Very little makes sense. As we start to understand things and adapt to the rules, they change again.
We live much closer together than we ever did historically. Yet we know our neighbours much less.
We have witnessed the birth of a truly global culture. A culture that fits no one. A culture that was built by Social Media’s algorithms, much more than by people. Let alone individuals, like you or me.
We have more knowledge, more science, more technology, and somehow, our governments are more stuck. No one is seriously considering a new Bill of Rights for the 21st century, or a new Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
—
Cosmic Horror as a genre largely depicts how this all feels from the inside. As ordinary people, we are powerless in the face of forces beyond our understanding. Cosmic Horror also commonly features the idea that bad things can happen to us without us noticing, and the angst that comes from it.
The genre often features Eldritch creatures. These are creatures that live beyond humans’ understanding. But whilst humans can’t understand or influence them, they can affect humans. Sometimes, they may even forcefully alter people’s thoughts and actions.
—
As humans, we have always been confronted with the Eldritch. The world was never our home, it was never designed to be legible or pleasant to us.
We come to life screaming and crying, without the intellectual means to understand why we got ejected from a nice place into a deeply inhospitable, cold and uncaring universe.
Many stories echo this. From Hesiod’s Golden Age to the Garden of Eden, we started in a state of primordial ease, where humans lived in a world that was good for them. But something happened, and we landed on Earth, with all of its suffering and hardships.
Even our lives start that way. We all have been children.
As children, we had very little agency. Our fates were in the hands of adults, entities much more powerful than we are. Although adults were uncannily similar to us, they were notably different. They didn’t think the same way we did, we had to play by their rules (or else), and they decided everything around us.
This is how humanity’s history started.
We lived in hostile lands, always at the mercy of death and the elements, without the science and the tools that would let us understand what was happening.
—
Nowadays, our Eldritch is of a different kind.
We thoroughly understand the natural world, but we have deserted it because it sucked.
We have built and migrated to an artificial world.
And yet, it is still full of phenomena we can’t understand, of inhumane entities that decide our fates.
This is existentially dreadful and awful.
There is no myth that makes sense of it.
There is no one to fault.
No one wants this.
Everyone is lost, unable to find a home.
Modern Magic
Most people are utterly confused all the time. They get through by not expecting to understand much.
“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Well, aside from a very small STEM elite, technology already is indistinguishable from magic for most people.
Most people do NOT have the expectation that if they study a technical topic, they will eventually understand how it works at a mechanistic level.
They do not expect that they could learn about the state of the art of any field, and eventually make their own opinion.
They just nod, shrug and move along.
They deeply expect that even with more time, they will not understand how phones work, or how cars are built. It is too technical. Possibly, it has something to do with electricity, robots, and circuit boards?
Who knows how a computer, a factory, 5G, or vaccines work? Who expects they could know?
Very few people.
—
Beyond deep hard tech, this also applies to soft technologies. Soft technologies include the Law, governance, how our institutions work, complex processes like containerisation, etc.
For instance, most people treat markets like magic.
Communists ascribe evil properties to markets.
Libertarians treat them as magical tools that can solve all coordination problems.
Nerds largely use them as a divination device: they speak of metaphorical markets, and explain everything through incentives and the efficient market hypothesis.
Aside from a select few people deeply interested in economics and governance, it is hard to see grounded discussions of when markets are practical solutions to practical problems, and how to deploy them safely and productively.
For most people, markets are just magic. Whether they are perceived as good magic or dark magic doesn’t matter, they are still magic.
—
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
Instead, to most people, experts are priests, necessarily intermediaries to interpret the scientific scriptures.
Priesthood comes with a lot of authority, and thus necessitates a lot of trust.
Historically, cultures put a lot of importance on acknowledging the special status of priests. The knowledge of a priest is not fungible, not everyone can obtain it. And great power implies great responsibilities.
Priests were de facto privileged. To balance that, their lifestyles usually came with many restrictions, all anchored on discipline and rejecting excesses. Depending on the culture, it might have been forced poverty, forced celibacy, the obligation to follow many additional rituals, etc.
—
On grounds of ideological equality, we have rejected that some people can intellectually understand things that others cannot. Variations in intelligence is a very taboo topic, rarely discussed in grounded ways.
Thus, modern priests are never confronted with their additional moral duties. They are never forced to abide by higher standards. And people resent them.
So much so that following the perceived abuses of the priest class, there has been a recent attempt at a Modern Reformation, mediated by the Internet rather than the Printing Press. Thanks to the Internet, people may not need priests anymore, being free to do their own homework.
The hope was that, through a combination of pop-science, infotainment and gamification, everyone would have become a super polymathic genius! Everyone an expert in hard sciences, soft sciences, the Law, and more!
Instead, we’ve gotten internet wokeism, antivaxx, and more conspiracy theories than we ever needed.
In short, our modern global culture explicitly rejects priesthood, even though there are many fields of knowledge that people de facto do not have access to.
—
Speaking of, no one understands 𝒞𝓊𝓁𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒.
I outlined one way our culture is changing: the annihilation of “experts” as a class of priests.
It feels real to me, but I might be wrong.
And if I’m right, I’m only right after the fact, I did not predict it.
In other words, I largely do not understand C̲u̲l̲t̲u̲r̲e̲.
I am constantly getting screwed over by my limited understanding of culture. I regularly get surprised by some novel cultural phenomenon that I did not expect, and have to change my course of action accordingly.
This is true of all of us. We are all puzzled and surprised.
C͎u͎l͎t͎u͎r͎e͎ changes much faster than it did 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years or 500 years ago.
Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes it’s for the worse. But the common thread is that we don’t expect it, nor do we understand it.
Despite its critical importance to our lives, ░C░u░l░t░u░r░e░ is as arbitrary as magic, part of the Eldritch.
Powerlessness
Whilst epistemic horror, the horror of not understanding what happens around us, is a literary genre, I don’t care much for it.
I am naturally a curious person, yet I have made my peace with not knowing things.
Pragmatically though, not knowing things makes us powerless. And this is where true horror comes from.
—
We are all disconnected from everything that matters.
No one expects that they can improve social media, governments, institutions, culture, housing prices, criminality rates around them, etc.
For example, in London, one of the richest cities in the world, there’s a massive wave of thievery that everyone has failed to stop.
Many petty criminals roam the streets looking for phones to snatch. In the last year, 2 fuckers tried to snatch my phone. Shoplifting has exploded.
Lawrence Newport from LFG left a bike in front of Scotland Yard, and it got quickly stolen. Despite having a GPS signal, the police didn’t even check the CCTV nor tried to pursue the criminal. A response sergeant took the time to respond and explain that the police is underfunded, and doesn’t have bike thefts as a priority compared to Domestic Violence and Abuse.
One of the richest cities in the world, in front of its own police’s headquarters, cannot prevent thievery.
Of course, vigilantism and taking matters into our own hands would be punished. And I can see why to some extent.
However, on the other hand, the police is not solving the issue, nor is the mayor, nor is the government, nor are the citizens. And no one is happy about this.
No one understands this state of affairs thoroughly enough to actually change it. Everyone is stuck.
—
It is possible to get unstuck. But the work needed to get there is not easy.
It requires studying a complex bureaucracy, from the funding of the police and diagnosing why courts having a massive backlog of cases, to designing laws mandating stronger sentences where it should.
It then requires making this common knowledge, creating media attention, and putting enough political pressure to finally pass the laws that make sense.
In practice, no one knows how to do this reliably, and people who have tried to change have failed.
Everyone now knows that in practice, thievery is to be expected in London.
C’est la vie. It is what it is. Shikata ga nai.
Thievery is now one of the forces of nature that a puny human has to contend with in London.
In Japan, there are earthquakes. In London, there is thievery.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
—
London’s thievery is just one minor example of how people feel powerless about a non-natural phenomenon. In the Eldritch Pantheon, it would be a minor spirit.
But there are Eldritch Deities that rule much bigger aspects of our lives.
For instance, Ｔｈｅ Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｙ.
What is 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔼𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕠𝕞𝕪? 🅃🄷🄴 🄴🄲🄾🄽🄾🄼🅈 is an Eldritch entity.
Sometimes, Tԋҽ Eƈσɳσɱყ is good. Getting a good job and a home are easy, raising a child is cheap, we can buy a lot of stuff, and everyone is happy.
Sometimes, T̵̤̀͊h̲̘̍e̻̔ ̴̧̑͘E̅̐͜͜c̷̢̥͐͠o̷̢̱̓n̬̹͑o̴̠͠m̴̥̝͗̇y̸̢̥͑ is bad. Everything is hard, and we struggle. We struggle to find a job, to borrow money for a home, to educate our children at a cheap and competent school. Everything is expensive, and everyone is unhappy.
If we pray hard enough, the next politician we vote for might ᑕᕼᗩᑎGE TᕼE EᑕOᑎOᗰY.
lol.
ㄒ卄乇 乇匚ㄖ几ㄖ爪ㄚ is not a real thing.
An eCOnoMIsT might say that it is just the combination of 𝔊𝔇𝔓, 𝔘𝔫𝔢𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔶𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱 ℜ𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔰, ℑ𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔱 ℜ𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔰 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔶 𝔒𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯 ℑ𝔫𝔡𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔰.
But this is obviously fake.
Everyone would talk about it even without these indicators.
Everyone knows it would still direct our lives.
—
Many other Eldritch Deities direct our lives.
They often look the same.
For instance, I asked ChatGPT to define “Շђє єς๏ภ๏๓ץ”, and it gave me a very Eldritch answer:
“▉▉▉ ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉” is a broad term that refers to the system by which a society organizes […]. It’s essentially the network of activities and relationships that determine […].
This is what the Eldritch Deities look like in 2025. We can’t pinpoint them. We use broad terms. They’re systems related to society. They’re network of activities and relationships.
I know them. You know them. Every modern human knows them.
Every modern human knows they are powerless in front of them.
Every modern human knows they must kowtow to them, if they don’t want to get screwed.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥, 𝔸𝕔𝕒𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕒, 𝔾𝕖𝕠𝕡𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕔𝕤, 𝔹𝕦𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕦𝕔𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤, 𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℂ𝕦𝕝𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕖, 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔸𝕝𝕘𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕙𝕞, 𝕋𝕖𝕔𝕙𝕟𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕪, 𝕀𝕕𝕖𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕚𝕖𝕤.
They’re all systems of networks and activities and relationships of a society.
We may have developed them. They may have arisen organically from our interactions.
But they are here, and we can’t control them. We are ants walking alongside them. They make and unmake our lives. They live by their own rules, amoral and inhumane.
Our artificial Eldritch Deities are here to stay, we are powerless in front of them, and we all feel it.
Escapism and Fantasy
Even though everyone feels it, too many reject the surreality of the situation.
They have not mourned. Instead of believing what is true, they cling to the hope that the world makes sense.
For them, the World should be a Big Story.
The Good Guys succeed, and the Bad Guys should be defeated.
Through a Rightful Struggle, growing and triumphing against our Dark Impulses, we should Defeat Evil and Enact Good.
This is so tragically wrong, naive and pathetic.
—
The typical fantasy of the powerless is that some Evil People have figured it out, and hold The Power.
That we just need to beat them, dispossess them, kill them even, and things will be alright.
This is the pathetic fantasy of the child who hopes there are adults in the room who can make things better when things go to shit.
“The System”, “Them”, (((They))), The Jews, The Capitalists, The Deep State, The Lizardmen, The Free Masons, The Patriarchy, Israel, The Illuminazis, Politicians.
This is all the same desperate cry.
“Please, have it so that someone has power and could make all of the bad things go away.”
Even if the Evil People do not make all the bad things go away, it would still be reassuring.
At least, someone would know what’s going on.
At least, even if we eventually fail, there would be an Enemy who can make it all meaningful, by Struggling to take them down.
At least, there would be a meaningful story happening, with humans at its centre.
—
But the truth is that no one has power.
Not even politicians and billionaires.
Elon Musk bought Twitter, got Trump elected, and set up DOGE. All that to fail, have Trump pass a bill directly opposed to his principles, and get ousted in less than 6 months.
No one knows how to make things go well. No one knows how, as puny little humans, we could wrestle with Eldritch entities.
This is an unsolved problem, and anyone pretending otherwise is lying.
We suck at building powerful companies that do not end up either corrupting governments, or being throttled by governments.
We suck at having conversations critical to our future without resorting to insults. Picture any conversation about immigration.
We suck at doing redistribution without disincentivising work and without incentivising fraud.
We suck at steering our culture toward any direction of our choosing.
We suck at electing politicians who can reliably pass the laws that Actual Experts my Priests say are good for the majority.
—
This is the core of the 21st century.
Realising that we humans are living alongside entities far more powerful than we are, and that we are losing ground to them.
Gradual Disempowerment has already started, it hasn’t waited for AI.
—
There are more forms of escapism beyond fantasising about a Big Bad Guy.
Giving up and Laying Down and Rotting.
Isolating oneself in the mountains, in a cottage or in video games.
Becoming a selfish asshole.
At best, escapism makes people useless and isolated.
At worst, it makes people panic and hurt each other.
Panicking
When one realises that Eldritch entities are living alongside us, one may panic.
That’s the horror part of cosmic horror. It’s shocking and terrifying.
Unfortunately, panic, horror, shock and terror are not very conducive to wisdom, healthy behaviour, trust and coordination.
—
In their panic, some are looking a bit too hard for a Big Bad Guy. They enter an aggressive frenzy, looking to tear down any enemy near them.
The Woke Left has The Whites, The Males, The Straight, The Coloniser and The Far Right.
The Far Right has Academia, The Swamp, Immigrants and the Woke Left.
The Communist Left has Capitalists, Corporations, The State, and the Fascists.
The Conservative Right has Atheists, Sex Work, Pro-Choice, and the LGBT+.
Because of the biggest propaganda campaign of my time, everyone is also making an opinion on whether Israel or Palestine is a Big Bad Guy.
In general, when people panic, they become more extreme, and fall prey to ideological spirals. This is a major way by which I̷͖̍d̸͈̎e̷̢͑o̸̫̊ľ̸̖ơ̴̠g̥̀ȋ̴̫e̷͍͌ș̴͋ grow more powerful.
—
In their panic, a select few try to grab as much power as possible.
On one hand, it might let them take a heroic stance against the Eldritch monsters.
On the other hand… Power is awfully convenient, isn’t it?
This usually doesn’t end well for the people.
Dominic Cummings tried to do it in the UK. He did the Vote Leave campaign and helped Boris Johnson elected. He said that although he thought Boris as a PM was “terrible for the country”, but that “The least bad option seemed to be, exploit the current situation to try and push certain things through and get the country into a better position.”
Thus, he became Boris’ senior advisor, got ousted a little more than a year later, and spent months (or years?) talking trash about Boris publicly, calling him The Trolley, and saying the faster he would go, the better things would be.
Overall, one of the main promises of Brexit (that it would help stop immigration) was broken. Immigration rose to record-high post-Brexit.
A similar thing happened with Trump and Elon.
Elon bought Twitter, used it to boost Trump. He became a “special government employee” when Trump became president, and started DOGE. Elon got ousted 4 months in (much faster than Dominic!). Then he stated that Trump was in the Epstein files and responded “Yes” to someone stating that Trump should be impeached.
Overall, one of Elon’s main promises was to reduce spending deficit through DOGE. In the end, he got ousted around the time of the Big Beautiful Bill, which drastically increased the spending deficit.
—
This panic leads people to playing stupid games, and winning stupid prizes (like Elon or Dominic).
There are very few people who actually try to reclaim power for Team Humanity, in a way that is cooperative rather than by trying to screw over others.
Lawrence Newport’s Looking For Growth is a notable exception. In its short history, it has created a Growth Bill, spread a lot of awareness around it, engaged directly with lawmakers, built a dashboard to clarify what is going on in the UK, etc.
Vitalik’s d/acc is another one. Instead of democratic engagement, it is pursuing the way of technological research, focused on helping people coordinate and enact their will.
The Core Paradox
In many ways, the world is both more and less cosmically horrific than it was 250 years ago.
—
We now understand almost all natural phenomena. Through our global measurement network, we can predict natural disasters before any human witnesses them. Disasters that our ancestors would have pinned on literal divinities.
We now understand biology. When people die, we largely understand what happened, we do not think it was dark magic. We have an understanding of human bodies mechanistic enough that we can design cures, and that doctors can recommend meaningful treatments instead of quack medicine.
We now understand, at least to some extent, psychology and psychiatry. We do not believe in demonic possessions anymore. We understand that mood swings exist, and have documented a large variety of hormonal as well as neurological disorders.
So much of the past belief systems was about the Natural Eldritch Monsters. But through the Great Scientific Method, we learnt to not fear them, uncovered their rules, and discovered that behind their crazy appearance, they were largely explainable in terms of physical and chemical principles.
—
And yet.
250 years ago, we built new constitutions in the US and the EU, and created our modern civilisation.
Now, despite all of our complex technology and science (or rather, because of their complexity), we are struggling to not make housing more expensive.
We are now at the point where we are struggling to have children.
People had children when the entire world was constantly at war, when 50% of children died before 10, when everyone was dirt poor, when no one had Amazon or instant comms.
Now, almost everywhere, we are failing to have enough children to merely hit replacement-level fertility rates.
—
There’s something big that has happened. We went to the moon, but now we struggle to have children? What’s up with that.
My high level explanation for this paradox is…
1) We managed to unravel, scientifically study, and to some extent dominate the Natural Eldritch Deities.
We understand astronomy, plate tectonics, the climate, physics, chemistry and biology.
Although there are still things to be learnt, they are not mysterious, magical or Eldritch anymore. They are regular puzzles, like jigsaws, and we are confident we’ll get there eventually.
2) To get there, we conjured the Modern Eldritch Deities, which come with their own problems.
It seems obvious that we cannot meaningfully steer 𝘈𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘢, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘮𝘺, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘊𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘨𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘮, etc. That many problems are arising from this failure.
But it seems equally obvious that getting rid of all of them would be disastrous.
So we are stuck in awkward codependent relationships with these entities.
3) Our Modern Eldritch Deities killed the Traditional Eldritch Deities.
We, modern humans, are not the first to conjure Eldritch Deities.
Our ancestors had already conjured many Eldritch Deities to deal with their own problems. Religions, pantheons, superstitions, ritual systems, and more.
We killed all of them.
In theory, we could have made rational decisions about which ones to keep and which ones to kill. Possibly reshaping some of them, to fit our needs best.
This might have meant: observing Chesterton’s Fence, following a conservative precautionary principle when deciding to stop rituals followed by millions, experimenting with different norms in different places, keeping the rituals and vibes but removing the fictitious beliefs, any of this.
But we did not.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
We killed the sacred. Not only did we kill it, we have eradicated it so thoroughly that we don’t really have the words left to talk about the problems it was solving.
Conclusion
Right now, we are stuck.
We have lost the belief in Progress. That each year will be better than the previous one, for humanity.
We have lost the belief in Agency. That we can do something about it.
We see that we are dependent on entities that do not always want what’s best for us. 𝕲𝖔𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖒𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖘, 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕰𝖈𝖔𝖓𝖔𝖒𝖞, 𝕾𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝕸𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆.
—
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
—
I have seen too many people feel the bad vibe, never putting words on it, and just getting passively demotivated. Or falling into ideological spirals.
I expect this article will be paradoxically motivating to a few. When I talk to people, it usually frees them a little to name the problem, understand that it is real, that it is not about them, and that this problem is one we can study and eventually solve.
On this, cheers!
The Modern Eldritch Deities have also always existed, alongside the traditional ones; we just never talked about them because the traditional ones were worse.
Arguably they weren’t as powerful or as eldritch before. The economy has always been a complex beast, but it was probably relatively more manageable when it boiled down to “90% of all people work on making barely enough food that we do not starve, 7% make tools for the 90%, 3% are on military and administrative duty and get to syphon off all the surplus”. And each local system was relatively isolated. It’s an interesting question whether the growth in complexity has outstripped our growth in understanding; maybe we hit an optimum ratio of understanding/complexity around Adam Smith and then things have gotten out of hand.
This is false. Consider the examples of Modern Eldritch Deities given: “The Government, Academia, Geopolitics, Bureaucracies, The Culture, The Algorithm, Technology, Ideologies.”
Academia didn’t exist 10,000 years ago. Nor did bureaucracies, geopolitics, or The Algorithm. To the extent that government, culture, technology, and ideologies did exist, they were legible and understandable by humans.
Academia existed in the form of “trying to become a priest so people trust the stuff that you say” and various adjacent concepts.” Bureaucracies and geopolitics existed, in a state actually worse (although simpler) than they do now, before we could even smelt iron.
We are building new gods in the hope that they will love us.
You may laugh as though this were impossible or recoil in fear if you know it is.
But it is what we’re doing.
This eclipses all other efforts to navigate those eldritch forces.
Will our new gods love us, or at least obey us? If they obey, will their mortal masters use their power for their brethren, or to create strange new worlds?
This piece is amazing. Thank you. I absolutely love the framing and agree with the analysis of the situation—only the action recommendations need to be updated
Like most incisive analyses of the current historical situation, this piece is hugely incomplete, particularly because it does not take account for likely progress in AI.
I generally agree with everything though I think here and there you bury too many choices that absolutely are born out of personal agency under the same mantle as the true unintelligible complexity. While we are absolutely powerless if we want the Eldritch gods to work in our favour, it actually is within the individual ability of the more powerful people to simply hit them with a lead pipe until they stop working—provided they’re reckless or stupid enough to want to do it. All it takes to simplify the world a lot is someone who can giving an order to fire off all the nukes they have. This is of course not really an improvement, but it is without question change.
Our biggest problem is that all in all, we are quite well off, but as all humans ever, we would like to be even better off, and our current well being hangs on such a complex system that any change is far more likely to do harm than good, because we’re already in a low entropy part of the phase space and there are very few ways to arrange things to be better compared to how many there are for them to be worse. And of course even the most knowledgeable of us have no clue how to do that, let alone the average voter (or politician).
Largely agreed, except on one point.
I think there are many safe ways to improve things, even with our partial understanding. This seems much more practically relevant than how many good vs bad actions there are in my opinion.
“The Algorithm” is in the hands of very few actors. This is the prime gear where “Evil People have figured it out, and hold The Power” isn’t a fantasy. There would be many obvious improvements if it were in adult hands.
There are a few things that I would consider relatively straightforward, obvious improvements from my position as someone who probably is upper 0.1% in education, and many of these “obvious” things are far from it for most people if I am to judge from the actual outcomes of electoral politics, let alone guaranteed to actually work without a hitch. And still very little that I’d call a solution for the really large issues.
1. I’ve noticed that many people, including myself, have come to similar ideas in the past ~5 years. Often the word ‘egregore’ is used to refer to (a subset?) of what you would call ‘The Eldritch’.
See e.g.:
https://exploringegregores.wordpress.com/who-worships-an-evil-god-2/
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-demons-by-fyodor-dostoevsky
https://morphenius.substack.com/p/food-for-thoughts
2. You say there’s a class of (now conquered) Natural Eldritch Deities like “astronomy, plate tectonics, the climate, physics, chemistry and biology”. I think it’s a mistake to consider these things as being the same kind of thing as Ideologies, Bureaucracies, and Academia. These are subject to natural selection and can mutate and spread, unlike the Natural Eldritch Deities. Thus they can be understood well as agentic entities, whereas astronomy, etc. cannot.
EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated “Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” as “Most people can’t understand complex topics”, whereas you could have intended “Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics” while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I’m leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it
might have been(confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.
You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don’t expect to understand things. The repeated use of “most people” without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to “most people are dumb”, but let’s let that pass, and assume you’re right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don’t feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
No. Strongly disagree. “Most people don’t understand X” is a thing I could accept, and “most people feel like they can’t understand X, for many Xes” seems like it could be true, but “most people can’t understand X” is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of “it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to” not “this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it”.
I think there may be an important difference between how you’re modeling getting to the point of “I understand this topic”, and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
You seem to be thinking of “I understand this topic” as equivalent to “I have reached the state of the art in this topic”, and presenting an implicit dichotomy between “I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic” and “I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me”. Whereas I think there’s a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to “I understand basically how this works, it doesn’t seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______”. And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.
As an example, let’s take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it’s plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event… and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They’re not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it’s no longer mysterious.
Or let’s take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it’s not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn’t require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you’ve got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek—The Original Economics Rap Battle!
Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who’s got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron’s Musings : The Economy. It’s not the best, but it’s an OK starting point where I can say to a friend “go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you’ll get the economy better than you do now”.
Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it’s harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person’s circle of control. But “and so I give up and rot” is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city’s website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they’re typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you’ll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven’t done anything that’s actually intellectually challenging.
I don’t actually think the change that’s required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it’s a change in attitude, from “the world is confusing, and I can’t understand it or do anything about it”, to “the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes”. And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.
Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the “most people have no hope of understanding complex topics” line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it’s correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don’t, and I guess they’re doomed.
You are confusing “Most people can’t understand X.” with “Most people have no hope of understanding X.”. Only the latter matter for the psychological toll it has on people.
Hopelessness might be warranted or not, but it’s there.
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Separately, I believe that quite often, their hopelessness is warranted.
Everyone hits their ceilings.
I know many mathematically talented people who struggle to express themselves in ways that are legible to others, or to move their body in a natural way. They will get better if they train, but it’s pretty clear to them and everyone else that their ceiling is low.
In general, I know many people talented [at a field] with clear limitations in [some other field]. Arts, maths, oral expression, style, empathy, physical strength, body awareness, and so on.
Over time, they learn to acknowledge their talents and their limitations.
Oops—I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can’t understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that’s too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I’m thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like “obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I’ve done that you’re pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did”.
I don’t think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they’ve hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it’s often a case of thinking “this is too complicated for me” and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn’t actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying “that’s beyond my ability”, we’d have a more chaotic world.
I believe...
People and society are largely well calibrated. People who are deemed (by themselves or society) to be bad at maths, at sports, at arts, etc. are usually bad at them.
People and society are not perfectly calibrated.
People are sometimes under-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them lacking confidence.
People are sometimes over-confident in their abilities. This is often downstream of them being too confident.
Most people would fail at passing the bar and the USMLE. This is why most people do not attempt them, and this is why our society tells them not to.
I believe it is load bearing, but in the straightforward way: it would be catastrophic if everyone tried to study things far beyond their abilities and wasted their time.
I think regardless of the details the statement in its strongest form is true of virtually everyone. Maybe anyone, if they just applied themselves, could work hard their whole life and achieve mastery of one topic. Let’s concede that.
That still leaves all of the other topics that are equally relevant to their lives and have no hope to have enough time to also understand before they die. I understand a lot about science and computers, and I’m even decently polymath-y enough to get a bit of stuff like biology, medicine, law. But I’m still dependent on the “priesthoods” of those fields; a mediocre lawyer knows far more law than I do. And it’s simply not economical nor, ultimately, possible for me to achieve a comparable level of understanding at everything I’d need to to be able to look at the world and say “ah, yes, I get it now, I see how the cogs tick”.
I agree with what you’re pointing at, but not with this statement. I think it’s worse than this. There are (groups of) people who (collectively) know how to make (some) things better. But The Power is held collectively by those you label The Powerless, and they lack the skills or drive to even know how to choose the right priesthood-holders to trust. As a result we spend an awful lot of time and effort tying our hands and shooting our feet, while competing would-be priests shout ineffectually at one another, regardless of who has a record of having made correct predictions before. Our ancestors may not have understood the natural world, but if someone showed up and made the right guesses about the behavior of some eldritch god vastly more often than anyone else could do, they would have been either elevated to leadership or feared/hated/condemned for black magic. We lost that skill, I think, in favor of playing social status games, the moment it sunk in that the natural-world-threats felt distant.
Aka: In practice we are sex-obsessed murder-monkeys and all of this is way above our pay grade.
I think lots of people have power to do stuff but the limits are such that it’s a lot easier to break things than it is to build them.
Suppose you were magically elected POTUS with the mandate of Making Things Much Better. How do you fix the economy, or the climate, or anything else in four years, with “only” at your disposal the full might of the United States, within your ability to command it? You would be faced with a ton of options, uncertainties, compromises, a few good ideas but none fully resolutive.
Now suppose the same thing happened, but with the mandate of Making Things Much Worse. That sounds like an easy enough job!
Not just the legalistic limits, but the 2nd Law.
Sure, I mostly meant the limits as in all sorts of constraints (what people will and won’t allow you to get away with, what is knowable, what is easily computed/predicted, etc). But ultimately it really boils down to, every step in the “better” direction requires moving towards an even smaller state space and thus decreasing bits of entropy in the state of the world. So in a sense it literally is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics.
I believe our ancestors elevated and condemned people for reasons mostly separate from whether they statistically made better predictions. Things like “Does this sound good?”, “Does this help give more power to the leader?”, “Is the person uttering the various statements seemingly convinced of them?”, “Can the person make it seem like the statements matched the reality post-hoc?”, etc.
It might have correlated in some cases, but what I am pointing at something much more hit-or-miss than the process you are describing.
Who is this “we”? This general framing presents the problem as a universal problem of modernity but a lot of the material feeding your ‘vibes’ are quite specific results of policy failures (e.g., in the UK, US) measured against your own preferences.
There are many people in Iceland, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore &c, who do not feel this oppressive ennui. Instead, things work quite well, the government is sane and in control, and public discourse is by-and-large rational.
It is tempting to see an eldritch horror as the problem, one which can be killed with arcane magic, because it avoids the difficult truth that the problem is a suite of local political obstacles which need to be successively overcome.
Do you mean something like, ‘Even if defeating the evil people does not make all the bad things go away’?
Nope.
I meant that even if the Evil People are Evil, and thus decide to not make all the bad things go away, the fact that they could make them go away is reassuring in itself.
I should have been clearer.
(I have edited it with the hope of making it clearer. Thanks.)
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I generally like it. I have a lot of notes, because I think there’s a better version of this that I’d really like.
As it stands, I think this post relies too much on ‘feel-good’ or agreed-upon Lesswrong beliefs, and isn’t super useful.
General:
This would benefit from being 30-50% shorter. There are a fair amount of tangents that should be their own conversation/argument, which makes me hesitant to implicitly cosign this by sharing it. I would send it to people if it had less rambles.
It seems like the “Eldritch Deity” framing is being used in two ways in this article, implicitly:
Embodying the complex levers & actions (the natural world, current systems e.g. global markets)
A mask used by humans to explain away instances of #1 without actually interacting with them (gods, phrases like “the economy”) It would be good to explicitly clear these up as two different concepts, or at least have different pointers for when one is being talked about.
Modern magic
Shorten:
Get rid of harping about intellectual superiority—this seems obvious/ is not the place to make this point.
Shorten culture tangent
Powerlessness
Shorten the beginning. It feels self-evident that not knowing things makes us powerless. The point I get from this is “Not knowing makes us powerless which is where the tragedy/horror comes from”
Thievery section should be shortened—cut down on vigilante tangent to something more like <there’s no recourse—acting in this way is vigilantism—maybe for good reason—but it’s frustrating to not have recourse>
In the “Possible to get unstuck” section, the quoted paragraph “designing laws mandating stronger sentences”—is one sided & stronger than I think it has a right to be (argues for a specific solution when the point is supposed to be specific solutions are hard)
Escapism & Fantasy:
The general premise here that <people try and frame things as a story> is talked about a lot. I wouldn’t reiterate this. I think it is worth emphasizing the link between this and powerlessness.
I don’t think that “(elon musk) got trump elected” is undisputedly true.
I generally don’t like this elon musk story—the lesson seems to be “even billionaires can (say they will) try to solve a problem (government inefficiency) and fail—no one knows how to make things work!”
But it seems likely this is just a case of <Elon specifically> being unable to solve something, and overestimate how complex/thorny things are. Presumably Bill Gates is having more impact on the things he wants to impact?
The story seems to say to me “trying to do things really quickly & surface level against these entities doesn’t work”. Which seems reasonable, but maybe is different than what it’s framed as?
Panicking:
This section restates the previous section!
The first point of Escapism & Fantasy—that people look for bad guys. This is redone w/ more bad guys.
Then the second point from E&F (that individual people grab for power) I would combine the Dominic example with the one from E&F. Maybe move both of those to this section.
The interesting part of this section doesn’t get enough time: “Very few people are trying to reclaim power in a useful way .. ” I would expand on the examples listed, and explore this idea more.
Core Paradox:
The first part of this is fine. A good recap. I don’t like the high-level explanation. I don’t see how cultural tradition or communal values (I assume this is what’s being pointed at here with “Traditional Eldritch Deities”) would help with the current deities of e.g. the economy.
Again I think this suffers from overloading of the phrase “Eldritch Deities”, and if this was cleared up maybe there’s a better point here.
Conclusion:
I like Progress & Agency. I like the call to change this.
I would like more discussion of what this looks like—similar to how I think the most interesting part of panicking was people actually trying to tackle the problem brought up in this post.
General Nitpicks
“Woke, wokeism”—unless I’m very off-base these have never seemed like ‘real’ terms to me. They’re woefully overdefined & reading them just makes me cringe.
The ability to which we understand certain things, e.g. human biology, seems overstated. Yes, we know many mechanisms we didn’t use to know & it seems like many things are an engineering problem, but like the body is just so complex—in the same way that modern Eldritch Deities are, even!
this might be silly, but I had an allergic reaction to the excessive amount of emphasis. strong downvote for that. I’m sure if your memetic immune system doesn’t see that as an attack, it tastes spicy in a good way, but I find it to feel oversaturated and unwelcome.
I have unvoted this comment, in expectation that if I don’t communicate that I know it’s a bit sharp, it will be received worse.
I agree, but only to the extent that I found the various different typefaces for the e.g. “The Economy” somewhat off-putting, and not enough to downvote. I think sticking to one ‘ornate’ typeface (e.g. 𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔼𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕠𝕞𝕪 or 𝒞𝓊𝓁𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒) would have been sufficient for this post to make the point. The use of bolding was a bit excessive, but not enough to feel off-putting in the same way as the varied typefaces.
I didn’t get that far, I meant the bolding and italics. tastes like chatgpt.