Cope is one of the most powerful psychological forces distorting our thinking. People have an incredibly strong need to believe that things will turn out okay.1 For people who emotionally believe that the universe consists only of our present society, this obviously distorts how you see things, because you need things to turn out okay in our present society. This is the source of common fantasies about e.g. utopian revolutions (among those dissatisfied with the current structure), or “The End Of History” eternally preserving the post-WWII political order (among those satisfied with the current structure), and many other fantasies, as well as the much more common reluctance to look squarely at problems which seem hard to resolve with our present social structure.

Once you take the very long view, and your emotional universe includes the distant past and the distant future, a lot of this psychological pressure is lifted from your analysis of today’s conditions. Will things turn out okay in our present society? In some ways yes, in some ways no, but it’s not the final word. In the year 3500 this will all be dust and something else will be happening. Maybe it’ll be better in 3500, and if not then, maybe in 5000. You don’t have to load so much of the cope onto the things happening in your own lifetime.

The point is not that you should fall into nihilism. The fact that our society is temporary does not mean it’s unimportant. Our mistakes and failures might be repaired in a couple hundred years, but that’s not much solace to our grandchildren if we screw things up in the meantime. Still, people seem to think much clearer when they see the stakes as very very large, rather than infinite.

It’s important to remember, when thinking about how the future will go, that nothing stays the same. Twenty years from now, the United States Congress will either run better than it runs today, or worse. The same goes for learning about the past. When you read about what Congress was up to twenty years ago, you’re reading about a different institution that functioned differently than the Congress of today.

The most basic reason for this is that man is mortal. People die and others start doing their jobs—maybe better, maybe worse, but not exactly the same. Young people grow up and have new ideas and start doing new things, which are either better or worse than what the last batch of young people did. Every organization is being constantly refounded. In sixty years it will experience ~100% turnover and become a completely different organization.

Institutions are usually built in short, sharp bursts. Growth is difficult and chaotic and people are arguing all the time. You look back two years later and things are totally different.

Decay is usually slow and steady. People are working hard and fixing problems, and each fix is 90% as good as the way things were before, and if you’re not paying close attention you won’t know that it’s any different. You look back two years later and things look pretty much the same. Then after 10 different 90%-as-good fixes you’re down to a third of your original quality.

If you find yourself looking around and asking “Are we growing, or decaying?” then you’re almost certainly decaying.

In theory this all works great. As everyone does their jobs, civilization ascends higher and higher, with more material wealth and better-administered laws and more knowledge than before. The institutions, and the people within the institutions, accumulate money and power because they do useful jobs well. The physical wealth, the cars and pants and couches, get distributed to people in return for making contributions to society.

The car company is only able to make cars and sell them at a profit because it’s in a society which has lots of law and lots of knowledge, so it makes sense that the producers of material wealth will end up sending some of that material wealth to the institutions that produce these intangible goods, through some combination of law and custom. That’s what it means for everyone to participate in a functional society. If you squint a little bit and force everything into an econbrain framework then you can even see it as a kind of trade.

The problem is that piles of wealth attract parasites. If you fill your pantry with sugar then ants will try to get in. For an institution, this happens both internally—you are giving out steady high-paying salaries, so people try to get those salaries by doing work which superficially appears to help your company, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money—and externally—you are giving money to institutions that educate the youth, so institutions try to get that funding by doing work which superficially appears to educate the youth, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money.

Bigger piles of wealth and power and prestige attract parasites in greater numbers and with greater sophistication. I’ve seen small hobbyist communities attract clumsy affinity scammers who run away with a few thousand dollars in donations for fake cancer treatments. I’ve seen fashionable research organizations attract smooth-talking job applicants angling for no-show sinecure jobs and connections in the scene. I’ve seen the feeding frenzy of half-baked grant proposals when the FTX Future Fund sprayed out $100 million in donations before its funders were arrested for fraud. I’ve seen brilliant hucksters spin elaborate webs of lies and apparently-working “AI” technology to try to scam tens of millions of dollars from investors.

In isolation this is inconvenient, but not a disaster. You spend a fraction of your resources on detecting and purging parasites from your system. Your detection won’t be perfect, so parasites will consume a fraction of your resources on top of that. It’s a source of drag, and will kill some projects on the margin, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what’s happening. Every big group in the history of the human species has had some amount of this going on.

Things get really bad when the parasites become politically organized. This is the point where things metastasize. Once an institution contains a powerful faction who are appropriating the institution’s resources at the expense of the institution’s mission, rather than by fulfilling the institution’s mission, it has entered a terminal spiral which is nearly impossible to reverse. Isolated individuals stealing stuff can only do so much damage, and the amounts they can steal are limited by the need to avoid detection. On the other hand, factions can bend the institution’s priorities to boondoggles which are easier to steal from, and in advanced cases such changes in strategy crowd out even the attempt to do real work.

For example in 2021 San Francisco, where I live, launched the Dream Keeper Initiative, which describes itself as a “citywide effort to reinvest $120 million over the next two years from law enforcement into San Francisco’s Black and African-American communities”. In fact it was largely a pretext for city officials to solicit bribes in return for sending city funds to their friends. The former head of the program, Sheryl Davis, is currently being tried for conflict of interest and misappropriating public funds. Most brazenly, Davis funneled millions of dollars to Collective Impact, a nonprofit organization she founded and formerly led, which paid the executive director salary of Davis’s live-in boyfriend James Spingola while the two shared bank accounts and expenses. As of now, most of the corrupt nonprofits involved have not been charged, such as the Homeless Children’s Network, which received $3.5 million from the program while paying kickbacks to Davis’s son.

The point of redirecting the money is precisely that it makes the money easier to steal, since the police are supposed to produce an output which can be checked, and the NGOs are not. (San Francisco police, like most American police departments, are notorious for making schedules which give officers large overtime payments as a matter of course—in 2024 about a third of officers received over $100,000 in extra overtime pay—but the officers do actually work a lot of overtime in order to receive this.) Many similar schemes were launched across the country around the same time, in large part pushed by people intending to take a cut for themselves and eager to distort the ostensible purpose to that goal.

Of course, when people are organizing to loot an organization, they don’t say so in those words. They’ll tell a nice-sounding story to everyone outside their faction, and cooperate to cover for each other—this consists less of explicit conspiracy and more of tacit cooperation on the basis of shared professional interest and ideological affinity, although there is some explicit conspiracy, and it’s disproportionately important when it does happen. Only when the fraudsters have triumphed completely and have no remaining fear of punishment will they openly defend the fraud without any reference to the organization’s ostensible purpose.

Another example, less lurid but as important as the looting of government budgets: Recently Arxiv announced a policy of banning authors for one year if they submit papers containing “incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation”, including “hallucinated references”. Lots of academics attacked the policy. Some did so by lying, claiming that it is wrong to punish authors for making mistakes formatting their references, as though it were being applied to people who mistyped an author’s name rather than people who claimed to base their arguments on works which do not exist. More interestingly, though, many attacked the policy on the basis that it will hurt the careers of the many academics who routinely cite references without reading them, that “it’s very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible” and therefore fake LLM citations should not be punished. Very obviously, inserting fake citations (whether done by human or LLM) is a practice which cannot possibly occur in a work that is constrained by attempting only valid arguments and is trying to say things only if they’re true. Very obviously, works which fail such a basic brown M&M test do not advance society’s knowledge. In fact they retard the pursuit of knowledge by drowning out real work. And Arxiv’s detractors do not contest this! Instead they argue that the policy will hurt the careers of people who acted in accordance with academic norms. Which is true so far as it goes, and would be a good reason to oppose the policy if the purpose of publishing papers was to provide comfy make-work jobs to people who abide by academic norms. But if the purpose of publishing papers is to produce and disseminate knowledge, then of course Arxiv should purge fraudsters who jam the frequencies with antiknowledge, most especially when such practices are the norm. (I suspect it’s not a coincidence that Arxiv made this move two months after announcing its intent to leave the university system and become an independent organization.)

From this, we can see that the cancer is more advanced in academic publishing than in San Francisco exostate “non-government” organizations. In both cases, the fraud rings have achieved enough internal control to steer the project to their own ends rather than the ostensible purpose. In both cases attempts to fix the “dysfunction” by pouring in more money make the problem worse because the people causing the problems are the ones who get the money—it’s like trying to get the ants out of your pantry by pouring in more sugar. The more money San Francisco gives to organizations claiming to treat drug addiction, the more addicts die of overdoses. The more money is given to academic historians or psychologists or Alzheimer’s disease researchers, the worse the outputs of their fields become. The institutions are too corrupt to turn resources into progress towards their ostensible mission. But in the case of San Francisco graft, people still have to lie. If they’re caught then a few of them will go to jail, and a few more will lose their government checks, at least until they move to a new 501(c)3. Meanwhile the publishing academics are so far gone that the corrupt ones don’t have to lie anymore.

Pretty quickly I learned that the best and fastest way to join a group is to organize events where we do the group’s core activity. In every group I’ve ever encountered, there is far more demand for social events and things to do than there is supply. Getting people to come is like giving away ice cream at the beach. You can make friends by showing up from the outside and consistently attending other people’s events, but it’s a lot easier and faster to make friends if you’re also organizing your own stuff and inviting the people you’re hoping to get closer to, or helping with someone else’s events. I’ve found this true everywhere from niche online fanfiction discussion groups to vanguard intellectual movements directing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries.

Surprisingly, it turns out things don’t actually work that way. In fact, events happen when someone puts in the legwork to organize them. And one of the most reliable laws of the universe is that, if something takes a little bit of legwork, then most people just won’t do it. A scene’s leaders are mostly the people who actually bother to put in the work.

The work of organizing is underappreciated by many people. But the other organizers are very attuned to this, and absolutely will notice who else is picking up the burdens.

I’ve come to believe that part of today’s problem of social alienation is a problem of too many free riders. Lots of people want to consume social fabric, but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric have largely fallen by the wayside. I don’t know how to solve this undersupply at the scale of society. But you can solve it at the scale of your own community by just supplying it.

Every political system decays over the decades, as the world changes and the problems the system was designed to solve are replaced by new problems outside of its scope, and as the people who built and understand the system die and are replaced.

So far there have been three different political systems under the US Constitution. First was the original system implemented by the Founding Fathers, with a relatively isolated agrarian economy; strong states; an untamed and effectively infinite frontier; and a minimal federal government funded almost entirely by tariffs. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down, culminating in the American Civil War.

From Lincoln’s war reforms and the following Reconstruction period was built the second system, with a stronger central government and substantial civil service; revenue largely from internal excise taxes; the consolidated two-party system of Democrats and Republicans; extremely rapid industrial growth steered by nationwide corporate trusts; the taming of the frontier; patronage distributed by local urban “political machines”; and deep ties to the international economic and political system. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down, culminating in the Great Depression.

From Roosevelt’s reforms during the New Deal and the war was built the third system, with a vast federal managerial apparatus in new bureaucracies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the greatly expanded federal executive departments; patronage distributed on the national level via new programs like Social Security; taxation almost entirely through income and payroll taxes; an industrial economy where large national and international corporations operate within the bounds set by federal regulators and bankers; imperial commitments across the globe; and the rest of the political assumptions we’ve all taken for granted for as long as anyone living remembers. This system functioned very well at first, but gradually broke down. By now the decline has become obvious to everyone.

There might be another revival and a fourth political system. As a system decays, a window opens up for about a generation, where the established system is dysfunctional enough that it cannot reliably coopt or destroy competitors, but it still remains functional enough that political reform from within can solve the core problems and keep the fundamental social structures working with what are, in the grand scheme of history, relatively minor and incremental changes. In America this has happened twice before. The window of possibility is opening again.

Revival isn’t automatic. Most great countries eventually fall because they simply decay, and decay, and decay, until they just kind of fall apart under their own weight, like the Soviet Union or the British Empire, or an external invader finally pushes over the hollow remains with surprisingly little resistance, like Rome or the Austrian Empire. America is generations away from such a fate. But if there is no great political reform, that’s where the road leads.

Which road will we go down? It’s not a matter of historical law. It depends on the skill, will, and virtue of specific individuals. Will there be a team of people with the ability and energy to build power, the knowledge to design a functional new system from the parts available, and the capability to put it in place? It depends on how well all of us do our jobs.

I don’t find their attempts convincing. Perhaps more tellingly, from very similar assumptions they reach for very different explanations of why the bond should exist. Hobbes argues for an implicit contract by which the child is perpetually “obliged to obey” whoever nurtures them, if anyone chooses to do so, because otherwise the helpless infant would simply die. Locke argues that parents have an obligation from God to nurture their children, and this comes with a duty to use reason on the child’s behalf and exercise command until the child attains reason, at which point their obligation ceases; and that even adult children are obliged by gratitude and by God to honor and assist, but not to obey, their parents.

Say what you will about whether these arguments are sound, it’s clear that neither of these is the actual reason that parents and children share a bond. Whether a family accepts Hobbes’s idea of contractual obedience or not, whether a family accepts Locke’s idea of divinely ordained stewardship or not, makes little difference to the bond between parents and children in that family. Parental relations are a fact about the human race (and many animals), and these attempts to morally justify the family are unrelated to that fact.

This becomes clearest when we look at siblings. The bond between siblings is one of the most fundamental and most important facts of human psychology. Neither Hobbes nor Locke attempts to justify it at all. It’s unlikely that the idea of explaining sibling bonds simply never occurred to them; probably, they tried to come up with explanations within the moral framework they were developing, and couldn’t come up with anything satisfying.

This is because their contractualist lens has no room for the family. Their attempts to tack on justifications for the child-parent bond are weak and incomplete, e.g. neither accounts for the fact that parents almost always feel obligations towards their adult children. Their explanations for the rest of family life are even worse, or lacking entirely.

This is fine so far as it goes. There are many valuable moral arguments which are not a 100% complete description of all possible moral issues. Their outlook towards natural law and liberty clearly captures some important truths about human morality. But over the last few centuries, the idea that their premises are the only legitimate moral principles to argue from has become gradually more common. Doing so leaves out a tremendous amount of what people actually care about—family is an especially clear example but far from the only one. We can imagine a coherent mind with a morality formed by these principles and nothing else. But it’s not a human mind.

At the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, Jessica waits in line. She is slouched forward in the characteristic fentanyl fold, supporting her weight by leaning heavily on a wire pushcart. At the front of the line, she produces her Calfresh EBT card. The farmers’ market clerk charges her card $30 and gives her paper vouchers — $30 in regular SNAP vouchers valid at the farmers’ market, plus an extra $60 in vouchers from Market Match, a program that describes itself as “California’s healthy food incentive program.” Ostensibly, this program subsidizes low-income recipients’ purchases of fruits and vegetables.

However, Jessica — wearing a puffy jacket and pajama pants, looking like she’s in her 50s but probably younger — is not here to buy fruits and vegetables. Instead of going to a farmers’ market stall, she takes them to a nearby group of older Cantonese women, their faces concealed behind surgical masks and sunhats, hovering a few yards away. Jessica gives her vouchers to one of these women, who counts the $90 in vouchers and gives Jessica $50 in clean green bills. Cash in hand, Jessica departs. The purchased vouchers are then turned in to the farmers’ market organizers, and reimbursed by check as though they had actually been received in legitimate transactions. The whole transaction takes place in clear view, only a few yards from the Market Match tent and the security guard.

Jessica is a composite character, not a real individual, representative of the many people we observed and interviewed who sell their SNAP vouchers. It’s easy to guess what they do with the cash. Multiple fentanyl addicts confirmed to us that they regularly get their drugs by selling SNAP at the farmer’s market. “If you want to buy drugs and not food, you can do it,” says one. We asked another addict if he buys snacks with the cash. “No. I buy dope, man.”

Continue reading my full article at The Voice of San Francisco.

For as long as any of us have been alive, we have seen an ever-changing series of popular predictions for how industrial technology is about to destroy civilization. Nuclear war was supposed to kill everyone, whether by literally exploding all of civilization or by irradiating the world’s surface or by nuclear winter. Toxic pollution and resource depletion were supposed to leave the world a barren wasteland. Overpopulation was supposed to lead to mass starvation, universal resource wars, and the collapse of society. Global warming was supposed to make the planet too hot for human life. And today, many people fear that artificial intelligence will disassemble humanity for parts.

So far, however, civilization has not been destroyed. It seems the demand for techno-apocalypses is much greater than the supply. What’s going on here? Why are so many people always convinced that technology is on the cusp of destroying civilization?

Of course, each individual prediction of doom has its own internal reasoning which should be evaluated apart from the broader trend. However the sheer number of widely expected techno-apocalypses, and the similarities in how the ideas are spread throughout society suggest a common pattern at work, separate from the question of how plausible any particular apocalypse scenario might be.

To understand this, the first thing we have to look at is when and where has this been happening. Is this a general phenomenon that humans do in all times and all places, or something that happens in all technological civilizations, or is it something specific to modern Western civilization?

It would be strange if there were popular predictions of techno-apocalypse before rapid technological change became such a visible force. This is indeed what we find. Before the modern era, the closest match is popular “millenarian” movements in Christian societies. These rhyme a little bit with modern techno-apocalypse, and the psychological effects on the believers are remarkably similar to the effects of modern techno-apocalypse beliefs, but they’re not really what we’re looking for. For one thing, millenarian beliefs are about society being radically transformed into a permanent utopia rather than being destroyed, and for another, the transforming force is Christ bringing about the Last Judgment rather than technology. We’ll have to keep looking.

Do we see techno-apocalypticism emerge as soon as rapid technological advance sets in? Actually, no! If we look around the Industrial Revolution, starting around the 1770s or so, there is nothing of the sort. Only a few cutting-edge intellectuals started to realize how important technological progress would be. Ben Franklin watched the prototype hot air balloons and immediately realized that air power would someday transform war, but rather than feeling anxious about the destruction it would cause, he hoped it might “[c]onvinc[e] sovereigns of the folly of wars.” This futurism was unusual even among intellectuals like Franklin, and none of it filtered down to popular discourse—understandably, because industrial technology was not yet transforming the regular person’s daily life.

It was not until the Second Industrial Revolution, starting roughly around the 1860s, that technologies like trains and mass production and electric lights rapidly intruded on urban people’s daily lives, and regular people began to perceive technological progress as a major force in the world. Yet, while there was popular discourse about technological progress, we still do not see techno-apocalyptic anxieties. The only case that looks a little bit similar was the “coal question,” the idea that available supplies of coal—at the time the only industrial power source in use—would eventually run out and industrial civilization would go with it. The idea was common knowledge in intellectual circles, but made approximately no impression on the public. Intellectuals occasionally brought up the “coal question” during popular debates about high coal prices, but never with the palpable anxiety of 20th century writers talking about “peak oil” and the like, and it never achieved any traction beyond the sort of philosophical futurist who in 2026 has opinions about the “simulation hypothesis” and the “Fermi paradox.”

Continue reading my full article at Palladium.

I’ve been going through the posts on Western culture from Richard Ngo’s 21st Century Civilization Curriculum and it reminded me of Quigley’s analysis. His is the best characterization I’ve seen of what distinguishes the ideology of Western civilization from the other civilizations.

We might begin by saying that Western ideology is optimistic, moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic yet social, and dynamic. All these terms refer only to aspects of the whole and do not really get us to its essence. This essence might be summed up in the belief that “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” Before we attempt to analyze this rather cryptic statement, we should say a few words about the more superficial aspects.

The Western outlook is optimistic because it believes that the world is basically good and that the greatest good lies in the future. … Western ideology believes that the material is good and the spiritual is better but that they are not opposed to each other since the material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world. The world and the flesh are good because they were both made by God (as in the Old Testament). The material world is necessary to the spiritual in two ways: (1) no soul exists without a body and (2) no soul can be saved except by its own efforts and cooperative actions with other persons, both of which can be achieved only by bodily actions in this world.

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The democratic and individualistic aspects of the Western outlook were always present, and go back, like other aspects, to the New Testament. They rest on the belief that all men have souls fit for salvation and, in the long run, have equal opportunity to achieve salvation. These ideas also appear in Christ’s concern with the downtrodden and oppressed, in the belief that the first and greatest sin was pride (the sin of Lucifer) and that the greatest virtue was humility, in the Beatitudes and in many parables (such as that of the lost sheep). It is worthy of note that all these points are concerned not only with the individual’s relationship to himself and to God but also with his relationship to his fellow men.

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All these different aspects of the Western outlook cluster about the essence of the outlook that we have tried to express in the statement that “Truth unfolds through a communal process.” The outlook to which this statement refers lies at the foundation of Western culture and is reflected equally in its religion, its politics, its science, and its economics. This outlook assumes, first, that there is a truth or goal for man’s activity. Thus it rejects despair, solipsism, skepticism, pessimism, and chaos. It implies hope, order, and the existence of a meaningful objective external reality. And it provides the basis for science, religion, and social action as the West has known these.

Second, this attitude assumes that no one, now, has the truth in any complete or even adequate way; it must be sought or struggled for. Thus this outlook rejects smugness, complacency, pride, and personal authority in favor of the Christian virtues and a kind of basic agnosticism (with the implication “We don’t yet know everything”), as well as the idea of achievement of good through struggle to reach the good. The earliest great work of German literature, Parzival, has as its subtitle “The Brave Man Slowly Wise.” This is typical of the Western ideology’s belief that wisdom (or any real achievement) comes as a consequence of personal effort in time. The same idea is to be found in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare’s tragedies (taken as a whole), and in Beethoven’s symphonies.

There are two important ideas here: one is that no one has the whole truth now but that it can be approached closer and closer in the future, by vigorous effort, and the other is that no single individual does this or achieves this, but that it must be achieved by a communal effort, by a kind of cooperation in competition in which each individual’s efforts help to correct the errors of others and thus help the development of a consensus that is closer to the truth than the actions of any single individual ever could be. We might call these two aspects the temporal and the social. They are covered in our maxim by the words “unfolds” and “social.”

There is also a third idea here; namely, that the resulting consensus is still not final, although far superior to any earlier or more individual version. Thus the advance of mankind or of any single individual is an endless process in which truth (or any achievement, even the development of an individual’s personality) is constantly approached closer and closer without ever being finished or reached.

We might mention also another phase of this outlook; namely, the idea that the cooperative effort that unfolds truth through a continuously developing consensus is a competitive process. More accurately it is cooperation through competition, as a game is. This refers to a social process that is superficially competitive but fundamentally cooperative, or, viewed in another way, a situation in which individuals compete and even struggle together for a higher social end (the consensus). This is a dialectic process and is one of the heritages from Classical antiquity, where this idea of the emergence of truth from pluralistic debate in the market place is found in the earlier dialogues of Plato and of other thinkers.

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The same idea about the social (and dialectic) unfolding of truth is at the foundation of Western science. It assumes that science is never static or fully achieved, but pursues a constantly receding goal to which we approach closer and closer from the competition-cooperation of individual scientists, each of whom offers his experiments and theories to be critically reexamined and debated by his fellow scientists in a joint effort to reach a higher (and temporary) consensus.

The same outlook appears in the basic political ideas of the West. These are liberal and not authoritarian. They cannot be authoritarian because no individual or institution has full and final truth; instead a fuller and more complete truth emerges as a guide to social activity from the free debate in free assembly of all men’s partial truths.

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The same kind of pluralist outlook is the real justification of capitalism and of all laissez-faire or pluralist economic systems so typical of the West even in its early period when economic development was taking its first steps.

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Thus we see the basic ideology of the West reflected in all aspects of the society, and continuing to influence ideas and actions even after it has been explicitly rejected. It is, for example, behind the theories of such late and “unconventional” thinkers as Darwin or Marx, both of whom believed that the Better emerged from the Good by the superficial struggles of the many to achieve what could never have been reached by any single individual alone. In fact, of these two, Marxist dialectic materialism is rather closer to the Western tradition than Darwin’s struggle for existence is. Marx, like his mentor Hegel, was Western in his belief that progress is achieved through struggle, but, like Hegel, he committed the Western sin of pride (the sin of Lucifer) in the intellectual arrogance which expected achievement of a final goal in the material world and in the near future.

Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.”

Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”

In 1963 an archaeological survey partially excavated limestone pillars on a Turkish hilltop. The archaeologists believed these were medieval tombstones dating to the Byzantine empire. 30 years later, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt recognized clues that the site was likely much older and excavated it more thoroughly. There, at Göbekli Tepe, he discovered a neolithic monumental complex thought to be 11,500 years old. What had initially been identified as tombstones were merely the tops of massive 18-foot pillars.

According to the generally accepted timelines, Göbekli Tepe was built thousands of years before the invention of agriculture. As such, Schmidt believed this massive site was built by nomadic tribes, who would visit it briefly for religious rites without interrupting their wandering ways. In contrast to the usual theory, that civilization came into being in tandem with agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, Schmidt argued that Göbekli Tepe proves hierarchical and state-like social organization predates agriculture, since the pastoralist nomads were able to able to recruit, organize, and feed the vast manpower needed to construct such a site.

Since Schmidt’s death in 2014, continued excavation has discovered evidence of domestic settlement and large-scale cereal processing at Göbekli Tepe. A 2019 paper by Dietrich et al. documents 7268 tools for grinding grain at the site. Rather than seeing this as evidence of sedentary agricultural life, the authors remain muted in their interpretation. “As no large storage facilities have been identified, we argue for a production of food for immediate use and interpret these seasonal peaks in activity at the site as evidence for the organization of large work feasts.”

It seems more likely that Göbekli Tepe was simply an agricultural city. The reason the architecture looks like a normal agricultural civilization, and does not look like anything we confidently know was built by nomads, is that it was a normal agricultural civilization rather than very unusual nomads. Schmidt estimated that only 5% of the site had been excavated shortly before he died in 2014, so continued investigation may someday uncover the “large storage facilities” whose absence was so persuasive to Dietrich et al.

Agricultural civilization is very likely older than is generally accepted. Our present archaeology has probably not identified the first-ever agricultural society, and perhaps we never will. On this hypothesis, the consensus for the beginning of agriculture will continue to be pushed earlier and earlier, first to 11,500 years ago and eventually further than that. Like the physicists Feynman describes, historians are being reluctantly dragged in a predictable direction by a predictable pattern of evidence. In 2015 a team of archaeologists published evidence of “small-scale trial cultivation” and “proto-weeds” 23,000 years ago, at a site twice the age of Göbekli Tepe.

“Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”

Rearguard actions are not always so steady and incremental. In 1912 Alfred Wegener published a paper arguing that the continents move. He noted that the coastlines and geological formations on opposite sides of the Atlantic line up nearly perfectly, and that fossil remains of ancient creatures were found on opposite sides of the ocean which they could not possibly have crossed, among other arguments. Wegener’s proposed explanation for how the continents move was wrong, but his explanations of apparent geological and biological mysteries which only made sense under continental drift are now considered correct.

At the time Wegener’s work was mostly dismissed, on the basis that continents moving sounds completely bananas. Only a small fringe of geologists continued to develop the continental drift theory. It was not until half a century later, when a separate research tradition discovered the theory of plate tectonics and provided a convincing mechanism for how continents could move, that continental drift rapidly became the scientific consensus.

More on this in a forthcoming article from Elizabeth Van Nostrand.

A thousand years ago, the inhabitants of what’s now the eastern United States were building cities and megastructures. The grandest of these sites we’ve discovered is the Cahokia complex of earth mounds, including the famous Monks Mound, whose base is the same size as that of the Pyramid of Giza, and the infamous Mound 72, which contains the remains of a mass human sacrifice of 53 young women who appear to be captives taken from a foreign ethnic group. Other mounds, smaller than Monks Mound but clearly large enough to require organized labor forces, are scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and the eastern United States.

We don’t know why these cities collapsed, and probably never will. We don’t even know what they called themselves. Archaeological evidence shows it disintegrated well before Europeans and their diseases arrived. We have found no writing from these people, and whatever oral histories of their collapse may have existed in 1492 did not survive the European contact.

While the evidence is not in dispute, academics generally avoid calling this civilization a civilization, and speak of the “Mississippian culture” or the “Mound Builders”. They admit that the people lived in cities at the largest sites. They admit that there is clear evidence of hierarchical social structure with differentiated social classes and professional administrators—they insist on describing this political structure as “complex chiefdoms” rather than “city-states”. They admit that larger cities ruled over weaker cities nearby—this was “settlement hierarchy”, not “imperialism”. Most scholars admit that the mounds were clearly built by large-scale mobilization of labor, probably on a corvee basis, although occasionally there are implausible proposals that the mounds were built by disorganized individuals bringing a single basketful of earth when they happened to visit the site, or other silly ways to deny the obvious evidence of well-organized labor mobilization.

Everyone knows that the Native Americans—or at least the North Americans—were noble savages who lived in harmony with the earth and could paint with all the colors of the wind. To say that the land was once inhabited by a civilization whose lives were closer to the Aztecs or the Mayas than to the small tribes who the Europeans encountered sounds as crazy as the idea of moving continents. There may be undisputed facts which cannot possibly square with the popular view, but these facts are unknown to most Americans. They are spoken only in euphemism and whisper, where it will not intrude on civic mythology.

The Ennigaldi Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which decides what to preserve, purchases tablets, and stores them in vaults. We are accepting donations if you want to support this work.

Ammonite Inscription Company produces tablets for the Ennigaldi Foundation and for anyone else. When I started this project I thought I could just raise money and buy tablets from the tablet guys. But there were no tablet guys who I could find, so I had to become the tablet guy.

It turns out these tablets also make great display pieces, so if you want a thousand-year inscription of your favorite poem or your wedding vows or a (black-and-white) artwork or your family records or anything, then Ammonite can do that. Going forward I also hope to sell to museums and others with an interest in long-term preservation, so they can just make a simple transaction rather than set up a production process from scratch.

In the future I’ll also offer “We make your tablets and store them in our permanent vault” rather than just “I deliver the tablets to you” but that’s a ways away.

My ultimate goal is to preserve the entire corpus of English-language Wikipedia c. 2014. This is more feasible than many people assume but it’s still very far beyond my current production capacity. I’ll be starting small and scaling up geometrically as I go.

You can sign up for the Ennigaldi Foundation’s newsletter to stay updated as the work continues.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which soon became one of the most influential works of economics and anthropology ever written. Today it is best remembered for its role in stigmatizing “conspicuous consumption,” a concept Veblen coins in the book. Veblen’s full theory is much broader. He describes the leisure class, a group of people whose vocation is performing aristocratic leisure in order to show that they are higher and more honorable than the common throng. It has been over a century since Veblen’s time, and the specific forms of reputable leisure which the privileged class engage in have changed completely. The basic structure of the leisure class, however, is much the same.

The most reputable displays of leisure were aristocratic in Veblen’s time. Veblen uses examples like hunting for sport, speaking Latin and Greek, and learning refined manners to demonstrate “good breeding.” By now, all of this is hopelessly old-fashioned. But the leisure class is far older than these aristocratic values and aesthetics, and did not cease to exist just because that ideology collapsed. Today the leisure class has adopted the new ideology, which we can roughly call “social activism,” and performs its conspicuous leisure in accordance with these newer values and aesthetics.

The Leisure Class of Today

When we talk about “the leisure class” today, we do not mean people who spend all day watching TikTok or playing video games or listening to true crime podcasts. We are talking about people who engage in conspicuous leisure. By conspicuous, we mean that they show off their exemption from unworthy labor through accomplishments which those without leisure cannot match, for want of time or money or energy. They spend their time and effort in “honorific” pursuits which place them above the base necessity of directly producing wealth.

A meatpacker illegally working twelve-hour shifts can watch Breaking Bad when he comes home, so watching Breaking Bad is just ordinary leisure, and having opinions about Breaking Bad does not demonstrate conspicuous leisure. But only a man of means and distinction can take three-week vacations to go scuba diving in exotic locations—and upload the selfies to social media—so this becomes a mark of honor. In the language of today’s economists, what Veblen calls “conspicuous” might be phrased as “suitable for costly signaling.” Conspicuous leisure often includes mastery of subtle and exacting speech codes, and adherence to precise forms of manners, carriage, and behavior, all of which requires careful study and training within the social milieu of the reputable elites.

Continue reading my full article at Palladium.

Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.

In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.

Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.

The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.

Continue reading my full article at Unherd.

In the 1300s, the bubonic plague pandemic swept through Europe, and killed an enormous fraction of the population—perhaps a third, according to many estimates. Around this time, Europeans were also becoming wealthier, while urban artisans and guildmasters were gaining economic power at the expense of feudal lords. It’s a common myth that European wealth increased because of the plague. However, these economic and social changes had started a century before the bubonic plague reached Europe. Late medieval economic growth came from the rise of towns and burghers, and the Black Death just happened to come along in the middle of that. Other pandemics did not go along with rising prosperity, because they did not arrive in the middle of unrelated economic transformations.

One example of the common myth is presented by Noel Johnson, an economist at George Mason University, in an interview with Tyler Cowen:

“So 1350 is when the Black Death is occurring, around then. Europe loses about 40 percent of its population to this bacterial infection that spreads through. And as anybody who’s taken introductory economics might suggest, when the labor supply goes down by a lot, with 40 percent of Europe dying, then wages are going to start going up. This means the bargaining power of peasants, relative to landowners and so forth, are going to increase. … the main thing that’s going on with institutional change is going to be this shift in the bargaining power that’s letting peasants have more power relative to nobles.”

Of course, according to introductory economics, killing 40% of the population would affect demand for crops as well as supply, and so the first-order effect on labor prices is zero. For Johnson's explanation to make sense, there must be some second-order reason why mass death would have different effects on the demand for food versus the labor supply of farmers. The usual explanation here is that the survivors had access to more natural resources. Byrne Hobart covers this argument:

“[I]f your country is close to the Malthusian limit, it means the incremental farmer is not producing enough food to feed themselves — if the average person produces enough food for one person, and some people have good land, the more marginal land is necessarily producing less than that average. … Arguably, the event that set off the Renaissance, and thus the Industrial Revolution, was the Black Death. By killing a third of Europe, it pushed us to well below the Malthusian limit, raised workers’ wages, and limited governments’ ability to tax city-dwellers. Things really started to take off in Northern Italy, which is also where the plague first arrived. Of course, it could have happened anyway, and could have happened elsewhere — the reason it hit in the first place was that trade had globalized enough that rats and fleas from China found their way to Venice, which wasn’t happening as much beforehand. But certainly the Bubonic Plague accelerated things by eliminating a lot of people and raising the marginal productivity of the survivors.”

Scott Alexander gives the most concise summary of this argument I've seen:

“Some people argue Europe broke out of the Malthusian trap around 1300. This is not quite right. 1300s Europe achieved above-subsistence GDP, but only because the Black Plague killed so many people that the survivors got a windfall by taking their land.”

This paints a picture of Europe at the limit of its ecological carrying capacity, with incomes stagnating at the level of bare subsistence. Then the Black Death wipes out a huge swathe of the population, and that breathing room permits higher productivity and higher incomes. Laborers go from being a burden to being a resource worth competing over, enabling them to negotiate for better legal and customary privileges as well as a higher share of the wealth they produce. This helps establish the foundations of the technological explosion that would eventually let the West escape Malthusian dynamics, or at least raise the Malthusian limits so far as to be unrecognizable. It's a coherent and sensible story.

But of course a coherent and sensible story isn't worth much on its own. I can easily tell coherent and sensible stories for wildly different conclusions. Here's one: by causing people to abandon marginally-productive land, which was plentiful, in favor of especially fertile land, which was scarce, the Black Death made landownership more important, and reinforced the economic power of the landowning nobility. Here's another: the Black Death made it uneconomical to learn a specialized trade because you were so likely to die before earning enough to repay the investment, and so the shortage of skilled workers led to a collapse of productivity. These stories are both completely backwards and describe the exact opposite of the real history, but that's impossible to know just from thinking about the story abstractly. You have to check against the actual events.

So what do we find when we check the Malthusian story against the historical record? Superficially, it seems plausible. Countless farms and villages were abandoned after the Black Death. We have some individual accounts complaining about peasants trying to bargain for higher wages in the aftermath. The 1300s were indeed a period of economic growth and growing technological sophistication. However, on closer inspection, the timelines don't match up.

These trends had all been underway since at least the 1200s, and some from the 1100s. Over the centuries before the Black Death, surveys of population and economics like Wilhelm Abel's Agricultural Fluctuations In Europe From The Thirteenth To Twentieth Centuries show many small towns and market villages springing up, and a greater share of the population living in these towns. Real wages of tradesmen rise. A smaller fraction of labor went to the Malthusian struggle for subsistence, and relatively more labor went to luxury goods. Mechanical technology got better; most importantly, better looms and spinning wheels spread across the continent, while many watermills were built for industry like ironsmithing or papermaking. Peasant mobility increased as people were drawn to opportunities in the towns. We see some records of burghers and merchants with significant fortunes, whereas earlier in the Middle Ages, the richest people were nearly always nobles or clergy.

This transition, where the economic center of gravity moved away from agricultural estates run by nobility and towards towns run by burghers, was a centuries-long process which started long before the Black Death and continued long after. Attributing these changes in wealth, urbanization, and peasant mobility to an event which struck long after the trends began is like when people try to explain the modern decline in fertility, which has been dropping steadily for centuries, by pointing to much more recent changes like phones. When I look closely at late medieval economics, I don’t see much change in the long-term trends around the time of the Black Death.

If the Malthusian explanation were correct, the most basic historical observation we’d expect is that food should have become abundant after the plague. This did not happen. Thomas Malthus himself, who was a more careful historian than those who wield his name today, acknowledges that “after the great pestilence in the time of Edward III [o]ne should naturally have thought that the quantity of good land being abundant, compared with the population, corn would have been very cheap. It was, however, on the contrary, dear during the twenty-five subsequent years”.

We can also check the theory by comparing it to other mass die-offs. The mechanisms described should hold for any society based on subsistence farming that loses a notable fraction of its population. What do we see when we check similar examples?

On the Malthusian model, famines should be the clearest case of mass deaths raising living standards, since that's when you know for sure that a population is above the carrying capacity. Yet the Irish famine of 1845 reduced the island's population by about a quarter, through death and emigration, with no resulting economic boom. The Bengal famine of 1770 may have killed a third of the population and was also an unmitigated disaster. In fact, I've never heard anyone claim that a famine had an economic silver lining, even though in theory it ought to be a much stronger case for a Malthusian bonanza than a plague.

If we compare other pandemics which killed a similar fraction of the population, we see no economic boom. The Plague of Justinian (caused by the same bubonic plague as the Black Death) and the Antonine Plague are universally considered to be terrible blows to the might of the Roman Empire, with no indication that these plagues led to economic gains for society in general or for laborers in particular. Earlier, the Plague of Athens was much the same, and the only economic effects Thucydides mentions are people inheriting estates and spending their savings on luxuries. If we look at smaller plagues, like contemporary epidemics of cholera or ebola—which often strike in areas where subsistence farmers are still common—then those are clearly an economic burden rather than a windfall. If we look at plagues which killed a larger fraction than the Black Death... well, there aren't many. The only candidate I can think of is the wave of European diseases introduced into the Americas, which were definitely not an economic windfall, and was a major contributor to the complete disintegration of Incan civilization. I've never heard any proponent of the Malthusian theory explain why the Black Death would be economically different from these other plagues and catastrophes.

Malthusian theories do not give good descriptions of technological societies. The core Malthusian axiom is that the natural environment and the supply of resources are fixed. This might be a reasonably good approximation when modeling a population of rabbits. But for human societies which can gain or lose the organizational capacity to maintain large irrigation systems, which can invent better plows and crop rotation, where even Stone Age societies can use their labor to terraform the land and enrich the soil to increase yields, this theoretical assumption does not hold and the theory reliably gives the wrong answer. Changes in the economic circumstances of technological societies are almost always explained by social and technological causes, not by Malthusian ecological causes.

In the case of medieval Europe, the cause was the rise of towns and burghers, with social systems and physical technology capable of producing more goods. This transition predates the Black Death by at least a century, and continued for centuries after. The apparent connection is just a coincidence, and disappears like a mirage if you look at the history closely. Other mass deaths from plague or famine did not produce the greater living standards which Malthusian economics predicts, because Malthusian economics is completely wrong.

I’ll add that it’s equally important to contemplate the actions of the victims—and especially their inactions. Most victims were appallingly passive in the face of oncoming death. At the final moment, a man would watch a hundred people in front of him lined up and shot, and then line up to receive his own bullet. We’re told that people are cowards out of a desire to save their own lives, but when passive cowardice was very obviously a certain path to extermination, and the only slim chance at life was through some desperate action, approximately nobody tried anything. This was a shameful abdication of the most basic duty to protect one’s own life and the lives of others. We must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps. Man's capacity to follow meekly as he's herded to his obvious death is at least as important to understand as man’s capacity to slaughter innocents.

Once events have reached the point where you’re being lined up in front of a shallow trench filled with the bodies of your neighbors, you obviously don’t have any *good* options. Still, at that point there is nothing *worse* than doing what you’re told for the last ninety seconds of your life and making things easy for the death squad. Better to sprint for the edge of the field and force your murderers to spend a few extra bullets while they chase you down. Better to attack with rocks or fists or fingernails, go down swinging and maybe even injure one of them. Never mind the one-in-a-thousand chance that it somehow helps, that those behind you also run and a few slip away in the chaos, at least it’s better to disrupt the orderly factory lines of the death machine and mildly inconvenience those who operate it.

But we are not here to exhort the dead to be something other than what they were. Our purpose is to learn from what happened and avoid making similar mistakes. Why did the men who watched the death squads shoot their neighbors, shoot their brothers, shoot their daughters, wait obediently for their own turn to be shot? We can imagine the stultifying terror, the habit of obedience, the knowledge that whoever steps out of line will be shot first. We can imagine the hopelessness and dread and inevitability. We can imagine the brute herd instinct to stay in the mass with our head down.

There is room for debate on when it is appropriate to succumb to cowardice to save yourself. But if we introspect on the experience of cowardice, on how it feels and what provokes it, it is clear that cowardice sometimes makes self-preservation harder. Like any emotional reaction, paralyzing fear can be a useful signal in normal cases, but can lead to deranged behavior in unusual or extreme cases.

What attitude would it take to overcome the paralysis of the men waiting quietly at the lip of the trench? What pattern of thought would recognize, if not the perfect moment for action, then at least a moment where action is less doomed than kneeling for the bullet? What type of mind can take the threat seriously enough, can recognize the necessity of taking a gamble that probably won’t work, without being paralyzed with the enormity of the situation?

And if you take such an attitude and bring it earlier, before that final moment when all hope has already been lost, then it can indeed determine whether you survive. Over half of German Jews survived the Holocaust by simply leaving Germany before emigration was forbidden in 1941. Those who stayed behind were not a random sample. Polish Jews fared worse because the Germans arrived as a conquering army, so fleeing took an extraordinary effort and some luck, and only around 10% were still alive at the end.

One account—I don’t remember where I read it. A teenage girl and a resistance member are in love. He offers to smuggle her out of the ghetto. She wants to go, and asks her mother’s permission. Her mother refuses to send her off with this boy—if the Nazis catch them, they’ll certainly be shot. They have a big screaming fight for hours. Her mother refuses to budge. The girl is inconsolable but she won’t outright disobey her mother. Long after the war is over, the interviewer asks the resistance fighter, Did you ever find out what happened to her? And he answers, No, I assume they both died when the ghetto was liquidated.

The Holocaust gets more airtime than other 20th century atrocities, but all of this applies just as well to the Soviet exterminations or the Khmer Rouge exterminations or the Turkish exterminations. After surviving a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If … if … We didn't love freedom enough.

To some extent this is an unrealistic fantasy imagining a comforting but implausible level of coordination, but there is also a genuine realization that they had done nothing, in the last minute when there was any slim hope of winning a fight. The gulags were not quite extermination camps, and even a political prisoner like Solzhenitsyn had odds of survival better than a coin flip. How many Polish doctors and engineers had similar thoughts while they were being marched into the Katyn Forest? We can only guess. They didn’t leave memoirs.

When should you fight? When should you arm yourself? When should you make friends with a dozen men who think similarly and happen to know how to use weapons? When should you flee across the border into self-imposed exile? What are the signs to track, what are the thresholds to watch for?

I don’t have any general answers. It depends too much on the specifics of the situation. But these are the questions that come to mind when I read the histories. At the very least it’s a more fruitful lens than the tired “How can I pin Hitler’s crimes on my political opponents?” approach which has become so common.

All civilizations study the past and read the texts handed down by their ancestors. What’s much rarer is systematically analyzing ancient artifacts and sites to figure out what past societies were like. By default we assume that such a massive empirical-theoretical project is natural and obvious, and every sensible civilization would devote lots of resources to it. After all, our own civilization has done this under the banner of “archaeology” since well before we were born. In the course catalogue it’s listed between “accounting” and “astronomy,” and it’s easy to take that as a law of the universe. However, archaeology is historically very abnormal, possibly even unique to our civilization. It’s likely that future civilizations will revert to the mean and stop bothering with it.

Archaeology as we know it—a tradition of knowledge among a dedicated body of scholars in dialogue with each other and more or less synced on goals and methods—dates from roughly the 1700s. When Western archaeologists first scoured the world to survey ancient sites, very often they found the locals had been vaguely aware of the ancient ruins nearby, but never bothered to investigate more deeply than boys wandering through for a curious afternoon. Since then, archaeology has gone global. Western culture and methods have been widely imitated by other civilizations, often with funding and training from the West, and archaeology has been part of that package.

Aside from modern Western and Western-derived archaeologists, I know of only two other cases where there was a serious tradition of knowledge studying ancient sites or artifacts to try to understand the past. Both of these were aimed at relatively narrow reconstructions of religious practices, rather than trying to understand everything about past societies like our own archaeologists. I’m sure there were also scattered individuals who stared at an old Roman road or an overgrown Khmer temple and tried to imagine how the people had lived, but that’s very different from a successful tradition of knowledge.

Before the West, Mesopotamian civilization came closest to archaeology as we understand it under the Neo-Babylonians in the 6th century B.C. They excavated ancient Mesopotamian temples which had been ruined for over a thousand years and studied them in detail, trying to infer their floor plans and furnishings so they could reconstruct them exactly as they had been originally. Kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus left inscriptions boasting that their temples were exact restorations of the ancient works, often on the same sites, and incorporating bricks and idols from the ancient temple. This almost certainly required methods which today’s archaeologists would recognize, such as identifying likely-looking mounds as buried megastructures, mobilizing laborers to excavate them, preserving ancient artifacts as they were dug up, and trying to piece the remains into a picture of what the ancients had been trying to do.

Famously, this project also produced the earliest known museum so far, which is best described in the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley’s book Excavations at Ur. On the compound containing the newly reconstructed Ziggurat of Ur, the king’s daughter Ennigaldi presided as high priestess. In one room near her temple’s school, Woolley unearthed a collection of several unrelated artifacts which were already ancient in Ennigaldi’s time, as well as a “museum label” which announced its text was copied “from bricks found in the ruins of Ur, which while searching for the ground-plan [of the temple] the Governor of Ur found, and I saw and wrote out for the marvel of beholders”. The bricks in royal constructions were stamped with the king’s name and other metadata, which has been a great help to both Neo-Babylonian and Western excavators. I’m sure the old kings would be pleased that their names are still preserved. The room also contained a few ancient artifacts unrelated to construction, like the head of a mace, so there was at least some attention to preserving antiques apart from just restoring the temples. We have so little data that we can’t say confidently what else they did or didn’t study, although it seems to me like the temple restoration project was probably the driving force, with a little bit of antiquarianism done opportunistically along the way as old sites were excavated.

This proto-archaeological tradition lasted for several generations, but seems to have ended during Ennigaldi’s lifetime. The Book of Daniel recounts the story of Ennigaldi’s brother, the crown prince Belshazzar, who received the prophecy of the “writing on the wall” foretelling the doom of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Belshazzar and his father Nabonidus were conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. Naturally, the Persians did not continue the Neo-Babylonian effort to revive Babylonian religion as a centralizing imperial project, and the expensive temple constructions were stopped. Rather than impose their own foreign religion, the Persians let the different subject peoples practice their own religions, most famously letting the Jews return to Judah and thereby ending the Babylonian Captivity. I know of no evidence of any excavations continuing under the Persians.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.

I should explain, for those who aren’t familiar with the subculture, that this is a friendly and constructive reception. Rationalists think disagreeing is fun and agreeing is boring—it’s one reason I get along with them. So, people who agree or think the article is insightful will vote up and move on to something they enjoy, while people who disagree or think the article is dumb or think it’s only mostly correct will spend the time to write up their objection. This is not a new observation, their founding texts explicitly call out their “culture of objections”. It’s fine, you just have to know how to interpret their discourse. “There’s a post with a high score and lots of disagreeing comments” is what it looks like when they’re taking an argument seriously.

The top comment, from Jim Babcock:

The article seems to assume that the primary motivation for wanting to slow down AI is to buy time for institutional progress. Which seems incorrect as an interpretation of the motivation. Most people that I hear talk about buying time are talking about buying time for technical progress in alignment. Technical progress, unlike institution-building, tends to be cumulative at all timescales, which makes it much more strategically relevant.

To which I say: Yes, obviously. This is implicit in my argument. I should have made it explicit, since I also heard the same point from several different people on Twitter. Even if most readers made the connection themselves, a notable minority did not. Mea culpa. I’ll spell it out here, and please forgive me if this seems long or repetitive; the point seems incredibly obvious to me and I’m not sure which part isn’t intuitive to these readers, so I’m going over the basics. I am tempted to just say “The technical progress in alignment has to come from institutions”, but if conveying the point were that easy then Jim could’ve put it together on his own.

If we accept the AI Doomer position that superintelligent AGI will inevitably be built someday, and will inevitably become the most powerful force in the world once it exists, then the big cosmic question is whether or not the eventual AGI does things that match what humans want—whether it’s aligned to human values, to use their term of art. (There’s ongoing debate about exactly what “alignment” means and what “human values” are and whether those are coherent concepts, but for our purposes it’s sufficient to gesture vaguely at the intuitive meaning—the task of aligning the future AGI does not require that we precisely understand these concepts now, only that we can eventually.)

Jim is absolutely correct that this alignment can only come because the people or programs which write the AGI’s code understand, technically, what they are doing, and write the correct code to produce an AGI which does things they want instead of producing an AGI which does something else. If you have “functional institutions”, but the institutions do not write the code for an aligned AGI, then you do not get an aligned AGI. You have to write the correct code. Functionality does not produce an aligned AGI via some quintessence of competence which diffuses into the AGI through the ether. “Institutional functionality” matters to this question only insofar as it affects whether the institutions in question create an aligned AGI or an unaligned AGI or no AGI.

According to the AI Doomers, the current institutions are on track to soon create an unaligned AGI, and are not capable of creating an aligned AGI. So, the institutions must improve if they are to produce the outcome which the AI Doomers seek. The differences between institutions result in differences between the outputs those institutions produce—research, engineering, software, and ultimately perhaps an AGI. Again I’m sorry if all this seems basic, I’m aware this is an old point which many AI Doomers have argued for explicitly and at great length, but Jim’s popularly-endorsed comment makes it clear that many of them didn’t see the mechanism here.

The problems with the “buy time for technical alignment research” strategy become clear when you stop thinking in zoomed-out abstractions and start thinking about specific projects. Most important, of course, is that the AI Doomers’ attempts to “buy time” have in fact achieved exactly the opposite, and by continuing the same strategy they are on track to continue accelerating the events which they claim they want to slow down, as I argued in my article. I doubt Jim disputes this; there are very few AI Doomers do, when I ask them in person. It is striking that so many of them are pursuing this strategy despite agreeing that it will probably have the opposite of the effect they say they want, but this isn’t the place for me to speculate about why.

We can set aside the actual political efforts pursued by AI Doomers in real life, and imagine there’s a magic wand which “buys time” in the way they wish for, and shuts down all research except for that conducted by AI Doomer institutions. Suppose the wand removes anything that looks like OpenAI, and only things that look like Redwood Research continue researching AI, and also they’re magically shielded from the entryism, gamesmanship, and other consequences that would happen if you did this in reality. Do any AI Doomers think this would actually suffice to solve the technical challenges? Probably there’s someone somewhere, but it’s not a common belief. Even the magic wand doesn’t help with their ostensible goal, unless you have another magic wand which gives you extreme institutional improvements.

Even just identifying technical AI alignment research, and separating it from other technical AI research, is extremely contentious, and the AI Doomers have not reached consensus on what should be included in the category. The AI Doomer ontology holds that “AI research” consists of two subtypes, “AI capacity research” and “AI alignment research”, but this distinction holds up much worse in practice than in theory. Essentially, AI capacity research is defined as advancing our understanding of how to make AI that is more powerful and better at doing stuff. AI alignment research advances our understanding of how to make AI choose to do stuff that is aligned to human values.

Conceptually speaking, this distinction is extremely fuzzy at best, and kind of fake at worst. Historically speaking, these labels have mostly been important as a way for AI companies like DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic to recruit AI Doomers to do research and development by branding it as “alignment”. There is no consensus among the AI Doomers about which projects count as “alignment research”. For every AI Doomer holding up a claimed example of technical alignment research progress, you will find another denouncing the same example as “safetywashing” a reckless capabilities advance. Many have championed programs like “benchmarks” and “evals” as ways of gaining better insight into how current AI software works and therefore assessing and improving its alignment, while others decry these as open-ended research tools which bring us closer to apocalypse. And as far as I’ve heard, literally all of the claimed technical alignment research advances were only possible because of the foundations laid by the past decade of capabilities research advances.

The conceptual problem might be solvable in principle. If so, however, the current AI Doomer institutions are evidently not up to the task of solving it. In large part because of this, they do not have any plausible research path to solve the technical problem, as they understand it. An “AI pause” with an exception for technical alignment research would not be enough, even if we limit ourselves to the magic wand version of the plan. In real life, of course, such a plan is even worse than this because it would get coopted even harder and faster than their previous alignment research efforts got coopted by AI companies.

To their credit, most of the AI Doomers openly acknowledge that the plan of buying time for technical alignment research cannot work. Statements like “I'm not sure how much I trust most technical AI safety researchers to make important progress on AI safety now. And I trust most institutions a lot less.” and “I have grown pessimistic about our ability to solve the open technical problems even given 100 years of work on them.” are common. This is why so many of them are putting their chips on human intelligence enhancement via genetic engineering, in hopes of producing people capable of solving the problem which is beyond their coalition’s current abilities. Previously I thought this was a niche plan advanced only by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but the response to my Palladium article showed it’s much more popular than that. I disagree with them about the relative chances of producing institutions with stronger epistemic foundations vs massive near-term breakthroughs in human intelligence enhancement technology, but the latter could indeed help if it were achieved.

Intelligence enhancement research has another great advantage over activism to shut down AI research: If the assumptions behind AI Doom are incorrect, then activism to shut down AI research makes the world worse, but research to improve intelligence still makes the world better. For people operating within the AI Doomer frame, I think this is the best way to solve the problem, rather than dig the hole even deeper as their past attempts have done. It is the Norman Borlaug approach rather than the Club of Rome approach.

While I am reluctant to pour cold water on a good cause, I do think a lot of AI Doomers are overestimating the odds that this project massively succeeds in our lifetime. Many of them are putting a lot of weight on the idea that current incremental progress is on the verge of a giant leap forward which produces engineered megageniuses. I don’t think this is true.

This brings us to the second-most popular comment on my article, from Oliver Habryka (I’m condensing it here but click through for the whole thing):

I feel like intelligence enhancement being pretty solidly in the near-term technological horizon provides strong argument for future governance being much better. There are also maybe 3-5 other technologies that seem likely to be achieved in the next 30 years bar AGI that would all hugely improve future AGI governance.

And then a lot of the post seems to make really quite bad arguments against forecasting AI timelines and other technologies … I will very gladly take all your bets that intelligence augmentation will not take "several centuries". … I see no methodology that suggests anything remotely as long as this, and so many forms of trend extrapolation, first principles argument, reference class forecasting and so many other things that suggest things happen faster than that.

…

We can’t bet on where the tech will be centuries from now, but Oliver, if you think there’s a large chance of achieving big megagenius breakthroughs in human intelligence before I’m old and failing—say, within 30 years—then yes I am very happy to bet you (or others whose honesty the community trust network vouches for).

For my general argument against being able to predict the arrival time of breakthrough technologies, see Against AGI Timelines. Briefly, the history of technology does not support the idea that large breakthroughs can be “timed” beforehand. The reasons apply to genetically engineering megageniuses (or to fusion power, curing cancer, superconductors, etc) as much as to AGI.

However, we can do a pretty good job of predicting incremental improvements in technology, e.g. battery capacity or desalination efficiency. Many at Less Wrong, apparently including Oliver, contend that we do not need large breakthroughs to get megageniuses, and current incremental progress on genetic engineering will be sufficient. I am skeptical.

The Less Wronger argument that big breakthroughs are imminent is best expressed in GeneSmith and kman’s Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible and How to Make Superbabies. The latter argues that genetic edits can “make someone with a higher predisposition towards genius than anyone that has ever lived” and achieve “50 additional years of life expectancy” by stacking together technologies which are on the verge of being proven. The authors have founded a company aiming to do exactly that. At the time I thought the comments on the post were interested-but-skeptical, but now I realize that many of Less Wrong’s people are putting tremendous strategic and psychological weight on projects like this. Perhaps I should have expected that, after putting their chips on superhuman intelligence transforming the world in their lifetimes via AGI and superhuman intelligence transforming the world in their lifetimes via rationality training, they are now putting their chips on superhuman intelligence transforming the world in their lifetimes via genetic engineering.

The lesser objection to this plan is that stacking together technologies which are on the verge of being proven is the sort of thing which often elides decades of finicky engineering work to solve unforeseen difficulties, and not infrequently results in the discovery that one of the hoped-for technologies is not actually as provable as you thought. The greater objection is that, even if the gene editing technologies work more or less as the authors hope, it is not at all clear that the effects will be as large as they claim. Modest effects would still be an enormous success, of course! But we don’t know nearly enough about human intelligence to justify their confidence in extreme effects.

We’re basically dealing with three black-box systems which we understand poorly. We know that genetic code creates the brain, but mostly we don’t know how, with a few exceptions for especially legible mutations. We know that the brain creates human intelligence, but mostly we don’t know how, with some exceptions like understanding that particular regions are associated with particular cognitive functions, or understanding particular chemical pathways which influence cognition in more or less understood ways. And our understanding of what human intelligence even is remains largely a “I know it when I see it” situation, with academic disciplines like psychology, behavioral economics, and ethnic studies offering explanations of how humans think which are incredibly incomplete at best and transparently fraudulent at worst, while introspective traditions like psychotherapy, meditation, and Less Wrong’s own rationality techniques provide mutually contradictory accounts of how human thought works, how it ideally ought to work, and how to improve it in practice.

When we know that some genetic mutation is associated with a higher IQ, usually we don’t know how the mutation affects the brain (for the ones which are in fact causal), or how the brain doing something differently alters the cognitive architecture, or the mechanics of what makes a different cognitive architecture “more intelligent”. If you stack hundreds of these mutations as the authors propose, what happens? I would like to find out but it seems really amazingly incredibly unclear, as several comments on the post point out. When GeneSmith and kman talk of boosting IQs to 170, that’s putting more weight on the concept of “IQ” than today’s IQ tests can bear.

This situation does not permit a precise engineering approach. It permits a statistical brute-force approach, which is what the authors propose. Statistical Challenges with Making Super IQ babies is a better and more informed critique of their statistical assumptions than I would be able to write, especially the “Correlation vs. Causation” and “The Additive Effect of Genetics” sections. For their plan to produce effects large enough to transform the strategic situation of artificial intelligence development as quickly as they hope, a bunch of assumptions would have to go right. (Including assumptions about the regulatory or cultural response to gene editing, which are beyond the scope of the technological argument.)

Let me reiterate that I absolutely one thousand percent support attempts to engineer megageniuses, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. If these attempts merely produce mild improvements in human intelligence or health which we mostly don’t understand mechanistically, perhaps breaking down at the upper tail, that’s an astoundingly great outcome, one of the best uses of a life’s work I can imagine. If I’m wrong and they or their peers make their 125-year-old megageniuses, then so much the better. If the project totally fails, then oh well, the story of human progress is a lot of crazy-sounding projects which mostly crash in ugly fireballs, except a small fraction which actually work and more than justify all the wipeouts along the way. Perhaps the results will help someone come up with a big conceptual breakthrough in understanding genetics or the brain or human intelligence, which makes it possible to do something closer to engineering than statistical brute-force. While most projects which look like this don’t win big, most projects which win big come from something that looks like this. New technology is very frequently achieved by crazy people who are ideologically committed to their particular project. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Genetic intelligence augmentation is not a plan so promising that we should institute a global tyranny to shut down technological progress until it has successfully created supermen, as some AI Doomers advocate. In my entire life I have never encountered a plan that promising. But it is promising enough that working on it is a good idea. AI Doomers would do much better to work on intelligence enhancement (genetic or otherwise) rather than pursue the social engineering which historically they have largely focused on, mostly counterproductively. Despite the difficulties, intelligence enhancement is one of the very few plans I’ve ever heard articulated which can actually help the issues they fear, rather than make them worse. If their predictions about future technology prove false, like the past predictions about imminent superhuman AI, then the project will still make the world better rather than worse.

The state’s role in supporting economic growth is critical. Our wealth comes from industry, that is, from the ability to mass produce goods—more goods, better goods, cheaper goods, produced with fewer hours of labor. The biggest advances in industrial production have required massive investments and social transformations so large they can only succeed with the support of the state, including in countries where the state’s support comes largely via market mechanisms, like the United States and modern China. A well-designed industrial policy works by incubating new, better modes of production to move a nation from its current economic equilibrium to a new, wealthier equilibrium.

It is a tragedy, then, that our current economic policy does exactly the opposite. We are vastly poorer because, instead of supporting “infant industries” until they can stand on their own feet, the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars to keep the most senile and sclerotic businesses on life support. This keeps millions of talented people and tens of trillions of dollars worth of plant and equipment locked up in decrepit enterprises run by mediocrities who specialize in preserving the status quo, or by outright incompetents running their businesses into the ground.

In the words of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, “[T]he problem that is usually being visualized is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them.” If the government were willing to let big businesses die a natural death when their time comes, then these resources would be captured by better-managed firms, and our industrial and technological growth would proceed faster. In 2024, the largest 0.1% of businesses, those with over 500 employees, accounted for 54% of private sector jobs in the U.S. Firms with over 10,000 employees accounted for 18% of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Our prosperity, and especially our grandchildren’s prosperity, depends critically on how much of this is in the hands of companies like Boeing and how much is in the hands of companies like SpaceX.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.

In recent decades, a growing coalition has emerged to oppose the development of artificial intelligence technology, for fear that the imminent development of smarter-than-human machines could doom humanity to extinction. The now-influential form of these ideas began as debates among academics and internet denizens, which eventually took form—especially within the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements—and grew in intellectual influence over time, along the way collecting legible endorsements from authoritative scientists like Stephen Hawking and Geoffrey Hinton.

Ironically, by spreading the belief that superintelligent AI is achievable and supremely powerful, these “AI Doomers,” as they came to be called, inspired the creation of OpenAI and other leading artificial intelligence labs whose technology they argue will destroy us all. Despite this, they have continued nearly the same advocacy strategy, and are now in the process of persuading Western governments that superintelligent AI is achievable and supremely powerful. To this end, they have created organized and well-funded movements to lobby for regulation, and their members are staffing key positions in the U.S. and British governments.

Their basic argument is that more intelligent beings can outcompete less intelligent beings, just as humans outcompeted mastodons or saber-toothed tigers or neanderthals. Computers are already ahead of humans in some narrow areas, and we are on track to create a superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI) which can think as broadly and creatively in any domain as the smartest humans. “Artificial general intelligence” is not a technical term, and is used differently by different groups to mean everything from “an effectively omniscient computer which can act independently, invent unthinkably powerful new technologies, and outwit the combined brainpower of humanity” to “software which can substitute for most white-collar workers” to “chatbots which usually don’t hallucinate.”

AI Doomers are concerned with the former scenario, where computer systems outreason, outcompete, and doom humanity to extinction. The AI Doomers are only one of several factions that oppose AI and seek to cripple it via weaponized regulation. There are also factions concerned about “misinformation” and “algorithmic bias,” which in practice means they think chatbots must be censored to prevent them from saying anything politically inconvenient. Hollywood unions oppose generative AI for the same reason that the longshoremen’s union opposes automating American ports and insists on requiring as much inefficient human labor as possible. Many moralists seek to limit “AI slop” for the same reasons that moralists opposed previous new media like video games, television, comic books, and novels—and I can at least empathize with this last group’s motives, as I wasted much of my teenage years reading indistinguishable novels in exactly the way that 19th century moralists warned against. In any case, the AI Doomers vary in their attitudes towards these factions. Some AI Doomers denounce them as Luddites, some favor alliances of convenience, and many stand in between.

Most members of the “AI Doomer” coalition initially called themselves by the name of “AI safety” advocates. However, this name was soon co-opted by these other factions with concerns smaller than human extinction. The AI Doomer coalition has far more intellectual authority than AI’s other opponents, with the most sophisticated arguments and endorsements from socially-recognized scientific and intellectual elites, so these other coalitions continually try to appropriate and wield the intellectual authority gathered by the AI Doomer coalition. Rather than risk being misunderstood, or fighting a public battle over the name, the AI Doomer coalition abandoned the name “AI safety” and rebranded itself to “AI alignment.” Once again, this name was co-opted by outsiders and abandoned by its original membership. Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “AI Notkilleveryoneism” in an attempt to establish a name that could not be co-opted, but unsurprisingly it failed to catch on among those it was intended to describe.

Today, the coalition’s members do not agree on any name for themselves. “AI Doomers,” the only widely understood name for them, was coined by their rhetorical opponents and is considered somewhat offensive by many of those it refers to, although some have adopted it themselves for lack of a better alternative. While I regret being rude, this essay will refer to them as “AI Doomers” in the absence of any other clear, short name.

Whatever name they go by, the AI Doomers believe the day computers take over is not far off, perhaps as soon as three to five years from now, and probably not longer than a few decades. When it happens, the superintelligence will achieve whatever goals have been programmed into it. If those goals are aligned exactly to human values, then it can build a flourishing world beyond our most optimistic hopes. But such goal alignment does not happen by default, and will be extremely difficult to achieve, if its creators even bother to try. If the computer’s goals are unaligned, as is far more likely, then it will eliminate humanity in the course of remaking the world as its programming demands. This is a rough sketch, and the argument is described more fully in works like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essays and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence.

This argument relies on several premises: that superintelligent artificial general intelligence is philosophically possible, and practical to build; that a superintelligence would be more or less all-powerful from a mere human perspective; that superintelligence would be “unfriendly” to humanity by default; that superintelligence can be “aligned” to human values by a very difficult engineering program; that superintelligence can be built by current research and development methods; and that recent chatbot-style AI technologies are a major step forward on the path to superintelligence. Whether those premises are true has been debated extensively, and I don’t have anything useful to add to that discussion which I haven’t said before. My own opinion is that these various premises range from “pretty likely but not proven” to “very unlikely but not disproven.”

Even assuming all of this, the political strategy of the AI Doomer coalition is hopelessly confused and cannot possibly work. They seek to establish onerous regulations on for-profit AI companies in order to slow down AI research—or forcibly halt research entirely, euphemized as “Pause AI,” although most of the coalition sees the latter policy as desirable but impractical to achieve. They imagine that slowing or halting development will necessarily lead to “prioritizing a lot of care over moving at maximal speed” and wiser decisions about technology being made. This is false, and frankly very silly, and it’s always left extremely vague because the proponents of this view cannot articulate any mechanism or reason why going slower would result in more “care” and better decisions, with the sole exception of Yudkowsky’s plan to wait indefinitely for unrelated breakthroughs in human intelligence enhancement.

But more immediately than that, if AI Doomer lobbyists and activists like the Center for AI Safety, the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, Americans for Responsible Innovation, Palisade Research, the Safe AI Forum, Pause AI, and many similar organizations succeed in convincing the U.S. government that AI is the key to the future of all humanity and is too dangerous to be left to private companies, the U.S. government will not simply regulate AI to a halt. Instead, the U.S. government will do what it has done every time it’s been convinced of the importance of a powerful new technology in the past hundred years: it will drive research and development for military purposes. This is the same mistake the AI Doomers made a decade ago, when they convinced software entrepreneurs that AI is the key to the future and so inspired them to make the greatest breakthroughs in AI of my lifetime. The AI Doomers make these mistakes because their worldview includes many assumptions, sometimes articulated and sometimes tacit, which don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.

Can you imagine what he felt, when the first man climbed over the edge of the trench with a white flag and a bottle of schnapps? Can you imagine what it was like to play in that soccer game with men you tried to kill yesterday?

In the mud and blood of Western Civilization’s most senseless and shameful disaster, the Christmas Truce of 1914 was the single ray of shining silver grace.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Peace on Earth, good will towards men.