Wrestling Gnon

100 Years Of Existential Risk

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0700

100 years ago Alfred Korzybski published The Manhood Of Humanity, the first book I’m aware of to analyze existential risks as a general category and try to diagnose their root causes. Using the primitive analytic tools available to him, Korzybski created a movement called General Semantics, which he hoped would raise the sanity waterline in a self improving process far into the future. General Semantics largely petered out a few decades after Korzybski’s death in 1950, but its spirit has been recaptured in contemporary movements like LessWrong rationality, Effective Altruism, etc. In typical histories of existential risk human extinction is taken as becoming an urgent concern after the invention of the atomic bomb. This is true, but Bostrom’s definition of existential risk doesn’t just concern extinction, it also considers regression and stagnation:

Existential risk – One where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

Human extinction may have become an urgent concern with the invention of the atomic bomb, but the permanent regression and stagnation of civilization became an urgent question sooner than that. Conservatively it became urgent after the end of World War I, and World War II simply escalated it from a question of regression to extinction. In fact if we examine the hundred years that have passed since Korzybski’s first investigation, what we find is a century of anxious discourse about the future of human technology and society. Each generation seems to rediscover and reiterate the same theme of exponential growth: in scientific knowledge, in firepower, in resource consumption, in population, in computer intelligence, and in the ability to finely manipulate the physical environment, as threats to humanity’s continued development and existence. Even as these things bolster and uplift us they threaten to destroy us in the same stroke.

The regression and stagnation of civilization is not just a technological question, but a sociological one. This means that the reiterated question of threats from exponential growth are inseparable from ideas like The Great Stagnation, which are fundamentally about why we see exponential growth in some areas but not others. This essay will outline a progression from democratic republics ending the feudal era by inventing mass mobilization, to the arms races of the 19th century taking mass mobilization and armaments to their logical conclusion, to the strategic firebombing and atomic weapons invented by the end of the second world war making armed conflict between nations an increasing logistical impossibility. In the wake of that impossibility societies lose one of the few escape hatches they had to update their institutions as they are rapidly obsolesced by the pace of industrial and scientific progress. Worse still, the link between being able to precisely train, control, and utilize large masses of men and military dominance is severed. In the contemporary battlefield large masses of men are a target, not an advantage, and the organization of the domestic society increasingly reflects this.

Prelude To Existential Risk

Our story begins with the French Revolution, when a group of liberal reformers took over the country, established a republic, and executed King Louis XVI

France found itself immediately under attack from the vengeful monarchs of Europe. The new republic lost badly until The Levée en Masse in August of 1793. It was a mass conscription decree, turning the entire French state and population into a war machine against the European monarchies. This was the trump card that allowed France to survive and ultimately dominate Europe. The monarchies had to be skittish about arming their citizens as troops: if they raised armies too large it would create a latent military ability that might destabilize their state and force concessions during rebellions. The French Republic had no such qualms, creating a latent military ability in the general population was the point, rather than a worrisome byproduct. This meant France could raise armies 10 times the size of its neighbors, an overwhelming advantage without which there would have been no possibility of survival.

France pressed that advantage against the rest of Europe, forcing the monarchies to slowly repeal themselves in the process. It is no coincidence that after Napoleon crushed Prussia at the Battle of Jena immediate nationalizing reforms followed. ‘Nationalization’ in the context of a feudal monarchy is the process of republicanizing and relating the peasantry to the state as citizens rather than serfs. It’s not that the monarchies fell overnight, but from that point forward there was a European trend towards nationalism and more egalitarian norms. The first industrial revolution further incentivized elites to learn to organize and finely control large numbers of people. Stately wealth and power became intimately connected to managerial competence, not just hypergamy and capital accumulation.

Even though Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the mass mobilization necessary to defeat him never really stopped. Instead the energy went into new methods of production like factories, which require strict ordered behavior and mass coordination to work. The new nation-states rapidly built and obsolesced fleets, artillery, weapons, armies. War itself became scarce but the European powers were constantly upgrading their means to pursue it in a costly arms race. This potential violence was exported to foreign lands and colonies, where it became actual violence as the Europeans subjugated less organized peoples and forced them to organize into trading ‘partners’ ruled over by a thin corps of European officers. These colonial empires effectively built an API around foreign lands to rationalize them and extract resources. This rapacious mode of development would have been hard to avoid even if it had been objected to on ethical grounds: Ceding a claim to a territory only meant that its resources would be marshaled against you by a rival.

While it would take some digging to make the case rigorously, it seems likely that the colonial mode of development had the side effect of making war seem romantic. When young men see fighting in distant territories against unequipped competitors as a route to social advancement, war might seem like a kind of hunting or sport. Tales of European exploration and the heraldic exploits of the feudal era promised bygone glory, severing popular imagination from the absurd dimensions of modern warfare between equipped adversaries. The American Civil War in the 1860’s gave some indication of what was to come, but by the onset of WW1 it was a picture 50 years out of date. Despite these defects the colonial powers developed wealth rapidly, creating a virtuous feedback loop where more wealth meant more room for exploration meant still greater wealth.

World War 1 and Early Existential Risk

Then in the 20th century, disaster struck when war became impossible.

The death of war went hand in hand with the birth of existential risk. In the run-up to World War One authors like Jan Bloch and Norman Angell didn’t just claim war would be wasteful. To them a general European war would be suicide. They expected a total war that would burn all resources. Once begun it was unclear when the fighting might stop. It could bring on a chain reaction of blood feuds, the belligerents wrestling each other to dissipation. The end result of this ceaseless, total war would be a global regression to medieval conditions. That republican war machine had become too efficient, the means of devastation too powerful for war to be a viable mechanism for organizing society.

But the theorists sketching World War One were skeptical it could really happen. Jan Bloch wrote 6 volumes on the shape of a future war, yet his ultimate conclusion was that it would never take place. He felt the vast expenditures states were making on a fairy tale conflict could have been going into schools or medicine. Bloch made three major predictions about WW1 that together he claims will make war impossible:

The armaments have become too deadly. The casualties will be enormous, the fighting stagnant and entrenched, and the officers will be killed at astonishing rates. Recent small wars had shown that officer corps get slaughtered in modern warfare.
It will be impossible to organize the multi-million man armies necessary to conduct this fighting. Especially once the officers are slaughtered and there’s no experienced leadership in the ranks.
It will be impossible to feed society and its armies after cutting off global trade and sending away farm hands to fight.

Of these three predictions, Bloch was wrong about the size of the armies being impossible, and he had underestimated the advances in agriculture that just barely kept the fighting viable. What he was not wrong about was the deadliness of the armaments, which had every effect he predicted of them. He felt that the European powers might try a general war once, and then it would be so disastrous that they would never try it again:

I maintain that war has become impossible alike from a military, economic, and political point of view. The very development that has taken place in the mechanism of war has rendered war an impracticable operation. The dimensions of modern armaments and the organization of society have rendered its prosecution an economic impossibility, and, finally, if any attempt were made to demonstrate the inaccuracy of my assertions by putting the matter to a test on a great scale, we should find the inevitable result in a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political organizations. Thus, the great war cannot be made and any attempt to make it would result in suicide. Such I believe, is the simple demonstrable fact.

But no, the European powers fought this war. Then after their regimes collapsed the new ones chose to fight it a second time.

If you had told Bloch that Europe would fight his impossible war, and organize the armies and feed the troops, that the armaments would be exactly as deadly as he says they would be and most of the political consequences he imagined would follow. And then, just a few decades later they would choose to fight that war again; I think he would be quite shocked. But that is in fact what happened.

X-Risk During The Interwar Years

In the interwar years the seeds of what we might now call the rationalist community were born. Those seeds were planted by Alfred Korzybski, a polish nobleman who was 35 when the war started. After WW1 ended European civilization spent the next two decades soul searching. Korzybski participated in the slaughter and sustained lifelong injuries. His experiences drove him to search with the rest of Europe for some kind of answer to what the war meant. Like many other thinkers, the chief concern on his mind was how to prevent a second world war. Where before existential risk was a fringe subject for contrarian, speculative thinkers, now it was very much a going concern. As Dan Carlin points out, it was the first time men became afraid of new weapons not because their enemies might have them, but because they were afraid for the whole species. This fear is visually depicted in the 1936 film Things To Come. Where in the far off year of 1966, a combination of gas attacks, air bombing, and biological warfare has returned humanity to medieval standards of living.

Korzybski concluded that the ultimate cause of the first world war was a disparity in the rate of progress between physical and social science. He formulated the nature of man as a ‘time binder’ separate from animal life in its ability to transmit information between generations. Plants bind energy, animals bind space, humans bind time. He felt people were learning optimally from nature because physical science showed an exponential progression, but their institutions learned at a glacial pace. Wars and insurrections then are caused by people needing to refresh their institutions to keep pace with physical science:

Consider now any two matters of great importance for human weal—jurisprudence for example, and natural science—or any other two major concerns of humanity. It is as plain as the noon-day sun that, if progress in one of the matters advances according to the law of a geometric progression and the other in accordance with a law of an arithmetical progression, progress in the former matter will very quickly and ever more and more rapidly outstrip progress in the latter, so that, if the two interests involved be interdependent (as they always are), a strain is gradually produced in human affairs, social equilibrium is at length destroyed; there follows a period of readjustment by means of violence and force.

But war had become impossible! So what was man to do?

Korzybski’s hope was that it would be possible to use mathematics and engineering methods to make social progress as efficient as scientific progress without resorting to war. He published his first book on this subject, The Manhood Of Humanity, in 1921. He then spent the next ten years researching and writing the second with his ideas on how humanity was to bring about this change in the efficiency of its social progress.

However if war was now impossible, insurrection was not. Even as thinkers like Korzybski, and there were quite a few of them, were doing their best to try and rapidly produce some kind of panacea to the ills of the 20th century; the conditions for a 2nd world war arranged themselves at lightning pace. Russia’s monarchy had fallen to a coup of communist fanatics, who had sights on converting the rest of Europe by insurrection or conquest. This international socialist movement became a real danger to Western states, sympathy towards it prevailed among progressives in Europe and America alike. In response dissidents began constructing and adopting harsh, antihumanist forms of right wing progressivism every bit as maladjusted as that of the Bolsheviks. In the same year Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, his WW1 impossibility thesis, F.T. Marinetti wrote his Futurist Manifesto decrying the sentimentality of Italian culture and calling for omnipresent war:

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

…

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

The socialist and futurist visions clashed violently around the world (and it is this legacy of the word ‘futurist’ that inspired the alternative term ‘futurology’). The right wing dissidents congealed into the person of Mussolini, who combined his homelands futurism and traditionalist machismo aesthetics into a totalitarian, syndicalist vision to get ‘fascism’. The King of Italy was eventually forced to let Mussolini run his country. A German insurrectionist named Adolf Hitler received a stay of execution from sympathetic judges, going on to acquire dictatorial powers through a mass movement. He faced strong opposition from Germany’s domestic communist party, but won thanks to elite sympathies. In Spain the socialists and fascists came to blows with a vicious civil war that ultimately put the fascist dictator Franco in power. There must have been bitter irony for Korzybski, a polish nationalist, that it was Hitler’s invasion of his native Poland that incited the 2nd world war he had spent so much time trying to prevent.

World War 2 and the Invention of Atomic Weapons

A second world war paved way for the most significant event in the history of existential risk: the invention of atomic weaponry. At the war’s outbreak approximately one or two hundred physicists had detailed knowledge of nuclear fission, and its potential for a ‘chain reaction’ releasing enormous amounts of energy. Some of these physicists began preparing to create an atomic bomb based on the process. In Germany, Heisenberg and other theorists spent their time jockeying over status and cutting uranium samples into cubes. They believed themselves in possession of secret knowledge opaque to their dumber colleagues in Britain, the United States, and Russia. In reality the British secret service was well aware of their activities, and prepared to assassinate them if they seemed too close to an atom bomb.

Where the Germans were timid and lazy in their investigations of atomic power, the British and Americans were bold and relentless. In Britain those physicists who understood the danger were terrified that Hitler might attain an atomic bomb. Two of them, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls wrote a memorandum outlining the basic theory of an atomic weapon, ultimately initiating the American Manhattan Project. Where Heisenberg felt reluctant to ask for 350,000 German Reichsmarks (around $140,000 US dollars at the time), the American Manhattan Project spent exorbitant millions in pursuit of the bomb. When the most promising process for getting pure samples of the elusive U-235 was gaseous diffusion, which produced only minute quantities, entire football fields of facilities were built to produce the necessary amounts.

The atom bomb was not just technologically the most significant event in the history of existential risk, but also conceptually. It was while inventing the bomb that the scientific community, and by extension the larger bulk of humanity, came face to face with our destiny as a species: the full implications of harnessing greater and greater amounts of energy. In the course of building the bomb American physicists invented new technologies and mathematics to drive the bomb forward. The polymath John von Neumann invented both the first stored program electronic computer and the statistical methods necessary to model key parts of the bombs operation. He had night terrors during the process about the ultimate consequences of his actions, in one from early 1945 supposedly telling his wife:

What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. Yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for the military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have. And this is only the beginning!

The energy source which is now being made available will make scientists the most hated and most wanted citizens in any country. The world could be conquered, but this nation of puritans will not grab its chance; we will be able to go into space way beyond the moon if only people could keep pace with what they create.

It was here that Neumann and Korzybski converged on the shape of things to come, both thinkers independently derived the technological singularity thesis. The physicist Stan Ulam relates Neumann’s speculation that there is an “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”. 25 years before when Korzybski was trying to derive the nature of man, he had sketched a series of branching paths into his notebook. He noted that the amount of knowledge humanity accumulated from generation to generation seemed to depend upon what was already known, implying an exponential function. Korzybski saw this progression would build slowly over generations until it hit a critical mass.

The singularity they were discussing followed rationally from historical and current events. It is not just man’s knowledge but his energy use and availability that grew exponentially between the early 18th and late 20th centuries. Henry Adams writes in his autobiography:

The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in 1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume seems, it may be tested in a thousand ways without greatly reducing it. Perhaps the ocean steamer is nearest unity and easiest to measure, for any one might hire, in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of 30,000 steam-horse-power to cross the ocean, and by halving this figure every ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835, which was accuracy enough for his purposes.

Between population growth, efficiency improvements, and actual increases in raw energy consumption the nanotechnologist J. Storr Hall estimates an average 7% annual increase in the amount of energy available to mankind since the invention of the Newcomen Engine in 1712. Far from being unprecedented, the birth of a posthuman society that invents everything there is to invent in one sprint was the natural conclusion of recent history. What is surprising is not that these two both came to the same conclusion so early, but that it took people so long to begin speculating about the radical endpoint implied by the progress they were experiencing.

The atom bomb itself followed from existing trends in weaponry during the war. Even before its invention, the methods of strategic bombing had become so effective that they had a 50:1 advantage over air defenses. That is, it cost 50 times less to destroy a square mile of Tokyo than it cost to build it. The first atom bombs gave a 300:1 ratio, or only 6 times what peak allied firebombing was already doing to cities. As Air Force general H.H. Arnold put it in the essay he wrote for One World Or None, even without atomic weapons civilization had already been doomed by advances in bombing. The bomb only made the conclusion overdetermined.

Now war had truly become impossible!

And when your society is a war machine, that exists to organize large masses of men to fight in spectacular wars, this means you have lost the reason for organizing and decay will inevitably set in.

After the war ended there was great panic about the implications of atomic weapons. Many of its inventors quickly came together to write a series of essays to explain them to the public. The resulting book was published in 1946 as One World Or None. It’s a fascinating time capsule, capturing in amber the mood and arguments among many scientifically literate people immediately following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were extremely pessimistic about the possibility of human technology overcoming the problems posed by atomic weapons. To quantify the danger H.H. Arnold put the bombs destructive power in terms of dollars to destroy a square mile of Tokyo, or advantage to the attacker over defenders. Louis Ridenour estimates the maximum efficiency of active defenses as stopping 90% of incoming projectiles, but the advantage to the enemy of only 10% making it through would still be comparable to the apocalyptic strategic bombing that was accomplished with chemical explosives. This is before considering further advances in atomic weapons, which we of course know progressed the question from one of civilizational collapse to human extinction.

The authors of One World Or None were urgent, and told the public that national borders and the concept of ‘national security’ needed to be abandoned immediately for there to be any hope for humanity’s survival. As Harold Urey puts it, whatever is the point of entrenching forts, putting industry underground, and protecting the army, navy, air force from destruction by enemy atomic bombs if those military units cannot protect the citizenry of the country. E.U. Condon speculates about the security state and abolition of civil liberties that will be necessary to prevent briefcase nukes from proliferating near every location of strategic interest in the United States. Walter Lippmann advocates passionately for the establishment of a world government whose laws would apply to individual citizens, not nations, and that the entire world community should stand behind whatever whistleblowers arise to bring anyone trying to build atomic weapons to justice. Einstein had some optimism that world government would be achieved, once people realized there was no cheaper or easier solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, an easier solution to the problem was found.

Game theory, another invention by the polymath Neumann, promised theorists at organizations like RAND a cheap way to prevent a third world war without giving up national sovereignty. The mathematics ‘proved’ that so long as you could make it in nobodies rational interest to start a third world war, and create common knowledge among all parties that it was in no ones interest, no war would occur. Unfortunately, these concepts were very much like the arguments and ideas used to say that there would never be a first world war. They also conveniently precluded building underground societies or dispersing industry across the country. In fact, according to this interpretation the best defense was a good offense, and any defensive measures simply fueled the delusion that war was still possible. The best thing to do was nothing, to ensure the maximum possible damage for all parties if a war broke out.

One could argue that this convenient logic absolved the burgeoning ‘military industrial complex’ of a responsibility to defend civilians or find a real solution to atomic weapons. It is often accepted that having gone 76 years without a 3rd world war that the game theory worked. We would do well to keep in mind however that at the onset of WW1 Europe hadn’t seen a continent wide conflict in a century. It was only after generations of relative peace, with European societies deeply disassociated from the reality of what war meant that they were able to fight Jan Bloch’s impossible conflict. The illusion of national security persists to this day even as no nation is really secure and the standing armies have become totally incapable of protecting the civilian populations they supposedly exist to serve.

Disassociation and Stagnation in the Postwar Years

After the invention of the atomic bomb Western society becomes increasingly unmoored from the material world. It is far beyond the scope of this essay to rigorously pinpoint the exact reasons for this, but a sketch of what happened is of undeniable interest. As has hopefully become clear, the history of existential risk is mostly a history of human technology and its consequences. The increasing disassociation of the postwar years effects not just how people characterize and think about existential risk in the decades that follow, but what technologies are developed. It is not possible to fully come to grips with the rational singularity forecasted by Korzybski and Neumann without a sense of how that singularity was thwarted in the 1960’s and 70’s. Nor is it possible to even begin to understand how Eric Drexler’s ideas about nanotechnology could have almost no physical impact after they became a New York Times bestseller in the 80’s without either assuming their impossibility or some kind of great stagnation thesis. The green activism and debate around limits to growth in the 70’s is both a cause and effect of the great stagnation, without which the narrative thread between what comes before and what follows gets murky.

We can begin our sketch by noting that the cultural decline of Western civilization from the 1950’s onwards is postmarked by its increasing distance from material reality. It was pointed out by the postmodernist Baudrillard that even a system with only reality and reference to reality (which includes other references) will eventually become deranged as the symbols begin pointing only to each other rather than any experience of the territory they claim to map. The only way to prevent this is to have some kind of grounding force that selects for reality based ideas over symbolic rabbit holes. This descent into ‘hyperreality’ can be observed in the trajectory of popular science fiction and ‘fantasy’ lore over the course of the last century. Heinlein’s science fiction novels were derivative of literature describing real scientific and industrial ideas to a young audience. Star Trek was derivative of the pulp science fiction produced by writers like Heinlein. And the same young audience that might once have looked up to Picard now pays attention to the alien-centered morality play of Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe. Tolkien took philology, which studies the linguistics of real historical mythologies and oral traditions, and produced The Lord of The Rings, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson took the fantasy of Tolkien’s generation and produced Dungeons and Dragons, and a surprising number of adults enjoy Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time. It’s notable that Steven Universe and Adventure Time are much more alike than any two works by Tolkien and Heinlein. In the game of simulacrum everything degenerates into the same kind of mush.

One factor going into the postwar stagnation is newfound consumer wealth cushioning US citizens against the immediate consequencs of their actions. After WW2 most industrial societies were in ruins and forced to rebuild, leaving America with strong net exports. In spite of this the decade and a half that followed the invention of the atomic bomb in the United States was malaised. The 1950’s are often remembered as the idyllic golden period of US society, but this is largely nostalgia. In reality the 1950’s was a transitional prelude to the widespread gender confusion and youth violence of the baby boomers in the 60’s and 70’s. The combination of affordable cars and an interstate highway system allowed young Americans to enter previously secluded high-trust communities and destroy them with no repercussions:

The “heroes” of On The Road consider themselves ill-done by and beaten-down. But they are people who can go anywhere they want for free, get a job any time they want, hook up with any girl in the country, and be so clueless about the world that they’re pretty sure being a 1950s black person is a laugh a minute. On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

We know that the 1950’s weren’t the golden age because the generation that grew up in that decade produced the stagnant 70’s. By contrast, the extremely generative period that produced the atomic bomb and most of the technologies that made broad prosperity possible through the rest of the 20th century were products of the American industrial culture of the 1920’s and 30’s. At the onset of the cold war that culture is increasingly demonized and othered in American rhetoric. When it is found that American students are unable to compete with the sterling rigor of Soviet education, America shifts focus to lionizing creativity and imagination. The godlessness of the 1920’s materialism is rescandalized as an intrinsically socialist, subversive idea. And the industrial utopianism that inspired many Americans like Frank Oppenheimer to try changing society through the power of science was interwoven with the communist vision and therefore taboo.

The most overwhelming aspect of One World Or None is its physical, highly intuitive account of the atomic bomb in terms of quantified material factors. The bomb is characterized not as a magic doomsday device, but a bomb with a destructive capacity comparable both to other bombs and to other methods of destruction, construction, etc. It is precisely this physical intuition that Korzybski appeals to in explaining why he thinks his age might succeed in solving the nature of man where previous generations had not. The reader need only compare One World Or None to the later X-Risk classic Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler, which spends pages suggesting the possibilities of atomic scale manufacturing without ever getting into the concrete details of how he expects these machines to compare to traditional industrial processes.

As the Soviet acquisition of atomic arms made war between the United States and the USSR truly impossible, military focus also became increasingly disassociated from reality. Operations shifted to proxy wars fought between the two powers. The first of these wars in Korea was so much like a real conflict that it allowed the US to keep up its illusions about the viability of war for a little longer. The next adventure in Vietnam removed all romance from the equation, pitting the well oiled US military against irregular jungle fighters who lured that foreign war machine straight into the mud. Getting stuck in that quagmire exposed US troops to lethal and traumatizing ambushes at the same time it exposed domestic society to insurrection and upheaval. Young men were incensed at the waste, brutality, and dishonor of this conflict. Their fathers had gotten to unseat the genocidal tyrant Hitler, but they were being asked to kill women and children in a faraway place of no clear importance.

Exponential Extraction and Externalities: The Limits To Growth

Both the focus on exponential growth and the disassociation from material factors are present in The Limits To Growth, a book that characterizes the 70’s X-Risk zeitgeist. The Limits To Growth is a short 1972 book about human resource consumption. It is written by The Club of Rome, a group of authors using ‘computer simulations’ not to predict the future, but to infer its shape. The Limits To Growth makes a basic argument about the trajectory of human civilization. Its authors state that because humanity is growing in population and using finite earthly resources at an exponential rate, the ‘natural’ development curve will be to consume almost all nonrenewable resources and then permanently crash down to an earlier level of development. At the same time humanity exponentially exhausts its resources it is also running into the limits for environmental absorbtion of the byproducts of human industry. Rising levels of mercury in fish, and lead in the polar ice point towards massive impacts of human industry on the surrounding environment. Carbon emissions from industry seem to be mostly absorbed by the ocean as well. In their simulations the Club of Rome finds that pollution is an even bigger threat than resource consumption. It both cuts off the flow of food and directly reduces the human lifespan, retarding the growth of civilization. However because their book is not a prediction, the Club of Rome completely declines to give any concrete figures about when pollution will reach a tipping point, noting that such questions seem impossible to answer even in principle while also admitting that tipping points have been observed from acute pollution in a local setting. They justify this hesitation explicitly:

The difference between the various degrees of "prediction" might be best illustrated by a simple example. If you throw a ball straight up into the air, you can predict with certainty what its general behavior will be. It will rise with decreasing velocity, then reverse direction and fall down with increasing velocity until it hits the ground. You know that it will not continue rising forever, nor begin to orbit the earth, nor loop three times before landing. It is this sort of elemental understanding of behavior modes that we are seeking with the present world model. If one wanted to predict exactly how high a thrown ball would rise or exactly where and when it would hit the ground, it would be necessary to make a detailed calculation based on precise information about the ball, the altitude, the wind, and the force of the initial throw. Similarly, if we wanted to predict the size of the earth's population in 1993 within a few percent, we would need a very much more complicated model than the one described here. We would also need information about the world system more precise and comprehensive than is currently available.

The Limits To Growth could just as easily be titled “counterinutitive properties of the exponential function”. It discusses specific resources like chromium only as examples of general categories, which could be omitted from the text without losing any substance. A reader who wants to get a specific sense of what I mean by disassociation needs only read one of the essays in One World Or None and then compare it to a subject discussed in The Limits To Growth. They will quickly realize that where the physics trained essayists in One World Or None are capable of rapidly producing thoroughly justified answers to speculative subjects, the authors of The Limits To Growth can’t manage half the clarity of a single essay in ten times the space.

The book is very much like Korzybski’s Manhood Of Humanity in that it is dealing with the nature of man as an exponential function. But where Korzybski focuses on the disparity between the rate of social and physical science, the Club of Rome focuses on the disparity between exponential growth and a finite environment. Because it is published 50 years after Manhood of Humanity, The Limits To Growth can take advantage of cybernetic concepts like positive and negative feedback loops which it uses to frame its argument. These unfortunately result mostly in borderline incomprehensible graphics that do more to obfuscate than enlighten. None of these flaws prevented it from receiving widespread discussion, or from its essential conclusions becoming the dominant outlook of green activists.

In the 60’s and 70’s population growth and energy-resource use apocalypses go hand in hand with nuclear apocalypse. Multiple authors in One World Or None recommend that nuclear power be delayed until world government or other means of control are established, because atomic power plants are the natural fuel source for atomic bombs. Anti-nuclear activists took this recommendation to heart and vigorously protested the construction of nuclear plants, ensuring that humanity continues to use fossil fuels well into the 21st century. Nuclear power suggests some of the catch-22 in the recommendations of authors like Club of Rome, namely that the measures taken to curb the growth that might kill us exacerbate issues like climate change that also might kill us.

It is important to remember that the core problem of the atomic bomb is humanity harnessing a level of energy with which it can kill itself. So anti-nuclear activism isn’t really about nuclear power, but all forms of energy. Space colonization also implies gaining access to suicidal amounts of energy in the form of room to accelerate objects to deadly speeds that crash into earth with energies far greater than an atomic bomb. This means a green society must ultimately cripple or retard basically all forms of industrial progress and expansion. While the first anti-nuclear activists might be characterized as naive, their successors seem to have a gleeful nihilism about sabotaging society. Because all forms of production need to use energy, control over what uses of energy are considered wasteful is dictatorial control over all processes of production. J. Storr Hall notes in Where Is My Flying Car? that these same activists were horrified by the prospect of cold fusion power, which has nothing to do with atom bombs.

Of the three sources of energy becoming available to society noted by Hall: fuel, population growth, and efficiency improvements, fuel and population both flattened; avoiding the industrial singularity that had been building since the Newcomen Engine. Humans can only learn at a relatively slow pace, so the progress in knowledge noted by Korzybski relied on a rapidly increasing population. Production of goods and services also requires people to perform, so industrial progress was also retarded by slowing population growth and further slowed by flat energy use. Hall also notes that the efficiency improvements which green activists lionize tend to result in increased demand that leads to more resource use. He attributes 3% of his 7% more available energy per year to population growth, 2% to fuel consumption, and 2% to efficiency improvements. World GDP growth in the last 50 years tends to be in the 2-4% range.

Drexler Contra Rome on Limits To Growth: Nanotechnology and Engines of Creation

Probably the most interesting response to Limits To Growth was by the scientist Eric Drexler. He noted that the microscopic scale at which cells operate implied much more precise forms of industry were possible than currently in use. This precise nanomachine industry would be able to recycle waste, use much fewer resources to accomplish tasks, work directly off solar energy, and reproduce itself from common materials just like existing lifeforms. Man could clean up his existing environment and then push dirty processes of production more easily into space using enhanced material science. But this was only the start: the same nanotechnology could be used to produce fundamental changes in the human condition by merging machines with the human body, performing surgeries impossible with contemporary medicine like reviving cryonics patients from the dead, and even changing human nature by making every faculty of man a programmable machine.

In fact Drexler quickly became so impressed by the capabilities of his hypothetical nanobots that he realized they could easily become an existential risk unto themselves. Unlike traditional protein based life, diamond nanomachines would be able to easily outcompete existing lifeforms in the wild. Their rate of reproduction would also be exponential, if they could construct themselves from common biomass or soil they might consume the entire planet, a hypothetical known as the gray goo problem. Rather than rejoice that a solution to mankind’s resource problems was at hand, Drexler found himself horrified by the nightmare that civilization was sleepwalking into. Without adequate preparation disaster was sure to come, and the precursors to nanotechnology such as genetic engineering and miniature computing devices were already being developed.

This all might seem like a fanciful notion, but Drexler was responding to a call to action from the Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman. In his 1959 talk Plenty Of Room At The Bottom Feynman explained how the miniaturization of industry would transform society. He discussed how working on the molecular and atomic scale would pave the way for genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, atomically precise manufacturing of all products, and possibly even the elimination of disease through small surgical robots. Feynman expresses his strong confusion that nobody is doing this yet, and exhorts the audience to closely investigate ways that the electron microscope might be improved. This talk seems to have been the basic blueprint not just for Drexler’s research program, but his overall thoughts on what nanotechnology implied for the future.

After publishing his thesis Drexler wrote up a pop science version of his ideas in the bestselling 1986 book Engines of Creation. Most of Engines&hellip is not actually about the technical details of nanotech, or even nanotech at all. Rather Engines of Creation is a guide to thinking about the consequences of technologies with exponential growth curves using the frame of evolutionary selection, then the dominant paradigm in AI. In it Drexler invents the timeline mode of analysis that would be familiar to contemporary theorists of existential risk. In Drexler’s timeline convergent interests from computer manufacturers, biologists, and others will create what he terms proto-assemblers that put together products at the nanoscale level in a limited way. Once these are mastered they will become universal assemblers that can be programmed to put together any product that can be made out of atoms. But before that can happen certain obstacles have to be overcome, these obstacles frame the Drexler timeline.

Drexler’s expectation was that on the way to proto-assemblers we would build narrow AI tools that allow us to build smaller and smaller computer chips. By the standards of what was considered AI in the 80’s, the current computer programs used to design circuits in computer engineering certainly qualify. Narrow AI would have a positive feedback loop with computers where better computers lead to better AI leading to better computer chips. AI would also help unlock the secrets of protein folding and genetic engineering, allowing the eventual creation of proto-assemblers. Drexler believed that before its invention AI programs would already explore nanotechnology space in anticipation of its possibility.

In this timeline once narrow AI is good enough it will allow the creation of proto-assemblers and then universal assemblers. Drexler admits he’s uncertain about what it will take to create general artificial intelligence, but that as a upper bound we know human minds occur in the physical universe so neuromorphic AI should work. Working off that inference Drexler figures that narrow AI will usher in nanotech and then nanotech will usher in AGI built off extremely miniaturized cheap computing devices such as protein computers. Both the nanotech and the AGI present an existential risk to humanity, but since nanotech poses a threat first 1986!Drexler focuses his narrative on that.

In order to avert catastrophe Drexler believes that the first scientists to nanotech will have to develop an “active shield” that finds and destroys any rogue competing nanomachines in its sphere of influence. If successful not only would this avert apocalypse, but end all forms of microbic disease and unwanted pests in human territory. However it would also give the controllers of the active shield dictatorial power over the structure of matter in their territory, leading Drexler to deeply fear its first development by authoritarian societies. This likely leads to arms race dynamics in nanotech, reducing the likelihood that its first creators will have a significant lead time in which to develop an active shield and also reducing the likelihood that its inventors will create it safely. Since the two superpowers have a vested interest in not witnessing this outcome, Drexler muses about the possibility of a collaboration between the Soviets and Americans on this issue.

In the end it didn’t matter, because even after becoming a New York Times bestseller no state seems to have seriously pursued nanotechnology. It is not entirely clear why. J. Storr Hall writes in Where Is My Flying Car? that the money invested into American nanotech went to grifters and charlatans who did not want atomically precise manufacturing capability to exist. But even if we accept this it simply pushes the question a step backwards: If states understood the thing they were trying to fund, atomically precise manufacturing as opposed to the buzzword ‘nanotech’, it seems unlikely they would allow an investment of millions of dollars to be wasted. Nor would they stop after ‘merely’ wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on their research program. The Manhattan Project was allowed to consume the equivalent of 23 billion dollars in 2007 money, and the active shield seems at least as important to develop as the atomic bomb.

Some theorists believe the answer is that nanotechnology as described by Drexler is simply not possible. Richard Smalley, a Nobel prize winning chemist who discovered buckminsterfullerene had a well publicized debate with Drexler where he claimed that nanomachines are ruled out by physical principles, and that the idea of ‘atomically precise’ manufacturing is the province of computer scientists who don’t understand that atoms do not just go wherever you want to put them. There is a striking parallel between the arguments used against nanotech and the arguments used against AGI, in that both tend to imply things we know exist shouldn’t be possible. Beyond a certain point one is forced into the position of arguing that self replicating microscopic machines are known to exist but can only function in exactly the form we find them in nature with no alternative approaches or substrate materials being possible. In the same way, beyond a certain point one is forced into arguing that the human brain exists and seems to have at least some material basis but cannot be replicated with a sufficient quantity of nonbiological components, or if it can that humans happen to occupy the peak of potential intelligence in spite of their design, resource, energy, and space limitations. Which is to say that beyond a certain point one is forced to call bullshit.

Extropians and X-Risks

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 made the 1990’s an optimistic decade in the West. Intellectuals such as Fukuyama speculated about an ‘end to history’ as liberal democracy spreads across the world. This meant the intense focus on existential risk in Drexler’s work largely fell on deaf ears. He correctly predicted at the end of Engines… that as time passed his ideas would be broken up into decontextualized chunks. Cryonicists were interested because nanotech provided a plausible way to revive patients. Engineers liked having a retort to the eco-doomsayers and hippies. The burgeoning transhumanist movement saw an opportunity to radically reinvent themselves. But it seems very few people read Drexler’s book and came away with the intended conclusion they were in mortal danger.

While a general atmosphere of 90’s optimism delayed thinking on existential risk, it was the most optimistic and vivacious transhumanist thinkers who ended up advancing it in the 2000’s. Perhaps the most notable conversion story is that of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a young physicist introduced to Drexler’s work through Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition. Great Mambo Chicken… is a book detailing how the early cryonics and L5 space colonization communities (of which Drexler was a member) became the transhumanist movement. Yudkowsky had managed to totally miss the urgency of Drexler’s message, since it was unintuitive to him that as the engine of progress technology could really do harm to the human race. His newfound interest eventually landed him on the extropians mailing list. The extropians were a libertarian transhumanist group with the modest goal of (among other things) abolishing death and taxes. It was while discussing nanotechnology with these people that Yudkowsky came to the startling realization that they didn’t really seem to be taking it seriously. If the implications of the technology implied real danger, they shied away from it because it might be incompatible with their libertarianism. Eventually Yudkowsky forked the list and founded a new group called SL4, meant only for people who reliably take weird ideas to their logical conclusions.

The realization that nanoweapons would destroy humanity pushed Eliezer to work harder on superintelligent AI. Since nanotechnology was going to destroy everything by default, he reasoned, the best thing to do was to accelerate the invention of a superintelligent AI that could prevent humanity from destroying itself. At first he thought that since the AI would be superintelligent, it would do good intelligent things by default. But in time he came to understand that ‘intelligence’ isn’t a human category, that humanity occupies a tiny sliver of possible minds and most minds are not compatible with human values. People only encounter intelligent human minds, so they think intelligent behavior means human behavior. This is a fatal mistake, there is a long history of AI researchers being surprised by the gap between what they think their instructions mean and what their programs actually do. In the year 2000 Marvin Minsky suggests that a superintelligent AI asked to solve a difficult (or outright impossible) math problem might ‘satisfy’ its creator’s goal by turning them and the rest of the solar system into a bigger computer to think with.

The relentless optimism of the 90’s evaporated after the 9/11 attacks inaugerated the new millenium in 2001. It seems auspicious that Nick Bostrom coined the phrase ‘existential risk’ in a 2002 paper, while across the ocean the United States was hard at work moving towards the onerous police state E.U. Condon felt would be a necessary response to briefcase nukes. In the desipair laden years that followed optimistic transhumanist sects went extinct while the profile of existential risk grew. Extropy went from being the dominant force in transhumanism to a footnote. As a cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association, Bostrom was able to capture the wilting energy, leading the movement away from exuberant libertarianism towards a central focus on X-Risk.

At some point during those years an equinox was reached between nanotechnology and AGI as the apex existential risk. Where the Drexler timeline had specified AGI would be a consequence of nanotechnology, now many thinkers such as Yudkowsky had put it the other way around: Superintelligent AI would come first, and nanotechnology would just be an implementation detail of how it destroys the world. This reversal was likely a consequence of increasing globalization: Moore’s Law stubbornly refused to quit giving computer performance enhancements while physical industry in the West became obviously stagnant. It no longer seemed plausible that anybody would build nanotechnology before AI became so good that it could develop itself into a bigger threat. The Yudkowsky timeline where fully general AI causes nanotech (and then immediately after the end of the world) unseated the Drexler timeline so thoroughly that it has seemingly been totally forgotten. Drexler’s ideas are retrospectively described as though they were unaware of AI, or that inventing everything there is to invent in one short sprint isn’t explicitly discussed in Engines of Creation.

By contrast Yudkowsky describes his vision of AI apocalypse in That Alien Message. His hypothetical AI approximates Solomonoff Induction, a theoretically perfect reasoning process able to infer the structure of the universe from minute quantities of information, say a video of a falling apple. While our current AI techniques such as deep learning fall far short of the performance implied by Solomonoff, Yudkowsky believed while writing that general intelligence would force researchers to get strong theoretical foundations, letting them approach the mathematical limits of inference. In his story humanity stands in for the AI, describing how we would react if we discovered a group of braindead gods with braindead alien values were simulating us in one of their computers. We easily trick them into thinking we’re dumber than we are, convince someone in the outside world to mix together our nanotech built in their physics, then consume them without a shred of empathy. It’s possible to quibble about how much empathy we would show our creators in this situation, but we can be fairly sure the story does not end with “and then after aeons of slowly grinding themselves up to creating an artificial mind the smoothbrains ruled the universe in plenty and peace until the end of time.”

Effective Altruism and X-Risk

During the 2010’s philosophers of existential risk began to rebrand away from their close association with transhumanism. Being tied to the hip with a niche, ‘radical’ ideology is counterproductive to their goal of getting humanity to notice it is in mortal danger. The perceived cultishness of transhumanism put up barriers to academic and institutional support for studies into X-Risk. So whether consciously or not, philosophers such as Bostrom began to divorce themselves from an explicit ‘transhumanist’ agenda. This wasn’t a change in beliefs or policy proposals so much as a change in emphasis. Humanity was still meant to conquer the stars and produce trillions upon trillions of kaleidoscopic descendants, but this project began to be framed in ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ terms such as utilitarianism and population ethics.

The first major opportunity to do this arose with Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism movement. The original idea behind Effective Altruism is pretty simple: A dollar goes further in the 3rd world than the 1st world, so if your goal is to make peoples lives better you’ll get more leverage by helping people in developing countries. This was paired with another idea called Earn To Give, where people take high paying jobs and live like paupers while they donate the rest to charity. Between these two concepts Effective Altruism built a community of strong utilitarians with significant personal investment in finding the best ways to help others. Early Effective Altruism had a lot of overlap with Yudkowsky’s rationalist movement, a self help version of Extropy that has an explicit X-Risk focus. This meant that X-Risk theorists could translate their ideas into the traditional moral philosophy used by Singer and get intelligent elites interested in them. Fringe philosophers like Yudkowsky were phased out of discourse in favor of more popular thinkers like Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics justified a central focus on existential risk for altruists. You can spend thousands of dollars to save a 3rd world life, or put the same amount of wealth towards ensuring the eventual existence of many many more future people. The resulting ‘longtermist’ altruism remains controversial in EA circles to this day.

Adopting the traditional moral philosophy of Effective Altruism had several unintended side effects on the field of existential risk. Probably the most important was that it put negative altruist interpretations of X-Risk into the overton window. Negative utilitarianism is the moral position that no amount of positive experiences outweighs suffering, and therefore only the reduction of suffering is morally relevant. Nick Bostrom cofounded the World Transhumanist Association with David Pearce, a negative utilitarian philosopher who believes life is a mistake and openly admits in interviews that he wants to destroy the universe. Because he doesn’t believe destroying the universe is politically viable, Pearce settles for advocating the abolition and replacement of all suffering with positive experiences. This isn’t because David Pearce is excited about there being more positive experiences, but because the positive experiences will replace the negative.

There is a natural tension between advocating the abolition of all life while opposing human extinction, but it’s not as crazy as it might sound at first. After all, if humanity goes extinct but leaves behind even trace multicellular life it will quickly evolve back into sentient beings capable of suffering. In a negative utilitarian interpretation humanity must become all-powerful so it can engage in true omnicide, not just save itself from suffering. Many other high profile negative utilitarians such as Brian Tomasik agree that it’s not politically viable to destroy all life, and see their job as harm reduction in the life that will inevitably persist past the singularity.

It is probably worth the readers time to reflect on the esoteric interpretation of these events. In order to garner stronger institutional support eager immortalists were forced to align themselves more closely with the underlying ethos of our current societies: The uncompromising, unexcepted suicide of all human persons and the total abolition of existence. With the COVID-19 pandemic testing all Western institutions and finding them virtually all wanting, at the same time it secludes people to their homes, and subjects them to an increasingly onerous police state, it seems predictable that the idea of committing suicide will gain enormous cachet, especially among the young. Under the weight of total social, institutional, and metaphysical failure it will increasingly seem to people like suicide is the only way out.

But there is another way out, if we still have enough sanity left to pursue it.

Alchemy As Precursor To Transhumanist Values & Philosophy

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0700

Special thanks to Ratheka Stormbjorne and Shiloh Miyazaki for doing some of the research for this essay. All opinions expressed are my own however.

The first work of science fiction was written because Mary Shelley couldn’t think of a ghost story. When she first came to Lake Geneva writing was the last thing on her mind, she’d originally intended on taking a vacation. Her relationship with the alchemist-poet Percy Shelley had set off an avalanche of scandal and drama; he had abandoned his marriage to be with her. Fleeing England, the couple was desperate to get their mind off it with vigorous outdoor activity, but fallout from a volcanic eruption the year before foiled their plans. In fact 1816 would eventually be known as “The Year Without A Summer”, in Lake Geneva it was cold enough to confine the pair to a Swiss villa with their new friend Lord Byron and his personal physician. During this isolation the group amused themselves by reading translated German ghost stories. Byron eventually suggested they should try writing some spooky tales of their own.

Mary liked the idea but found herself stumped, she spent days trying to think of something. Inspiration finally struck after listening to her boyfriend Percy and Lord Byron discuss what might come of Galvanism, the discovery of “animal electricity” and the gruesome phenomena of dead flesh temporarily reviving under electrical stimulation. To many late 18th and early 19th century scientists it seemed that at last the secret of life had been uncovered. It was possible that man would soon gain total control over biology. Debate raged over what should be done with these new powers if they materialized. Theologists were terrified that success would mean the triumph of atheism, people would come to understand that man was a kind of automaton fully explainable without an immortal soul. Industrialists on the other hand were intrigued, and even talked of creating a new race of servants to replace their human workers. Mary found it all haunting, she went to bed that night imagining “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together”, the ‘thing’ brought to life by the awesome power of Galvanism. When she tore herself away from the daydream she realized it would be a perfect story. With this first scene in mind she began writing the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein and his monster.

Galvanism may have been new but the scientific impulses behind it were not. It had taken over two millennia for chemistry to reach the stage where creating new forms of life from raw parts seemed like a realistic possibility. Percy Shelley’s interest in the Noble Art of alchemy placed him at the tail end of a nearly two century long project to purify Europe, casting out its backwardness and superstitions.

At Oxford he had set up a kind of ‘mad scientists lab’ in his dorm room, a primordial chaos of galvanic batteries, obscure poisons, and strange drugs. This put Percy into conflict with certain religious faculty, Roseanne Montillo writes:

While on a nightly round Mr. Bethell heard peculiar noises coming from behind Shelley's locked doors. Curious, he became convinced that Shelley was engaging in "nefarious scientific pursuits," which of course he intended to put a halt to. He marched into the room, where Shelley was engulfed in a leaping "blue-flame". Stunned, Bethell asked what he was doing, and Shelley replied, "I am raising the devil." On hearing this, the tutor approached the galvanic battery and placed his hands above it. He received a nasty electrical discharge that sent him flying across the room.

Shelley was later expelled for writing a pamphlet advocating atheism. Mary learned what she knew of alchemy from Percy. Thus her novel Frankenstein inadvertently stands at a cultural-historical nexus, between the world before and after Europe’s transmutation from feudal slum to secularizing industrial society. During this period chemistry underwent its own transformation from ‘alchemy’ to chymistry, attacking its former claims to goldmaking in exchange for greater academic status. As a result alchemy’s legacy has been largely excised from the history of science. Isaac Newton for example was an aspiring adept who mostly researched how to brew the philosophers stone. He would have been rightly known in his own time as an alchemist, but is given the title of ‘physicist’ or ‘mathematician’ in ours.

Alchemy As Precursor and Its Early History

Histories of transhumanism have been indirect victims of sidelining alchemy’s influence on science. Two mentions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appear in Nick Bostrom’s history of transhumanism, and they’re both incidental. The Galvanism which had inspired her story doesn’t appear at all, and alchemy is relegated to a few paragraphs at the beginning. Newton comes up as a ‘rational humanist’, which he was not (Keynes, 1946). Four of the paper’s twenty five pages are dedicated to antecedents, with the rest focusing on 20th century developments. Elise Bohan’s book on the same subject also skips alchemy on the basis that transhumanism is founded on modern scientific epistemology, so nothing before that can really be called transhumanism (Bohan, 2019). This is unfortunate because alchemy is very much part of the history of science, and it’s the part which most earnestly engages with the goals of transhumanism. It is precisely the embarrassment from these earlier studies overexaggerations, hoaxes and mythologies that makes people feel the need to apologize when discussing the ‘absurdity’ of discovering eternal life in the modern academic context (as e.g. Huaizhi and Yuantao 2001 do). One could argue that transhumanists simply represent a return to form now that modern science has regained the confidence its predecessors lost during the Enlightenment.

The origins of those predecessors are shrouded in mystery. No records survive of man’s first serious attempts at goldmaking, and its early history is not completely known. Medieval alchemists believed their discipline had been invented by a man named Hermes Trismegistus (Principe, 2013). Said to have received the true theology from God, Hermes was famous for prophesizing the rise of Christianity. However close analysis of the Hermetic texts bearing his name in the 17th century found them to be the pseudonymous work of other, likely Greek authors of the 3rd and 4th centuries (“Isaac Casaubon,” n.d.). Modern scholarship gives conflicted accounts of alchemy’s origins. Lawrence Principe writes in his Secrets Of Alchemy that alchemy was born from the practical counterfeiting literature of Egyptian artisans meeting Greek philosophy through 3rd century (A.D.) trade (Principe, 2013). He believes that some people were unsatisfied with counterfeiting gold, and began researching how to make the genuine article.

Many other scholars don’t believe alchemy began with making gold at all. Jung’s interpretation of alchemy as an internal, spiritual transformation is (in)famous, but also ahistorical (Principe, 2013). A more plausible narrative is presented by S. Mahdihassan, who interprets the ‘red powder’ described as the philosophers stone to be colloidal gold, often ‘brick red’ in color (Mahdihassan, 1979). In his account alchemy began as part of Chinese medicine, which held ‘soul energy’ to be related to redness. Herbalist immortality cults slowly evolved into metallic (i.e. gold, mercury) immortality cults, and their beliefs were spread by trade to India, Rome, etc. We know in China itself there are descriptions of immortals eating gold to preserve their youth. For example the book “On Salt and Iron” written by Huan Kuan in 81 B.C states that “immortals swallow gold and pearls, so that they enjoy eternal life in heaven and earth”; later works explicitly claim alchemists eat gold to live longer (Huaizhi & Yuantao, 2001). Alchemy then was the preparation of colloidal red-gold, which eventually mutated into attempts to create gold bullion.

Picture of colloidal gold in various sizes by Aleksandar Kondinski. License.

Regardless of which interpretation we believe it is clear that Chinese alchemy seems to have started as medicine, primarily pursuing the elixir of life. Western alchemy by contrast fixated at some early point in its history on the philosophers stone, a legendary substance said to be able to turn ‘base metals’ into gold bullion. In both cases these aims were largely retained, with the elixir of life staying primary in China even after the introduction of goldmaking (Barnes, 1934), and medicine only becoming a major component of Western alchemy after John of Rupescissa wrote about it in the 14th century (Principe, 2013). Thus we can say that alchemy began the formal scientific study of two key planks of the extropian agenda: Defeating death in the Eastern alchemy and achieving post-scarcity in the West.

Alchemy and Transhumanism

Beyond goals alchemy shares a fundamental philosophical bond with transhumanism: It was likely the first time men made the argument that artificial products could out-do their natural equivalents. In today’s world of synthetic fabrics, pharmaceuticals, plastics and stainless steel nobody denies that it’s possible to improve on the materials provided by nature. But when alchemy first hit the scene (and for many centuries after) this was considered an open question. Avicenna (A.D. 980-1037) wrote against alchemy on the basis that human industry is fundamentally weaker than the powers of god, implying transmutation is impossible (Principe, 2013). Roger Bacon’s (A.D. 1214-1294) spirited response to this argument in 1266-67 went farther than claiming parity, he insisted that alchemical gold was better than real gold! Principe notes that defenses of alchemy may constitute the first sustained arguments in favor of the power of human ingenuity and technology (Principe, 2013). This seems plausible, nearly a thousand years earlier Ge Hong of the Eastern Dynasty (A.D. 284-364) wrote that ‘medicinal gold’ made by alchemists was better at curing disease than real gold, stating “the gold thus transformed is the essence of all the medicine, much better than all the natural drugs” (Huaizhi & Yuantao, 2001). Mahdihassan points out that the colloidal gold which may have inspired the legend of the philosophers stone would be the first synthetic drug ever made (Mahdihassan, 1984). The willingness to:

Radically intervene in
Places thought to be immutable natural orders by
Carefully applying natural philosophy

Is a clear philosophical family relation to alchemy that goes beyond superficial shared goals.

These days when it comes to radical intervention, making table salt doesn’t cut it anymore. In his book Great Mambo Chicken & The Transhuman Condition Ed Regis describes the artificial planets proposed by Gerry O’Neill. O’Neill asked his students, almost on a whim, if the earth’s surface was really the best place for human life. They studied the question seriously and concluded that artificial worlds could be much better than earth. However building them would require people to accept the sense of intervening into the terra firma itself to create better conditions for crops, cities, space travel, etc (Regis, 1990). Like Bacon’s insistence that alchemical gold can beat the natural article, O’Neill doesn’t stop at the idea we might create comparable worlds to Earth. He thinks our planets ‘design’ is mediocre (also, recall, not actually designed) and human engineering can surpass it.

Universalist Greed

One of the more subtle parallels between transhumanism and alchemy is their shared attitude towards greed, and by extension agency. Sustained human agency is difficult because people do not default to ‘agentic’ behavior in the economically rational, maximizing sense. A maximizing agent implicitly wants everything. The infamous paperclip maximizer will, if given the power to do so, consume every available resource in the universe to make more paperclips. People usually don’t act like that, they’re more like automatons that explore for N steps until they find a niche to settle into, ideally exploiting it for the rest of their life. Even the basic drives are about satisfaction, not maximization. Take hunger for example: You get hungry, eat, and are no longer hungry; until the equilibrium is disrupted and you become hungry again.

Only people who are hard to satisfy can really manifest agency, otherwise they settle into a niche and decay. Those who are competent eventually reach a kind of escape velocity, where they’ve won enough at life that they’ve fully satisfied their physical and social needs. People who want to make an impact beyond that, whose agency doesn’t short circuit in the presence of readily available mates, land, food & water, respect, and all the other trappings of personal victory are the only kind of creature that is suited to things like transhumanism or alchemy. Evolutionary psychologists are quick to remind us that all of our behavior is an elaborate ruse to mate and raise babies. The first act of transcendence is to let this ruse become self sustaining, a game that is played for its own sake on its own terms. Loving your neighbor is adaptive, loving the world is pathology. It’s necessary to develop this kind of pathology to get anywhere with serious transhumanism when the script is calling for babies and suicide. Good people who want to be good rather than just adaptively good (i.e. genuinely altruistic) should be maximizers.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, imagine taking a walk with your friend on the beach. It’s a nice day out and neither of you are in any hurry. You both decide that since you’re there, cleaning up trash sounds like a decent thing to do while you talk. As you’re cleaning you get to asking yourselves how you could clean at scale. It turns out beaches have a lot of trash, and you know every piece of it will wind up contaminating the water or lodged in an animals stomach. The ideas start small and gradually get more ambitious. One thought is you could start a livestream of trash collecting together, advertising the activity as an opportunity for cool philosophical discussion. Maybe you could make a trash collection game, one that uses machine learning to identify and score points for different kinds of trash. Perhaps there’s some kind of legal intervention you could lobby for, one that would reduce the amount of trash being left on beaches in the first place.

By the way, this is a true story.

You end up collecting a full trash bag, which you discover takes a lot of effort. Your imagination turns to big piles of trash like this on every beach in the world, and the herculean task of trying to pick it all up. That aching in your bones is one garbage bags worth, the pain of picking up a single beach of trash. Zooming out you imagine that sensation growing as the picture gets bigger. 5 beaches worth of pain, 10 beaches, 20 beaches, 50, 100…you envision a little army of people picking up trash off beaches, at a scale where it’s no longer human, it’s just a number. And each monotonic increase in that number represents that pain in your bones, that ache in your back.

And the good of picking up a beach worth of trash. If your brain was designed to exist in the modern world, that’s what it would feel like to do good at scale, to make a number go up that was adjusted to the right thing. It’d be the good feelings of picking up a beach worth of trash, times that tick, like a trash collection clicker game where the numbers flood your nervous system and you’re overwhelmed with utility.

We see this kind of thinking drive many transhumanist philosophies. It’s the central idea of Effective Altruism, a transhumanist-adjacent movement that tries to figure out how to do the most good with your life. But the general idea of cultivating an infinite hunger for more has an earlier precedent in Max More’s Extropy, a transhumanist movement that was active in the late 80’s and 90’s. More writes in his manifesto Principles of Extropy (More, 2003):

Perpetual Progress

Extropy means seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.

“Growing in healthy directions without bound.” is the blueprint of a maximizing agent.

Universalist Greed in this precisely-articulated sense is a novel feature of Extropy. As far as I know before the 20th century there is no concept of a ‘maximizing agent’ as a value-neutral category. There are ‘tyrants’ and ‘conquerers’, but the idea of a good person who wants literally everything is foreign territory. Perhaps the closest is Niccolo Machiavelli, who was reviled as a sort of antichrist for advocating rational tyranny on utilitarian grounds. It is no coincidence that a certain kind of left-wing thinker reacts to ‘rationalist’ ideas by screaming ‘fascism!’ (Armistead, 2016). This kind of frank ambition is traditionally parsed as moral and spiritual sickness.

The problem with wanting everything is that everyone else wants everything too. Solving this problem is nontrivial. One simple equilibrium that works is to instruct good people to renounce and to punish others who fail to renounce their agency. This is the Christian recipe for moral goodness: Submit to god and retreat from public life to preserve your purity, castigate anyone who engages in worldly pursuits. The idea being if you become too ambitious, you’ll inevitably do harm. It’s not an unfounded fear, the cautionary tale of so many 20th century dictators should be enough to give us serious pause.

For Universalist Greed to be a viable ethic, there must be some method of getting maximizing agents to cooperate with each other. Yudkowsky’s Coherent Extrapolated Volition is one prototype of this coordinating machinery. The idea is that a peace treaty may be struck so that anyone who wins the game will give away almost all of their winnings to others. I suspect that to really make this work would require either a strong commitment mechanism, or some horrifying game theoretical development in the vein of the Mutually Assured Destruction used to prevent annhilation during the cold war. Either is beyond the scope of this essay.

Universalist Greed in Alchemy

In alchemy we begin to see the seeds of a Universalist Greed. This first appears in the common moral dimension added to the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. The stone is a vehicle to satisfy human greed, turning base metals like lead into valuable metals such as silver and gold. Yet alchemical secrecy is a moral precursor: Knowledge of the stone was said to be carefully guarded so that it does not fall into the wrong hands. In his Secrets of Alchemy Lawrence Principe describes Jabir ibn-Hayyan’s (721 – c. 815) ‘dispersion of knowledge’, a secrecy technique supposedly advised to him by his master to thwart the unworthy (Principe, 2013):

The Jabirian corpus also carries stylistic features that left their mark on subsequent alchemical writers. The first of these is the dispersion of knowledge (tabdid al-'ilm), a method ostensibly for helping to preserve secrecy. Jabir states that "my method is to present knowledge by cutting it up and dispersing it into many places." The idea is that the entirety of Jabir's teaching cannot be found altogether in one place; instead, he distributes a single idea or process piecemeal through one or several books. This technique partly fulfills the charge given to Jabir by his supposed master, Ja'far: "O Jabir, reveal the knowledge as you desire, but such that none have access to it but those who are truly worthy of it."

Who is worthy varies from time to time and place to place, but the nature of alchemy lends itself to certain narratives. It was often believed that the secrecy helped foil the impatient and unvirtuous, who were too stunted to do the long study necessary to achieve the stone. Roger Bacon for example believed that scientific wisdom was revealed to men by god so that they might find salvation (Brehm, 1976). This naturally linked scientific (i.e. alchemical) knowledge to moral character, leading Bacon to lament that “we Christians discover nothing worthy, the reason for which is that we do not have their [Abrahamic and Pagan luminary ancestors] morals. For it is impossible that wisdom stand with sin, but perfect virtue is required by her.” (Brehm, 1976). As Principe notes however, we should take some caution with this sort of statement. At the time Bacon was writing alchemy’s position in Europe was tenuous, facing crackdowns and persecution; linking alchemy to Christian piety was one of the ways its practitioners survived in the face of social hostility (Principe, 2013).

Regardless of their sincerity, links between Christian piety and chemical knowledge began to run deep in European alchemy. These even extended into explanations of the stones mechanism of action. It was generally thought that the stone worked by purifying ‘base metals’. Alchemists believed there were only a handful of kinds of metal, and that lesser alloys like copper were impure forms of silver and gold (Principe, 2013). This theme of purification lent itself well to Christian allegory and metaphor. Roger Bacon believed that the elixir of life worked on the same principle as the Christian resurrection (Brehm, 1976). Later writers like Count Michael Maier (1569-1622) discuss their quest for the stone in nearly identical moral language to Bacon (Tilton, 2003). Maier believed the stone simultaneously grants ‘temperance’, or a withdrawal from overindulgence, while fulfilling the greedy aspiration of goldmaking (Tilton, 2003):

In Maier's eyes disease was closely associated with impiety and a sinful lifestyle; and the Universal Medicine which he strove to uncover imparted 'temperance' to the human body, a term which refers simultaneously to a somatic and a psychic or moral state. The imbalance of humours in the body that Maier sought to treat was the direct result of overindulgence in sensual pleasures, such as the drinking of alcohol, sexual debauchery and gluttony. Likewise, impious urges such as anger are the result of just such a disequilibrium in the four bodily fluids, which may be remedied by the temperance-imparting lapis just as metals may gain a more perfect proportion or balance of opposing elements. Furthermore, the operation of Maier's alchemical remedies depends upon the 'virtue' of divine origins inhering in the rays of the sun, be it directly received or reflected; and in the term virtus itself we may also see something of the holistic sense that has been largely lost to contemporary science, i.e. the dual meaning of 'strength' or 'power' and 'moral virtue'.

This perspective on alchemy derived from Maier’s interest in Rosicrucianism, a (mostly mythical) hermetic sect which de-emphasized goldmaking in favor of chymical medicine and service to humanity (Wunder, 2008). They borrowed this attitude from the physician Paracelsus (A.D. 1493-1541), who wrote much about the connection between alchemy, metaphysics, and medicine, but tended to see goldmaking in a contemptuous light (Wunder, 2008; Principe, 2013). Many followers of Paracelsus saw toxicity as arising from original sin, which alchemy could redeem by extracting useful medicine from otherwise poisonous plants and substances; by this means the alchemist became a kind of savior (Principe, 2013). Rosicrucian myths expanded on this theme, pushing focus beyond just the personal virtue of the alchemical practitioner, emphasizing their role in redeeming a fallen humanity (Wunder, 2008). In this way they extended a morally-tinged greed into an outright universalist one.

Existential Risk

Many transhumanists focus on mitigating existential risks (X-Risk) that might eradicate humanity, and some alchemists were driven by similar concerns. Franciscan friars in particular believed that the coming of the Antichrist was an immediate threat. Roger Bacon (A.D. 1214-1294) and John of Rupescissa (ca. 1310 – between 1366 and 1370) both carried out alchemical research with the aim of thwarting his coming assault on Christendom (Principe, 2013). Rupescissa wrote (Principe, 2013):

I considered the coming times predicted by Christ in the Gospels, namely, of the tribulations in the time of the Antichrist, under which the Roman Church shall be tormented and have all her worldly riches despoiled by tyrants...Thus for the sake of liberating the chosen people of God, to whom it is granted to know the ministry of God and the magisterium of truth, I wish to speak of the work of the great Philosophers' Stone without lofty speech. My intention is to be helpful to the good of the holy Roman Church and briefly to explain the whole truth about the Stone.

This may have been the first time people undertook scientific research with the explicit intent of averting the end of the world. While John’s interest in alchemy seemed to depend on this motivation (Principe, 2013), it would be naive to imagine Roger Bacon wouldn’t have been interested in carrying out this research regardless. A comparable situation might be Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Musk has explicitly cited AI Risk as a key motivation behind the proposed brain-computer-interface (Neuralink, 2019). He believes that AI is less likely to kill us if we can symbiotically merge with it in a way that would be impossible with our current communication limitations. At the same time it’d be hard to argue that if AI Risk weren’t present Elon Musk would have no interest in the project.

Alchemy and Romanticism

Despite all these similarities it would be difficult to argue that medieval alchemy directly inspired transhumanism. Goldmaking largely disappeared from Europe in the 18th century, when it was driven underground again by Enlightenment and Renaissance criticism (Principe, 2013). Naively we might imagine it was some kind of scientific or philosophical critique that reburied alchemy, but this doesn’t seem to be the case (Principe, 2013). While it is now common knowledge that gold is an element, this was not actually proven at the time. Instead european alchemy succumbed to moral panic insisting goldmaking was not just theoretically flawed but actively fraudulent. These critiques had existed in one form or another for centuries, but in the 18th they began to seriously erode goldmaking as a study (Principe, 2013). This led high profile chemists to jettison public work on the subject so they would be allowed to join the academy (Principe, 2013). Where before alchemy and chymistry had been synonyms, ‘alchemy’ was increasingly used as a scapegoat for the parts of chemical work that were barring chymists from state and institutional support.

Ironically enough alchemy-as-scapegoat did go on to directly influence transhumanism through its descendant’s involvement with science fiction. An unintended side effect of the scapegoating was to make ‘alchemy’, now considered the antithesis of Enlightenment epistemology, 50 feet tall as occult knowledge. Like so many other abandoned scientific ideas it took on a second life as pseudoscience and mysticism. When later people began to oppose reason’s perceived excesses they turned to ‘alchemy’ in rebellion (Principe, 2013). This strange countercultural current was nursed along by a proliferation of 18th century secret societies such as Freemasons, the Illuminati, etc (Principe, 2013; Wunder, 2008). These societies were loosely based on the legendary Rosicrucian order, whose hoax manifesto had taken on a powerful life of its own all across Europe (Wunder, 2008).

The basic model of these fraternities was to turn enlightenment philosophy into ritual-based mystery cults, with each ‘degree’ of advancement representing internalization of a key enlightenment principle (Wunder, 2008). This structure obviously lent itself to adaption and modification, so that there were many lodges and orders teaching many different ‘degrees’. The proliferation and churn of these organizations was so swift that there arose great confusion about everything relating to Freemasonry, secret societies, etc (Wunder, 2008). By combining secrecy and intellectual filtering it became possible for many fraternities to teach secular and atheist worldviews under the guise of Masonry; a practice for which the entire phenomena came under frequent scrutiny (Wunder, 2008). Anti-Masonic literature and debate along with the societies themselves were a mainstream cultural feature across Europe, one which would endure well into the 20th century.

One of the main draws for members of these societies was their blend of hermetic mysticism and secular teaching. They provided a ‘middle way’ for those who found total secularism too alienating (Wunder, 2008). This was catnip for Romantic writers like Percy & Mary Shelley, who would have been broadly exposed to these ideas. We can infer that these orders likely contained antecedents of the contemporary atheism that undergirds most transhumanist worldviews. For example the ‘honorable’ antiquarian Algernon Herbert discusses Hermetic atheist mystery cults in one of his books (Herbert, 1829). While reading the following passage, keep in mind that “The Iliaster” is one of Paracelsus’s names for the philosophers stone:

The same is the demigod of the school of Ammonius Saccas, called Man*. The outward doctrine of the pagans represented the dead as remaining in the imperfect state of soul without body, and they were not so much to blame for their description of that state as for the perpetuity which they assigned to it. They held out no promise of resurrection to any, and no general expectations of reward or punishment. And it was the intention of the Free-Masons to promulgate again the like doctrines, as they informed Henry 6th, saying, that they had in concealment “the art of becoming good and perfect without the help of fear and hope.” But the interior doctrine was, that the souls of men (that is to say, so much of the Quintessenceas was in them, or, as the Alchemists called it, their Evestrum) should suffer an oblivion of their past lives, and a compurgation by means of the elements or of a sort of chemical permutation, and should then pass into other human or animal bodies; until at last their very existence was destroyed by absorption into the mass of the universe.

Such was and is in substance, though with various modifications in the ways of stating it, the spirit of the interior atheism as concerning the future state. But those who, by participation in the Great Mysteries, partake of the nature of the Great Iliaster, shall return with glorified bodies when he returns, and are subject to no Lethe which should destroy their moral and to no absorption which should destroy their natural identity. That is not a mere dream of the fanatics; but it is (in one sense) supported by the prediction of Daniel, that many of the wicked shall arise at the first resurrection. The reader now sees how that fact, which is historically ascertained, is also morally accounted for, the interment of treasure; those, who were to come in the retinue of the great universal tyrant, were, in hoarding, not merely giving to him, but saving for themselves.

I find this passage (bolding mine) stunning in both its semantic associations and its testimony to the threat that Herbert must have felt from atheism. He calls them ‘fanatics’, a word which would seem entirely out of place in the same sentence as ‘atheism’ today. Not only does he engage with the concept, itself an admission that atheism has some intellectual standing, Herbert feels compelled to give his account of what ‘mundane atheists’ of the Hermetic (alchemical) sort believed. Further, having discussed in brief their plan to defeat death he goes so far as to admit that this plan will work(!), at least until Christ smites them for their hubris during the second coming. This is an admission of the most baffling sort, I am completely shocked that this text exists. Herbert seems to be a respected enough author to have his own wikipedia page so it seems unlikely that this is some kind of anomalous document like a conspiracy theory. This gives us some window into the role that alchemy would have played through hermetic orders in creating the foundations for the secular humanism that would later play so prominent a role in Extropy.

20th Century Development

During the 20th century Hermetic orders and secret societies shifted somewhat in their role. Increasing secularization made many of the secrets previously harbored by these pseudo-cults speakable in public without (violent) reprisal. These orders were also the victim of a general decline in fraternal organizations and clubs. This makes their history in the 20th century something of a late, decadent phase. A great deal of that decadence might be attributed to one Aleister Crowley, the infamous Satanist that put his own popular spin on the Masonic structure and teachings.

Crowley got his start in these organizations through his induction into the Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn in 1898. Earlier at Trinity College he had developed a love of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, and was almost certainly a fan of Frankenstein (Wikipedia contributors, 2020), which Percy Shelley helped edit (Adams, 2008). In 1910 as part of his wandering mystic eclecticism, Crowley joined the Ordo Templi Orientis branch of Hermeticism, where he eventually achieved the VII degree (Carter & Wilson, 2004). Two years later in 1912 he would publish his Book of Lies, Theodor Reuss, the head of the OTO was furious. He confronted Crowley and claimed that he had revealed the highest secret of the order, a form of sex magick (i.e. of the sort that made Tantric Buddhism infamous in the West) in this book (Carter & Wilson, 2004). Crowley insisted he had done no such thing, until Reuss showed him the passage in question. Reuss swore him to secrecy and advanced him in the order to its highest degree. In 1917 Crowley began rewriting the masonic material at the foundation of the OTO in line with his Thelema, a new philosophy which posited that each man has a will and that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” (Carter & Wilson, 2004).

While at this point the reader may be tempted to conclude that we’ve lost the thread of connection, and none of this has anything to do with the likes of Max More or Eliezer Yudkowsky, they would be quite wrong. In the same year that he began developing his Thelema in earnest, Crowley wrote the novel Moonchild (1917) which discusses the artificial creation of a world-savior in the form of a homunculus (Carter & Wilson, 2004):

But other magicians sought to make this Homunculus in a way closer to nature. In all these cases they had held that environment could be modified at will by the application of telesmata or sympathetic figures. For example, a nine-pointed star would attract the influence which they called Luna — not meaning the actual moon, but an idea similar to the poets' idea of her. By surrounding an object with such stars, with similarly-disposed herbs, perfumes, metals, talismans, and so on, and by carefully keeping off all other influences by parallel methods, they hoped to invest the original object so treated with the Lunar qualities, and no others. (I am giving the brifest outline of an immense subject.) Now then they proceeded to try to make the Homunculus on very curious lines.

Man, said they, is merely a fertilized ovum properly incubated. Heredity is there even at first, of course, but in a feeble degree. Anyhow, they could arrange any desired environment from the beginning, if they could only manage to nourish the embryo in some artificial way — incubate it, in fact, as is done with chickens to-day. Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, they thought that by performing this experiment in a specially prepared place, a place protected magically against all incompatible forces, and by invoking into that place some one force which they desired, some tremendously powerful being, angel or archangel — and they had conjurations which they thought capable of doing this — that they would be able to cause the incarnation of beings of infinite knowledge and power, who would be able to bring the whole world into Light and Truth.

I may conclude this little sketch by saying that the idea has been almost universal in one form or another; the wish has always been for a Messiah or Superman, and the method some attempt to produce man by artificial or at least abnormal means.

Given his conception of the soul as information it is unsurprising that Eliezer Yudkowsky would seek to endow his Friendly AI with the abstract will (or ‘values’ as he terms it) of the human race. His abnormally birthed Messiah is not a man so much as he (she?) is all men. Certainly the ambition to summon a being of infinite knowledge and power to enlighten humanity is invoked as literally here as possible. But for the moment we will step away from Crowley, to focus on another important philosopher of the 1940’s sci-fi zeitgeist that helped inspire Eliezer’s philosophy, one Count Alfred Korzybski.

If one event in the 20th century had to be singled out as decisive of its character, it would probably be the first world war. WWI was an unprecedented martial slog that inspired a great deal of philosophical soul searching. It also created the necessary conditions for the rise of the Soviet Union, which included its own branch of Utopian Universalist Greed that this work is too brief to contain (Andarovna, 2019). Alfred Korzybski participated in this slaughter, and found himself quite shaken up by it. Worse still, many had predicted WWI before its onset, Jan Bloch’s infamous Is War Now Impossible? was published 15 years before the start of WWI. If everyone knew the war was on its way it seemed absurd that nobody could stop it (Miyazaki, 2020).

Korzybski considered the problem of what lesson should be learned from WWI long and hard. The ultimate result of his thinking was the book The Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921. Manhood of Humanity is a book whose essential thesis is that Man is a time binder, differentiated from the rest of nature by the ability to retain experiences and transmit them across generations. In Korzybski’s view, technological and social progress are an exponential function dependent on already accumulated knowledge (Kodish, 2011). Empirically the growth rate of technological capabilities had surpassed that of socializing abilities, inevitably leading to existential risk:

At present I am chiefly concerned to drive home the fact that it is the great disparity between the rapid progress of the natural and technological sciences on the one hand and the slow progress of the metaphysical, so-called social “sciences” on the other hand, that sooner or later so disturbs the equilibrium of human affairs as to result periodically in those social cataclysms which we call insurrections, revolutions and wars.

… And I would have him see clearly that, because the disparity which produces them increases as we pass from generation to generation—from term to term of our progressions—the “jumps” in question occur not only with increasing violence but with increasing frequency.

This realization was so profound to Korzybski that he couldn’t be satisfied just writing a book about the general phenomena. Given his thesis, it seemed obvious that the only hope of saving the world would be to find out what ‘time binding’ is made of, and then use that understanding to improve our ability to bind time in the social sciences (Kodish, 2011). He expected to put out a follow up book soon after Manhood, but it actually took him 10 years to write. The resulting work was published in 1933 as Science and Sanity, which can be thought of kind of like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences if they had been published in the 1930’s. To write them, Korzybski did his best to absorb the science then available to him about human cognition, physics, mathematics, and several other subjects besides (Kodish, 2011). He wrote that man was not an animal (obviously a mammal, but a time-binding mammal!), that cognition should be thought of as something performed by the whole-organism and its nervous system, that “the map is not the territory”, and had his students learn to differentiate between levels of abstraction above raw sensory perception. His hope was to create an enduring field of study based on these ideas, which he called (to his regret) General Semantics.

Science and Sanity was a cult hit that appealed to a particular sort of person. It was especially popular with the then-burgeoning Science Fiction fandom (Brunton, 2020):

Van Vogt, lover of systems, was always convinced a system existed for his life: a way to generate “unusual solutions” for the various problems of being human. He wrote a get-rich-quick book, a book about hypnotism, and – God help us all – “a novel about my theories on women,” “which has never been published as such” (small mercies). He wrote entire novels based on the system of General Semantics, a set of language and logic practices for becoming more objective and reasonable – to streamline the process of thinking. He sketched out schemes for meta-systems of living, with names like “Null-A” and “Nexialism,” and spent a decade or so in Dianetics, fiddling with e-meters and tape recorders amid piles of pamphlets offering superhumanity in a storefront on Sunset Boulevard. (He shared this peculiar trajectory toward transforming consciousness – Semantics, Scientology, and pulp science fiction, rather than, say, Marx or activism or acid – with William Burroughs.)

The 1930’s science fiction pulp (as found in Astounding Science Fiction) was of a new kind for literary pulp, in that it came with an ideological mission (Wright, 2013). While today we take the existence of rockets for granted, in the 1930’s rockets were a fringe theoretical subject whose practical possibility had not been established (Carter & Wilson, 2004). One of the overall goals of the science fiction pulp was to take humanity to the stars by promoting the development of rocketry (Wright, 2013). Science fiction has in fact preceded and in many cases promoted the practical research that would later come to redefine our society and conceptions of what is possible.

The mind-powers obsessed science fiction fandom and the esoteric magick of Aleister Crowley are combined in the person of Jack Parsons. Parsons is unusual in that his childhood interest in science fiction translated into pioneering work on rocketry. In fact, Parsons is arguably the person who did the most to make practical rocketry in the United States viable (Carter & Wilson, 2004). He was also a devoted disciple of Crowley, and became infamous for the Thelemic rituals and ceremonies he’d put on in his Pasadena mansion. These were part of a general quest to take Thelema mainstream, ushering in the age of the beast (Carter & Wilson, 2004). By destroying Christianity Parsons hoped to uplift humanity, a goal he and Crowley ostensibly shared. Crowley at one point wrote to Parsons (Carter & Wilson, 2004):

It seems to me that there is a danger of your sensitiveness upsetting your balance. Any experience that comes your way you have a tendency to over-estimate. The first fine careless rapture wears off in a month or so, and some other experience comes along and carries you off on its back. Meanwhile you have neglected and bewildered those who are dependent on you, either from above or from below.

I will ask you to bear in mind that you have one fulcrum for all your levers, and that is your original oath to devote yourself to raising mankind. All experiences, all efforts, must be referred to this; as long as it remains unshaken you cannot go far wrong, for by its own stability it will bring you back from any tendency to excess. At the same time, you being as senstitive as you are, it behoves [sic] you to be more on your guard than would be the case with the majority of people.

For his part, Parsons turned his leased mansion estate into 19 apartments. The ad he put out in the local paper informed prospective tenants that he would only rent to atheists and bohemians (Carter & Wilson, 2004). The resulting tenants practiced black magick, polyamory, discussed science fiction and futurology, and came from many walks of life (Carter & Wilson, 2004). This strange group house became a social and intellectual hot spot for the Pasadena aerospace and science fiction scenes.

While I’m not aware of Parsons himself ever taking any interest in General Semantics, his friends sure did (Carter & Wilson, 2004). Most notably Parsons was friends with L. Ron Hubbard, who played the role of ‘scribe’ during Parsons’ infamous Babalon Working, in which he combined Enochian magick rituals with tantric sex practices to try and birth a Moonchild (Carter & Wilson, 2004). Needless to say this did not work, but the experience seems to have been formative for Hubbard, whose enduring interest in Crowley’s Thelema (supposedly first encountered at age 16) and General Semantics would become key inspiration for his Dianetics and Scientology (Wright, 2013):

One striking parallel between Hubbard and Crowley is the latter's assertion that "spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science." Crowley argued that by advancing through a graded series of rituals and spiritual teachings, the adept could hope to make it across "The Abyss," which he defined as "the gulf existing between individual and cosmic consciousness." It is an image that Hubbard would evoke in his Bridge to Total Freedom.

Although Hubbard mentions Crowley only glancingly in a lecture — calling him "my very good friend" — they never actually met. Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two. "That's when Dad decided that he would take over the mantle of the Beast and that is the seed and the beginning of Dianetics and Scientology," Nibs later said. "It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe."

It would be easy to dismiss Thelema as a weird, marginal product of its era, one only of interest to modern readers as a curiosity. However Crowley’s ideas seem to cast a long cultural shadow whose influence is not always obvious. For example, it’s interesting how much contemporary focus is put into the notion of ‘finding your passion’, a concept that seems almost identical to Crowley’s assertion that the purpose of life is to find your Will and then do it. It seems likely that the Sith in George Lucas’s Star Wars are based at least in part on Thelema. A skeptically inclined reader could probably dismiss any modern similarities as general secularization, which Crowley merely forecasted rather than caused. Perhaps more important to our current analysis is that these ideas were ‘in the water supply’ among science fiction authors during this period. Someone who makes a habit of reading sci-fi from that time would at the very least be indirectly exposed to them.

Conclusion: Pulp Sci-Fi As Occult Fomite

The easiest way to explain the direct influence this had on transhumanism is to give an example. In his post Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence? Eliezer Yudkowsky writes about how when he was growing up he read many books from the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940’s and 50’s (Yudkowsky, 2018). This is the same Golden Age which believed that psychology would eventually come to dominate the sciences in prestige. This is evident for example in the works of Isaac Asimov who wrote in his Foundation trilogy that the greater of the two civilization-restoring ‘Foundations’ would be the one which dealt with matters of the human mind. This theme also appears in the work of A.E Van Vogt, who based his World of Null-A on the notion of a future where General Semantics eventually becomes the foundation of world government.

In fact one of the key reasons for the overall failure of General Semantics as a movement was it gambled very hard on the future prestige of psychology, which did not materialize. This can be seen in Korzybski’s insistence and dedication to getting mainstream psychology to take him seriously, but it can also be detected in the sort of person that populated the General Semantics movement. For example Bruce and Susan Kodish, the authors of Drive Yourself Sane are both therapists (Kodish & Kodish, 2011). I suspect that this was directly related to the expectation that psychology and psychiatry were rising stars, and that being eminent in these fields would be a ticket to widespread success and awareness.

The World Of Null-A is also interesting in that Yudkowsky cites it as the first time he was exposed to General Semantics (Yudkowsky, 2009). Remember, A.E. Van Vogt was very about mental superpowers one step removed from magick. In Yudkowsky’s post on rationalist fiction he says the book was a direct inspiration for Harry Potter and The Methods Of Rationality. Of course we shouldn’t imagine science fiction is the only thing going into Eliezer’s cosmology, it’s mostly made of science-fact (this is after all the entire point). [Yudkowsky once cited Ed Regis’s Great Mambo Chicken…] as the book that pulled him away from a career in physics towards transhumanism (Yudkowsky, 1999). He later walked this back and gave Drexler’s Engines of Creation a larger role (Yudkowsky, 2009). It should also be noted that any influence from the likes of Crowley on Yudkowsky is almost certainly indirect. In fact, Eliezer says that until sitting down to write his rationalist fiction post he hadn’t been aware Korzybski invented the phrase ‘the map is not the territory’ (Yudkowsky, 2009). This can be forgiven, Bruce Kodish’s excellent biography of Korzybski was not available until 2011. However if Eliezer isn’t even familiar with Korzybski, who is directly relevant to his notions of rationality, it’s unlikely he would have any interest in the Romantics or their descendant subcultures.

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Adams, S. (2008, August 24). Percy bysshe shelley helped wife mary write frankenstein, claims professor. Telegraph.
Carter, J., & Wilson, R.A. (2004). Sex and rockets: The occult world of jack parsons. Washington, Port Townsend: Feral House.
Andarovna, S.Y. (2019). Blood, water and mars: Soviet science and the alchemy for a new man. ScholarWorks @ Central Washington University.
Miyazaki, S. (2020, February 17). Jan bloch’s impossible war. Hivewired.
Kodish, B.I. (2011). Korzybski: A biography. Pasadena, California: Extensional Publishing.
Brunton, F. (2020, March 21). The unusual solution. Buttondown.
Wright, L. (2013). Going clear: Scientology, hollywood, & the prison of belief. New York: Vintage Books.
Yudkowsky, E. (2018, November 16). Is clickbait destroying our general intelligence?. LessWrong.
Yudkowsky, E. (2009, March 19). Rationalist fiction. LessWrong.
Yudkowsky, E. (1999). Bookshelf. Yudkowsky.net.
Yudkowsky, E. (2009, February 17). Good idealistic books are rare. LessWrong.
Kodish, S.P., & Kodish, B.I. (2011). Drive yourself sane: Using the uncommon sense of general semantics (Third Edition). Pasadena, CA: Extensional Publishing.

Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why

Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 -0700

A few years ago I wrote a comment on LessWrong about how most authors on the site probably don’t know how to do a literature review:

On the one hand, I too resent that LW is basically an insight porn factory near completely devoid of scholarship.

On the other hand, this is not a useful comment. I can think of at least two things you could have done to make this a useful comment:

Specified even a general direction of where you feel the body of economic literature could have been engaged. I know you might resent doing someone elses research for them if you’re not already familiar with said body, but frankly the norm right now is to post webs spun from the fibrous extrusions of peoples musing thoughts. The system equilibrium isn’t going to change unless some effort is invested into moving it. Notice you could write your comment on most posts while only changing a few words.

Provide advice on how one might go about engaging with ‘the body of economic literature’. Many people are intelligent and reasonably well informed, but not academics. Taking this as an excuse to mark them swamp creatures beyond assistance is both lazy and makes the world worse. You could even link to reasonably well written guides from someone else if you don’t want to invest the effort (entirely understandable).

I also linked a guide from Harvard’s library (Garson & Lillvick, 2012) on how to do a literature review. But this guide makes extensive use of flash video, which makes it increasingly hard to access the content. Even if flash was alive and well, video is not necessarily the most comfortable format. Worse still, I remember feeling there was a great deal of tacit knowledge excluded from the guide which wouldn’t be apparent to someone that isn’t already familiar with academic culture. Even if the guide was a perfect representation of how to do an academic literature review, the priorities and types of work put together by LessWrong authors are more outsider science (Dance, 2008) than they are Harvard. For this reason I’ve had writing a guide to literature review aimed towards academic outsiders on my to-do list for a while.

At the same time I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel. This guide is going to focus specifically on filling in the knowledge gaps I would expect from someone who has never stepped foot inside a college campus. The other aspects have been discussed in detail, and where they come up I’ll link to external guides.

What is a literature review?

‘Literature review’ the process is a way to become familiar with what work has already been done in a particular field or subject by searching for and studying previous work. A ‘literature review’ is a document (often a small portion of a larger work) which summarizes and analyzes the body of previous work that was encountered during literature review, often in the context of some new work that you’re doing.

Why do literature review?

Literature reviews tend to come up in two major contexts: As a preliminary study to help contextualize a novel work, or as a work itself to summarize the state of a field or synthesize concepts to create new ideas. Most of my research falls into the latter category, I’m a big fan of putting together existing evidence and ideas to synthesize models (namespace, 2020). Gwern also tends to do work in this style (Branwen, 2020). I suspect that a lot of authors on LessWrong are attempting to do this, but fail to really say anything useful because they haven’t figured out how to incorporate thorough evidence into their argument. When I did a review of all my notes from 2015, I found the number one failure mode I’d fall into was not paying attention to prior art. This was because I did not have heuristics like:

If it’s hard to write about or you get stuck, you should probably do more research
If I want to write a post on something and I haven’t checked the relevant literature for it yet I should probably do that as part of writing the post
Encountering or generating a cool mental model (Constantin, 2018) is a useful cue to consult the literature
If I’m trying to deal with a hard technical problem I should look at what work has already been done

The Benefits Of Literature Review

Literature review provides many benefits, such as:

Build Off The State Of The Art: Unless you make it a habit to look at what work already exists on a subject, you’ll say what others have already said and do what others have already done. Your cognition is slow and expensive, and that makes leveraging the work of others extremely valuable. It is tempting to think that the established experts are idiots and you can beat them all with your own cleverness. Sometimes, this is actually true (Harford, 2019) but it’s not something you should be counting on as a rule. Some literatures are mud moats (Smith, 2017), but other literatures are priceless treasures. Without access to the mathematics literature you would need to be a prodigy like Ramanujan to make new contributions. In my 2015 notes there was an episode where I tried designing a package manager. I filled many pieces of paper with thoughts on resolving dependency conflicts. Never did it occur to me to look at what methods were already used by existing systems like .deb or .rpm, let alone research papers that might tell me about theoretical methods.
Providing Context: Cultural artifacts exist in some kind of context, historical, social, or intellectual. Without provenance a 5,000 year old sword is just a rusty piece of metal (Giuliani-Hoffman, 2020). The same principle applies to intellectual work, without a justifying context artifacts are parsed as garbage (Foddy, 2017). The literature can help you provide context for your ideas and ground them in something other than just your personal experience.
Learn From The Mistakes Of Others: Bismarck famously remarked that fools learn from experience and wise men learn from the mistakes of others. Even if previous work has failed to make significant progress it can often serve as a reference of promising-sounding ideas that won’t work. This familiarity is often a crucial component of the ‘cleverness’ that sets you apart from others. The Wright Brothers were very familiar with the established work on aerodynamic theory (Benson, 2014). Their rapid-iteration approach to airplane design quickly revealed that real world test flights defied their expectations, leading them to develop a new way to measure the performance of airplane parts. Once this was done the data enabled them to easily invent the airplane. Without that starting data to work from, it would have taken the Wrights longer to realize that data was the bottleneck to making an airplane.
Common Language: Scholars develop a shared language to discuss their studies. These vernaculars are a key marker of group membership (Hossenfelder, 2016). Authors that use the right words generally have standing and authors that use their own ad-hoc vocabulary are generally considered cranks. Even beyond credibility, writing in the standard language used by other authors makes it more likely you’ll get expert feedback on your work.
Unknown Unknowns: Until you go looking, you often just plain don’t know what you don’t know about a subject. For example in my essay on fuzzies and saddies (Zealot, 2020) I didn’t know that literature on morale was relevant to the research question until I started looking at the psychology of soldiers. Often when you start looking at previous work you have a “wait this exists?” moment that significantly alters the way you approach it.

Literature Review As Accessible Contribution

One question I hear often is: “How can I contribute to the rationality project without institutional resources?”. Literature reviews are an accessible contribution that builds skills. Some of the best posts on LessWrong are literature reviews. The research skills that you build while doing it are extremely valuable, and will help you in most things you might want to pursue. It doesn’t require very much money, and can be performed from the comfort of your home. All these traits make it nearly ideal for people who want to contribute but don’t have a lot of resources, or who have to spend most of their time on school or work. Literature review does take time however, so like any volunteer work it’s necessary that the person undertaking it have spare time and energy to work with. If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to private message me on LessWrong or join this blog’s Discord server and I’ll do my best to help.

The Document Universe

As a phenomenological definition, the document universe is the set of artifacts which are easy to access inside of academic review spaces like museums, libraries, reading/viewing rooms, or a home office. It is the spatial environment in which the literature exists. Learning to navigate this environment is essential to getting good at literature review.

People Are Documents Too

When you want to know more about a subject but aren’t sure where to begin, the classic advice is to ask a librarian. Human beings are a key part of the document universe. They are intentionally created artifacts that contain knowledge, and that knowledge is backed by a full general intelligence. It’s no coincidence that Socrates didn’t like writing. People are arguably the most important part of the document universe. Knowledge does very little if it isn’t contained inside someone.

Because of their high value and short shelf life it can be hard to get access to knowledgeable people (Hossenfelder, 2016). It’s not impossible however (Dance, 2008), the received wisdom is that most scholars are eager to discuss their work so long as you respect their time. Eric Raymond’s classic essay (Raymond, 2014) on asking good questions is oriented more towards “How do I X with program Y?” type queries, but with some mental rearranging applies just as well to plenty of other queries. For academic questions in particular it’s important that you do your best to understand the science and understand the language used by the science (Hossenfelder, 2016). Failure to do that is likely to get you spam filtered as a crank.

Academic Sources Are Underadvertised

Most web users don’t seem to be aware of academic sources. I remember when I was younger feeling a vague malaise as I browsed the Internet, because all the knowledge seemed to be diffuse and informal. When I read books it was clear that they were high quality sources of knowledge, but the Internet felt barren of that. It turned out this was mostly just because I was looking in the wrong place. The academic section of the document universe is publicly indexed by Google Scholar which makes it much easier to find high quality sources on most subjects.

Traditional Bibliography

The vast majority of the history of scholarship happened before the existence of electronic computers, let alone widespread high-capacity networked electronic computers. That means the formal norms of scholarship evolved in an environment quite alien to our current era of cheap access and full text search. In this section we’ll review some of their features in that context.

Citation Trees As Central Dogma Of Academia

In school you were probably told that you had to cite your sources, and that failing to do so was plagiarism. Plagiarism is usually defined as “stealing someone else’s work without credit”, but in the context of citations this definition is very misleading. Grade schools like the concept because it lets them clearly define how much copying is cheating, with the unfortunate side effect that smart kids categorize the practice as schoolhouse ritual rather than valuable technique. By contrast in a functional literature where works are written to be read academic citation norms provide a genealogy of ideas. These days we’re pretty used to digital documents that directly reference other pages, videos, etc; but before the Internet was widespread academia alone had the benefit of author provided citations. Academic citation formats are platform agnostic. They’re content addressed rather than location based, so the goal of an academic citation is to give you enough information to reliably locate a specific source in the document universe. This is why they tend to get so tedious. A book might have 12 editions with multiple authors and undergo a title change, and only one version contains the passage you reference. All the annoying details in citation formats were put there in response to bibliographic failures and lookup complications with simpler formats.

Within a single work citations provide context for readers and leads for further reading, but it’s when you have a whole literature that the practice really shines. It becomes possible to follow citations backwards to see the progression of ideas, move horizontally to find related work, and use modern database systems to find work downstream that cites a document as an ancestor. The genealogy aspect of academic citations also improves the signal:noise ratio by eliminating unimproved duplicate work, and makes it easier to associate ideas with the authors that originated them. All of this makes the academic sections of the document universe much more pleasant to navigate than the informal universe of newspaper articles and blog posts. From a contributors standpoint there’s also more security, the norms are built to get your ideas hooked into a network of associated work which future scholars will consult during their reviews (Hanson, 2007). Outside of that Eden it’s possible your effort will just get lost in the noise.

Unfortunately because the web is a disaster (Binstock, 2012) we’re not really liberated from citations by the presence of hyperlinks. In an ideal world the web would be content addressed so that if a source stopped providing a document it could be seamlessly served by a backup provider like the Internet Archive. Instead we address by location, so if the domain hosting this blog changes hands and they put up a new site all the links to my posts break. If I decide I don’t want to pay hosting costs anymore, all the links break. If the servers have a technical malfunction even though they’re technically still on in some dusty computer lab somewhere, all the links break. As you might imagine this happens a lot (Branwen, 2019), so it’s not viable to rely on links to identify content. Traditional citations at least provide for the possibility that there is a second copy somewhere which can be found with a search engine. The most savvy netizens do their best to ensure (Branwen, 2019) there is a second copy somewhere. Because these problems are unlikely to be fixed any time soon, if you plan to write lasting content you had best get familiar with citation formats.

Library Science As Conceptual Foundation Of The Academic Document Universe

Underlying the usefulness of a citation tree is physical infrastructure which houses, indexes, and curates documents. This type of work has been traditionally performed under the moniker of library science, even if in recent times it has mostly been done by a distributed system of bloggers, cooperating scientists, server hosts, and for-profit firms like Google. The old systems still exist however, and they’re the environment of adaption for the current academic tradition. This makes it useful to know the principles of traditional library science so that you can better model academic-document-space. I recommend the book The Intellectual Foundation Of Information Organization by Elaine Svenonius (Svenonius, 2000) to get that understanding. Published in 2000, it was written just before digital documents were set to disrupt the academic ecosystem. It captures the full powers of the old ways in amber.

The Intellectual Foundation… is a particularly useful book for the scholar because it is designed to be read by the designers of future library systems. This means that it focuses less on the details of particular designs (which we probably don’t care about very much by this point) but more on the principles which an effective system should satisfy and the “why?” behind them. These principles define the territory which citations describe, and will help you grok certain aspects of traditional scholarship.

How To Do Literature Review

I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t bother to look at what others have already written about doing a literature review. This talk with Dr. Candace Hastings (Hastings, 2009) on doing literature review is decent, it spends a lot of time focusing on the way to use sources in your writing once you’ve found them. She also explains how you can use citation counts to find the most important scholars in the field you’re looking at. Guidelines for writing a literature review by Helen Mongan-Rallis (Mongan-Rallis, 2018) is a well written page on this topic for academics.

Every time I do research I perform a simple thought experiment: assuming somewhere in the world exists evidence that would prove or disprove my hypothesis, where is it? I tend to visualize this as a shot of earth from space, and then ‘zooming in’ on the sense data that would show me what I want to know. The literalism of this visualization is important because it emphasizes the sensory basis of evidence. Things happen in the world, and artifacts of their presence are left over afterwards. Physical remnants, images captured by cameras and sketch artists, written observations. This ‘object level’ phenomenological universe is what you’re trying to get information about by looking at the literature.

A key consequence of this is that ‘the literature’ is not always what’s output by academics. If I was studying martial arts, I would be looking into the history of martial arts as it’s practiced by martial artists, in whatever mediums they use to record and disseminate information. Memory is a human activity, and your first priority should be to find the most effective and relevant sources for whatever you’re looking at.

For tips on actually finding sources on the Internet (commonly known as ‘Google-Fu’) I recommend Gwern’s page (Branwen, 2020) on the subject.

When You Don’t Know The Name of Your Literature, or Missing and Biased Literatures

One of the more pernicious problems for literature review can be not knowing the name of the relevant literature. I often find myself posing research questions where it isn’t clear how I would find previous work. The inciting post (Hoffman, 2018) that convinced me to write this one is discussing a phenomena that seems unlikely to be studied by economists. If I was doing literature review as part of writing this post, I would ask myself “What does the universe look like where we had the world wars and then wartime mobilization never stopped?”. Then, I would aggressively dig in to find decisive places where looking at what happened before and after the world wars would prove or disprove my thesis. It’s not enough to identify two points and then draw a trend line, that’s not what it looks like to thoroughly justify yourself (namespace, 2020). As a thoroughly justified hypothesis looms closer and closer to theory, arguing against it should begin to feel like your debate partner is reality itself.

For the specific problem of a literature you simply don’t know the name of, your best bet is often to ask others. Many times I’ve wanted to post a Request For Literature (RFL) on LessWrong, but felt without context the concept wouldn’t really make sense to most readers. Hopefully after publishing this I’ll be able to link it for context and that won’t be a problem.

I didn’t know what literature to look at for my essay on Fuzzies and Saddies (Zealot, 2020), where the thesis is both outside the overton window and our current social reality. How do you look at the literature for something like that? Well, one of the benefits of living in a consistent universe (namespace, 2020) is that it can take a lot of effort to reliably censor all information that would point towards a real phenomena. Because our censorship is largely of the distributed kind based on social pressure, it’s largely ad-hoc and doesn’t hold up well against the historical record or clever inference. I took notes on how I found the book on Missionary Morale.

Example Research Session: Finding The Book On Missionary Morale

Research Question (roughly): What makes some people seem to derive satisfaction and utility from being put into hellish situations like WW1?

Immediate question: Where would I be able to find information relating to this question, where would it be recorded and how would it be framed?

Thought: “What about studies on how soldiers attitudes about war change after they’ve been to war? [Most soldiers will probably dislike it, but some do like it and this might be studied as a pathology]”

Search (Google Scholar): soldiers attitudes toward war

First result: Stouffer, S. A., Suchman, E. A., DeVinney, L. C., Star, S. A., & Williams Jr, R. M. (1949). The american soldier: Adjustment during army life.(studies in social psychology in world war ii), vol. 1.

Look for thing, find thing. Read through it some, then:

Observation: There’s a chapter on morale, the thing I am researching, “motivation through suffering, being fueled by harrowing circumstances, asceticism, keeping spirits up in the face of a hostile universe” is very closely related to and overlaps with the study of morale. Therefore I can look at morale studies to get a better look at this subject.

Read through book’s study on effect of exposure to combat on morale, realize that it doesn’t seem to be very useful to me.

Principle of Pain: Why isn’t this useful to me?

Answer: The thing causing the drop in morale is of the wrong structure, these studies are about exposure to short bursts of extreme stress and danger which is not the situation my audience will be encountering in their lives.

Principle of Balance: Okay then, what would be useful to me (be of similar circumstances)?

Constraint: Needs to be a population which it’s likely there will be studies on.

Hypothesis: Military intelligence officers, since their job is closer to the research aspect of things while still being in a population whose morale will be studied.

Hypothesis: Spy morale, spies need to exist in a foreign place pretending to be someone they’re not while their real job is to do something else which is adversarial to the people in their immediate environment. The sort of alienation and lack of belonging that causes seems like a probable fit for how it actually feels to be researching things that only you care about in your immediate environment over a long period of time while at a deep cultural gulf between yourself and the people around you.

Principle of Exhuastion: Ph.D burnout, paratrooper morale (esp. if there are cases where single paratroopers are dropped into an area and have to be on their own, snipers?), Evangelical/Missionary morale/burnout, Wilderness survival/etc morale

I go look up stuff on spy morale, forgot to take notes during this.

Observation: MICE to RASCALS talks about ‘operational psychology’, which might have material on agent attrition and factors relating to it.

Principle of Balance: What do counterintelligence officers do to dissuade potential spies?

Observation: Undercover police work involves similar stuff in a domestic context which is less secret than international espionage.

Find paper on undercover police work, read it.

Principle of Pain: This still isn’t quite what I want, because the point here is to condition an officer to play a role which they then need to be pulled out of later without too much damage. Though I guess that could be relevant, it’s just not the core of the thing.

Decide to move on and look at missionaries.

Search (Google Scholar): missionary morale

Read the first search result, which is a book from 1920 on literally this subject (Miller, 1920).

Bibliography

Garson, D., & Lillvik, C. (2012). The literature review: A research journey. Research guides at Harvard Library. https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=310271&p=2071512
Dance, A. (2012). Outsider science. Symmetry Magazine. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/marchapril-2008/outsider-science
namespace. (2020, February 1). “Memento mori”, Said the confessor. The Last Rationalist. http://thelastrationalist.com/memento-mori-said-the-confessor.html
Branwen, G. (2020, May 8). Embryo selection for intelligence. https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Constantin, S. (2018, December 14). Player vs. character: A two-level model of ethics. LessWrong. https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/fyGEP4mrpyWEAfyqj/player-vs-character-a-two-level-model-of-ethics
Harford, T. (2019, August 14). The penny post revolutionary who transformed how we send letters. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48844278
Smith, N. (2017, May 15). Vast literatures as mud moats. Noahpinion. https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/vast-literatures-as-mud-moats.html
Giuliani-Hoffman, F. (2020, March 25). 5,000-year-old sword is discovered by an archaeology student at a venetian monastery. CNN Style. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/5000-year-old-sword-discovered-in-italy-trnd/index.html
Foddy, B. (2017). Getting over it with bennett foddy [Desktop & Mobile video game]. Humble Bundle: Bennett Foddy.
Benson, T. (2014, June 12). Overview of wright brothers discoveries. Re-Living the Wright Way. https://wright.nasa.gov/discoveries.htm
Hossenfelder, S. (2016, May 19). The holy grail of crackpot filtering: How the arXiv decides what’s science – and what’s not. Backreaction. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-holy-grail-of-crackpot-filtering.html
Zealot, E. (2020, April 21). Fuzzies and saddies part one: X-risk and motivation. The Last Rationalist. https://www.thelastrationalist.com/fuzzies-and-saddies-part-one-x-risk-and-motivation.html
Hossenfelder, S. (2016, August 11). What i learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. Aeon Ideas. https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists
Raymond, E.S., & Moen, R. (2014, May 21). How to ask questions the smart way. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Hanson, R. (2007, July 17). Blogging doubts. Overcoming Bias. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/blogging-doubts.html
Binstock, A. (2012, July 10). Interview with alan kay. Dr Dobb’s. https://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442
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Svenonius, E. (2000). The intellectual foundation of information organization. The MIT Press.
Hastings, C. (2009, September 25). Get lit: The literature review. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9la5ytz9MmM
Mongan-Rallis, H. (2018, April 19). Guidelines for writing a literature review. https://www.d.umn.edu/~hrallis/guides/researching/litreview.html
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Hoffman, B.R. (2018, May 23). There is a war. LessWrong. https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/DtS6x5r54sEx7e2tP/there-is-a-war
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namespace. (2020, March 23). On necessity. The Last Rationalist. https://www.thelastrationalist.com/on-necessity.html
Miller, G.A. (1920). Missionary morale. Google Books (orig. New York, Cincinnati: The Methodist Book Concern).

Video Games As Alternative Motivation Literature

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

Perhaps the first time I fully grasped the unvarnished reality of what a video game is was reading The Borderlands Gun Collector’s Club by Steve Yegge. This ultra-long tongue in cheek blog post might be the best essay on game design ever written. It’s witty, empirical, cynical, documents a real (and horrifying) video game subculture, and digs without mercy into the underlying glitches in human psychology that make it work. Yegge’s unsentimental definition of ‘fun’ as ‘addictive’ turns the entire premise of game design on its ear. Your plebian expectation that video games are supposed to be about enjoyment means nothing to Yegge. To him a video game is a series of exploits in human motivation which compel the mammal brain to interact with it for hours, even though it’s completely disconnected from any tangible reward or consequence in life.

Every video game then is an experiment in human motivation, and they always have been. In their book Racing The Beam, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost sketch the history of commercial video games from arcade machines to Atari. The founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, worked as a carnival barker before he ever decided to create any video games. He used that experience extensively to design what we would recognize as the modern video game based on his exposure to Steve Russel’s Spacewar!. Like the bee orchid which serves as testimony to the existence of a particular winged insect, each video game is testimony to the existence of a form of human motivation. This means we can analyze video games as a way of getting around the inherent biases and restrictions in the motivation literature.

And what’s notable about these early arcade machines, Atari games, and even many NES and SNES titles, is that they’re not fun. Like the carnival games they’re indirectly based off of, they rely as much on frustration and negative feedback as they do positive feelings to motivate engagement. When I was a kid there was a period for about 3-5 years where you could buy retro games in thift stores and resell them on eBay for money, which my father did often. So I ended up with a massive game collection spanning most of the post-Atari era of gaming. And what often struck me about games on the NES or SNES was how relentlessly difficult they were in comparison to later titles. The sort of experience you’d have playing them is captured well by early episodes of The Angry Video Game Nerd:

I hate this game. But why am I playing it? Well that's the question everyone has asked themselves and they all have the same reason: because you're angry and you want to win. You want to beat the Nintendo; but the cold fact is that nobody cares but you.

“I’m angry and I want to win” is the basic essence of the attitude that got me through all the hard STEM classes in my associates degree taken consecutively. I’d failed Calculus II at some point and taken all the easy classes before attempting it again, only to be met with 9 months of pain if I wanted to finish the degree. Normally when people encounter that they just drop out. College is a game where you drink poison, then prove your value by drinking increasingly large swigs of poison. If I wanted to win I had to drink the poison on a much more aggressive schedule than normal. It’s not an experience I’d recommend to you but something analogous is often necessary to make progress in life.

The fact that these games exist and people still want to play them is very strong evidence against purely hedonistic motivation. Perhaps more astonishing is that they come earlier in the development process than hedonistic games. Before video games had the ability to entertain you, they would frustrate you. Plenty of modern games have rediscovered and continue to use this basic premise. Often, they’re even held up as the best examples of the medium. Dark Souls is an infamously difficult game which some critics consider one of the best ever made. Even less popular indie titles like FTL: Faster Than Light receive strong positive reviews while being uncompromising in their difficulty.

For many in the game industry, these frustration-driven titles are a time honored tradition that they’re disappointed to see replaced by more gentle games like Minecraft. Bennett Foddy even went so far as to make an entire tribute game called Getting Over It to highlight the receding focus on hard games. Most people interpret Getting Over It as a ‘troll’ game where the purpose is just to piss the player off for giggles, but I don’t think so. The 12 minute monologue included with Getting Over It that plays in snippets as you progress through the game is earnest, and by the end increasingly personal. It’s a meditation on challenge in video games and in life, and what it says about our culture that we’ve begun to replace difficult personal experiences of triumph with shallow imitations to be browsed and discarded at an accelerating pace. To Foddy, this disposability is a sign of decadence and a collective agreement to surround and identify ourselves with garbage. Perhaps the core of his critique can be summed up in a statement he makes before what is widely agreed to be the hardest part of the game:

An orange is sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It's coffee, it's grapefruit, it's licorice.

I think what Foddy is trying to get at, and perhaps too nice to say is: If ‘sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel’ is how you feel about your life you will always be unsatisfied. Life is not a series of islands made from passion and joy floating in an ocean of miserable feelings. Those ‘miserable feelings’ are what life is, they constitute 95% percent of your life by volume and zombiehood is when you have no idea how to appreciate any of it. Ernest Becker discusses how the fear of life is deeply intertwined with the fear of death. He talks about it like creation is fabulous, it’s so fabulous that we shrink away from it. Which it is, but it’s also deeply horrible. The idea that we simply fear life because it’s too much good stuff for us is uncharacteristically optimistic of Becker. The reality is even harsher and sadder than that. Life is mostly awful things, which you fear, it’s also sometimes good things, which you also fear. You’re just weak like that.

A lot of where people fall down with this stuff is that they live in a hedonistic culture, and they have no notion of value outside of that. They see the real world, which is by volume made of suffering, and they think “okay, this hurts but, you know it’s supposed to be better than hedonism [where ‘better’ means ‘more happy’] so I’ll stick with it for a bit I guess”. Eventually they notice that happiness they’re expecting never arrives and conclude it’s bogus. Their expectation of happiness is the entire problem. You have to take the ahedonistic emotions on their own terms, appreciate them in their own currency.

And few games attempt to guide the player through that more authentically than Pathologic.

A 2005 Russian cult classic, Pathologic is a game that gets mixed reviews in the West. Critics have plenty to be unhappy with. Pathologic doesn’t conform to the standard expectations of what a video game is supposed to be. The sophisticated plot requires cognitive engagement, most of the game consists of walking from place to place and talking to people, combat seems intentionally designed to be clunky and unsatisfying, the graphics are limited, its game world is a rural town in 9 shades of brown viewed several meters at a time through a poisonous fog, and the writing is a dubious translation of what amounts to a novel of verbose philosophical commentary shoved in the players face during gameplay.

The basic premise is that you play one of three doctors sent to a town in the Russian Steppe to deal with a deadly plague outbreak. Your three choices are a (philosophically) rational doctor, an empirical surgeon, and a miracle working child. Pathologic builds the game around 12 days of events in which each character participates no matter who you pick. Events happen with or without you, and if you fail your main quest for the day one of your supporters falls ill and prevents you from getting the good ending unless you can cure them. Because it’s survival horror you have to eat food, sleep, keep your immunity to the plague up, etc. A great deal of the game’s tension is built around balancing these competing problems while still making progress in the story. Because the game is constructed like a novel, it has a lot of plot depth to it that isn’t really possible to summarize in this post without making it many paragraphs longer. If you’re really interested in hearing more I suggest hbomberguy’s excellent 2 hour video essay review of the game:

I haven’t played it myself, but I did watch significant portions of a full playthrough on YouTube to verify that this review more or less tells the truth. As a matter of game design Pathologic tends to enjoy challenging the player by setting up a scenario that puts multiple competing interests into play at once and then forcing the player to resolve it. For example, hbomberguy was particularly impressed by an event that happens on day 2. After word of the plague gets out, all the supplies in town become much more expensive as everyone panic buys them. One of your side quests for the day (if you play as the rational doctor) is to help someone set up a shelter by buying what’s left of the food and delivering it to them. You of course don’t have the money on hand to do this, because food is wicked expensive. So you collect donations, buy the food, then deliver it. Sounds simple enough, but here’s the catch: A naive player probably didn’t buy very much food on day 1. As they’re walking around town with this giant pile of money, then later giant pile of food, the hunger meter creeps upward. It’s possible to eat the food to relieve the hunger, but that’s obviously morally suspect. A player that sticks to their morals and completes the quest finds out the shelter has been contaminated with the plague and the food has to be returned to the quest giver in abject defeat. You don’t get any useful food as a reward, but you do get nuts that can be bartered with child NPCs. Eating the nuts (as you might be tempted to do with your hunger meter so high) is a bad idea, they provide almost no hunger reduction and sell for quite a bit of value in the town’s barter economy.

I actually watched this same quest in someone else’s playthrough, and got to notice how much variance in the experience is put into the game. Hbomberguy is forced to use his own money to buy the food, whereas the more inquisitive player I watched got a dialogue tree that let him collect an extra donation. Hbomberguy doesn’t listen to the explanation of the reward given at the end of the quest, so he has to “find out” that the nuts are valuable in the barter economy. This is actually directly told to the player if they’re paying attention to what people say to them and pick the right dialogue options. In Hbomberguy’s playthrough he doesn’t have to find a plague house for the main quest because he already encounters one doing this side quest, the other fellow ends up doing both quests. Watching these two players have the same experience back to back makes it really clear how the game is structured and what things it does and doesn’t reward. Players who pay attention and keep an open mind prosper, players that try to rush past ‘irrelevant’ dialogue and focus on ‘gameplay’ miss that they’re literally skipping it.

This is in marked contrast to typical game design. In the developer documentaries produced for the Halo trilogy, designers often bring up the concept of ‘30 seconds of fun’. They say if the developers do their job right, the player should experience a moment of flow killing baddies that’s fun for 30 seconds, and the key to making a good video game is to loop that 30 seconds over and over in slight variations. Someone who plays Halo multiplayer for a year straight should expect to experience 30 seconds of fun a million times. Pathologic by contrast cannot offer you a million instances of ‘30 seconds of fun’. In fact, I’m not sure there’s 30 seconds of fun to be had in the whole game. Every mechanic is designed to be about something other than (usually the opposite of) ‘fun’. The core game loop is not centered around zapping the player’s pleasure center continuously.

Instead what Pathologic does to motivate the player revolves around its approach to setting. The setting of Pathologic is rich in detail and anthropological in its construction. Its authors put a lot of work into trying to depict the game world as a complete culture and society, rather than just a generic location for events to take place in. And unlike The Elder Scrolls which hides its extensive background and lore in largely optional in-game ‘books’ and skippable dialogue, Pathologic puts the setting front and center to the experience. Even a ruthlessly efficient player will be confronted with their status as a foreigner in the town, where the conflict between rural tradition and modernism sees its flash point. This culture is vital to the game because it provides a vehicle for attachment. Without the anthropology and well constructed plot it’s not clear why someone would even bother with a full playthrough. George Miller discusses this briefly in the context of missionary work as a potential source of intellectual engagement:

UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES
The missionary has some intellectual opportunities that are denied to his fellows at home. There are Oriental literatures and philosophies that supply fascinating and fruitful fields of research. There are natives with whom he may discuss questions of the spirit and from whom he may secure valuable suggestions as to the interpretation of some of these long-locked treasures of the ancient mind. But if the missionary is to keep his own spirit fresh and maintain an intellectual morale that will not fail him, he will have to solve in his own way the problem of having always a fresh and partly read book on his desk or in his traveling bag.

— George Miller, Missionary Morale

I think that in the context of working on X-Risk, the ‘setting’ of our world takes on an analogous role. Earlier I said that a core trait of Eliezer’s rationalist is a love for the world and its inhabitants. Knowing the world is a basic prerequisite to loving the world. Wise people understand that “love at first sight”, an ignorant love based on shallow perceptions is the province of juveniles and fools. That love often fades the deeper you get to know the object of its focus. It’s the love that solidifies and deepens with familiarity that is worth having. I’ve found that history, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and similar subjects do not just improve my ability to comprehend and try to intervene in the world (agency & sanity). They also deepen my attachment to and appreciation for humanity as a concrete, existing entity.

Your motivating attachment to the world is what you have to protect. It defines your Dramatis Persona and the shape your agency can take. If your character motivation is driven by focusing on a particular person, family, or institution then your strategy choices are constrained to preserve that focus. If anything resembling a winning strategy is outside those constraints, it’s not in your power to pursue it. I’m not saying you’ve already lost with that sort of limitation, but you do need to acknowledge the gravity of what it means. Whatever you can’t bear to part with will control you:

Linji Yixuan writes about Buddhism:

Followers of the Way [of Chán], if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.
The same sort of deal applies to relentless determination:
If you meet yourself on the road, kill them.

The overall effect of this is demonstrated well by Pathologic’s design strategy to motivate the player. The game consistently rewards exploration, ignoring the NPCs on the street that you can barter with is a death sentence. These same NPCs also have stories they can tell you about the town, which are presented alongside stuff you need to continue through the game so you’re more likely to actually read them. The soundtrack is well crafted dark ambient music that helps push the player to trance-out and think during all the walking they have to do from building to building. Vital hints are given out by characters in the same dialogues as philosophical and cultural background, rewarding you if you pay attention and actively think about what you’re being told. Characters are often out to deceive and lie to you, forcing you to really think about their motivations and how they fit into the overall structure of the setting. If the writing and the worldbuilding and the music and the atmosphere do their job, if you’re charmed by the story and its setting, if the game manages to get you invested in its world the experience is transformed from tedium to something profound and worthwhile:

All the least fun bits of the first playthrough are ramped up to eleven, the walking is even more excruciating and circular, the survival mechanics are harder on account of having no money and low reputation a lot of the time and not having as many rich friends. Many of the quests are deliberate attempts to waste your time and get you killed by Foreman Oyun. But you're invested now, the suffering is engaging and you want to know what happens; how it all shakes out for him. You take the hours of walking in stride. You see all the efforts you go through as proof that you're willing to go through hell and high water to save this town. If you didn't like this game you wouldn't get to this point anyway but if you somehow did, it's excruciating, it's awful, you're having a shit time being bored.

But if you care about the story, if you got immersed in the atmosphere and are engaged fully with the survival mechanics and your understanding of how much harder things are now, this is the best fucking time I've had in a game in years. It's still not fun, it's something else, this other thing I can't even describe. It's satisfying in a way I'm not used to games being. In a way the game is asking you a serious question about whether you're willing to be punished to succeed. If you give up and close the game and stop playing it you're basically letting the town die without your help aren't you? Oyun is trying to trying to make you give up and stop playing, and I'm not gonna let him. I'm gonna solve this shit and I'm gonna cure the town.

— hbomberguy, Pathologic is Genius, And Here's Why

On some level, the player knows this is futile. Hbomberguy is discussing his second playthrough as the empirical surgeon, which means he’s already seen how the game ends. By the 12th day nearly everyone in town has been killed by a combination of plague, riots, and famine; ultimately the player fails. Their final decision is about which sliver of value to preserve after the carnage has ended. That futility doesn’t stop Hbomberguy, and the game anticipates this. In the game’s very good ending where you save all of your supporters as well as the supporters of a second playable character, you’re informed the game world is an imaginary place whose characters are puppeted by children. This hurts, to know that everything you’ve worked for is all just a game in someone’s imagination. That is until you get the secret ending where the developers point out that the children controlling the game world are also a fictional device and your expectation that you’re participating in anything other than a game is trivially unreasonable. The game is played in full knowledge of its probable futility:

The Theater of Cruelty is a Theater of Death – a pantomime of suffering, and a look, directly in the eye, at existential dread. You cannot come to a conclusion of what to do in the face of the absurd without first encountering the absurd. And the game, quite blatantly, gives its conclusions; though you may die, though you may [fail], though you may be forced to endure and live with the permanent consequences of your mistakes, you’re still encouraged to pick yourself up and carry on. Though it presents a scenario in which victory seems impossible, it encourages you to keep trying anyway. Though it presents a world where doing the right thing and pressing on forward might have no guarantee of reward, it pushes you to keep going, regardless. The game tells you, openly, that you will lose; that you cannot save everyone, that it’s a fool’s errand to even try – and then, with a wink and a smile, it tells you to BE that fool. “Pathologic” is, ultimately, a game about hope and determination, in the face of complete existential destruction. It’s easy to have hope in a world of smiles and rainbows – in a world where you know the future is guaranteed to be fine. It’s so much harder to have hope when the world is falling apart around you, and so much harder to persuade yourself to carry on when you’ve already made so many mistakes, and so many are suffering, and everything seems so pointless.

— SulMatul, Dissecting Pathologic 2; The Best Game of 2019

This is the other side of the coin with refusing necessity. In a world full of uncertainty you can never really be sure it’s all hopeless. If that sounds like wishful thinking, there’s historical precedent for it. I’m always struck by the improbable timeline we’ve experienced where the United States and USSR didn’t nuke each other into oblivion during the cold war. We got close several times, but nuclear war has so far been averted. If you went back to 1945 and predicted there would be no nuclear war between then and 2020, you would probably be considered an incredible optimist by anyone who is thinking logically straight. I’m to understand that from the moment of its creation, the physicists who invented the atomic bomb understood they had just caused the end of the world. The exact path by which nuclear war was averted would seem implausible and strange, that during an especially tensious moment the USSR would allow itself to collapse rather than risk ending the world by desperately clinging to power. In spite of basic mismanagement and human error, animosity and hatred, poor luck, and plain old reckless stupidity the world is still here.

"Memento Mori", Said The Confessor

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0800

Ten years ago Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post about cryonics where he was baffled by the fact that most young cryonicists heard about the concept and then decided to sign up. There was no extended questioning, no sales pitch, young (future) cryonics patients were simply exposed to the concept of cryonics by seeing it mentioned on television or the radio. He referred to this simple absorption of the idea as ‘clicking’, and desperately wanted to know what went into the seemingly magical click. EY hypothesized that rather than having an extra sanity gear in their head, it seemed more likely cryonicists had some insanity gear(s) missing.

Eliezer, you of all people should know there is no such thing as magic. You even say so in this exact post. User ‘bshock’ replies with his experience working a job where he signed people up for cryonics, writing of the reasons people reject it:

The first and largest by far tended to be religious, which is to say, afterlife mythology. If you thought you were going to Heaven, Kolob, another plane of existence, or another body, you wouldn’t bother investing the money or emotional effort in cryonics.

Only then came the intellectual barriers, but the boundary could be extremely vague. I think that the vast majority of people didnt have any trouble grasping the basic scientific arguments for cryonics; the actual logic filter always seemed relatively thin to me. Instead, people used their intellect to rationalize against cryonics, either motivated by existing beliefs (from one end) or by resulting anxieties (from the other).

Anxieties relating to cryonics tended to revolve around social situation and/or death. Some people identified so deeply with their current social situation, the idea of losing that situation (family, friends, standing, culture, etc.) was unthinkable. Others were afflicted by a sort of hypothetical survivor guilt; why did they deserve to live, when so many of their loved ones had died? Perhaps the majority were simply repulsed by any thought of death itself; most of them spent their lives trying not to think about the fact that we would die, and found it extremely depressing or disorienting when forced to confront that fact.

(Bolding mine)

I find this answer astonishing in its clarity, and frustrating in its prescience. Looking back on it after nearly two years of research it’s annoying to think if I’d been paying more attention I could have caught on to the importance of the fear of death earlier. It’s not that I didn’t think the fear of death was important, the problem is that I hadn’t understood how important it is to peoples ability to implement rationality. A great deal of what goes into the click is having a worldview that can soberly consider mortality. I actually hadn’t looked at that post again until sitting down to write this one. It’s encouraging to see the most credible answer points towards the thesis of this post: that the fear of death acts as a sort of master key for introductory rationality concepts. Examining the fear of death ties all the rationality basics together into a coherent framework, including:

Map/Territory Errors
Something To Protect
Keeping Your Identity Small
Atheism
X-Risk

Why The Fear Of Death?

In ‘soft’ disciplines like psychology, it’s easy to confuse ourselves with compelling nonsense. Hypothesis space is vast, and we often pick from it by exploring some territory, seizing on a plausible idea, and then using a mix of confirmation bias and correlation to ‘prove’ our idea correct. Most of these proofs are worthless, you could construct another one of about the same justification to support a completely separate or even contradictory idea. So when we consider this topic it’s not enough to craft a plausible narrative and give it a body of connective conceptual flesh. We have to narrow the hypothesis space to try and give ourselves a better chance of landing in the right territory. In the service of that lets consider some other narratives which I often see cited to explain people bouncing off rationality and see if the fear of death stands out against them:

The Utility Narrative

Scott writes in his classic Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great that the basic reason why people aren’t interested in rationality is that it’s not useful:

Looking over history, I do not find any tendency for successful people to have made a formal study of x-rationality. This isn’t entirely fair, because the discipline has expanded vastly over the past fifty years, but the basics—syllogisms, fallacies, and the like—have been around much longer. The few groups who made a concerted effort to study x-rationality didn’t shoot off an unusual number of geniuses—the Korzybskians are a good example. In fact as far as I know the only follower of Korzybski to turn his ideas into a vast personal empire of fame and fortune was (ironically!) L. Ron Hubbard, who took the basic concept of techniques to purge confusions from the mind, replaced the substance with a bunch of attractive flim-flam, and founded Scientology. And like Hubbard’s superstar followers, many of this century’s most successful people have been notably irrational.

There seems to me to be approximately zero empirical evidence that x-rationality has a large effect on your practical success, and some anecdotal empirical evidence against it. The evidence in favor of the proposition right now seems to be its sheer obviousness. Rationality is the study of knowing the truth and making good decisions. How the heck could knowing more than everyone else and making better decisions than them not make you more successful?!?

The shortform response to this is that the people who are successful at things by being ‘rationalist-y’ about them usually don’t call what they do rationality. Bruce Lee did not call his style ‘rationality’, but his description of it could be quoted in The Sequences:

I have not invented a “new style,” composite, modified or otherwise that is set within distinct form as apart from “this” method or “that” method. On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds. Remember that Jeet Kune Do is merely a name used, a mirror in which to see “ourselves”. . . Jeet Kune Do is not an organized institution that one can be a member of. Either you understand or you don’t, and that is that. There is no mystery about my style. My movements are simple, direct and non-classical. The extraordinary part of it lies in its simplicity. Every movement in Jeet Kune Do is being so of itself. There is nothing artificial about it. I always believe that the easy way is the right way.

Jeet Kune Do is simply the direct expression of one’s feelings with the minimum of movements and energy. The closer to the true way of Kung Fu, the less wastage of expression there is. Finally, a Jeet Kune Do man who says Jeet Kune Do is exclusively Jeet Kune Do is simply not with it. He is still hung up on his self-closing resistance, in this case anchored down to reactionary pattern, and naturally is still bound by another modified pattern and can move within its limits. He has not digested the simple fact that truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive. Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.

In other words, Bruce Lee follows the way of winning. Famous gamer David Sirlin would not call what he does rationality, but his book Playing To Win has a better definition of rationality than the ‘systematized winning’ found in The Sequences:

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

“Rationality is when you stop living your life by fake rules” is a heuristic I tell others often, it’s beautiful in its succinctness and simple enough that almost anyone can understand it.

In Moneyball, Billy Beane and Bill James did not call what they do rationality, yet Billy’s picks were quite literally done by a stats whiz that studied behavioral economics (read: formal rationality) in college and Bill Jame’s ‘sabermetrics’ (“the empirical analysis of baseball”) community sounds almost like LessWrong in its heyday, with the same pattern of a grumpy founder that quits after everyone he shares his insight with proves to be totally inadequate:

Jame's literary powers combined with his willingness to answer his mail to create a movement. Research scientists at big companies, university professors of physics and economics and life sciences, professional statisticians, Wall Street analysts, bored lawyers, math wizards unable to hold down regular jobs — all these people were soon mailing James their ideas, criticisms, models, and questions. His readership must have been one of the strangest groups of people ever assembled under one idea. Before he found a publisher, James had four readers he considered "celebrities."

…

"I hate to say it and I hope you're not one of them," he wrote in his final, 1988 Baseball Abstract, "but I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don't even like, nitwits who glom onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message … Whereas I used to write one 'Dear Jackass' letter a year, I now write maybe thirty." The growing misunderstanding between himself and his readership was, he felt, not adding to the sum total of pleasure or interest in the universe. "I am no longer certain that the effects of my doing this kind of research are in the best interest of the average baseball fan," he explained. "I would like to pretend that the invasion of statistical gremlins crawling at random all over the telecast of damn near every baseball game is irrelevant to me, that I really had nothing to do with it … I know better. I didn't create this mess, but I helped."

Rationality does in fact seem to work, but the people who actually use it do not generally call themselves ‘rationalists’.

The top comment on That Magical Click is by ‘pjeby’, who replies:

One of the things that I’ve noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think “guessing the teacher’s password”, but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

An anecdote: once, when I still worked as software developer/department manager in a corporation, my boss was congratulating me on a million dollar project (revenue, not cost) that my team had just turned in precisely on time with no crises.

Well, not congratulating me, exactly. He was saying, “wow, that turned out really well”, and I felt oddly uncomfortable. After getting off the phone, I realized a day or so later that he was talking about it like it was luck, like, “wow, what nice weather we had.”

So I called him back and had a little chat about it. The idea that the project had succeeded because I designed it that way had not occurred to him, and the idea that I had done it by the way I negotiated the requirements in the first place—as opposed to heroic efforts during the project—was quite an eye opener for him.

Fortunately, he (and his boss) were “clicky” enough in other areas (i.e., they didn’t believe computers were magic, for example) that I was able to make the math of what I was doing click for them at that “teachable moment”.

Unfortunately, most people, in most areas of their lives treat everything as magic. They’re not used to being able to understand or control anything but the simplest of things, so it doesn’t occur to them to even try. Instead, they just go along with whatever everybody else is thinking or doing.

For such (most) people, reality is social, rather than something you understand/ control.

Having experienced this when I was younger I think this idea is broadly correct. However as I’ll explain in the rest of this post the fear of death and social reality as barriers to rational thinking are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they reinforce and are deeply entangled with each other.

The Intelligence Narrative

Another common explanation for the small number of rationalists is that rationality requires a level of intelligence that’s very rare. Consider The Unz Review’s The 7 tribes of intellect which says of the top 5% of human intelligence:

These are the top 5%. If you are fortunate enough to be in this category, the world is your oyster, unless you blow it by getting drunk, or by imagining that you are so bright that no further work is required, or you go off the rails into being some sort of clever fool, due to some personality difficulty.

…

They can deal with tasks which require the application of specialised background knowledge, dis-embedding the features of a problem from a text, and drawing high-level inferences from highly complex text with multiple distractors. They can almost certainly do the previous credit card comparison task; they can summarise from a given text two ways in which lawyers may challenge prospective jurors; and, using a calculator, determine the total cost of carpet to cover a room, given the dimensions of the room and the cost per square yard of carpeting. (There you are, at the apotheosis of intellect. You can challenge a juror and carpet a room). Their occupations will include the professions, the sciences and, with experience and application, the top posts in business and government. Entertainments will include most artistic and literary endevours, and theories will be seen as interesting in themselves. Vocabularies are in the 30,000 to 42,000 range, which is probably as high as you can go without using lots of technical terms. In modern welfare states they would be high net contributors, very probably supporting two or even three households in addition to their own, and have property and savings. In IQ terms they are 125 and above.

I’ve sometimes told people that if they don’t know how to use a spreadsheet, ipython, or another tool for quantitative thinking they’re not a rationalist. It naturally follows that intelligence is a bottleneck. The sort of thinking you have to do if you want to be reliably correct about things is hard and even the brightest peoples capacity for it is limited. IQ points don’t really grant magic abilities, they grant modest abilities the average reader of this blog would be surprised to learn most people don’t have. On the 2016 LessWrong Survey the median respondent claimed to have an IQ of 138. Obviously a survey is not necessarily going to get us the most reliable data on this, but I can’t say I really think they’re lying.

At the same time, the intelligence barrier might not be as high as is commonly assumed. In his Superforecasting, Tetlock finds that the average IQ of his best performers in the geopolitical forecasting tournament was 80th percentile, far below the 1:1000 rarity implied by LessWrong and SlateStarCodex survey results. This makes sense exactly because the skills provided by IQ points are so modest. Beyond a certain point, if raw intelligence was the only way to get ahead humanity wouldn’t get very far. Assuming it’s possible to teach advanced epistemics to the merely intelligent rather than exclusively the ultra-intelligent this has serious strategy considerations for handling existential risk and other issues.

The Fear of Death Narrative

In his The Denial of Death anthropologist Ernest Becker identifies the fear of death as the unifying psychological struggle between man and the natural world. Here he is describing the confabulation and resistance to thinking that characterizes most people:

Now these euphemisms mean usually that he accepts to work on becoming the father of himself by abandoning his own project and by giving it over to The Fathers. The castration complex has done its work, and one submits to social reality. He can now deflate his own desires and claims, and can play it safe in the world of the powerful elders. He can even give his body over to the tribe, the state, the embracing magical umbrella of the elders and their symbols, that way it will no longer be a dangerous negation for him. But there is no real difference between a childish impossibility and an adult one. The only thing that the person achieves is a practiced self deceit, what we call the Mature Character.

Take stock of those around you and you will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings. Which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer. And if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary, through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost, the individual suspects this but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true. He uses them as trenches for the defenses of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

This is not necessarily an intuitive notion. I had previously favored the utility, social reality, and intelligence narratives as the basic explanation for why there were so few rationalists. The fear of death was an important factor, but one that played second fiddle to these more important bottlenecks. Over time though I’ve updated towards a more primal rejection, basic primordial fears in the human animal which encourage poor thinking. Beyond its above average explanatory power, I provide four basic arguments for why we should expect the fear of death to be special even before we dig into any detailed analysis:

The Argument From Empiricism: Death is an irrationality hotspot, and the denial of death represents perhaps the most brazen example of unsanity which is still tolerated in the modern world. People say in all seriousness that after their body is destroyed, they will be resurrected into another plane of existence or reincarnated on earth. They confabulate the most bizarre metaphysics to support these claims, it’s probably not a coincidence that people’s brains shut off when it comes to cryonics. People do not say “I may not have mated, but after I die my essence will spread out among the living and my bloodline will continue in the tribe.”, they’re very sober about the consequences of not reproducing.
The Argument From Culture: As Becker points out in his book, and as you’d learn from reading any number of anthropology papers, some form of the denial of death is a cultural universal. Becker is particularly insightful with his notion of an immortality project, by which people use magical thinking to defeat death even in ostensibly secular guises. While we’re all familiar with the ordinary religious forms of death-denial, even supposedly ‘secular’ nations such as the Soviet Union made up for their state sponsored atheism by emphasizing the immortality of living on through one’s industrial or scientific accomplishments. It is notable that by controlling a group immortality project, tribes and societies gain a symbolic control over life and death with which they can magically kill defectors and deviants.
The Argument From Biography: When telling their life stories rationalists tend to cite facing the reality of death as a key moment of development. Alfred Korzybski for example actually wrote his Manhood of Humanity, a book whose thesis was that the mismatch between the growth curve in technology and the growth curve in civilizing capability would inevitably lead to X-Risk, before he wrote his famous Science and Sanity which founded General Semantics. The impetus for that was his participation in WWI, which forced him to seriously consider the question of how to prevent such horrible wars in the future. Eliezer Yudkowsky has his Coming Of Age sequence where he discusses the realization that there is no magic that stops really bad things from happening. My own journey started with the childhood realization that there is nothing to stop my world from being ended by a nuclear war. It was my experience trying to explain my terror to family, friends, and available adults that led me to instantly sympathize with HJPEV when he explains his own battle against ordinary unsanity about risk.
The Argument From Reflection: If you get into Buddhist meditation or acid, you’ll eventually find that the layers of your identity begin to peel away. At the bottom of your motivation stack you find the fear of death, which to continue living you must leave alone and reattach to the material world. Someone else following the same procedure of “take acid once a week and see what happens” reports a similar melting away of inhibitions surrounding the fear of death. For many readers this will be a “pfft, so what” sort of deal, but if people hack their brains to become uninhibited agents and then report the change as having faced the reality of death I think that’s notable.

Map-Territory Errors

In his Denial of Death Becker says that the best interpretation of the observations made by Freud and other early psychoanalysts is they point to a deep human trauma about the fear of death. He posits people create an identity and buy into a social symbol system in large part to ward off the fear of death. This is because humans are, as Alfred Korzybski identified them, symbolic creatures. We are separated from the rest of earthly existence by the ability to bind time, and transmit observations as little pieces of culture. The problem is that the symbolic is the realm of the gods, but people are still mortal and creaturely. As the famous Jewish creation myth goes, man has the Knowledge of higher worlds, and his punishment is to die knowing. In order to continue existing normally with this massive mortal horror hovering over us all the time, is to selectively deny reality.

Why is our selective denial of the reality of death so damaging to our ability to think? The basic reason is that it involves what I call the refusal of phenomenological necessity. Necessity can be stated simply as: 2 and 2 equals 4, conclusions follow from their premises. In order to deny the reality of death, we must also deny the reality of anything which might be able to show us our mortality. This includes of course, basically any system of ordered thinking. Or at least, any system of ordered thinking based on perception of the world around us. Consider the classic syllogism: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Deep damage has to be done to your thinking to avoid absorbing the importance of logic that simple. Naturally then we should expect most people are failing to absorb the simple logic of many things.

So it’s not surprising that the most consequential map territory errors are motivated by fear. As children we believed there were monsters under our bed, but more extraordinary was the belief we could banish them by hiding under a blanket. This is the fundamental essence of a map-territory error. We control our perceptions, not the variables those perceptions are nominally meant to track. This creates magical beliefs, where we think that controlling our perceptions (the map) alters the territory.

Becker notes that during childhood development, there is usually a stage where the child believes themselves to be omnipotent. When a small child wants something, they signal their desire and the desire is fulfilled. In fact, it is entirely sensible for them to conclude they are omnipotent. Eventually, the child has desires which outstrip what is possible for their caregivers to provide, and the child often wishes for their caretaker’s death. Because the child believes they’re omnipotent, this juvenile death fantasy is taken as a serious threat in their own mind, and they feel extreme guilt about it.

This speaks to the fact that the default is to have deeply magical beliefs about reality. This impulse is so strong, that even after we have (in the abstract) banished any possibility of psi, ghosts, spirits, etc; we still have people insisting that there must be something more, some way in which the map controls the territory. Because it seems so intuitive and compelling to us that it does.

Death and The Roots of Magick

In shamanic practice, the shaman is typically associated with death and the dead. The shaman is a necromancer, a spirit-channeler, a traveler between the world of the living and the world of the infinite cosmology of dead things. Shamans are supposed to gain their powers through a near death experience, or some proxy thereof. Modern day notions of magic are the descendants of these ancient astral spirit guides. Thus the roots of magick and sorcery are in death, and management of the fear of death. We see this in anthropological accounts of sorcery among more primitive societies, take for example this account of a deadly magician:

During my first fieldwork, Asao was the scariest man in the village – a sagguma, and proud of it. People would have openly despised him, only it was too dangerous to do so. It was safer to fear him, and that they certainly did…Sangguma [sorcerers] are said to acquire ghostly powers by mastering magical skills, submitting to harsh bodily disciplines, and drinking the fluids of a rotting corpse. Asao did not simply admit to all of this, he boasted of it. Animal familiars (mostly night birds) spied for him and brought him news of distant places. Asao claimed the ability to fly and to make himself invisible. With ostentatious glee, he told of participating in attacks (sangguma usually work in teams of two or three) on selected victims…Occasionally, he would be mysteriously absent for days or weeks at a time, presumably in retreat to purify his magical powers or on commission to stalk and attack someone in another, possibly distant, place (Tuzin, 57).

What’s striking to me about this is the similarity, many steps removed, from the modern day “edgelord”, whose social role is to be a troll, culture warrior, or contrarian killer of comforting untruths. This is probably not a coincidence. As Becker points out, it is important for people to control social norms and expression, to enforce religious rules because to lose control of these things is to lose their sense of control over life and death. Tribal control of immortality symbols is used as a psychological weapon against would-be magicians, to be a sorcerer then is to be someone who has stepped outside of social reality:

So, what is a sorcerer? A sorcerer is a – real or perceived – violator of norms of conduct. Such atypical behaviors often entail great risk. One who transgresses taboos that are not particularly esteemed, or that indicate one’s impressive abilities, can gain greater status and prestige, while those who infringe on regulations widely considered legitimate earn the enmity of kith and kin. This is the paradox at the heart of sorcery – the sorcerer seizes power or inadvertently orchestrates his own demise, on occasion performing each concurrently.

Something To Protect

Which brings us to another key point of becoming a rationalist: Something To Protect. In his Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky writes that the impulse to become a rationalist must come from protecting another being or entity; it can’t come from protecting yourself. I know this is false, because for me it did come from protecting myself. But I think I know why he would believe this. If you are a selfish creature as people fundamentally are, and you think that your beliefs control reality, to acknowledge the reality of death is to kill whatever you gaze at with it. It’s easier then for us to face the reality of death through a proxy than to acknowledge the reality of our own death. The exact mechanics of why it’s easier are tricky. One cynical possibility is that the proxy is sacrificial. To acknowledge the reality of a family member dying or animals dying is to subject them to death, which instantly creates emotional attachment and feelings of fear, guilt, and responsibility. The proxy stands in for us, and lets us see the horror of death without risking our own life being taken by magic.

A more optimistic possibility is that Something To Protect allows you to elevate a thing over your own survival. Having found something you care more about than living, risking magical death is not quite so horrifying in comparison.

Keeping Your Identity Small

This brings us to identity. In Becker’s view, identity is about putting up a wall between yourself and reality.

It’s notable that Korzybski called confusing the layers of abstraction identification. Korzybski saw identity in the sense of Aristotle’s “A is A” as the core obstacle to rationality. He advocated the removal of words such as “I” and “is” from everyday speech. He also felt that the splitting of man into a “spirit” being separate from an animal being was responsible for much philosophical woe. It is only by accepting our embodied, creaturely nature that we can take full advantage of our ability to think according to General Semantics. Accepting our embodied creaturely nature is of course also to accept our mortality, as it is the creaturely aspects of man which make him decay and die.

As Paul Graham notes in his essays, things which are part of our identity are things which we parse as being direct attacks on us when they’re criticized. Conveniently, anything that’s part of your identity you can’t think clearly about (because to think clearly about it would be to be ‘killed’ by magic). If as Becker says our identities exist to protect us from the reality of death (and they at least in part do), then it stands to reason that one of the most powerful interventions to become more rational is to tear down the damn wall.

This is, as far as I can tell, absolutely the case. The most powerful rationality intervention, bar none, is Paul Graham’s simple notion of keeping your identity small (which he is light on the details of how to actually do, but the goal is sound). Really, the average person should just grind flaying off useless or maladaptive identity aspects and then come back and try the other epistemic enhancing techniques. In the same way that say, you might grind Buddhist meditation before going after stoic control of your emotions.

Even if you’re not sold on the fear of death thesis, identity is still probably the place to start for most people. When we let ideas become part of our identity, they become sacred and it’s not possible to update on them even if they’re wrong. This creates natural bottlenecks on the road to developing uncommon sense, which have to be overcome by shedding ad-hoc identity constructs.

Atheism

This also explains another ‘mysterious’ feature of rationality: Why the association with New Atheism? Can’t you be Catholic and be a rationalist, as many practitioners of General Semantics were?

For example Samuel Bois, who wrote the 1966 General Semantics classic The Art of Awareness: A Handbook on Epistemics and General Semantics was Catholic. It’s tempting then to think that we can retain our faith and be a rationalist, but it’s precisely because the denial of death is so damaging to our thinking that we can’t. Until we break down our fake immortality, it’s not really possible to perceive the world clearly.

This theory, that atheism is a fundamental point because it is key to facing the reality of death, is importantly enough more predictive than the idea that atheism is important because you need to reject the uniquely damaging influence of Christianity. Because it needs to be atheism, agnosticism won’t do. Many people in the modern era are agnostic; they have a vague feel good religious apathy which serves to prevent them from having to think very hard about this subject. Those people still act stupid in the way Christians act stupid, even though they’ve rejected Abrahamic faith. Therefore we know that the important feature is facing the reality of death, not rejecting Christ, Yahweh or Allah. In fact even your median atheist has probably still not quite processed the reality of death, they’re just more capable of doing so.

Existential Risk

It also explains the focus on existential risks. With nuclear arms we already have the tools to destroy ourselves, if nukes are not enough we are likely to get tools that are some time during the 21st century. Most people are fundamentally crippled in their ability to think about this; again, to think about it would be to be killed by magic. Therefore we can infer on priors that existential risks are almost certainly underfocused on in proportion to their seriousness and severity. If your society has problems thinking about something, it’s a safe bet that issues involving that topic are not getting the attention or rigor that they deserve.

This is why Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote his Sequences in the first place. The problem was not that people were failing to understand complex concepts, but rather that they were failing to see the simple logic of scary ideas. Once you’ve faced the reality of death and stopped living your life by fake rules, understood Darwin, shed your fake immortality, rooted out animism from your intuitions and learned a bit about thinking clearly concerns about existential risk are straightforward obvious ideas, not arcane cultish nuttery.

Rethinking Rationality Training

If all this is true we should take a hard look at how we’ve been trying to “train” rationality up to this point. More classes on critical thinking won’t help if the barriers are emotion rather than skill based. Below are some ideas to consider.

Keeping Your Identity Small

I recently read a post where the author said they’d had trouble implementing Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small in a useful way. It was only after becoming more confident in their ability to get by without any particular identity feature that they could stop identifying as this or that. I’m honestly a little skeptical, and suspect the reader misunderstood what Graham was trying to get across. So lets take their example: If you’re someone whose only way to connect with other people is jokes, you might think something like:

“I’m a funny person.”

Are you a funny person? Maybe you are, but are you more than that? Are you always a funny person? Using phrases like “I am” or “is” or “be” in the wrong ways can reinforce static self concepts[0]. To change and then stop identifying is to miss the entire point, you were supposed to notice your limitations by not identifying and then change. The author’s insistence that keeping your identity small is not actionable advice frustrates me a little because I know it is.

How I learned to do it was:

Read Paul Graham’s essay.
Start noticing identity driven defensiveness as a salient feature of other peoples behavior.
Eventually notice when I have this feature in my behavior.
When I notice, ask “Do I endorse this part of my identity? Is this identity feature maladaptive?”
If I endorse it, reinforce/lean in. If I don’t, step back/unfuse.

Map/Territory

In his research Korzybski found that map/territory errors were best trained out of people by having them spend time with a model of the ladder of abstraction[1]. Bruce Kodish describes this in Korzybski: A Biography:

The diagram could be used as a tool to help bring human thinking to the human level. A person could keep it in front of himself as a reference to help distinguish the levels when dealing with any problem (A statement about a descriptive statement - an inference - is not the descriptive statement; a label or description of an object is not the object; the object is not the invisible, inferred process; etc.) In order to time-bind most effectively, a person had to understand and use the mechanism correctly by recognizing and distinguishing the levels or orders in any situation. This was not a statistical approach to a science of man but one based on human potentiality.

I suspect that something like this would help a lot more than any workshop. People need simple things they can practice on their own to get past identity and ontological confusion in their thinking.

Meditation

Many CFAR-ish people claim that meditation practice was essential to them becoming more rationalist, but can’t explain why. This explains why: Meditation practices help you face the reality of death and process it. It stops being a thing that “works but we don’t know why just trust us” and gives us a predictive model of why we should expect it to work, and what things will contribute to it working or not.

Practicing Dying

Supposedly Becker often told people that they should practice dying. I’m not sure exactly what this entailed, but I do a similar thing to help me think about X-Risk. I’ll lay down in bed and imagine that I’m about to die in the next 5-15 minutes. Die of what you ask? Oh, any number of things. The most common is a nuclear war, but it’s often being turned into grey goo by a rampant superintelligence, or more mundane causes of death like cancer or a virus. When I first started doing this I found it very distressing, but over time I’ve gotten a lot more capable at soberly considering the end of my existence.

It’s notable that the rhetoric used to talk about defeating death might actually be having the opposite of its intended effect on many people. Emphasizing the horror and tragedy of death is useful if you’ve already accepted its reality and need social permission to say the obvious. If you’re crippled in your ability to think about mortality however, this rhetoric probably reinforces the flinch reaction people have and takes them farther away from reality.

Bibliography

Drive Yourself Sane: Using The Uncommon Sense Of General Semantics, Third Edition (2011) by Susan and Bruce Kodish.
Korzybski: A Biography (2011) by Bruce Kodish

Book Review: The War On Normal People by Andrew Yang

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0700

For several years now I’ve been trying to put my worldview to paper. Every attempt has been thwarted by the yawning chasm between the way I see things and the common philosophy which dominates public discussion. I broadly subscribe to the SL3+ vision of the future, and tend to think of policy in the terms used by authors like Tyler Cowen and Scott Alexander. Mainstream politicians do not represent me in the slightest, and I usually just end up voting for the Democrats because they at least pretend to care about renewable energy and gaping societal wounds like the American healthcare system. So when I heard about Andrew Yang’s open support for a Universal Basic Income, I was intrigued. I admittedly wrote him off as a no-chance marginal candidate, and for a long time didn’t pay him any mind. He did get a couple bucks from me so he could get into the debates, because I figured it would be entertaining to have him there. What finally got my sustained attention was the slow proliferation of Yang 2020 memes in pretty much every online youth hangout I happen to have membership in. It reminded me of a certain other candidate in 2016, who had been written off as a no-chance joke by every right minded person in the country. Donald Trump is of course still lording his victory over the insanity-challenged.

The realization that Yang had figured out the elusive strategy for a post-Trump presidential run tuned me in. When my small donation was followed up with an offer to attend a fundraiser, I replied with ‘maybe’ and mulled over it for a few days. Eventually it occurred to me that this person had the means to beat Trump and was saying everything I’d thought for years but knew I’d never hear from a politician with a shot at office. So I went to that fundraiser, and I bought this book. There was something anxious about opening it. I was deeply familiar with the awkward, distant communication that’s typical of people who try to sell Universal Basic Income or any other concept coming from the economic-rationalist cluster of ideas.

Shockingly, it was the exact opposite of what I’d feared. As I read this book it slowly dawned on me that Andrew Yang had perfected the rationalist argument. Or as I put it to a friend: “I didn’t know it was possible to write better than Scott Alexander and be running for president.” The War On Normal People is a book I will probably read over and over, its argument is laid out so well it deserves intense study as rhetoric. Anyone who is trying to write ‘rationalist’ ideas for a normal audience needs to find a copy and read it closely. Unlike almost every other book on these subjects, The War On Normal People is written for the everyman. Concepts are presented in accessible, succinct language. What could be a cold compendium of facts is brought to life by evocative personal ancedotes and informal wit. The entire book runs to 244 uncrowded pages communicating a data-driven narrative of vast social change on the horizon. It’s somehow light and breezy reading, but densely packed with relevant facts and statistics. I was so blown away by the sheer rhetorical craftsmanship that I began to wonder if it was really written by Yang or a brilliant ghost writer on commission.

How Yang Answers A Question

When you dig into Trump’s way of speaking, his way of writing, how he gives a speech even, you get a lot of fascinating insight about rhetoric. While I haven’t found the time to do a deep dive, I suspect Yang is similar. The first video I link there, How Donald Trump Answers A Question, looks at the way Donald Trump rhetorically handles an adversarial interview question. I think that you can look at some of Andrew’s writing with the same frame. The eigth chapter, entitled The Usual Objections features a Frequently Asked Questions interlude where Yang takes on the most common concerns people have with predictions of technological unemployment. In it he includes the question:

If we were undergoing a technological revolution, wouldn't we be seeing it appear in increased productivity?

So how does Yang answer? He starts by explaining the background of the question, that this is a concern raised by academics and why it would be a concern. If people are being unemployed by robots we should expect productivity per worker to go up. As an extreme case, if ten people ran the entire economy then productivity per worker would be 10% of GDP. This is not how Yang explains it though, instead he writes “The thought is that we’d see a productivity spike if we were doing a ton more with technology and fewer people.” The biggest word in that sentence is ‘productivity’, and I’m sure it’s only there because it has to be. It’s a simple way to explain the idea that doesn’t require any reference to fractions, that dreaded enemy of grade school America.

The next thing Yang does is admit that productivity numbers are actually depressed. Instead of denying the premise, he accepts it. This is a standard rationalist rhetorical move, what’s interesting is how he proceeds. First he explains two plausible theoretical explanations for why productivity might be stagnant. One is that maybe robots only move the needle once there’s a lot of them, but we can still be fairly sure they’re coming. Relying on current statistics as the only indicator of long term trends would be pretty foolish after all. At the start of the 20th century, eggs and ham was a dish reserved for the well to do. It’s now available at McDonalds to anyone with a few dollars in their pocket. That’s not how Yang chooses to say it. He says “Counting on the measurements to tell us what’s going on is like waiting until the storm is here before battening down the hatches.” Again we see simple language and reference to well known concepts, the message is gotten across without having to resort to complex ideas.

His next plausible explanation is that automation creates a sort of equilibrium. When a machine unemploys people, the unemployed are added to the labor market for cheap. It’s not difficult to imagine a dynamic where labor is automated only to the point that wage slaves become cheap and no further than that. Some historians speculate that this is why the Roman Empire failed to develop an industrial revolution. They had the necessary science, but no economic incentive due to an abundance of slave labor. However, this equilibrium isn’t stable. Yang transitions from this argument to tell a personal story about being CEO of a company. He was generous until growth slowed down, at which point he began scheming about how he would perform ruthless cost cutting if things got tight. The previous two reasons Yang cites take up about 1/3 of the answer, this story and its narrative takeaway at the end are given the rest of the page space. At the end Yang includes a graph of reported job loss over time, showing stark swings in layoffs between economic downturns. It admittedly took me some effort to read what this graph was showing. The effect could have been much more dramatic if it had been blown up to fill an entire page and given the Tufte treatment, with labels sketched next to points of interest in the data.

Structuring Argument

Again, I haven’t taken the time to give the whole book a close rhetorical analysis. But one thing that stood out to me even on the first read is the way Yang structures his argument. He proceeds in a logical order, starting from the witty proposition that the ‘tech bubble’ is after the readers job and then expanding outward. Particularly impressive was a section where he broke down several different sectors of the US economy and demonstrated how automation was expected to impact each of them. Yang is good at following up on second order consequences of things. I think this was the first analysis I’ve read which pointed out that there is a trucker ecosystem, and losing truck jobs will shutter plenty of services that cater to them. He builds the argument brick by brick, showing how each thing we might hope would mitigate the consequences probably won’t materialize, and how the things we might hope would make up for that won’t materialize either, all the way back until we get to UBI.

One thing that Yang uses very often, and in fact it’s the first thing he uses to introduce his argument, is ethos. Rationalist authors tend to shy away from ethos, because argument from authority is supposed to be a fallacy and they would prefer the facts speak for themselves. This is kind of stupid for multiple reasons, but Yang really shoves what they’re missing in your face. As the founder of Venture For America, an organization dedicated to making startups in diverse places outside the usual Silicon Valley/New York megatropolis, Yang is able to say that there’s no hope for job programs within the first pages of his book and it’s credible. The rationalist guru Eliezer Yudkowsky famously claims that ‘rationalists should win’, and let me tell you Yang is winning big with his use of ethos. He uses his personal experience and societal position in compelling ways that let him skip pages and pages of tedious argument. It makes for a more readable, dare I say smarter book than the verbose mega essays of Scott Alexander.

Parting Thoughts

As interesting as the book is, I wouldn’t say it’s perfect. In particular I felt like the second half where Yang starts proposing solutions wasn’t as tight and rigorous as the first half. I can’t fault him too much for this, since the problems he’s laying out are close to the “impossible” end of the scale and a lot of the ideas for how we solve them are theory or speculation. But if you’d like to judge for yourself, it’s an inexpensive paperback. When I read Bernie Sanders political biography in 2016 I thought it was a very exciting book, because it showed that there is a road to political success built on incremental improvement. At the time I’d have given it 5 stars, this book is much more exciting than that so I guess it’s six stars. It’s short, thought provoking, scary, an excellent case study in rhetoric, and you should read it.

Three Are The Beliefs By Which Death Will Be Defeated

Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00:00 -0700

A few months ago Sarah Constantin posted an interesting thread to twitter about trauma. In it she cites psychology research claiming that deep trauma is linked to the loss of three major beliefs:

there is also what we might call “one-place trust,” where one trusts other people in general rather than trusting a specific individual or group of individuals...one must first have *trust* in order to trust y to do z or to trust y more generally

Jones (2004) calls it “basal security,” while Herman (1992/1997) refers to “basic trust” but also to a sense of “safety in the world.” Améry (1999) describes an enduring loss of “trust in the world” that he experienced after torture and subsequent incarceration in Auschwitz

“losing trust” involves losing a habitual confidence that more usually permeates all experience, thought, and activity

we experience a fundamental assault on our right to live, on our personal sense of worth, and further, on our sense that the world (including people) basically supports human life.

Janoff-Bulman (1992, pp. 5–6)...identifies three such beliefs as central to one-place trust: “the world is benevolent;” “the world is meaningful;” and “the self is worthy.”

Sarah concludes by arguing that because damage to the three beliefs is trauma, anyone who tries to argue you out of them explicitly is a bad actor:

Hot take: anyone pressuring you to lose this "basal security" or "sense of trust", or anyone saying it is morally obligatory to lack it, is a bad person who is literally traumatizing you.
— Sarah Constantin (@s_r_constantin) April 16, 2019

In making this argument Sarah has stepped right into one of the central secular atheist fallacies. It’s not a fallacy unique to atheists, but their essentially secular character makes them more vulnerable to it than most. It goes something like “the most important thing in life is happiness, and happiness is mostly this vague sense of wellbeing and peace that you get from things like meditation and baby photos”. This view is certainly more wholesome than unrestrained hedonism, but it shares many subtle flaws with its more aggressive utilitarian relatives.

As a brief digression before we go any further, it’s important that we ground our sense of secularism. This essay is going to use that word a lot, so we need to make sure we’re on the same page about what it means. The most straightforward definition is that something is secular if it’s not religious. But that doesn’t tell us what secularism is, it just tells us what it isn’t. A more abstract definition might be that a secular perspective is one that doesn’t use magic to explain the world. Certainly that would fit with being non-religious, and goes a long way towards explaining the natural conflict between secularists and superstition. And this presents a problem for secular atheists in the meditation and baby photos crowd.

The problem is that trust in a benevolent meaningful world of personal worthiness requires you to believe in magic. It’s simply not possible to square the world we actually live in with those three foundational beliefs without introducing figurative or literal magic thinking. There is often a moment when atheist-shaped people realize that the world is not a nice place, even if they’re not quite a full atheist yet. And I don’t just mean ‘not nice’ in the sense that people are unkind, I mean the realization that the world is a fundamentally hostile environment indifferent to human existence.

I remember my moment. I was probably eight or nine, staying at home reading a U.S. history textbook. My mother had left me in the room and told me that I need to read it to pass State exams; fair enough. Reading about the founding fathers and the US Constitution it occurred to me that every person I was reading about was dead. It didn’t matter how great their accomplishments were, how good a person they were, whether they were bad or good or whatever they were all dead, every single one. That realization hit me really hard; I actually broke down crying. My mother came in and asked me what was wrong. I told her was that I didn’t understand why good people like that have to die. I remember her answering my question with a silent hug. Nobody who has had this experience really believes that the world is benevolent or personally invested in their success.

The most frustrating aspect of this for me is that Sarah is right about the importance of base trust. Belief in a benevolent meaningful world of personal worthiness is often the basis on which people ground their sense of agency. Trust in those three things lets you believe what you do is important. And when you lose that trust, it is a form of spiritual damage. If you look at the reasons people give for why they let the world burn; statements against these are common. Where we disagree is that Sarah seems to implicitly believe these are the only beliefs you can base agency on, and therefore anyone who tries to convince you’re they’re not true is an evil person. Quite often the exact opposite is true: good people dealing with bad things need you to see what they see. They are not equipped to singlehandedly solve the worlds problems.

The argument is made more absurd when you consider the speaker. Seeing Sarah make this argument is stunning. As the director of a life extension research lab, Sarah’s work is dependent on people acknowledging death is awful and worth fighting. I suspect that the people who donate to this work are not those with charmed lives of confidence, kindness, and meaning who want more time to enjoy them. In the popular imagination immortality is a goal for villains ¹, it takes a certain amount of independent and careful thought to break from the crowd. Living life pain-free doesn’t exactly encourage philosophical soul searching.

In addition to their not being true (a key point that bears repeating), using the three beliefs Sarah cites as a foundation for agency invites other problems. For one thing, it severely restricts the scope of agency by limiting how severe a problem people are allowed to see in the world. If you think that at its core the world is a benevolent environment with a meaningful arc, that will significantly distort the way you look at things like existential risk. “Sure climate change is bad” you’ll say, “but it can’t really wipe out the human race, can it?”. Your mental model of the problems effecting humanity will operate on fake rules, which you can’t afford if you’re serious about solving them.

For this and other reasons, heroic people on zealous crusades (as any sufficiently life-encompassing mission is bound to become, pursued seriously) tend to reject one or more of the three beliefs cited by Sarah. While I can’t provide statistics to this effect, the samples below will give you some flavor of the typical rejections.

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is the creator of the GNU General Public license, the first copyleft license for software (if not the first copyleft license period). He also wrote the POSIX compatible utilities used with basically every modern Linux or Unix system today. He’s dedicated his life to an ethos of software freedom that most people find esoteric, but is incredibly important to our current arguments around DRM, transparent AI, corporate surveilance and more. The following excerpts are taken from the book Free as in Freedom, a biography about Stallman.

The self is worthy

"I had just the right skills,” says Stallman, summing up his decision for launching the GNU Project to the audience. “Nobody was there but me, so I felt like, `I'm elected. I have to work on this. If not me, who?'

The world is benevolent

For Stallman, the realization that Xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. At first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the refusal. As a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, Stallman's attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness. Now that the request had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. “I was so angry I couldn't think of a way to express it. So I just turned away and walked out without another word,” Stallman recalls. “I might have slammed the door. Who knows? All I remember is wanting to get out of there."

Twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that Stallman has elevated the event into a major turning point. Within the next few months, a series of events would befall both Stallman and the AI Lab hacker community that would make 30 seconds worth of tension in a remote Carnegie Mellon office seem trivial by comparison. Nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform Stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, Stallman singles out the Carnegie Mellon encounter for special attention.

The world is meaningful

He also credits blind chance. Had it not been for that run-in over the Xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political conflicts that closed out his career as an MIT employee, had it not been for a half dozen other timely factors, Stallman finds it very easy to picture his life following a different career path. That being said, Stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in the position to make a difference.

Adolfo Kaminsky:

When reading about the Holocaust, many people ask themselves if they would risk their life to save innocent strangers from death. Adolfo Kaminsky doesn’t ask himself this, he knows from lived experience the answer is yes. During WW2 he used his chemical skills to help underground resistance groups forge passports that kept Jews away from the death camps. These excerpts are taken from an op-ed in the New York Times entitled If I Sleep For An Hour 30 People Will die.

The self is worthy

"The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he told me. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure.” Years later he’s still haunted by the work, explaining: “I think mostly of the people that I couldn’t save.”

The world is benevolent

Mr. Kaminsky empathized with refugees partly because he was one himself. He was born in Argentina to Russian Jews who’d first fled Russia to Paris, and then been kicked out of France. When Adolfo was 7, the family, by then with Argentine passports, was allowed to rejoin relatives in France. “It was then that I realized the significance of the word ‘papers,’ ” he explained.

The world is meaningful

The group focused on the most urgent cases: children who were about to be sent to Drancy. They placed the kids in rural homes or convents, or smuggled them into Switzerland or Spain. In one scene from the book, Mr. Kaminsky stays awake for two nights straight to fill an enormous rush order. “It’s a simple calculation: In one hour I can make 30 blank documents; if I sleep for an hour, 30 people will die.”

Nate Soares:

Nate Soares is the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit research group that tries to figure out how to prevent AI from causing the end of the world. He’s written some fairly personal essays on the Internet discussing his motivations for working on this daunting task. One essay in particular, On Saving The World manages to touch on all three of the base trust beliefs directly.

The self is worthy

This is the context in which I decided to save the world. I wasn’t as young and stupid as you might think — I didn’t believe I was going to save the world. I just decided to. The world is big, and I was small. I knew that, in all likelihood, I’d struggle ineffectually for decades and achieve only a bitter, cynical adulthood.

But the vast majority of my peers hadn’t made it as far as I had. Even though a few were sympathetic, there was simply no way we could change things. It was outside of our control.

The adults were worse. They smiled, they nodded, they commended my critical thinking skills. Then they went back to what they were doing. A few of them took the time to inform me that it’s great to want to change the world and all, but eventually I’d realize that the best way to do that was to settle down and be a teacher, or run a church, or just be kind to others.

I wasn’t surprised. I already knew it was rare for people to actually try and fix things.

The world is benevolent

I was raised Catholic. On my eighth birthday, having received my first communion about a year prior, I casually asked my priest how to reaffirm my faith and do something for the Lord. The memory is fuzzy, but I think I donated a chunk of allowance money and made a public confession at the following mass.

A bunch of the grownups made a big deal out of it, as grownups are like to do. “Faith of a child”, and all that. This confused me, especially when I realized that what I had done was rare. I wasn’t trying to get pats on the head, I was appealing to the Lord of the Heavens and the Earth. Were we all on the same page, here? This was the creator. He was infinitely virtuous, and he had told us what to do.

And yet, everyone was content to recite hymns once a week and donate for the reconstruction of the church. What about the rest of the world, the sick, the dying? Where were the proselytizers, the missionary opportunities? Why was everyone just sitting around?

On that day, I became acquainted with civilizational inadequacy. I realized you could hand a room full of people the literal word of God, and they’d still struggle to pay attention for an hour every weekend.

This didn’t shake my faith, mind you. It didn’t even occur to me that the grownups might not actually believe their tales. No, what I learned that day was that there are a lot of people who hold beliefs they aren’t willing to act upon.

Eventually, my faith faded. The distrust remained.

The world is meaningful

Yet even these simple ideas were absent in the actual system. Corruption and inefficiency ran rampant. Worse, my peers didn’t seem particularly perturbed: they took the system as a given, and merely memorized the machinery for long enough to pass a test. Even the grownups were apathetic: they dickered over who should have power within the system, never suggesting we should alter the system itself. My childhood illusions fell to pieces. I realized that nothing was meticulously managed, that the smartest people weren’t in control, making sure that everything was optimal. All the world problems, the sicknesses and the injustices and the death: these weren’t necessary evils, they were a product of neglect. The most important system of all was poorly coordinated, bloated, and outdated — and nobody seemed to care.

One pattern you might notice in these excerpts is that of replacing the three beliefs with more truthful alternatives. When you lose your trust in something like a benevolent world (which is easy to do, since it’s obviously false) one possible reaction is to replace that belief with something you can place your trust in. Laws of statistics perhaps, or people pursuing their self interest. People who are more cynical than most often end up replacing the 3 default agentic beliefs entirely, on account of their un-truth and no desire to bullshit themselves. If the replacement was necessary to see the full scope of a problem like death or X-Risk, it’s not uncommon for them to go around preaching their new perspective to anyone who will listen.

People doing that are typically not evil. They care about the world and want the best for it, or at least the best for other people. There’s a difference between tearing down magical thinking for the sake of tearing it down, and attempting to disillusion people with purpose. I think part of the confusion here is that secular atheism in its New Atheist form has decided to make a hobby out of doing just that. Scott Alexander has previously written about why New Atheism became so unpopular and reviled, and I think he makes some good points about it. But one point which I haven’t seen brought up nearly enough in proportion to its importance, is the secular nature of atheism. Most people do not want to live their lives without magic, and the New Atheists are entirely willing to gore anyones sacred cow no matter which political tribe worships it. New Atheism doesn’t offer a positive direction for people to go in, it’s mostly just ripping security blankets from peoples arms and calling that progress. The condescending core of New Atheism is perhaps best illustrated by the ad they made headlines putting on British buses:

There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

This takes it as a given that most people are being oppressed by their belief in god. That’s probably not the case, the most oppressive aspects of Abrahamic theism like the concept of hell are not things ordinary people believe in. That might sound preposterous, but I’m pretty sure most ostensible Christians don’t really believe in eternal damnation the way an ex-protestant atheist believes in damnation. When an ordinary person hears ‘eternal damnation’, they think of the place where bad people are going to be sent as punishment for their crimes. The atheist thinks of eternal damnation, of some poor Buddhist monk suffering in hell for eons and eons, being brutally raped, poked, and otherwise tortured until the stars blink out in the sky, and beyond. Billions and billions of years of suffering for the crime of not having been born Christian. Their pleas for mercy met only with another round of unimaginable pain, unceasing, never ending. Anyone who thinks that is fair and just would be a psychopath. Since most ordinary people are not psychopaths I think it’s fair to say they probably haven’t thought deeply enough about hell to really be said to ‘believe’ in it.

Why Do Millenials Want To Die?

When magic is removed from the world without purpose, often what results is not enlightenment but a diffuse malaise. Consider the Reddit thread Why Do Millenials Want To Die?, which asks young people to explain their collective disenchantment with the world. Their answers have the fingerprints of secular disillusionment all over them.

The world is meaningful

In answer to the thread’s question, bigolfishey writes:

I don’t particularly want to die. There’s still movies I want to see, books I want to read, friends I want to spend time with. But if, say, I were diagnosed with incurable brain cancer today... I don’t know that I would be especially devestated. I wouldn’t be thrilled, obviously. But a lot of that would come from the grief that I know my death would cause my family and friends; I detest making other people unhappy. But for me personally? Meh. As for why, if I had to guess it’s because it’s very hard to see the point of it all. Life, that is. It’s not like my life is miserable, either; I’m not living like a rock star, but I have friends, family, a job. But what’s the endgame for me? Work 30-50 hours a week for the next 40-50 years with the slim hope of retirement so I can spend the last decade or so of my existence doing “what I want to do”?

The world is benevolent

They continue:

And in the meantime, the planet, the literal, actual terra firma where we live, is actively being destroyed for the benefit of rich old bastards who won’t live long enough to suffer the consequences. But we will. I will almost certainly live long enough to hear a scientist say “we have passed the point of no return, the planet Earth is permanently damaged in a way we cannot fix”. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the future we’re heading towards.

The self is worthy

Jpf123 writes in response to bigolfishey a few branches down the comment tree:

Oh, no. Im not in the work force yet but am about to accept a professional career for the next 40ish years even though every fiber of my being screams for me to do something more meaningful with my life. But I’m growing to accept the empty pursuit of money and the stark reality that there’s little any one of us can do and we as a generation are struggling to politically mobilize due to voter apathy and all the shit the other generations have told us.

What we are reading in this thread is a compendium of broken wills. Rather than being empowered to anticipate and correct course away from disastrous outcomes, these young people are paralyzed by the enormity of what they’re up against. This is what it looks like to lose your basis for agency without a way forward. I think at this point most people who aren’t actively delusional know that we’re in serious trouble. The bottleneck is now avenues to turn that knowledge into action, which are so lacking that a lot of people my age have given up.

Sarah responds to this outcome by shooting the messenger. We’re told implicitly by her ‘hot take’ that these social activists going around spreading awareness should shut the hell up. They, and not the unconstrained emission of greenhouse gases, are stealing the future from todays young people. I for one am glad that we have a chance, no matter how slim, to prevent the destruction of the world. Where I think we’ve fallen down is in our failure to build people up. It’s very easy to criticize the factual claims of a religion like Christianity, it’s a lot harder to show people how to live a meaningful life without it.

Here’s the thing about telling people god isn’t real. Even if someone knows god doesn’t exist, that’s not enough. Because when you think about fully consciously acknowledging it to yourself, you flinch back. “Okay but if I believe that…then what?” This is a very common human reaction that people don’t identify enough. People don’t just change their beliefs, they need alternative beliefs to switch to. Ones that let them keep being them, to a certain extent. If you say “okay fine you win there’s no god”…well now what? Because god for lots of people, isn’t enforcing morality. It’s providing a basis on which to believe those 3 things about a meaningful benevolent world.

You know the story about the stock exchange and the end of the world? It goes:

One day.

News heads around the New York Stock exchange that the world is ending.

NORAD has detected a missile launch or something.

Traders are going crazy, selling assets like mad, a riot almost breaks out.

In the middle of the commotion a manager, walking by in that zen like state managers somehow attain at times.

Stops and sees an employee selling tons of shit, and taps them on the shoulder.

"Hey, what are you doing?"

"I'm selling everything boss, the world is going to end!"

The boss sighs over the sound of screaming argument from other cubicles.

"Listen you idiot, if the world ends asset prices don't matter, only trade as if the world is going to keep existing tomorrow. Always always."

He silently repeats the 'always' as he walks off.

And the trader was enlightened.

That’s how people reason about this stuff. If believing a certain thing ‘ends’ your personal narrative, then you simply refuse to believe the thing unless your personal narrative is unsustainable or you’re abnormal. It’s anthropic epistemology. Unless a secular value system is ready for the full psychological challenge of living in a world without magic, it will never displace the older perspectives it aims to make obsolete. Guided replacement of the three beliefs is just one part of that, but I think it’s an important part. I recently saw a poster advertising a talk given at an ‘atheist church’ in Seattle. The speaker was an ex-Muslim set to discuss why they left their religion. For some reason the phrase ‘atheist church’, which is a little more religious than usual, really threw the negativity of that presentation in sharp relief for me. Imagine a similar poster for some Protestant church with a pastor there to discuss the fire and brimstone fate awaiting atheists in hell. I doubt it would be a popular topic in comparison to the two dozen other things he could talk about from the bible.

It’s not a coincidence that pretty much every major religion has some form of wise man who is meant to lead you through the hard work of spiritual insight. Left to their own devices, people tend to get stuck. Old mystery cults of the sort discussed in Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages were even more intimate. They used elaborate props and rituals to help acclimate the initiate to a different way of viewing things. While it sounds dubious to modern ears that the Book of Thoth can be used to enter into the immortal realm, that principle of guidance and social support through transformative change remains relevant.

In short, positive thinking is bunk, religion isn’t quite about the factual existence of god, and robust secular agency is dependent on replacing the belief in a benevolent meaningful world of personal worthiness with belief in a rules based world of fragile value and personal election.

Bibliography

Pew Research Center. (2013, August 6). Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension. Retrieved from https://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical-life-extension/ ↩

Movie Review: First Man

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800

First Man is the sort of film that is destined to produce tons of fans and plenty of haters. A dramatic retelling of Neil Armstrong’s journey to become first man on the moon, several things inevitably conspire to create controversy. It’s a film saddled with the curse of covering its subject matter in a way that many people neither expect nor want to see it handled. To make matters worse it’s a film about iconic American history produced in the midst of a bitter culture war in the United States. Here the mutual fist-shaking focuses on the production decision not to show Neil Armstrong plant the American flag on the lunar surface. No less than Trump himself has weighed in on this issue, promising he won’t see the movie because of the omission. The real Buzz Aldrin took to Twitter to mock the directors, tweeting a picture of the flag planting with the appropriate political hashtags. I can’t exactly say I’m in a position to argue with Buzz Aldrin, but I am disappointed by the whole thing.

I’m disappointed because aside from this, First Man is a pretty damn good movie. It’s a shame to see it overshadowed by one ill-advised direction decision. It makes things especially complicated because First Man isn’t really what most people would expect from a movie about Apollo 11. If I had to describe it succinctly, I might be tempted to go for the word “anxietycore”. Every scene in First Man is awkward and anxious. From the opening sequence on to the final lunar approach and landing. The directors try to take the viewer back to a time before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were gods, when they were just men in a rocket and the supporting techs were just rude mechanicals. For people who are expecting a silver screening of the triumphant, omnipotent euphoria and cultural nostalgia surrounding Apollo 11 I expect this movie will be a real disappointment.

One place where First Man excels is depicting the true difficulty and vastness of space exploration, thin margins for error and all. It plays very well with the choice of anxiety as an overriding theme. Reaching the silent lunar surface after all that struggle is otherworldly, almost eerie. I found myself reminded of H.P Lovecraft’s sentiment that humanity is meant to live in ignorance, that the universe is simply too big and too scary for us to venture far in. By flattening even the interpersonal world that Armstrong inhabits, the underlying existential aspect is better communicated. And yes, the scenes of Neil’s private life are staggeringly awkward. I’m not sure if it’s because the directors are scared by the world of 1960 and have trouble depicting it in a sympathetic way, or because they’re going for a French slow-burn long-shot aesthetic, but either way the awkwardness of the setting is almost totalitarian. To someone who’s not particularly invested in the idea, this movie could easily come off as a depiction of insanity. Who would do this to themselves? What motivates someone to strap themselves to a giant bomb just so they can get a scoop of moon dirt?

Critically to the composition, First Man doesn’t tell us. Armstrong is a man apart through the entire movie, his inner thoughts aren’t presented in the narrative. A lone exception is made for the moonwalk, where Neil’s face is obscured by his visor and the movie hits its dramatic climax. For the rest of the movie these details are communicated only through subtext. The closest we get to an explanation is the opening scene, where Neil appears to stall a test flight for an experimental plane to get a look at earth’s atmosphere. He later tells NASA during his audition that space exploration changes your perspective, and he’s hopeful the mission will help the world see things it should have seen sooner. This abstract, vague gesture towards something is the only explanation provided for why Neil is insisting he be sent back into training after nearly killing himself in a test vehicle crash, why he’s submitting to painful interview questions from the press, why he’s straining his relationship with his wife. And ‘why’ becomes an overbearing question at points in this movie. When Neil sits down with his sons and tells them he might not be coming back, in an awkward long-shot of nervous fidgeting and darting eyes, one wonders what motivation is at work in this character. We don’t know, and are only left to guess from the narrative clues provided by the director.

Another place where First Man is particularly impressive is plot structure. For an event as complex and expansive as the Apollo missions, the directors do an incredible job of rendering it in a way that can be understood without ever feeling condescending or cheesy. The movie makes incredible use of setup and callback. Perhaps my favorite example is that throughout the film, scenes tend to end or start on shots of the moon visible in the sky. This on its own would be competent, certainly it helps communicate the sheer ambition of the project and reminds the viewer of what all this preliminary work is for. But the true payoff comes when, after landing on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong peers up at the sky and sees Earth in the exact same position that has been occupied by the moon in every other comparable shot in the film. It’s a moment that truly underscores just how incredible the journey undergone by Armstrong is, with Earth every bit as distant and impossibly far away seeming as the lunar surface had been on Earth.

Overall, it’s not exactly a life changing experience and I could have lived without seeing it, but I do have to admire the cinematic accomplishment here. If you’re someone who thinks a subtle, anxious and gritty film about Neil Armstrong’s perspective in the Apollo mission sounds interesting you’ll probably enjoy it. If you’re looking for a celebration of the Apollo mission, this movie isn’t what you’re looking for.

Cory's Cookies and The 92% Tax Rate

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0700

Marginal Revolution recently did a post on CNBC’s The Profit. The Profit is a reality TV show where the host, experienced managerial talent Marcus Lemonis, buys into a struggling small business and uses his management expertise to bring it back into profitability. Out of curiosity I decided to watch a few episodes myself on YouTube. Of the full length episodes available on CNBC’s channel, the one featuring Mr. Cory’s Cookies really stood out to me. In many ways this episode is the perfect representation of the series core themes. Cory’s Cookies is being run by Cory, who is 13 and wants to be a big businessman when he grows up, and his mother Lisa who is by her own admission an uneducated person learned of little but the school of hard knocks. The overall thrust of the episode is that Marcus invests $100,000 into the company, and then builds the family business a real supply chain. The entire episode is fascinating, and I really think that it’s worth your time to give it a watch. However this post is not a review of the episode itself, but rather an exploration of something interesting that’s highlighted within it.

At 17 minutes and 32 seconds into the episode, Marcus sits down with a copacker that Lisa has done a licensing deal with. He’s frustrated to learn that the copacker has managed to get Lisa to sign a 8% royalty deal giving them all retail rights to the Cory’s Cookies brand. As Marcus puts it, a million dollars made from retail sales translates into $80,000 for Cory’s Cookies. This on its own isn’t particularly interesting, on the surface it would just be a predatory licensing deal. What’s interesting is that when Marcus calls the copacker out on this, they reply that 8% is a standard industry royalty. And Marcus doesn’t particularly object, which leads me to believe that’s probably true. When I heard this it blew my mind, it’s an implicit commentary on the value of a business that gives us a platform from which to deconstruct the notion of a “business idea”.

So What Goes Into A Good Business Idea, Anyway?

Here’s a conversation you may have had with a friend before:

YOU: Man, I really want to do a business or something.

FRIEND: Well you could sell lemonade. :P

YOU (thinking to yourself): Thanks for taking this seriously, jackass.

There’s an intuitive level on which you understand “sell lemonade” or “sell cookies” is a bad plan of action for starting a business. Yet Kraft makes millions doing just that so what’s the difference? Is it just capital? Well, no. I’m willing to bet if I dropped 15 million dollars into my average readers lap with the stipulation that they use it to make a kickass lemonade brand their success would be far from consistent. Traditionally economists identify three major resources necessary for business:

Land
Labor
Capital

More recent business texts add a fourth necessary resource that goes by several different names. Generally this is some form of managerial talent or risk taker willing to try a new enterprise. Attitudes toward this range from “that’s dumb” to “this is essential and we’re stupid for not including it earlier”. I started out in the first camp but now find myself firmly in the second. To explain why, it’s illustrative to take a trip back to Mr. Cory’s Cookies and look at exactly what it is Marcus is doing to help their business. Right away Marcus takes note of the fact that the copacker deal only applies to retail, and focuses on making a kickass direct to consumer supply chain. A major problem in doing this is that the cookies are not made with preservatives so their shelf life is absurdly short. Because of this the original copacker Lisa tried to bring the cookies to market with couldn’t replicate Cory’s recipe in a useful way. To make it happen Marcus employs:

Rastelli Global, a shipping company that can work around the fact that Cory’s Cookies have a painfully short two day shelf life using flash freezing technology.
Century Packaging, a printer that can get Cory’s Cookies a proper container to put their cookies in for Rastelli to ship.
A copacker that is only handling the manufacture of cookies, not other aspects of the business like the one Lisa signed a licensing agreement with. As a consequence, they’re getting paid on contract to make cookies, not run the whole supply chain. This leaves a lot more profit margin for Cory’s Cookies to take advantage of.

It’s important to note that these are not random companies, at the very least Rastelli Global and Century Packaging seem to be companies that Marcus has already worked with in the past. Critically, he knows they’ll get the job done at the price point he wants. This information on not just what kind of firm to employ but which ones are trustworthy, along with the necessary resources to make the transactions happen, is worth 92% of the Cory’s Cookies business. Going by the example of the copacker Lisa signed a licensing agreement with, we can conclude that not having the knowledge or relationships to make this supply chain happen incurs an effective 92% tax on revenue. It is worth stepping back for a minute to fully appreciate how subtle yet brutally costly information effects really are. Yes Marcus invested 100k into the business, but a loan from the bank for the same amount would not have gone nearly as far without Marcus on staff to put this together for them.

What’s the moral of this story? Well…

Recontextualizing The ‘Business Idea’

The problem with your friends lemonade suggestion is that it’s not actionable. This is the basic problem with the ‘idea guy’, a creature that has now thankfully been laughed out of even middlebrow portrayals of the business ecosystem. Standard wisdom says that the value of an idea is zero. I think this is only really true if you narrow down ‘business idea’ to exclusively refer to the most abstract, high level description of a field of endeavor. All the messy implementation details go into the ‘business plan’. The distinction between a ‘business idea’ and a ‘business plan’ is that a good business idea can be had by anyone, but you need managerial talent to make a good business plan. If I say:

“Hey, you should sell some lemonade” and I basically describe a roadside lemonade stand, you might be tempted to hit me.

“Hey, you should sell some lemonade” and I describe how there’s a market opportunity for someone to sell high quality commercial lemonade at 50 summer fairs and how you would make deals with them & get the supplies to make the drinks, well that’s significantly more interesting.

“Hey, you should sell some lemonade” and I describe a recipe for making a better lemonade powder than Country Time and exactly what companies you would use for supplies and how you’d get various retail stores to carry it, that’s amazing!

If I call that giant description a ‘business plan’ rather than a ‘business idea’, well then we can just shift phrasing and say that a good business plan is worth a hell of a lot. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, understood this well. He wrote a college paper describing a business model that would allow someone to compete with the U.S Post Office for delivery. His paper did not receive high marks, Smith looked at his grade, looked at the paper and said “No, that’s horseshit I know this will work”¹. He dropped out soon after to pursue the business for real. History vindicated Fred Smith, and if I know anything about human nature that professor probably insisted till the day he died he’d been correct. The irony of this is that anyone capable of making a business plan they know will work is probably just going to pursue it themselves. Why hand someone else free money?²

There is a subtle affliction that causes one to believe their detail poor business ideas are in fact solid business plans. I like to think of this affliction as Spherical Cow Mindset. The Spherical Cow Mindset is characterized by a tendency to go mapmaking without the territory. It’s encountering problems and trying to solve them from scratch instead of studying the solutions of others. Its insisting on principles of phenomena that reside entirely in ones head. It’s building a social network for lawyers without doing a single user interview first. It is intellectual, operational cancer! And the patient is functionally brain dead until the tumor is excised by exposure to reality, or perhaps less deranged patterns of thought.

Its essence is a failure to think in systems, refusing to model reality with as many moving parts as are actually required. The truth is that most people have business value almost exactly backwards. A common mantra for new school managers is people/process/product. The average person thinks of business in terms of product/process/people. I suspect this is because when you observe the system from the outside that’s how it looks. You see the product, peer at the process, and eventually stop at the controllers behind the scenes. In this view of things you have the product, which is a platonic ideal model kept in a hermetically sealed vault in Switzerland. Having this platonic ideal is most of the value, after which a ruthless process of copying is used to distribute imitations of the product widely. This is handled by a sprawling machine that’s merely infrastructure, so it’s not as valuable as the unique contribution of the product. Finally you have managers, who occasionally hit the machinery’s cog-people with cudgels to keep them in line. The manager contributes a fraction of the value but takes a disproportionate cut of the proceeds because he’s a troll living under an unassailable bridge and no one can stop him.

This kind of misunderstanding sounds comical when it’s stated out loud, but I think the model persists precisely because people don’t state it out loud. To state it as a coherent position implies more cognitive effort than the sort of person who believes this is willing to put in. People have this idea that they don’t really need to understand things in detail to diagnose their problems. Once you go mapmaking without the territory like that you’ve entered the spherical cow mindset. As applied to issues like economics, the natural result of thinking managers only have a rent seeking role is to scapegoat them. In fact, most peoples positions on most complex issues are some form of scapegoating; anyone who is interested in understanding the world should be careful not to mistake it for informed diagnosis of systematic problems.

Kiara, Robert. (2018, March 13). How FedEx’s founder revolutionized shipping with a mediocre college term paper. Retrieved from https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/how-fedexs-founder-revolutionized-shipping-with-a-mediocre-college-term-paper/ ↩
One potential reason is that even a solid business requires risked capital, but then that’s what VC money is for. ↩

8BBS: A Forgotten Primary Source

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Many people are vaguely aware that the word ‘hacker’ did not always refer to a computer burgler. Once you begin to ask about the details however things start to break down. When did it go from being computer tricksterism to computer trespass? I never seem to get the same answer twice. Some cite Steven Levy’s Hackers as having ruined the term by popularizing it for a generation of teenage punks. More informed respondents tell me that the 411 Gang corrupted ‘hacker’ through their antics. In my own research, one incredible primary source I keep coming back to is a bulletin board that existed circa 1980 called 8BBS. 8BBS was an open forum that ended up being primarily used by phreakers to discuss the art of phone and computer intrusion. Having been used as one of the major primary sources in Katie Hefner’s Cyberpunk it seems like I’d hear about it more often.

The basic reason I don’t is that it wasn’t available on the web until recently, and it’s only available in a nasty PDF format. For my own personal use this is highly inconvenient, but for getting others interested it’s basically a show stopper. Realizing that nobody else is going to fix it and this is a valuable thing that deserves to be on the open web, I’d like to sketch a plan for restoring this source to a decent web based home.

The Problem: It’s A Scan…Of A Printout

The original medium this source came in had search and good indexing. It was easy to read a thread or find posts by a certain user. The printout format strips away search, and mangles the indexing a bit since page number and post ID are correlated but not quite the same. Worse, the printout was hole punched at some point so it could go into a binder, and this destroyed some of the information. The scan adds a further layer of obfuscation, as the quality of the documents and their flaws are magnified in a scanning environment. Subtle details lost in the scanning process make it highly unpleasant to read the resulting document.

Restoring Indexing

The archive.org material includes a 500mb archive of individual jp2 images of the scanned pages, these could easily be imported into a wiki at which point it would be fairly easy to tag what post ID’s appear on each page. This way you’d be able to browse the posts by their ID number even if it’s just seeing the post as an image.

Restoring Readability and Search

The textual nature of the text must be restored to provide it with improved readability through CSS. This means the text must be extracted from the images somehow.

Text Extraction Methods

OCR - I haven’t really been able to get OCR to work very well, so far the packages I’ve used have been of sufficiently low quality that it was faster to type. The closest results I’ve seen came from this tool which is specifically designed to recognize fixed-width fonts.
Human Transcription - This is what I’ve had the most success with so far, but it’s labor intensive and slow. One hope is that by doing things on a wiki platform I can enlist the assistance of others in transcribing images.
Mechanical Turk - A subpoint of the above, it occurs to me that I could pay for an online transcription service like mechanical turk to do the pages. I’m not sure how much I’d have to pay to get something accurate, but perhaps the fact that the participant is making history might allow me to get services at a lower rate. (So as not to sound callous: I’m to understand Turkers are sensitive to that kind of thing since the wages are low enough that many participants are there to have something to do at their job during breaks, for a ‘normal’ transcription service I would assume it’s just business.)

Once the images are transcribed search is just a matter of getting them into a platform which features decent search. PmWiki has good search, so I’m not particularly worried about this aspect as much as I am about being able to get the posts into text at all.

Wrestling Gnon

100 Years Of Existential Risk

Prelude To Existential Risk

World War 1 and Early Existential Risk

X-Risk During The Interwar Years

World War 2 and the Invention of Atomic Weapons

Disassociation and Stagnation in the Postwar Years

Exponential Extraction and Externalities: The Limits To Growth

Drexler Contra Rome on Limits To Growth: Nanotechnology and Engines of Creation

Extropians and X-Risks

Effective Altruism and X-Risk

Alchemy As Precursor To Transhumanist Values & Philosophy

Alchemy As Precursor and Its Early History

Alchemy and Transhumanism

Universalist Greed

Universalist Greed in Alchemy

Existential Risk

Alchemy and Romanticism

20th Century Development

Conclusion: Pulp Sci-Fi As Occult Fomite

Bibliography

Literature Review For Academic Outsiders: What, How, and Why

What is a literature review?

Why do literature review?

The Benefits Of Literature Review

Literature Review As Accessible Contribution

The Document Universe

People Are Documents Too

Academic Sources Are Underadvertised

Traditional Bibliography

Citation Trees As Central Dogma Of Academia

Library Science As Conceptual Foundation Of The Academic Document Universe

How To Do Literature Review

When You Don’t Know The Name of Your Literature, or Missing and Biased Literatures

Example Research Session: Finding The Book On Missionary Morale

Bibliography

Video Games As Alternative Motivation Literature

"Memento Mori", Said The Confessor

Why The Fear Of Death?

The Utility Narrative

The Social Reality Narrative

The Intelligence Narrative

The Fear of Death Narrative

Map-Territory Errors

Death and The Roots of Magick

Something To Protect

Keeping Your Identity Small

Atheism

Existential Risk

Rethinking Rationality Training

Keeping Your Identity Small

Map/Territory

Meditation

Practicing Dying

Bibliography

Book Review: The War On Normal People by Andrew Yang

How Yang Answers A Question

Structuring Argument

Parting Thoughts

Three Are The Beliefs By Which Death Will Be Defeated

Richard Stallman

The self is worthy

The world is benevolent

The world is meaningful

Adolfo Kaminsky:

The self is worthy

The world is benevolent

The world is meaningful

Nate Soares:

The self is worthy

The world is benevolent

The world is meaningful

Why Do Millenials Want To Die?

The world is meaningful

The world is benevolent

The self is worthy

Bibliography

Movie Review: First Man

Cory's Cookies and The 92% Tax Rate

So What Goes Into A Good Business Idea, Anyway?