[Link] Hacking Technological Determinism for Fun and Profit
An article by Nyan Sandwich on More Right.
I’ve recently encountered and more fully grokked some ideas that invalidate my previous understanding of how to achieve political ends. To start with, I saw an interesting talk that urged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to work on technologies that facilitate Exit from the influence of the “Paper Belt”, which in our terms is roughly the Cathedral. Then there have been our recent discussions with Scott Alexander, and his solid case for Technological Determinism. On that background, I’ve been rethinking our methods.
The argument is roughly that, if culture is downstream of technology, there is no point engaging historical inevitability at the level of culture. This is debatable and is currently being debated, but supposing it’s true, I want to explore methods for achieving our ends by placing ourselves upstream of technology.
We’ll start with the questions any decent entrepreneur should be asking continuously. First, what is the problem? The modern establishment has shown itself unable to protect us from crime and urban decay; unable to extract first-world living conditions from the materially richest country on earth; unable to preserve community, family, and civil society; unable to educate everyone to high-class standards of values and attitudes; unable to hold the flame of rational truth finding in public discourse; etcetera. We know that more is possible.
What is the current solution? The reflex answer, and therefor what we have been doing, is to use the usual method: intellectual discourse, movement building, ideological engineering, and organized political action. But in the cases where this worked – the French, American, and Russian revolutions, and the Nazi movement are examples – they had multiple seriously talented people in place, and it’s not even clear whether those people were driven by their own agency rather than historical inevitability. Perhaps we could try something different.
Why is the current solution inadequate? The world has changed. We’re all walking around with instantly networked supercomputers in our pockets; we’re seated all around the world having this discussion in a medium that doesn’t even physically exist, and barely existed at all 10 years ago; we have data about nearly everyone and every subject, and much else, accessible to all of us, in seconds. Surely something has changed in what methods are best? Further, the current set of methods at best produced some big events many years ago, and even that is debated. Then we have this other set of methods that has seriously changed the world multiple times in the last century, and dominates every serious prediction of the future. If we are interested in power, we should take interest in this second set of methods.
This is the section that I am particularly interested in discussing, building better models of this has clear consequences for futurism as well as ambitious effective altruism:
The second set of methods, and what I’ll explore here, is Technological Innovation.
So lets assume that Technology is our vector. What about the payload? Can Technological Innovation can be wielded for arbitrary purposes, or does it too just happen? We can look at examples: Bitcoin exists now because of the ideology of the cypherpunks community. We’re using mice and and hypertext because Douglas Englebert identified the ability to interact with information as critical to the future of humanity, and then invented mice and hypertext to help that. We went to the moon in 1969 because von Braun wanted us to, and built us the tools to do so. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the Internet just happened because hackers gonna hack, and flight, calculus and many other innovations happened simultaneously in multiple places basically when the time was right.
It looks to me like there are two kinds of Technology Innovation, one of which can carry ideological payloads, and one which cannot. Tech like flight and calculus and the Internet are worked on by multiple people, improved on by others, and generally escape the control of any single philosopher-inventor. They get ruthlessly optimized for only the necessary and useful functions, so that ideological payloads are selected out. If the Wright brothers had designed their original plane for their particular concept of beauty as well as function, it would not have had a lasting effect on the development or impact of flight. On the other hand we have technology that involves a last-mover advantage explosion to monopoly status, where near-arbitrary payloads can be added. If Zuck decided that Facebook was going to include some social engineering feature, it would have to be pretty outrageous to cause Facebook’s downfall. If the Unix model subtly influenced the direction of society, there is not much we could do about it. Worse is Better, and Thiel’s Startup Notes are critical reading on these topics.
So there are two components to a working intervention:
Riding a tech wave to monopoly power the way Thiel describes in the linked series above. Without this, your tech cannot hope to have enough influence or the flexibility to deliver a payload.
Using the flexibility provided by monopoly status, build in features of that technology that strategically influence how society goes. Predicting this in advance a-la Bitcoin is hard. Better to install an agent with the right goals (eg you) in that position of power so you can have a tighter feedback loop and continue to mold the tech strategically.
Elon Musk is the best example I can think of of doing this well. He is building companies, Tesla and SpaceX, that have a good chance of taking the next wave in their respective fields, and loading a highly responsive and effective ideological payload on top of that. If those companies continue to succeed, Musk will achieve his ideological goals for human space exploration and sustainability. On the other hand we have Bitcoin. Assuming that Satoshi was ideologically motivated, and that Bitcoin is the future of money, whether Satoshi wins depends a lot on how smart he was in 2008 when the ideological payload of Bitcoin became static.
What this means for us is that a very promising way forward is for those of us with entrepreneurial aspirations to identify upcoming tech opportunities with room for favorable ideological payloads, and then execute like mad to make it happen. No one said it would be easy.
Murder rates have been going down over time as has many other types of crime in the US (see e.g. here and here), which seems to be where you are implicitly focusing. This is also true for many other developed countries. There’s a lot of question of what is causing this, from legalized abortion, to reduction in lead levels, to improved emergency care, to improved policing, to higher incarceration levels. One can make strong cases for all of these but one would suspect that the vast majority of the change is really just one or two of them since it is highly unlikely that all different causes would be sheer coincidence move in the same direction.
But the cause is incidental to the primary issue: the claim here (and most of the rests of the claims in the paragraph in question) seems empirically false. You need at least some sort of evidence otherwise it looks like generic pessimism and inaccurate nostalgia.
I cannot make a strong case for any of those five causes of falling crime. Indeed, I can do no other than make a strong case against all of them (except the fourth, because it is underspecified). The first two hypotheses predict a stronger effect on younger people than older people. The third predicts a uniform effect across ages. If the fifth theory is about deterrence, it is also uniform; if it is about incapacitation, it predicts and effect on older people.
The fall in homicide is partly due to the population being older and partly due to older people being less murderous than they used to be (before the crack epidemic, which we ignore because all five hypotheses do). Young people (say, 14-25) are just as murderous as ever. That is exactly the opposite of the predictions of the first two theories. We can rule out abortion and lead as having absolutely no contribution. Better emergency care could be covering up a massive increase in attempted homicide among the young.
So the only theory which survives is the prison incapacitation theory. So I must admit that it is better than the first three. But it fails to explain the international trend. Canada and many countries in Europe had identical trends—up in the 60s, down in the 90s. They had the same halving of homicide without any increase in prison. (I don’t know if the age breakdown was identical.)
I suppose that “improved policing” could mean arresting people repeatedly so that they are trained to avoid crime. That could explain why the young have not yet learned. But it is still very much underspecified.
I don’t think the crack epidemic is very relevant since it was primarily a US only thing. I do agree that all the hypotheses have problems.
I’d be very interested in seeing a citation for that. I was under the impression that probability to murder has gone down among all age brackets. Certainly in the late 1980s there were warnings that the temporary boom in young people born from the baby boomers were going to cause an increase in crime(see e.g.here), and yet crime rates kept going down in the 1990s.
There is by the way one very strong piece of evidence for the lead hypothesis: individual states had different amounts of lead and we can look at the varying crime levels in those states. That data shows that lead levels account for (with about a 20 year delay) a large part of the change in crime levels. See here. There’s one serious confounding factor: more progressive states were more likely to clamp down on lead levels earlier, but it doesn’t seem to be that serious a complicating factor in this context.
Yes, improved policing is underspecified, and that’s my fault: I don’t think highly of the hypothesis and so I didn’t bother expanding into what proponents mean. They mean using detailed analysis to locate crime hotspots and better forensics (so one is more likely to catch repeat offenders). Most proponents of this seem to combine it with the high incarceration rate it seems.
Did you click on my link? Surely if you did, you would recognize the source and not need me to provide a precise citation.
Another serious confounder in that study is that the author is an economist.
Oh, come on. Everyone takes as their baseline the crack epidemic.
No. Sorry, I didn’t notice there was a link there.
Hah. This seems like a fully general counter-argument since I could replace economist with almost any other discipline and have similar issues. I don’t see anything actually wrong with their data or stats in this case.
The graph you had shows the current dips to be below that of the start of the crack epidemic. (Treating 1980 here as start. This would be almost but not quite true if we started at 1984 which is sometimes used as the start point of the epidemic.)
Yes, young people are slightly less murderous than in 1980. I think that’s close enough for my claim of “as murderous as ever.” They aren’t driving the overall numbers, except by not existing. The point is that this is exactly the opposite of what is predicted by the first two theories. And not very compatible with the third.
One thing is for sure: though the national homicide rate is comparable to that of 1960, the situation is completely different. The ride up was different than the ride down. Here is a graph of homicide victimization rates 1968-2013, from CDC data. The previous graph shows how that is close to but not the same as offending rates. The very rank order of age buckets has changed.
When you replicate the paper, then you will not see anything wrong the data and stats. Or you will. At that point, I will be happy to look at your data and code.
But much less murderous than 1988, and that’s about 20 years after the height of lead levels.
How so? Abortion is the first theory, and making young people not exist seems to be one impact it has. Part of the standard version of the abortion argument focuses on their being fewer young people in bad environments, but general reduction in young people would have a similar impact. (Although this doesn’t explain the reduction in crime in other age brackets).
Huh. That is a very interesting point. I don’t see how any of the explanations in question would make that likely. I recognize I am confused.
What I meant by that comment was that there were no obvious points where looking at it there was an obvious problem with the stats. This is depressingly common problem where one can look at a paper and just be like “yeah, no” to something in the way they handled the statistics.
I do think there is another possible issue that the paper doesn’t address: different states may have been measuring lead levels in different ways and I could see that as being a proxy for something else, like general attention to health of the population.
1988? The year before it skyrockets, somewhere in 87-89, looks to me the same as 1980. Are we talking about crack or not? That was way too abrupt to blame on lead, especially because it hit 14-17 and 18-24 simultaneously. I’d prefer to stay far away from crack, at 1980 or even the previous peak of 1975.
I suppose that you could have a much more complicated theory that lead makes people more susceptible to drug fads and gang wars, which is why the data is noisier than it used to be. But that’s a very different theory that cannot be tested by simple lagged regressions. And I think that the noise is only in America.
When people say “abortion reduced crime” they’re referring to Levitt’s theory that it produced individuals that are less criminal. Of course, that isn’t the theory that he tested, something that you can’t tell from his paper. The question of whether abortion reduced total fertility is controversial. I suppose that the claim that abortion lengthened generation time is not controversial. Anyhow, abortion is a drop in the bucket of demographic change.
Hmm, that’s a good set of points. So it really does look very hard to explain what was going on and lead doesn’t look like it has enough data.
Having discussions with you has to be one of my favorite things on LW because whenever I do, I find out that I’m probably wrong about something.
I guess I should more often post evidence agreeing with people.
In the long run, I expect crime will continue to decrease because technology tends to augment the capabilities of intelligent people and large, coordinated groups more than it augments dimmer people and small groups. Since crime is mostly committed by less capable individuals and smaller groups, they should fare poorly against private security and law enforcement.
This is certainly a plausible explanation of part of what is going on. But I’m not sure it explains everything. It may be testable though: if it is correct one would expect the drop in crime rate to be higher in areas where the police have been quicker to adopt new prevention measures.
Interesting. Let’s get weird!
I am currently wondering what a socio-culturally conservative person would hack in technology to influence culture. These kinds of people are generally disliked in intellectual circles like here because they tend to want to limit the freedom of other people, however, if you put that out of the picture for now and assume (unfounded, but whatever) that technology is more about increasing other people’s freedoms than decreasign them, you could say that the profounding sad longing people like G. K. Chesterton, Robert Nisbet (The Quest For Community), Wendell Berry or in a way even Tolkien had for the pre-modern era does not deserve being hated and we may want to take a look at it.
We can also see it the other way around: some technology could make some conservatives be more content with its cultural outcomes, and perhaps shut up, which may be a win for some liberals.
So let’s say someone, let’s call him John, wants to reinvent the good aspects of the Middle Ages (or, for the cynical: the imagined, romantic aspects) and not the bad (unfreedom, inequality, cruelty, religion) aspects, so how could technology be hacked for that purpose?
My first idea is John could work on 3D printing bringing production at home, so there is now more of a DIY culture, cottage industry, mom and pop shop, rural blacksmith kind of thing. Less of a need for a thousand people to commute to work in a factory, and people making things they need at home or being more experienced at programming 3D printing for a given purpose they play the role of the family-business medieval shoemaker.
How would this affect culture? By liberating people from employment, large chunks of the capitalism-socialism debate become obsolete. Communities are more self-sufficient and rely less on external factors, they can afford to be more conservative, they can be the Amish but with modern tech. You get something like medieval guilds.
John’s second idea could be to extend female fertility into the 50′s and 60′s or towards infinity. You could say The Pill created sexual liberalism. But by the same logic, the longer women have the choice to settle down with a man and suspend their careers for children, the more women will choose it. And this is a very uncontroversial way of doing it because it does not reduce women’s choices in any way. Conservatives never really opposed women doing some work as long as they are also mothers. Extend fertility toward infinity and virtually all (okay, most) women will choose to have both have working phases and motherhood phases, problem/debate resolved forever. I think such a technology would have a lot of support from feminism.
Then maybe John wants to have knights and feudalism. More specifically, he makes protective military technology, shield, armor, which is vastly more advanced than offensive weapons. The result is an aristocracy because the peasants’s gunshots will pling off their armor. Think Dune, but he also needs to make sure it protects from explosions and a whole house collapsing on his head and suffocating there or dying in a fire, um, not easy.
Or maybe John is are the more American kinds of conservative, more libertarian than feudal. American individualism comes from frontier culture, and to reinvigorate it he can work on extending the final frontier i.e. colonizing space. This is not even a new idea, writers like Heinlein expected precisely this from expanding out from Earth.
Please keep your replies value-free. What matters here is not whether what our imagined John is trying to do here is excitingly romantic or horribly reactionary, the question is simply whether it would work for his purpose or not. If you hate this idea, good: figure out how can you counter this kind of technology by other kinds of technology.
This is provably false.
DNA’s impact on property crime is tremendous and historically unprecedented. Ubiquitous surveillance, cashless transactions, and technology based ownership tagging are contributing factors, but DNA is absolutely massive.
The traditional clearance rate (arrest) for property crimes such as burglary and auto-theft is just under 8%. In jurisdictions that actively collect DNA from the scenes of property crimes, the clearance rate is just south of 16%.
Simply put, if you commit a burglary or auto theft, and leave DNA at the scene (blood on a broken window, saliva on a sandwich, urine/semen, sweat on the driver’s seat of the car, etc), and are arrested at any time prior to the expiration of the statute of limitations for that crime, anywhere in the country, you can expect to be charged and convicted.
The importance of this to crime prevention is impossible to understate, especially when used synergistically with the aforementioned technologies (CCTV and traffic cameras identify vehicles leaving the scene, identity-based tags on equipment and cashless transactions mean that there is much less to steal, cellphone tracking means that the crook either leaves it at home and is not in touch with his lookouts or is tracked, etc). Furthermore, as violent criminals are more likely to have their (or their relatives) data in the DNA database, and to be picked up for unrelated offenses (such as fights in bars or general bad behavior) this method catches more violent criminals than nonviolent criminals. And, the icing on the cake, criminals who are “criminally versatile” (usually psychopaths) frequently engage in property crimes such as burglarly and car theft, so this probably positively affects the rate on other classes of crime (kidnapping, murder, arson, reckless driving, etc).
Selective processing of DNA, slow processing infrastructure, etc are issues related to lack of access to technology by communities, not flaws in the technology itself.
Sources on the facts I reference are a body of work done by the Urban Institute to answer these questions.
Looks like we means US, again.
How the US can achieve the living conditions of other first world nations is a solved problem: do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality. Fund urban renewal instead of letting cities rot. Etc.
Of course that’s all moving in the progressive direction, not the reactionary direction.
Kind of funny how you completely misunderstood the text. “unable to extract first-world living conditions from the materially richest country on earth” refers to the DR Congo, not the United States (check the link). The United States actually is a first world country.
Some other mistakes I frequently see Europeans make when grandstanding about the US (but refusing to do even 2 minutes actual fact-checking:
-US social welfare spending per capita is higher than any EU country. -There have been massive urban renewal projects in the US, for decades.
That would suggest we are misspending compared to Europe if true.
Yes. That is certainly true about healthcare, the US government spends comparable amount of EU governments per capita, the issue is basically with higher costs (and holes uninsured people can fall through).
For example, about urban renewal, currently the Austrian government rarely pays 100% of the cost of an apartment house and I think the US government often does, “projects” etc. The Austrian method is to have non-profit co-ops where tenants are members build them and the government pays 30%, gets to hand out 30% of the apartments on a social basis (wohnservice.at) basically mixing poor and non-poor people, to avoid the formation of ghettoes, although they are not the poorest people because they pay full rent. They don’t pay the starting capital. Because the 70%, normal members-tenants need to cough up about 20% of the value of the apartment, roughly $25K to 50$K in advance. This is what the government buys out for 30% who get it socially/are poor, so actually my calculation was wrong, the government does not even pay 30% of the total cost. But they pay normal rents, which means for a two-bedroom roughly 60% of the unofficial monthly minimum wage. This means they are not the poorest poor actually. At any rate, the leverage here is fairly low spending giving a significant hand up to the non-poorest poor and incentivizing these building projects.
To the extent urban renewal projects actually work (they often don’t), I think they mostly move the problem around. The urban core itself may be revitalized, and the poor then move somewhere cheaper as gentrification sets in. I definitely don’t think it is an effective method for fighting poverty or inequality, but it is popular.
As for welfare, I don’t think misspending is the problem per se. One problem is that healthcare is a lot more expensive in the US due to our convoluted healthcare system. I think the main reason life is much worse for America’s poor than Europe’s poor is that America’s poor are harder to live around.
I would not generalize over all of Europe, I generally would not want to live around the Paris poor while the Vienna poor are way more livable. To put it very, very bluntly, Turkish-Albanian-Serbian poor > North African poor. It is an incredibly insensitive way to put it, but this is simply what my experience boils down to. The former countries got historically more “westernized”/secularized/liberal/whatnot. I regularly train with the former types of guys as I go to a fairly cheap boxing gym. They are okay. A bit rough around the edges, may be a tad aggressive, but culturally compatible. Football > religion types of guys. There are places in/near Paris I would not go in, for the police / ambulance does not really dare to go in either.
I am absolutely not convinced it is a good idea to port policies from one culture to another. Neither when US Neoliberalism gets exported to Latin America & Eastern Europe (“Washington Consensus”) nor when Euro Social Democracy gets imported to the US (“Nordic Model”). Cultural differences can make every policy win or fail.
I mean, even in the EU it seems very similar tax-and-spend models work well for Scandinavia but abysmally for PIIGS. The cultural difference between the North and
Essosthe Mediterrean is already too high.I think homogenity/multiculturalism may also play a role… which predicts sooner or later we will see less Social Democracy in the EU. But the point is, tax-and-spend requires trust, and trust is based on things like similarity or making sure the other players in the prisoner’s dilemma don’t defect (don’t cheat on taxes etc.) and it seems to suggest the need for cultural homogenity.
One useful way to model is that supra-national, EU-level redistribution does not really work due to the lack of trust which is due to the—thankful! - lack of cultural homogenity, and the US is so dishomogenous that it resembles the whole of the EU more than any individual nation. European nations stopped being ethnic too but there is at least still some kind of a default ethnicity & ethnic culture in each, which at least helps in coordination problems: a German-Turk and a German-Serb at least have a basic idea that their easiest way to cooperate in the game is to behave like a German-German, the “default” citizen. The US went way beyond the point where Scottish and German ethnicities could be considered default. And this is why there are constantly these coordination problems e.g. men no longer know how to behave with women without being creepy because there is not one default ethnic culture.
BTW before anyone misunderstands this comment, it is not a criticism of multiculturalism or some kind of a hidden racism. It is simply pointing out in the long run it cannot be combined with nationalism and the national level redistribution we commonly call Social Democracy. To cope with multiculturalism, nationalism needs to go the way of the dodo and nations reimagined as a loose confederation of communities, and redistribution happening only inside the communities but not overall in the nation. This is doable, for example Austria has universal healthcare but not single-payer, there are stuff like miners or railroad workers health insurance “cassa”. This is workable. Similar institutions are possible to imagine on an ethnic-communitarian basis. Private business is aleady doing it, DenizBank is advertising in Vienna largely where Turks live because it is of course so that they trust it more than others. Time to go beyond the Westphalian period of (economic) nationalism.
The US has “a” culture?
The export of neoliberalism wasn’t the export of a system which was known to work in practice, it was the export of a system believed to work in theory by certain people...south American neoliberalism deliberately went further than was possible in the US...it was an experiment.
That happened?
Tax and spend isnt a boolean. Everyone does it to some extent.
Let’s say that applies to Greece and Italy. Would it also apply to the US?
Is that a fact? Where is the EU’s Detroit?
Athens.
And that’s being allowed to rot, not being bailed out?
Just like Detroit :-P
I’m from the Detroit region, and I would say Detroit is actually a great example, since it has been receiving bailout after bailout for many years. Not to mention the steady torrent of state and federal taxes that kept Detroit trudging along so far.
Here are a couple of recent bailouts.
And there are better and worse ways of spending money.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/03/business/la-fi-europe-rebuild-20110103
Dude. It is literally all over the East. How about a nice cup of Ózd? However, even the UK has some brutally post-industrial areas.
About the rest, sorry, your habit is to ask too much and answer too little, one needs to be frugal when trading time with you, and I don’t mean it as an insult, don’t take it bad :)
50 years of communism , , 5-10 years in the EU and it is all the EUS fault. Fact . Not a question, possibly sarcastic, though.
Sure, under Thatchers version of Reagonomics.
If I had the answers, I wouldn’t be wasting time on here. Do you have the answers? Woops, did it again.
“do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality” Is there some evidence that this is what they’re doing and if so can we tease out the effects of confounding factors such as homogeneity, race and other explanatory factors that inform reactionary thought?
Once you tease out these factors, does Europe actually end up being better at all?
Well one thing you could look at is the level of criminality in the homogenous but poor European societies—most Eastern European countries fit that description.
I haven’t investigated this map, though google images turn up several which show a similar pattern so I’m guessing it’s not nonsense: http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Murder-Rate-map.png
Assuming it’s accurate, that at least provides a prima-facie case that inequality does cause crime. I suspect however the existence of a ceiling past which reducing inequality no longer depresses crime rates. And ofcourse criminality and inequality could have a common cause, such as lower IQ. If we look at a world IQ map:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v0ofzbpEfd8/VOyorckWQvI/AAAAAAAAFFM/6H0UFN5tFKY/s1600/world_average_iq_2000.png
IQ does seem to interact with criminality.
That particular idea has been widely explored in the literature. E.g. Fajnzylber does it in Inequality and violent crime, finding a significant correlation of 0.54 between income inequality and log of homicide rate. This is pretty strong by social science standards. The correlation with other types of crime is much lower.
Curiously, If you restrict to Europe, the correlation is negative, but it is positive if you restrict to East and South Asia, which has Gini coefficients and murder rates comparable to European countries.
IMHO murder rates are incredibly gun-dependent, and I don’t meant it as a gun-control argument, because politics is downstream from culture, so they are gun-culture dependent, not gun-law dependent. (Pro-gun culture with restrictive laws just means a huge black market, like drugs.)
Anecdotally, it is not easy to find black market guns in Eastern Europe. The supply of the ex-Yugo civil wars and drunk Soviet soldiers dried up, the international dealers and organized crime simply do not care about the minimal profits they could make on retail, they want it wholesale into conflict zones and whatnot. It is not a good black market retail business, unlike drugs, customers won’t return every day or week. Retail black market could be based people owning 10-20 guns, private collectors, and occasionally sell one, there are a lot of people in the US who are like that but almost none in EE.
Things like not having a lot of game around to hunt play a role. But more likely, there are only two stable equilibria, everybody or nobody having guns, EE is tending towards nobody, the US has so many already that the only possible equilibrium state is everybody.
I think that is not true at all. That is, there is no significant dependency between availability of firearms and murder rate. Where aren’t many guns, most common murder weapon is knife, it is the only difference.
Availability or widespread ownership?
I wasn’t very interested in exploring the criminal claim that is strongly focused on by commenters so far, perhaps the discussion would have been better if I’d only quoted the second half of the essay?
Models of how to add ideological payloads to new technologies should be very interesting to ambitious effective altruists or those concerned with the saftey of transhuman technology, I lose prediction points because I thought that this would be the thing driving discussion. Hoping to hear more thoughts or materials on it was what motivated me to open the topic.