This gave a satisfying “click” of how the Simulacra and Staghunt concepts fit together.
Things I would consider changing:
1. Lion Parable.In the comments, John expands on this post with a parable about lion-hunters who believe in “magical protection against lions.” That parable is actually what I normally think of when I think of this post, and I was sad to learn it wasn’t actually in the post. I’d add it in, maybe as the opening example.
2. Do we actually need the word “simulacrum 3”?Something on my mind since last year’s review is “how much work are the words “simulacra” doing for us? I feel vaguely like I learned something from Simulacra Levels and their Interactions, but the concept still feels overly complicated as a dependency to explain new concepts. If I read this post in the wild without having spent awhile grokking Simulacra I think I’d find it pretty confusing.
But, meanwhile, the original sequences talked about “belief in belief”. I think that’s still a required dependency here, but, a) Belief in Belief is a shorter post, and I think b) I think this post + the literal words “belief in belief” helps grok the concept in the first place.
On the flipside, I think the Simulacra concept does help point towards an overall worldview about what’s going on in society, in a gnarlier way than belief-in-belief communicates. I’m confused here.
Important Context
A background thing in my mind whenever I read one of these coordination posts is an older John post: From Personal to Prison Gangs. We’ve got Belief-in-Belief/Simulacra3 as Stag Hunt strategies. Cool. They still involve… like, falsehoods and confusion and self-deception. Surely we shouldn’t have to rely on that?
My hope is yes, someday. But I don’t know how to reliably do it at scale yet. I want to just quote the end of the prison gangs piece:
Of course, all of these examples share one critical positive feature: they scale. That’s the whole reason things changed in the first place—we needed systems which could scale up beyond personal relationships and reputation.
This brings us to the takeaway: what should you do if you want to change these things? Perhaps you want a society with less credentialism, regulation, stereotyping, tribalism, etc. Maybe you like some of these things but not others. Regardless, surely there’s something somewhere on that list you’re less than happy about.
The first takeaway is that these are not primarily political issues. The changes were driven by technology and economics, which created a broader social graph with fewer repeated interactions. Political action is unlikely to reverse any of these changes; the equilibrium has shifted, and any policy change would be fighting gravity. Even if employers were outlawed from making hiring decisions based on college degree, they’d find some work-around which amounted to the same thing. Even if the entire federal register disappeared overnight, de-facto industry regulatory bodies would pop up. And so forth.
So if we want to e.g. reduce regulation, we should first focus on the underlying socioeconomic problem: fewer interactions. A world of Amazon and Walmart, where every consumer faces decisions between a million different products, is inevitably a world where consumers do not know producers very well. There’s just too many products and companies to keep track of the reputation of each. To reduce regulation, first focus on solving that problem, scalably. Think amazon reviews—it’s an imperfect system, but it’s far more flexible and efficient than formal regulation, and it scales.
Now for the real problem: online reviews are literally the only example I could come up with where technology offers a way to scale-up reputation-based systems, and maybe someday roll back centralized control structures or group identities. How can we solve these sorts of problems more generally? Please comment if you have ideas.
This gave a satisfying “click” of how the Simulacra and Staghunt concepts fit together.
Things I would consider changing:
1. Lion Parable. In the comments, John expands on this post with a parable about lion-hunters who believe in “magical protection against lions.” That parable is actually what I normally think of when I think of this post, and I was sad to learn it wasn’t actually in the post. I’d add it in, maybe as the opening example.
2. Do we actually need the word “simulacrum 3”? Something on my mind since last year’s review is “how much work are the words “simulacra” doing for us? I feel vaguely like I learned something from Simulacra Levels and their Interactions, but the concept still feels overly complicated as a dependency to explain new concepts. If I read this post in the wild without having spent awhile grokking Simulacra I think I’d find it pretty confusing.
But, meanwhile, the original sequences talked about “belief in belief”. I think that’s still a required dependency here, but, a) Belief in Belief is a shorter post, and I think b) I think this post + the literal words “belief in belief” helps grok the concept in the first place.
On the flipside, I think the Simulacra concept does help point towards an overall worldview about what’s going on in society, in a gnarlier way than belief-in-belief communicates. I’m confused here.
Important Context
A background thing in my mind whenever I read one of these coordination posts is an older John post: From Personal to Prison Gangs. We’ve got Belief-in-Belief/Simulacra3 as Stag Hunt strategies. Cool. They still involve… like, falsehoods and confusion and self-deception. Surely we shouldn’t have to rely on that?
My hope is yes, someday. But I don’t know how to reliably do it at scale yet. I want to just quote the end of the prison gangs piece: