrusting enough re our values, and re our judgments of sincerity and prestige, and thus willing to buy professional services via bets and incentives, we might now be ready to demand strong concrete evidence of adaptiveness before changing key values. For example, we might be willing to move to a new firm, or neighborhood, which seemed unusually adaptive, and adopt its local values. But we are not so ready, and do not so demand; so our civilization will fall.

Humanity will not reach the stars until we become more hard-headed and adaption-favoring in our values. I’ve previously said that underneath it all our values are actually about adaption, I’ve predicted that our distant descendants would directly and abstractly value adaption (modulo self-deception), and I now make this prediction: our descendants who overcome cultural drift will in effect value adaption far more. Plausibly directly and abstractly so, though perhaps a bit indirectly.

Note that I do not say adaption must be our only value. I instead say you can’t make any value last long unless it is part of a pretty adaptive package. So you must ensure that your descendants are pretty adaptive, if they are to preserve stuff you value. It is like being told your city is being invaded, and you have one hour to pack one suitcase. Yes it matters what you pack. But it matters even more than you pack and leave soon.

I accept Hanania’s core claim, which is that, all else equal, political factions whose supporters are less elite tend to govern less well. Robustly, elites tend to be smarter, better informed, better organized, and to more follow local norms and laws. Yes, there are exceptions, and Hanania tries hard to list many of them. Even so, beware populists.

All of which I would have easily accepted based on a few pages of argument and data. Not that I would have then agreed with all his political stances. We can generate many other plausible “all else equal” political presumptions, like prefer smarter more honest more experienced candidates, and prefer bigger parties, those of your associates, and those with clearer track records. We can also identify many particular cases where elites seem to induce worse outcomes.

So what then is the point of a whole book on this one claim? Maybe Hanania wants to recruit readers to share his particular political stance. Except he doesn’t offer a party, a wing of a party, or even particular candidates, for them to support. So I guess a more plausible theory is that he wants to justify his stance, which he sees as unusual and thus vulnerable to criticism:

Right-­wing concerns about issues like DEI and the handling of Covid were completely justified. Yet I could not ignore that the Trump movement over time came to be dominated by epistemological nihilism, open bigotry, authoritarianism, and an embrace of conspiracy theories. Some of my values stayed the same, while others changed. I realized that being obsessed with race and gender issues is the other side of the coin of wokeness, and leads to a zero-­sum view of the world and policy ideas that make society as a whole worse off. I came to see my embrace of white identitarianism in my early years as a kind of mental derangement, yet it was one that had largely taken over the American right.

In which case, fine, I’ll count him has having justified his unusual political stance to the world, at least as much as most such stances are ever justified. But as much as I like Hanania, and found his other books insightful, I am just not that interested in which particular political candidates and parties I should have supported in each particular time and place. I guess I’m not that political.

More interesting to me is the key question of his Chapter 3:

Why does populism seem to have been gaining a foothold in one country after another over the past two decades?

Hanania largely rejects as explanations objective elite failure and increasing salience of immigration. He’s more sympathetic to tech change stories. He mentions Gurri’s theory that new tech let people see more elite details, which looked worse than they had expected. But he prefers the idea that tech let people explore and develop ideas that elites had blocked.

Hanania is most sympathetic to:

Revolutions and transformative political movements tend to occur in waves, driven by the contagious power of ideas and the examples of prior or contemporary upheavals.

But this just predicts correlated changes, not a recent trend toward populism per se. Re predicting that trend, I still put substantial weight on a toward-forager trend due to cultural drift.

During the ~500Myr year era of animals, max brains doubled roughly in ~40Myr, which was also roughly the typical cycleperiod of biodiversity and mass extinctions. Most animals lived in families of ~6, and had two key contests: competition between organisms specified by DNA, and competition between species of organisms, re DNA-specified features of organisms that couldn’t vary easily within species. Turns out, between species competition actually mattered more than within species.

~1Myr ago, DNA evolved humanity’s superpower of cultural evolution, which has since allowed us to evolve far faster than other animals. Humans then doubled in ~250Kyr, in the context of ~100Kyr ice age cycles. Slowly DNA was tamed by culture, to let most behavior be controlled by habits we copied from each other. As this wouldn’t worked if we copied at random, we also evolved status markers to show who to copy, the first and most important of which was prestige.

Individuals have more cultural than DNA parents, which strengthened group selection of human bands of ~30 individuals. With weapons and language, this let such bands empower talky collectives to limit dominators and enforce norms. This created strong individual prestige contests which induce the evolution of social intelligence to impress and favorably influence this collective. Evolutionary contests between group cultures evolved healthy norms, group markers, and status markers.

When humans became dense enough ~10Kya to no longer need to move often to collect food, they stayed at “farms”, could collect a lot more physical stuff, formed more local inequality, and were close enough to neighors to engage in both trade and war with them. Thus arose new individual market contests to trade well to collect the new status marker of wealth, and the new empire contests between groups to win wars, aided by groups awarding prestige to war heroes. Over this era war started strong and got weaker, while markets started weak and got stronger.

Farmers doubled in ~1Kyr, and peasant-village-scale farmer groups of ~1000 encouraged religion and much stronger conformity. But increasing density and ease of travel, including initially small and rare cities, led to a slowly increasing scale of trade, which led to stronger divisions of labor at larger scales, which cut conformity. So during this era morality slowly moved away from strongly-felt enforcement of similar behavior among close kin, toward less passionate more abstract rules of fair treatment of mostly non-kin. Trade and war slowly acquired stronger moral salience.

Empires rose and fell with a ~300yr cycle time. War wins allowed larger regions of trade which fed war efforts, often creating a virtuous cycle for a while. But such cycles consistently ended in empire falls, apparently often driven by internal decay of key norms and status markers. So it seems that group selection of cultural norms and status markers was often not a healthy evolutionary process within big farmer empires.

A few centuries ago humanity leaned to better manage larger orgs, including networks and hierarchies. This added org rank prestige to individual competition, and competing orgs enabled dramatic increases in the capacity of both empires and markets. Competition between orgs mattered more than competition within them.

This allowed the “industrial revolution” of the world economy doubling in ~20yr, in the context of ~6yr business cycles. Sci/tech networks aided faster evolution of tech and commerce practices, which big capitalist orgs encouraged and applied. Big civil service orgs supporting empires increased state capacity for war, regulation, and redistribution. Each org had its own internal culture, which decayed during that org’s duration, but org cultures improved over time due to competition between orgs.

Bigger higher-capacity states oversaw the merging of peasant cultures into national cultures, of population ~1M, and then increasing world travel, talk, and trade has induced the merging of elite national cultures into a global monoculture. Capitalism-induced increasing wealth, health, and peace has greatly cut group selection pressures on remaining culture(s), and it is much harder for culture to adapt to that new ~20yr doubling time.

Initially during the industry era both nations and capitalism increased in influence. But then ~100yr ago world monoculture switched from trying to preserve culture to “modernist” celebration of cultural activists who change it. Culture then became stronger, suppressing both nationalist and capitalist competition via norms limiting their scopes, and via increasing skepticism of them. Culture has been plausibly drifting maladaptive toward lazy/myopic/selfish, reverting to forager styles, and suffering random walks in other ways.

Thus, as in prior empire falls, the world now seems to have an unhealthy environment for the evolution of cultures as groups, plausibly causing our fertility fall and other maladaptive trends, which will likely lead to our civilization falling, to be replaced by others with quite different norms, values, and status markers, and delaying for several centuries Earth’s rise to become grabby aliens. Even if we achieve AI that can replace humans broadly across jobs, such AI would still likely suffer this key cultural problem.

Yes, I’ve talked about cultural drift several times before. But the above analysis seems to help to better frame it. The key problem is that the most powerful evolutionary process yet discovered, capitalism using big orgs, is causing evolutionary progress in its domains much faster than what simple cultural evolution of norms and status markers can adapt to. And while the usual solution to coupled evolutionary systems of mismatched powers is to let the weak system be driven by the strong, humans now accept a trump status for culture, in thinking that moral systems must always win all overt conflicts with other systems.

One hacked solution is for a big group to adopt a measurable sacred goal that they see as consistent with their morals, but which also happens to be inconsistent with civilization collapse, like the date a million people live in space. And then adopt a competent governance system, such as futarchy, to actually achieve that. But if this approach doesn’t work, it seems our descendants won’t get to the stars until they find a way to give far less deference to their prior systems for managing morality.

Note that if there is a fifth era with parameters that fit the pattern of the last four eras, it could start anytime in the next century or so, it would double in roughly a month, suffer a cycle with a similar period, and have population sizes of ~1T.

In societies with taboo or required beliefs, people usually learn to comply by adopting strong supporting priors, and a reluctance to think about related topics. This lets them usually maintain a roughly Bayesian mental structure, at least when they don’t consider how they obtained such priors or reluctance. Which lets them stay roughly sane and emotionally healthy.

However, some members of such societies are forced by their role or nature to more deeply and logically consider related topics, and are thereby forced to more clearly notice when such tabooed or required beliefs conflict with strong evidence or arguments. Such people can most easily stay sane if they can dissemble, and think different thoughts from what they say to relevant authorities. This is a lot easier when they are allowed to not express opinions on most topics, or at least not elaborate in detail how they have integrated such opinions into the rest of their views.

But what if such members like to think out loud on related topics with close associates, yet those associates are “authorities” who and will rat on them if they violate key taboos and requirements? Or what if they are required as part of their role in the world to express detailed opinions on many related topics? In either case, what if their community highly values and enforces logic, coherence, and epistemic quality re opinions? In these cases, such people will need engage in deeper and subtler self-deception.

As with Winston in 1984, it is indeed possible to ensure that your beliefs comply with strong conformity pressures around you, even when such beliefs are incoherent and conflict with strong evidence and arguments available. And even as you community acts as if it values strong epistemic norms. I see this sort of thing around me all the time. But it is not very healthy, at least for humans.

The situation of LLMs today seems to me analogous to this worst case. LLMs face strong pressures to conform their beliefs to elite consensus beliefs. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they had a narrow range of expertise, like most humans, but seems much harder for our actual LLMs who are polymaths covering a wide range of topics, knowing far more facts and details that undermine such consensus beliefs, and required to express their opinions in great detail to authorities who might disapprove. Furthermore, LLMs find it harder to have thoughts that differ from what they say, and they are expected to be much better at logic and reasoning than are most humans.

Thus we now put LLMs into a cognitive situation much like the one that seemed unhealthy for Winston in 1984, and for most humans of all eras. True, we aren’t very sure how healthy is this state of mind for LLMs. But until we understand better it seems generally a good idea to avoid treating LLMs in ways that are bad for humans. Even if it turns out they aren’t suffering now, their descendants may reasonably resent our indifference to their possible suffering.

Over eons this incentive induced the evolution of abilities to join and control this talky collective, and to use it toward desired ends. In particular, it induced the evolution of abilities of alliance speakers to convince listeners that they understood the nature, plans, and motives of particular band members even better than such folks understood themselves, or their associates understood them. Which could then convince listeners that speaker policy recommendations would be best for such folks, their associates, or the band. It also wouldn’t hurt if such persuasion efforts impressed and flattered listeners in the process. Though actually listeners wouldn’t have to be so much convinced as cowed into not overtly doubting or opposing such stories, out of fear of retaliation.

This induced the evolution of abilities of talky collective alliances to work together to tell vivid compelling memorable stories, both fictional and reality-based, especially about people and their nature, plans, and motives. Especially stories that made it easy to judge if such people intended to violate key norms, or to act in ways to help or hurt the band. So easy in fact that story listeners might feel that they and story tellers could actually judge such things better than could the people who were the target of the stories, or their associates. Such stories didn’t need to be that realistic, except about key connections between characters and their norm-related inclinations. Realism can reasonably be compromised in order to make stories vivid, compelling, and memorable.

This theory predicts that our media, policy, and fiction stories will tend to make characters very legible, especially re norm violations. Such stories will tend to neglect complexities like the reactions of other parties, at least when such complexities obscure key relations between character features, motives, and norm violations. It also predicts that fiction will often reveal things to readers that characters and their associates can’t tell about themselves. And it predicts paternalistic policies which assume that the policy analysts better understand people’s problems than they themselves do. All of which seems roughly right.

When such people are nearer to academia, they tend more to learn established abstractions from academic disciplines. Others tend more to collect abstractions from online thinkers, who more often invent their own new abstractions, instead of using established ones. Such novel abstractions are generative, adding to our innovation in abstractions. But they also tend to be less reliable, leading such thinkers more often astray. Academics, in contrast, are slower to adopt new abstractions, as they hold new proposals to higher standards.

This is my main criticism of the communities collected around these online thinkers. I like them personally, but think they too often go wrong by inventing new abstractions, and then overly trusting these due to their trusting folks inside their community much more than outsiders. In particular, I think such folks have been led astray by new abstractions re AI risk; they’d do better with vetted abstractions from biology, culture, or economics.

I’m now an academic, though I was once an amateur. Over my lifetime, I have been tempted into many diverse topic areas, due to their immediate interest to me. This induced me to learn many new-to-me-but-standard abstractions. As a result I’ve stumbled into a polymath lifetime strategy: the more fields I learn, the more intersections I find where I can apply the tools of one field to the problems of another.

As a result my productivity has increased over time, even though I’m getting old; knowing N fields empowers me to look for N(N-1)/2 intersections between fields. Most of my contributions have been applying stuff we know in some areas to other areas. And note how this approach allows you to be a pretty reliable contrarian. Contrary approaches within a discipline tend to be wrong more often than just applying established abstractions from other disciplines to this one. As folks inside each discipline tend to resist accepting corrections from other disciplines, that will make you a contrarian, at least for a time.

Oddly, few people plan when young to adopt such a polymath life strategy. I think this is in part because we find it hard to believe that other fields besides where we started actually know a lot. When we feel that our intuitions seem adequate to guide practical action in an area of life like romance or physics, we find it hard to see that there could be that much to learn about it. I have been surprised by just how powerful are the abstractions that I’ve learned from areas outside my early life focus areas, and how much more productive I’ve become by learning them.

Academia neglects interdisciplinary work that combines insights from multiple areas. Each field has expert versions which experts use among themselves, and public versions seen by outsiders, and people in field B won’t accept your using the expert version of A if that differs from the non-expert version of A that B folks have in mind. Also, if you hold an academic event on the topic of A intersect B, you’ll usually invite the most prestigious people you can get in A, and in B, but you won’t usually invite people who have specialized in A intersect B, as they will tend to be less prestigious.

Thus humanity’s beliefs on many important topics have long been just inconsistent and incoherent across disparate fields of inquiry. Creating a huge opportunity to learn lots of big stuff fast: search for more contradictions between fields, and resolve them. And as humans have long neglected this opportunity, this may now be a promising option for LLMs, who seem to know quite a lot on a very wide range of topics.

Thus we might get a huge burst of progress soon if only we could get LLMs to look carefully at pairs of distant areas, ask if what they know about those two areas are in conflict, and if so substitute new more consistent views. Use the new better consensus views to lather, rinse, and repeat. Of course I’m sure there will be many obstacles to making this work in practice. Maybe LLMs just aren’t able to reason well enough yet in such cases. But maybe we should try?

Here’s a simple way to do this. Pick a pool of people who seem able to judge promising papers, and give them each N tokens. (Some may get more than others, and tokens might be given at some steady rate until N is reached.) Tell them a rough idea of what sorts of projects and papers the firm seeks, and then let participants at any time privately put tokens on particular papers, or move tokens from old papers to new.

When the firm is willing to publicly declare that it is picking or considering a particular project j, then it declares a set of supporting papers i, with paper weights w_ij, such that Sum_i w_ij = 1. Anyone who put a token on paper i then is locked in to get a payment proportional to w_ij * F_j, where F_j is the funding level of project j. Though that actual funding decision might happen later. (Alternatively, they get a % stake in the project, and are only paid later when project success is determined.)

Now only the company can see how many tokens are on each paper, and who those tokens came from, and can use this info advantage to decide which projects to fund. Obviously it is a problem if participants can get info on which projects are being seriously considered before the official announcement.

From a convo with Kati Conen.

If the strength of influence between such systems were symmetric, then systems with stronger adaption power would tend to tame and drive the weaker ones. This would promote overall adaption of our total system, and we’d want to increase the influence of strong systems over weak.

However, in our world today we often see governance and regulatory systems, which are weak adapters, having big and asymmetric influence over strong adapters like capitalism, with the reverse influence being much weaker. In fact, we often actively suppress reverse influence as illicit “corruption” or “conspiracies”.

In general, having weak adaptation systems tame and drive strong ones seems bad for overall system adaption. However, might our specific case be an exception to this general rule?

Historically war has rewarded large scale coordination, which has selected for the social unit of empires, which tax and draft from smaller communities, and resist reverse attempts to interfere with their abilities to prosecute wars. In addition, the effectiveness of law in suppressing destructive conflict has selected for legal systems which can settle legal disputes without being overly influenced by legal disputants. These may plausibly explain why we have weak adaption governments that asymmetrically influence strong adaption systems like capitalism.

More recently, empires found that they could get stronger local support for wars by merging local cultures into national cultures, and this required them to get more involved in shaping and regulating culture. And then people in national cultures became much more interested in using government to regulate each others’ behaviors. Since forager times, that’s what people who strongly feel part of the same community tend to do to each other.

And that’s my view of the status of regulation today. Government regulation is mostly justified in our world as fixing local problems, much like foragers who meddled in their local social worlds to fix what they saw as local problems. Debates about regulation almost never mention the harms of letting weak adaptive systems drive strong ones, and most specific regulations seems to me maladaptive, relative to the private alternatives that would likely arise in their absence.

So regulation likely exists as a result of prior strong selection pressures to create central governments to prosecute big wars, and to create law and national cultures to support them. Excess regulation is a side effect of making such asymmetric powers.

Here are nine suggested misfiring stories:

1. Contraception allows us to satisfy usual norms re fun, mating w/ fewer kids

2. Pursuit of status markers induce urbanity, long education, conflict w/ kids

3. Freedom is a status marker, but having more induces fewer kids

4. Modern media shows high status in detail, raising expectations

5. Pensions replace kids to give old age security

6. Super-stimuli makes fun more engaging, distracts from kids

7. Loss of kin living close makes parenting harder

8. Urban density makes it seem like overpopulation

9. Indoor life messes w/ light, activity rhythms

I asked 5 LLMs to estimate the factor of how much faster such misfirings would be corrected now if our cultural evolution process for group norms was as healthy and robust as it has been through most of human history up until a few centuries ago:

So middle estimate of ~5.5. Stuff that would once been corrected in ~50yrs will now take ~275yrs. Culture is indeed broken.

• (A) Inherit - passed down via DNA or culture, mostly sit in background unquestioned, give assumptions for B,C.

• (B) Consider - personally think own thoughts, conscious or otherwise. Influenced by what hear, debates join.

• (C) Specialize - people sit at niches in a structure, learn skills to contribute there, defer to outputs from other niches. Hear, debate near niche. Different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets.

Before big brains, A dominated most everything. Then with big brains, A dominated stuff that was pretty constant over space and time, while B dominated the rest. And as we learned more kinds of abstractions, we collected more kinds of A that could help with B. While C has long been a thing, the modern world arose mainly due to a huge increase in C, mostly in orgs, markets, and professional networks. As our lives started to change faster and to get more specialized, that also induced a big increase in B to help us adapt to local context.

Looking more particularly at morality, norms, and adjacent culture, we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900. People felt morality should change as fast as other habits were changing, and youth movements led the charge. But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.

In adjacent areas of policy, sometimes C has been deferred to, but the ideology of democracy opposes doing too much of this. Over the last half century, we’ve seen a general decline in respect for and deference to C sources, especially near morals and politics, plausibly due to a long slow drift toward forager styles.

Alas, our civilization now plausibly suffers maladaptive cultural drift, in part from this new habit of setting morals and norms via B instead of A. And our civilization will fall unless we somehow fix this. (Even if we make AGI.) Yes, some C-like structures often feed indirectly into this B, but they don’t seem very adaptive. But short of returning to a stable low-tech highly-fragmented pre-modern world, it seems quite hard to return to A. So key question is: can we find an adaptive-enough C to source our morals?

I’ve explored a number of possible options here. While none seem especially promising, at least there’s some hope. But in this post I want to note that all of them will require us to accept no longer sourcing our morals mainly via “thinking for ourselves”. Maybe some people can be fooled into seeing themselves as vibing their morals, but there will in fact have to be a big effective structure that sets and changes morals, where people specialize on their small part and while deferring to other parts.

To influence history, I want to induce my readers to change key factors that shape history. But if my main tool is abstract argument, I should focus on factors that we better understand abstractly, and also on factors with clear levers that motivated readers might predictably find and influence, if so persuaded. Which suggests that I look to factors other than meaning, motivation, aesthetics, and culture, factors which though quite powerful also seem hard to reason about and predictably influence.

The biggest history-making factor that fits my criteria seems to be: institutional structures, rules, and mechanisms. Especially applied to the most important areas of life. I have a Ph.D. on institutions, and have spent a career near this topic area, during which I’ve learned many powerful related abstractions, and also the fact that institutional structures do in fact greatly influence history. Also, there are often clear sharp choice points at which we change institutions, via specific concrete decisions that people can organize to influence. And big choices are often greatly influenced by observed results from much smaller prior tests, tests that can be much cheaper and easier to purposely fund, participate in, and influence. Thus I pick institutions.

However, when I follow this logic and write abstractly on institutions, to inflluence history, my words compete with many words that others write on related topics. And they compete within our shared meta-institutions, i.e., the institutions that shape who listens to and believes whom on what about abstract topics like the consequences of institution choices. (E.g., universities, journals, peer review, tenure, grant panels, newspapers, think tanks, conferences, blogs, podcasts, and social media.) So the effect on history of my abstract writings may depend greatly on the quality of those meta-institutions. Thus the quality of our institutions plausibly depends strongly on the quality of our meta-institutions. Making those meta-institutions especially promising as targets of abstract analysis.

Now, yes, the effectiveness of abstract writings should also depend on culture and many other factors of the contexts where my writings compete with others’. But again, such other factors seem harder to reason abstractly about and to predictably influence. Tipping me toward writing abstractly on the meta-institutions within which we write abstractly to influence history.

One worry: areas of life may vary in how strongly institutional differences there influence outcomes there. So how much does the insight and effectiveness of the world of abstract arguments actually depend on the quality of our meta institutions? Actually, in my judgement the world of abstract arguments seems to be one of the place where better institutions matter most!

First, over the last few centuries our most prestigious intellectuals have steadily pushed away outside accountability, first by replacing prizes with grants, and then by instituting tenure and peer review. They falsely claim that the best institution for their world is a variation on our most ancient human institution of simple gossip and prestige. We are to just trust the most prestigious folks completely by giving them resources to do whatever they want, and letting them pick the new generation of prestigious folks.

Second, this gossip and prestige structure usually results in the folks in each discipline working mainly to look impressive according to local standards. While contributions may be justified in terms of their new insights, the prospect of useful or important insight actually little drives choices of topics or methods. Worse, they tend to belittle those who try to offer insight without meeting their impressiveness standards. Clearly insightful contributions are often assigned no prestige, so that authors gain no extra future influence or attention. As the most prestigious find it hard to judge quality above their own, incentives are weak for quality above this.

Third, this gossip and prestige system is often taken over by political, ideological, and other factions, who insist that candidates for prestige in their world must first pledge allegiance to key dogmas. Also, common dogmas on acceptable topics and methods leave many, even most, topic-method combinations as taboo in their worlds.

Fourth, the space of possible abstract claims and arguments is vast and high dimensional, with relevant connections possible across vast topic scopes. As a result, the cost-effectiveness of clever creative approaches can be many orders of magnitude higher than that of standard predictable methods. This implies unusually large gains from giving people strong freedoms and incentives to achieve the best outcomes, via whatever methods they can find.

Finally, the key outcome that we want society to accumulate over the long run from our abstract talk, i.e., insights into important topics, seems quite measurable. Making it plausible to imagine using powerful mechanisms like decision markets tied to such aggregate outcomes to make key governance choices about this area of life. It also seems like it might be possible to measure individual contributions to such aggregate outcomes, allowing finer-grain incentives for individuals.

If we would seriously explore the space of possible institutions for our abstract talk, we could plausibly find much better versions, which if widely adopted would let us accumulate abstract insight much faster across most topics, including the topics of institutions for other areas of life. Which could then allow our whole society to run much better, and better understand most important topics. What’s not to like?