“If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.”
https://substack.com/@ravenofempire
Raven Of Empire
Karma: 9
I do agree the wars are less in scale, I was not making any claim that they weren’t. The claim is about the sum of all structural violence that occurs, the sum of Moloch. War, disease, poverty, starvation and death are all caused by unnatural concentrations of resources outside immediate access on the land. Those resources include the information and skill required to survive. In hunter-gatherer life, the knowledge and skills needed to survive were distributed across the community and accessible to everyone. Finally, even if you gained the skills to go off the grid as an individual you’d still need a clan to survive long term.
Society has abstracted the violence of nature into a threat of violence when trying to avoid the leviathan, and that threat is frequently acted on.
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You’re right that the inference from ‘people suppress bragging’ to ‘egalitarian society’ deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you’re applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn’t built on the thin inference ‘people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism’.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar’s number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don’t exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you’d predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band life don’t transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson’s own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.
it creates a background violence that takes form in the many invisible hands of structural power asymmetry.
responds to:
So the natural state of humanity seems like groups fighting against other groups, but even within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females’ children, and so on. A fractal of competition...
The argument is that this social contract violence abstraction is the attempt at meeting our fundamentally collaborative evolutionary niche in the context of large societies. The fractal power structure you describe is the full and complex solution that Hobbes’ simplifies.
We as a social species have evolved to this point because it is the most amount of collaboration our social technologies have gotten to.
Within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females’ children, and so on.
Alphas in human society is a Randian myth. Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
Hobbes’ “state of nature” honestly bothers me, particularly from the perhaps simplistic lens of its name. As a toy game-theoretic model of a multi-polar trap, it is interesting, but in reality it’s too reductive. This isn’t a new criticism; I just want to talk about it.
I dislike many things about the concept, but I will illustrate two: his assumption of a “war of all against all”, and his assumption that this state of nature has ended.
The war of all against all is an oversimplification; humans are fundamentally collaborative animals. For example, an easy conclusion of modern anthropology is that humans evolved for relevant cooperation. Our reasoning clearly emerged out of social problem solving, and although we are tribally competitive, it can be seen as a remnant of the interspecies competitive state that our niche relies on evolving out of. It was out of the forge of the EEA that our prosocial instincts emerged.
The social contract is a useful idea; I just find his application of it, particularly as the solution to the state of nature, to be another oversimplification. What the social contract fundamentally does is abstract the violence; it effectively just moves or concentrates it. The social contract creates Moloch. Instead of allowing violence to exist in physicality, it creates a background violence that takes form in the many invisible hands of structural power asymmetry. It also creates a much more obvious concentrated foreground violence, one that bubbles up in the conflicts between leviathans. It creates war on a scale much larger than simple tribal conflicts. We have not moved out of the state of nature; we have simply abstracted it, just as you abstract a data type.
Goodhart’s Law and a Minimum Viable Sugarscape: Karpathy Pattern ABM Autoresearch
Raven Of Empire’s Shortform
This is so true. I find the assumption that the required specifications are even knowable exhausting. We do not have perfect information. People be just wrong sometimes.
I agree with a lot of the ideas in this post, the dangers of centralization of power and the considerations that have to be made for long term success. I agree that the core problem is expansion without consideration of long-term defensibility. I do believe that protecting the core of the ideology of lesswrong and AI safety is a noble cause.
I have an almost orthogonal issue with your arguments, I think institutional robustness may be the wrong tool for the job, and potentially counterproductive. My problems are specifically the case for antifragility, and my argument against the US as a success case.
This process of corruption after expansion is one of creative destruction. One group is wildly successful, popularizes the ideology, people find the core to be rotten, break off into smaller groups, and restart the cycle. This is the process of life.
Creating an institution that is robust only allows the unavoidable mistakes written into its initial conditions to persist for longer. It lets the rot stew.
Addressing the US, I would argue this process of creative destruction is happening now, to the US. The argument that the US is able to protect its core through institutions is contradicted simply by the fact that they are made up of people. As you said the innovation is that these things don’t rely on just good people.The US institutions fundamentally requires people to operate. In fact it concentrates the power such that the problems of specific people happening to be bad is compounded. If core leaders don’t act in good faith, significant harm occurs, often in ways that are completely unaccountable. I’ll avoid making specific political examples, my core point is that implying institutions aren’t people is wrong.
The US empires dominance created the conditions for chinese success, the core of creative destruction. The very dominance that made American institutions look robust created the conditions for their replacement. Optimizing for short term profit, a core failure mode baked into its founding incentives, hollowed out its productive capacity and allowed China to fill the gap in hard goods.
In my opinion robust institutions are doubly bad, ideological or political. Institutions compound the errors and the exploitation, and the robustness disallows for growth under creative destruction.
Hello! My name is Owen, I’m a 21-year-old physics and computer science student and newish here. I have been in parallel communities to the rationality scene since I was 16 and have a lot of experience speculating wildly about science fiction topics haha. Seriously though I think this community is interesting and has a wonderful goal of attempting to be less wrong :) I’m excited to participate more as I attempt to lose my pre-reserved judgements about the people in this community lol.
https://substack.com/@ravenofempire is a free substack where I argue with more artistic flair than allowed here. Some of my post may be a LessWrong translated version of things I have posted there.
This pattern appears in mainstream responses to left-economic critique.
The critiques point at concrete problems: real wage stagnation and extreme capital concentration distorting political institutions. The standard responses are: “capital concentration is necessary for economic development,” “self-interest aggregates information better than bureaucratic central planning,” “look at the Soviet Union.”
Im not saying marxism or its implementations can be accepted without question, but defensive neoliberal rhetoric cannot be accepted either. “The theorist’s framework was flawed” or “the implementations failed” isn’t an answer to “is wage stagnation real” or “is capital concentration distorting political institutions.”