Robin Hanson - Civilizational Goals to Prevent Decline - Transhumanist Party Enlightenment Salon

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party Virtual
Enlightenment Salon. My name is Jannati stolier Off the second
and I am the Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party.
Here we hold conversations with some of the world's leading
thinkers in longevity, science, technology, philosophy, and politics. Like the

(00:21):
philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, we aim to connect
every field of human endeavor and arrive at nuances to
achieve longer lives, greater rationality, and the progress of our civilization. Greetings,
ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our US Transhumanist Party
Virtual Enlightenment Salon of Sunday, November sixteenth, two thousand twenty five.

(00:46):
Today we have a fascinating conversation for you and a
continuation of a prior conversation about cultural drift, the risks
of cultural decline, and how that decline could hopefully be prevented.
And joining us today in addition to our Director of

(01:07):
Visual Art Artremone Garcia, is our special guest, Professor Robin Hanson.
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George
Mason University and received his PhD in nineteen ninety seven
and social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason's economics
faculty in nineteen ninety nine after completing a two year

(01:28):
post dock at UC Berkeley. His major fields of interest
include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. He is
also interested in all aspects of the future, which is
why we are quite pleased to have him back again
as our guest, including uploading, nanotech, cosmology, the foundations of physics,
future economic growth rates, limits of computation, and the origins

(01:51):
of life. So quite a wide range of interests, and
we had him previously as a guest on our Virtual
Enlightenments lawn of August twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. This
was such a fascinating conversation that we thought it would
be a great idea to continue it today and bring
back some of the prior audience questions as well. But

(02:14):
before we do that, Professor Hanson has a really brief
presentation to recap what we discussed previously and set the
stage for continuing our conversation. So Professor Hanson, welcome and
please proceed.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Hello everyone, So the idea is just to go quickly
over the basic ideas here just so we're all on
the same page. Civilizations have risen and fallen in history,
and our civilization might also fall. And the question is,
if so, what would cause that and could we stop it?
It should be a very basic concerned all futurists if

(02:53):
our civilization is going to fall. So let's take contexts
in biology. Species in biology are a unit of organisms
and they live in either large or small habitats. So
there are like large oceans where there are big habitats,
and then there are tiny rainforest sections and rivers and
the coral reefs where there's lots of little habitats. And

(03:14):
in the little habitats you have small species with fewer members,
and in the big habitats you have big species with
more members. And a key point is that these big species,
in the big habitats, they can do more innovation faster
within the species because there's more places for innovations to
start in a big species, and then it can spread
to the whole species. So large species should innovate faster

(03:37):
in terms of the features that are allowed to vary
within the species, but small species can do more innovation
of the features that define as species, the things that
they all have to have it together, and therefore there's
going to be more innovation of species and coral reefs
and rivers and rainforests. And it turns out life today
more comes from that second set of habitats, meaning that

(03:58):
evolution of species actually seems to matter more than evolution
in species. Culture is a unique thing for humans compared
to pretty much all the other animals. It's basically biological
evolution again, but now we just have more ways to
inherit behavior. So instead of just passing along your behavior
through your DNA to your children from two parents, you

(04:22):
can collect behavior from many parents basically, and you can
do that within your life. You don't have to wait
till you're born and get a whole new set, and
so cultural evolution can just be much faster and flexible.
And it's humanity superpower, and that's the thing that made
humanity work well. And it has the same natural selection process,

(04:42):
and it has these same two levels that we were
talking about within culture evolution and between culture revolutions. So
if you think about corporate cultures, for example, when you
have a corporation, it has a culture within there, and
then there's innovation within a company, an innovation that shows
up one place in a company, it can spread to
all the rest parts of the company. With it's harder
to spread and innovation across company boundaries. But then there's

(05:03):
the whole corporate culture that's hard to vary within the company.
And then for that you need more companies. And so
industries that are more fragmented with more companies actually are
more innovative overall than industries with fewer firms, suggesting that
again innovation of corporate culture actually matters more than innovation
within corporate culture. So think of natural selection here in

(05:27):
terms of culture, or even DNA as a control problem.
So make an analogy with driving a car. When you're
driving a car, there's a set of parameters of the process,
and if they're in a good rate regime, it'll work
in a bad resume at work. So think of the primeters.
How fast are you going, how wiggily is the road,
How clearly can you see the road, How quickly can
you react to what you see to turn the wheel,

(05:49):
How reliable is the wheel connection to the tires, how
bumpy is the road. You can see that if all
these parameters are in a good regime, you're going slowly
down a road that's not moving very far. You can
see clearly you'll stay on the road. But if you
turn all these parameters bad, then you'll just go into
a regime where you can't stay on the road. You'll
drift off the road and crash. That's a control problem. Now,

(06:10):
natural selection is a control process too. We tend to
think of natural selection as about improving and creating innovations,
but its first tax is to prevent things from getting worse.
So natural selection needs to preserve stuff and keep it
from getting worse. And so the way to think about
it is, there's this high dimensional space illustrated here, but

(06:30):
think of more than just three dimensions, ten one thousand dimensions.
And in this high dimensional space, there's some adaptive region.
There's a region where things are good, and there's a
bunch of points in this space, and points near the
middle of this adaptive region they grow and they split.
Points away from this region shrink and die. And the
task of natural selection initially is just to have this

(06:53):
cloud of points track this region, because this region is
going to move, and as the region moves, some of
the points should stay close to it so that those
points can split and grow, so that the whole cloud.
Some of the points will die and go away, but
the cloud can keep tracking as long as some of
the points are closer. So there's four key parameters of
this process. One is how many points are there. You

(07:15):
can tell if there's just one point, it's going to
be harder to track the region. Two is how big
is this effect of points in the region growing, points
out shrinking. If there's not much of an effect, there
won't it won't track the region. Third, how fast is
this region moving. The faster it moves, the harder that'll be.
And fourth, how much do these points just wiggle independently

(07:38):
of all these other things, Because the more they just
randomly wiggle a lot, it'll be hard to track the region.
So those are the four key parameters of the natural
selection process of DNA and of culture. And the problem
is going to be at the culture level as opposed
to the with it, not the within cultures. So it's
the between cultures. So let's go to macrocultures. So I

(08:00):
think three centuries ago in our world, a world was
full of lots of little peasant cultures, each with a
thousand or two people in it, near the edge of survival.
They had pandemics and famines and wars all the time,
so they were subject to a strong selection. There were
hundreds of thousands of these things. The world changed slowly.

(08:25):
That is, the world economy doubled roughly every thousand years
back long ago, so the adaptive region was changing slowly,
and they were very conservative cultures. They were trying not
to change. So arguably that was a good regime for
cultural evolution. These cultures could track the world effectively, and
they did. But now over the last few centuries what's changed. First,

(08:48):
we peasant cultures and we smashed them into a national culture,
so we had much less variety, from hundreds of thousands
down to hundreds. Then we merged at least the elite
parts of these cultures into a global monoculture, a vast
reduction and variety selection effects are way down because as
we've gotten rich and peaceful and healthy, we're not dying off,

(09:10):
so these cultures aren't dying off. Third, the world is
changing much faster, so worldly commoy now doubles every fifteen
to twenty years instead of thousand years, So the rate
at which culture needs to adapt to this rapidly changing
world is much faster, and Finally, in place of conservative
cultures that we're trying not to change, we decided we
were eager for cultural change. So the modern world has

(09:31):
cultural activists who are eager to cause cultural change. They
have all these agendas they're trying to push to cause
cultural change, and unfortunately most of that isn't tracking adaptive pressures.
So from the point of view of this selection process,
it's just random wiggling. And so that's the reason to worry.
Now our macrocultures, the few remaining, are not tracking the

(09:54):
adaptive region as a move. So it's like the car
driving off the road. And that's the key problem here.
So the prediction noticed is that within cultural revolution should
be great. Having just a few macrocultures means that innovation
within them can spread to any other part of them,
and that should be having record levels of technology and
business practice innovation that's predicted by having too few cultures.

(10:17):
The problem is the shared features of cultures, attitudes toward
democracy and war and family and patriotism and death and
work and you know, those sorts of key attitudes of
that drive human behavior. Those are the things we wouldn't
have enough variety in and plausibly this could explain many

(10:39):
ways in which culture has become maladaptive. That is, norms
and values markers could plausibly be becoming maladaptive over the last
few centuries as a result of this. Probably the most
clearest example would be fertility fall, which seems to be
about to cause a population decline. There are ways to
those seem to be primarily caused by a number of
cultural trends that we can IDENTI if I've talked to

(11:01):
if you want that the approximate cause of fertility decline
is cultural change, And then why are these cultures changing?
Possibly just because of cultural drift as well. We've been
talking about this process by which culture drifts off the
road and reven We're not going to focused on that
at the moment, but there are ways we can think
about fixing fertility. But if we think about ways to

(11:22):
fix this cultural drift problem, first of at the highest level,
I think there's two possible fixes. Basically, we're on a
ship heading for an iceberg. There are two things you
can do. You can try to rest control of the
whole ship and turn the wheel to turn the whole ship,
or you can try to get off on lifeboats. Those
are the two key options. So we can try to

(11:44):
reform and improve the shared monoculture of the world and
try to get it to become more adaptive to follow
a new process of making its changes, or we can
abandon it and try to make new subcultures that are resist.
So in terms of fertility, basically, long ago, the Christians

(12:07):
took over the Roman Empire by doubling every twenty years
for three centuries, and the Amageh and Heredum are at
the moment doubling every twenty years. The Amus have been
doing that for over a century. If they keep doing
that for another couple of centuries, then they could dominate
the world. And their key is that they resist influenced
by the macroculture shared world culture. They are very insular
part due to being religious, and so they just have

(12:29):
their own separate world where they have their own culture
and therefore can promote their own fertility. So an approach
of getting off in the lifeboats is try to do
that sort of thing, join one of these subcultures that's
growing instead of they shared foiled figure, or try to
create a new transhumanist perhaps insular subculture that would have

(12:50):
high fertility and then escape the shrinking of the rest
of the world, or we can try to turn the
whole ship. There are some sort of ways to think
about what we could do. If we don't do anything, plausibly,
not only will this civilization fall like past ones have,
but when the next one rises, it would fall again,
because the same process could be behind the rise and

(13:12):
fall of all of these. Eventually, if we get spread
across different stars in the future, they could be so
far apart that they couldn't be synchronized. You'd at least
have multiple independent cultures, but that's a long way off.
We could try. Obviously, if we could return to strong
war and fandoms and pandemics, then yay, we would get
more selection pressure, but nobody wants that. Maybe we could

(13:35):
try to get stronger fertility. Hey, if we get Ais,
they could at least prevent population decline, and that would
be and they might if we allowed them to be Malthusian,
they could have stronger selection pressures within them, but they
could still have the problem of a world monoculture of Ais.
Unless the Ais fragment somehow into very separate, insular subcultures,

(13:58):
the whole world's culture of Ais could still have this
cultural drift problem. We could try to change culture to
become more adaptive. We could have a kind of multiculturalism
that's deeper. So today, when people talk about multiculturalism, they
tend to think of a shallow kind of multiculturalism. I
eat different food and songs and holidays. People like that

(14:19):
kind of multicultural list. But if you talk about people
having different attitudes toward gender or sex or death war,
people hate that kind of multicultural live and they work
hard to suppress it. So you somehow need to get
a lot more of that. You could try to return
to a past culture, but somehow you need to generalize
it from its original context. You could somehow have a

(14:42):
world that just celebrated and eagerly pursued social Darwinism, but
as you know, people hate that idea. We could try
to reduce the scope of culture by taking more choices
out of the shared scope of the choices we make
together and into more choices. We could make different by having,
say capitalism choose more things in the world, less reliance

(15:02):
on status markers to make choices. And finally, my favorite
solution is a long shot, which is just to have
a much stronger form of governance. So I am the
inventor of a formal governance called a few tarchy, and
it's undergoing trials now finally invented twenty six years ago,

(15:23):
but now finding over the last few years a couple
of companies and other organizations have been trying and if
those success trials continue to be successful, then maybe we'll
have a more competent form of governance. And then the
idea is to hand that task over to this government.
And so the mechanism is, briefly, you have a asset
that represents the value trying to achieve that goes up,

(15:45):
the price goes up and down when people's estimate of
that value goes up and down. You split that asset
into two conditional markets where you trade the asset conditional
on making a particular decision yes versus no. There's the
yes ass value of the asset, that no value of
the asset. If the yes price is higher than the no,
that's the market saying yes, you want to do this
so that the price goes up so that your value

(16:06):
gets achieved. That's this key concept that's being tested and
it's kind of in history I won't tell you about. Then,
in order to make this work, what we actually would
need to do is find a sacred goal. And that's
probably why I've been invited back here, is that because
if you just give it the goal of preventing civilization decline,
that won't actually work because once the mechanism starts to

(16:29):
demand sacrifices of us in the name of this goal,
will go, well, we don't like that, so forget, let's
change the goal. We need a goal that we would
be committed to that is, because it was sacred to us,
we would be ashamed to abandoned it, and we would
be proud to sacrifice it. And we need that goal
to also be a goal that was inconsistent with civilization declined.

(16:50):
So when I did some polls, here are some things
near the top, or say, when a lot of people
live in space, or when we produce immortality. Those are
goals that many people think we could treat as a
sacred goal plausibly that we would be attached to and
proud to sacrifice for, and they do seem to be
inconsistent with civilization decline. And so then if you just

(17:11):
gave those goals to an incompetent form of governance like
the ones we have now, that won't work. Because they
won't actually achieve the goal, they'll just say they are.
But if you have a competent form of governance where
you can give it a goal and then it will
actually achieve it, then by giving it a goal inconsistent
with civilization decline, you would in fact prevent civilization decline.
And then they shared large part of the world that

(17:32):
shared such a governance mechanism tied to such a sacred
goal could in fact plausibly prevent So I e. This
is the way to turn the whole ship of the
world culture. And that's the quick description of my concept.
And I have succeeded in roughly fifteen minute summary here
of what we talked about much longer last time, and

(17:53):
of course we will review things as necessary to get
clearer on them in this coming discussion over the next
or forty minutes.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Excellent. Well, thank you very much for this overview. And indeed,
the reason why I thought it would be worthwhile to
continue this conversation is because this approach of emphasizing a
sacred goal seems to be the most powerful of the

(18:23):
potential solutions that you have articulated. If we could make
it work. Before we quite get to that point in
the discussion, because you mentioned some other possibilities, I wanted
to bring up certain past audience questions that could be relevant.
And we will get back to the slides, especially the

(18:45):
slide on the sacred goals, because I would like to
explore those with you later. But first, in terms of
certain audience members, they were wondering, well, does declining fertility
necessarily cause declining innovation or can we compensate for that

(19:06):
through various ways? And you did point out some of them.
I was thinking, could we cultivate individuals more intensively, Like, yes,
we have more intensive parenting now, so most families don't
have eight kids. They might have one kid, but they
would put a lot of resources into that one kid.
Instead of working on the farm all day. That person

(19:28):
can actually study quite a bit, become competent in a
variety of disciplines, and eventually become much more innovative than
the average person who was raised to work on a
farm two three hundred years ago. Also another possibility would
be using more automation and AI. It seems that the

(19:50):
AI agents that are emerging today are let's say, very
basic versions of the ms that you have written about,
and they're already starting to post on x Twitter, They're
already starting to engage in conversations with people. Some people
might think they're stimulating certain ideas, certain intellectual discourse that

(20:13):
might not have happened otherwise. So there's some promise in that. Also,
cultural changes to value innovation more. Some people don't value
innovation as much as perhaps we might want them to,
and could they be persuaded to think in more innovative ways.
And even if there are fewer people in absolute terms,

(20:33):
there will be more innovative people who explicitly value innovation.
So these are let's say, some fairly proximate ways in
which fertility decline can be compensated for. I would be
happy to go into some, let's say, less proximate ways,
but these seem very directly accessible today. So what do

(20:54):
you think about these alternatives?

Speaker 2 (20:57):
So this is responding to a point I didn't make
any today's summary because I went very quickly and didn't
talk much about the fertility problem. But a key problem
with declining fertility is that the population then declines, and
then the economy declines, and then plausibly, I argued, innovation
rates decline, and that has consequences for cutting, liberality, and

(21:20):
other sorts of features of our society. So the overall
typical approximation is that innovation rates are roughly proportional to
overall rates of economic activity. Now, you might say, well,
that's overall and average. Couldn't we change more specifically to
have some people be much more innovative? Now? In our

(21:41):
world today, say Silicon Valley is accepted as being unusually innovative,
and many places around the world have said, we want
to be the next Silicon Valley of X, whatever X is,
and they put a lot of effort into trying to
reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, largely failing. So for the last century,

(22:01):
even the world has known that innovation has been the
route to wealth and power in the world, and so
nations all around the world have said, how can we
be more innovative? And they have tried somewhat to be
more innovative, but largely failed to purposely become more innovative.
The world doesn't seem to know how actually, because overall
rates of innovation haven't actually changed that much in the

(22:23):
last century or so, even though we've decided to increase
the priority and we spend a lot more on research
and development than we did a century ago by factor
of ten or something, at least in terms of even
percentage of the economy. But even so, rates of innovation
have just not increased very much. And in the places
that really put in an effort to say, let's be
the next silicon valley here, they have not actually succeeded

(22:45):
in becoming the next silicon. So even though there are
in fact large variations in how innovative companies are and
places are, it just seems like we don't know how
to purposely achieve that. So that's why I would still
stick with the overall approximation that if population declines plausibly,
I mean, another question is when population peaks, the West

(23:06):
will have already been declining and Africa will be rising.
So a key question in that intermediate period is can
Africa pick up the innovation tasks that the West would
be dropping. Can African population be as innovative as the West,
And even then we have a problem with population declines.
But I think there's reason to worry that Africa may
just not be as innovative as the West has been

(23:28):
at and therefore innovation rates could well peak before population does.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yes, very interesting and certainly for Africa to be as
innovative as the West, Africa is going to need to
develop the infrastructure for innovation. When I've spoken with Africans
who have been interested in transhumanism and entrepreneurship and bringing
more technology to African countries, they have stated that, yes,

(23:56):
there is an eager, largely young population that is willing
to learn, that is willing to innovate, but they have
real problems with infrastructure, poor roads, poor electrical access, water access,
internet access, a lot of corruption, a lot of crime,
and to overcome that will require a massive effort. Many

(24:18):
of them would rather move to a Western country and
become more innovative there, and they're certainly quite motivated to
do that, at least among the people with whom I've conversed.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
If they're allowed, that's fine, that it doesn't matter that
it happens in Africa. There'll just be a lot of
Africans then, and we just would want to be innovative anywhere.
So if we could make them innovative by moving them
to the West, great, But the question is will they move,
and then if they do move, will they be as innovative? Yes?

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Indeed, so if the issue is a declining population is
likely to cause a decline and innovation, and maybe we
don't know exactly how, but we haven't been able to
figure out acceptable substitutes. In let's say an intermediate term.
Could there be more of a transhumanist policy involving ectogenesis?

(25:13):
So let's say people's willingness to reproduce in the old
fashioned way has declined and will continue to decline, and
that kind of reproduction, though nobody will put barriers in
the way of it, is not going to be enough
to replenish the current levels of population. But artificial wombs

(25:35):
are advancing, so there have already been successful experiments in
terms of incubating organisms like baby sheep in artificial wombs.
It's not inconceivable that within twenty years we could have
sufficiently reliable artificial womb technology to incubate humans. So could

(25:56):
there be a policy stating that we will target a
population growth of x percent. If people voluntarily fulfill that goal,
that's great, But if they don't, then the shortfall will
be supplied through an ectogenesis program. And then for those
children who are born there could be perhaps some families

(26:19):
willing to adopt them. For those who are not adopted,
we will educate them, so we will have an education
program for the next generation of maybe TRANSHUMANISTM client children too,
because there might be a normative component to that and
that would slow down the population decline or maybe averted.
What do you think of that possibility.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
So IVF has been a technology for assisting with birth
for over a half century now, and I think the
stats at the moment are IVF still is a really
minor contribution to overall birth rates. So and if you
look at say forty year olds or even over forty today,

(27:00):
they're having births at a lower rate than they did
in say nineteen hundred, and it's mostly because of unwillingness
to have the kids. That is, if you have a kid,
then it's a lot of work to raise them, and
so people today are not being willing to go through
all that work. So if you could somehow get women
to have kids and then raise them in an orphanage,

(27:20):
then maybe you could substitute for the unwillingness of women
to raise the and their husbands of course to raise
the kids. But even today we find it quite hard
to sort of just pay women to have kids. So
I mean, if we're going to continue rely on the
willingness of people to have kids voluntarily and then raise
them voluntarily. Then it's you know, these technologies aren't the

(27:44):
limiting factor. It's the limiting factors people just not willing
to have and raise the kids. Obviously, if you could
you substitute a form of capitalism in where we'll pay
women to have kids and then pay orphanages to raise
the kids, and then say to parents you don't have to,
you know, raise the kids. Well, we'll do it for you.
You know, then you could have a lot more kids.
But people just don't like that idea, mostly of for

(28:07):
profit orphanages or even large government orphanage houses, you know,
raising most kids.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Yes, and I would foresee some let's say cultural resistance
to that idea. I think there would have to be
an extreme assurance that the upbringing would be of good quality.
So one potential arrangement that does seem to work to
some extent is the kibbutz in Israel, where children are

(28:37):
raised in rather communal settings and.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Parents in the kibbutz put a lot of work into parenting.
This is not you know, not parenting that that is parenting. Yes,
they're shared communal parenting, but they put a lot of
work into parenting.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yes, fair enough, fair enough. So then there's also the
possible ability of, let's say, a more intensive multiculturalism. And
there were several questions along these lines. So one question
was given that American culture has the tendency to borrow

(29:14):
elements from most cultures, is it possible for American culture
to incorporate the between culture competition into itself through a
more pronounced hyper pluralism that is specifically cultivated. So maybe
we could have some basic ground rules like don't kill
one another, don't enslave one another, don't abuse your kids.

(29:36):
But within those parameters, there's a great variety of say,
educational approaches or lifestyle approaches, and it's not just say
foods or music or clothing styles. You really could create
your own little society, your own little microcosm, and largely

(29:56):
self regulate and see what happens as long is you
don't wage war on other little societies. And there would
be some sort of macro framework, but it would be
pretty lais a fair.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
So separate out a making it possible for people to
make very separate cultures, and the willingness or inclination to
do so. First of all, this is largely a world
problem now, no longer just a US culture. Isn't actually
that different from the rest of the world culture on
most of these cultural things, it's more of a world

(30:31):
especially among elites. And the main approximate cause of this
lower cultural variety is the fact that we trade and
talk and travel more all around the world, that we
are just more integrated and more connected to each other.
So to resist that and to reverse it, we would
have to become more insular, to resist interacting, traveling, talking

(30:55):
with all these other people in the world. And most
people aren't inclined to do that. So the question is
how do you get them even inclined to those sorts
of variations. But then there are again some very soons
that we have all sorts of, you know, cultures of fandom, say,
and people liking different kinds again food and drink and
songs and holidays and things like that. We tend to

(31:16):
celebrate that kind of variety. Unfortunately, the kind of we
need is the kind that's more basic life practices. And
then when you look at people who have different attitudes
to say, gender equality or to death or to war
or to democracy, when you see different attitudes or that
people call those Nazis and they want to crush it,

(31:36):
and there's just not much interest in tolerance for that
kind of variety. That is, I mean, first of all,
you get some people have to want to be that right,
and then you have to get other people to allow it,
to support that, you know, letting them be different. So
for example, if you look at say COVID, we have

(31:59):
you known countries in the world that could have had
one hundred different policy experience experiments, but we in fact
mostly did pretty much the same thing in the whole
world around because people shared a world culture and they
in fact not only fought together about what to do
the same whenever anybody did it different, they said, shame,
shame on Sweden. How dare you do something different than
the rest of us are doing. We need to stop

(32:19):
you from doing that different. Or today, the only country
in the world I think that allows organ sales is
i Ran, and by alessisis to get together a lot
and talk about how are we going to make Iran
stop deviating from the world consensus that they shouldn't be
organ sales. And that's just true in a lot of
areas of regulation, and culture that there's relatively a little variety,
and when there is variety, the main energy is to

(32:39):
try to squash it, to try to stop that variety.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
So I'm wondering, though, in terms of variety, isn't an
approach like multiculturalism likely to preserve more variety? So Siba
Chamuza are foreign ambassador from Togo previously asked as multiculturalism
in the broad sense of the term, not one of
the essential sources of the power and success of the

(33:04):
United States. So the United States as the foundation in
a way for the current global monoculture, in the sense
that so many countries, societies, places around the world have
adopted elements of American culture. The United States too has
borrowed elements from a lot of other cultures it has
come into contact with, and hasn't been insular. So some

(33:27):
of our viewers, like Michael Lasine, wonder well, is insular
really good or can being too insular, let's say, circumscribe
the ability of a culture to persist in the face
of changing external circumstances. So America has been a fairly
robust culture, precisely because there has been a great deal

(33:51):
of adaptability. On the other hand, The point that you're
making is that the American culture has become so much
a part of the global monoculture that there could be
some variations outside of the American culture as it exists
today that are just roundly rejected, even if they may

(34:14):
be adaptive to future changes. So could there be some
sort of policy of assimilating smaller cultures and not killing
them off through selection pressures, but letting them remain and
seeing how they might be drawn upon as needed, even
if they don't become the main culture. They don't become

(34:36):
the monoculture. But we try to be humane. We don't
want to eradicate any group of people or any culture
as long as it's peaceful. So is there a way
to do that? Is there a way to create, let's say,
a macroculture that has between culture competition inside it.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
So over the last few centuries, a key trend was
that some cultures became more powerful and more rich and
more widely known around the world, and then as other
cultures started to become aware of these more rich, powerful cultures,
they largely said, we need to copy some of that

(35:22):
or we're going to be left behind. There's been a
large degree of copying the most successful over the last
few centuries, where a big energy of cultural convergence has
been cultures dropping their previous features and adopting the more
modern or successful features. And that's part of why the
world is much more homogeneous today. And there's offer like

(35:42):
an emptying out. So you might think of say Mexican Americans,
like they retain their Mexican identity by some foods and
some clothes and some holidays, maybe some TV shows they like,
but mostly they're pretty much the same as everybody else
Whereas like half century or century ago, they would have
been a lot more differ they would have retained things.
But this has happened for many in the United States.

(36:03):
Many kinds of cultures come here, and they retain some
surface differences and some surface identity, but much of their
basic practices are adapted or switching to the common practices
in the United States. And that's how the whole world
is going now. Really, So, I mean, and yes, almost

(36:24):
everybody thinks if I were to become insular and you know,
just retain my old ways, I would be losing out
compared to all the advantages I can get by adopting
the global standard practices and yes, almost everybody else thinks.
I don't want to lose out. I want to join
the world consensus and be like everybody else so that

(36:45):
I can't I don't fail. And that's been the energy
for this huge convergence. But the problem is about that
cloud of points. We just have the one point now,
and so if it wiggles randomly in one direction and
the adaptive region goes in another direction, we're just going
to lose that connection, and you need a cloud of

(37:06):
points to track it. But we don't have the cloud
of points. And nobody wants to be the points that
would be away from where everybody else is because they
would see they would lose out. Not only you know,
might they have worse technology, et cetera, but they would
just be at odds with other people and less easily
assimilate in other people. So here's a piece of evidence.
When I meet elite people around the world, which I

(37:28):
do sometimes, especially young ambitious people, they tell me two things.
So say they're from Brazil. They tell me Brazilians have
some unique features that the world should value. They have
a unique personality and things they're good at. And you know, yes,
they're different in some ways, but that's good for the world.
And then they also tell me that they personally will
fit in just fine in any elite organization. They have

(37:49):
no distinguishing features that will be any trouble whatsoever for
being part of elite organizations around the world. And in fact,
they are pretty much the same as all the other
elite people in terms of how they carry themselves and
the personalities and their capabilities. So that's this strong convergence
of young, ambitious elite people all around the world today

(38:10):
and has been for a while. They eagerly try to
figure out what is the elite shared culture and try
to act like that and have the same taste as
other people like that and the same capacities and do
meetings the same, et cetera. Because they all want our
ambitious people wanting to fit in. But then we all
have this single shared elite culture.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Interesting, and I do observe that there is this singular
elite culture that a lot of people at least aspire toward.
Sometimes I think they kind of undermine themselves because if
they aspired more for success in let's say, a smaller setting,

(38:56):
a more local setting, at least relatively speaking, they would
be more back in to big fish and small ponds,
and they would actually win out over being in a
singular competition with all of the elites from all over
the world.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
So in college, if you have our program to say
in politics, and now you call it national or international politics,
students are much more interested. If you have a business program,
you call it this is international business, and people love
to go over that. That is, students just love to
associate with these larger units and see that as more prestigious.
And nobody wants to do local politics. You want you're

(39:32):
a politician, you want to be national or international politics. Right, so, yes,
but there's a lot of jobs in local politics and
local business. But I mean most businesses local business. But
people want to be involved in international business. Why because
they like the grand prestige of these large units. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
So it seems that the drive for prestige and many
people overshadows the drive for actual success. And there are
other examples of this. So highly vertical industries, like say Hollywood,
a lot of people move to the Los Angeles area
thinking they will strike it big, they will become some

(40:11):
famous actor or famous singer. Of course most of them
won't even by the sheer lack of available slots for
those kinds of roles, so they end up underperforming relatives
to their potential had their aspirations been let's say, more
down to earth or in industries where the pyramid is

(40:33):
not so steeply sloped. So it seems the problem, or
one of the main problems here isn't that there's a
dominant culture that's intentionally eating up all the other cultures
and erasing variety. It's that there is something in the
incentive structure for many people that leads them to gravitate

(40:57):
toward making themselves and their own behaviors, habits, aspirations more homogenious.
Even if the dominant culture is pretty lax and tolerant,
like most American elites aren't going to say you have
to be exactly like us in every single respect. There
are actually fairly tolerant of variety. So would you say,

(41:18):
it's just the incentive structure of how people themselves respond
to a very successful, generally speaking, monoculture.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Humans that just have this strong tendency to when they
interact with other people create a shared culture, and that
includes shared expectations about dress and accents and food and
how you carry yourself and when you show up at
work and all these sorts of things. That's just forever
for humanity, been a thing that's happened. When you have
multiple cultures come together, then it takes some time for
them to produce a shared culture, but that does consistently happen.

(41:50):
So that's where we're in right now.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yes, indeed, so now I think it's a good idea
to revisit the safe goals. So I will bring up
this slide once again because even in a monoculture, it
is hypothetically possible to have a sacred goal that motivates
a lot of people, and it could be seen as

(42:15):
a source of status and prestige. And it's interesting too.
The top two goals that you've listed here based on
your survey are having an off earth population and preventing
human extinction. Those seem to be very sensible, but very
low mortality is an third, or tied with second place,

(42:40):
I suppose with preparing to fight aliens. I'm not sure
we need a belligerent stance toward potential alien visitors. But
very low mortality is of course the goal, or a
framing of the goal that transhumanists would very much identify with,
and it could solve a lot of problems in addition

(43:02):
to being inherently worthwhile, because then population decline would be slowed,
a lot of very innovative people would stay around and
remain biologically younger and would be able to continue to
contribute and innovate. So the issue, the obstacle that I'm

(43:24):
seeing as a transhumanist is how do you get this
extremely large monoculture, which has very entrenched institutions and constituencies,
to embrace a goal like this. And I would invite
you to discuss that, invite you to discuss what you
think are some of the characteristics of these sacred goals

(43:48):
that would make them easier to formulate or implement. And
do you see a path from our current society to
a society where even let's say the American derived world
monoculture embraces very low mortality or radical life extension or

(44:10):
any other of the sacred goals that you've displayed.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
So I switched the slide to a slide on modernism
that we didn't go over before because I wanted to
highlight the What I would see is the main obstacle
is that roughly around nineteen hundred, the world just radically
changed its stance toward culture. Up until that point, most
everywhere was very conservative and didn't want to change culture,
even though it was changing culture. So if you look

(44:36):
at say a novel like Middle March, it describes the
world where the culture the world is changing, like railroads
are coming to the town in England, but the society
sees itself as very stable. And then around nineteen how
do we have the rise of modernism where not only
is there a perception of large change not just of
technology but of culture, but there's an eagerness to cause

(44:56):
cultural change. This is the rise of youth movements and
cultural activism. And since then we've had an enormous rate
at which culture has been changing, largely driven by youth movements.
So it isn't that people couldn't come to value immortality
or people living in space. Those are plausible things that

(45:18):
people could value. The point is that you're if you
try to get people to value that, you are fighting
all these other people eager to push it in other directions.
We decided that the most prestigious people in our society
are the people who cause cultural change, cultural values and
norms to change. And so since around nineteen hundred, it

(45:38):
corresponds with the rise of high school. Basically that created
youth culture because we had all the kids who used
to be spread out across adults in different workplaces now
all together and with creating their own youth culture. Then
with college students altogether, and then these youth cultures are
just eager to cause cultural change. They cause youth movements,
and that's been this repeat process over the last century

(46:02):
and a half of cultural change. If you look at
culture today, it really has changed a lot over the
last one hundred century or so in terms of what
we value, what are our key norms, what are our priorities,
and we you know, and plausibly a lot of this
is cultural drift, i e. Not adaptive change. But whoever

(46:26):
wants to push culture in any direction is fighting against
all the other people eager to gain prestige by pushing
culture in some other direction. And that's the more fundamental
problem here. Like, for example, over the last say decade
or two, anti racism, anti sexism was became a big
goal of cultural change, and people prioritized that and made

(46:48):
that more important than other things. And it's not so
much they're against immortality, they're against distracting from the most
important thing they see in anybody who's pushing something else
can be suspected of being a somebody in opposition to
the key goals that the youth current youth movement is pushing.

(47:09):
And so can you get the next youth movement to
take one of these goals on. But even if you do,
then the next youth movement after that will change their
mind and have some other goal. And the point is
we need these goals to be stable, sacred goals, not
just a movement shows up that values it and then
fades away while something else comes up. We need them
to be to last for centuries. And are we willing

(47:32):
to make sacrifices in the name of them over centuries.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yes, thank you for that explanation. And it's interesting that
you mentioned youth culture because we are aware of an
attempt previously, actually quite some time ago, to introduce an
element of the pursuit of radical life extension into youth culture.
We had a virtual Enlightenment salon with a gentleman named

(47:59):
Karl Carlisle back in twenty twenty three, and at the
time he was eighty three years old, but he had
been a youth activist in the early nineteen sixties in
what was called SLAM, the Student League for the Abolition
of Mortality, And subsequent to his work in SLAM, he
did some activism in the LA area to actually get

(48:24):
a Mayor Brady of Los Angeles, to issue a proclamation
about support for anti aging research. But in the nineteen
eighties he decided that it would be worthwhile to try
to attract more young people to the cause of radical
life extension by creating essentially rock songs that young people

(48:47):
could listen to. His moniker was Johnny Forever, and he
had essentially rock songs on immortality. He thought that would
kind of ignore a youth movement and change the culture.
I don't think he had as much success as he hoped,
and he actually lamented in that salon that he wished

(49:09):
he had stuck with more of the political activism instead
of being distracted by the attempt to culturally change the
preferences of young people. But it's just astonishing. This was
an attempt to change the youth culture, but it seemed

(49:31):
not to have the momentum. And the tragic story of
Carl Carlisle, as far as I'm aware, is unfortunately he
died at the age of eighty five earlier this year.
So I think unfortunately he was born too soon. Maybe
he didn't pick the approach that would have most expeditiously

(49:52):
arrived at longevity escape velocity for himself. But is there
some more effective way to or the youth culture or
is that not the correct target for a sacred goal.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Transhumanism was a bit of a youth movement a little
two to three decades ago. That's where the name got started.
There were people who had more of a futurist youth
movement at the time, and this was one of the
brands and streams of that. It's just it's fighting with
all these other bids for which way to use move culture,

(50:29):
and usually many bids at any one time, and then
some of them went out and most of them don't write.
That's the nature of activism. So you know, your Carlisle
might have regretted that he didn't pick the most popular
activist stream because then he could have been part of
the winning popular activist group, as opposed to having chosen

(50:50):
and also ran that wasn't the winner.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yes, indeed, But do you think there's any realistic hope
for another youth movement based on transhumanism, futurism, longevity, especially
today where there are so many youth influencers on social
media and it seems to be a very let's say,
fragmented youth culture, but increasingly one where the norms, the

(51:22):
communications styles are a bit indecipherable even to older people
who might have been in previous youth cultures. But they're
so scattered across the web, like they have their discord
servers and they create their own little subcultures. How can
they be reached?

Speaker 2 (51:42):
So consider the analog to say the stock market. Lots
of people would like to predict which way the stock
market's going to go because then they can make a
lot of money buying low, selling high, etc. Right, And
our theory of the stock market is that the net
effect of all those people trying to predict which way
the stock market's going to go ends up with the
stock market, where it's very hard to predict which way
it will go. It's a random process. And our standard

(52:03):
story of fashion is pretty similar. There are all these people,
say clothing companies and marketing companies, et cetera, that would
love to predict which way fashions are going to go
because then they could make products ahead of time and
set up their marketing campaigns to match the fashions of
the time, and then that our standard story of fashion
is that it's actually pretty random. The net effect of
all these different groups trying to predict which way fashion

(52:27):
is going to go and maybe push it to go
their direction ends up with a world of fashion that's
kind of random and that you can't predict which way
it's going to go. And that's sort of the nature
of fashion. And so this is basically cultural fashion, which
kinds of activisms are going to be popular. And so
that means these various things you might hope to become

(52:48):
the fashion are candidates. That's not like they're ruled out that.
The whole point is they could become the fashion, but
then they could not. It depends a lot on lots
of things. I might more think could you be ready
so that if it was starting to become a fashion,
that you could suddenly be ready to jump in and
take advantage of that. Rather than asking can you predict it?

(53:11):
Is are you ready for us? It's like with the weather.
The weather is hard to predict, but when there's a snowstorm,
you want the right sort of people to be ready
to come in and get rid of the snow in
the stock market. You don't know which tech things are
going to burst, but if you are flexible enough with
your resources, you can be ready to take advantage of
the next burst of tech fashion.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
So it's more a matter of being ready as an organization,
as a movement, having the people, having the resources, having
the ability to articulate a case for why a particular
goal is important. If one observes all of a sudden,
the spike in interest in it, or some relevant cultural

(53:54):
events on which one could comment and say, okay, here's
why we can contribute to this.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
I mean, so, for example, for immortality, I wouldn't say
we're actually seeing a substantial burst in immortality per day.
We are seeing activity as we have an interest, but
it's sort of more steady. But space is actually at
an unusual burst of capability. SpaceX has over the last
ten years produced amazing, widely recognized to be surprisingly capable

(54:24):
new space capabilities, and that has made a lot of
people excited about how much space activity could happen in
the near future. And so that is a momentum that
you could build on to create the sacred goal of
lots of people living off of space, and again poles
show that pretty near the top, So I think it's
not crazy to try to get that going now. It

(54:47):
so happens. I was just at a meeting of space
policy people last Thursday, and I said, basically, look, the
biggest issue in space policy right now has to be SpaceX.
You know, they're being the winners, they're producing all the stuff,
but they could be overextended. If you know the way

(55:07):
Musk does his companies, I could sort of believe that
he made some gambles that you know, are at risk
of failing, and so I would think the best thing
to do is to make sure those gambles don't fail,
like figure out how to get obstacles out of his
way and make space boom in the way that he
and others would hope, and then that energy and momentum
would create excitement for more people living in space, and

(55:29):
that would make it more possible for society to get
united around this goal of more people living in space.
And these space policy people, unfortunately, their main reaction was, oh,
you know, SpaceX is dominating too much the space industry.
It's too much concentration of power. We need to suppress
SpaceX so that other kinds of space companies can have
more room to compete with it. And so you know

(55:52):
their priority isn't space activity per se, it's making sure
their very space organizations get proper respect and at ten
than space policy.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Yes, and that can happen within a particular movement where
there's fragmentation or there are internal rivalries, and sometimes the
success of one's organization, or one's friend circle, or one's
self personally may overshadow the mission, the success of the goal.

(56:22):
And that is something I think any group of people,
any movement, need to be vigilant about. It's interesting too,
because in space the sacred goals are easier to articulate.
I'm aware of an initiative called as Guardia. They refer
to themselves as the Space Kingdom of as Guardia. It's

(56:45):
a virtual nation. It has several hundred thousand members. But
their goal essentially is to advance the infrastructure of space
to the extent that a person could be born in space.
And they have a very specific benchmark that if there's
a birth in space, then they have succeeded in their goal.

(57:09):
It's conceivable to have other goals, like a base on
the Moon, a base on Mars. It's conceivable to even
have a sequence of goals where you can say, Okay,
base on the moon is more realistic in the near future,
so that'll be our first goal, a base on Mars
will be our second goal, etc. Though some people may
disagree about that sequence. I'm curious if you think something

(57:34):
similar can be formulated for a series of life extension goals. So,
for instance, one goal might be have somebody exceed the
lifespan of Jean Calment. I think that's fairly reasonable to
achieve within the next decade or so, and then go

(57:54):
out from there. What are your thoughts on some realistic
goals that could still be quite motivational to people.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
Well, if you recall the reason I was focused on
finding a sacred goal for us to pursue was this
hope that that could prevent cultural drift and the civilization
decline if we could have a competent form of governance pursuing.
But that would require that those goal choices be made
by that competent form of governance. That is, you'd give

(58:25):
it the overall goal that's a long term goal, and
you would let it decide these shorter term sub goals
and which are the most effective to achieve. As soon
as you start to have us all talk together about
what we think the short term sub goal should be
and then you get excited about that and get some
coalition around that, then you've lost the power of actually

(58:46):
doing it well and more substituted sort of political fashion
about it. So then I would rather we figure out
what would be the long term goal that we could
agree on and then agree that we want to put
something in charge of that, and then trust what it
decides as the way to achieve it. So that's a

(59:07):
key problem here. You see with feutarchy and other sort
of politics, like more specifically on space, a lot of
people are just very wary of letting capitalism go wild
in space, even though you know we have the history
of say the Wild West and capitalism helping you know,
us this. They don't want that sort of a capitalist
process to be the thing that runs space. But you know,

(59:28):
quite plausibly that means they don't want space because that's
most plausibly the way it can and would be achieved
if it's going to be achieved. And so I think
one big obstacle here is just to get people to
be committed enough to the goal of space relative to
the as other goals they have about anti trust or
you know, world egalitarianism or some sort of a you know,

(59:51):
non capitalist sorts of venture in space or something. And
the more that you're going to put all those other
goals in on this, the less you're actually going to
be able to cheat it, and the less it prevent
civilization declimb. So that's the nature of a sacred goal.
If you pick that goal, then you're willing to sacrifice
many other things for that goal because it's the important thing.

(01:00:12):
And so in some sense we're not quite there yet
with space, but the goal would be that these other
things that are in the way in people's minds, Oh,
we don't want to go to the moon if the
moon has to have property, and then somebody might buy
up the good parts of the moon to early before
the rest of us can get out there. If that's
your priority, then well you don't really prioritize space. If

(01:00:32):
you prioritize space, you'd say, whatever it takes, that's the
important thing, you know, let's do it, and you'd be
willing to accept many other sacrifices for that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Very interesting so I take it. You don't think it
would be a particularly effective approach to have something like
a little orange handbook of goals that are laid out
in a systematic fashion, and then you just distribute a
lot of copies of that handbook to people and they

(01:01:04):
carry it around and they read about the goals, and
they understand the goals, and they essentially make life choices
on the basis of pursuing the goals. You would favor
a mechanism that essentially calibrates the sub goals in real time,
and the sacred goal is more of an overall culture

(01:01:26):
wide understanding. Without a lot of the details.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
We're showing how big of an ask this is, that
that you know, maybe from a distance it seemed feasible,
but now we're realizing how hard this scenario is. What
we civilization's default is likely to fall and you know,
collapse like the Roman Empire did, and that's what's going
to happen from us doing the local things that feel
good and that you know, are the results of all
our usual local politics, et cetera. The questions can we

(01:01:51):
somehow escape that fate, and the ideas well, there are
if we just said, let's make sure a civilization doesn't cline,
and we've had a competent form of governance, we assigned
that it wouldn't actually work because as soon as it
asked us to sacrifice, we'd go to hell with that.
That's too much trouble. Let's, you know, do something easier
and give it a different goal. Right, So, the only

(01:02:13):
way we're actually going to prevent civilization to collapse with
a competent form of government is to give it a
goal and then stick with that goal, and have that
a goal we care about that happens to be inconsistent
with civilization declined. We won't actually care enough about decline
for that to be our goal. But maybe some other
goal could be something we're more strongly attached to, And

(01:02:33):
maybe when a million people have off of space, making
that date be as soon as possible could be the
sort of goal that we would feel very attached to.
And then when a competent government does things to achieve
that that at moment feel like sacrifices, we would be
proud of that instead of ashamed, and we would not

(01:02:53):
give up on the goal, and we would be all
the more committed to seeing that we were moving toward
the goal and we were sacrificing for it. But that
requires that we really are attached to this goal and
it's more important than these other things that we might
bring up as contrary considerations to the goal. Oh what
about democracy in space? Oh what about making sure there
are millionaires out there? You know, blah blah blah. More.

(01:03:15):
Those are your key goals where your goal is in space.
The goal is a bunch of other things and you're
not actually going to achieve it. So the ask here
has to be, no, this goal has to be a
really strong goal that you're achieved. So it wouldn't be
a list of life practices that would make you promote space,
because that's not something we can actually do very well.
But it would be maybe say novels and movies placed

(01:03:39):
a few centuries into the future, like say the Expanse,
where you go, yeah, we really want that world. That's
the future we want to create, and you have heroes
in those stories that you want to realize by making
that world, and you know there's parts of that world
that your family would be in or your country. You
want a really compelling vision that people are engaged by
and then are to sacrifice for.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
And very interesting. So I do wonder along these lines
to what extent multiple goals of the sort can coexist.
For instance, Luisa Royo writes in our chat, you can't
prioritize space and be egalitarian. Did I get that right?
Or he hopes he misheard this, But I'm thinking, could
there be essentially a polygal where you have multiple visions

(01:04:27):
of the future that are compatible, that essentially illustrate a
different and better paradigm of existence. So that could be
radical life extension, space colonization, universal abundance, like everybody gets
a three D printed mansion and a lot of other

(01:04:49):
attributes of a prosperous society, which I think everybody would agree,
at least from a high level vantage point, this would
lead to better lives for people. Can you have a
vision that is not just one achievement, but achievements in

(01:05:12):
a variety of areas which are not in conflict with
one another necessarily accept to the extent that you could decide, well,
do I want to devote my efforts to space exploration,
or do I want to say study biology and biotechnology,
devote my efforts to life extension. So people could choose

(01:05:35):
different career paths, but perhaps within a broader paradigm. We
could call it transhumanism, we could call it something else,
but it's the pursuit of that next stage in the
development of our species. How feasible would that be as
a vision to motivate people?

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
So if civilization declines as it most likelihood, unless we
do something to prevent it, that would be along a
path where we are achieving many of the goals we
want at the time, including being egalitarian, having democratic participation,
being careful not to offend people. There are a great

(01:06:19):
many goals that we have that are not in conflict
with civilization decline, where putting a large weight on those
goals wouldn't prevent civilization decliin, we would decline while achieving
those goals. There are some goals that happen to be
in conflict with civilization declide, and then some of those
are more transhumanist type goals because they're about grand achievements

(01:06:40):
that require a lot of effort and capability, and that
therefore civilization decline would prevent. So the whole point is
to put more weight on that second set of goals
relative to the first. If you just put weight on entertainment,
making sure people are entertained and relaxed and have fun
and have vacation and are heard when they have objections
to things, and we are you know, aren't offended by inequality,

(01:07:02):
et cetera. Those goals are quite consistent with decline, and
if we put most of our weight on those goals,
we will just achieve them while declining. To prevent decline,
we need to put a lot of weight on goals
that it happened to conflict with decline. And that's the
hard part here. Now, you could take ten goals that
happened to click with the decline and put some weight

(01:07:22):
to average on all of them, just it wouldn't have
to be careful about how you put the way to
which if you some sort of an ore thing, if
we achieve any one of these ten, okay, great, If
we have to achieve all of them, then you're trying
to it's just going to be really hard to achieve
all ten goals, and then you're just going to basically
not achieve your goal of keeping all ten, and so
the market will realize, yeah, you can't do that and

(01:07:43):
just give up on it. So you need to give
this governance mechanism a chance of actually achieving whatever goal
you handed. And so that doesn't have to be just one.
But if you give more than one, you'll have to
be in some sort of or sense one or the
other or these like. Give of any of these things,
achieve any of these things, please, but all of those
things will need to be things that are inconsistent with

(01:08:05):
the client. That's the hardest part here. So, yes, the
issue is you put enough a weight on it. Being
a galitarian you will just achieve in a galitarian world.
But that can be a world of decline.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
Yes, fair enough. And actually this was one of the
issues with the rise of early Christianity, which was more
egalitarian in a sense than the structure of the Roman
Empire that preceded it, but it was very compatible with decline.
Edward Gibbon made that argument. But it's interesting too. You

(01:08:40):
mentioned ten goals. So I created this New Decades message
for the twenty twenties right at the end of twenty nineteen,
and in it I outlined ten goals that I thought
would be reasonable and desirable for humankind to achieve in
this decade. Now, clearly I did not have any anticipation

(01:09:02):
of COVID being as devastating as it was But right now,
more than five years into this decade, I know that
one of the goals has been achieved. I'm not confident
about several of the others. A few of the others
could still be achieved, and I will briefly read those

(01:09:24):
goals out because I think they may be interesting to
consider from the standpoint of whether any or most or
all of them could be at least incorporated into a
sacred goal. So the first goal is to construct the
next world's tallest building after the Bush Khalifo, which was

(01:09:45):
built in twenty ten. I think this could still be
done somewhere in Saudi Arabia, and it seems to me
as long as humans are building taller skyscrapers that requires
at least some civilizational infrastructure that is incompatible with decline.
Second goal, build a base on the Moon. Ambitious, Maybe

(01:10:07):
it will happen in the next five years. I'm not
fully confident about that goal Number three land a human
on Mars. Again, that's still not beyond the realm of possibility,
But human societies have just distracted themselves with a bunch
of nonsense in the early part of this decade. Another

(01:10:28):
goal established the first fully operational seasted communities. Again, still conceivable,
but it requires a jurisdiction willing to tolerate it. Then
Goal number five, Unfortunately, I'm increasingly doubting that this could
happen this decade. Have at least one person lived beyond
one hundred and twenty years. Again, particularly because there's just

(01:10:50):
one person alive today who could conceivably reach the age
of one hundred and twenty, and she's one hundred and
sixteen at present. Goal number six cut all world nuclear
weapons stockpiles in half. Reagan and Bush did more than that,
Bush Senior, of course, but given the geopolitical situation in

(01:11:12):
the world today, that seems unlikely to be achieved this
decade unless there's a major turn toward peace. Goal number seven,
compose one hundred tonal symphonies. To my surprise, that has
already been exceeded by a fairly significant margin, so that
goal has been met. Goal number eight develop medically effective

(01:11:33):
cures for every type of cancer. I remember when I
was in middle school, I was told, well, of course
cancer will be cured by twenty fifteen, and I was
still optimistic in twenty nineteen that maybe this decade we
could cure every.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Type of cancer.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
Then goal number nine in the decade with fifty percent
of all vehicles on the road at level two autonomy
or greater. That's not beyond the realm of possibility. I
would still say unlikely, but maybe reachable in the twenty thirties.
And then goal number ten, This one, regrettably I doubt

(01:12:14):
will be achieved this decade experience at least one year
in which no country is at war with any other country,
with war including insurgencies and terrorist attacks. So we've seen
this decade the rise of war and belligerence and the
kinds of ideologies that fuel them. So I don't think
we're going to have a year without war, terrorism, or

(01:12:36):
armed insurgencies this decade. So what do you think of
those goals? They were fairly modest for a transhumanist. I
actually thought, what could be realistic if the twenty twenties
turn out to be a fairly benign decade.

Speaker 2 (01:12:53):
So there's a large space of possible goals one could define,
and a large space of purposes for which you could
make them. And for the purpose of preventing civilization decline,
we need goals on a particular timescale. So goals that
you could achieve in the next ten years if we

(01:13:14):
committed to achieving them, that won't necessarily prevent decline over
a coming century or two. And a goal that you
had for one thousand or ten thousand years in the
future also wouldn't really do much to prevent decline in
the next century or two, because hey, there'll be another
civilization that'll rise a few centuries later, and then hey,

(01:13:36):
it might do stuff. Maybe it'll more depend on what
that new civilization is than whether we decline. So in
order to induce people to try to prevent civilization decline,
you need them to pick goals on the timescale at
which decline would get in the way of that. And
the goals you were picking were more things achievable in

(01:13:57):
the next ten years or so. Make this new tallest building.
We could do that, and civilization still declines. It's not
actually changing our world, so they were less likely to
decline exactly. It's just doing a achievement that we can
be proud of. Now. Maybe it would change our attitudes

(01:14:18):
towards future achievements, so we'll want to do more like
that in the future, and that might prevent declimb but
those would be more indirect consequences of achieving a goal
like that, maybe trying to change culture in some way
that makes those goals more respected. As you know, we've
had a number of stated goals of governments in the

(01:14:38):
last years in terms of say, carbon carbon used to climb. Right,
So if you look at what are the goals that
the world is most said, sign treaties and made statements
about we want to achieve this goal, they are things
like reducing less carbon, right, But that's quite consistent with
civilization decline. In fact, civilization client prob would in fact

(01:15:01):
cause carbon reduction. So unfortunately, even though those could be
good goals to pursue, they don't plausibly actually induce us
to be less likely to decline.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
Yes, interesting, and I do understand the point that some
great achievement, including a technical achievement like building the world's
tallest skyscraper, may not necessarily avert the decline of an
entire civilization. It could be, as you alluded to, a
source of inspiration for people, they could realize, oh, great

(01:15:37):
things are still being done. We want to continue that momentum,
continue to do great things, continue to achieve great things,
and therefore we need to sustain that civilizational base that
makes those achievements possible.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
I could pick you another project that might be more
related to preventing the clients. So let's you know, maybe
the most likely groups to replace as would be say
the Amish or Heredum, who are not especially pro technology
and have many concerns about our dominant culture and it
polluting them. So there's a risk that when they are
the rising civilization, they will be wary of, you know,

(01:16:14):
looking up our old libraries or old media and other
things that we've said in the past, because they are
just are afraid of being polluted by all of that.
And maybe that would delay the rise of a next civilization.
And so we might make a project where we try
to make lots of little I don't know, basically, USB
drives full of civilization world of information that we scatter

(01:16:37):
around the world to make it easy for future people
to find them and read them and build again. That
would be a long term project that would be less
about preventing this decline but more about enabling the next rise.

Speaker 1 (01:16:52):
Very interesting, and I'm aware actually of some books that
have been published along these lines, like a Handbook to
Rebuilt Civilization. It has a similar title to that and
it has a lot of diagrams of essentially various technologies
that could potentially be replicated in a future less advanced society,

(01:17:14):
but could bring up the level of advancement fairly rapidly.
So it is an interesting idea. I am just hoping
that the decline could be averted to some extent, and
I am seeing signs of the decline relative to say,
twenty fifteen. So one hypothesis that I hold somewhat loosely

(01:17:39):
in my mind, just based on my personal experience and
recollection of what culture was like, is that the current
let's say, dominant culture in the world, you might call
it the monoculture, peaked around twenty fifteen in terms of
its success and efficacy and ability to implement beneficial change,

(01:18:05):
and since that time it has been torn apart by polarization,
but also certain declining material standards of living, the affordability
crisis being one of them, certain periods of declining life expectancy,
deaths of despair. All of these would not be happening
in a prospering, improving culture. So some malaisa set in

(01:18:31):
over the past decade. I don't know yet whether that's
a local decline or whether that is the prelude to
a more pronounced decline, and the view that you've articulated,
which ties it to the fertility decline, would suggest it's
the beginning of a more pronounced decline. How Other people disagree,

(01:18:53):
including some of our audience members, but it's definitely worth exploring.
And my hope is maybe we're early enough, if this
is a prelude to a larger decline, that we could
arrest that decline somehow, especially if we achieve a major
surge of technological progress in the next decade or two.

(01:19:16):
So I'm trying to find some sort of goal and
for that goal to be sufficiently inspiring to people to
overcome the internal rifts within the monoculture, so especially the
left right polarization that has been just so pernicious. Because
we don't have a situation where we have the kind

(01:19:40):
of cultural competition you described previously, where there are little
cultures competing with one another. It seems like the monoculture
has split into two blocks and the sacred goal of
each block is to destroy the other block, which is
very damaging in my view. But what do you think
about that? Do you see that is a great obstacle

(01:20:01):
to uniting the culture around a sacred goal.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
It is an obstacle to sharing a goal. Now we do,
and both the lefts and the right do actually share
many goals. They're just not very eager to point to
or emphasize the goals that they share. They're much more
eager to point to emphasize the goals that they differ
on because that's what energizes their conflict. So, you know,

(01:20:28):
as you may know, when you can find a bipoderitisan
support for some policy, that's suddenly when nobody cares about
the policy, it doesn't get proposed and doesn't get acted
on because what people want to do is own the
libs or on the other side, and they're looking to
find a policy that they can pass that will somehow
shame or put or put, you know, make the other
side harder to achieve their goals. And that's what much

(01:20:51):
of politics is about these days, is about finding ways
to beat the other side. So, you know, that is
an obstacle to finding a shared goal that we could
all get behind and feel very motivated. By twenty sixteen
was the peak of births worldwide. Births per you know,
per month or whatever had been declining since then, and

(01:21:13):
so you know there's a delay for population to start decline,
which is the average age at which people die. So
that's why you know twenty sixteen is the peak of births,
but the peak of population would be more like twenty
fifty five, say forty years later, And that's you know,
a relatively clear measure of the fertility and population decline

(01:21:37):
is the peak of births. I agree that it's hard
to tell, and many other kinds of cultural parameters to
what extent they are caused by cultural drift versus not,
and to what extent they were just part of fluctuations
going up and down as opposed to long term trends.
Those are in fact hard to tell. I did have,
if you want to go over them, some sort of
theories to explain some of the consistent trends over the

(01:21:59):
last few entries and cultural change. It's not all just random, yes,
please do I think I even have a you can
have a slide in here about that somewhere. But the
point is that one kind of cultural drift is in
fact these random walks. But I guess I don't have

(01:22:21):
that there anyway. So one ways you could have a
trend is if say there was a human nature and
then cultural evolution pulled us away from human nature in
order to say, be farmers. So if you can think

(01:22:42):
of maybe our forger long ago, our human nature was
pretty well adapted to that environment, and then cultural elevision
took over and was able to move us away from
our habit upon a time to be more appropriate for
a new world, like the world of farming, and maybe
now in the modern world. So if selection pressures would
weaken as plausibly they did if in the last few centuries,

(01:23:06):
then one of the predictions is we would just drift
back more towards human nature, and that would be an
explanation for many trends. So one set of stories of
that form, if we say human nature is naturally lazy, selfish,
and present oriented, then that would be a trend you
might expect over the last few centuries is we've, as

(01:23:26):
selection pressures we can, we've become more lazy, selfish, and
present oriented. Another sort of story is to say, well,
we were once foragers and then we became farmers, but
as selection pressures we can, we've drifted back to me
more like foragers, and that can explain a number of
trends in the last few centuries in terms of value changes.
It explains, you know, more leisure, more travel, more art,

(01:23:50):
more promiscuity, more democracy, less religion, less fertility or less
domination of all sorts, more concerned with the environment. All
of those trends are plausibly ways in which we have
become more forger like over the last few centuries, and
so this theory predict we would continue in that direction
if there's still room to go in those directions. Now

(01:24:13):
many people like this. That is the idea is instead
of adapting the world around us, we've looked inside ourselves
and said what feels right. And that's been a driver
of many youth moments over these years, is youth saying
what feels right, and then they want to change the
culture around them to match what feels right, and plausibly
forge your ways feel right. And so we have been

(01:24:35):
moving back and many people think this is great. It
feels great that we are becoming more closer to our
ideals of what sort of attitudes feel right inside. But
if these are not adaptive in the new world, then
these are just ways of which we are drifting away
from what's adaptive. Even though it feels right, yes, and

(01:24:56):
that is a concern of mine as well. It does
seem to me like the predominant let's say attitude in
Western culture change circa i'd say, the late nineteen sixties
from do what makes rational sense and some more universal

(01:25:19):
manner to do what feels right.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
If it feels good, do it. And to a large extent,
these virtual enlightenment salons are an attempt at a mild
antidote to that where we actually reason through particular questions
instead of just adopting initial feelings based inclinations. And I
just wish we had more of a broad base of

(01:25:45):
cultural discourse that's oriented more toward reason than toward initial
emotional response.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
Well, I mean, I think one way to think about
this is there's what strategies will achieve our values? And
what are our values? So you're saying we don't want
to be reasonable, but often what people mean by reasonable
is to be effective at achieving your values. But then
when I look at these says, I know these are
value questions, and we are now being more true to
our values. But your values come from your culture, and

(01:26:18):
your values can be wrong in an adaptive sense. That is,
cultural evolution is this process that's designed, that's there to
produce more adaptive behavior, and it'll choose your values in
order to make your behavior adaptive. And then if it's broken,
it will no longer be choosing your behavior to be adaptive,
and then your culture will become less adaptive. In civilization terms,

(01:26:41):
it will shrink and go away. But many people feel like,
I'm really attached to my values. I'm okay with my
civilization going away as long as we can just keep
pursuing our values for as long as it lasts.

Speaker 1 (01:26:54):
Yes, there are people like that. So there are people,
for instance, who are anti nas who think, well, it's
okay even if humanity declines and dies out eventually, as
long as people get to do what they want while
the current cohort of people are alive. And that seems

(01:27:15):
to be a rather limiting perspective in my view.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
So I have it's going to go away, right it is.
As long as there's some part of our world that
becomes more adaptive, the less adaptive parts will go away.
So I think the way I'd like to say it is, Look,
if there's something you value, whatever it is, if you
want it to be there in the future, you need
to tie it to adaptive stuff, because only adaptive stuff lasts.

(01:27:42):
You don't care about the future. Okay, fine, you know,
enjoy your values as long as they last. But the
future will be full of adaptive stuff. And if you
want your thing to last, be in the future. Say democracy,
you like democracy, you want more democracy in the future. Well,
you're going to make sure democracy is a tie to
adaptive creatures adaptive behaviors, because otherwise it'll go away. I

(01:28:04):
happen to value, say open inquiry. If I'm going to
pick more most fundamental value the thing, I will sacrifice
other things for it's that. But even then, I think
open inquiry can last. It can be part of an
adaptive package, and I want to tie it to other
adaptive things so it can last. But I want to
be I want things that represent me and that are

(01:28:27):
parts of me and that have parts that are like
me to be there in the future. I want, therefore,
to be adaptive. I want to find ways in which
things like me and the parts of me can be
parts of things that don't lose out in the adaptive competition,
so that they are there in the future and can
push for the things I like.

Speaker 1 (01:28:45):
There absolutely and I agree with you open inquiry as
a fundamental value. It's interesting too that in a lot
of traditional cultures open inquiry was frowned upon, in some
cases it was suppressed. In the current what you would
characterize as the global monoculture, there is more tolerance for

(01:29:07):
open inquiry than is historically there used to be, and
that is a value worth preserving. Certainly, we hold that
to be a high value because we engage in it
very often in the virtual Enlightenment salonsa in general, in
the transhumanist movements. So absolutely it's essential for the cultures

(01:29:29):
that value open inquiry to prevail over cultures that would
suppress it. At least within cultures that suppress it, give
people a choice to escape them, and give people a
choice to move to societies where open inquiry is valued. Now,
Art Tramone had an interesting comment about foragers becoming shoppers.

(01:29:52):
So Art Ramone, maybe you would like to elaborate on that,
and if you have any other questions or comments too,
this is a good opportunity.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
Sure, yeah, it's if there is a natural state of
humanity before we became you know, farmers, you know, foraging,
So with shopping is a lot like like foraging and
people at the shop.

Speaker 4 (01:30:16):
So that's kind of going back to or or nature.
And uh, I did have sort of an idea or
a question. Uh remember the Georgia guid stones. You know,
they had all the inscriptions, you know, maintained humanity under
five hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
Million and so forth.

Speaker 5 (01:30:36):
And I was looking at those and thinking of your
your concept here, and a lot of them I think
don't really support uh, continued civilization. I think they're all
pretty pretty on the down line. So be not a
cancer on the earth. Leave room for nature, Leave room

(01:30:57):
for nature. It's you know, a fooits beauty, love seeking,
harmony with the infinite. So something it out.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
Right. So if you you know, in the past, if
you thought of yourself as representing a civilization, being an
advocate for a civilization, say like the Roman Empire, you
want it to grow and be more capable, have more people,
more technological. And that's a vision of say the American
Empire that many Americans had, or of the Soviet Empire
that many Soviet citizens had. Up until you know, half

(01:31:30):
century or so ago, many people were quite consciously wanting
their civilization to be more physically prominent in the world,
to have more technology, more people, more place, buildings, more roads,
more more stuff, and to be bigger. And then in
the last half century or so, you know, one of
the big changes of cultural activism has been to make

(01:31:52):
people value that less and to more value, as you described,
a more minimal impact on the world. And unfortunately, we
can quite easily achieve a more minimal impact by decline
and civilization. That's quite consistent with civilization decline, and that
means many people have said, no, decline sounds good. There's
less environmental impact and fewer people causing problems, and that

(01:32:17):
is a common Those are common values today, yes, and that.

Speaker 1 (01:32:24):
Is unfortunate that those are common values that some people
think that damage done by humans and some sphere or
spheres of life is so significant that it would be
a better outcome for human civilization itself or humanity itself
to decline. And of course, as a transhumanist, I'm strongly

(01:32:45):
opposed to that point of view. I want humanity to
prosper and I think human civilization is fundamentally good. But
it's interesting that Ardromon mentioned the Georgia Guidestones. Here's the
Wikipedia entry on them. This is a monument that existed
from nineteen eighty to nineteen twenty two, and this was,
in essence a statement of values by its creators, a

(01:33:09):
statement of goals for the civilization. We may disagree with
some of them, but it evoked such a strong reaction
from let's say, traditionalist Christians that somebody bombed it, somebody
vandalized it to some extent, to such an extent in
twenty twenty two that it was ultimately torn down it

(01:33:33):
couldn't be salvaged. So this also raises a concern about
framings of civilizational goals that might be so provocative to
certain fanatics that at least certain manifestations of those goals
would attract severe hostility. And I suppose that's not a

(01:33:56):
new problem. We've had fanatics throughout history. But from the
standpoint of a movement that is, let's say, not that
inclined to do actual combat, how do we frame civilizational
goals to avoid that kind of response, to avoid some

(01:34:18):
group of people saying, well, no, you're just evil and satanic, etc.
And we are going to physically fight you.

Speaker 2 (01:34:26):
So I think one key issue worth highlighting here that
is a problem with the approach I've described is that
we often have explicit values that we state in words
that we put on monuments like this, and then we
have implicit values in our behavior that are at odds
with that. For example, a common observation, excluding by my
colleague Brian Kaplan in an upcoming book, is that capitalism

(01:34:51):
gives us stuff we want, but we aren't so proud
of wanting, and we often a task government with giving
us things we say we want. Even when we choose privately,
we don't tend to choose them, and so that's a
problem with more explicit goals in governance. So I think
like a function of democracy is often that we can

(01:35:13):
say we will like trees, and we want a lot
more trees, and trees are really important to us, and
a politician will say, yes, I will support the trees,
I will do everything for trees. Please elect me, and
I will do the tree thing, and then we elect them,
and he doesn't because he knows we didn't actually want
the trees that much. What we wanted was to be
able to say we wanted the trees. And ordinary democracy
supports hypocrisy in that way, and that's a virtue of

(01:35:37):
it to the extent we want hypocrisy, which apparently we
do but if mechanism like FUTUREKI which I described, requires
that we explicitly pick a goal and that it will
actually successfully achieve that goal. So now that's a problem
with the goals we are tempted to say we want
aren't actually the goals we want, because we will in

(01:35:59):
fact get the things we say we want through that process,
not the things we want. Another nice example I think
is to think about a regular police where there's an
implicit goals given by the mayor to the police, what
neighborhoods count, what crimes count, or something versus if we
had an explicit bounty system where we put a particular
dollar amount on each crime, and then the priorities for

(01:36:20):
crime would be based on those dollar amounts. With an
explicit bounty system, we either have to treat all the
neighborhoods equally or be explicit saying some neighborhoods don't count
as much as other ones. With the implicit police system,
we in fact decide some neighborhoods count a lot more
than others, but we don't have to say so, we
pretend they all count the same. So now with futarchy,

(01:36:42):
we will need we will have a mechanism that will
be very effective plausibly at achieving a stated goal, But
then will we be willing to state to it the
goal we actually have. So I do think there's a
substantial risk that wanting to protect the environment and wanting
equality and a galaxy car and not offending people would
be in fact the goals people say they want, and

(01:37:05):
then the mechanism would be very effective at achieving that.
And if what they implicitly wanted was to grow and
become wealthy and prosperous and have large capable technology, but
if they aren't willing to say that's what they want,
then they don't achieve it. So that's showing that the
scenario describe is a somewhat of a big ask. First

(01:37:26):
of all, we have to prove this governance mechanism works.
We have to get people on board with a sacred
goal that's inconsistent with civilization decline and give it to
that mechanism. And we have to be willing to admit
that that goal is the goal we want. If we
are wanting to instead say other things like these goals

(01:37:47):
on this monument you describe, then that's what will happen.
We will actually achieve those things and civilization would then decline.

Speaker 1 (01:37:55):
Yes, And of course, getting people to explicitly acknowledge a
lot of the goals and values that they implicitly practice
has been a challenge for transhumanists because, as I have
articulated before, a lot of people are implicit transhumanists in
terms of how they use technology, but they.

Speaker 2 (01:38:16):
Want to live one more day every day. Yes, so
implicitly they want to live forever, but they want to
say they want to live forever. They say they want
to finite live, but every day they want to live
one more day.

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
Right. And it's this cultural reluctance to explicitly articulate the
implicit goals that will be a significant obstacle and I
think will take a lot of cultural activism to overcome. Now,
an interesting related question comes to us from DBA Cournel,

(01:38:47):
and he wonders, how do you explain that our cultures
are creating so many BS tasks which I understand to
be work that does not benefit anyone from being done.
And that's in a lot of systems organizations, whether private
or governmental. Is it the result of this tension between
explicit goals and implicit goals, like in a lot of

(01:39:09):
organizations they will say, oh, we value diversity, which is fine,
but now we have a chief Diversity officer and we
have this entire bureaucracy that focuses on diversity that ends
up making work for itself. Whereas you might not need
that work to actually have meaningful diversity. You just have

(01:39:31):
people willing to engage an open inquiry or something of
that nature.

Speaker 2 (01:39:36):
So I talked earlier about corporate cultures and that in general,
for profit corporate culture, the process seems to be relatively
healthy because there is a lot of selection and a
lot of variety that can produce selection for healthy corporate cultures.
And that would suggest that when they choose which jobs
there are, those are reasonable choices. The ways in which

(01:39:59):
that wouldn't happen and is when the larger macroculture pressures
each corporation to do certain things otherwise it will face,
you know, disapproval from the larger world. So that can
be you know, DEI, or it can be ESG, or
it can be regulatory required you know activities, or just

(01:40:20):
things that if you didn't do in somebody's you know,
exposed you that you would face social shame and disapproval.
And so those sorts of processes can end up creating
jobs and activities that may in fact not actually be
very useful, but are useful for the purpose of convincing
regulators or the public that you are a good person

(01:40:40):
somehow are not a bad person. And culture is in
charge of those sorts of things. I mean, for example,
in a world that was racist, which there was such
a world in our world recently, then if you put
the wrong sort of race people in front of other
their customers as a service person or as a person

(01:41:05):
in the shop, then you would face disapproval because the
world would not like your choice there and they would
be seeing it, and you could be shamed and punished
for doing so. Right, so you would have to keep
a public appearance consistent with whatever are the norms of
that community, even if that wasn't the profit maximizing thing

(01:41:26):
to do otherwise, but your need to maintain an appearance
and to be accepted would be driving your behavior. Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:41:37):
Interesting, interesting, and I see you have on your slides
your cultural drift fix. And let's venture into Feu Turkey
a bit explain a bit more some of the mechanics
of how it would work and also how gaming of
the system could be prevented. So, for instance, let's say

(01:42:01):
we have a sacred goal and it could be radical
life extension framed in some way. But then there's another
constituency that has a lot of money that wants to
smuggle in some of those other goals. So if there's
a betting market, it could use those resources to essentially
recalibrate the bet to some extent so that one outcome

(01:42:24):
is more favorite than it would have been otherwise. How
does a future key system prevent that?

Speaker 2 (01:42:31):
So I described talk to this slide briefly early in
our session. The ideas we have some overall metric that
we're wanting to achieve that we state and there's a
formula for it, and that at any one time, there's
an asset that pays off in proportion to that metric,
and there's a current price for that asset, and that
price gives us an expected value in the market for

(01:42:53):
that metric that we decided is what we're trying to achieve. Now,
the argument here is that we put a substantial weight
in that metric on a goal like when do a
million people live in space? Or when do life as
average lifespans go above one hundred and fifty or something,
But we wouldn't put all our weight on that. Clearly,

(01:43:15):
we'd also want just society to keep functioning, and so
we would also put substantial weight on the usual goals
of you know, having not war and not death and
you know, wealth, et cetera. Those would be the usual
sort of goals you would do if you didn't have
this extra special sacred goal long term. But these are
just practical things you would want to be achieving. So

(01:43:39):
now one problem we could be just might not put
enough weight on the long term safe goal, and then
market decides that's too hard, forget it. We're just going
to pursue these things we know how to do and
that's what they achieve, right, So you want to put
enough weight on it. And again we talked before out
if you add too many constraints to how this must
be achieved, it'll also go, yeah, I can't do that

(01:44:00):
and just quit. So you'll need to give it enough
freedom with how it pursues the goal and express it
in a general enough way that it could figure out
how to do so. But there's always going to be
this temptation of people who have policies to just want
to put their policy in as a goal. So for example,
say you know the question is how many roads should

(01:44:20):
we have? Well, if you think of roads as an
instrument to get other things, you will, you know, have
the policy about roads be based on well, does let
people get to their work? Does let people get to vacation?
Does it save them time? How much does it cost?
The system will consider those trade offs in the benefits
and costs of roads and deciding how many roads to make.
But say you just want more roads because you make roads, say, well,

(01:44:42):
what you might try to do is get the number
of roads just stuck in the outcome metric. We just
count the number of roads and then Tadau gets what
the market decides. I guess we need more roads because hey,
if we put more roads in, then the outcome metric
goes up. And that's our job to make the metric
go up. So it's a problem if we try to
put means in where end should be. But there'll be

(01:45:03):
a temptation to try to do that, and so somehow
the system will have to be watching out for that
and resisting it because if it doesn't mean everybody will
just put their favorite means in and we'll end up
just you know, having some sort of mix of means
that are whatever people have the political power to push
to get their means to have a higher weight, just
kind of what happens now. So in ordinary democracy today,

(01:45:24):
you know, the legislature passes bills that spend money on
different purposes, and that's a net effect of what not
only what people want, but what they think will have
what effect, and just you know how much political power
they have to push things. And so our current system
is an amalgam of those sorts of things. And the

(01:45:45):
goal of future here is to say, if you could
just pick what you want as the outcome, there's this
other process that could be a lot more effective in
figuring out how to get it. And you would empower
that process by setting up this mechanism and just telling
it what you want, but not how to get it.
But a way to corrupt that is to say, no, no, no,
I want to tell it how to get it because
I want you know, I don't want to make roads,

(01:46:06):
because I make growths.

Speaker 1 (01:46:09):
Interesting. So the few tarchy needs to be limited to
the goal as such, but not as to the means.
What do you conceive of as being let's say, the
governance structure that sets the goal. So would it be
let's say transhumanists come to power and there's some sort

(01:46:31):
of decision made saying, okay, we are going to prioritize
radical life extension as the goal. Period. Now, the market
that gets set up in the few tarchy figures out
the sequence of steps, the means, et cetera, and people
place their bets on various approaches. Is that the framework.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
So at some point we would have to adopt this
competent form of governance and then would have a goal,
and maybe illicially would have a very playin goal in
terms of wealth and peace and lifespans and you know,
leisure time. You just have some simple weighted average of
the ordinary playing goals that people might have. And then
at some point some people would say, no, we need

(01:47:16):
to have this long term, sacred goal and that needs
to be important. And then if there's enough people elected
who share that belief that we need to have that,
they would then pass a bill that would change the
metric of the system to change the outcome we're trying
to achieve. And if it puts a large enough weight on, say,
when we achieve immortality of a certain sort, then the

(01:47:37):
market process that adopts policies would start to prioritize that.
That is, as soon as we put a high weight
on immortality. Then somebody says, let's pass a bill for
more funding for you know, life longevity research, and the
speculators go, yeah, we think that if you funded that
longevity research and your goal here was this lifespans, then

(01:47:58):
in fact you would on average be more likely to
achieve your goals by that sort of longevity research plan.
And then that would pass, and then the next year
somebody might say, well, it's good to have longevity research,
but you're doing it the wrong way. The way you're
funding it is not very effective. Let's try this other,
maybe prize based way to fund longevity research. And then
the market might say, yeah, that does sound good. Let's

(01:48:19):
change how we give out the money. No longer again
we get into government employees, but now setting up prizes.
And then you would switch then, and repeatedly you'd have
people proposing changes and then the market would either say naw,
that doesn't look like it will work, and say no,
that does look like ituld work, and each time the
market says yeah, we approve, then that would become the
new policy, and now taxes would change, benefits would change,

(01:48:42):
all the policies would change as a result of the
market saying yep, that looks like our best guess of
what will achieve these goals that you specified. But of
course people in the next year might say, yeah, we
don't want to put so much emphasis on longevity. Yes,
it's a nice long term goal, but it sounds too
expensive at the moment. We're paying off a lot for
all these things we're doing in that let's cut it back.
And then it might start to cut back how much

(01:49:03):
of a weight they put on it because they started
to see that it was expensive, And then that's the
key question here. Would they continue to put enough weight
on it so that the market would start to do
things that prevent civilization decline, because it says, look, if
civilization decline, we're just not going to achieve this, So
we need to prioritize that, because that's what the metric
here is.

Speaker 1 (01:49:25):
Very interesting. Now, have you given some consideration to a
good Heart's law and the problems that it might pose.
So good Hearts law states that when a measure becomes
a target, it ceases to be a good measure for
various reasons, Like in a corporation, if some manager discovers, oh,

(01:49:46):
teams that have been successful have this particular attribute, and
then they start to explicitly measure and target that attribute,
and it turns out there are ways in which that
attribute could be maximum without having the underlying let's say,
virtues or competencies that you actually want. Is there a

(01:50:07):
way in a few tarchy to avoid speculators essentially maximizing something,
including for the sheer purpose of earning a monetary return.
But then that thing that's maximized becomes detached from the
sacred goal or what we want to achieve through the
sacred goal.

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):
Our world is full of metrics that continue to function
even when they are targets here of activity. Right, So,
for example, corporations continue to be organized to make profits,
and they like to play accounting games sometimes with that,
but they have limited ability to pretend to have profits
when they don't. For example, paying off dividends is a

(01:50:50):
way to show that you have got money that you
can pay, that you achieve from profits. There's great inflation,
for example, so you know, students get paid for having
higher degrees, and that's continued. But as great information increases,
they don't all get paid more because they all have
more A's right. So the metric is more what's your

(01:51:10):
rank in the school, and that's what your gpa, because
the rank is harder to mess with, right. And so
our world is full of like deaths, dead bodies you
can count, and that's a metric that we try to
reduce the number of dead bodies. And yes, people might
try to take someone who's alive and miserable and keep
them alive just so that they can make sure there

(01:51:32):
aren't as many dead bodies, but it turns out to
be hard to keep miserable bodies alive without actually making
sure they live longer. That is, our world is full
of metrics that roughly do function, even though they are
the target of people's intentional activities to look good.

Speaker 1 (01:51:51):
Yes, fair enough, And this has been such a fascinating conversation.
We are nearing the last two minutes. I as always
wish we had more time, but I did want to
ask you one final question from one of our audience members,

(01:52:11):
Alan Crowley. I think this is a fascinating question. Do
you think linguistic drift is a companion to cultural drift?
And he mentions or welly in terms like you speak
and double speak, which can obscure certain truths. If there
is deleterious cultural drift, do we see it accompanied by
changes in the way people use language, which may even

(01:52:36):
prevent a culture from being resilient against that cultural drift.

Speaker 2 (01:52:41):
I don't know. It's my most basic answer, because I
don't study language that much. The key thing would be
when language elements are the sorts of things that individuals
can be different on, and that's okay, then the selection
will be within culture selection, which is thing we do
well on. So, for example, developing new terminology for a

(01:53:03):
technical field, I expect that most new terminology is in
fact useful for that new technical field because different people
in that field could choose to use different words, and
they're competing, and it turns out those are the words
that work better. It's more words that are tied to
our basic shared values and norms that it would be
hard to vary. So, for example, what is it to

(01:53:25):
be racist? That term is a very contested shared term,
and you can't you aren't allowed to just have your
own definition of it. You can be you know, people
complain if you make up your own definition of that word.
To use it differently than other people, and they need
that concept to be somewhere. And so because we all
share the same concept together with the same word, then

(01:53:48):
we could together drift badly in terms of what concept
we use and what it needs. So it would be
quite plausible that maybe we once had a more useful
concept of racist, and how we pick the different concept
of racist that's actually worse for all of us, but
each one of us must go along with it because
it's the shared concept the culture enforces.

Speaker 1 (01:54:10):
Yes, well, thank you for that answer, and thank you
for joining us today. This has definitely been highly enlightening.
Daniel Tweed writes, Robin is so good. I feel like
I should be paying tuition. This has been a great
workshop in essence for us transhumanists on perhaps possible ways
that we can formulate grand civilizational goals to Oh, thank.

Speaker 2 (01:54:35):
You, because I've been trying to get people to take
this problem seriously for the last few years, and the
fact that you invite me back to talk about the
same subject I take as a sign you see the
problem as important. I convinced you a bit that this
was not just any other talk topic. This was a
maybe important thing that we face that you want to
dive in further, and I'm happy to see people see

(01:54:58):
that this is an important problem, is bigger than just
me or some little, you know, fun news item. This
is civilization level issue.

Speaker 1 (01:55:07):
Absolutely, it is a civilization level issue. And as Daniel
Tweed rites, the longer people live, the greater care they
will take to improve the world. And that's definitely an
outcome that we would want. So thank you very much
for joining us today and continuing the conversation and hopes
that we may all live long and prosper

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Robin Hanson - Civilizational Goals to Prevent Decline

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Robin Hanson - Civilizational Goals to Prevent Decline