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.

Thanks to Roots of Progress’s Jason Crawford and Heike Larson for hosting, to the attendees for asking illuminating questions, to Eli Tyre for recording, and especially to Jean Colson and Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg for accompanying me in the study group where I conducted most of this research.

Ben

Hello everybody, thank you for coming. I'm Ben Landau Taylor. I work at Bismarck analysis. We're a consulting firm that does a lot of institutional analysis. How does this company work? How does this government agency work? And I also spend a lot of time studying society and especially industry to try to figure out how it works.

Medieval China is a really interesting piece of that. I consider it to be the most understudied period in history, because you have this centuries-long period of very rapid technological and industrial progress, massive increases in wealth, to an extent never seen before in human history, basically the second biggest build-out of this stuff that's ever happened. It goes from about 600 to 1200 AD, and then it slowly peters out, and by 1400 is just completely stopped, and then you get basically 500 years of stagnation, and very little change in technology and wealth and so forth, until the Europeans show up, having by then gotten way ahead of the Chinese despite having started very far behind.

As someone who lives in a civilization that has been industrially expanding for several hundred years, the fact that the only other time this happened, it eventually stopped, is something that I find existentially horrifying. So I've been looking into that to try to understand what was going on. And this will largely be about my present picture of that.

I've talked about there being a lot of progress. What do I mean in particular? There’s some famous, easily understandable technologies from this period. This is when you see the invention of gunpowder, and its first use as a military weapon. You don't see anything like the sort of sophisticated artillery that the Turks later build, or the handguns that come out of Europe, but all of that stuff traces back to the Chinese invention of gunpowder and their crude rockets in this time. This is when you see the compass first start being used for navigation, which is a huge deal for ocean-going commerce.

What’s most impressive to me is the canal network, where they build this incredible, incredible, basically an interstate highway system of canals across the entire country. The most important is the Grand Canal, which connects the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. In my opinion it’s the most impressive human construction before the industrial era. There is also this massive, massive, massive network of subsidiary canals, which are the backbone of agriculture and the backbone of commerce, that connect pretty much all of the major population centers in China. You'll be hearing a lot more about the canals. 

Bob

Is China unified at this time, or is it a bunch of little tiny states?

Ben

Both at different periods. It's unified for most of it. Later I'll jump into a very brief overview of a thousand years of political history. It always seesaws, and this is no exception. 

You also see a massive increase in population. Estimating population is always quite hard, especially when it's a long time ago, so don't take these as super confident. But according to the estimates I've seen, in 600 the population was about 45 million, and in 1200 about 140 million, so basically tripling over quite a long period of time.

There was a massive increase in wealth. You see a lot more trade, and more use of tea and oil and luxury goods like that, often shipped from quite a long way. Robert Hartwell estimates that the per capita iron production goes from half a pound in 806 to three pounds in 1078, so a sixfold increase. For comparison, he estimates in 1700 in Europe, it was about four pounds, so a little bit ahead of where the Chinese were in about 1100. To oversimplify, you will see that most European technology catches up and surpasses medieval Chinese technology around the 1600s and early 1700s. There are some exceptions, because it's not all uniform.

You see massive increases in the amount of arable land, just huge amounts of terraforming, to take random swamps or deserts and turn them into incredibly productive rice farms. A lot of new rice varieties are introduced, with higher yields or growing cycles better suited to the climate, and this ends up being a big factor in the increasing population. There’s better mechanical sophistication, especially for hydraulic technology. There’s many other things, but this will give you a bit of a sense.

Eli

What's the most sophisticated technology that the average peasant would have interacted with?

Ben

Probably a pump for irrigation of their farms. They had these pedal-powered pumps for raising water, either over the next dike or drawing it out of the well.

Eli

Okay, so I should be thinking most of the population is agrarian peasants, and there's these sophisticated supply networks, basically, right?

Ben

Yes. They are paying their taxes via these canals, they're growing their crops with hydraulic tech that require the massive capital investment in the canals, they are importing salt and maybe some tea and oil and wood for the coffin for their father, all of these things in a way that they would not have been able to afford in 400 AD.

Eli

Okay, cool.

Vaniver

Do you know what the urbanization percentage is?

Ben

Not off the top of my head, and it's going to vary over this period, but pretty much all of the major cities trace back to either earlier than this, or to this period. Many of the Yangtze cities, especially, were established in this period. So presumably it’s increasing, but I don't have those numbers.

And then all this slowed down, especially after the 1200s.There's not a super sharp point when it abruptly stopped. It was more of a gradual thing. And then by the 1400s we can say that it was definitively over. Every historian I've read is like, yeah, 1400 to 1900 is a super stagnant period. The point you can put a pin in it and say, okay, now it’s definitively over, is Zheng He’s fleet. Some of you may have heard of this. It was a massive trade and military fleet that the Chinese sent over the Indian Ocean. They did, I think, seven trade voyages, and also military shows of force, intimidating all little states in the area into paying tribute to the Chinese emperor. They did a bunch of these and made a ton of money. Lots of incredible exploration, many say it was one of the greatest feats of navigation until the discovery of the Americas.

And then, because of infighting between different factions at the imperial court, in 1430 this was just shut down. The fleet was destroyed, and they started becoming incredibly isolationist, and not letting in foreign traders. They dismantled the greatest fleet that had ever existed in the world for political reasons. And that kind of set the tone for the next 500 years, as the society sort of slowly started crumbling. And then eventually the Europeans showed up and sort of lightly blew on the Jenga tower and sent it the last way over, which is how most civilizations end.

Eli

I mean, 500 years is a pretty long, stagnant period.

Ben

It sure is.

Eli

Maybe you'll get to this, but are things getting worse over that period, or is it, are they mostly stable at the level of technology and organization they have?

Ben

Mostly stable. There are political crises, but there is not a lot of lost technology, and living standards are approximately the same,

Eli

Okay. That's surprising to me. I would guess it's either going up or going down.

Ben

It’s going a little bit down, but less than you might expect.

Eli

Okay.

Vaniver

So when I think about capital flows, about as many scholars are buried as graduate every year, basically?

Ben

Population does continue to rise, and you see an intensification, but per capita, that's probably right. 

Vaniver

Okay. 

Ben

So that's the very, very big technological and industrial picture. There's a couple of pieces of background I want to give before I start getting closely into the economics. To give a very, very brief political history, this is going to be filled with incredible oversimplifications, because I'm trying to put a thousand years into several minutes. 

Briefly, China, as was mentioned, goes back and forth between being a unified empire, and carved up between a bunch of kings or warlords or dukes or whatever they're calling them this century. Before all this happened was the Han dynasty, widely perceived as a golden age. And then in the 200s AD, they start disintegrating. There’s civil wars and the Three Kingdoms period. And then eventually it totally falls, and the horse barbarians from the north overrun what’s left, and set up what is called the Five Barbarians period, because of the five barbarian kingdoms that get carved out of what had been the Han dynasty.

This goes on for a while, and then in the late 500s, it’s reunified by the Sui dynasty, a very short-lived dynasty, which is most notable for being the ones who build the Grand Canal connecting the northern Yellow River and the southern Yangtze River, but this bankrupts them and makes everyone really angry at their incredibly draconian policies. And so there's a coup, and they are replaced with the Tang dynasty, which is running basically the same state, but there's a new guy in the chair. And they keep this going for a couple hundred years before eventually it fragments again.

You have the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, which lasts a little less than a hundred years. It's not a total disintegration, like the fall of the Han, it's more of just a political separation. Around 900 it’s reunified into the Song dynasty, which then rules for quite a long time. After a few hundred years, the northern part of the Song dynasty is conquered by another wave of horse barbarians, but the Song continue ruling southern China. Historians talk about the Northern Song dynasty, which means the ones who ruled all of China, and the Southern Song, which rules just the rump in southern China.

And then the Mongols come. First they conquer the northern part that's being ruled by one of the barbarian dynasties, and they keep going and also conquer the Southern Song. That's the Yuan Dynasty, around 1200, which is the end of the period I'll be talking about.

So this is mostly a period of unification with interruptions, the main interruptions being the fragmentation between the Tang and the Song, and the bifurcation when the northern part of the Song is conquered. 

Also, to give a very brief geographical background, at this period the core of China consists of the two river valleys. There's the Yellow River in the north, and there's the Yangtze in the south. The southern coast of China is a very big deal for the core of China now, but it was kind of hinterlands then. 

An important thing here is that the Yellow River is weird. It is not like other rivers. There's nothing like it in European experience. It is prone to huge, huge, huge, megafloods. I won't get into the reasons why that is, but you may have heard how the Mississippi River changes its course and will burst its bank and go somewhere else. The Yellow River is like that times ten. When it changes course—there's the Shandong Peninsula, this mountainous peninsula in the northeast of China. Sometimes the Yellow River hits the ocean north of that, sometimes it hits the ocean south of that. Like, it'll really wildly change. When it changes, you'll get these massive floods that will drown thousands of people, and hundreds of thousands will die of starvation. This is what we mean when we talk about floods on the Yellow River. It's not like any flood of any river that has ever happened in European history. The Yangtze River is a much more normal river and works the way you are used to thinking of rivers.

So the earlier civilization, what I think of as Ancient Chinese Civilization, the period ending with the Han dynasty and their fall, was based around the Yellow River, which is where all the action was. It was the economic heart, it was where most people lived, and the Yangtze was this relatively unimportant frontier. Later on, in what I think of as medieval Chinese civilization, which I put at about 600 to 1900, the center of gravity moves down south to the Yangtze River, which becomes much, much more populous and the core economic center of gravity, where most of the action is happening.

The canals have a bunch of purposes. There's transport, which includes commerce, and also tax extraction. An important thing politically is that, unlike, say, the Romans, or the medieval English, the central government mostly isn't taking taxes in money. Mostly, they're taking taxes in grain. Their capital is in the north, and you can't really get all of the grain from the Yangtze River to the northern capital over land. This is probably the main reason why, when the Sui dynasty reunifies China, they build the Grand Canal, so now they can use the canal to ship the tax grain from the southern Yangtze River up to the Yellow River where the capital is.

There’s also irrigation. And especially on the Yellow River, there’s also flood control. You have to maintain the dikes. If you don't maintain the dikes, well, you're going to get a megaflood. This is a flood where tens or hundreds of thousands of people will die, and it will discredit you the way Chernobyl discredited the Soviet Union. You messed up the maintenance, and now everything's ruined. Those are the three big things that people have to balance when they're looking at all of the water infrastructure. 

All right, so that's some of the background. Now we're ready to start actually talking about the economics of why the progress was happening in this 600ish year period.

The theory here I'm drawing on is from a scholar named Caroll Quigley. He has a book called The Evolution of Civilizations. I'm not going to go over the whole thing. It's a great book, but I'm just going to take one idea from it, of what he calls the instrument of expansion. I think of it as the economic engine, a term I like better. In any expanding civilization, there is going to be a class of people and a social process of how wealth is accumulated. A particular social class of people accumulates the surplus, and reinvests that surplus into the creation of more wealth. Any society is going to have a lot of different things going on, but in any expanding civilization, there will be one that is the main game in town. For us today, it’s industrial capitalism. People operate machines at a profit, and then they use this to get more machines. And that's been the big story for the last quarter of a millennium.

In medieval China, there were two instruments sequentially, one after the other. This isn't to say there was nothing else happening. We've still got agriculture and things today, but that’s not the big driver of progress.

In the ancient Chinese civilization, during the Han and earlier, the instrument is this imperial state bureaucracy, mobilizing vast, vast numbers of people, because we need to build this huge new canal to connect these two river valleys, or something. It's a common type of river valley state you also see in, say, the pharaohs, or the Mesopotamians. It's a type that recurs. The ancient Chinese were the most advanced of these river valley imperial bureaucracies. They made bigger works and were marshaling more people than any of the others.

And then after around 600, you see this newer medieval Chinese civilization, and they're using a different instrument of expansion. There are still some of these really big top down projects where the emperor is mobilizing a huge number of people. Most famously, of course, is the Grand Canal itself, connecting the two major river valleys. But much, much, much more of the waterworks projects are being done in a decentralized way that didn't happen during the Han. It’s organized by local landlord families and local provincial officials, who are often in the same clan or sometimes just the same guy. I'm the big landlord and I’m going to make a spur from the river to my little area. My cousin is the prefect so he's going to draft a bunch of corvee labor, and I'm going to pay for some labor, and we're going to use that to drain the swamp, or build a new set of dikes and sluices to extend the canal over here and turn that into more agricultural land, so we can make more money, and so on. And this decentralized provincial-level thing ends up being the main process by which it goes from a few river valleys and a small number of big imperial projects to this vast interstate highway system that goes pretty much everywhere. This is not an overnight process. It takes a couple hundred years throughout the Tang dynasty.

However, eventually, any instrument of expansion is going to decay and become corrupt. The way that that happens with this one is that these landlord families and local gentry clans, which are driving this, as they’re getting richer, they're also becoming more politically powerful, and they start turning more of their attention away from increasing their material output and trying to settle new lands and so forth, and more attention into political competition and trying to displace the older aristocrat families from the north.

You've probably heard how the medieval Chinese had the civil service exams and the scholar-bureaucrat social class. This is when that system gets instituted, which is a big win for these smaller landed gentry families, and they end up displacing the older aristocrat-scholar families. Your dad had been the chief minister before, but my son scored slightly higher on the test, so sorry, my clan will be taking the position from your clan. This move to meritocracy is part of how the previous elites are displaced. More and more of the landlord class’s energy and effort goes from tending the economic engine to infighting and political competition, and growth gradually slows down.

Audience

Did they run out of land that could be improving? 

Ben

No. You were seeing more land being claimed and expanded as late as the 1700s and 1800s. A lot of the best land gets settled early, and then population increases, and so they have to cultivate it more and more intensely. You start seeing those insane terraced rice paddies as they're like, okay, we're out of flat land, but we know how to turn the horrible mountains into something you can actually farm. That takes a huge amount of well-organized labor. They keep expanding into additional land for centuries after this process I'm describing has ended. They're not using new techniques, but they are applying the older, known techniques to more and more land for quite a long time. 

Audience

Are you gonna speak to a system of land tenure? Like, if you're some landlord and you're like, I'm gonna clear out this space that presumably nobody has a claim, to is it like homesteading, or…?

Ben

That depends on exactly when you're looking. Usually that sort of thing is technically illegal, but frequently done anyway. The officials are frequently worried about all of these vagrants, which means people who had to sell their land and then move south, and now they don't have any land. And people are like, we can't have landless itinerant workers. We need to get them settled on land and get them officially into the system. And so there will be all of these amnesties for, well, they weren't really supposed to clear that land, but they did, so now let's settle some people there and put them on the household tax rolls. So this gray legality process keeps happening.

Audience

What's the cultural through line? Like the religion that centralizes, or what they prioritize or value at that time?

Ben

The big thing is the family, clan, ancestor worship stuff. Daoism has been around and is popular. Buddhism is just taking root in this period and is becoming popular. The government and the big aristocrats are funding a lot of those monasteries. But the load bearing thing in most people's minds is the ancestor worship. These are the bones of my father and the bones of his father, etc, etc. When the population gets big and they cut down basically all of the trees, one of the big reasons people are upset about this is like, Oh no, I can't make the coffin out of the right ritual wood anymore because the trees are all gone.

Audience

Can you speak to the original shift from these large state or imperial projects, to this more decentralized agricultural expansion? What caused that initial shift and what this historical story tells us about the role of the state?

Ben

Basically, the big imperial projects kept happening at about the same rate as they had previously, and then this new thing also started happening. Because there are so so many more local provinces and local landlords and there's only one emperor, this means that by quantity, most of the individual projects, they'd be smaller, but most of the projects are done locally in a way that wasn't happening in 200 AD. If you want to get deep into this, there's a book by Chi Ch'ao-ting that covers the transition in great detail. I can look it up after this, but I'm blanking on the name right now. It's a wonderful book. [Key Economic Areas in Chinese History]

Last question for right now.

Audience

During this period, is this just low intensity agricultural expansion, or is there a commensurate increase in urbanization too?

Ben

In absolute terms, the urban population is definitely rising. I'm not sure about the percentage. I would guess it's probably rising, but the urban population statistics are just so bad, it's hard to be sure. The best censuses are tax rolls of agricultural households. The city tax system was not done in a similar household-based way, so they just weren't looking at it as closely.

So eventually that instrument of expansion decays. And in Caroll Quigley's theory of civilizations, which I think is right, when your instrument of expansion decays, it can go one of two ways. Either you can continue your society's slide and enter a long period of stagnation, or you can circumvent it with a new instrument of expansion, which is unusual, but does happen. And what it looks like to me is that, in this case, you had this initial stagnation and which led to a lot of conflict, you have the An Lushan rebellion, and then later the fragmentation of the Tang dynasty.

But then eventually, a new instrument of expansion arose, and a different class of people was accumulating surplus and directing it. And it looks like this was the merchants who were doing long distance commerce via the canal network. They would move grain, luxury goods, metal over very long distances and make profits by buying it cheap over here, selling it for a profit over there, getting these big fortunes and putting those into things like craft guilds and weaving houses, or the largest iron foundries that had ever been built, the most sophisticated and centralized foundries that had ever existed up to this point in time.

There's less recorded about these merchants, because the society at the time really disdained the merchants and thought the farmers and landlords were the heart of the people, so I found less good stuff written about them. But this seems to have been the driver of the economic expansion and the technological improvements throughout the Song dynasty, 900 to 1200 ish. These craft guilds existed before, but they seem to be really exploding as everything is continuing to rise and get bigger, even as the manorial landlords seem to be driving less of it.

Eli

What's the relationship between the merchants and the improvements in technology? Are they bringing the technologies?

Ben

They'll be like, Okay, I just made a bunch of money shipping stuff around, and I'm looking for durable things to put that in. Sometimes I'll just buy land. But I also might set up a ceramics workshop and make really fine porcelains. And then, oh, maybe there's a better way of making porcelain. Or I'm going to make an iron foundry and, oh, if we centralize things and have one really big foundry here, then it becomes worthwhile to build this new type of forge. And so they have the capital accumulated that they can pay for the setup costs of these new industries, many of which are being done in the way they always were, but some of which are done in a more sophisticated way.

Eli 

Okay, this is somewhat interesting to me, insofar as the industrial revolution in Europe is preceded by a rise of a merchant class.

Ben

I strongly suspect that for the European industrial revolution, a bunch of cultural things that were put in place by the commercial capitalist period in European history seem to me like prerequisites. I'm getting a little bit out of scope. 

Bob

You mentioned that they formed craft guilds. What is a craft guild? 

Ben

A craft guild is a guild of people who practice goldsmithing, or blacksmithing, or glazing, or weaving, or some other craft that produces manufactured goods. And you'll be organized into a group that has master-apprentice relationships, and we teach them, and here's how we provide the working capital for the young people, and here's the duties they owe to us as the old people. And in both European and Chinese history, they also end up with a bunch of legal privileges and sort of being deputized by the state for a bunch of tax collection things.

I'll just jump ahead and get to this now—one of the really important differences between how the guilds work in medieval European history and in Chinese history is, in Europe, they also become politically very powerful in the Middle Ages. They end up running a bunch of cities, basically as republics that are being led by guildmasters. And then the cities have some political independence, and the Holy Roman Emperor has to negotiate with the city and to grant them these privileges, and you can have a militia, but you have to pay me these taxes in return.

Nothing like that ever happens in medieval China. They are politically inert. They are never in a position to make demands in the way that the European guilds are doing at a slightly later date than this. They are always much more subordinate to the scholar-bureaucrat class that is in the local administrative role.

Another interesting difference is that the Europeans, you'll see much more among the merchants, not among the craft guilds, but among the merchants, you'll see much more specialization in Europe, where it'll be like, Oh yes, this is the family of cloth merchants. This is the family that specializes in pearls. Whereas all the accounts I've seen of the Chinese merchants, they're much more opportunistic wheeler-dealers. Oh, this trip, it seems like cloth is cheap. And then when I'm going, I hear a rumor that pearls are really cheap in that city, so I'm going to go over there. It seems much more fragmented and much less “this is the thing that I do”. And the development of credit markets ends up being much more primitive in China. The European commercial capitalists are inventing double entry bookkeeping and some really complex banking arrangements. And in China it stays much more like, I'm going to borrow a bunch of money from my cousin because he's really rich, or the guildmaster likes me and so I can get a loan there. So they never really cohere as a social class which is able to wield political influence in the way that the European one did. And I suspect that this is not the only necessary feature, but one of the necessary features for the industrial revolution in Europe later on. But I'm not totally sure about that, that's a tangent I won't get into right now.

Eli

Do you have a sense of why in China, they didn’t become politically organized?

Ben

I'm not sure. Joseph Needham claims that one of the big reasons for this is that in Europe, there was the memory of the city-state and the Greek polis as a political form, and that this caused people to be like, oh, yeah, that's a thing we can do, and so that that led to a bunch of the political consciousness of cities, and that was the vehicle through which the merchants expressed power, whereas the city-state just wasn't a concept in China. He's right that the city-state was not a concept in China. I'm not totally persuaded by the explanation. That's the least terrible explanation I've heard, and it's not a very good one.

Eli

Okay, you don't think it's just that Europe was a balance of power system with a bunch of different nations competing with each other, and so you had leverage, like a city could have leverage to negotiate with their ruler, because England is fighting France, and France is fighting Germany or whatever.

Ben

I don't think that's the case. You also don't see this during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. 

Eli

Fair enough.

Ben

So eventually this stagnates, as happens with any instrument of expansion. I want to do more research into the stagnation, both here and then in the half a millennium after. Take this as less confident than the rest of this talk, but my current best picture is that the means of it stagnating is largely through the scholar-bureaucrat class making more and more regulations and exactions, and siphoning off more and more, and more being like, “no, you can only do this in this way. You can't do that way, because it's new. You have to do it the way that everyone's done this for ten thousand generations.” Ten thousand generations means about a hundred and fifty years. It's a phrase they use a lot.

This sort of top-down administrative, we're going to shut down anything new—oh, your treasure fleet is empowering the wrong faction at court so we're going to shut that down, can't have that—seems to be the thing that locks it in place. I'm not totally sure. I want to read more about this. 

When your instrument of expansion is getting corrupted and taken away from innovation and expansion, then sometimes you get a circumvention with a new one. Usually you don't. In this case, after the second instrument, there was no circumvention. And so they kept doing basically the same thing in pretty similar ways for about five hundred years.

You see a lot of intensification. You see a lot of them doing the same thing, but the population keeps going up. A lot of new, more marginal lands are brought into cultivation, but the techniques they're using here are basically the same. There's some small improvements, likely there's some small things being lost, harder to prove, because when it's lost then it's lost, but it seems like it's pretty much staying the same. That's pretty much my picture of what happens overall.

To briefly summarize, you have the decline of the previous Ancient Chinese Civilization. I have a blog post I argue for this being the correct way to cut up the civilizations, if anyone wants a little more detail on that. And then you get this new thing arising around 600 with the Sui and the Tang dynasty, where they have this local landlord-administrator class who is capturing the surplus, extracting all of it from their oppressed peasants and whatnot, and putting that into the decentralized expansion of the canal network, into this interstate highway system, massively expanding the arable land and the population along with that. And that gets corrupted. 

It eventually gets displaced by the merchant class doing long distance trade, which gives you several centuries of expansion and innovation and rising wealth. And then eventually it gets corrupted.

And because there is no third circumvention, you then get the centuries of stagnation. You get a slowly ramping up political dysfunction and what we would now call decreasing state capacity. For any civilization, after you've had a long period of this stagnation and decline, you become unable to resist foreign invaders. And so then the Europeans show up with gunboats. The thing that had been sitting there on its own, there's now something that can push it over, the way the German tribes did for the Romans after their period of stagnation.

One of the reasons I'm interested in this, as I think about our own Western civilization—I think of our Western civilization having coming after the Classical civilization of the Greeks and the Romans and those guys, that one fell apart. You got a new one that arose. Its first instrument of expansion was feudalism, which is a manorial system of landlords. It kind of rhymes with the Tang dynasty, the first one from medieval Chinese civilization. It didn't have the canals, pretty important difference. Eventually feudalism got corrupted, and you've got people spending much more time jousting and making marriage alliances, instead of murdering the French and trying to set up a new manor and claim more of that land. 

That got circumvented by commercial capitalism, very similar to the structure of the Song dynasty period. The cities were more politically powerful. The guilds were a bigger deal. But if you replace the canals with the Mediterranean or the North Sea, it looks quite close. Eventually that got corrupted into mercantilism, and people make money by restricting production instead of by expanding production. The European guilds become much more about making sure that we don't have too many people come in and become weavers, or too many people come in and become winemakers, and extracting the money to send to the state in return for all these privileges. The story of the East India Company is the government creating a monopoly and being like, no one else can trade with the East Indies. That’s becoming the main thing.

That eventually gets circumvented by industrial capitalism, where it's not by long distance trade, it's by the operation of machines that the industrial capitalist class makes money, and is able to direct where that surplus goes. And that's been the story for the last couple hundred years. 

It looks to me like it is in the process of corrupting. It is not fully done, but it looks like the rate of advance over the last hundred years is lower than that of the hundred years prior. And perhaps I'm right about this. Perhaps I'm not. If I'm not, I do think these things do get corrupted eventually. And so a big question in my mind is, one, how long can we keep this one going? And two, if and when this instrument also stagnates, will we circumvent it with a fourth, or will we enter our own long period of stagnation? That’s one of the things that I was thinking about a lot when I was looking over the Chinese case. 

Thank you all, and we have fifteen minutes left for further questions.

Audience

So if I'm hearing your thesis right, you say the engines of progress, it's not that they sort of peter out on their own. They don't have enough land to intensify, or the capital deepening doesn't end because of depreciation.

Ben

Right. It’s a social process. It's not a physical limit.

Audience

Specifically, also, in each of the cases, also rent seeking. They switch from deploying the capital for further productive improvements, but in each case, it's can we rent seek off the existing things we have?

Ben

Exactly, yes. So if you want more detail on this, I'm taking this theory from The Evolution of Civilizations by Caroll Quigley. He goes into a lot more depth on this, and walks through the precursor civilizations to Western civilization, and Western civilization itself. Highly recommended. But yes, that is the theory of how this particular transition happens.

Vaniver

Expanding on that. If someone looks at America today, or the West today, or whatever, it says it's a service economy instead of a manufacturing economy. In the Quigley picture, is this just like, yep, that's all the rent seeking, and the machines are the economic story?

Ben

Yes. I think this is correct. Caroll Quigley thinks this is correct. There are some exceptions that are called “services” which I think of as being part of the real economic base, but not most of them.

Eli

And you would say the same thing about the computers. You can’t have an economy based on moving bits around.

Ben

There are exceptions, but a much larger proportion of that looks to me like extraction or consumption rather than the engine of progress. There are definitely exceptions, CNC machine tools being the most obvious, of like, oh, the robot is just building the engine.

Eli

Notably, that's physical.

Ben

Yes. A strong majority of the computer things that do not have a physical output, I would personally classify that way, yes.

Eli

Yeah, that makes sense.

Vaniver

I think there are two parts to your story that haven't clicked yet, or something about them feels slightly off. The first one is the end of the agricultural expansion. You called it an instrument of expansion?

Ben

Yeah, that's Quigley's term. I also call them economic engines, which, at least to me, is a clearer term, but yes.

Vaniver

I'm imagining there's whatever area, it has like a thousand peasants. Eight hundred of them are required to produce the food for a thousand people, and so the remaining two hundred, you can use a hundred of them to just go clear a marsh and set up more farms, or whatever. When you get the intra elite competition, where now I want to have my kids cram for the Imperial exam and get a better position or whatever, presumably I still have the surplus peasants that are still clearing marshes.

Ben

You still have the surplus peasants. So at t=1, you have a guy who spent his whole life learning how to run a farm, and he's got a bunch of surplus peasant labor, which he directs to improving the waterworks. At t=2, you have a guy who has spent his whole life learning to become a scholar-bureaucrat, and trying to rise through the bureaucracy and failing and being really frustrated, so he directs his surplus pleasant labor to joining the An Lushan Rebellion.

Vaniver

Okay, so it is mostly a lower management failure or something, where now, rather than directing their spare resources towards whatever environmental goals that would improve global productivity, it is directed against society.

Ben

Yes.

Audience

Something you just said made my ears perk up. How much of this is just a problem of people with not enough resources to fully self actualize, but enough resources and frustrated ambitions to actually cause problems?

Ben

When you're looking at how exactly, psychologically, the corruption of an instrument happens, this looks like a fairly large factor. I don't think it's the single biggest, but in all the cases, it's not how it starts, but once it gets underway, this is how the snowball gets bigger.

Audience  

So not just elite overproduction.

Ben

Yeah. It goes from working well to moderate problems because of more economic reasons. Then it goes from moderate problems to very bad because of this stuff.

Audience

There was something you said in the way you described industrial capitalism that I'm not sure I agree with, and I'm not sure if you meant it or not. You described it as sort of, you have machines. You make money with machines. Use that to buy more machines. I would say the mechanism of industrial capitalism is little bit that, but is more technological progress, that you have ideas, and then you make money from the ideas and use that to develop better ideas, and these are embodied in better machines. But that most progress is not the capital deepening, but the idea deepening. And I'm curious if you agree with that or not. 

Ben

Mostly yes. When you look at the reason why we are living better than people in 1924 it’s not because we have more of the machines that they had in 1924. It's because we have better machines. And if you look at where the investment for those better machines came from, it was from people who made the surplus by operating the machines and then invested it, not just into intensification and scaling up the thing they already knew how to do, but also into, oh, wait a minute, I think this other type of machine is going to be even better.

Audience

If I heard your story right about at least the second economic engine, they kept doing what they were doing, they did still operate workshops or so forth, but they did them in the same way they did them before.

Ben

So by the 1400s, 1500s, that was true. In like 1000 AD, 1100, they were doing quite new things. The ironworks is the one that I know the best, where they're building totally new types of forge that were unknown in 800.

Audience

And I guess what I'm asking is, when this ceases, is the failure of the engine of progress that it stops generating new ideas? Maybe the intensification continues, but without new ideas, it can't raise the standard of living?

Ben

Yes. Then there's the question of, what socially is happening to break the generation and implementation of new ideas? My strong guess—I haven't literally found this in the records, but I'd be surprised if it was wrong—is that in 1500 or whatever, people are still thinking of new ways of doing things, then they just can't be implemented because someone will stop you.

Audience 

In your thesis, it seems like it's economics that's the driving force behind periods of expansion and stagnation. So it's when the class that's producing the economic engine starts rent seeking and trying to influence politics, that the political stagnation starts to happen as well.

Ben

Yes, it is. The idea is that the political stagnation is downstream of the stalling out of the economic thing. When the economic engine is working and growing, everyone can have more stuff and get the things they want by working together to keep the engine running. Then when it slows down, people are like, Wait a minute. I was told to expect that I would get more things, but that's not happening just by getting the same share of the growing thing, because it's growing slower now. So now if I want to get the stuff I was expecting, then I'm going to have to be doing more infighting, and I'm going to have to try to make sure I get it from that other guy. This is a self-reinforcing process. The other guys are like, Oh, I have to protect myself from all that. And you get more energy going into infighting and relatively less into expansion. A more modern term I've heard for this is the idea of embedded growth obligations. Your society is structured around the idea that you're growing at a certain rate, and when you are, everything's fine, and when you're not, people start looking around and being like, So then how am I going to get all the stuff I was obligated to get? And you can get it through infighting.

Audience 

So I'm curious how you think about the the critiques of, at the turn century, people are trying to figure out in China why the Qing had stagnated, and the new cultural intellectuals identified the core problem to be cultural and political, with the conservative Confucian class not wanting to adopt new technologies and even going back to the Ming Dynasty, one of the common explanations for why the Ming Emperor stopped the Zheng He he treasure fleets was because these conservative Confucian scholars hate this. So I'm curious, in the Chinese telling of why things stagnated, it seems to be much more cultural and political. How does that square with this?

Ben

I think it is a reinforcing cycle. As it gets going, the political will then redound and push, push the economic in the similar direction, which will then have stronger effects on the political. I do think that the first cause looks to be more economic, but I would love to know more about especially the Qing Dynasty than I do. I have read less than I’d like. 

It seems like we’re running into the next group, so I’ll stick around outside if anyone wants to ask me further questions. Thank you all for coming.

Selected bibliography

Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past

Chi Ch'ao-ting, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History

Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology, part 2: Mechanical Engineering

Denis Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T'ang Dynasty

Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce And Society In Sung China, translated and adapted by Mark Elvin

Robert Hartwell, Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry

The Book of Swindles, Zhang Yingyu, translated by Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk

The simpler and less important reason is that it’s actually more like a normal distribution, not a binary division. Most people are about average, and some are outliers in one direction or the other.

Okay sure you probably knew that. What’s more important is that the psychological propensity that gets described as “extroversion” is actually two different things, and they’re not related to each other very strongly.

The first thing is how much socializing you need. Some people suffer if they’re not around people constantly. They have to be out and about and meeting lots of friends or else they’re gonna have a hard time. Other people are pretty much fine as hermits. They can mostly live on their own, send a text to their mom every now and then, and see a friend every couple of weeks, and they’re fine. There are a decent number of couples where the husband and wife can be perfectly happy while seeing no one except each other for months on end.

The second thing is how much socializing takes out of you. Some people get drained by spending two hours at a low-key event with close friends. Some people can spend a week exchanging business cards at an industry conference or partying with strangers at Burning Man and keep going without pausing to rest.

(And again, of course both of these are more like bell curves than sharp binaries, and most people are somewhere in the middle.)

The usual model of extroversion claims that these are two facets of the same thing, and will mostly go along with each other. But in my experience that’s not true at all, and they seem mostly unrelated. There are people who are outliers on one of these, but pretty much normal on the other. There are (fewer) people who are outliers on both of these, and all four of those combinations seem about equally common.

People are all over the map but cluster towards the center. Personally I’m maybe +0.5 standard deviations on “socializing need”, and I used to be about +1 or 1.5 standard deviations on “socializing cost” when I was a young awkward nerd, but now that I’m an older nerd with better interpersonal skills I’m roughly median. You can add more complexity to this if you want to—most obviously, “socializing need” is not one thing, and different people get very different things out of “socializing”—but I find that this two-factor model gets at the heart of what people care about, here, without being too unwieldy.

A full theory of economics requires a good theory of human behavior, at least as far as their production and purchasing decisions are concerned. It’s not much use if you can only talk about how people ought to behave in your idealized thought experiment but can’t describe the actual world. Fortunately, academics have realized this and attempted to fuse economics with psychology, creating the field of behavioral economics. Unfortunately, academic psychology has been pretty much entirely fake for decades, so behavioral economics is mostly nonsense and fraud—garbage in, garbage out. But the general approach is a good one, and yields fruit if done with a better theory of psychology than you’ll get from p-hacked or fabricated Mechanical Turk survey results. Many of the best economists have achieved greatness by applying psychological insights to economic questions, such as Keynes, Weber, Veblen, and Pareto.

Today, the default theory of economic behavior is that people rationally make optimal decisions to (1) maximize their profit and (2) purchase the maximum utility with their funds. Of course this is not actually true. Pretty much everyone will profess to believe that this “homo economicus” model is just a simplifying assumption. And if you actually use it that way and remember the limits to your thought experiment, then it’s useful enough. But in practice, many theorists will pay lip service to the limitations of the rational profit-maximization model of human behavior and then just base their theories on the maximalist version of it anyway.

In reality, it’s not as simple as “people are rational profit-maximizers” or “people are irrational kludges of heuristics and biases”. People are different. Different classes of people tend to use different styles of thought. For economics, the landscape of where and how “homo economicus”-style decisionmaking is present is one of a society’s most important features.

Most people use this thought process little, or not at all. They make decisions mostly based on emotional impulses and/or custom. Much of the customary economic behavior is received wisdom about “responsible behavior” according to rational profit-maximizing logic, so people following “responsible” customary scripts can seem similar if you're not looking closely, since the two often come to similar conclusions except when circumstances are changing and the old scripts stop working. An easier way to tell the difference between economic maximization and adherence to responsible customary scripts is by listening to how someone explains their thought process and justifies their decisions. Many people will in fact do better by following these scripts than by trying to figure out profit-maximizing behavior on their own.1 There are also people who follow rational maximizing logic in one domain but not another, e.g. plenty of people went into business or finance because it pays the best, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by rationally maximizing their own little corner of the economy, and then back at home they insist on saving eighty cents by consuming inferior toilet paper or whatever. And of course, many people are neither economic maximizers nor responsible script-followers, and will spend 10% of their income on Doordash or 150% of their income on a fancy car.

The class that does largely make decisions based on rational economic maximization is very small. In societies like ours, this minority ends up wielding a tremendous share of economic power. They become vice presidents at big companies, they run small businesses, they found software startups and sell them for two hundred million dollars, occasionally they become the CEO of a megacorporation after the founder dies.2 For major consumption purchases like houses and cars, they produce the books and articles and podcasts that tell everyone else what is “responsible” to spend, and many people (very sensibly) defer to their intellectual authority and take their advice without understanding the reasons. They are not perfectly optimal reasoners, but they do their best, and those who are better at economic maximization tend to outcompete their peers, rise higher, and make more consequential decisions.

So, many parts of the economy come pretty close to following “homo economicus” logic—not as an inevitable truth of human psychology, but as a contingent consequence of this particular class of people being sorted into these roles. Different times and places operate more or less on “homo economicus” logic because this class's position varies. Most famously, when commercial capitalism eclipsed feudalism in the early modern period, this class came to wield a great deal more power over the economy. The burghers of commercial capitalism and the bourgeoisie of industrial capitalism both reorganized their societies according to the logic of economic maximization.

There's another influential minority that also wields disproportionate economic power, and also operates according to reason more than impulse or custom. These people are rationally maximizing political power. They populate government and regulatory bureaucracies, of course, and they also hold many managerial positions in business. They are happy to forgo profits in order to secure position or privileges for themselves, their social class, or their nation—not just instrumentally in pursuit of more profits, but because they fundamentally want certain political results more than they want higher profits. They are capable of rationally pursuing profit, and often do, but they do not attempt to maximize profit, and frequently will deliberately make decisions that reduce profit but achieve political goals. They will provide sinecures for their political clients, class allies, and personal friends. They will direct subsidies to their nation’s unprofitable aerospace company to make sure the infrastructure is available if a war comes. They will pull advertising from a media company, even if that advertising budget helps their bottom line, if the company deviates from the political coalition they support.

When it comes to economic decisions, these four styles of thought—impulse, custom, economic reason, and political reason—are the most important, but they are not exhaustive. For example, in entertainment and music, economic decisions are made mainly by a mix of rational economic maximization, the rational maximization of fame, and the pursuit of artistic greatness. There are many other motives and approaches throughout society, in subordinate roles or in particular social niches.

These divisions are not absolute, and everyone has at least a little bit of all of these styles of thought. No one is completely free, or even mostly free, of the influence of custom or of emotional impulses. In finance, for example, the thrill of gambling and speculation plays some role even among the top practitioners. These impulses can also spur behavior we approve—as Keynes wrote, “If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.” Even when people are coldly calculating, the line dividing economic reasoning from political reasoning cuts through the heart of every human being.

Caveats aside, though, almost everyone falls primarily into one of these categories. There is one style of thought which they find more natural, which they have trained the most, which they believe is wiser and more fundamental and more moral than the others. The different styles of economic decisionmaking are not randomly distributed, but cluster in certain parts of society due to sorting, training, and experience.

Understanding an individual player’s economic decisions requires understanding what type of reasoning they’re using. Understanding a society’s economic patterns requires understanding which elites hold which economic powers, and how those elites tend to make those decisions.

For centuries, men have believed that rising wealth and population would soon deplete all available resources, causing mass death and social collapse. For centuries, they have been wrong. Predictions of imminent collapse have been a constant since Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus claimed that lowering birth rates would help prevent, or at least mitigate, this mass famine and suffering. His heirs say the same thing today. Today there are eight people for every man, woman, and child alive in Malthus’s day, and the eight eat better than the one. The days have passed when a bad winter in Europe or a megaflood on the Yellow River would cause starvation deaths by the hundred thousand. Now even the worst backwaters fear only “food insecurity” and fractional chances of stunted growth.

Claims of resource depletion and collapse have accompanied industrial society on every step from steamboats to container ships, from hot air balloons to Mars rovers. Of the many such arguments that have been put forward in our long history, the best was made in 1865, when William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. This book argued that industrial society was eventually doomed because of the limited supply of coal for power. Because consumption grows exponentially and supply is finite, we will eventually run out of coal and be unable to power our machines.

It’s true that the supply of coal is finite. What Jevons missed, understandably in his own time, is that coal is not the only possible source of industrial power. When he published, effectively all industrial power came from coal. In 2023, this was down to 26%. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, the first oil-producing megacorporation, five years after Jevons finished his book. A century after Jevons’s argument, in the 1960s, oil finally surpassed coal as the world’s top power source. Today coal, oil, and methane gas each provide about a quarter of the world’s power, with coal providing a bit more power than methane gas and a bit less than oil.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.

In 2006, Sylvain Lesné and seven coauthors published a paper on Alzheimer’s disease, “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This was a major paper in the development of the “amyloid hypothesis,” a proposed mechanism for how Alzheimer’s disease afflicts its victims. About 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, more than the entire population of California, making it the world’s most common cause of dementia. This population will grow as the world’s average population gets older. There is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and its pathology is poorly understood. Any progress in understanding this disease represents a massive humanitarian victory. Encouraged by this paper and other promising studies, funding and talent poured into investigating the amyloid hypothesis. By 2022, such research had received over $1 billion in government funds.

That year, neuroscientist Matthew Schrag discovered doctored images in this and many of Lesné’s other papers, including others purporting to provide evidence for the amyloid hypothesis. These images had been manually edited and cropped together to falsely show support for the papers’ hypotheses. Notably, these frauds all made it through the formalized “peer review” processes of Nature and six other academic journals undetected, before eventually being uncovered by unrelated channels.

Schrag’s investigation that uncovered the fraudulent papers began as a tangent from his work uncovering doctored images used in studies supporting simufilam, an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease. The suspicion would prove vindicated when in June 2024 Hoau-Yan Wang, a paid adviser to simufilam’s developer, was indicted by a federal grand jury for fabricating data and images in simufilam studies for which he obtained $16 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, following a 2021 petition to the Food and Drug Administration, a method of reporting research fraud which is highly unusual if not unique.

Follow-up to evidence of Lesné’s fraud was slow. Schrag’s discovery kicked off two years of wrangling, eventually leading all of Lesné’s coauthors—but not Lesné himself—to agree to retract the 2006 Nature paper. As Science reported in 2022, “The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled ‘amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s’ has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and [his coauthor] Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.”

Scientists must now untangle the strands of fraud woven through decades of arguments stretching across a billion dollars worth of research. The paper’s contribution to the allocation of this billion dollars might also be a reason why such a widely-cited paper, presumably read by thousands of experts where some must have spotted the fraud, wasn’t reported earlier. Whether the amyloid hypothesis survives or not, this fraud has likely delayed the arrival of life-saving medication for tens of millions of people, perhaps by many years. If so, it is a humanitarian disaster larger than most wars.

Continue reading my full article in Palladium magazine.

I’ve talked a lot about what America means to Americans. I’d also like to talk about what America means to the world, and to the future. 

Americans are notorious idealists, but our ideals haven’t stayed within this country. The American conceptions of virtues— democracy, freedom of speech, human rights—have influenced every major country, most obviously with our friends and allies, but even our rivals. People laugh when the Chinese government calls itself democratic or when Putin claims he’s invading Ukraine to protect human rights, and yes it’s very funny, but it also shows how influential American morals are. And when a society keeps hearing the pretense of American morals used to justify itself, then slowly the pretense will start to become more real.

That’s the biggest reason American morality has spread so far and so deeply: sometimes our wealth has helped and sometimes our might has helped, but mostly it’s our spiritual power. American ideas are actually very good, and when people hear them it makes sense, and they want to live up to the ideals as much as you and I do.

We also can’t forget that America is the driver of humanity’s technological progress. Cars, airplanes, nuclear power, solar power, the phone, the transistor, the internet—for eighty years this country has been the source of every major technology breakthrough, and that won’t change any time soon. From Paris to Shanghai, prosperity is built out of American inventions. The greatest feat in the history of the species was landing men on the Moon. And when we landed, we left a memorial that says “WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND”.

And as far as this country has already led the world, we’re not done. Every one of us here knows our country still has huge moral problems to overcome. Some of us here are organizing to overcome them. With every step forward, the world will watch, and follow our trail if they still like where we’re going. Every one of us here knows how much the world needs better technology. Some of us here are inventing it. I don’t know what technology is going to lift the next billion people out of poverty, but I can guess where it will be invented.

And this isn’t only our work. When our time is past, our children will pick up the torch. Our grandchildren will carry it to places we can’t even imagine.

Some day, when alabaster cities gleam on every rock in the Solar System, not all of them will be American. But all of them will be there because of America.

This essay was originally posted on July 4, 2023.

Each of these three forms has a functional version, which mostly works in the interests of the people and the state, but inevitably decays into a dysfunctional version which mostly pursues its own privileges instead. The dysfunctional version of dictatorship is tyranny. The dysfunctional version of aristocracy is oligarchy, the rule of the few (oligos). The dysfunctional version of democracy is ochlocracy, the rule of the mob (oklos).

Polybius gives a compelling argument that the Roman Republic’s strength comes from incorporating elements of all three forms of government. Polybius is hardly an unbiased observer—he was packed off to Rome and socialized into its elite, then later sent back to his homeland and tasked with setting up Rome’s colonial government, sort of like an ancient Syngman Rhee—but his point that states use a mix of these forms is well-taken. It’s illuminating to analyze states as combinations of these three elements. The U.S. was founded as a mix of aristocracy and democracy, then slowly and steadily became more democratic over the next 150 years or so. Early modern England was a tug of war between aristocracy and dictatorship. Nazi Germany was one of the purest dictatorships in recorded history. Today Brazil, El Salvador, and much of South America is a mix of democracy and dictatorship, which confounds liberal ideology but is no less coherent than these other combinations.

However, this three-part breakdown can’t account for everything. In recent decades, many of the U.S. government’s major decisions can’t be explained by any of these three forms, e.g. the response to Covid. The European Union is even less accurately described by this model. Older societies like Song dynasty China or ancient Ur fare no better.

The missing element in these cases is bureaucracy, the rule of salaried officials whose power comes from an appointed position.2 Like the other three forms of government, bureaucracy comes in both functional and dysfunctional versions. For the functional version, think of the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century, when government bureaus were eradicating malaria, installing artificial harbors at Normandy, and landing men on the Moon. In the dysfunctional version of bureaucracy, which we can call red tape, the interests and privileges of bureaus come before fulfilling their stated missions, and they become a drag on action rather than a source of action. In America today the medical bureaus like the CDC and FDA might be the clearest examples, and any American can list many many more.3

Once we’ve added in bureaucracy, we can account for the remaining cases. America today is primarily a bureaucracy, with democratic elements in the legislature and White House, and aristocratic elements in business. Ur was a mix of dictatorship and bureaucracy, as far as we can tell from the surviving sources. And so on.

It seems these four fundamental forms of government—democracy, aristocracy, dictatorship, and bureaucracy—are sufficient to explain the political structure of states. As I look out across time and space, the governments I see are composed of combinations of these forms, with very little left over.

This essay was originally posted on July 11, 2023.

Mathematical science has followed this same course. The core of it, the pursuit of the sacred Truth, was at first followed by a narrow minority of esoteric intellectuals. When science was young, this took them to some wild and mystical places. Maybe you’ve heard of Isaac Newton’s alchemy research and his extremely heretical theology work. That sort of thing was pretty common. The 17th century’s second-most important advance in mathematics, after Newton’s invention of calculus, was the idea of coordinate geometry, or Cartesian coordinates. This originated in Rene Descartes’ The Geometry, the appendix to his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, which is better known for its philosophy on the nature of the self (“I think, therefore I am”), proofs of the existence of God, and his thought experiment about being deceived by an omnipotent demon. One of these might be a coincidence, but two is a pattern.

This wasn’t just mathematicians. Many of the early scientists published their work with occult symbology which has to be seen to be believed:

Science unveiling Nature. Engraving by Jan Luyken, for a 1681 work of zoological anatomy by Gerard Blasius. Here Science is removing the Veil of Isis, a longstanding mystic symbol of the unknowability of Nature’s ways, which Plutarch attributes to the ancient Egyptians. In the Age of Enlightenment, Dutch scientists like Blasius repurposed it as a symbol of their triumph. Note the astrological symbols of the classical planets, and the angel dissecting a beast.

Artemis unveiling herself. Engraving by Romein de Hooghe, for “Dissections and Discoveries of Living Animals” by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the first microbiologist. Isis was often identified with the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus.

Over the centuries, science has gone from triumph to triumph. Scientific materialism is the spiritually dominant cosmology across most of the world and in every first-rate power center. A vast network of institutions and uncountable billions of dollars are directed to its practice. Yet the mass version, sometimes denigrated as “scientism”, has filed off the interesting bits that make science useful. I’m grateful for the work of people who have catalogued the problems with scientism, but here I’m trying to describe the core of science, the pursuit of the sacred Truth through experiment and analysis. This is still pursued only by a relatively narrow minority of intellectuals who tend to be off-puttingly esoteric, introspective, utopian, and frequently—if quietly—outright mystical.

Since World War I, society has vastly, vastly expanded the number of people who can write “scientist” on their resumes, but we haven’t much expanded the number of people who are carrying forward the project of Francis Bacon. Today most scientists are careerists who don’t really understand all the arcana of experimental design and statistical analysis and so on, and anyway they care more about grants and professorships than about revealing Nature’s most intimate secrets.

A ship passes the Pillars of Hercules, symbolizing the edge of the known world, into a vast ocean depicted with a pair of open eyes. Engraving by Simon de Passe, for Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. The Latin tag is a quotation from the Book of Daniel’s apocalyptic prophecies, and translates as “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

There are still esoteric weirdos mixed in there, the ones who will run to and fro in order to increase knowledge rather than to increase their h-index, and who will reshape their own minds to that purpose. But I can’t even call them the “real scientists” anymore, because in practice “scientist” now refers to a bureaucratic job title like “accountant” or “public relations”, not a discipline devoted to the sacred charge of increasing knowledge. Practitioners of the sacred discipline can recognize each other—faking the signs is difficult, and bureaucratically unrewarding—but there’s no word to distinguish them from scientists because doing so would undermine society’s story of what “science” is. 

Efforts to fund and train practitioners of this discipline en masse failed, because esoteric disciplines simply can’t be trained en masse. Some people induct themselves via deep study of the masters’ texts, and some are inducted via longterm apprenticeships.

Let me try to clarify what I’m talking about here. What’s important isn’t that master scientists must be praying to Artemis and going deep into occult pagan symbolism. That stuff is one way of expressing the thing, but it’s not the thing itself.

It will help to contrast the scientist’s mindset with the engineer’s mindset, which was best expressed by Rudyard Kipling. “The careful text-books measure / (Let all who build beware!) / The load, the shock, the pressure / Material can bear.” In the engineer’s world, right action is a matter of diligent troubleshooting, careful application of known rules, and rigorous testing. A scientist’s spirit reaches for the heavens, but an engineer’s spirit settles “under the earthline”. Their sacred charge is the prosperity and safety of society. Kipling’s poems captured the engineers’ mindset so well, he was asked to design the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, whose Iron Ring is worn by Canadian engineers to this day. Of course any good scientist has a streak of the engineer, and any good engineer has a streak of the scientist, but they remain very different mindsets. “Oh, veiled and secret Power / Whose paths we seek in vain / Be with us in our hour / Of overthrow and pain”. Not at all like Leeuwenhoek and Blasius gloating about unveiling the secret Power.

The scientist’s sacred charge is not anything so worldly as prosperity or safety. Like mathematicians and philosophers, they are seekers of Truth—not necessarily of hidden Truths, but once you’ve learned the known Truths, the hidden Truths are what’s left. Their mission is intensely personal, and intensely transcendent. The knowledge may indeed be useful, but the burning need to know comes first. One of the first mysteries of science is that, if you prioritize mere utility above Truth, you will lose both.

Unfortunately, these days those anointed by the institutions often lack any sense of these higher duties, as well as the skills to fulfill those duties. Medicine is one of many places where this is visible. Most doctors have trouble with very basic concepts in statistics, like understanding conditional probability when interpreting diagnostic tests where the rate of false positives is on par with the rate of true positives, such as breast cancer screenings. Much has been made of this by partisans of Bayes’ rule, but I first heard of it from my dad, who was talking about the difficulty of his work teaching this stuff to medical students. Among medical researchers the situation is somewhat better, but not much.

And to be clear, my dad is not some esoteric mystic writing paeans to the glory of Nature. He is a competent technician whose main contribution to the great human quest for Truth consisted of calling out bullshit statistics from stooges of the drug companies, which he fit in around the edges of his actual job treating patients. I’ve often heard him say, “When you start medical school, your friends will ask you about their health problems and you'll just have to say ‘I don't know.’ But when you finish medical school, why, now you get to tell them ‘We don't know.’” He has not looked beyond the Veil of Isis to behold the secret Power, and his job does not require him to pretend that he has. The careful textbooks measure.

My point is that most research scientists do not even reach this level. By merely understanding what statistical tests mean and when they do or do not indicate knowledge of reality, rather than treating them as rote incantations to apply until you get the result you want, he has surpassed not just most practicing doctors, but also the collective judgment of the research establishment. The heirs of Bacon and Leeuwenhoek are not in the driver’s seat, here.

Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science. Sculpture by Louis-Ernest Barrias, 1899. She wears a scarab as a reference to the Egyptian origin of the Veil of Isis.

This, plus the superpower of actually reading the damn paper—another technique which he struggles mightily to instill in young doctors—was enough for him to correctly identify bullshit arguments even when they were enshrined in official American Heart Association guidelines and driving tens of billions of dollars of annual drug sales. Even today the most fruitful scientists, the ones who successfully look behind the veil, tend to be much weirder people than my dad ever was, even during his wild and crazy youth. (This isn’t the place to get into it, but his stories of the hippie days are almost as wild as my mom’s.) 

Today’s scientists would rather project the image of a lab-coated avatar of respectability than the wild-haired genius with powder burns on his face and ink stains on his fingertips. Oppenheimer was perhaps the last of the greats who deliberately performed the mystical Faustian archetype, flamboyantly naming the capstone of his career after the Christian Trinity and quoting his own translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Nevertheless, the underlying level of homebrew mysticism among scientists and mathematicians hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think since the days when they’d put a many-breasted pagan goddess at the front of their books.

Space exploration has its origin in early 20th century scientists searching for man’s role in the cosmos, before it was also picked up by engineers who want to build a really sick rocket and statesmen who want to nuke the Moon. Half a century later, the Voyager probes were sent outside the Solar System, carrying the famous Golden Records with cultural information about humanity in case they are someday recovered by alien life, prepared under the direction of Carl Sagan; the Records include an electroencephalogram scan of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project, recorded while she was meditating on falling head over heels in love with Sagan. The pair announced their engagement two days after the launch of Voyager 1, and soon co-created the Cosmos TV series about humanity’s place in the universe. To this day, many of the largest spaceflight projects are driven by men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pursuing the manifest destiny of making humanity a “multiplanetary species”.

In mathematics, Terry Tao is honest enough, and his position is secure enough, that he can talk openly about doing research while writhing on the floor in an altered state of consciousness:

“For some problems, actual physical sensation can actually be useful. Many mathematicians, you will find, they wave their hands, or gesture somehow when thinking about a problem. … There was one time when I was trying to understand a very complicated geometric transformation in my head involving-- I was rotating a lot of spheres at the same time. And the way I actually ended up visualizing this was actually lying down on the floor, closing my eyes, and rolling around. And I was staying at my aunt's place at the time. And she found me rolling on the floor with my eyes closed. And she asked me what I was doing. And I said, I was thinking about a math problem, and she didn't believe me.”

Few are public about it, but a substantial fraction of the best scientists and mathematicians are doing something that’s approximately as weird as Tao. And it’s not just random noise introduced by overtuned creative geniuses with plenty of spare energy. As in Tao’s case, it’s often a load-bearing part of how they do their best work. On rare occasions, they’ll explicitly tell the public what they’re doing. Sometimes they’ll leave little hints and allusions to their weirder beliefs and practices, or describe the tip of the iceberg that they think they can get away with. (I’ve wondered what other stuff Tao might not want to share with the internet.) Very often they’ll deliberately keep the weird shit to themselves and maybe their close friends, because who wants to deal with the hassle. This stuff can be passed down in master-apprentice relationships, but not in the careful textbooks, which is a big part of why so many of the great scientists and mathematicians were trained personally by the last generation’s greatest.

It’s a huge missed opportunity that all our self-styled mystics are fucking around with jhanas and machine elves and eliminating suffering, and none are trying to reverse-engineer our most advanced sphere-rotation psychotech. If they could codify even a few fragments of the leading researchers’ esoteric mental practices, math and science would accelerate, perhaps as much as when the gedankenexperiment was codified.