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Language: en
the following is a conversation with
Daniel schmachtenberger a founding
member of the consilience project that
is aimed at improving public sens making
and dialogue he's interested in
understanding how we humans can be the
best version of ourselves as individuals
and as collectives at all scales quick
mention of our sponsors ground news
netsuite for sigmatic magic spoon and
better help check them out in the
description to support this podcast as a
side let me say that I got a chance to
talk to Daniel on and off the mic for a
couple of days we took a long walk the
day before our conversation I really
enjoyed meeting him just on a basic
human level we talked about the world
around us with words that carried hope
for us individual ants actually
contributing something of value to the
Colony these conversations are the
reasons I love human beings our
insatiable striving to lessen the
suffering in the world but more than
that there's a simple magic to two
strangers meeting for the first time and
sharing ideas becoming fast friends and
creating something that is far greater
than the sum of our parts I've gotten to
experience some of that same magic here
in Austin with a few new friends and in
random bars in my travels across this
country where a conversation leaves me
with a big stupid smile on my face and a
new appreciation of this too short too
beautiful life this is the Lex Freedman
podcast and here is my conversation with
Daniel schmachtenberger
if aliens were observing Earth through
the entire history just watching us and
uh we're t with uh summarizing what
happened until now what do you think
they would say what do you think they
would write up in that summary like it
has to be pretty short less than a page
like in uh heer's guide there's I think
like a paragraph or a couple
sentences how would you summarize how
sorry how would the aliens summarize do
you think uh all of human civilization
my first thoughts take more than a page
uh they'd probably distill it because if
they
watched well I mean first I have no idea
if their senses are even attuned to
similar stuff to what our senses are
attuned to or what the nature of their
Consciousness is like relative to ours
and so let's assume that they're kind of
like us just technologically more
advanced to get here from wherever they
are that's the first kind of constraint
on the thought
experiment and then if they've watched
throughout all of history
they saw the burning of Alexandria they
saw that 2,000 years ago in Greece we
were producing things like clocks the
anti-ia mechanism and then that
technology got lost they saw that there
wasn't just a steady dialectic of
progress so every once in a while
there's a giant fire that destroys a lot
of things there's a giant like uh
commotion that destroys a lot of things
yeah and it's usually
self-induced uh they would have seen
seen that
and so as they're looking at us now as
we move past the nuclear weapons age
into the full globalization anthropos
scine exponential Tech
age still making our decisions
relatively similarly to how we did um in
the Stone Age as far as rivalry Game
Theory type stuff I I think they would
think that this is probably most likely
one of the planets that is not going to
make it to being Intergalactic cuz we
blow ourselves up in the technological
adolescence and if we are going to we're
going to need
some major progress rapidly in the
social technologies that can guide and
bind and direct the physical
Technologies so that we are safe vessels
for the amount of power we're
getting actually H trackers guide has a
estimation about how how much of a risk
this particular thing uh poses to the
rest of the Galaxy and I think I forget
what it was I think it was medium or low
so so their estimation was would be that
this this species of Antti creatures is
not going to survive long there's ups
and downs in terms of technological
innovation the fundamental nature of
their behavior from a game theory
perspective hasn't really changed they
have not learned in any fundamental way
how to uh
control properly incentivize or properly
do the mechanism design of game
to ensure long-term survival and then
they move on to another planet do you uh
think there is in a more slightly more
serious question do you think there's
some number or perhaps a very very large
number of uh intelligent alien
civilizations out
there yes would be hard to think
otherwise I know I think Bostrom had a
new article not that long ago on why
that might not be the case that
the Drake equation might not be the kind
of end story on it but when I look at
the total number of Kepler planets just
that we're aware of just galactically
and and also like when that um when
those life forms were discovered in
monol that didn't have the same six
primary atoms I think it had arsenic
replacing phosphorus as one of the
primary aspects of its energy metabolism
we get to think about that the building
blocks might be more different so the
physical constraints even that the
planets have to have might be more
different
uh it seems really unlikely not not to
mention interesting things that we've
observed that are still
unexplained as you've had guests on your
show discussing Tic Tac and oh oh the
ones that have visited yeah well let's
Dive Right into that what do you make
sense of uh the rich human
psychology of uh there being hundreds of
thousands probably millions of witnesses
of UFOs of different kinds on Earth most
of which I presume are conjured up by
the human Mind through the perception
system some number might be true some
number might be reflective of actual
physical objects whether it's uh you
know drones or testing military
technology that's secret or other
worldly technology what do you make
sense of all of that because it's
gaining quite a bit of popularity
recently there's uh some sense in which
that that's
um that's us humans being hopeful and
dreaming of other worldly creatures as a
way to escape the dreariness of our of
The Human
Condition but in another sense it could
be it really could be something truly
exciting that a science
should turn its eye towards so what do
where do you place it speaking of
turning eye towards this is one of those
super fascinating ating actually super
consequential possibly topics that I
wish I had more time to study and just
haven't allocated so I I don't have firm
beliefs on this because I haven't got to
study it as much as I want so what I'm
going to say comes from a superficial
assessment um while we know there are
plenty of things that people thought of
as UFO sightings that we can fully write
off we have other better explanations
for them uh what we're interested in is
the ones that we don't have better
explanations for and then not just
immediately jumping to uh a theory of
what it is but holding it as
unidentified and being being um curious
and
Earnest I think the the uh Tic Tac one
is quite interesting and made it in
major media recently but I don't know if
you ever saw the disclosure project uh
guy named Steven Greer organized a bunch
of mostly US military and some
commercial flight uh people who had
Direct observation and classified
information uh disclosing it at a CNN
briefing and so you saw high-ranking
generals Admirals fighter pilots all
describing things that they saw um on
radar with visual uh with their own eyes
or cameras and also describing some
phenomena that had some consistency
across different people and I find this
interesting enough that I think it would
be silly to just dismiss
it um and specifically like we can we
can ask the question how much of it is
natural phenomena ball lightning or
something like that and this is why I'm
more interested in what uh fighter
pilots and astronauts and people who are
trained in
um being able to identify uh flying
objects and um atmospheric phenomena um
have to say about
it I think the thing then you you could
say well are they more advanced military
Craft um is it some kind of you know
human craft
the interesting thing that a number of
them describe is something that's kind
of like right angles at speed or if not
right angles acute angles at speed but
something that looks like a different
relationship to inertia than physics
makes sense for
us I don't think that there are any
human technologies that are doing that
even in really deep uh underground black
projects now one could say okay well
could it be a hologram well would it
show up on radar if radar is also seeing
it and so
uh I don't know I think there's enough I
mean and for that to be a massive
coordinated scop is it as interesting
and ridiculous in a way as the idea that
it's UFOs from some extraplanetary
source so it's it's up there on the
interesting topics to me there's if it
is at all alien
technology it is the
dumbest version of alien technology it's
so far away it's like the old old old
crappy VHS tapes of alien technology
these are like crappy drones that just
floated or even like spaced to the level
of like space junk because it is so
close to our human technology we talk
about it moves in ways that's uh that's
unlike what we understand about physics
but it still has very similar kind of
geometric Notions and something that we
humans can perceive with our eyes all
those kinds of things I feel like alien
technology most likely would be
something that we would not be able to
perceive not because they're hiding but
because it's so far Advanced that it
would be much it would be beyond the
cognitive capabilities of us humans just
as you were
saying as per your answer for aliens
summarizing
Earth it's uh the starting assumption is
they have similar perception systems
they have similar cognitive capabilities
and and that very well may not be the
case let me ask you
about staying in Aliens for just a
little longer because I think it's it's
a good transition in talking about
governments and human
societies do you think
if a US government or any government was
in
possession of an alien spacecraft or of
information related to alien
spacecraft they would
uh have the capacity structurally would
they have the the
processes would they be able to
uh communicate that to the public
effectively or would they keep it Seeker
in the room and do nothing with it both
of uh to try to preserve military
Secrets but also because of the
incompetence that's inherent to
bureaucracies or either
well we can certainly see when certain
things become Declassified 25 or 50
years later that there were things that
the public might have wanted to know
that were kept secret for a very long
time for reasons of uh at least
supposedly National Security um which is
also a nice source of plausible
deniability for
um people covering their ass for doing
things that would be problematic and um
um other
purposes there are there's a scientist
at
Stanford who supposedly um got some
material that was recovered from Area 51
type area did analysis on it using I
believe electron microscopy and a couple
other methods and came to the idea that
it was a nanotech
alloy um that was something we didn't
currently have the ability to do was not
naturally
occurring so there I've have heard some
things and again like I said I'm I'm not
going to stand behind any of these
because I haven't done the level of
study to have high confidence
um I think what you said also about
would it be super low Tech alien um
craft like would they necessarily move
their atoms around in space or might
they do something more interesting than
that might they be able to uh have a
different relationship to the concept of
space or information or Consciousness or
um one of the things that the craft
supposedly do is not only accelerate and
turn in a way that looks non-inertial
but also disappear so there's a question
as to like the two are not necessarily
mutually exclusive and it could be
possible to some people run a hypothesis
that they create intentional amounts of
exposure as an invitation of a
particular kind um who knows interesting
field we we tend to assume like SEI
that's listening out for aliens out
there I've just been recently reading
more and more about gravitational waves
and you
have orbiting black
holes that orbit each other they
generate ripples in
SpaceTime on my uh for fun at night when
I lay in bed I think about what it would
be like to ride those waves when they
not not the low magnitude they are as
when they reach Earth but get closer to
the black holes because it'll basically
be shrinking and expanding Us in all
Dimensions including time so it's
actually ripples through space time that
they
generate why is it that you couldn't use
that it's travels at the speed of
light travels at spe which a very weird
thing to say when you're when you're uh
morphing space time it's it's comp it's
it's You could argue it's faster than
the speed of light so if you're able to
communicate
by to summon enough energy to generate
black holes and to orbit the uh to to
force them to orbit each other why not
travel as the ripples in space time
whatever the hell that means somehow
combined with wormholes so if you're
able to communicate through like we
don't think of uh gravitational waves as
something you can communicate with
because the the radio will be have to be
the a very large size and very dense but
perhaps that's it you know perhaps
that's one way to communicate it's a
very effective way and uh that would
explain like we wouldn't even be able to
make sense of that of the physics that
results in an alien species that's able
to control gravity at that scale I think
you just jumped up the kardashev scale
so far that you're not just harnessing
the power of a star but harnessing the
power of mutually rotating black holes
um I I that's way above my physics payg
grade to think about including
even uh nonrotating black hole versions
of transwarp travel um I
think uh you know you can talk with Eric
more about that I think he has better
ideas on it than I do my hope for the
future of humanity mostly does not rest
in the near term on our ability to get
to other habitable planets in time and
even more than that in the list of
possible solutions of uh how to improve
human civilization uh orbiting black
holes is not in on the first page for
you it's not on the first page okay I
bet you did not expect us to start this
conversation here but I'm glad the
places it
went I am excited on a much smaller
scale of uh Mars europ or Ty
or Venus potentially having very like
bacteria like life forms just going
a on a small human level it's a little
bit scary but mostly really exciting
that there might be life elsewhere MH in
the volcanoes in the
oceans all around us teeming having
little societies and whether there's
properties about that kind of life
that's somehow different than ours I
don't know what would be more exciting
if those colonies of single cell type
organisms what would be more exciting if
they're different or they're the same if
they're the same that
means through the rest of the universe
there's life forms like us something
like us everywhere if they're different
that's also really exciting CU there's
life forms everywhere that are not like
us
that's a little bit scary I don't know
what scary
actually I it's both scary and exciting
no matter what right the idea that they
could be very different is
philosophically very interesting for us
to open our aperture on what life and
Consciousness and and self-replicating
possibilities could look
like the question on are they different
or the same obviously there's lots of
life here that is the same in some ways
and different in other ways um when you
take the thing that we call an invasive
species is something that's still pretty
the same hydrocarbon based thing but
co-evolved with co- selective pressures
in a certain environment we move it to
another environment it might be
devastating to that whole ecosystem
because it's just different enough that
it messes up the self-stabilizing
Dynamics of that ecosystem so the
question of are they would they be
different in ways where we could still
figure out a way to inhabit a biosphere
together or fundamentally not
fundamentally the uh uh nature of how
they operate and the nature of how we
operate would be incommensurable is a
deep question well we offline talked
about mimetic Theory right it it seems
like if they were sufficiently different
where we would not even we can coexist
on different planes uh seems like a a
good thing if we're close enough
together to where we'd be competing then
it's you're getting into the world of
viruses and pathogens and all those
kinds of things to where we would would
uh one of us would die off quickly
through basically mass murder
without even even accidentally even
accidentally if we just had a
self-replicating single cell kind of
creature that happened
to not work well for the hydrocarbon
life that was here that got introduced
because it either output something that
was toxic or utilized up the same
resource too quickly and it just
replicated faster mut ated faster that
it wouldn't be a um mimetic Theory
conflict theory kind of harm it would
just be uh a a Von nyman machine a
self-replicating machine that was
fundamentally incompatible with these
kinds of self-replicating systems with
faster UDA Loops for one final time
putting your alien SL God hat on and you
look at human
civilization the do you think uh about
the 7.8 billion people on Earth at as uh
individual Little Creatures individual
little organisms or do you think of us
as uh
one organism with a collective
intelligence what's the proper framework
through which to analyze it again as an
alien so did I know where you're coming
from would you have asked the question
the same way before the Industrial
Revolution or before the Agricultural
Revolution when there were half a
billion people and no telecommunications
connecting
them
I would indeed ask the question the same
way but I would be less confident
about uh about your
conclusions um it would be an actually
more interesting way to ask the question
at that time but I was nevertheless ask
it the same way yes well let's go back
further and smaller then uh rather than
just a single human or the entire human
species let's look
at uh in a relatively isolated tribe yes
in the Rel atively isolated probably sub
Dunbar number sub kind of 150 people
tribe do I look at that as one entity
where evolution is selecting for it
based on group selection or do I think
of it as 150 individuals um that are
interacting in some
way well could those individuals exist
without the group
no uh
The evolutionary adaptiveness of
humans was in involved critically group
selection and individual humans alone
trying to figure out stone tools and
protection and whatever uh aren't what
was selected
for and so I think the ore is the wrong
frame I think
it's individuals are affecting the group
that they're a part of they're also
dependent upon and being affected by the
group that they're part of and so this
now starts to get in deep into Political
theories also which is theories that
Orient towards the collective at
different scales whether a tribal scale
or an Empire or a nation state or
something and ones that Orient towards
the individual liberalism and stuff like
that and I think there's very obvious
failure modes on both sides and so the
relationship between them is more
interesting to me than either of them
the relationship between the individual
and the collective and the question
around how to have a virtuous process
between those so a good social system
would be one where the organism of the
individual and the organism of the group
of individuals is they're both
synergistic to each other so what is
best for the individuals and what's best
for the whole is
aligned but there is nevertheless an
individual they're not it's uh it's a
matter of degrees I suppose
but what is um what defines a human
more the the social network within they
which they've been brought up through
which they've developed their
intelligence or is it that their own
sovereign individual
self like what's your intuition of how
much not just for evolutionary survival
but as intellectual beings how much do
we need others for our development yeah
I think we have a weird sense of this
today relative to most previous periods
of Sapien
history I think the vast majority of
Sapien history is tribal like depending
upon your early human model two or
300,000 years of homo sapiens and little
tribes where they depended upon that
tribe for survival and excommunication
from the tribe was was fatal I think
they and our whole evolutionary genetic
history is in that environment and the
amount of time we've been out of it is
is relatively so tiny and then we still
depended upon extended families and
local communities more and the big kind
of giant Market complex where I can
provide something to the market to get
money to be able to get other things
from the market where it seems like I
don't need anyone it's almost like
disintermediating our sense of need even
though even though your and my ability
to talk to each other using these mics
and the phones that we coordinated on
took millions of people over six
continents to be able to run the supply
chains that made all the stuff that we
depend on but we don't notice that we
depend upon them they all seem
fungible um if you take a baby obviously
that you didn't even get to a baby
without a mom was it dependent or
dependent upon each other right without
two two parents at minimum and they
depended upon other people but if we
take that baby and we put it out in the
wild it obviously dies so if we let it
grow up for a little while the minimum
amount of time where it starts to have
some autonomy and then we put it out in
the wild and there this has happened a
few times it doesn't learn
language and it doesn't learn the Artic
the small motor articulation that we
learn doesn't learn the type of
Consciousness that we end up having that
is
socialized so I think I think we take
for granted how much conditioning
affects us um is it possible that
uh it affects basically
99.9 or maybe the whole thing the whole
thing is the connection between us
humans and that were we uh no better
than Apes without our human connection
because that that thinking of it that
way forces us to think very differently
about human society and how to progress
forward if the connections are
fundamental I just have to object to the
know better than Apes because better
here I think you mean a specific thing
which means have capacities that are
fundamentally different then I think
Apes also depend upon troops um yes and
I I think the idea of humans as better
than nature in some kind of um ethical
sense ends up having heaps of problems
we'll table that we can come back to it
but when we say what is unique about
Homo sapian capacity relative to the
other animals we currently inhabit the
biosphere with and I'm saying it that
way because there were other early
hominids that had some of these
capacities uh we
believe our tool creation and our
language creation and our coordination
are all kind of the results of a certain
type of capacity for
abstraction and other animals will use
tools but they don't evolve the tools
they use they keep using the same types
of tools that they basically can find so
a chimp will notice that a rock can cut
a Vine that it wants to and it'll even
notice that a sharper Rock will cut it
better and experientially it'll use the
sharper Rock and if you even give it a
knife it'll probably use the knife
because it's experiencing the
effectiveness but it doesn't make stone
tools because that requires
understanding why one is sharper than
the other what is the abstract principle
called sharpness to then be able to
invent a sharper thing
that same abstraction makes language and
the ability for abstract
representation which makes the ability
to coordinate in a more advanced set of
ways so I do think our ability to
coordinate with each other is pretty
fundamental to the selection of what we
are as a species I wonder if that
coordination that connection is actually
the thing that gives birth to
Consciousness that gives birth to well
let's start with selfawareness it's more
like theory of Mind theory of mind yeah
you know I I I I suppose there's
experiments that show that there's other
mammals that have a very crude theory of
mind not sure maybe dogs something like
that but actually dogs probably has to
do with that they co-evolved with humans
see it'd be interesting if that theory
of mind is what leads
to Consciousness in the way we think
about it is the richness of the
subjective experience that is
consciousness I have a inkling sense
that that only exist because we're
social
creatures that that that doesn't come uh
with this with the hardware and the
software in the in the beginning that's
like uh that's learned as an effective
uh tool for communication almost like we
we think we I think we think uh that
Consciousness is
fundamental and
uh maybe it's
not now there's um a bunch of folks kind
of criticize the idea a that the
illusion of Consciousness is
consciousness that it is just a facade
we use
to to uh help us construct theories of
mind you almost put yourself in the
world as a subjective being and that
experience you want to richly experience
it as an individual person so that I
could empathize with your
experience I find that notion compelling
mostly because it allows you to then
create robots that become conscious not
by being quote unquote conscious but by
just learning to fake it till they make
it is uh create a you know present a
facade of
Consciousness and with the with the task
of uh making that facade very convincing
to us humans and thereby it will become
conscious have a sense in that in some
way that will make them conscious if
they're sufficiently convincing to
humans
is there some element of that that you
uh you find convincing this is a much
harder set of questions and deep end of
the pool than starting with the aliens
was um we went from Aliens to
Consciousness this is not the trajectory
I was expecting nor you but that let us
walk a while we we can walk a while and
I don't think we will do it justice so
what do we mean by
Consciousness versus conscious
self-reflective awareness what do we
mean by awareness qualia theory of mind
there's a lot of terms that we think of
as slightly different things and um
subjectivity first
person
uh I I don't remember exactly the quote
but I remember when reading when Sam
Harris wrote the book Free Will and then
denet critiqued it and then there was
some writing back and forth between the
two because normally they're on the same
side of kind of arguing for critical
thinking and logical fallacies and
philosophy of science against um
Supernatural ideas and here dennet
believed there is something like free
will he is a determinist compatibilist
but no consciousness an ex a radical
eliminativist and Sam was saying no
there is consciousness but there's no
Free Will and that's like the most
fundamental kinds of axom I senses they
disagreed on but neither of them could
say it was because the other one didn't
understand the philosophy of science um
or logical fallacies and and they kind
of spoke past each other and at the end
if I remember correctly Sam said
something that I thought was quite
insightful which was to the effect of it
seems because they weren't making any
progress in shared understanding it
seems that we simply have different
intuitions about
this
and what you could see was that what the
words meant right at the level of symbol
grounding might be quite different
uh one of them might have had deeply
different enough life experiences that
what is being referenced and then also
different associations of what the words
mean this is why when trying to address
these things Charles Sanders Pur said
the first philosophy has to be semiotics
because if you don't get semiotics right
we end up importing different ideas and
bad ideas right into the nature of the
language that we're using and then it's
very hard to do epistemology or ontology
together uh so I'm saying this to say
why I don't think we're going to get
very far as I think we would have to go
very slowly in terms of defining what we
mean by words and fundamental concepts
um well and also allowing our minds to
drift together for a time so our
definitions of these terms align I think
there's
some there's a beauty that some people
enjoy with Sam that he is quite stubborn
on his definitions of terms without
often clearly revealing that definition
so in his mind he can like you could
sense that he can deeply understand what
he means exactly by a term like Free
Will and Consciousness and you're right
he's very he's very specific in in
fascinating ways that not only does he
think that Free Will is an
illusion he thinks he's able not thinks
he says he's able to just remove himself
from the experience of Free Will and
just be like for minutes at a time hours
at a time like really experien as if he
has no free will like he's a a leaf
flowing down the river MH and given that
he's very sure that Consciousness is
fundamental so here's a this conscious
Leaf that's subjectively experiencing
the floating and yet is no ability to
control and make any decisions for it
for itself it's only a um the decisions
have all all been made there's some
aspect to which the terminology there
perhaps is the problem so that's a
particular kind of meditative experience
and the people in the vedantic tradition
and some of the Buddhist Traditions
thousands of years ago described similar
experiences and somewhat similar
conclusions some slightly
different there are other types of
phenomenal
experience that uh are the phenomenal
experience a pure agency and you know
like the the Catholic Theologian but
evolutionary theorist tar Des shardon
describes this and that rather than a
Creator agent God in the beginning
there's a creative impulse or a creative
process and he was would go into a type
of meditation that identified as the
pure essence of that kind of creative
process um and I think the types of
experien was we've had and then one the
types of experience we've had make a big
deal to the nature of how we do symbol
grounding the other thing is the types
of experiences we have can't not be
interpreted through our existing
interpretive frames and most of the time
our interpretive frames are unknown even
TOS some of them and so so this is
tricky this is tricky topic um so I
guess there's a bunch of directions we
could go with it but I want to come back
to what the um impulse was that was
interesting around what is consciousness
and how does it relate to us as social
beings and how does it relate to the
possibility of Consciousness with it AIS
right you're keeping us on track which
is uh which is wonderful you're a
wonderful hiking partner okay yes let's
go back to the initial impulse of uh
what is consciousness and how does the
social impulse connect to
Consciousness is consciousness a uh
consequence of that social connection
I'm going to State a position and not
argue it cuz it's honestly like it's a
long hard thing to argue and we can
totally do it another time if you
want I don't subscribe to Consciousness
as an emergent property of biology or
neural
networks obviously a lot of people do
obviously the the philosophy of science
orients um towards that
in not absolutely but largely
um I think of the nature of first person
the universe of first person of of
qualia
as uh experience
sensation desire emotion phenomenology
the but the the felt sense not the we
say emotion and we think of a
neurochemical pattern or a endocrine
pattern but all of the physical stuff
the third person stuff has position and
momentum and charge and stuff like that
that is measurable
repeatable I think of the nature of
first person and third person
as ontologically orthogonal to each
other not reducible to each other
they're different kinds of
stuff and so I think about the evolution
of third person that we're quite used to
thinking about from subatomic particles
to atoms to molecules to on and on I
think about a similar kind of and
corresponding evolution in the domain of
first person from the way Whitehead
talked about kind of prehension or Proto
qualia in earlier phases of
self-organization into higher orders of
it and the there's correspondence but
that neither like the like the idealists
do we reduce third person to first
person which is what idealists do or
neither like the physicalists or do we
reduce first person to third person
obviously bom talked about uh an
implicate order that was deeper than and
gave rise to the explicate order of both
um Nagel talks about something like that
I have a slightly different sense of
that but again I'll just kind of not
argue how that occurs for a moment and
say so rather than say does
Consciousness emerge from I'll talk
about do higher capacities of
Consciousness emerge in relationship
with so it's not first person as a
category emerging from third person but
increased complexity within the nature
of first person and third person
co-evolving um do I think that it seems
relatively likely that more advanced
neural networks have deeper
phenomenology more complex where it goes
just from basic sensation to emotion to
social awareness to abstract cognition
to self-reflexive abstract cognition
yeah but I wouldn't say that's the
emergence of Consciousness I would say
it's increased complexity within the
domain of first person corresponding to
increased complexity and the
correspondent should not automatically
be seen as causal we can get into the
arguments for why that often is the case
so what I say that obviously the Sapien
brain is pretty unique and a sing s Le
sapen now has that right even if it took
sapiens evolving in tribes based on
group selection to make that brain so
the group made it now that brain is
there now if I take that a single person
with that brain out of the group and try
to raise them in a box they'll still not
be very interesting even with the brain
um but the brain does give Hardware
capacities that if conditioned in
relationship um can have interesting
things emerge so do I think that the the
human biology
types of human consciousness and types
of social interaction all co- emerged
and co-evolved
yes as a small as side as you're talking
about the biology let me comment that I
spent this is what I do this is what I
do with my life this is why I will never
accomplish anything is I spent much of
the morning trying to calc trying to do
research on how many computations the
brain performs and how many um how much
energy uses versus the state-of the are
CPUs and
gpus now arriving at uh about 20
quadrillion so that's 2 to the 10 to the
16 computations so synaptic firings per
second that the brain does and that's
about a million times faster than the uh
uh the let's say the 20 thread
state-of-the-arts Intel CPU
the the 10th Generation and then there's
similar calculation for the for the uh
for the GPU and all ended up also trying
to compute that it takes 10 watts to run
the brain about and then what does that
mean in terms of calories per day kilo
calories that's about two for an average
uh human brain that's 250 to 300
calories a day and uh so it ended up
being um a calculation where you're
doing about uh 20
quadrillion
calculations uh that that are fueled by
something like like depending on your
diet three bananas so Three Bananas
results in a in a computation that's
about a million times more powerful than
uh the current state of computers now
let's take that one step further there's
some assumptions built in there the
assumption is that one what the brain is
doing is just
computation two the the relevant
computations are synaptic firings and
that there's nothing other than synaptic
firings that we have to to factor so um
I'm forgetting his name right now
there's a very uh uh famous
neuroscientist at Stanford just passed
away recently who did a lot of the
pioneering work on gal cells and showed
that um his assessment gal cells did a
huge amount of the thinking not just
neurons and it opened up this entirely
different field of like what the brain
is and what Consciousness is you look at
damasio's work on embodied cognition and
how much of what we would consider
Consciousness or feeling is happening
outside of the nervous system completely
happening in endocrine process involving
lots of other cells and Signal
communication uh you talk to somebody
like Penrose who you've had on the show
and even though the Penrose Hammer Hoff
conjecture is probably not right is
there something like that that might be
the case where we're actually having to
look at stuff happening at the level of
quantum computation of
microtubules I'm not arguing for any of
those I'm arguing that we don't know how
big the unknown unknown set is well at
the very least this is this is become
like an infomercial for the human brain
at the very but wait there's
more at the very least of Three Bananas
buys you a million times at the very
least at the very least impressive and
then you could have uh and then the
synaptic firings were referring to as
strictly the electrical signals there
could be the mechanical transmission of
information there's chemical
transmission of information there's
there's all kinds of other stuff going
on and then there's memory that's built
in that's also all tied in not to
mention which I'm learning more and more
about it's not just just about the uh
the neurons it's also about the immune
system that's somehow helping with the
computation so it's the entirety and the
entire body is helping with the
computation so the three bananas they
could buy you a lot it could buy you a
lot but the on the topic of sort of uh
the greater degrees of complexity
emerging in Consciousness I think few
things are as beautiful and inspiring as
taking a step outside of the human brain
just looking at systems where Simple
Rules create incredible
complexity uh not create incredible
complexity emerges
so one of the simplest things to do that
with is the cellular atoma and there's I
don't know what it is and maybe you can
speak to
it we can certainly we will certainly
talk about the implications of this but
there's so few things that are as awe
inspiring to me as knowing the rules of
a system and not being able to predict
what the heck it looks like and it
creates incredibly beautiful complexity
that when zoomed out on looks like
there's actual organisms doing things
that are much uh that that operate on a
scale much higher than the underlying
mechanism so with cell aoma that's cells
that are born and die born or die and
they only know about each other's
neighbors and they're simple rules that
govern that interaction of birth and
death and then they create at scale
organisms that look like they take up
hundreds or thousands of cells and
they're moving they're moving around
they're communicating they're sending
signals to each other and you forget at
moments at a time before you remember
that the simple rules on cells is all
that it took to create that
that's it's
sad in that we can't come up with a
simple description of that
system that generalizes the behavior of
the large
organisms we can only come up we can
only hope to come up with the thing the
fundamental physics or the fundamental
rules of that system I suppose it's sad
that we can't predict everything we know
about the mathematics of those systems
it seems like we can't really in a nice
way like economics tries to do to
predict how this whole thing will unroll
but it's beautiful because how simple it
is underneath it
all so what do you make of uh the
emergence of complexity from Simple
Rules what the hell is that about yeah
well we can see that something like
flocking Behavior the murmuration can
can be computer coded it's not a very
hard set of rules to be able to see some
of those really amazing types of
complexity and the whole field of
complexity science and some of the
subdisciplines like stigar G are are
studying how following fairly simple
responses to a fairmon signal do ant
colonies do this amazing thing where the
what what you might describe as the
organizational or computational capacity
of the colony is so profound relative to
what each individual um ant is doing I
am not um anywhere near as well versed
in The Cutting Edge of cellular aoma as
I would like unfortunately I in terms of
topics that I would like to get to and
haven't like uh ETS more um wol from is
a new kind of science I have only
skimmed and read reviews of and not read
the whole thing or his newer work since
um but his idea of the four basic kind
of categories of uh emergent phenomena
that can come from cellular and that one
of them is kind of interesting and looks
a lot lot like complexity rather than
just uh chaos or homogeneity or um self
termination or
whatever I think this is very
interesting it does not instantly make
me think that uh biology is operating on
a similarly small set of rules and or
that human consciousness is I'm I'm not
that reductionist oriented
and
uh
so if you look at say Santa Fe Institute
one of the co-founders Stuart Kaufman um
his work he should you should really get
him on your show so a lot of the
questions that you like one of Kaufman's
you know more recent books after
investigations and some of the real
fundamental stuff was called Reinventing
the sacred and it had to do with some of
these exact questions uh in kind of
non-reductionist approach but that is
not just silly hippie ISM um and he was
very interested in highly non-erotic
systems where you couldn't take a lot of
behavior over a small period of time and
predict what the behavior of subsets
over a longer period of time would do um
and then going further someone who spent
some time at Santa Institute and then
kind of made a whole new field that you
should have on Dave Snowden who some
people call the father of anthro
complexity or what is the complexity
unique to
humans uh he says something to the
effect of that modeling humans as
termites really doesn't cut it like we
we we don't respond exactly identically
to the same pherone s using stigma G
like it works for flows of traffic and
some very simple human behaviors but it
really doesn't work for trying to make
sense of the cysteine chapel and Picasso
and general relativity creation and
stuff like that and it's because the the
termites are not doing abstraction
forecasting deep into the future and
making choices now based on forecast of
the future not just adaptive signals in
the moment and evolutionary code from
history that's really different right
like making choices now that can Factor
deep modeling of the future um and with
humans our uniqueness one to the next in
terms of response to similar stimuli is
much higher than it is with a termite um
one of the interesting things there is
that their uniqueness is extremely low
they're basically fungible within a
class right there's different classes
but within a class they're basically
fungible and their system uses that very
high numbers and lots of um loss right
do you think the termite feels that way
don't don't you think we humans are
deceiving oursel about our uniqueness
perhaps it doesn't it just isn't there
some sense in which this emergence just
creates different higher and higher
levels of abstraction where every at
every layer each organism feels unique
is that
possible that we're all equally dumb but
at different scales un no I think
uniqueness is
evolving I think that hydrogen atoms are
more similar to each other than cells of
the same type are and I think that cells
are more similar to each other than
humans are and I think that highly K
selected species are more unique than R
selected species they're different
evolutionary processes the r selected
species where you have a whole a lot of
death and very high birth rates you're
not looking for as much individuality
within or individual possible expression
to cover the evolutionary search space
within an individual you're looking at
it more in terms of a numbers game um so
yeah I would say there's probably more
difference between one orca and the next
than there is between one Cape bu
Buffalo and the next given that it would
be interesting to get your thoughts
about mimetic Theory where we're
imitating each
other in the context of this idea of
uniqueness how much truth is there to
that uh how compelling is this worldview
to you of gerardi and mimetic theory of
Desire where maybe you can explain it
from your perspective but it seems like
imitating each other is the
fundamental property of the behavior of
uh human
civilization well imitation is not
unique to humans right monkeys imitate
um so a certain amount of learning
through observing is not unique to
humans humans do more of it uh it's
actually kind of worth speaking to this
for a moment um monkeys can learn new
Behavior new we've even seen teaching an
ape sign language and then the ape
teaching other Apes sign language um so
that's a kind of mimesis right kind of
learning through
imitation and that needs to happen if
they need to learn or develop capacities
that are not just coded by their
genetics right so within the same genome
they're learning new things based on the
environment and So based on someone else
learn something first and so let's pick
it up uh how much a creature is the
result of just its genetic programming
and how much it's learning is a very
interesting
question and I think this is a place
where humans really show up radically
different than everything else and you
can see it in the in the neony how long
we're basically
fetal um that a the closest ancestors to
us if we look at a chimp a chimp can
hold on to its mother's fur while she
moves around day one and obviously we
see horses up and walking within 20
minutes the fact that it takes a human a
year to be walking and it takes a horse
20 minutes and you say how many
multiples of 20 minutes go into a year
like that's a long period of
helplessness that wouldn't work for a
horse right like they or anything else
and and not only could we not hold on to
Mom in the first day it's three months
before we can move our head volitionally
um so it's like what why are we
embryonic for so long basically it's
like like it's still still fetal on the
outside had to be because couldn't keep
growing inside and actually ever get out
with big heads and narrower hips from
going upright
um so here's a place where there's a
co-evolution of the pattern of humans
specifically here are our neony and what
that prends to
learning with our being tool making and
environment modifying creatures which is
because we have the abstraction to make
tools we change our environments more
than other creatures change their
environments the next most environment
modifying creature to us is like a
beaver and then you we're in La you fly
into LAX and you look at the just
orthogonal grid going on forever in all
directions and you know we've recently
come into the anthropac where the
surface of the Earth is changing more
from human activity than geological
activity and then beavers and you're
like okay wow we're really in a class of
Our Own in terms of environment
modifying yeah um so as soon as we
started
tool making we were able to change our
environments much more radically we
could put on clothes and go to a cold
place right and this is really important
because we actually went and became apex
predators in every environment we
functioned like apex predators the polar
bear can't leave the Arctic right and
the the lion can't leave the Savannah
and the Orca can't leave the ocean and
we went and became apex predators in all
those environments because of our tool
creation capacity we could become better
Predators than them adapted to the
environment or at least with our tools
adapted to the environment so in every
aspect towards any organism in any
environment we're incredibly good at
becoming apex predators yes and nothing
else can do that kind of thing there
there is no other apex predator that you
see the other apex predator is only
getting better at being a predator
through evolutionary process that's
super slow and that super slow process
creates co- selective process with their
environment so as the Predator becomes a
tiny bit faster it eats more of the slow
prey the genes of the fast prey in breed
and the prey becomes faster and so
there's this kind of balancing and we in
because of our tool making we increased
our predatory capacity faster than
anything else could increase its
resilience to it as a result we start
outstripping the environment and
extincting species following stone tools
and going and becoming apex predator
everywhere this is why we can't keep
applying apex predator theories because
we're not an apex predator we're in apex
predator but we're something much more
than that um like just for an example
the top apex predator the world in Orca
an orca can eat one big fish at a time
like one tuna and it'll miss most of the
time or one
seal and we can put a mile long drift
net out on a single boat and pull up an
entire School of them right we can
deplete the entire oceans of them that's
not an orca right like that's not an
apex predator um and that's not even
including that we can then genetically
engineer different creatures we can
extinct species we can devastate whole
ecosystems we can make built worlds that
have no natural things that are just
human built worlds we can build new
types of natural creature synthetic life
so we were much more like little Gods
than we are like apex predators now but
we're still behaving as apex predators
and little gods that behave as apex
predators causes a problem kind of core
to my assessment of the world so what
does it mean to be a predator so a
predator is uh somebody that effectively
can mine the resources from a place so
for their
survival or is it also just purely like
higher level objectives of violence and
what is can Predators be Predators
towards the same each other towards the
same species like how we think are we
using the word Predator sort of
generally which then connects to
conflict and uh military conflict
violent conflict in in the space of uh
human species obviously we can say that
plants are mining the resources of their
environment in a particular way using
photosynthesis to be able to pull
minerals out of the soil and nitrogen
and carbon out of the air and like that
um and we can say herbivores are being
able to mine and concentrate that so I
wouldn't say mining the environment is
unique to predator predator
is you know
uh generally being defined as mining
other animals right we don't consider
herbivores Predators but um animal which
requires some type of violence capacity
because animals move plants don't move
so requires some capacity to uh overtake
something that can move and try to get
away um we'll go back to the Gerard
thing then we'll come back here why are
we Neo in this why are we embryonic for
so
long because are we did we just move
from the Savannah to the Arctic and we
need to learn new stuff if we came
genetically programmed we would not be
able to do that are we throwing Spears
or are we fishing or are we running an
industrial supply chain or are we
texting what is the Adaptive Behavior
horses today in the wild and horses
10,000 years ago are doing pretty much
the same stuff and so since we make
tools and we evolve our tools and then
change our environment so quickly and
other animals are largely the result of
their environment but we're environment
modifying so rapidly we need to come
without too much programming so we can
learn the environment we're in learn the
language right which is uh going to be
very important learn the tool making
learn the um and so we have a very long
period of relative helpless of
helplessness because we aren't coded how
to behave yet because we're imprinting a
lot of software on how to behave that is
useful to that particular time so our
mimesis is not it's not unique to humans
but the total amount of it is really
unique and this is also where the
uniqueness can go up right is because we
are less just the result of the genetics
and that means the kind of learning
through history that they got coded in
genetics and more the result of of it's
almost like our Hardware selected for
software right like if evolution is kind
of doing these think of as a hardware
selection I have problems with computer
metaphors for biology but I'll use this
one here um that we have not had
Hardware changes since the beginning of
sapiens but our world is really really
different and that's all changes in the
software right changes in on the same
fundamental genetic substrate what we're
doing with these brains and minds and
bodies and social groups and like that
and
so
um now Gerard specifically was looking
at when we watch other people talking so
we learn language you and I would have a
hard time learning Mandarin today or it
would take a lot of work we'd be
learning how to conjugate verbs and
stuff but a baby learns it instantly
without anyone even really trying to
teach it just through mamisa so it's a
it's a powerful thing they're obviously
more neuroplastic than we are when
they're doing that and all their
attentions allocated to that but they're
also learning how to move their bodies
and they're learning all kinds of stuff
through mimesis one of the things that
Jord says is they're also learning what
to
want and they learn what to want they
learn Desire by watching what other
people want and so intrinsic to this
people end up wanting what other people
want and if we can't have what other
people have without taking it away from
them then that becomes a source of
conflict so uh the Mimis of Desire is
the fun generator of conflict and that
then the conflict energy within a group
of people will build over time this is a
very very crude interpretation of the
theory can we just pause on that for
people who are not familiar and for me
who hasn't I'm Loosely familiar but
Haven to internalize it but every time I
think about it it's a very compelling
view of the world whether it's true or
not it's
quite it's like when you take uh
everything Freud says as truth it's a
very interesting way to think about the
world in the same
way thinking about the mtic theory of
Desire that everything we
want is imitation of other people's
wants we don't have any original wants
we're constantly imitating others and
so and not just others but you know
others were exposed to so there's these
like little local Pockets however Define
local
of people like imitating each other and
uh one that's super empowering because
then you can pick which group you can
join like what what do you want to
imitate it's it's uh it's the old like
uh you know whoever your friends are
that's what you're life is going to be
like that's really powerful I mean it's
depressing that we're so unoriginal but
it's also liberating and that if this
holds true that we can choose our life
by choosing the people we hang out with
so okay thoughts that are very
compelling that seem like they're more
absolute than they actually are end up
also being dangerous we want communism
um I'm I'm going to discuss here where I
think we need to amend this particular
Theory but specifically you just said
something that everyone who's paid
attention knows is true experientially
which is who you're around affects who
you become and as as libertarian and
self-determining and Sovereign as we'd
like to be
um everybody I think knows that if you
got put in the Maximum Security Prison
aspects of your personality would have
to adapt or you wouldn't survive there
right you would become different if you
were if if you grew up in Dar versus
Finland you would be different with your
same genetics like just there's no real
question about that um and that even
today if you hang out in a place with
ultra marathoners as your roommates or
um all people who are obese as your
roommates the statistical likelihood of
what happens to your Fitness is pretty
clear right like the Behavioral Science
of this pretty clear so uh the whole
saying we are the average of the five
people we spend the most time around I
think the more self-reflective someone
is the more time they spend by
themselves in self-reflection the less
this is true but it's still true so one
of the best things someone can do to
become more self-determined is be
self-determined about the environments
they want to put themselves in because
to the degree that there is some
self-determination and some
determination by the environment don't
be fighting and environment that is
predisposing you in bad directions try
to put yourself in an environment that
is predisposing the things that you want
in turn try to affect the environment
and ways that predispose positive things
for those around
you or perhaps also CH there there's
probably interesting ways to play with
this you could probably put yourself
like form connections that have this
perfect tension in all directions to
where you're actually free to decide
whatever the heck you want because the
set of wants within your circle of
interactions is so conflicting that
you're free to choose whichever one so
if there's enough tension as opposed to
everybody align like a flock of birds
yeah you I mean you definitely want that
all of the dialectics would be
balanced um so if you
have someone who is extremely oriented
to self-empowerment and someone who's
extremely oriented to kind of empathy
and compassion both the dialectic of
those is better than either of them on
their own um if you both of them
inhabiting being inhabited better than
you by the same person spending time
around that person will probably do well
for you um I think the thing you just
mentioned is super important when it
comes to cognitive schools which
is I think one of the fastest things
people can do to improve their learning
and their not just cognitive learning
but their meaningful problemsolving
communication and Civic capacity
capacity to participate as a citizen
with other people and making the world
better is to be seeking dialectical
synthesis all the
time and so in the hegelian sense if you
have a
thesis you have an anti-thesis so maybe
we have libertarianism on one side and
Marxist kind of Communism on the other
side and one is arguing that the
individual is the unit of choice and so
we want to uh increase the freedom and
support of individual choice because as
they make more agentic choices it'll
produce a better for everybody the other
side saying well the individuals are
conditioned by their environment who
would choose to be born into darur
rather than Finland um so we actually
need to collectively make
environments that are good because that
the environment conditions the
individuals so you have a thesis and an
antithesis and then hegel's idea is you
have a synthesis which is a kind of
higher order truth that understands how
those relate in a way that neither of
them do and so it is actually at a
higher order of complexity so the first
part would be can I steal steal man each
of these can I argue each one well
enough that the proponents of it are
like totally you got that and not just
argue it rhetorically but can I inhabit
it where I can try to see and feel the
world the way someone seeing and feeling
the world that way would CU once I do
then I don't want to screw those people
because there's truth in it right and
I'm not going to go back to war with
them I'm going to go to finding
solutions that could actually work at a
higher order if I don't go to a higher
order then there's
war and but then the higher order thing
would be well it seems like the
individual does affect the commons and
the collective and other people it also
seems like the collective conditions
individuals at least statistically and I
can cherry pick out the one guy who got
out of the ghetto um and pulled himself
up by his bootstraps but I can also say
statistically that most people born into
the ghetto show up differently than most
people born into the Hamptons and so
unless you want to argue that and have
you take your child from The Hamptons
and put him in the ghetto then like come
on be realistic about this thing so how
do we make we don't want social systems
that make weak dependent individuals
right the the welfare argument but we
also don't want no social system that
supports individuals to do better we
want we don't want individuals where
their self-expression and agency fucks
the environment and everybody else and
employs slave labor and whatever so can
we make it to where
individuals are creating holes that are
better for conditioning other
individuals can we make it to where we
have holes that are conditioning
increased agency and sovereignty right
that would be the synthesis so the thing
that I'm coming to here is if people
have that as a frame and sometimes it's
not just thesis and antithesis it's like
eight different views right can I steal
man each view this is not just can I
take the perspective but am I seeking
them am I actively trying to inhabit
other people's
perspective then can I really try to
essentialize it and argue the the best
points of it both the sense making about
reality and the values
why these values actually
matter then just like I want to seek
those perspectives then I want to seek
is there a higher
order set of understandings that could
fulfill the values of and synthesize the
sense making of all of them
simultaneously maybe I won't get it but
I want to be seeking it and I want to be
seeking progressively better ones so
this is perspective seeking driving
perspective taking and then seeking
synthesis I think that that one
cognitive disposition might be the most
helpful
thing would you put a title of dialectic
synthesis on that process because that
seems to be such a part so like this
rigorous
empathy like like it's not just empathy
it's empathy with rigor like you really
want to understand and and embody
Different World Views and then Tred to
find a higher order
synthesis okay so I remember last night
you told me when we first met uh you
said that you looked in somebody's eyes
and you felt that you had suffered in
some ways that they had suffered and so
you could trust them shared pathos right
creates a certain sense of kind of
shared bonding and shared intimacy so
empathy is actually feeling the
suffering of somebody else and feeling
the the depth of their sensient I don't
want to fuck them anymore I I me hurt
them I don't want to behave in a I don't
want my proposition to go through when I
go and inhabit the perspective of the
other people if they feel that's really
going to mess them up right and so the
rigorous empathy it's different than
just compassion which is I generally
care like I have a generalized care but
I don't know what it's like to be them I
can never know what it's like to be them
perfectly and that there's a humility
you have to have which is my most
rigorous attempt is still not it my most
rigorous attempt mine to know what it's
like to be a woman is still not it I
have no question that if I was actually
a woman it would be different than my
best guesses I have no question if I was
actually black it be different than my
best guesses
so there's a humility in that which
keeps me listening because I don't think
that I know fully but I want to and I'm
going to keep trying better to and then
I want to across them and then I want to
say is there a way we can forward
together and not have to be in war it
has to be something that could meet the
values that everyone holds that could
reconcile the partial sense making that
everyone holds and that could offer a
way forward that is more agreable than
the partial perspectives at war with
each other but the so the more you
succeed at the sympathy with humility
the more you're carrying the burden of
their of other people's pain essentially
now this goes back to the question of do
I see us as one being or 7.8 billion
yeah I think
the if I'm overwhelmed with my own pain
I can't empathize that much because I
don't have the bandwidth I don't have
the capacity if I don't feel like I can
do something about a particular problem
in the world it's hard to feel it cuz
it's just too
devastating and so a lot of people go
numb and even go nihilistic because they
just don't feel the agency so as I
actually become more empowered as an
individual and have more sense of agency
I also become more empowered to be more
empathetic for others and be more
connected to that shared burden and want
to be able to make choices on behalf of
and in and in benefit of so this way of
living seems like a way of living that
would solve a lot of problems in society
from a cellular aom
perspective so if you have a bunch of
little like little agents behaving in
this way my intuition there'll be
interesting complexities that emerge but
my intuition is it will create a society
that's very different and
recognizably better than the one we have
today how much um like oh wait hold that
question cuz I want to come back to it
but this brings us back to jard which we
didn't answer the conflict theory yes
cuz about how to get past the conflict
theory yes you know the Robert Frost
poem about the two paths you never have
time to turn back to the other we're GNA
have to do that quite a lot we're going
to be uh living that poem over and over
again but yes how how to uh let's return
back okay so the rest of the argument
goes you learn to want what other people
want therefore fundamental conflict
based in our desire because we want the
thing that somebody else has and then
people are conf they're in conflict over
trying to get the same stuff power
status attention physical stuff a mate
whatever it is and then the we learn the
conflict by watching and so then the
conflict becomes meic so the and you
know we become on the the Palestinian
side or the Israeli side or the
communist or capitalist side or the left
or right politically or whatever it is
and until eventually the conflict energy
in the system builds up so much that
some type of violence is needed to get
the bad guy whoever it is that we're
going to blame and you know Jord talks
about why scapegoating was kind of a
mechanism to minimize the amount of
violence let's blame let's blame a a
scapegoat as being more relevant than
they really were but if we all believe
it then we can all kind of calm down
with the conflict
energy it's a really interesting concept
by the way I mean you went you
beautifully summarized it but the idea
that there's escape goat that there's a
this kind of thing naturally leads to a
conflict and then they find the other
some group that's the other that's
either real or artificial as the cause
of the conflict and well it's always
artificial because the cause of the conf
conflict and Gerard is the mimesis of
Desire itself and how do we attack that
how do we attack that it's our own
desire so this now gets to something
more like Buddha said right which was
desire is the cause of suffering um
Gerard and Buddha would kind of agree in
this way so and so but that's that
explains I mean again it's a compelling
description of human history that we do
tend to come up with the other and uh
okay kind of I just I just had such a
funny experience with someone critiquing
Jord the other day in such a um elegant
and beautiful and simple way it's a uh a
friend who's
a grew up Aboriginal Australian uh is a
scholar of Aboriginal social
Technologies and he's like n man Gerard
just made shit up about how tribes work
like we come from a tribe we've got tens
of thousands of years and we didn't have
increasing conflict and then scapegoat
and kill someone we'd have a little bit
of conflict and then we would dance and
then everybody'd be fine like we'd dance
around the campfire everyone would like
kind of physically get the energy out
we'd look in each other's eyes we' have
positive bonding and then we're fine and
no nobody no scape goats and I think
that's called The Joe Rogan theory of
desire which is uh he's like all all of
human problems have to do with the fact
that you don't do enough hard shit in
your day uh so maybe maybe could just
dance it cuz he says like doing
exercising running on the treadmill gets
gets all the demons out maybe just danc
and gets all the demons out so this is
why I say we have to be careful with
taking an idea that seems too
explanatory and then taking it as a
given and then saying well now that
we're stuck with the fact that conflict
is inexorable because human because
mimic desire and therefore how do we
deal with the inexorability of the
conflict and how to sublimate violence
well no the whole thing might be
actually gibberish meaning it's only
true in certain conditions and other
conditions it's not true so the deeper
question is under which conditions is
that true under which conditions is it
not true what do those other conditions
make possible and look like and in
general we should stay away from really
compelling models of reality because
there's something about about our brains
that these models become sticky and we
can't even think outside of them so it's
not that we stay away from them it's
that we know that the model of reality
is never
reality that's the key thing humility
again it goes back to just having the
humility that you don't have a perfect
model of reality there's an ep the the
model of reality could never be reality
the process of modeling is is inherently
information
reduction and I can never show that the
unknown unknown set has been
factored um it's back to the cutometer
you can't you can't uh put the uh Genie
back in Bottle like uh when you realize
it's unfortunately sadly impossible to
um to create a model of celom even if
you know the basic rules that predict to
even any degree of accuracy what uh um
how that system will evolve which is
fascinating mathematically sorry I I
think about it quite a lot it's very
annoying wolf has this rule
30 like you should be able to predict it
it's so simple but you can't predict
what's going to be like there's a
there's a problem he defines they try to
predict some aspect of the middle middle
column of the system just anything about
it what's going to happen in the future
and you can't you
can't it sucks because then we can't
make sense of this world in a really in
of reality in a definitive way it's
always like in the
striving like it we're always striving
yeah I don't think this
sucks that so that's a feature not a bug
well that's assuming a designer um I
would say I don't think it sucks I think
it's not only beautiful but maybe
necessary for
beauty mess so you're uh so you're
you're disagree with Jordan Pierson you
should clean up your room you like the
room's messy it's h it's essential for
the for beauty it's not it's not that
okay I take I have no idea if it was
intended this way and so I'm just
interpreting it a way I like the
Commandment about having no false
Idols to me the way I interpret that
that is Meaningful is that re reality is
sacred to me I have a reverence for
reality but I know my best understanding
of it is never
complete I know my best model of it is a
model where I tried to make some kind of
predictive capacity by reducing the
complexity of it to a set of stuff that
I could observe and then a subset of
that stuff that I thought was the causal
Dynamics and then some set of you know
mechanisms that are involved and what we
find is that
it can be super useful like Newtonian
gravity can help us do ballistic curves
and all kinds of super useful stuff and
then we get to the place where it
doesn't explain what's happening at a
cosmological scale or at a Quantum scale
and at each time what we're finding is
uh we excluded stuff and it also doesn't
explain the reconciliation of gravity
with quantum mechanics and the other
kind of fundamental laws and the so
models can be useful but they're never
true with a capital t meaning they're
never an actual real full they're never
a complete description of what's
happening in real systems it can be a
complete description of what's happening
in an artificial system that was the
result of applying a model so the model
of a circuit board and the circuit board
are the same thing but I would argue
that the model of a cell and the cell
are not the same
thing and I would say this is key to
what we call complexity versus the
complicated which is a a distinction
Dave Snowden made well um in defining
the difference between simp complicated
complex and chaotic systems um but one
of the definers in complex systems is
that no matter how you model the complex
system it will still have some emergent
Behavior not predicted by the model can
you elaborate on the complex versus the
complicated complicated means we can
fully explicate the phas space of all
the things that it can do we can program
it uh all
human not all for the most part
human-built things are complicated they
don't
self-organize they don't self-repair
they're not self evolving and we can
make a blueprint for them where sorry
for human systems for human Technologies
human techies sorry okay so so non that
are basically the application of models
right right and Engineering is kind of
applied science science as the modeling
process and but with but humans are
complex complex stuff with biological
type stuff um and sociological type
stuff it more has generator functions
and even those can't be fully explicated
then it has or our explication can't
prove that it has closure of what would
be in the unknown unknown set where we
keep finding like oh it's just the
genome oh well now it's the genome and
the epigenome and then a recursive
change on the epigenome because of the
proteome and then there's mitochondrial
DNA and then virus is affected and fuck
right so it's like we get OV excited
when we think we found the
thing so on Facebook you know how you
can list your relationship as
complicated it should actually say it's
it's complex that's the more accurate
description you uh self-terminating is a
really interesting idea that you talk
about quite a
bit first of all what is a
self-terminating system and I think you
have a sense correct me if I'm wrong
that human civilization as it currently
is is a self-terminating
system why do you have that intuition
combined with the definition of what
self self-terminating
means okay so if we look
at human societies historically human
civilizations uh it's not that hard to
realize that most of the major
civilizations and empires of the past
don't exist anymore so they had a life
cycle they died for some reason so we
don't still have an the early Egyptian
Empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any
of those right and
so they they terminated sometimes it
seems like they were terminated from the
outside and War sometimes it seems like
they self-terminated when we look at
Easter Island it was a self termination
um so uh let's go ahead and take an
island situation if I have an island and
we are consuming the resources on that
island faster than the resources can
replicate themselves and there's a
finite space there that system is going
to self-terminate it's not going to be
able to keep doing that thing because
you'll get to a place of there's no
resources left and then you get uh so
now if I'm utilizing the resources
faster than they can replicate or faster
than they can replenish and I'm actually
growing our population in the process so
I'm even increasing the rate of the
utilization of
resources I might get an exponential
curve and then hit a wall and then just
collapse the exponential curve rather
than do an S curve or some other kind of
thing um so self-terminating system is
any system that depends upon a substrate
system that is debasing its own
substrate that is debasing what it
depends upon so you're right that uh
if you look at Empires they rise and
fall throughout human history but but
not this time bro
we're this one's going to last forever
that's I like that idea I think that if
we don't understand why all the previous
ones failed we can't ensure that and so
I think it's very important to
understand it well so that we can have
that be a designed outcome with somewhat
decent probability so where it's sort of
in terms of consuming the resources on
the island and we're a clever bunch and
we keep coming
up especially when the on the horizon
there is a a termination point we keep
coming up with clever ways of avoiding
disaster of avoiding collapse of
constructing this is where technological
innovation this is where growth comes in
coming up with different ways to improve
productivity and the way Society
functions such that we consume less
resources or get a lot more from the
resources we have
so there's some sense in which there's a
human Ingenuity is a source for optimism
about the future of this particular
system that uh that may not be
self-terminating if if there's more
Innovation then there is
consumption so um over consumption of
resource is just one way of think can
self-terminate we're just kind of
starting here but
um there are reasons for
optimism and pessimism then they're both
worth understanding and there's failure
modes on understanding either without
the other um as as we mentioned
previously there there's what I would
call naive techno optimism naive techn
Capital optimism that says uh stuff just
has been getting better and better and
we wouldn't want to live in the Dark
Ages and Tech has done all this awesome
stuff and um we know the proponents of
those models uh and the stuff is going
to kind of keep getting better of course
their problems but human Ingenuity Rises
to it supply and demand will solve the
problems whatever would you put r
corwell on that or uh in that bucket is
there
some specific people you have in mind or
naive optimism is truly naive to where
you're essentially just have an optimism
that's blind to any kind of realities of
the way technology progresses I don't
think that
anyone is who thinks about it and writes
about it is perfectly naive gotcha PL
it's a platonic ideal there there might
be a bias in the nature of the
assessment I would also say there's kind
of naive techn
pessimism and there
are
um critics of technology I mean you read
the uni bombers Manifesto on why
technology can't not result in our
self-termination so we have to take it
out before it gets any further um but
also if you read a lot out of the X risk
Community you know Bostrom and Friends
uh it's like our total number of
existential risks and the total
probability of them is going
up and so I think that there are we have
to hold together where our positive
possibilities and our risk possibilities
are both increasing and then say for the
positive possibilities to be realized
longterm all of the catastrophic risks
have to not happen any of the
catastrophic risks happening is enough
to keep that positive outcome from
occurring so how do we ensure that none
of them happen if we want to say let's
have a civilization that doesn't
collapse so again collapse Theory it's
worth looking at books like um the
collapse of complex societies by Joseph
tainter it does an analysis
of that many of the societies fell for
internal institutional Decay
civilizational Decay reasons um bodard
in simulation and simulacra looks at a
very different way of looking at how
institutional decay in the collective
intelligence of a system happens and it
becomes kind of more internally
parasitic on itself um obviously Jared
diamond made a more popular book called
collapse um and as we were mentioning
the anti-ia mechanism has been getting
attention in the news lately but it's
like a 2,000-year old clock right like
like metal gears
and does that mean we lost like, 1500
years of technological progress um and
from a society that was relatively
technologically advanced
um so what I'm interested in here is
being able to say okay
well why did previous societies
fail can we understand that abstractly
enough that we
can make a civilizational model that
isn't just trying to solve one type of
failure but solve the underlying things
that generate the failures as a whole
are there some underlying generator
functions or patterns that would make a
system self-terminating and can we solve
those and have that be the kernel of a
new civilizational model that is not
self-terminating
and can we then be able to actually look
at the categories of XIs we're aware of
and see that we actually have resilience
in the presence of those not just
resilience but anti
fragility and I would say for the
optimism to be grounded it has to
actually be able to understand the risk
space well and have adequate solutions
for it so can we try
to dig into some basic intuitions about
the underlying sources of uh
catastrophic failures of the system and
over consumption that's built in into
self-terminating systems so both the
overc consumption which is like the slow
death and then then there's the fast
death of nuclear war and all those kinds
of things AGI biotech bioengineering
nanotechnology Nano my favorite
Nanobots
Nanobots are my
favorite because it sounds so cool to me
that I could just know that I would be
one of the scientists that would be full
steam ahead in building them
without sufficiently thinking about the
negative consequen I would definitely be
I would be podcasting all about the
negative consequences but but when I go
back home I'd be I just in my heart know
the amount of excitement is a dumb
descendant of ape no offense to ape
uh so I want to backtrack on my previous
uh
comments about uh negative comments
about
apes uh that I have that sense of
excitement that uh would result in
problems so sorry a lot of things said
but what's can we start to pull it a
thread because you've also provided kind
of a
beautiful General approach to this which
is this dialectic synthesis or just
rigorous empathy whatever whatever word
we want to put to it that seems to be
from the individual perspective as one
way to sort of live in the world as we
try to figure out how to construct non-
self-terminating systems so what what
are some underlying sources
yeah first I have to say um
I I actually really respect Drexler for
emphasizing greu in engines of creation
back in the day um to make sure the
world was paying adequate attention to
the risks of the the nanotech um as
someone who was right at The Cutting
Edge of what could be
um there's definitely game theoretic
advantage to those who focus on the
opportunities and don't focus on the
risks or pretend there aren't risks
um because they get to Market first um
and then they externalize all of the
costs through limited liability or
whatever it is to the common or wherever
happened to have it other people are
going to have to solve those but now
they have the power and capital
Associated the person who looked at the
risks and tried to do better design and
go slower um is probably not going to
move into positions of as much power
influence as quickly so this one of the
issues we have to deal with is some of
the the bad game theoretic dispositions
in the system relative to its own um
stability and the key aspect to that
sorry to interrupt is the externalities
generated yes what flavors of
catastrophic risk are we talking about
here what what's your favorite flavor in
terms of ice cream so mine is coconut
nobody seems to like coconut ice cream
uh so ice cream
aside what's uh what are you most
worried about in terms of catastrophic
risk that will help us kind of
um make concrete the the the discussion
we're having about how to fix this whole
thing yeah I think it's worth taking a
historical perspective briefly to just
kind of Orient everyone to it we don't
have to um go all the way back to the
aliens who've seen all of civilization
but to just recognize that um for all of
human history as far as we're
aware there were existential risks to
civilizations and they happened right
like there were civilizations that were
killed in war um that tribes that were
killed in tribal Warfare whatever so uh
people faced existential RIS to the
group that they identified with it's
just those were local phenomena right
they it wasn't a fully global phenomen
so an Empire could fall and surrounding
Empires didn't fall maybe they came in
filled the
space
um the first time that we were able to
think about catastrophic risk not from
like a solar flare or something that we
couldn't control but from something that
humans would actually create at a global
level was World War II and the bomb
because it was the first time that we
had Tech big enough that could actually
mess up everything at a global level it
could mess up habitability we just
weren't powerful enough to do that
before it's not that we didn't behave in
ways that would have done it we just
only behaved in those ways at the scale
we could affect and so it's important to
get that there's the entire world before
World War II where we don't have the
ability to make a non-habitable
biosphere non-habitable for us and then
there's World War II and the beginning
of a completely new phase where Global
human induced catastrophic risk is now a
real thing and that was such a big deal
that it changed the entire world in a
really fundamental way which is you know
when you study history it's amazing how
big a percentage of history is studying
War right in the the history of Wars you
said European history whatever it's
generals and wars and Empire expansions
and and so the the major Empires near
each other never had really long periods
of time where they weren't engaged in
war or preparation for war or something
like that that was humans don't have a
good precedent in the post tribal phase
the civilization phase of being able to
solve conflicts without War for very
long World War II was the first time
where we could have a war that no one
could
win and so the superpowers couldn't
fight again they couldn't do a real
kinetic War they could do diplomatic
Wars and Cold War type stuff and they
could fight proxy wars through other
countries that didn't have the big
weapons and so mutually assured
destruction and like coming out of World
War II we actually realized that nation
states couldn't prevent World War and so
we needed a new type of of supervening
government in addition to nation states
which was the whole Breen Woods world
the United Nations the World Bank the
IMF the
globalization trade type agreements
mutually assured destruction that was
how do we have some coordination Beyond
just nation states between them since we
have to stop war between at least the
superpowers and it was pretty successful
given that we've had like 75 years of no
superpower on superpower
War um we've had lots of y wars during
that time we've had you know Cold
War and I would say we're in a new phase
now where the bretonwood solution is
basically over or almost over can you
describe the bretonwood solution yeah so
the bretonwood
the series of agreements
for
how uh the nations would be able to
engage with each other in a solution
other than War um was these igos these
intergovernmental organizations
and was the idea of globalization since
we could have Global effects we needed
to be able to think about things
globally where we had trade
relationships with each other where it
would not be profitable to war with each
other it' be more profitable to actually
be able to trade with each other so our
own self-interest was you know going to
drive our non-war
interest um and so this started to look
like and obviously this this couldn't
have happened that much earlier either
because industrialization hadn't gotten
far enough to be able to do massive
global indust Industrial Supply chains
and ship stuff around you know quickly
but like we were mentioning earlier
almost all the electronics that we use
today just basic cheap stuff for us is
made on six continents made in many
countries there's no single country in
the world that could actually make many
of the things that we have and from the
raw material extraction to the Plastics
and polymers and the you know Etc and so
the I the idea that we made a world that
could do that kind of trade and create
massive GDP growth we could all work
together to be able to mind natural
resources and grow stuff with the rapid
GDP growth there was the idea that
everybody could keep having more without
having to take each other's
stuff and so that that was part of kind
of the the BR and woods post World War
II model the other was that we would be
so economically interdependent that
blowing each other up would never make
sense that worked for a
while
now it also brought us up into planetary
boundaries faster the unrenewable use of
resources and turning those resources
into pollution on the other side of the
supply chain so obviously that faster
GDP growth meant uh the overfishing of
the oceans and the cutting down of the
trees and the climate change and the uh
mining toxic mining tailings going into
the water and the mountaintop removal
Mining and all those types of things
that's the over consumption side of the
of the risk that we're talking about and
so the answer of let's do positive GDP
is the
answer rapid and exponentially obviously
accelerated the planetary boundary side
and that started to be that that was
thought about for a long time but it
started to be modeled with the club of
Rome and limits of growth
um
and it but it's just very obvious to say
if you have a linear materials economy
where you take stuff out of the earth
faster whether it's fish or trees or or
ore and you take or oil you take it out
of the earth faster than it can
replenish itself and you turn it into
into trash after using it for a short
period of time you put the trash in the
environment faster than it can process
itself and there's toxicity associated
with both sides of this you can't run an
exponentially growing linear materials
economy on a finite Planet forever
that's not a hard thing to figure out
and it has to be exponential if there's
an exponentiation in the monetary Supply
because of interest and then fractional
Reserve Banking and to then be able to
keep up with the growing monetary Supply
you have to have growth of goods and
services and so that's that kind of
thing that has happened
um but you also see that when you get
these Supply chains that are so
interconnected across the world you get
increased fragility because a a collapse
or a problem in one area then affects
the whole world in a much bigger area as
opposed to the issues being local right
so we got to see with coid and an issue
that started in one part of China
affecting the whole world so much more
rapidly than would have happened before
Breen Woods right before international
travel supply chains you know that whole
kind of thing and with a bunch of second
and third order effects that people
wouldn't have predicted okay we have to
stop certain kinds of travel because of
viral contaminants but the countries
doing agriculture depend upon fertilizer
they don't produce that is shipped into
them and depend upon pesticides they
don't produce so we got both crop
failures and crops being eaten by
locusts in scale in Northern Africa and
Iran and things like that because they
couldn't get the supplies of stuff in so
then you get massive starvation or
future kind of hunger issues because of
supply chain shut Downs so you get this
increased fragility in Cascade Dynamics
where a small problem can end up leading
to Cascade
effects
and also we went from two superpowers
with one catastrophe
weapon to
now that same catastrophe weapon is
there's more countries that have it
eight or nine countries that have it and
there's a lot more types of catastrophe
weapons we now have cat catastrophe
weapons with weaponized drones that can
hit infrastructure targets with bio with
in fact every new type of tech has
created an arms race so we have not with
the UN or the other kind of
intergovernmental organizations we
haven't been able to really do nuclear
de proliferation we've actually had more
countries get nukes and keep getting
faster nukes the race to hypersonics and
things like that um and every new type
of technology that has emerged has
created an arms race and so you can't do
mutually assured destruction with
multiple agents the way you can with two
agents two agents it's a much easier to
create a stable Nash equilibrium that's
forced but the ability to Monitor and
say if these guys shoot who do I shoot
do I shoot them do I shoot everybody do
I and so you get a three body problem
you get a very complex type of thing
when you have multiple agents and
multiple different types of catastrophe
weapons including ones that can be much
more easily produce than nukes nukes are
really hard to produce there's only
uranium in a few areas uranium
enrichment is hard icbms are hard
but weaponized drones hitting smart
targets is not so hard there's a lot of
other things where basically the scale
at being able to manufacture them is
going way way down to where even
non-state actors can have them and so
when we talk about exponential Tech and
the decentralization of exponential Tech
what that means is decentralized
catastrophe weapon
capacity and especially in a world of
increasing numbers of people feeling
disenfranchised frantic whatever for
different reasons
so uh I would say we're the brettonwoods
world doesn't prepare us to be able to
deal with lots of different agents
having lots of different types of
catastrophe weapons you can't put
mutually assured destruction on where
you can't keep doing growth of the
materials economy um in the same way
because of hitting planetary boundaries
and where the fragility Dynamics are
actually now their own source of
catastrophic risk so now we're so like
there was all the world until World War
II and World War II is just from a from
from a civilization time scale point of
view was just a second ago it seems like
a long time but it is really not we get
a short period of relative peace at the
level of superpowers while building up
the military capacity for much much much
worse War the entire time and then now
we're at this new phase where the things
that allowed us to make it through the
nuclear power are not the same systems
that will let us make it through the
next stage so what is this next post
Breton Woods how how do we become safe
vessels safe stewards of many different
types of exponential technology is uh a
key question when we're thinking about X
risk okay so and I I'd like
to try to answer the how a few time a
few ways but first on the mutually
assured
destruction do you give credit to the
idea of two
superpowers not blowing each other up
with nuclear weapons to the simple game
theoretic model of mutually ass sh
destruction or something you've said
previously this idea of inverse
correlation which I tend to believe
between now you were talking about tech
but I think it's maybe broadly
true the inverse correlation between
competence and propensity for
Destruction
so the better the the the bigger your
weapons not because you're afraid of uh
mutually assur self-destruction but
because we're human beings and there's a
deep moral fortitude there that's
somehow aligned with competence and
being good at your job that like it's
very hard to be uh a psychopath and be
good at killing at
scale is do you share any of that
intuition kind
of I think most people would say that
Alexander the Great and genghiskhan and
Napoleon were effective people that were
good at their
job uh that were actually maybe
asymmetrically good at being able to
organize people and uh do certain kinds
of things that were pretty oriented
towards certain types of
Destruction um or pretty willing to
maybe they would say they were oriented
towards Empire expansion but pretty
willing to uh commit certain acts of
Destruction in the name of it what what
are you worried about the genas Khan or
you could argue he's not a
psychopath uh that are are you worried
about gasan are you worried about Hitler
or are you worried about a
terrorist who is has a very different
ethic which is not even for uh for it's
not trying to preserve and build and
expand my community it's more about just
the destruction in itself is the goal I
I think the thing that
you're looking at that I do agree with
is that there's a psychological
disposition towards
construction right and a psychological
disposition more towards destruction
obviously everybody has both and can
toggle between both and often times one
is willing to destroy certain things we
have this idea of creative destruction
right willing to destroy certain things
to create other things and
utilitarianism and trolley problems are
all about exploring that space and the
idea of war is all about that I am
trying to create something for our
people and it requires destroying some
other people
um sociopathy is a funny topic because
it's possible to have very high falty to
your ingroup and work on perfecting the
methods of torture to the outgroup um at
the same time because you can dehumanize
and then remove empathy um
and I would also say that there are
types so the reason the thing that gives
hope about the orientation towards
construction and destruction being a
little different in psychologies is what
it takes to build really catastrophic
Tech even today where it doesn't take
what it took to make a nuke a small
group of people could do it takes still
some real technical knowledge that
required having studied for a while and
some then building capacity and there's
a question of is that psychologically
inversely correlated with the desire to
damage civilization
meaningfully uh a little bit a little
bit I think um no I think a lot I think
it's actually I mean this is the
conversation I had like with I think
offline with Dan
Carlin which is like it's pretty easy to
come up with ways that any competent I I
can come up with a lot of ways to hurt a
lot of people and it's pretty easy like
I alone can do it
and like there's a lot of people as
smart or smarter than me at least in the
creation of
explosives why are we're not seeing
more insane mass murder I I think
there's
something fascinating and beautiful
about this yes and it does have to do
with some deeply pro-social types of
characteristics in humans and
um but when you're dealing with very
large numbers you don't need a whole lot
of a phenomena and so then you start to
say well what's the probability that X
won't happen this year then won't happen
in the next two years three years four
years and then how many people are doing
destructive things with lower Tech and
then how many of them can get access to
higher Tech that they didn't have to
figure out how to
build so uh when I can get commercial
Tech and maybe I don't understand Tech
very well but I understand it well
enough to utilize it not to create it
and I can repurpose said when we saw
that commercial drone with a homemade
thermite bomb hit the Ukraine Ukrainian
Munitions Factory and do the equivalent
of an incendiary bomb level of damage
that's just home Tech that's just simple
kind of thing and so the question is not
what is does it stay being a small
percentage of the population the
question is does can you bind that
phenomena nearly
completely
and especially now when you as you start
to get into bigger things crisper genan
Drive Technologies and various things
like that um can you bind it completely
long
term over what period of time not
perfectly though that's the thing I'm
trying I'm trying to say that there is
some let's call it uh let's uh a random
word love that's inherent in that's core
to Human Nature that's preventing
destruction at scale and you're saying
yeah but there's a lot of humans there's
going to be8 plus billion and then
there's a lot of seconds in the day to
come up with stuff there's a lot of pain
in the world that can lead to uh
distorted view of the world such that
you want to channel that pain into the
destruction all those kinds of things
and it's only a matter of time that
anyone individual can do large damage
especially as we create uh more and more
democratized decentralized ways to
deliver that damage even if you don't
know how to build the initial weapon you
can but the thing is it seems like we're
it's a race
between the
cheapening of destructive
weapons and the capacity of humans to
express their love towards each other
and it's a race that so far I know on
Twitter you it's not popular to say but
it love is winning okay so what is the
argument that love is going to lose here
against uh nuclear weapons and biotech
and and Ai and uh and drones okay I'm
going to comment the end of this to a
how love wins so I just want you to know
that that's where I'm oriented that's
the end okay but I'm I'm going to argue
against why that is a
given because it because it's not a
given I don't believe and I think this
is like a good romantic comedy so you're
going to create drama right now but it
will end in a happy ending well it's
because it's only a happy ending if we
actually understand the issues well
enough and take responsibility to shift
it do I believe like there's a reason
why there's so much more dystopic SciFi
than protopic sci-fi and the and the Su
protopic sci-fi usually requires magic
is
because or at least magical Tech right
TI lithium crystals and warp drives and
stuff because
it's very hard to imagine people like
the people we have been in the history
books
with exponential type technology and
power that don't eventually blow
themselves up that that make good enough
choices as stewards of their environment
and their comments and and each other
and Etc so like it's easier to think of
scenarios where we blow ourselves up
than it is to think of scenarios where
we avoid every single scenario where we
blow ourselves up and when I say blow
ourselves up I also I mean the
environmental versions the terrorist
versions the war versions The cumulative
externalities
versions
um can I and I'm sorry if I'm
interrupting your flow of thought but
why is it easier is it could could it be
a weird psychological thing where we
either are we just more capable to
visualize explosions and destruction and
then the sicker thought which is like we
kind of enjoy for some weird reason
thinking about that kind of stuff even
though we wouldn't actually act on it
it's it's almost like some weird uh like
I love playing shooter games you know uh
first person shooters and like
especially if it's like murdering zombie
and doom you're shooting demons I played
one of my favorite games Diablo is like
slashing through different monsters and
the screaming and pain and the Hellfire
and then I go out into the real world uh
to eat my coconut ice cream and I'm All
About Love so like
I can we trust our ability to visualize
how all it all goes to shit as actual
rational way of thinking I think it's a
fair question to say to what degree is
there just kind of perverse fantasy and
um morbid exploration and whatever else
that happens in our imagination
uh but I don't think that's the whole of
it I think there is
also a reality to the combinatorial
possibility space and the difference in
the probabilities that there's a lot of
ways I could try to put the 70 trillion
cells of your body together that don't
make you yeah there's not that many ways
I can put them together that make you
there's a lot of ways I can try to
connect the organs together that make
some weird kind of group of organs on a
on a desk but that doesn't actually make
a functioning
human and and you can kill an adult
human in a second but you can't get one
in a second takes 20 years to grow one
and a lot of things to happen right I
could destroy this building in a couple
minutes with demolition but it took a
year or a couple years to build it
there is uh there's Don Cole this is
just an example it's not he doesn't mean
it there's a there's a gradient where
entropy is
easier and there's a lot more ways to
put a set of things together that don't
work than the few that really do produce
higher order
synergies and
so when we look at a history of war and
then we look at exponentially more
powerful Warfare arms race that drives
that in all these directions and when we
look at a history of environmental
destruction and exponentially more
powerful Tech that makes exponential
externalities multiplied by the total
number of agents that are doing it in
the cumulative effects there's a lot of
ways the whole thing can break like a
lot of different ways and for it to get
ahead it has to have none of those
happen and so it there's just a
probability space where it's easier to
imagine that thing so what so to say how
do we have a protopic future we have to
say well one criteria must be that it
avoids all of the catastrophic risks so
can we understand can we inventory all
the catastrophic risk can we inventory
the patterns of human behavior that give
rise to them and could we try to solve
for that and could we have that be the
the essence of the social technology
that we're thinking about to be able to
guide bind and direct the new physical
technology because so far our physical
technology like we were talking about
the gangas cons and like that that
obviously use certain kinds of physical
technology and armaments um and also
social technology and unconventional
warfare for a particular set of purposes
but we have things that don't look like
Warfare like Rockefeller and standard
oil and it looked like a constructive
mindset to be able to uh bring this new
energy resource to the world and it did
and the second order effects of that
are climate change and all of the oil
spills that have happened and will
happen and all of the wars in the Middle
East over the oil that have been there
and the massive political cluster fuck
um and human life issues that are
associated with it and on and on right
um and so it's
also not just the orientation to
construct a thing can have a narrow
focus on what I'm trying to construct
but be affecting a lot of other things
through second and third order effects
I'm not taking responsibility before and
you you you often on another tangent
mention second third and fourth order
effects and
ordering which is really fascinating
like starting with the third order
plus it gets really interesting because
we we don't we don't even acknowledge
like the second order effects right but
like thinking cuz those it could M it
could get bigger and bigger and bigger
in ways we're not anticipating so how do
we make those so it sounds like part of
the part of the thing that you're
thinking through in terms of a solution
how to create an anti fragile a
resilient
Society is to make
explicit acknowledge understand the
externalities the second order third
order fourth order andth order effects
how do we start to think about those
effects yeah the war application is
harmor trying to cause or that we're
aware we're causing right um the
externality is harm that at least
supposedly we're not aware we're causing
or or at minimum it's not our intention
right maybe we're either totally unaware
of it or we're aware of it but it is a
side effect of what Our intention is
it's not the intention itself there are
catastrophic risks from both types the
direct application of increased
technological power to a rivalrous
intent which is going to cause harm for
some outgroup for some ingroup to win
but the outg group is also working on
growing the tech and if they don't lose
completely they reverse engineer the
tech up regulate to come back with more
capacity so there's the exponential Tech
arms race side of in-group outgroup
rivalry using exponential Tech that is
one set of risks and the other set of
risks
is the application of exponentially more
powerful Tech not intentionally to try
and beat an out group but to try to
achieve some goal that we have but to
produce a second and third order effects
that do have harm to the commons to
other people to environment to other
groups uh that might actually be bigger
problems than the problem we were
originally trying to solve with the
thing we were building when Facebook was
building a dating app and then building
a social app where people could tag
pictures they weren't trying to build a
democracy destroying app uh that would
maximize time on site as part of its ad
model through AI optimization of a
Newsfeed to the thing that made people
spend most time on site which is usually
them being lyic hijacked more than
something else which ends up appealing
to people's cognitive biases and group
identities and creates no sense of
shared reality they weren't trying to do
that but it was a second order effect
and it's a pretty fucking powerful
second order effect um and a pretty f
fast one because the rate of tech is
obviously able to get distributed to
much larger scale much faster and with a
bigger jump in terms of total vertical
capacity then that's what it means to
get to the verticalized part of an
exponential
curve so um just like we can see that
oil had these second order environmental
effects and also social and political
effects war and so much of the whole
like the total amount of oil used is has
a proportionality to Global GDP and this
is why we have this you know the Petro
dollar and um and so the the oil thing
also had the externalities of a major
aspect of what happened with
military-industrial complex and things
like that so but we can see the same
thing with with more current
Technologies with Facebook and Google um
and and other things
so I don't think we can run and the more
powerful the tech is we build it for
reason X whatever reason X is maybe X is
three things maybe it's one thing right
we we're doing the oil thing because we
want to make cars because it's a better
method of individual Transportation
we're building the Facebook thing
because we're going to connect people
socially in the personal sphere but it
it interf effects with it interacts with
complex systems with ecologies economies
psychologies cultures and so it has
effects on other than the thing we're
intending some of those effects can end
up being negative effects but because
this technology if if we make it to
solve a problem it has to overcome the
problem the problem's been around for a
while it's going to overcome in a short
period of time so it usually has greater
scale greater rate of magnitude in some
way that also means that the
externalities that it creates might be
bigger
problems and you can say well but then
that's the new problem and Humanity will
innovate its way out of that well I
don't think that's paying attention to
the fact that we can't keep up with
exponential curves like that nor do
finite spaces allow exponential
externalities
forever and this is why a lot of the
smartest people thinking about this are
thinking well no I think we're totally
screwed in unless we can make a
benevolent AI Singleton that rules all
of us um you know guys like Bostrom and
and others uh thinking in those
directions because they're like how do
humans try to do multipolarity and make
it work and I I have a different answer
of what I think it looks like that does
have more to do with the love but some
applied social Tech align aligned with
love this is good CU I have a bunch of
really dumb ideas I'd prefer to uh hear
I'd like to I'd like to hear some of
them first I think the idea I would have
is uh to be a bit more rigorous
in trying to measure the amount
of love you add or subtract from the
world in second third fourth fifth order
effects it's actually I think especially
in the world of tech
quite
doable you know you just might not
like you know the the shareholders may
not like that kind of metric but it's
pretty easy to
measure like that's not even
uh um perhaps half joking about love uh
but we could talk about just happiness
and well-being long-term
well-being that's pretty easy for
Facebook and for YouTube for all these
companies to measure
that they do a lot of kinds of surveys
they could do I mean there's very simple
Solutions here that you could just
survey how I mean servers are in some
sense use useless because they're
um a subset of the population you're
just trying to get a sense it's very
loose kind of understanding but
integrated deeply as part of the
technology most of our Tech is
recommender systems most of the sorry
not Tech uh online interactions driven
by recommender systems that learn very
little data about you and use that data
uh based on mostly based on traces your
previous Behavior to suggest future
things this is how Twitter this how
Facebook works this is how uh AdSense or
Google AdSense works is how Netflix
YouTube work and so on and and for them
to just track as opposed to engagement
how much you spend in a particular video
a particular site is also track give you
the technology to do self-report of what
makes you feel good what makes you grow
as a person
of what makes you uh you know the best
version of
yourself the the the the Rogan uh idea
of the hero of your own movie and just
add that little bit of
information if you you have people you
have this like happiness surveys of how
you feel about the last five days how
would you report your experience you can
lay out the set of videos It's kind of
fascinating to I don't know if you ever
look at YouTube the history of videos
you've looked at that it's fascinating
it's very embarrassing for me like it'll
be like a lecture and then like a set of
videos that I don't want anyone to know
about which is which is which would be
like I don't know maybe like five videos
in a row where it looks like I watched
the whole thing which I probably did
about like how to cook a steak even
though or just like the best chefs in
the world cooking steaks and I'm just
like sitting there watching it for no
purpose whatsoever wasting away my life
or like funny videos are like legit that
that's that's that's always a good one
and I could look back and rate which
videos made me a better person and not
and I mean on a more serious note
there's a bunch of conversations
podcasts or lectures I've watched which
made me a better person and some of them
made me a worse person uh quite honestly
not for stupid reasons like I feel
Dumber but because I do have a sense
that that started me on a path of
um of not being kind to other people for
example I'll give you uh for my own and
I'm sorry for ranting but maybe there's
some usefulness to this kind of
exploration of
self when I focus on creating on
programming on
science I become a much deeper thinker
and a Kinder person to others when I
listen to too many a little bit is good
but too many podcasts or videos about
how how our world is melting down or
criticizing ridiculous people the worst
of the quote unquote woke for example
all there's all these groups that are
misbehaving in fascinating ways because
they've been corrupted by power the more
I W the more I watch
criticism of them the worse I become and
I'm aware of this but I'm also aware
that for some reason it's Pleasant to
watch those sometimes and so for for me
to be able to self-report that to the
YouTube algorithm to the systems around
me and they ultimately try to optimize
to make me the best person of the best
version of myself which I personally
believe would make YouTube a lot more
money because I'd be much more willing
to spend time on YouTube and give
YouTube a lot more a lot more of my
money that's a that's great for business
and great for Humanity because it'll
make me a Kinder person it'll incre
the the love quotient the love metric
and uh it'll make them a lot of money I
feel like everything is aligned and so
you you should do that not just for
YouTube algorithm but also for a
military strategy of whether to go to
war or not because one externality you
can think of about going to war which I
think we talked about offline is we
often go to war with kind of governments
with a uh with not with the people you
have to think about the kids of
countries that see a
soldier and because of what they
experience their interaction with a
soldier hate is born when you're like 8
years old six years old you lose your
dad you lose your mom you lose a friend
somebody close to you that one really
powerful externality that could be
reduced to love positive and negative is
uh the hate that's born when you make
decision
and that's going to take
fruition that that little seed is going
to become a tree that then leads to the
kind of Destruction that that we talk
about uh so but in my sense it's
possible to reduce everything to a
measure of how much love does this add
to the
world all that to say uh do you have
ideas of how we practically uh build
systems that that that create uh
resilience
Society there were a lot of good things
that you shared where there's like 15
different ways that we could enter this
that are all interesting so I'm trying
to see which one will probably be most
useful pick the uh the one or two things
that are least ridiculous when you were
mentioning if we could see some of the
second order effects or externalities
that we aren't used to seeing
specifically the one of a kid being
radicalized somewhere else which
engenders enmity in them towards us
which decreas is our own future Security
even if you don't care about the kid if
you care about the kid it's a whole
other thing um yeah I mean I think when
we saw this when Jane Fonda and others
went to Vietnam and took photos and
videos of what was happening and you got
to see the pictures of the kids with
Napal on them uh that like the anti-war
effort was bolstered by that in a way it
couldn't have been without that there's
there's
a until we can see the images you can't
have a Mir Neuron a effect in the same
way and when you can that starts to have
a a powerful effect I think there's a
deep principle that you're sharing there
which
is that if we we can have a rivalrous
intent where our in group whatever it is
maybe it's our political party wanting
to win within the us maybe it's our
nation state wanting to win in a a war
or an economic War over resource or
whatever it is that if we don't
obliterate the other people completely
they don't go away they're they're not
engendered to like us
more they they didn't become less smart
so they have more enmity towards us and
whatever Technologies we employed to be
successful they will now reverse
engineer make iterations on and come
back and so you drive an arms race which
is why you can see that the wars were
over history employing more
lethal weaponry and not just the kinetic
War um um the information War and the
narrative War and the economic War right
like it just increased capacity in all
of those
fronts um and so what seems like a win
to us on the short term might actually
really produce losses in the long term
and what's even in our own best interest
in the long term is probably more
aligned with everyone else because we
intera affect each other and I think the
thing about globalism globalization and
exponential Tech and the rate at which
we affect each other and the rate at
which we affect the biosphere that we're
all affected by is that this this kind
of proverbial spiritual idea that we're
all interconnected and need to think
about that in some way that was easy for
tribes to get because everyone in the
Trib so clearly saw their
interconnection and dependence on each
other but in terms of a global level the
the speed at which we are actually
interconnected the speed at which the
harm happening to Something in Wuhan
affects the rest of the world or uh a
new technology developed somewhere
affects the entire world or an
environmental issue or whatever is
making it to where we either actually
all get not as a spiritual idea just
even as physics right we all get the
interconnectedness of everything and
that we either all consider that and see
how to make it through more effectively
together or failures anywhere end up
becoming decreased quality of life and
failures and increased risk everywhere
don't you think people are beginning to
experience that at the individual level
so governments are resisting it they're
they're trying to make us not empathize
with each other feel connected but don't
you think people are beginning to feel
more and more connected like isn't that
exactly what the technolog is enabling
like social networks we tend to
criticize them but isn't there a sense
which we're experi you
know when you watch those videos that
are criticizing whether it's the woke
antifa side or the Q andon Trump
supporter side does it seem like they
have increased empathy for people that
are outside of their ideologic Camp no
not at all so I may be
um I may be conflating my own experience
of the world and uh that of
uh that of the populace I I tend to see
those
videos as feeding something that's a
relic of the past they figured out that
drama fuels
clicks but whether right or wrong I
don't know but I I tend to sense that
that is not that hunger for drama is not
fundamental to human beings that we want
to
actually that we want to understand
antifa and we want to like empathize we
want to take radical ideas and be able
to empathize with them and synthesize it
all okay let's look
at cultural outliers in in terms of
violence versus
compassion we can see that a lot of
cultures have relatively lower ingroup
violence bigger outgroup violence and
there's some variance in them and
variance at different times based on the
scarcity or abundance of resource and
other things but you can look at say
Janes whose whole religion is around
nonviolence so much so that they don't
even hurt plants they only take fruits
that fall off them and stuff or to go to
a larger population you take Buddhists
where for the most part with a few
exceptions for the most part across
three Millennia and across lots of
different countries and geographies and
whatever you have 10 million people plus
or minus who don't hurt
bugs the whole spectrum of genetic
variance that is happening within a
culture of that many people um and head
traumas and what whatever and nobody
hurts bugs and then you look at a group
where the kids grow up as child soldiers
in Liberia or darur where to make it to
adulthood pretty much everybody's killed
people hand to hand and killed people
who were civilian or innocent type of
people and you say okay so we were very
neous we can be conditioned by our
environment and humans can be
conditioned where almost all the humans
show up in these two different bell
curves it doesn't mean that the Buddhist
had no violence it doesn't mean that
these people had no compassion but the
they're very different gaussian
distributions
and so I think one of the important
things I like to do is look at the
examples of the populations what
Buddhism shows regarding Compassion or
what Judaism shows around education the
average level of Education that
everybody gets because of a culture that
is really working on conditioning it or
or various cultures what are the
positive deviants outs of the
statistical deviants to see what is
actually possible and then say what are
the conditioning factors and can we
condition those across a few of them
simultaneously and could we build a
civilization like that becomes a very
interesting question so there's this
kind of real politic idea that humans
are violent large groups of humans
become violent they become irrational
specifically those two things rivalrous
and violent and irrational and so in
order to minimize the total amount of
violence and have some good decisions
they need ruled somehow and that not
getting that is some kind of naive
utopianism that doesn't understand human
nature yet this gets back to like
mimesis of Desire as an inexorable thing
I think the idea of the masses is
actually a kind of
propaganda um that is useful for the
classes that
control um to popularize the idea that
most people are too violent lazy um
undisciplined and irrational to make
good choices and therefore their choices
should be sublimated in some kind of way
I think that if we look back at these
conditioning
environments we can can say Okay so the
kids
that go to a really fancy school and
have a good developmental environment
like exitor Academy there's still a
gaussian distribution of how well they
do on any particular metric but on
average they become
senators and the worst ones become
high-end lawyers or whatever and then I
look at an inner city school with a
totally different set of things and I
see a very very differently displaced G
distribution but a very different set of
conditioning factors so then I say the
masses well if all those kids who were
one of the parts of the masses got to go
to exitor and have that family and
whatever would they still be the masses
um could we actually
condition more social virtue more civic
virtue more orientation towards
dialectical synthesis more empathy more
rationality widely
yes would that lead to better capacity
for something like participatory
governance democracy or Republic or some
kind of participatory governance
yes is it necessary for it actually
yes and is it good for class interests
not not really uh By the way when you
say class interest this is the powerful
leading over the the less powerful that
kind of
idea anyone that benefits from
asymmetries of power doesn't necessarily
benefit from decreasing those
asymmetries of power and kind of
increasing the capacity of people more
widely
and um so when we talk
about power we're talking about
asymmetries in agency influence and
control you think that hunger for power
is fundamental to human nature I think
we should get that straight before we
talk about other stuff so like uh this
uh this this pickup line that I use it a
bar off which is uh power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely is
that true or is that just a fancy thing
going to say in modern society there's
something to be said have we changed as
societies over time in terms of how much
We crave
power that there is an Impulse towards
power that is innate in people and can
be conditioned one way the other yes but
you can see that Buddhist Society does a
very different thing with it at scale
that you don't end up seeing the
emergence of the same types of
sociopathic
behavior and particularly then creating
sociopathic
institutions um and so it's like is
eating the foods that were rare in our
evolutionary environment that give us
more dopamine hit because they were rare
and they're not anymore Salt Fat sugar
um is there something pleasurable about
those where humans have an orientation
to overeat if they can well the fact
that there is that possibility doesn't
mean everyone will obligately be obese
and die of obesity right like it's
possible to have a uh a particular
impulse and to be able to understand it
have other ones and be able to balance
them and so to say that um power
dynamics are are obligate in humans and
we can't do anything about it is very
similar to me to saying like we everyone
is going to be obligately obese yeah so
there's some degree to which those the
control those impulses has to do with
the conditioning early in life yes and
the culture that creates the environment
to be able to do that and then the
recursion on that okay so what if we
were to uh bear with me just asking for
a friend if we were to kill all humans
on Earth and then start
over is there ideas about how to build
up okay we don't have to kill let's
leave the humans on Earth they're fine
and go to Mars and start a new
Society is there ways to construct
systems of conditioning
education of how we live with each
other that would
um that would incentivize us properly to
not seek power not to not construct
systems that are of asymmetry of power
and to create systems that are resilient
to all kinds of terrorist attacks to all
kinds of
destructions I believe so so is there
some inklings with get of course you
probably don't have the an all the
answers but you have insights about what
that looks like I mean is it just
rigorous practice of dialectic synthesis
as essentially conversations with
assholes of various flavors until
they're not assholes anymore because
you've become deeply empathetic with
their
experience okay so there's a lot of
things that
we would need to construct to come back
to this like what is the basis of
rivalry what how do you bind it how does
it relate to Tech if you have a culture
that is doing less rivalry does it
always lose in war to those who do War
better and how do you make something on
the enactment of how to get there from
here um great great so what's rivalry
why is is rivalry bad or good is is so
is another word for rivalry
competition yes I think roughly yes I
think bad and good are kind of silly
Concepts here good for some things bad
for other things contexts and
others even that um okay let me give you
an example that relates back to the
Facebook measuring thing you were
mentioning a moment
ago first I think what you're saying is
actually aligned with the right
direction and what I want to get to in a
moment um but it's not the the devil is
in the details here so I I enjoy praise
it feeds my ego I grow stronger so I
appreciate that I make sure to include
one piece every 15 minutes as we go
thank you um
so it's easy easier to
measure there are problems with this
argument but there's also utility to it
so let's take it for the utility it has
first it's harder to measure happiness
than it is to measure
Comfort uh we can measure with
technology that the shocks in a car are
making the car bounce less that the bed
is um softer and you know Material
Science and those types of things and
happiness is actually hard for
philosophers to Define because some
people find that there's certain kinds
of overcoming suffering that are
necessary for happiness there's
happiness that feels more like
contentment and happiness that feels
more like passion is is Passion the
source of all suffering or the source of
all creativity like the there's deep
stuff and it's mostly first person not
measurable third person stuff even if
maybe it corresponds to third person
stuff to some degree but we also see
examples of some of our favorite
examples is people who are in the worst
environments who end up finding
happiness right where the Third person
stuff looks to be less conducive and
there's some Victor Frankle Nelson
Mandela whatever um but it's pretty easy
to measure Comfort it's pretty Universal
and I think we can see that the
Industrial Revolution started to replace
happiness with Comfort quite heavily as
the thing it was optimizing for and we
can see that when increased Comfort is
given maybe because of the evolutionary
disposition that expending extra
calories when for the majority of our
history we didn't have extra calories
was not a safe thing to do who knows why
um when extra Comfort is given it's very
easy to take that path even if it's not
the path that supports overall
well-being
longterm and um so we can see that you
know when you when you look at the
Techno Optimist idea that we have better
lives than Egyptian pharaohs and kings
and whatever what they're largely
looking at is how comfortable our beds
are and how comfortable the transport
ation systems are and things like that
in which case there's massive
Improvement but we also see that in some
of the Nations where people have access
to the most Comfort suicide and mental
illness of the
highest and we also see that some of the
happiest cultures are actually some of
the ones that are in materially lame
environments and so there's a very
interesting question here and if I
understand correctly you do cold showers
and Joe Rogan was talking about how he
needs to do some fairly intensive kind
of um struggle that is non-c Comfort to
actually induce being better as a person
this concept of hormesis that it's
actually stressing an Adaptive system
that increases its adaptive capacity and
that there's something that the
happiness of a system has something to
do with its adaptive capacity its
overall resilience Health well-being
which requires a decent bit of
discomfort and yet in the in the
presence of the Comfort solution it's
very hard to not choose it and then as
you're choosing it regularly to actually
downregulate your overall adaptive
capacity and
so when we start saying can
we make Tech where we're measuring for
the things that it produces Beyond just
the measure of GDP or whatever
particular measures look like the
revenue generation or profit generation
of my
business are all the meaningful things
measurable and what are the right
measures
and what are the externalities of
optimizing for that measurement set what
meaningful things aren't included in
that measurement set that might have
their own externalities these are some
of the questions we actually have to
take seriously yeah and we I think
they're answerable questions right
progressively better not perfect right
so I so first of all let me throw out
happiness and comfort out of the
discussion those seems like useless the
distinction so I because I said they're
useful well-being is useful but I think
I I take it
back I'm I knew uh I proposed new
metrics in this uh brainstorm session
which is uh so one is like personal
growth which is intellectual growth I
think we're able to make that concrete
for ourselves like you're a better
person than you
were a week ago or a worse person than
you were a week ago I think we can
ourselves report that and and and
understand what that means it's this
gray area when you try to Define it but
I think we humans are pretty good at
that because we have a sense an
idealistic sense of the person we might
be able to become we we all dream of
becoming a certain kind of person and I
think we have a sense of getting closer
and not towards that person maybe this
is not a great magic fine the other one
is Love
Actually fuck if you're happy or not are
you're comfortable or not how much love
do you have towards your fellow human
beings I feel like if you try to
optimize that and increasing that that's
going to have that's a good
metric how many times a day sorry if I
can make quantify how many times a day
have you thought positively of another
human being put that down as a number
and increase that number I think the
process of saying Okay
so let's not take GDP or GDP per capita
As the metric we want to optimize for
because GDP goes up during war and it
goes goes up with more Healthcare
spending from sicker people and various
things that we wouldn't say correlate to
Quality of Life uh addiction drives GDP
awesomely um by the way when I say
growth I wasn't referring to G GP I'm
I'm giving an example now of the primary
metric we use and why it's not an
adequate metric and because we're
exploring other ones so the idea of
saying what would the metrics for a good
civilization be if I had to pick a set
of metrics what would the best ones be
if I was going to optimize for those and
then
really try to run the thought experiment
more deeply and say okay so what happens
if we optimize for that try to Think
Through the first and second and third
order effects of what happens that's
positive and then also say what negative
things can happen from optimizing that
what actually matters that is not
included in that or in that way of
defining it because love versus number
of positive thoughts per day I could
just make a long list of names and just
think say positive thing about each one
it's all very superficial not include
animal with the rest of Life have a have
a very shallow to total amount of it but
I'm optimizing the number and if I get
some credit for the number so the and
this is when I said the model of reality
isn't
reality when you make a set of metrics
say we're going to optimize for this
whatever reality is that is not included
in those metrics can be the areas where
harm occurs which is why I would say
that wisdom is something
like the discernment that leads to right
choice
beyond what metric based optimization
would
offer yeah but another way to say that
is wisdom is uh constantly expanding and
evolving set of
metrics which means that there is
something in you that is recognizing a
new metric that's important that isn't
part of that metric set so there's a
certain kind of connection discernment
awareness and this is Game Theory
there's a girdles incompleteness theem
right which is if the system if the set
of things is consistent it won't be
complete so we're going to keep adding
to it which is why we were saying
earlier I don't think it's not
beautiful and especially if you were
just saying one of the metrics you want
to optimize for at the individual level
is becoming right that we're becoming
more well that's then becomes true for
the civilization and our metric sets as
well yeah and our definition of how to
think about a meaningful life and a
meaningful civilization I can tell you
what some of my favorite metrics are
what's
that uh well love is obviously not a
metric it's you can bench yeah it's a
good metric yeah I want to optimize that
across the entire population starting
with infants
um
so in the same way that love isn't a
metric but you could make metrics that
look at certain parts of it the thing
I'm about to say isn't a metric but it's
a it's a consideration CU I thought
about this a lot I I don't think there
is a metric a right one um I think think
that every metric by itself without this
thing we talked about of the continuous
Improvement becomes a paperclip
maximizer I think that's why what the
idea of false idol means in terms of the
model of reality not being reality then
my sacred relationship is to reality
itself which also binds me to the
unknown forever to the known but also to
the unknown and there's a sense of
sacredness connected to the unknown that
creates an epistemic humility that is
always seeking not just to optimize the
thing I know but to learn new stuff and
to be open to perceive reality directly
so my model never becomes sacred my
model's
useful my so the model can't be the
false idol correct yeah and this is why
the first verse of the TA Ching is the
da that is namable is not the Eternal da
the naming then can become the source of
the 10,000 things that if you get too
carried away with it can actually
obscure you from paying attention to
reality Beyond in the models it sounds a
lot a lot like Steven wol from but in a
different language much more poetic I
can imagine that no I'm I'm referring
I'm joking but there's Echoes of
cellometer which you can't name you
can't construct a good model cellometer
you can only watch in
awe I apologize I'm distracting your
train of thought horribly and miserably
making it diff by the way something
robots aren't good at and uh dealing
with the uncertainty of uneven ground
you've been okay so far you've been
doing wonderfully so what's your
favorite metrics that's why I know
you're not a Rob passing the test so one
metric
and there are problems with this but one
metric that I like to just as a thought
experiment to consider is because you're
actually asking we're I mean I know you
ask your guests about the meaning of
life because ultimately when you're
design when you're saying what is a
desirable civilization you can't answer
that without answering what is a
meaningful human life and to say what is
a good civilization because it's going
to be in relationship to that right
um
and then you have whatever your answer
is how do you know what is the what is
the epistemic basis for for postulating
that um there's also a whole another
reason for asking that question I don't
I mean that that doesn't even apply to
you whatsoever which is it's interesting
how few people have been asked
questions like
it we we we joke about these questions
is silly right it's it's funny to watch
watch a person and if I was more of an
asshole I would really stick on that
question right it's it's a silly
question in some sense but like we
haven't really considered what it means
just a more concrete version of that
question is what is what is a better
world what is the kind of world we're
trying to create really have you really
thought about I'll give you some kind of
simple answers to that that are
meaningful to me but let me do the
societal indices first because they're
fun yes
we should take a note of this meaningful
thing because it's important to come
back to are you reminding me to ask you
about the meaning of life
noted let me jot that down yeah so um
well because I think I stopped tracking
at like 25 open threads um okay let it
all burn one index that I find very
interesting is the inverse correlation
of addiction within the
society the more a society produces
addiction within the people in it the
less healthy I think the society is as a
pretty fundamental metric and so the
more the individuals feel that there are
less compulsive things in com compelling
them to behave in ways that are
destructive to their own
values uh and in so far as a
civilization is conditioning and
influencing the individuals within
it the inverse of addiction um broadly
defined correct addic
what's it yeah compulsive behavior that
is destructive towards things that we
value yeah I think that's a very
interesting one to think about that's a
really interesting one yeah and this is
then also where comfort and addiction
start to get very close and the ability
to go in the other direction from
addiction is the ability to be exposed
to hypernormal stimuli and
not go down the path of desensitizing to
other stimuli and needing that
hypernormal stimuli which does involve a
kind of hormesis so I do think the
civilization of the future has to
create something like ritualized
discomfort
and um ritualize discomfort yeah I think
that's what the sweat lodge and The
Vision Quest and the solo journey and
the iasa journey and the Sundance were I
think it's even a big part of what yoga
ASA was
um is to make beings that are resilient
and strong they have to overcome some
things to make beings that can control
their own mind and fear they have to
face some fears but we don't want to put
everybody in war or real trauma and yet
we can see that the most fucked up
people we know had childhoods of a lot
of trauma but some of the most
incredible people we know had childhoods
of a lot of trauma whether or not they
happen to make it through and overcome
that or not so how do we get the
benefits of the the stealing of
character and the resilience and the
whatever that happened from the
difficulty without traumatizing people a
certain kind of
ritualized
discomfort that not only has us overcome
something by ourselves but overcome it
together with each other where nobody
bailes when it gets hard because the
other people are there so it's both a
resilience of the individuals and a
resilience of the
bonding so I think we'll keep getting
more and more comfortable stuff but we
have to also develop res and the
presence of that um for the anti-
addiction Direction and the fullness of
character um and the trustworthiness to
others so you have to be uh consistently
injecting discomfort into the system
ritualize I mean this sounds like uh you
have to imagine Copus happy you have to
uh imagine Copus with his
Rock uh optimally resilient from a
metrics perspective in society
so we we want we want to constantly be
throwing rocks at ourselves not
constantly uh you didn't have to
frequently um periodically periodically
and there's different levels of
intensity different periodicities now I
do not think this should be imposed by
States uh I think it should emerge from
cultures and I think the cultures are
developing people that understand the
value of it so the people so there is
both a a cultural cohesion to it but
there's also a voluntarism because the
people value the thing that is being
developed they understand it and that's
what condition so conditioning it's
conditioning some of these some of these
values and conditioning is a bad word
because we like our idea of sovereignty
but when we recognize the language that
we speak and the words that we think in
and the and the patterns of thought
built into that language and the
Aesthetics that we like and so much is
conditioned in us just based on where
we're born you can't not condition
people so all you can do is take more
responsibility for what the conditioning
factors are and then you have to think
about this question of what is a
meaningful human life because we're
unlike the other animals born into
environment that they're genetically
adapted for we're building new
environments that we were not not
adapted for and then we are becoming
affected by those so then we have to say
well what kinds of environments digital
environments physical environments
social
environments would we want to create
that would develop the healthiest
happiest most moral Noble meaningful
people and what are even those sets of
things that matter so you end up getting
deep existential consideration at the
heart of civilization design when you
start to real how powerful we're
becoming and how much what we're
building it in service towards matters
before I pull it I think three threads
you just laid down uh is there another
metric index that you're interested in
I'll tell you one more that I really
like there's there's a number but one
the next one that comes to mind
is
uh I have to make a very quick
model
uh healthy human bonding say we were in
a tribal type setting my positive
emotional states and your positive
emotional states would most of the time
be correlated your negative emotional
states in mind and so you start laughing
I start laughing you start crying my
eyes might tear up
and we would call that the compassion
compersion axis I would this is
a model I I find useful so compassion is
when you're feeling something negative I
feel some pain I feel some empathy
something in relationship compersion is
when you do well I'm stoked for you
right like I actually feel happiness at
your Happ I like compersion yeah the
fact that it's such a uncommon word in
English is actually a problem culturally
um cuz I feel that often and I think
that's a really good feeling to feel and
maximize for actually that's actually
the metric I'm going to say oh wow is
the compassion compersion Act access is
the thing I would optimize for now there
is a state where my emotional states and
your emotional states are just totally
decoupled and that is like sociopathy I
don't want to hurt you but I don't care
if I do or for you to do well or
whatever but there's a worst state and
it's extremely common which is where
they're inversely
coupled where my positive emotions
correspond to your negative ones and
vice versa and that is the I I would
call it the jealousy sadism axis
the jealousy axis is when you're doing
really well I feel something bad I feel
taken away from less than upset envious
whatever
and that's so
common but I think of it is kind of a
lowgrade Psychopathology that we've just
normalized the idea that I'm actually
upset at the happiness or fulfillment or
success of another is like a profoundly
fucked up thing no we shouldn't shame it
and repress it so it gets worse we
should should study it where does it
come from and it comes from our own
insecurities and stuff and but then the
next part that everybody knows is really
fucked up is just on the same axis it's
the same inverted which is so the
jealousy or the Envy is the I feel badly
when you're doing well the sadism side
is I actually feel good when you lose or
when you're in pain I feel some
happiness that's associated you can see
when someone feels jealous sometimes
they feel jealous with a partner and
then they feel they want that partner to
get it Revenge comes up or something so
sadism is really like jealousy is one
step on the path to sadism from the
healthy compassion compersion access so
I would like to see a society that is
inversely that is conditioning sadism
and jealousy inversely right the the
lower that amount and the more the
compassion compersion and if I had to
summarize that very simply i' would say
it would optimize for
compersion which is because no notice
that's not just saying love for you
where I might be self-sacrificing and
miserable and I love people but I kill
myself which I don't think anybody think
is a great idea or happiness where I
might be sociopathically happy where I'm
causing problems all over the place or
even sadistically happy but it's a
coupling right that I'm actually feeling
happiness in relationship to yours and
even in causal relationship where I my
own agentic desire to get happier wants
to support you to mhm that's actually
speaking of another pickup line uh
that's quite honestly what I
as a guy who's single this is this is
going to come out very ridiculous
because it's like oh yeah where's your
girlfriend bro
but that's what I look for in a
relationship CU it's like it's so much
it's so it's such an amazing life where
you actually get joy from another
person's success and they get joy from
your success and then it becomes like
you don't actually need to succeed much
for that to have a like a
a a like a cycle of just like happiness
that just increases like exponentially
it's weird so like just be just enjoying
the the happiness of others the success
of others so this this is like the U
let's call this cuz the first person
that drilled this into my head is Rogan
Joe Rogan he was the embodiment of that
because I saw somebody who is uh
successful rich and
nonstop truly I mean you could tell when
somebody's full of shit and somebody's
not really genuinely enjoying the
success of his friends that that was
weird to me that was interesting and
mean the way you're kind of speaking to
it the reason Joe stood out to me is I
guess I haven't witness genuine
expression of that often in this culture
of just real joy for others I mean part
of that has to do there hasn't been many
channels where you can watch or listen
to people being their authentic cells so
I'm sure there's a bunch of people who
live life with compersion they probably
don't seek public attention also but the
that that was that yeah if if there was
any word that could express what what
I've learned from Joan white he's been a
really inspiring figure is that
compersion and I wish our world was uh
had a lot more of that cuz then
it I mean my own sorry to go on a small
tangent but like
you're speaking how Society should
function but I feel like if you optimize
for that metric in your own personal
life you're going to uh live a truly
fulfilling life I don't know what the
right word to use but that's a really
good way to live life you will also
learn what gets in the way of it right
and how to work with it that if you
wanted to help try to build systems at
scale or apply Facebook or exponential
Technologies to do that you would have
more actual depth of real knowledge of
what that
takes and this is you know as you
mentioned that there's this virtuous
cycle between when you get stoked on
other people doing well and then they
have a similar relationship to you and
everyone is in the process of building
each other up uh and this is what I
would say the healthy version of
competition is versus the unhealthy
version the healthy version right the
the root I believe it's a Latin word
that means to strive together and it's
that impulse to of becoming where I want
to become more but I recognize that
there's actually a hormesis there's a
challenge that is needed for me to be
able to do that but that means that yes
there's an Impulse where I'm trying to
get ahead maybe I'm even trying to win
but I actually want a good opponent and
I want them to get ahead too because
that is where my ongoing becoming
happens and the win itself will get
boring very quickly the ongoing becoming
is where there's aliveness and for the
ongoing becoming they need to have it
too and that's the strive together the
so in the healthy competition I'm stoked
when they're doing really well cuz my
becoming is supported by it mhm now this
is actually a very nice segue
into a model I like about what a
meaningful human life is if you want to
go
there let's go there we can go somewhere
else if you want well I have I have
three things I'm going elsewhere with
but if we were first let us take a short
stroll through the park of the meaning
of life Daniel uh what is a meaningful
life
I think
um the semantics end up mattering
because a lot of
people will take the word meaning and
the word purpose almost
interchangeably and they'll talk they'll
think kind of what is the meaning of my
life what is the meaning of human life
what is the meaning of life what's the
meaning of the universe
and what is the meaning of existence
rather than non-existence so there's a
lot of kind of existential
considerations there and I think there's
some cognitive mistakes that are very
easy
like taking the idea of purpose which is
like a goal which is a utilitarian
concept the purpose of one thing is
defined in relationship to other things
that have assumed
value um and to say what is the purpose
of everything well it's a purpose is too
small of a question it's fundamentally a
relative question within everything what
is the purpose of one thing relative to
another what is the purpose of
everything and there's nothing outside
of it with which to say it you actually
just got to the limits of the utility of
the concept of purpose it doesn't mean
it's purposeless in the sense of
something inside of it being purposeless
it means the concept is too small which
is why you end up getting
to you know like in dosm talking about
the nature of it rather the there's a
fundamental what where the why can't go
deeper is the nature of it um but uh I'm
going to try to speak to a much simpler
part which is when people think about
what is a meaningful human life and kind
of if we were to optimize for something
at the level of individual life but also
how does optimizing for this at the
level of the individual life lead to the
best Society for in so far as people
living that way affects others and
longterm the world as a whole and how
would we then make a civilization that
was trying to think about these
things because you can see that there
are a lot of dialectics where there's
value on two sides individualism and
collectivism or
um the ability to accept things and the
ability to push harder and whatever and
there's failure modes on both
sides and so when you were starting to
say okay H individual happiness and
you're like wait fuck sadists can be
happy while hurting people it's not
individual happiness it's love but wait
some people can self-sacrifice out of
love in a way that actually ends up just
creating codependency for everybody um
or okay so so how do we think about all
those things
together
one like this kind of came to me as a a
simple way that I kind of relate to it
is that a meaningful life involves the
mode of being the mode of doing and the
mode of becoming and it involves a
virtuous relationship between those
three
and that any of those modes on their own
also have failure modes that are not a
meaningful life the mode of being the
way I would describe it
if if we're talking about um the essence
of it is about taking in and
appreciating the beauty of life that is
now it's a mode that is in the moment
and that is largely about being with
what
is it's fundamentally grounded in the
nature of experience and the
meaningfulness of experience the Prima
fascia meaningfulness of when I'm having
this
experience I'm not actually asking what
the meaning of life is I'm actually full
of
I'm full of experiencing it the
momentary experience the
moment so taking in the beauty of
life doing is adding to the beauty of
life I'm going to produce some art I'm
going to produce some technology that
will make life easier more beautiful for
somebody else I'm going
to uh do some science that will end up
leading to better insights or others
people's ability to appreciate the
beauty of life more because they
understand more about it or whatever it
is or protect it right I'm going to
protect it in some way but that's adding
to or being in service of the beauty of
life through our doing and becoming is
getting better at both of those being
able to deepen our being which is to be
able to take in the beauty of life more
profoundly be more moved by it touched
by it and increasing our capacity with
doing to add to the beauty of life
more
and so I hold that a meaningful life has
to be all three of those and where
they're not in con conflict with each
other ultimately it grounds in being it
grounds in the intrinsic meaningfulness
of experience and then my doing is
ultimately something that will be able
to increase the possibility of the
quality of experience for
others and my becoming is a deepening on
those so it grounds an experience and
also the evolutionary possibility of
experience and the point is
to oscillate between these never getting
stuck on
anyone yeah or I suppose in parallel
well you can't really attention is a
thing you can only allocate
attention I want
moments where I am absorbed in the
sunset and I'm not thinking about what
to do next yeah and then the fullness of
that can make it to where my doing
doesn't come from what's in it for me
because I actually feel overwhelmingly
full already
and then it's like how can I how can I
make life better for other people that
don't have as much opportunity as I had
how can I add something wonderful how
can I just be in the creative
process and so I think where the doing
comes from matters and if the doing
comes from a fullness of being it's
inherently going to be paying attention
to
externalities or it's more oriented to
do that then if it comes from some
emptiness that is trying to get full in
some way that is willing to cause
sacrifices other places and where chunk
of its attention is internally
focused and so when Buddha said desire
is the cause of all suffering then later
the vow of the bodhisatwa which was to
show up for all sensient beings in
Universe forever is a pretty intense
thing like
desire I would say there is a kind of
Desire if we think of desire as a basis
for movement like a flow or a gradient
there's a kind of Desire that comes from
something missing inside seeking
fulfillment of that in the world that
ends up being the cause of actions that
perpetuate suffering but there's also
not just non- desire there's a kind of
Desire that comes from it feeling full
at at the beauty of life and wanting to
add to it that is a flow this
direction and I don't think that is the
cause of suffering I think that is you
know and and the Western Traditions
right the Eastern Traditions focused on
that and kind of unconditional happiness
outside of the in the moment outside of
time Western tradition said no actually
desire is the source of creativity and
we are here to be made in the image and
likeness of the Creator we're here to be
fundamentally creative but creating from
where and in service of what creating
from a sense of connection to everything
and wholeness and service of the
well-being of all of it is very
different which is back to that
compassion compersion axis being doing
becoming it's pretty
powerful also could potentially be
algorith matized into a robot just
saying where does
um where does death come into
that so being is forgetting I mean the
the concept of time completely there's a
there's a sense to doing in becoming
that has a deadline in built in the
urgency built in do you think death is
fundamental to
this to a meaningful life uh
acknowledging or
um feeling the terror of death like
gness Becker or just acknowledging the
uncertainty the mystery the The
Melancholy nature of the fact that the
right ends is that part of this equation
or it's not necessary okay we look at
how it could be related I've experienced
fear of
death I've also
experienced times where I thought I was
going to die it felt extremely peaceful
and
beautiful
and
um it's funny because if we we can be
afraid of death because we're afraid of
Hell or bad Reincarnation of the BAU or
some kind of idea of the afterlife we
have where we're projecting some kind of
sensient suffering but if we're afraid
of just
non-experience I noticed that every time
I stay up late enough that I'm really
tired I'm longing for deep deep sleep
and non-experience right like I'm
actually longing for experience to stop
and it's not morbid it's not a bummer
it's and and I don't mind falling asleep
and I sometimes when I wake up want to
go back into it and then when it's done
I'm happy to come out of it so
um when we think about death and having
finite time here and we could talk about
if we live for a thousand years instead
of a hundred or something like that it'
still be fine nighttime but the one
bummer with the age we die is that I
generally find that people mostly start
to emotionally mature just shortly
before they die um but
um
there's if I get to live forever I I can
just stay focused on what's in it for me
forever
and if life continues and Consciousness
and sensient and people appreciating
Beauty and adding to it and becoming
continues my life doesn't but my life
can have effects that continue well
beyond it then life with a capital l
starts mattering more to me than my life
my life gets to be a part of it in
service
too and the whole thing about when old
men plant trees the shade of which
they'll never get to be in um I remember
the first time I read this poem by HZ
the the Sufi poet written in like the
13th century or something like that and
he talked about that if you're lonely to
think about him and he was kind of
leaning his Spirit um into yours across
the distance of a millennium and would
comfort you with these poems and he was
thinking about people Millennium from
now and caring about their experience
and what they'd be suffering if they'd
be lonely and could he offer something
that could touch them and just fucking
beautiful and so like the most beautiful
parts of humans have to do with
something that transcends what's in it
for
me and death forces you to that so not
not only does death create the urgency
it uh urgency of doing it you're very
right it does have a sense in which it
uh incentivizes the compersion and the
compassion
mhm and the widening you remember
Einstein had that quote something to the
effect of it's an optical delusion of
Consciousness to believe there are
separate things there's this one thing
we call universe and uh something about
us being inside of a prison of
perception that can only you know see a
very narrow little bit of it
but this this might be just some weird
disposition of mine
but when I think about the future after
I'm dead and I think
about Consciousness I think
about young people falling in love for
the first time and their experience and
I think about people being odd by
sunsets and I think
about all of it right I can't not feel
connected to that do you feel some
sadness to the very high likelihood that
you will be forgotten completely by all
of human history you Daniel the
name that that which can not be
named systems like to
self-perpetuate egos do that the idea
that I might do something meaningful
that future people appreciate of course
there's like a certain sweetness to that
idea but I know how many people did
something did things that I wouldn't be
here without and that my life would be
less without whose names I will never
know and I feel a gratitude to them I
feel a closeness I feel touched by that
and I think to the degree that the
future people are conscious enough there
is a you know a lot of traditions had
this kind of are We being good ancestors
and respect for the ancestors beyond the
names um I think that's a very healthy
idea but let me return to a much less
beautiful and uh much less Pleasant
conversation you mentioned prison back
to X risk
okay and
conditioning you mentioned something
about the
state
so what role let's talk about companies
governments
parents all the mechanisms that can be a
source of conditioning which flavor of
ice cream do you like do you think the
state is the right thing for the future
so governments that are elected
Democratic systems that are representing
representative democracy is there some
kind of political system
of governance that you find appealing is
it
parents uh meaning a very close nit
tribes of conditioning that's the most
essential and then uh you and Michael
malice would uh happily agree that it's
Anarchy where the state should
be uh dissolved or destroyed or burned
to the ground if you're Michael malice
giggling um holding the torch
as the fire burns so which which is it
is the state can the state be
good or is the state bad for the
conditioning of a beautiful world A or B
this is like an S test you you like to
give these simplified good or bad things
um would I like the state that we live
in currently the United States federal
government to stop existing today no I
would really not like that um I think
that' be quite bad for the world in a
lot of ways uh do I think that it's
a optimal social system and maximally
just and Humane and all those things and
I want it to continue as is no also not
that um but I am much more interested in
it being able to evolve to a better
thing without going through um the
catastrophe phase that I think it's just
non-existence would give so what size of
state is good in a sense like do should
we as a human society as this world
becomes more globalized should we be
constantly striving to reduce the we can
we can put on a map like right now
literally like
the the centers of power in the world
some of them are tech companies some of
them are governments should we be trying
to as much as possible decentralize the
power to where it's very difficult to
point on the map the centers of power
and that means making the
state however there's a bunch of
different ways to make the government
much smaller that could
be reducing in the United States
reducing the the funding for the
government all those kinds of things
that set of
responsibilities the the set of powers
it could be I mean this is far out but
making more Nations or maybe Nations not
in a space that are defined by
geographic location but rather in the
space of ideas which is what Anarchy is
about so Anarchy is about forming
collectives based on their set of ideas
and and doing so dynamically not based
on where you were born and so on I think
we can say that
the natural state of humans if we want
to describe such a thing was to live in
tribes that were below the Dunbar
number meaning that for a few hundred
thousand years of human
history all of the groups of humans
mostly stayed under that size and
whenever it would get up to that size it
would end up cleaving and so it seems
like there's a pretty strong and but
there weren't individual humans out in
the wild doing really well right so we
were a a group animal but with groups
that had a specific size so we could say
in a way humans were being domesticated
by those groups they were learning how
to have certain rules to participate
with the group without which you'd get
kicked out but that that's still the
wild state of people and and maybe it's
useful to do as a side statement which
I've recently looked at a bunch of
papers around donar's number where the
mean is actually 150 if you actually
look at the original paper it's a range
it's really a range so it's actually
some somewhere under a th so it's a
ranging from like 2 to 500 or whatever
it is but like you could argue that the
uh I think it actually is exactly two
two the range is 2 to 520 something like
that and this is the mean that's taken
crudely it's not a very good paper the
in terms of the actual numeric
numerically speaking but it'd be
interesting if there's a bunch of dbar
numbers that could be computed for
particular environments particular
conditions so on it is very true that
there are likely to be something small
you know under a million but it'd be
interesting if we can expand that number
in interesting ways that will change the
fabric of this conversation I just want
to kind of throw that in there I don't
know the if the 150 is baked in somehow
in the heart into the heart Ware we can
talk about some of the things that it
probably has to do with up to a certain
number of people and this is going to be
variable based on the social
technologies that mediate it to some
degree we can talk about that in a
minute
um up to a certain number of people
everybody can know everybody else pretty
intimately so let's go ahead and just
take 150 as a as an average number
um everybody can know everyone
intimately enough that if your actions
made anyone else do poorly it's your
extended family and you're stuck living
with them and you know who they are and
there's no Anonymous people there's no
just them and over there and that's one
part of what leads to a kind of tribal
process where what's good for the
individual and good for the whole has a
coupling also below that
scale everyone is somewhat aware of what
everybody else is doing there's not
groups that are very siloed
and as a result it's actually very hard
to get away with bad behavior there's a
force kind of
transparency and so you don't need kind
of like the
state in uh in that way but lying to
people doesn't actually get you ahead
sociopathic Behavior doesn't get you
ahead because it gets seen and uh so
there's a conditioning environment where
the individuals behaving in a way that
is aligned with the interest of the
tribe is what gets conditioned when it
gets to be a much larger system it
becomes easier to hide certain things
from the group as a whole as well as to
be less emotionally bound to a bunch of
anonymous
people I would say there's also a
communication protocol where up to about
that number of people we could all sit
around a tribal council and be part of a
conversation around a really big
decision do we migrate do we not migrate
do we you know some something like that
do we get rid of this person and why why
would I want
to agree to be a part of a larger group
where everyone can't be part of that
Council and so I am going to now be
subject to law that I have no say in if
I could be part of a smaller group that
could still survive and I get a say in
the law that I'm subject to so I think
the cleaving and and a way we can look
at it beyond the dunar number two is we
can look at that a civilization has
binding energy that is holding them
together and has cleaving energy and if
the binding energy exceeds the cleaving
energy that Civilization will last and
so are things that we can do to decrease
the cleaving energy within the society
things we can do to increase the binding
energy I think naturally we saw that had
certain characteristics up to a certain
size kind of
tribalism that ended with a few things
it ended with people having migrated
enough that when you started to get
resource Wars it you couldn't just
migrate away easily and so tribal
Warfare became more obligate it involved
the plow in the beginning of real
economic surplus there were so there
were a few different kind of um forcing
functions
but we're talking about what size should
it be right what size should a society
be and I think the idea like if we think
about your body for a moment as a
self-organizing complex system that is
multiscaled we think about Body Is a
Wonderland our Body Is a Wonderland yeah
uh you have that's a John Mayor song I
apologize but yes so uh if you think
about our our body and the billions of
cells that are in it well you don't have
like think about how ridiculous it would
be to try to have all the tens of
trillions of cells in it with no
internal organization structure right
just like a sea of protoplasm it would
pure democracy and so you have cells and
tissues and then you have tissues and
organs and organs and organ systems and
so you have these layers of organization
and then obviously the individual in a
tribe in a
ecosystem and each of the higher layers
are both based on the lower layers but
also influencing them yeah I think the
future of civilization will be similar
which is there's a level of governance
that happens at the level of the
individual my own governance of my own
choice I think there's a level that
happens at the level of a family we're
making decisions together we're inter
influencing each other and affecting
each other taking responsibility for the
idea of an extended family and you can
see that like for a lot of human history
we had an extended family we had a local
community a local church or whatever it
was we have these intermediate
structures whereas right now there's
kind of like the
individual producer consumer taxpayer
voter and the massive nation state
Global complex and not that much in the
way of intermediate structures that we
relate with and not that much in the way
of real personal Dynamics all
impersonalized made
fungible and so I think that we have to
have Global governance meaning I think
we have to have governance at the scale
we affect stuff and if if anybody is
messing up the ocean that matters for
everybody so that that can't only be
National or only local everyone is
scared of the idea of global governance
because we think about some top- down
system of imposition that now has no
checks and balances on power I'm scared
of that same version so I'm not talking
about that kind of global
governance um it's why I'm even using
the word governance as a process rather
than government as an
imposed uh
phenomena and so I think we have to have
Global governance but I think we also
have to have local governance and there
has to be relationships between them
that
each where there are both checks and
balances and power flows of information
so I think governance at the level of
cities will be a bigger deal in the
future than governance at the level of
nation states because I think nation
states are largely fictitious things
that are defined by Wars and agreements
to stop Wars and like that I think
cities are based on real things that
will keep being real where the proximity
of certain things together the physical
proximity of things together gives
increased value of those things so you
look at like Jeffrey West's work on
scale and finding that companies and
nation states and things that have a a
kind of complicated agreement structure
get diminishing return of you of
production per capita as the total
number of people increases Beyond about
the tribal scale but the city actually
gets increasing productivity per capita
but it's not designed it's kind of this
organic thing right so there should be
governance at the level of cities
because people can sense and actually
have some agency there probably
neighborhood and smaller scales within
it and also verticals and some of it
won't be Geographic it'll be network
based right networks of affinities so I
don't think the future is one type of
governance now what we can say more
broadly is say when we're talking about
groups of people that inter affect each
other the idea of a civilization is that
we can figure out how to coordinate our
choic making to not be at war with each
other and hopefully increase
total productive capacity in way that's
good for everybody division of labor and
Specialty so we all get more better
stuff and whatever but it's a it's a
coordination of our choice
making I think we can look at
civilizations failing on the side of not
having enough coordination of choic
making so they fail on the side of chaos
and then they cleave and an internal War
comes about or whatever or they can't uh
make smart decisions and they overuse
their resources or whatever or it can
fail on the side of trying to get
order via imposition via force and so it
fails on the side of Oppression which
ends up being for a while functional is
for the thing as a whole but miserable
for most people in it until it fails
either because of Revolt or because it
can't innovate enough or something like
that and so there's this like toggling
between order via oppression and chaos
and I think the idea of democracy not
the way we've implemented it but the
idea of it whether we're talking about a
representative democracy or a direct
digital democracy liquid democracy uh
Republic whatever the idea of an open
Society participatory governance is can
we have order that is emergent rather
than imposed so that we aren't stuck
with chaos and infighting and inability
to coordinate and we're also not stuck
with
oppression
and what would it take to have emergent
order this is the most kind of central
question for me these days because
if we look at what different nation
states are doing around the world and we
see nation states that are more
authoritarian that in some ways are
actually coordinating much more
effectively so for instance we can see
that China has built High-Speed Rail not
just through its country but around the
world and the US hasn't built any
High-Speed Rail yet you can see that it
brought 300 million people out of
poverty in a time where we've had
increasing economic inequality happening
you can see like that if there was a
single country that could make all of
its own stuff if the global Supply
chains failed China would be the closest
one to being able to start to go closed
loop on fundamental things uh belt and
Road
initiative supply chain on rare earth
metals transistor manufacturing that you
like oh they're actually coordinating
more effectively in some important ways
in the last call it 30
years and
that's imposed order imposed order and
we can see that if in the US if now
let's look at why real
quick we know why we created term limits
so that we wouldn't have forever
monarchs that's the thing we were trying
to get away from and that there would be
checks and balances on Power and that
kind of thing but that also has created
a a negative second order effect which
is nobody does long-term planning
because somebody comes in who's got four
years they want reelected
they don't do anything that doesn't
create a return within 4 years that will
end up getting them elected reelected
and so the 30-year Industrial
Development to build high-speed trains
or the new kind of Fusion Energy or
whatever it is just doesn't get invested
in and then if you have left versus
right where whatever someone does for
four years then the other guy gets in
and undo it for four years and most of
the energy goes into campaigning against
each other this system is just
dissipating as heat right like it's just
burning up as heat and the system that
has no term limits and no internal
friction in fighting because they got
rid of those people can actually
coordinate better
but uh I would argue it has its own fail
States eventually and dystopic
properties that are not the thing we
want there so the goal is to accomplish
to create a system that does long-term
planning without the negative effects of
a monarch or dictator that stays there
for the long
term and uh
uh accomplish that through uh not
through the
imposition of a single leader but
through emergence so doesn't that
perhaps first of all the technology in
itself seems to may maybe disagree allow
for different possibilities here which
is uh make primary the system not the
humans so
the the the basic uh the medium on which
the Democracy happens like like a
platform where where people can uh make
decisions do the choice making the
coordination of the choice
making where emerges some kind of order
to where like something that applies at
the scale of the family the extended
family the city the the country the
continent the whole world and then does
that so dynamically constantly changing
based on the needs of the people sort of
always
evolving and uh it would all be owned by
Google like doesn't doesn't this is
there a way to um so first of all you
optimistic that it it you could
basically create like technology can
save us technology at creating platforms
by technology I mean like software
Network platforms that allows humans to
deliberate like make government together
dynamically without the need for a
leader that's on a Podium screaming
stuff that's one and two if you're
optimistic about that are you also
optimistic about the CEOs of such
platforms the idea that technology is
values neutral values agnostic it and
people can use it for constructive or
destructive purposes but it doesn't uh
predispose anything it's just it's just
silly naive technology elicits patterns
of human behavior because those who
utilize it and get ahead end up behaving
differently because of their utilization
of it and then other people then they
end up shaping the world or other people
race to also get the power of the
technology and so there's whole schools
of anthropology that look at the effect
on social systems and the minds of
people of the change in our tooling U
Marvin Harris's work called cultural
materialism looked at this deeply
obviously Marshall mclan looked
specifically at the way that information
Technologies change the nature of our
beliefs Minds values social
systems
um I will not try to do this rigorously
because there are academics will
disagree on the subtle details but I'll
do it kind of like
illustratively you think about the
emergence of the plow the oxr plow in
the beginning of Agriculture that came
with it where before that you had Hunter
gather and then you had horiculture kind
of a digging stick but not the plow well
that the world changed a lot with that
right
and a few of the changes that um at
least some theorists believe in is when
the Oxon plow started to proliferate any
culture that utilize it was able to
start to actually cultivate grain
because just with a digging sitick you
couldn't get enough grain for it to
matter grain was a storable caloric
Surplus they could make it through the
famines they could grow their population
so the ones that used it got so much
ahead that it became obligate and
everybody used it that responding with
the use of a plow animism went away
everywhere that it existed because you
can't talk about the spirit of the
Buffalo while beating the cow all day
long to pull a plow um so the moment
that we do animal husbandry of that kind
we have to beat the cow all day you have
to say it's just a dumb animal man has
dominion over Earth and the nature of
even our religious and spiritual ideas
change you went from women primarily
using the digging stick to do the
horiculture or gathering before that men
doing the hunting stuff to now men had
to use the plow because the upper body
strength actually really matter mattered
women would have miscarriages when they
would do it when they were pregnant so
all the caloric Supply started to come
from men where it had been from both
before and the ratio of male female Gods
changed to being mostly male Gods
following that um obviously we went from
very that particular line of thought
then also says that feminism followed
the
tractor and that the rise of
feminism um in the west started to
follow women being able to say we can do
what men can because the male upper body
strength wasn't differential once the
internal combustion engine was much
stronger um and we can drive a tractor
so I don't think to try to trace complex
things to one cause is a good idea so I
think this is a reductionist view but it
has truth in it
and so the idea that technology is
values agnostic is silly technology
codes patterns of behavior that code
rationalizing those patterns of behavior
and believing in them the the plow also
is the beginning of the anthropos scene
right it was the beginning of US
changing the environment radically to to
clear-cut areas to just make them useful
for people which also meant the change
of the view of where the the web of life
we just a part of it Etc so all those
types of things um so that's brilliantly
put but by the way that was just
brilliant but the question is so it's
not agnostic but so we have to look at
what the psychological effects of
specific Tech applied certain ways are
and be able to say it's not just doing
the first order thing you intended it's
doing like the effect on patriarchy and
animism and um the end of tribal culture
and the beginning of Empire and the
class systems that came with that and we
can go on and on about what the plow did
um the beginning of surplus was
inheritance which then became the
capital model and like lots of
things so we have to say when we're
looking at the tech how is what are the
values built into the way the tech is
being built that are not obvious
right so you always have to consider
externalities this is no matter what and
the externalities are not just physical
to the environment they're also to how
the people are being conditioned and how
the relationality between them is being
condition the question I'm asking you so
I personally would rather be led by a
plow and a tractor than Stalin okay
that's the question I'm asking you is
uh in creating an emergent government
where people where there's a democracy
that's Dynamic that makes choices that
does governance
at at like a very kind of liquid like uh
there's a bunch of fine resolution
layers of abstraction of governance
happening at all scales right and doing
so dynamically where no one person has
power at any one time that can Dominate
and impose rule okay that's the Stalin
version I'm saying
isn't the the uh alter isn't the
alternative that's emergent empowered or
made possible by the plow and the
tractor which is the modern version of
that is like the internet the the
digital space where we can the monetary
system where you have the cryptocurrency
and so on but you have much more
importantly to me at least is just basic
social interaction the mechanisms of
human transacting with each other in the
space of ideas isn't so yes it's not
agnostic definitely not agnostic you've
had a brilliant rant there the tractor
has effects but isn't that the way we
achieve an emerging system of uh
governance yes but I wouldn't say we're
on
track you haven't seen anything
promising it's not that I haven't seen
anything promising it's that to be on
track requires understanding and guiding
some of the things differently than is
currently happening and it's possible
that's actually what I really care about
so you couldn't have had a Stalin
without having certain Technologies
emerge he couldn't have ruled such a big
area without transportation Technologies
without the the train without the uh
communication Tech that made it possible
so when you say you'd rather have a
tractor or a plow than a Stalin there's
a relationship between them that is more
recursive which
is new physical Technologies allow
rulers to rule with more power over
larger distances ially mhm
and um but some things are more
responsible for that than others like
Stalin also ate stuff for breakfast but
the thing he ate for breakfast is less
responsible for the starvation of
millions than than the Train the train
is more responsible for that and then
the weapons of war are more responsible
so some technology like let's not throw
it all in the you're saying like
technology has a responsibility here but
some is better than other I'm saying
people's use of Technology will change
their behavior so it has behavioral
dispositions built in the change of the
behavior will also change the values in
the society it's very complicated right
it will also as a result both make
people who have different kinds of
predispositions with regard to rulership
and different kinds of new capacities
and so we have to think about these
things it's kind of well understood that
the printing press and then in early
Industrial M ended feudalism and created
kind of nation states so one thing I
would say as a long Trend it that we can
look at is that whenever there is a a a
step function a major leap in technology
physical technology the the underlying
techno-industrial base with which we do
stuff it ends up coding for it ends up
predisposing a whole bunch of human
behavioral patterns that the previous
social system what had not emerged to
try to solve and so it usually ends up
breaking the previous social systems the
way the plow broke the tribal system the
way that the Industrial Revolution broke
the feudal system and then new social
systems have to emerge that can deal
with that the new powers the new
dispositions whatever with that Tech
obviously the nuke broke nation state
governance being adequate and said we
can't ever have that again so then it
created this in international governance
apparatus
world
so I guess what I'm saying is
that the solution is not exponential
Tech following the current path of what
the market incentivizes exponential Tech
to do Market being a previous social
Tech I would say
that exponential
Tech if we look at different types of
social Tech so let's just briefly look
at the democracy tried to do the
emergent order
thing right at least that's the
story and which
is and this is why if you
look this important um part to build
first it's kind of doing it it's just
doing it poorly you're saying I mean
that's it is emergent order in some
sense I mean that's the hope of
democracy versus other forms of
government correct I mean I I said at
least the story because obviously it
didn't do it for women and slaves early
on it doesn't do it for all classes
equally Etc but the the idea of
democracy is that is participatory
governance and so you notice that the
modern democracies emerged out of the
European Enlightenment and specifically
because the idea that a lot of people
some huge number not a tribal number
huge number of anonymous people who
don't know each other are not bonded to
each other who believe different things
who grw up in different ways can all
work together to make Collective
decisions well that affect everybody
and where some of them will make
compromises in the thing that matters to
them for what matters to other strangers
that's actually wild like it's a wild
idea that that would even be possible
and it was kind of the result of this
High enlightenment idea that we could
all do the philosophy of
science and we could all do the hegelian
dialectic those ideas had emerged right
and it was
that we we could all so our choic making
because we said a society is trying to
coordinate Choice making the emergent
order is the order of our of the choices
that we're making not just at the level
of the individuals but what groups of
individuals corporations Nations States
whatever do um our choices are based on
our choic making is based on our sense
making and our meaning making our sense
making is what do we believe is
happening in the world and what do we
believe the effects of a particular
thing would be our meaning making is
what do we care about right our values
generation what do we care about that
we're trying to move the world in the
direction of if you ultimately are
trying to move the world in a direction
that is really really different than the
direction I'm trying to we have very
different values we're going to have a
hard time and if you think the world is
a very different world right if you
think that systemic racism is rampant
everywhere and one of the worst problems
and I think it's not even a thing if you
think climate change is almost
existential and I think it's not even a
thing we're going to have a really hard
time coordinating and so we have to be
able to have shared sense making of can
we come to understand just what is
happening together and then can we do
shared values generation okay maybe I'm
emphasizing a particular value more than
you but I can see how I can take your
perspective and I can see how the thing
that you value is worth valuing and I
can see how it's affected by this thing
so can we take all the values and try to
come up with a proposition that benefits
all of them better then the proposition
I created just to benefit these ones it
harms the ones that you care about which
is why you're opposing my proposition
yeah we don't even try in the process of
crafting a proposition currently to see
and this is the reason that the
proposition when we vote on it gets half
the votes almost all the time it almost
never gets 90% of the votes is because
it benefits some things and harms other
things we can say all theory of
tradeoffs but we didn't even try to say
could we see what everybody cares about
and see if there was a better solution
so how do we fix that try I I wonder is
it is it as simple as the social
technology of Education well no it's
that the proposition crafting and
refinement process has to be key to
democracy or paratory government
currently but it's the isn't that the
humans creating that situation so so one
ways there's two ways to fix that is the
one is to fix the individual humans
which is the education early in life and
the second is to create somehow systems
that yeah it's both so I I understand
the education part but creating systems
that's why that's why I mentioned the
Technologies is creating social networks
essentially yes that's actually
necessary okay so let's go to the first
part and then we'll come to the second
part
so democracy emerged as an Enlightenment
era idea that we could all do a
dialectic and come to understand what
other people valued and so that we could
actually come up with a Cooperative
solution rather than just fuck you we're
going to get our thing in war right and
that we could sense make together we
could all apply the philosophy of
science and you weren't going to stick
to your guns on what the speed of sound
is if we measured it and we found out
what it was and there's a unifying
element to the objectivity in that way
and so this is why um I believe
Jefferson said if you could give me a
perfect newspaper and a broken
government or in paraphrasing or a
broken government in perfect newspaper I
wouldn't hesitate to take the perfect
newspaper because if the people
understand what's going on they can make
build a new government if they don't
understand what's going on they can't
possibly make good choices and um
Washington I'm paraphrasing again first
president said the number one aim of the
federal government should be the
comprehensive education of every citizen
in the science of government science of
government was the term of art think
about what that means right science of
government would
be Game Theory coordination Theory
history it wouldn't called Game Theory
yet um history sociology economics right
all the things that lead to how we
understand human coordination I think
it's so profound that he didn't say the
number one aim of the federal government
is rule of
law and he didn't say it's protecting
the border from enemies because if the
number one aim was to protect the border
from enemies it could do that as
military dictatorship quite effectively
and if the goal was rule of law it could
do it as a dictatorship as a police
state and so if the number one goal is
anything other than the comprehensive
education of all the citizens in the
science of government it won't stay
democracy long you can see so both
education and the fourth estate the
fourth estate being the so education can
I make sense of the world am I train to
make sense of the world the fourth
estate is what's actually going on
currently the news do I have good
unbiased information about it those are
both considered prerequisite
institutions for democracy to even be a
possibility yeah and then at the scale
it was initially suggested here the town
hall was the key phenomena where there
wasn't a special interest group crafted
a proposition and the first thing I ever
saw was the proposition didn't know
anything about it and I got to vote Yes
or no it was in the town hall we all got
to talk about it and the proposition
could get crafted in real time through
the conversation which is why there was
that Founding Father statement that that
voting is the death of democracy voting
fundamentally is polarizing the
population in some kind of sublimated
War but the and we'll do that as the
last step but what we want to do first
is to say how does the thing that you
care about that seems damaged by this
proposition how could that turn into a
solution to make this proposition better
where this proposition still tends to
the thing it's trying to tend to and
tends to that better can we work on this
together and that in a town hall we
could have that as the scale increased
we lost the ability to do that now as
you mentioned the internet could change
that the fact that we had
Representatives that had to write a
course from one town hall to the other
one to see what the colony would do um
that we stopped having this kind of
Developmental um propositional
development process when the town hall
ended the fact that we have not used the
internet to recreate this
is somewhere between insane
and aligned with class
interests I would push back to say that
the internet has those things it just
has a lot of other things I I feel like
the inter has places where that
encourage synthesis of competing
ideas and uh sense making which is what
we're talking about is just that it's
also flooded with a bunch of other
systems that perhaps are out competing
it under current incentives perhaps has
to do with capitalism and the market is
the sure Linux is awesome right and
Wikipedia and places where you have and
they have problems but places where you
have open source sharing of information
betting of information towards
Collective building is that building
something like like how much has that
affected our court systems or our
policing systems or our military systems
or our first of all I think a lot but
not not enough I I I think this
something I told you offline yesterday
is
a perhaps this a whole another
discussion but I I don't think we're
quite quantifying the impact on the
world the positive impact of
Wikipedia you said the policing the I
mean I just I I just think the amount of
um empathy that what could like
knowledge I think can't help but lead
to empathy just knowing okay I just
knowing okay I I'll give you some pieces
of information knowing how many people
died in various Wars that already that
Delta when you have millions of people
have that knowledge it's like it's a
little like slap in the face like oh
like my boyfriend or girlfriend breaking
up with me is not such a big deal when
millions of people were tortured you
know like just a little bit and when a
lot of people know that because of
Wikipedia uh or the effect their second
order effects of Wikipedia which is it's
not that necessarily people read
Wikipedia it's like YouTubers who don't
really know stuff that well will
thoroughly read a Wikipedia article and
create a compelling video describing
that Wikipedia article that then
millions of people watch and they
understand that holy shit a lot of there
was such first of all there was such a
thing as World War II and World War One
okay like they they can at least like
learn about it they can learn about that
this was like recent they can learn
about slavery they can learn about all
kinds of injustices in the world and
that I think has a lot of effects to our
to the way whether you're a police
officer uh a a lawyer a judge in the
jury or just just a
regular civilian citizen the way you
approach the every other communication
you engage in even if the system of that
communication is very much flawed so I
think there's a huge positive effect on
Wikipedia that's my case for Wikipedia
so you should donate to Wikipedia I I'm
I'm a huge fan but there's very few
systems like it which is sad to me so I
think it's it would be a useful exercise
for any uh listener of the show
to really try to run the dialectical
synthesis process with regard to uh a
topic like this and take
the um techn concern perspective with
regard to uh information Tech that folks
like Triston Harris take and say what
are all of the things that are getting
worse and what and are any of them
following an exponential curve and how
much worse how quickly could that be
and then and do that fully without
mitigating it then take the Techno
Optimist perspective and see what things
are getting better in a way that kwell
or diamandis or someone might do and try
to take that perspective fully and say
are some of those things exponential
what what could that portend and then
try to hold all that at the same
time and I think there are ways in
which depending upon the metrics we're
looking at things are getting worse on
exponential curves and better on
exponential curves for different metrics
at the same time which which I hold is
the destabilization of previous system
and either an emergence to a better
system or collapse to a lower order are
both
possible and so I want my optimism not
to be about my assessment I want my
assessment to be just as fucking clear
as it can be I want my optimism to be
what inspires the solution process on
that clear assessment so I never I never
want to apply optimism in the sense
making right I want to just try to be
clear if anything I want to make sure
that the challenges are really well
understood but that's in service of an
optimism
that there are good potentials even if I
don't know what they are that are worth
seeking right there's kind of a there is
a some sense of optimism that's required
to even try to innovate really hard
problems mhm but then I want to take my
pessimism and Red Team my own optimism
to see is that solution not going to
work does it have second order effect
and then not get not get upset by that
because I then come back to how to make
it better so it's just a relationship
between optimism and pessimism and the
dialectic of how they how they can work
so when I of course we can say that
Wikipedia is a pretty awesome example of
of a thing we can look at the places
where it has limits or has failed
where um on a celebrity topic or cor
corporate interest topic you can pay
Wikipedia editors to edit more
frequently and various things like that
but you can also see where there's a lot
of information that was kind of
decentrally created that is good
information that is more easily
accessible to people than everybody
buying their own encyclopedia branic or
walking down to the library and that can
be updated in real time
faster
and I think you're very right that the
business model is a big
difference because Wikipedia is not a
for profit Corporation it is a it's
tending to the information Commons and
it doesn't have an agenda other than
tending to the information Commons and I
think the two masters issue is a tricky
one when I'm trying to optimize for very
different kinds of things
um where I have to sacrifice one for the
other and I can't find synergistic
satisfiers which one and if I have a
fiduciary responsibility to
shareholder uh profit maximization and
you know what what do that end up
creating I think the ad model that
Silicon Valley took um I think jiren
Laney or I don't know if you've had him
on the show but he has interesting
assessment of the nature of the ad model
um Silicon Valley wanting to support
capitalism and entrepreneurs to make
things but uh also the belief that
information should be free and also the
network Dynamics where the more people
you got on you got increased value per
user per capita as more people got on so
you didn't want to do anything to slow
the rate of adoption um some places
actually you know PayPal paying people
money to join the network because the uh
value of the network would be there'd be
a metf like Dynamic proportional to the
square of the total number of users so
um the ad model made sense of how do we
make it free but also be a business get
everybody on but not really thinking
about what it would mean to and this is
now the whole idea that if you aren't
paying for the product you are the
product um if if they have a fidu
responsibility to their shareholder to
maximize profit their customer is the
advertiser the user who it's being built
for is to do behavioral mod for them for
advertisers that's a whole different
thing than that same type of tech could
have been if applied with a different
business model or different purpose um I
think there because Facebook and
Google and other information and
communication platforms end up
harvesting data about user behavior that
allows them to model who the people are
in a way that gives them more sometimes
specific information and behavioral
information
than even a therapist or a doctor or a
lawyer or a priest might have in a
different setting they basically are
accessing privileged information there
should be a fiduciary
responsibility and in normal fiduciary
law law if there's this principal agent
thing if you are
a uh principal and I'm an agent on your
behalf I don't have a game theoretic
relationship with you right if you're
sharing something with me and I'm the
priest or I'm the therapist I'm never
going to use that information to try to
sell you a used car or whatever the
thing is but Facebook is gathering
massive amounts of privileged
information and then using it to modify
people's behavior for a behavior that
they didn't sign up for wanting the
behavior but what the corporation did so
I think this is an example of the
physical Tech evolving in the context of
the previous social Tech where it's
being shaped in particular ways and here
unlike Wikipedia that evolved for the
the information Commons this evolved
for fulfilling particular agentic
purpose most people when they're on
Facebook think it's just a tool that
they're using they don't realize it's an
agent right it is a corporation with a
profit motive and um and as I'm
interacting with it it has a goal for me
different than my goal for myself and
and I might want to be on for a short
period of time its goal is maximize time
on site and so there is a rivalry that
is take but where there should be a
fiduciary contract I think that's
actually a huge deal and I think if we
said could we apply Facebook like
technology
to uh develop
people's citizenry capacity right to
develop their personal health and
well-being and habits as well as
um cognitive understanding the
complexity with which they can process
the health of their
relationships um that would be amazing
to start to explore and this is now the
thesis that we started to discuss um
before is every time there is a major
step function in the physical Tech it
obsoletes the previous social Tech and
the new social Tech has to
emerge what I would say is that when we
look at the nation state level of the
world today the more top- down
authoritarian nation states are as the
exponential Tech started to emerge the
digital technology started to emerge
they were in a position for better
long-term planning and better
coordination and so the authoritarian
states started applying the exponential
Tech intentionally to make more
effective authoritarian States and
that's everything from like an Internet
of Things surveillance system going into
machine Learning Systems to the Sesame
credit system to all those types of
things and so they're upgrading their
social Tech using the exponential Tech
otherwise within a nation state like the
us but Democratic open societies the so
the countries the states are not
directing the technology in a way that
makes a better open Society meaning
better emergent order they're saying
well the corporations are doing that and
the state is doing the relatively little
thing it would do aligned with the
previous corporate law that no longer is
relevant because there wasn't fiduciary
responsibility for things like that
there wasn't antitrust because this
creates functional monopolies because of
network Dynamics right where YouTube has
more users than Vio and every other
video player together Amazon has a
bigger percentage of market share than
all of the other markets together you
get one big dog per vertical because of
network effect which is a kind of
organic Monopoly that the previous
antitrust law didn't even have a place
that wasn't a thing antim Monopoly was
only something that emerged in the space
of government contracts so so um so what
we see is the new exponential technology
is being directed by authoritarian
nation states to make better
authoritarian nation states and by
corporations to make more powerful
corporations the powerful corporations
when we think about the Scottish
Enlightenment when the idea of markets
was being Advanced the modern kind of
ideas of markets the biggest
corporation was
Tiny compared to what the biggest
corporation today is so the asymmetry of
it relative to people was
Tiny and the asymmetry now in terms of
the total technology at employees total
amount of money total amount of
information processing is so many orders
of
magnitude and rather than there be
demand for an authentic thing that
creates a basis for Supply as Supply
started to get way more coordinated and
powerful and the demand wasn't
coordinated because you don't have a
labor union of all the customers working
together but you do have a coordination
on the supply side Supply started to
recognize that it could manufacture
demand it could make people want shit
that they didn't want before that maybe
wouldn't increase their happiness in a
meaningful way might increase addiction
addiction is a very good way to
manufacture
demand and so as soon as manufactured
demand started through this is the cool
thing and you have to have it for status
or whatever it is the intelligence of
the market was breaking now it's no
longer collective intelligence system
that is upregulating real desire for
things that are really meaningful you're
able to hijack the lower angels of our
nature rather than the higher ones The
Addictive patterns Drive those and have
people want shit that doesn't actually
make them happier or make the world
better and so we really also have to we
have to update our theory of markets
because behavioral econ showed that
homoeconomicus the rational actor is not
really a thing but particularly at
greater and greater scale can't really
be a thing voluntarism isn't a thing
where if my Corp if my company doesn't
want to advertise on Facebook I just
will lose to the companies that do
because that's where all the fucking
attention is and so then I can say it's
voluntary but it's not really if there's
a functional
Monopoly same if I'm going to sell on
Amazon or things like that so um what I
would say is the these corporations are
becoming more powerful than nation
states in some
ways
and they are also debasing the Integrity
of the nation states the open societies
so the democracies are getting weaker as
a result of exponential Tech and the
kind of new tech companies that are kind
of a new feudalism Tech feudalism
because it's not a democracy inside of a
tech company or the supply and demand
relationship um when you have
manufactured demand and kind of Monopoly
type
functions and so we have basically a new
feudalism controlling exponential Tech
and authoritarian nation states
controlling it and those attractors are
both
shitty and so I'm interested in the
application of exponential Tech to
making better social Tech that makes
emergent order possible
and where then that emergent order can
bind and direct the exponential Tech in
fundamentally healthy not X risk
oriented directions I think the
relationship of social Tech and physical
Tech can make it I think we can actually
use the physical Tech to make better
social Tech but it's not given that we
do if we don't make better social Tech
then I think the physical Tech empowers
really shitty social Tech that it's not
a world that we want I don't know if
it's a road we want to go down but I
tend to believe that the market Market
will create exactly the thing you're
talking about which I feel like there's
a lot of money to be made in
creating a social
Tech that creates a better
citizen that creates a better human
being this this uh the the your
description of Facebook and so on which
is a system that creates addiction which
manufacturers
demand is not
obviously inherently the consequence of
the markets like I feel like that's the
the first stage of us like baby deer
trying to figure out how to use the
internet I I feel like there's much more
money to be made with something that
creates compersion and love honestly I
mean I I I really from we can have this
I can make the business case for it I
don't know I don't think we want to
really have that discussion but don't do
you have some hope that that's the case
and what I guess if not then how do we
fix the system of markets that work so
well for the United States for so long
like I said every social Tech worked for
a while like tribalism worked well for
two or 300,000 years I think social Tech
has to keep evolving the social
Technologies with which we organize and
coordinate our Behavior have to keep
evolving as our physical Tech does um so
I think the thing that we call markets
of course we can try to say oh even
biology runs on markets and but the
thing that we call markets the
underlying Theory homoeconomicus demand
driving Supply that thing broke it broke
with scale in particular um and a few
other things so it needs updated in a
really fundamental
way um I think there's something even
deeper than making money
happening that in some ways will
obsolete money-making
I think capitalism is not about
business so if you think about business
I'm going to produce a good or a service
that people want and bring it to the
market so that people get access to that
good or service that's the world of
business but that's not capitalism
capitalism is the management and
allocation of capital which financial
services was a tiny percentage of the
total Market it's become a huge
percentage of the total Market a
different creature so if I was in
business and I was producing a good or
service and I was saving up enough money
that I started to be able to invest that
money and gain interest or do things
like that I start realizing I'm making
more money on my money than I'm making
on producing the goods and services so I
stop even paying attention to goods and
services and start paying attention to
making money on money and how do I
utilize Capital to create more capital
and capital gives me more optionality
because I can buy anything with it than
a particular good or service that only
some people
want
um
capitalism more Capital ended up meaning
more
control I could put more people under my
employment I could buy larger pieces of
land novel access to Resource mines and
put more technology under my employment
so it meant increased agency and also
increased
control I think ationalism is even more
powerful so rather than enslave people
where the people kind of always want to
get away and put in the least work they
can there's a way in which economic
servitude was just more profitable than
slavery right have the people work even
harder voluntarily because they want to
get ahead and nobody has to be there to
whip them or control them or
whatever this is a a cynical take but it
a meaningful take um
so
people so Capital ends up being a way to
influence human behavior right and
yet where people still feel free in some
meaningful way they they're not feeling
like uh they're going to be punished by
the state if they don't do something
it's like punished by the market via
homelessness or something but the market
is this invisible thing I can't put an
agent on so it feels like free and so
if if you want to affect people's
behavior and still have them feel free
Capital ends up being a way to do that
but I think affecting their attention is
even deeper because if I can affect
their
attention I can both affect what they
want and what they believe and what they
feel and we statistically know this very
clearly Facebook has done studies that
based on changing the feed it can change
beliefs emotional dispositions Etc and
so I think there's a way that
the the harvest and directing of
attention is even a more powerful system
than than capitalism it is effective in
capitalism to generate Capital but I
think it also generates influence beyond
what capital can do and
so do we want to have some groups D
utilizing that type of tech to direct
other people's attention if
so
um towards what towards what metrics of
what a good civilization and good human
life would be what's the oversight
process what is the transparency I can I
can can answer all the things you're
mentioning uh I I can build I I
guarantee you if I I'm not such a lazy
ass uh I'll be part of the many people
doing this is transparency and control
to giving control to individual people
okay so
maybe the
corporation has coordination on its
goals that all of its customers or users
together don't have so there's some
asymmetry where
it's uh a symmetry of its goals but
maybe I could actually help all of the
customers to coordinate almost like a
labor union or whatever by informing and
educating them adequately about the
effects the externalities on them this
is not toxic waste going into the ocean
of the atmosphere it's their their minds
their beings their families their
relationships um such that they will in
group change their behavior and um I
think the IDE
one way of saying what you're saying I
think is that you think that you can
rescue homoeconomicus
from uh the rational actor that will
pursue all the goods and services and
choose the best one at the best price
the kind of Rand Von mis's Hayek that
you can rescue that from Dan areli and
behavioral econ that says that's
actually not how people make choices
they make it based on status hacking
largely whether it's good for them or
not in the long term and the large
asymmetric Corporation can run
propaganda and narrative Warfare that
hits people's status buttons and their
limic hijacks and their lots of other
things in ways that they can't even
perceive that are
happening um they're not paying
attention to that the site is employing
psychologists and split testing and
whatever
else so you're saying I think we can
recover homoeconomicus and not just
through a single like mechanism of
Technology there's there's the uh not to
keep mentioning the guy but platforms
like uh Joe Rogan and so on that that
make help make viral the ways the the
education of negative externalities can
become
viral in this world so
interestingly I actually agree with
you
that got them four and a half hours in
that we can Tech can do some good right
well see what you're talking about is
the application of tech here broadcast
Tech where you can speak to a lot of
people and that's not going to be strong
enough cuz the different people need
spoken to differently which means it has
to be different voices to get Amplified
to those audiences more like Facebook's
Tech but nonetheless we'll start with
broadcast Tech plants the first seed and
then the word of mouth is a powerful
thing you need to do the first broadcast
shotgun and then it like lands or
catapult or whatever I don't know what
the right weapon is but then it just
spreads the word him M through all kinds
of tech including Facebook so let's come
back to the fundamental thing the
fundamental thing is we want to kind of
order at various scales from the
conflicting parts of our self actually
having more Harmony than they might have
to uh family extended family local all
the way up to Global um we want emergent
order where our
choices have more alignment right we
want that to be emergent rather than
imposed or rather than we want
fundamentally different things or make
totally different sense of the world
where Warfare of some kind becomes the
only
solution emerging order requires us in
our choice making requires us being able
to have related sense making and related
meaning making
processes can we
apply digital Technologies and
exponential Tech in general to try to
increase the capacity to do that where
the technology called a town hall the
social Tech that we'd all get together
and talk obviously is very scale Limited
and it's also oriented to geography
rather than networks of aligned interest
can we build new better versions of
those types of things and going back to
the idea that a democracy or
participatory governance depends upon
comprehensive education and the science
of government which includes being able
to understand things like asymmetric
information Warfare on the side of
governments and how the people can
organize adequately um can you utilize
some of the Technologies now to be able
to support increased comprehensive
education of the people and maybe
comprehensive informedness so both
fixing the decay in both education and
the fourth estate that have happened so
that people can start self-organizing to
then influence the corporations the
nation states to do different things and
or build new ones themselves yeah
fundamentally that's the thing that has
to happen we the exponential Tech gives
us a novel problem landscape that the
world never had the the nuke gave us a
novel problem landscape and so that
required the whole Bret and Wood's world
the exponential Tech gives us novel
problem landscape our existing problem
solving processes aren't doing a good
job we have had more countries get nukes
we haven't done nuclear de proliferation
we haven't achieved any of the UN
sustainable development goals um we
haven't kept any of the new categories
of tech from making arms races so our
Global coordination is not adequate to
the problem
landscape so we need fundamentally
better problem solving processes a
market or a state as a problem solving
process we need better ones that can do
do the speed and scale of the current
issues right now speed is one of the
other big things is that by the time we
regulated DDT out of existence or
cigarettes not for people under 18
they'd already killed so many people and
we let the market do the thing but as
Elon has made the point that won't work
for AI by the time we recognize
afterwards that we have an autopoetic AI
That's a problem you won't be able to
reverse it that there's a number of
things that when you're dealing with
tech that is either
self-replicating and disin mediates
humans to keep going doesn't need humans
to keep going or you have Tech that just
has um exponentially fast effects your
regulation has to come early it can't
come after the effects have happened the
negative effects have happened if
because the negative effects could be
too big too quickly so we basically need
new problem solving processes that do
better at being able to internalize
externality solve the problems on the
right time scale and the right
Geographic scale and those new processes
to not be imposed have to emerge from
people wanting them and being able to
participate in their development which
is what I would call kind of a new
cultural Enlightenment or Renaissance
that has to happen where people start
understanding the new power that
exponential Tech offers the way that it
is actually damaging current governance
structures that we care
about and creating an x- risk landscape
but could also be redirected towards
more Proto IC purposes and then saying
how do we rebuild new social
institutions what are adequate social
institutions where we can do
participatory governance at scale in
time and how can the people actually
participate to build those things I the
the solution that I see working requires
a process like
that and the result maximizes love so
again Elon you be right that love is the
answer let me take it back from the
scale of
societies to the scale that's far far
more important which is the uh scale of
uh family you've written a blog post
about your dad we have uh various
flavors of relationships with our
fathers um what have you learned about
life from your
dad well people can read the blog post
and see a lot of individual things that
I learned that I really appreciated um
if I was to kind of summarize at a high
level um I had a really incredible dad
like very very
unusually uh positive set of experiences
he was committed we were homeschooled
and he was committed to work from home
to be available and like prioritize
fathering in a really deep
way
um and you know as a super gifted super
super loving very unique man he also had
his unique issues that were part of what
crafted the unique Brilliance and those
things often go together and I say that
because I think I had I had some unusual
gifts and also some unusual difficulties
and I think it's useful for everybody to
know their path probably has both of
those um but
uh if I was to say kind of at the
essence of one of the things my dad
taught me across a lot of lessons was
like
a the intersection of self-empowerment
ideas and practices that self-empower
towards Collective good uh towards some
virtuous purpose beyond the self and he
both said that a million different ways
taught it in a million different ways
when we were doing construction and he
was teaching me how to uh build a house
we were putting the wires to the walls
before the drywall went on he made sure
that the way that we put the wires
through is beautiful like the
the that the height of the holes was
similar that we Twisted the wires in a
particular way that and it's like no
one's ever going to see it and he's like
if a job's worth doing it's worth doing
well and Excellence is its own reward
and those types of ideas and if there
was a really shitty job to do he'd say
see the job do the job stay out of the
misery just don't indulge in any
negativity do the things that need done
and so there's like a there's an
empowerment and a nobility together
um and yeah that extraordinarily
fortunate is there ways you think you
could have been a better
son is there things you
regret it's an interesting question let
me first say just as a a bit of a
criticism that uh what kind of man do
you think you are not wearing a suit and
tie a real man
should exactly uh I agree with your dad
on that point you mentioned Offline that
uh he suggested a real man should wear a
suit and
tie but outside of that is there ways
you could have been a better
son maybe next time on your show I'll
wear a suit and
tie my dad would be happy about that um
please
I can answer the question later in life
not
early um I had just a huge amount of
respect and reverence for my dad when I
was young so I was asking myself that
question a lot so I there weren't a lot
of things I knew that I wasn't seeking
to apply
um there was a phase when I went through
my kind of individuation
differentiation where I had to make him
excessively wrong about too many things
um I don't think I had to but I did
and he had a lot of kind of non-standard
model beliefs about things
whether
early uh kind of ancient civilizations
or ideas on evolutionary theory or
alternate models of physics and and
um
and they weren't irrational but they
didn't all have the stand
of epistemic proof that I would need and
I went
through and some of them were kind of
spiritual ideas as well I went through a
phase in my early
20s
where I kind of had the the attitude
that
Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens has that
can kind of be
[Laughter]
um like excessively certain and
sanctimonious uh applying their
reductionist philosophy of science to
everything and um kind of brutally
dismissive uh I'm embarrassed by that
phase
um not to say anything about those men
in their path but for myself and so
during that time I was more dismissive
of my dad's epistemology than I would
have liked to have been I got to correct
that later apologize for it but that was
the first thought that came to
mind you've written the
following I've had the experience
countless
times making love watching a sunset
listening to music feeling the
breeze that I would sign up for this
whole life in all of its pains just to
experience this exact
moment this is a kind of worldless
knowing it's the most important and real
truth I know that experience itself is
infinitely meaningful and pain is
temporary and seen clearly even the
suffering is filled with beauty I have
experienced countless lives worth of
moments worthy of life such an
unreasonable
Fortune a few words of gratitude from
you beautifully written is there some
Beautiful Moments now you have uh
experienced countless lives worth of
those moments but there's some things
that
uh if you could uh in your darker
moments you can go to to relive to
remind yourself that the whole ride is
worthwhile maybe skip the Making Love
part we don't want to know about
that I mean I I
feel I feel unreasonably
fortunate
that it is a
such a humongous list because I mean I
feel fortunate to have like had exposure
to practices and philosophies and a way
of seeing things it makes me see things
that way so I can take responsibility
for seeing things in that way and not
taking for granted really wonderful
things but I can't take credit for being
exposed to the philosophies that even
gave me that
possibility
um you know it's not just with my wife
it's with every person who I really love
when we're talking and I look at their
face I in the context of a conversation
feel overwhelmed by How Lucky I Am to
get to know them and like that there's
never been someone like them in all of
history and there never will be again
and they might be gone tomorrow I might
be gone tomorrow and like I get this
moment with them and when you take in
the uniqueness of that fully and the
beauty of it it's overwhelmingly
beautiful and you I remember the first
time I did a big dose of of
mushrooms and I was looking at a tree
for a long time and I was just crying
with overwhelming how beautiful the tree
was and it was a tree outside the front
of my house that I'd walked by a million
times and never looked at like this and
it wasn't the dose of mushrooms where I
was hallucinating like where the tree
was purple yeah like the tree still
looked like if I had to describe it say
it's green it has leaves looks like this
but it was way fucking more beautiful
like like capturing than it normally was
I'm like why is it so beautiful if I
would describe it the same way and I
realize I had no thoughts taking me
anywhere else yeah like what it seemed
like the mushrooms were doing was just
actually shutting the narrative off that
would have me be distracted so I could
really see the tree and then I'm like
fuck when I get off these mushrooms I'm
going to practice seeing the tree
because it's always that beautiful and I
just miss it and so I practice being
with it and quieting the rest of the
mind and then being like wow and and if
it's not mushrooms like people will have
Peak experiences where where they'll see
life and how incredible it is it's
always there it's funny that I had this
exact same experience and on quite a lot
of mushrooms just sitting alone and
looking at a tree and exactly as you
described it appreciating the Bea
undistorted beauty of it and it's funny
to me that here's two humans very
different with very different Journeys
or at some Moment In Time both looking
at a tree like idiots for
hours
and just in awe and and happy to be
alive and yeah uh even just that moment
alone is is worth living for but you did
say humans and we have a moment together
as two humans and you mention shots have
to well I have to ask what uh what what
are we looking at when I went to go get
a smoothie before coming here I got you
a keto smoothie that you didn't want cuz
you're not just keto but fasting but I
saw the thing with you and your dad
where you you did uh shots together yeah
and this place happened to have shots of
um Ginger turmeric
Cayenne juice of some kind and so I with
some Himalayan I didn't necessarily plan
it for being on the show I just brought
it well but we can we can do it that way
I think we should we shall uh we shall
toast like
Heroes Daniel it's a huge honor what we
toast to what do we toast to we toasted
this moment this this this unique moment
that we get to share together I'm very
grateful to be here in this moment with
you and uh yeah I'm grateful that you
invited me here we met for the first
time and I will never be the
same for the good and the bad Li
am that is really interesting that feels
way healthier than the Vodka my dad and
I were
drinking so I feel like a better man
already Daniel this is one of the best
conversations I've ever had I can't wait
to have many more likewise so this is uh
it's been an amazing experience thank
you for wasting all your time today I
want to say in terms of what you're
mentioning
about like the that you work in machine
learning and the
optimism that wants to look at the
issues but wants to look at how this
increased technological power could be
applied to solving them and that even
thinking about the broadcast of like can
I help people understand the issues
better and help organize them like
fundamentally you're you're oriented
like Wikipedia what I see to really try
to tend to the information Commons
without another agentic interest
distorting it and for you to be able to
get guys
like Lee Mullen and Roger Penrose and
like the the the greatest thinkers of
that are alive and you know have them on
the show and most people would never be
exposed to them and talk about it in a
way that people can understand uh I
think it's an incredible service I think
you're doing great work so I was really
happy to hear from you thank you
Daniel thanks for listening to this
conversation with Daniel
schmachtenberger and thank you to ground
news netw suite for sigmatic magic spoon
and better help check them out in the
description to support this podcast and
now let me leave you with some words
from Albert Einstein I know not with
what weapons World War III will be
fought but World War I will be fought
with sticks and stones
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next
time