Meditation on Moloch

Sci­ence. Same essay:

The mod­ern re­search com­mu­nity knows they aren’t pro­duc­ing the best sci­ence they could be. There’s lots of pub­li­ca­tion bias, sta­tis­tics are done in a con­fus­ing and mis­lead­ing way out of sheer in­er­tia, and repli­ca­tions often hap­pen very late or not at all. And some­times some­one will say some­thing like “I can’t be­lieve peo­ple are too dumb to fix Sci­ence. All we would have to do is re­quire early reg­is­tra­tion of stud­ies to avoid pub­li­ca­tion bias, turn this new and pow­er­ful sta­tis­ti­cal tech­nique into the new stan­dard, and ac­cord higher sta­tus to sci­en­tists who do repli­ca­tion ex­per­i­ments. It would be re­ally sim­ple and it would vastly in­crease sci­en­tific progress. I must just be smarter than all ex­ist­ing sci­en­tists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And yeah. That would work for the Sci­ence God. He could just make a Sci­ence De­cree that every­one has to use the right sta­tis­tics, and make an­other Sci­ence De­cree that every­one must ac­cord repli­ca­tions higher sta­tus.

But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the sys­tem. No in­di­vid­ual sci­en­tist has an in­cen­tive to uni­lat­er­ally switch to the new sta­tis­ti­cal tech­nique for her own re­search, since it would make her re­search less likely to pro­duce earth-shattering re­sults and since it would just con­fuse all the other sci­en­tists. They just have an in­cen­tive to want every­body else to do it, at which point they would fol­low along. And no in­di­vid­ual jour­nal has an in­cen­tive to uni­lat­er­ally switch to early reg­is­tra­tion and pub­lish­ing neg­a­tive re­sults, since it would just mean their re­sults are less in­ter­est­ing than that other jour­nal who only pub­lishes ground-breaking dis­cov­er­ies. From within the sys­tem, every­one is fol­low­ing their own in­cen­tives and will con­tinue to do so. 14. Con­gress. Only 9% of Amer­i­cans like it, sug­gest­ing a lower ap­proval rat­ing than cock­roaches, head lice, or traf­fic jams. How­ever, 62% of peo­ple who know who their own Con­gres­sional rep­re­sen­ta­tive is ap­prove of them. In the­ory, it should be re­ally hard to have a de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected body that main­tains a 9% ap­proval rat­ing for more than one elec­tion cycle. In prac­tice, every rep­re­sen­ta­tive’s in­cen­tive is to ap­peal to his or her con­stituency while throw­ing the rest of the coun­try under the bus – some­thing at which they ap­par­ently suc­ceed.

From a god’s-eye-view, every Con­gressper­son ought to think only of the good of the na­tion. From within the sys­tem, you do what gets you elected. It’s kind of em­bar­rass­ing that ran­dom no­bod­ies can think up states of af­fairs bet­ter than the one we ac­tu­ally live in. And in fact most of them can’t. A lot of utopias sweep the hard prob­lems under the rug, or would fall apart in ten min­utes if ac­tu­ally im­ple­mented. Any human with above room tem­per­a­ture IQ can de­sign a utopia. The rea­son our cur­rent sys­tem isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t de­signed by hu­mans. Just as you can look at an arid ter­rain and de­ter­mine what shape a river will one day take by as­sum­ing water will obey grav­ity, so you can look at a civ­i­liza­tion and de­ter­mine what shape its in­sti­tu­tions will one day take by as­sum­ing peo­ple will obey in­cen­tives. But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not de­signed for beauty or nav­i­ga­tion, but rather an ar­ti­fact of ran­domly de­ter­mined ter­rain, so in­sti­tu­tions will not be de­signed for pros­per­ity or jus­tice, but rather an ar­ti­fact of ran­domly de­ter­mined ini­tial con­di­tions.

Just as peo­ple can level ter­rain and build canals, so peo­ple can alter the in­cen­tive land­scape in order to build bet­ter in­sti­tu­tions. But they can only do so when they are in­cen­tivized to do so, which is not al­ways. As a re­sult, some pretty wild trib­u­taries and rapids form in some very strange places. Just as the course of a river is la­tent in a ter­rain even be­fore the first rain falls on it – so the ex­is­tence of Cae­sar’s Palace was la­tent in neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and reg­u­la­tory regimes even be­fore it ex­isted. The en­tre­pre­neur who built it was just fill­ing in the ghostly lines with real con­crete.

So we have all this amaz­ing tech­no­log­i­cal and cog­ni­tive en­ergy, the bril­liance of the human species, wasted on recit­ing the lines writ­ten by poorly evolved cel­lu­lar re­cep­tors and blind eco­nom­ics, like gods being or­dered around by a moron.

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I will now jump from boring game theory stuff to what might be the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

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Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources? John Moes, a his­to­rian of slav­ery, goes fur­ther and writes about how the slav­ery we are most fa­mil­iar with – that of the an­te­bel­lum South – is a his­tor­i­cal aber­ra­tion and prob­a­bly eco­nom­i­cally in­ef­fi­cient. In most past forms of slav­ery – es­pe­cially those of the an­cient world – it was com­mon for slaves to be paid wages, treated well, and often given their free­dom.

He ar­gues that this was the re­sult of ra­tio­nal eco­nomic cal­cu­la­tion. You can in­cen­tivize slaves through the car­rot or the stick, and the stick isn’t very good. You can’t watch slaves all the time, and it’s re­ally hard to tell whether a slave is slack­ing off or not (or even whether, given a lit­tle more whip­ping, he might be able to work even harder). If you want your slaves to do any­thing more com­pli­cated than pick cot­ton, you run into some se­ri­ous mon­i­tor­ing prob­lems – how do you profit from an en­slaved philoso­pher? Whip him re­ally hard until he elu­ci­dates a the­ory of The Good that you can sell books about? gions, at their heart, are the most basic form of memetic repli­ca­tor – “Be­lieve this state­ment and re­peat it to every­one you hear or else you will be eter­nally tor­tured”.

Productivity turns into famine when we no longer can afford our own existence