So if I have grasped your own background, you come from an American social layer which is itself pretty elite in terms of social and cultural capital. You were socially adjacent to many people who did carry out the multi-year performative process, but you declined to do so, and the system did not reach out to take you on board anyway, and this is part of your evidence that it is something less than a perfect meritocracy.
I am most reminded of Eric Weinstein, who went to Harvard, but didn’t make it into the patronage networks-within-the-network, and 40 years later now specializes in elaborating his own version of how the system is deficient, corrupt, etc., while having made his own living among the counter-elite of finance, and in particular ending up working for Peter Thiel.
I don’t know your story at all, all I know is that you can write some good essays (e.g. the recent “Compradorization”), but I haven’t tried to find out what social and economic matrix you personally inhabit.
As for the general theme of alleged elites that aren’t actually the best, I have no trouble at all believing that. I would support a Swiss-cheese model of deficiencies in the world’s institutions and cultures, that leads to lost opportunities at every level, from people who are close to the very top of the pyramid but get passed over in favor of the second best, down to gifted individuals who nonetheless end up homeless, dead, or mad, because they can’t get the most elementary kind of social leverage.
My own situation is something like this: I’m Australian, I grew up without any connection to the professional classes or the middle class, but got as far as being a reserve for our IMO team, started a university degree, discovered that the human race in general was resigned to everyone spending their lives working for money and then dying of natural causes, found the Internet as a space where alternative ideas of all kinds had a chance, and over the long term spent my life below the poverty line but never far from academia, and educating myself and pursuing projects online.
I have accomplished a few things, but only a small fraction of what I might expect to have accomplished, if I had found or created a niche at a higher economic level. So I have a sense of profound ongoing lost opportunities, and I don’t just mean a loss for myself—there are works that I could have produced decades ago, which probably would have been in the canons of this or that intellectual subculture if I had actually been able to finish them, judging by what’s there now. Of course I have spent a bit of time thinking about this. If I had been the kind of person who knew at an earlier age how the game is played, perhaps my output would have been mediocre, rather than being those counterfactual works of excellence. Or maybe that’s just a cope.
As you mention, Australia has its own attempt at a meritocratic system, one that I don’t know much about (e.g. I have never heard of those Victorian high schools that you mention). I’m sure it has its deficiencies but I always felt that the barriers I personally faced were of a more fundamental nature, given the nature of my interests and ambitions. To mention one basic recurring example, if the average human psyche had the wisdom and the willpower to see a cure for ageing as something worth trying for, that would have been part of mainstream culture, institutions, and agenda decades ago, if not centuries. The most sophisticated explanation for such resistance that I ever found is in the works of Celia Green, who basically argues that humans learn to repress their ambitions—whether of that kind, or much lesser—for the sake of avoiding the difficulty and pain of failure, and then they take out this repressed frustration on each other in various ways.
In any case, such barriers can be overcome, but that requires persuasive power, political instincts, the ability to call upon other forms of credibility, and so forth, combined with the original insight that things could and should be different.
Returning to your own essay, as you might imagine, I am much more familiar with overlooked talent and lost opportunities that are right out on the social margins, rather than face to face with the central struggles for status and power. If you go far enough outside the system, you find rival elites, counter-elites, the makings of new future elites, as well as lost civilizations, futures that could have been, defeated and forgotten counter-elites of the past. And changes do occur, on small and large scales. The tech right obviously considers itself a new meritocracy that can use the turbulence of Trumpist populism to kick over the moribund shells of liberal America and replace them with AI-powered techno-optimist adhocracy, or whatever the new order is envisaged to be.
As a believer in short AI timelines, many of these discussions seem too late to me. The basic transition we face is not reform of meritocracy, or a changeover of national or international elites, but the replacement of the human race itself by something else. But they can still tell us something about how the human world worked, even as it prepares to leave the historical stage.
I went to St John’s College for undergrad, a small dissident college which was the only liberal arts & sciences college I could find that seemed mostly unironic in how it promoted itself & approached the curriculum. They didn’t offer merit scholarships but my grandfather was happy to pay for it.
I worked for Fannie Mae doing “credit risk analytics” after college, was promoted a couple times, ultimately to manager, while getting my MS in Math & Statistics from Georgetown, a top 25 university. I was key to standardizing mortgage data to a level that enabled high quality hedonic modeling of home prices; I think I’m on one of the related patents. I quit because it didn’t seem like I was doing anything to help anyone.
Then I went to work for GiveWell/OPP, and kept having my probationary period extended instead of being hired or fired because I wasn’t doing a bad job in any articulable way but somehow wasn’t giving them what they wanted.
I took a few years off to think about the situation, and now I’m on salary at a small research nonprofit, due to goodwill from richer friends from various kinds of work I couldn’t be paid for.
It’s not that I can’t get rewarded, but that I can’t get rewarded directly for contributing something good with integrity, which is demoralizing and confusing when mostly people are talking in a jargon that collectively invalidates that criticism despite obviously many of them believing it much of the time.
This way of organizing society seems to me to be obviously related to AI misalignment. A team would have difficulty coherently trying to develop aligned AI if it’s constituted the way this process constitutes elites.
As for alternate elites, I’d be interested in helping constitute one with an explicit theory of this class of problem, with a more overt acknowledgement of adversariality than the usual “Goodhart’s Law” deflection. Anything less and we just get OpenAI level slippage again.
So if I have grasped your own background, you come from an American social layer which is itself pretty elite in terms of social and cultural capital. You were socially adjacent to many people who did carry out the multi-year performative process, but you declined to do so, and the system did not reach out to take you on board anyway, and this is part of your evidence that it is something less than a perfect meritocracy.
I am most reminded of Eric Weinstein, who went to Harvard, but didn’t make it into the patronage networks-within-the-network, and 40 years later now specializes in elaborating his own version of how the system is deficient, corrupt, etc., while having made his own living among the counter-elite of finance, and in particular ending up working for Peter Thiel.
I don’t know your story at all, all I know is that you can write some good essays (e.g. the recent “Compradorization”), but I haven’t tried to find out what social and economic matrix you personally inhabit.
As for the general theme of alleged elites that aren’t actually the best, I have no trouble at all believing that. I would support a Swiss-cheese model of deficiencies in the world’s institutions and cultures, that leads to lost opportunities at every level, from people who are close to the very top of the pyramid but get passed over in favor of the second best, down to gifted individuals who nonetheless end up homeless, dead, or mad, because they can’t get the most elementary kind of social leverage.
My own situation is something like this: I’m Australian, I grew up without any connection to the professional classes or the middle class, but got as far as being a reserve for our IMO team, started a university degree, discovered that the human race in general was resigned to everyone spending their lives working for money and then dying of natural causes, found the Internet as a space where alternative ideas of all kinds had a chance, and over the long term spent my life below the poverty line but never far from academia, and educating myself and pursuing projects online.
I have accomplished a few things, but only a small fraction of what I might expect to have accomplished, if I had found or created a niche at a higher economic level. So I have a sense of profound ongoing lost opportunities, and I don’t just mean a loss for myself—there are works that I could have produced decades ago, which probably would have been in the canons of this or that intellectual subculture if I had actually been able to finish them, judging by what’s there now. Of course I have spent a bit of time thinking about this. If I had been the kind of person who knew at an earlier age how the game is played, perhaps my output would have been mediocre, rather than being those counterfactual works of excellence. Or maybe that’s just a cope.
As you mention, Australia has its own attempt at a meritocratic system, one that I don’t know much about (e.g. I have never heard of those Victorian high schools that you mention). I’m sure it has its deficiencies but I always felt that the barriers I personally faced were of a more fundamental nature, given the nature of my interests and ambitions. To mention one basic recurring example, if the average human psyche had the wisdom and the willpower to see a cure for ageing as something worth trying for, that would have been part of mainstream culture, institutions, and agenda decades ago, if not centuries. The most sophisticated explanation for such resistance that I ever found is in the works of Celia Green, who basically argues that humans learn to repress their ambitions—whether of that kind, or much lesser—for the sake of avoiding the difficulty and pain of failure, and then they take out this repressed frustration on each other in various ways.
In any case, such barriers can be overcome, but that requires persuasive power, political instincts, the ability to call upon other forms of credibility, and so forth, combined with the original insight that things could and should be different.
Returning to your own essay, as you might imagine, I am much more familiar with overlooked talent and lost opportunities that are right out on the social margins, rather than face to face with the central struggles for status and power. If you go far enough outside the system, you find rival elites, counter-elites, the makings of new future elites, as well as lost civilizations, futures that could have been, defeated and forgotten counter-elites of the past. And changes do occur, on small and large scales. The tech right obviously considers itself a new meritocracy that can use the turbulence of Trumpist populism to kick over the moribund shells of liberal America and replace them with AI-powered techno-optimist adhocracy, or whatever the new order is envisaged to be.
As a believer in short AI timelines, many of these discussions seem too late to me. The basic transition we face is not reform of meritocracy, or a changeover of national or international elites, but the replacement of the human race itself by something else. But they can still tell us something about how the human world worked, even as it prepares to leave the historical stage.
I went to St John’s College for undergrad, a small dissident college which was the only liberal arts & sciences college I could find that seemed mostly unironic in how it promoted itself & approached the curriculum. They didn’t offer merit scholarships but my grandfather was happy to pay for it.
I worked for Fannie Mae doing “credit risk analytics” after college, was promoted a couple times, ultimately to manager, while getting my MS in Math & Statistics from Georgetown, a top 25 university. I was key to standardizing mortgage data to a level that enabled high quality hedonic modeling of home prices; I think I’m on one of the related patents. I quit because it didn’t seem like I was doing anything to help anyone.
Then I went to work for GiveWell/OPP, and kept having my probationary period extended instead of being hired or fired because I wasn’t doing a bad job in any articulable way but somehow wasn’t giving them what they wanted. I took a few years off to think about the situation, and now I’m on salary at a small research nonprofit, due to goodwill from richer friends from various kinds of work I couldn’t be paid for.
It’s not that I can’t get rewarded, but that I can’t get rewarded directly for contributing something good with integrity, which is demoralizing and confusing when mostly people are talking in a jargon that collectively invalidates that criticism despite obviously many of them believing it much of the time.
This way of organizing society seems to me to be obviously related to AI misalignment. A team would have difficulty coherently trying to develop aligned AI if it’s constituted the way this process constitutes elites.
As for alternate elites, I’d be interested in helping constitute one with an explicit theory of this class of problem, with a more overt acknowledgement of adversariality than the usual “Goodhart’s Law” deflection. Anything less and we just get OpenAI level slippage again.