35 – When Did You Cry About The End?

Let us travel back in time, starting right now and walking backwards.

Today Elon announced on Twitter “Having a Bit of Existential AI angst today”

A couple days ago Sam Altman (ChatGPT OpenAI) wrote a text talking about AGI and taking it seriously in the OpenAI website. In the aknowledgements, he thanks a few of our folks, including the reasonable Paul Christiano, Nate Soares and Allan Dafoe – all of whom I know in person and vouch for as sincere EAs – Helen Toner, who I also know, and Holden Karnofsky, who I have always been suspicious of and continue to be, but many other people think he is a reasonable EA.

A day before that, Sam Altman showed up with Eliezer Yudkwosky and Grimes (Elon’s ex) in a viral internet picture.

The Day before, a podcast with Yudkowsky saying we are all going to die came out.

Now, you may see coincidence, but I see causation.

In that interview, Eliezer mentions when he cried.

2015. In 2015 me, Elon, and many other people gave presentations in the google based EA global. Elon’s condition for participating was that on top of the public facing panel on AI, they also did a private one.

They later came on to the hotel where we had a rationalist conference a few months before with all the top AI people and some of the smartest people on Earth. (I’ll post pictures of these events below) At that time it was already obvious for the best of us that Paul was the best of the young people. And Paul went on to create OpenAI with some other people.

Yudkowsky was close to the negotiating tables and stuff. But at some point, be it by Elon’s will, or by OpenAI policy, whatever, they decided to go open. People like me from the Nick Bostrom school of Superintelligence were scared about the name being OpenAI.

The story I told myself to sleep at night was that they were pretending and using the name Open so that anyone interested in Openess would go there, and we could neutralize them all if they were likely to destroy the world elsewhere. A small, very small part of me still believes this.

In the Interview, Yudkwoksy says that when that funding round happened and they were more moved by likes and dislikes and primate stuff, that is when he realized that we were not going to make it as a species. That is when he cried. That is when he realized the that we were not going to make it. 2015

Now if you’re new here. No one fought for this harder than Yudkwosky (not even Nick). Yudkwosky is a genius and one of the best people in history. Not only he tried to save us by writing things unimaginably ahead of their time like LOGI. But he kind of invented Lesswrong. Wrote the sequences to train all of us mere mortals with 140-160IQs to think better. Then, not satisfied, he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to get the new generation to come play. And he founded the Singularity Institute, which became Miri. It is no overstatement that if we had pulled this off Eliezer could have been THE most important person in the history of the universe. Once someone asked me if I disliked Eliezer (I guess it was because he didn’t talk to me much despite us working in the same offices) my response was something like “I love Eliezer. There is nothing Eliezer could do to possibly cause me to dislike him. The only scenario where I can possibly imagine Eliezer doing something that would make me personally dislike him is if he was holding a blade to the neck of my family members. And even then once the situation was over I would still be extremely thankful to him for all he has done.” You get the idea. I like the guy.

Anyway, so Elon cried in 2023. Eliezer cried in 2015.

Back when I was leaving Oxford, right before Nick finished writing Superintelligence, in my last day right after taking our picture together, I thanked Nick Böstrom on behalf of the 10^52 people who will never have a voice to thank him for all he has done for the world. Before I turned back and left, Nick, who has knack for humour, made a gesture like Atlas, holding the world above his shoulders, and quasi letting the world fall, then readjusting. While funny, I also understood the obvious connotation of how tough it must be to carry the weight of the world like that. He didn’t cry then, in 2013, but that gesture was king of an emotional cry in a way. So let us say Nick cried in 2013.

I met Geoff Anders in 2012, while a visiting scholar in the Singularity Institute. He arrived 2 weeks before I did. I was like the 6th member of Leverage, about a day into knowing Geoff. I could see that he was there for the same reason I was, with the same intensity. It was pretty cool.

A few days into this trip, me, Geoff, and Justin Shovelain (another character from that world) went out for food. We were doing the same we all did, back in 2012. Talk at maximal speed about how to save a world on fire that didn’t know it was on fire. Back then, there were only like, I don’t even know. There were very few people who understood what was up. More than 10, fewer than 150.

And at some point in the conversation it just hit me. A jolt of neurotransmitters, feelings and sensations just overcame my body like a torrent and I stopped listening and speaking for a little bit.

At that moment I understood the magnitude of the responsibility that had been bequeath on us. I realized how rare I was. How few of us there were.

You may think it is fun to be Neo, to be the One or one of the Chosen ones. I can assure you it is not. We had discussions about how we couldn’t take the same plane, despite odds of planes falling being so low, because the risk for the world was so high. The stakes of every single conversation were astronomical. The opportunity cost of every breath was measured in galaxies.

And when my body finally processed that this is real, that it is actually happening, I did what our ape bodies do best. I cried. I cried with my whole heart. I cried in 2012.

I am sure that Nick, Yudkwosky, and others, have cried before. Put yourself in that position. Can you imagine the weight of the world on your shoulders like that?

Anyway. So, today, as far as I’m concerned, Elon cried.

Of course the situation isn’t the same anymore, not in the least.

Elon was convinced by Nick Bostrom, same as me. I don’t know when he joined the game exactly but we started trying to get him in 2013 and he was definitely on board, enough to present at EA Global and meet our folk and all that jazz in 2015. So at some point in between Nick broke through to him.

Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One has a final chapter that is literally just Nick Bostrom simplified – not interpretation, it says so in the chapter – so I’m sure Peter cried at some point before 2011 when I imagine he finished the course on which a student based the book they wrote. That’s when he cried. Peter and Elon are friends-ish. So you know, maybe that.

2023 is not like 2012, when I cried.

Eliezer and Nick never really believed we had a great chance. But the size of the chance we had in 2012 was so much, so much bigger than than the slim chance our actions matter now. Maybe we will all die. Maybe we will all go to AI heaven. But the odds that our actions will be what determines that have diminished orders of magnitude in between then and now.

Another guy who I saw cry, literally, was Michael Arc, also known as Vassar. It was 2012 and he had just returned from like, Israel, England etc… and he was fucking exhausted like I have seldom seen. He was “me at the end of Burning Man” tired. ‘Burned out’ was named after his state. The guy was a wreck. And in that conversation with a few people I think was a couple days before the day I cried with Geoff and Justin. That was the first time I heard someone state that “it is just us”. He was pointing out that with all the mechanisms they had put in place to locate people, it looked like there were no other people in other parts of the world, in the top unis, etc… there was no one else. It was just them (I had just arrived, I don’t think I should count) and there were not many of them. It was seeing him say that that began the cascade that led me to cry a few days later. That day, Vassar cried.

I also saw Anna Salamon’s day. The memory is blurry but I recall her having returned from England. She wasn’t sad though. She was very grounded and rational (this was before the meeting where I saw them found CFAR) and had just met Nick for the first time (I had not met him yet). She said they seemed to be “just like us, except more able to survive the bureocracy of academia” at least in England, I concluded, there was hope. We were not the only tribe on the case.

A post mortem: Did I do enough?

Well. We lost. So, based off that obvious metric I didn’t do enough. That is what Solzhenitsyin would say anyway.

Even the stuff I did do, like write a paper on AGI and psychology, I didn’t try to spread it to the relevant parties. I accepted being scapegoated relatively easy from the Berkeley world because of rejection sensitive disphoria and other stuff. If we use the Elon or Nate standard of “do whatever regardless of what you feel so we win no matter how unlikely our victory is” there is no doubt that I did not do enough. Thank goodness I am not as draconian as they are in my self judgement. I think for a random monkey in Brazil, I did some pretty high levels of stuff while the window of opportunity was open.

I helped create EA, gave the first TED talk, created a couple crucial consideration institutions, met Nick, Paul, Eliezer, Hanson and so on. I ran for a period the world’s largest EA house. I did a PhD in Altruism which is about creating the necessary conditions in the future world for things to go well both in the case AGI is possible and in the case it isn’t.

I met Toby and Will, of EA fame. Toby showed me what math philosophers should know. Will and I were a little more…. uh. Ok that’s not relevant for the internet. But what I’m most thankful to Will is that he saved me an amount of time that is hard to imagine. Pretty much everything I wanted to do between 2010 and 2016, Will did 2 years before I would. In so doing, Will relieved me of some responsibilities that I cannot express enough how grateful I am for. Will was like the bird in the front of the formation that breaks the air barrier, and he allowed me a much, much, much freer life than I would have without him. Thank You William MacAskill, for what you have done for me, personally.

I’m sure Will cried at some point. I hear from the grapevine that both Toby and Will joined our team, team Nick Bostrom, so to speak, over time. Both of them started as EAs but Toby’s latest book is on existential risk , The Precipice, and WIll’s latest book is What We Owe The Future. Basically the longer we lived, the more I saw them converge to the position I held back in the early days. Joao, my friend colleague and coauthor from Brazil, edited and did research for both books.

But anyway. All this is just a post-mortem pre-mortem. We haven’t died yet. But if even Elon is already in the crying stage, who is left trying to fight who understands the real odds at stake? Dr Strange? The odds are getting close to Avengers odds, which assuming reality fluid homogeneity across possible worlds in the MCU (a ridiculous assumption) is one in 15 million. We are not doing that bad yet, but, we’re less than 2 orders away from it.

So, that’s when everyone that I know cried.

If you have an idea of what to do to save the world, shoot me a message. Can’t really get much worse than this. And one of you may have a good one.

I should have spread my paper and PhD more thoroughly. But I lack the emotional stamina for it. The social dynamics of the Bay affected me, and being away was kind of a necessity psychologically.

Anyway, you don’t have that problem. If you have an idea to save the world, let me know. I can at least help you filter out the bullshit, and refine the decent ones to a level where we could bring them to some of the right people.

Maybe you haven’t cried yet. Maybe you never will.

But most of the rest of us cried.

I cried a little bit writing this text.

It’s ok to cry.

It is a big deal, and we are here for you.

For 22 years, relentlessly, we tried. Not only these characters whose cries I happened to witness, but hundreds of other people.

I thank and love every one of them.

I has been an absolute honor to serve with you all folks!

I’ll see you on the other side!

42 – Steelmanning the Other Side: Tinder, AI Girlfriends, Incels, Social Media, Porn, TikTok and Contemporary Dating (Yes, Really!)

Epistemic Status: Literally trying to build the steelman strongest case I can for the things above which a lot of people (me Very included) are very worried about. This is essay 42, and I think Steelmanning the other side can often be the solution to Life, The Universe, And Everything. Although I will steelman all these things together, I don’t disagree with all of them, I have always been a defender of Porn and TIkTok.

“The family is a fiction, but it is a useful fiction to keep useless men away from dangerous activities” – Someone 30+ years ago in a book

This will be more or less the sustaining basis of my argument.

Men don’t like hanging out with babies for extended periods too much. They get somewhat annoyed. Men like children more and more as they become closer to adolescence. Women always have and always will do primary care of younglings, cause, they like it more.

Back in prehistoric barbarism times size and strenghts were the chieftans of economic ability and protection capability. A service economy killed the first property, and firearms and a police force killed the second.

Men were once useful to protect women and children from strangers, and to bring home the bacon. Now the supermarket brings the bacon, and women can make enough money to raise kids, which again, they like more in the early years. So men have become useless.

The author of that book knew that millenia ago as soon as the second wave of feminism struck. Which, wow, Nietzsche level abstractive ability of predicting things.

So now Women can basically earn their own bacon, get good genes from a couple of guys, and use that money to raise some fine babies and kids.

Conservatives, falsely, believe that fathering matters. Here’s a bit of science for you: To test comparative anthropology stuff, you need to stabilize as much as you can, and vary the thing you’re trying to study. In the case of fatherness, the big confouding variable of course is genes. The question isn’t whether intact famillies do better than broken families with single mums. That’s a dumb question. The question is “how much of the fact that single mum kids suck is caused by the absence of dad in the environoment and male teachers, and how much is caused by the genes of that dad sucking?” and of course the response to that, like the response to literally every investigation into human psychology and behavioral genomics bar none ever is: it is WAY, WAY, WAY more genetic than we would like to admit. Take a guy who is a conscientious brilliant well adjusted low neuroticism, polite, orderly father of 7 in a protestant educated home, throw his genes around in ghetto single mums and watch some outstanding people rise from a terrible upbringing. His genes basically made them great, whereas the dad who leaves to get milk and never comes back is an asshat with bad genes.

So let us agree that in a service economy with power law wealth distribution and a police force, men are not necessary for the family. They contribute the genes and after that they are basically expensive pieces of furniture that tell the woman to make them a sandwich when she could instead be making power points from home for far more money for her and the kids. Plus, if she doesn’t have dad around at home, she can totally feel desired and loved like its the first time by going on dates with some local chads. And if she decides she needs a longer term companion, she can basically downgrade to a beta bux and he will happily provide for her and the kid.

So in short, men have become much less useful since the 1990s. We may not like it, but it’s facts. Whatever you think should be the case, the fact is that if you control for intelligence and select only like 110+ there are millions of single mums doing perfectly fine, alloparenting with friends, grandmas and nannies, and so on. Again, you have to control for genes, like everything else. Twins one of whom married to a dude and with 2 kids at home versus a twin single mum with also 2 kids at home. I mean, they will both do fine. The kids will likely do fine as well. Genes are far, far more important than we give them credit for, because we are afraid of eugenicists, and fair enough, eugenicists have been really annoying in the past.

So, families are no longer really necessary, or can be done on a partial basis, like a relationship between co-parenting parents that live in different apartments in the same neighbourhood etc…

That leaves us with, you guessed, a metric ton of men who are no longer in families. Now historically that’s how you build either an army or a civil war and unrest. We don’t need an army or a civil war, but the thing about the rise of useless men is that it coincided with The Great Dopamine Awakening and The Rise of Porn.

These two events not only countenanced what literally everyone expected (men will become super violent and society will descend into chaos) but OBLITERATED them. Porn, Only Fans, Playboy, surrogate relationships, one to many girlfriend subsistutes etc.. completely stopped men from doing riots and destroying everything. And videogames and TikTok and other stuff made the world far more interesting. So fucking damn interesting that it caused another event no one had predicted: A decline in alcohol consumption. Now I know alcohol is a little known substance that only a niche few berkeley hippies heard of but lucky for you I’m one of them and here’s the thing. HALF of all crime is alcohol related. That goes for boyfriends beating the shit out of their chicks, murders, car accidents, and all that jazz. So once we could get our fix from Phennibut, Caffeine, youtube and tiktok, and yes, even instagram, Crime went TO THE FLOOR. Crime is now half what it was. So let me say this again. Contrary to what everyone predicted every, although the number of marriages fell, the number of incels increased 4x+ topping 8% to like 30-50% now, the amount of crime at the very same time went down by 50%. Insane!

Now I have a confession to make .I am a TikTok user. And a Porn user. It all started when I was a …. I’m kidding you are a user too, and if not you’re addicted to some other social media, we all are.

Now here is a totally wild proposition: What if we stay on Tiktok instead of doing other things because Tiktok is BETTER? I know, shocker. I’ve lived on Tiktok for a long time. It is a positive place, full of energizing people who pull you up if you’re down, with great advice if you’re depressed, who will teach you things if you need to learn things, make you laugh when your friends didn’t invite you to a party, make you cry with emotional stories of kindness and generosity, seduce you with a level of sexyness that you almost never would get in real life even if you’re the boss of your neighbourhood mating market, and who will keep you away from boredom for literally 10 thousand hours. Tiktok will simply put give you what you want better than you knew what you wanted, forever, for free, by kind beautiful generous people, in a digestible, quick format that will elevate you and improve your life. Youtube does all those things though not as strongly because the algorithms are not as good, but it will also teach you how to think and allow you to be a bystander in the most interesting conversations in the world.

Instagram is bad, I can’t really steelman it, because guys hate instagram and are only in it because they want to get girls, which they fail at doing and get frustrated, and girls are in it to receive validation for photoshopped best pictures which are not really them and they get seriously depressed because there’s literally a million gilrs hotter than them, with an AI photoshopped face that is 15 years old, and thus absolutely unbeatable in the male preference market. But I can do Tinder. The human population is decidedly not homogenous. Girls who are hypersexual can go on Tinder and receive all the Chad sauce they need to be fulfilled. If they sleep with enough men (and they will cause I’m talking by definition about the most sociosexual women possible) then bam, a lot of guys get to unload some of their suffering from uselessness in their faces and breasts, which makes a for a great Tuesday night.

Now if the family is optional and has been for about 30 years or more, and not a survival necessity, men might have realized that they didn’t really like being servants to the upper class of women anymore. Like maybe, just maybe, there’s more to life than to live in a cubicle helping your boss get rich 15 hours a day to come home to a wife who only gets wet from seeing you occasionally and often demands some strange stuff from you.

Maybe, just maybe, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Smash Bros, Halo, Counter Srike etc… are actually more fun than women. I am not saying this ironically. I truly mean it. I think there’s a giant cohort of guys who pursue women because they think it is the right thing, whereas playing Magic, Fortnite, or watching the best 250 movies of all time on IMBD would actually make them much, much happier, with less stress and less demands.

I literally prefer playing Magic to Sex. I have literally passed on dates, several times, to play magic. A few times to scroll on TikTok. I am sure other men have variation on their preferences. So maybe the reason a lot of men are checking out, now that families don’t really need us anymore is because they literally found something better to do. Create a new Elvish language. Get jacked like Arnold. Climb everest, whatever. Women might always insist that “I’m not like other girls” but every guy my age who has been dating 18-25 year old girls for 16 years knows that that’s not really a totally accurate description of reality. Women are a lot alike, and there’s a ton, a metric ton, a fuckton of men who would like them if they were more easygoing, generous, and sexually available, but who genuinely feel like in their current form and shape, they are not the best ways to pass the time. I mean Dutch history is fascinating, chess is kinda cool, and live multiplayer action games are just better than reality. There are hundreds of millions of men who just don’t want women around except for cuddles, praise, and sex. And if you’re one of them, isn’t it great that men are useless now for non sperm purposes, and you’re not conscripted to serve a bitch for 3 decades before she flees with your money and kids? If you’re the kind of man that thinks like that, I’m sure lots of women will love that you self selected out of the market. MGTOW benefits women too.

This is only possible, of course, due to porn and other pararomantic parasocial relationships, which quelch the impossible for women to understand ferocity of the male sexual drive. Men are wild beasts, but now we can all share the experience of hooking up with a sex doll while inside a VR with a different hot 28 year old Ukraini@n r3fugee girl every night, who seduces on camera (in full size, 3d, with audio) then makes us feel validated, and then just let’s us spread our genes like Genghis Khan could never imagine on a creampie insiher. And much like a Starbucks coffe comes with a splash of environmental righteousness and save the planet virtue, ejaculating in that doll comes with a splash of giving Putin the middle finger and helping the war effort and saving democracy. (no joke, one of the VR websites has ukra1ne flags and US flags but no other flags, so you can help someone being damaged by the war)

Porn has always been good. Besides the diversity, it also helps people in long distance relatinoships to remain faithful, it helps disabled people get some semblance of mates, it helps ugly people not r@p3, and the benefits go on, and on, and on. The fact that like 2 people can create like literally 10 million orgasms with a well done video is just, I mean, historically unprecended. Mr Beast is making the world better. But he’s got nothing on Porn.

Humans are ridiculously adaptable. People in North Korea or in the poorest quintile of India are pretty happy. Mennonites study until age 13, then talk about the bible in low german until they die. Also pretty happy, and popping like 7 babies each. San Franciscans think not aborting is barbaric, not doing LSD is like going to the middle ages, Christianity is egypt level old, and cuddle parties are the new Vegas. Pretty happy on average as well, doing just fine. And no matter how much you try to attack them, they literally don’t give a shit about the shit and needles on the street, when they are walking 5 blocks betwen their weekly orgy and their startup meeting, which is just a pre-game for the hackaton, since, you know, it’s saturday.

Now women don’t want to have to deal with shitty men. And, to be honest, that seems kind of like a sensible position to have. I don’t wanna deal with shitty men either, specially not if they try anal every week. That shit hurts you know?

What I’m saying is that maybe having most men have these parasocial relationships might not be that bad.

I’m an expert at relationships (not Good relationships, don’t put the cart ahead of the horses) I’ve had 13 of them, 2 bad, 6 good, 5 excellent or so… And I’ve had parasocial relationships, first with a Yang-stan girl who I would leave playing in background, she’s asian (Hi Paget, I know we’re friends on facebook lol) so then I transitioned to another asian who talks about Dogecoin, Luci. I tried to get a thing going with ASMR Glow but I like ASMR males so much more that between The Laughing Heart and another guy I kinda had to break up with her, lol. I mean you get the idea. I was still dating real girls while all that happened, but it’s very obvious to me that the reason I watched so many videos of those two intelligent asian girls was to get some non-nagging, feminine, intelligent company while I cooked my steak or whatever I did sometimes. Some guys need it to be more girlfirend like so they go on Twich, pay the chick, do only fans, talk to indian men pretending to be her, and so on. And all the more power to them, for me literally having a voice in the background of an asian chick talking about something moderately interesting and occasionally looking at their long hair, was more than enough pararomantic relationship. But again people differ and some guys need much more engagement than that.

That engagement is coming. AI gfs are getting better and better. And let’s face it, most men think women can be a hassle with the whole shit testing and neuroticism and needing safety and “would you still love me if I was a worm” stuff. The AI versions will be super understanding empathic, encouraging, avaiable, sexy, and making you feel good. More and more men will voluntarily leave the market. That’s a good thing. First they won’t do raids. Second, much like the gays are awesome cause more women for us, they will leave even more women for us. At some point we will be drowning in pussy, real or virtual, and both will be happy, Chad and Zack (Zack is back!).

Is contemporary dating really all that bad? I mean I know everyone is complaining about it right now. But think about it. Fewer men are dating just because their balls are getting to heavy to carry, since there’s anime girls ready to get them off any second of the day. The few men who are going out there in the wild really do want a girl.

The girls sometimes only want validation and some free food. But men are kind of done with that, so they’re checking out.

Eventually since humans are incredibly adaptable, we should expect an equilibrium, where whatever are the conditions of dating, at that time, is exactly what the people who keep choosing to go to the dating market wanted from dating, at that time. If that balance will be Calígula level orgies between Chads and Sociosexual Stacies while everyone else stays at home or plays RPG, or if it will be christian couples who decided to pretend fathers are not useless because Jesus said so and want to play that game forever, I don’t know. But in either case, the people that want thing X will get thing X, and everyone else will leave that market.

We are living in a rare and unusual time where the tech came at us so fast that everyone is using it wrong. So everyone is sad and lonely and stuff. But soon the stigma on loneliness and Dolly, the doll, will go away, like the stigma on porn or being gay went away.

So men will freely choose to bang sillycon and play games on syllicon chips, removing carbon-heavy women out of the play altogether.

Women will get the best guys and the best genes, be some boss bitch if they want, and some pretend submissive christian wife if they want, and that that.

Right now we have men deceiving women and women being obligated by nature to filter men in ways that are not good for women or for men. But we will adapt. Hoes will be hoes, can’t make them a housewife after all. Some system like uber or postmates or amazon rating will emerge where we can track who is looking for longer or shorter relationships in a way that is hard to fake.

The main problem of contemporary dating (nothing can possibly correctly follow this sentence beginning) is fundamentally that we lost control of how to track people’s true intentions and capabilities. It is fundamentally a signalling problem. A millionaire extravert PhD in Altruism who speaks 5 languages and can travel with you for like, ever (any similarities with living persons is merely incidental), but who is only 5″10 and has a hispanic name might get filtered out before being even seen by any woman he would take actual interest in the streets, and hundreds of women who would be happy to hang with him will instead select via different signals that leave them heartbroken instead. Again for uber (aka strangers of the ethnicity you were most told to fear driving 16 year old girls in their cars drunk at night) we literally solve that problem. For amazon we solved it. For food, with yelp and postmates, we solved it. TikTok knows what you want way, way way more than you do. So we already know what you want without you telling us. Now make a robust signalling system so that long term maters will meet long term maters, and vice versa, a system of reputational tracking and relationship estimating that will actually find out if someone would be a good match for you or not, and bam. You win. You will be a trillionaire and you will kind of flat out solve the dating problem that rose a consequence of people meeting their significant other, or their insignificant sexual object, via discreet messaing and not through the veto of a community.

Soon we will be able to accurately signal who we are, the good the bad and the ugly, and at that time, dating will go back to being good. You may think people will not adopt that technology, and that`s not true. People will literally adopt anything women 15-26 adopt, because society follows them around. So as soon as those women conclude that`s the best way to both be happy mother of 4, and also on the other side of personality to be the target of a weekly bukkake, society will immediately, and without question, follow these young women to that new app.

So we are actually in the best of worlds. We created some stuff that is so fun and stimulating it is better than to be in a relationship for a large fraction of the population, and it makes people drop cigarretes and alcohol behind. We are finding ways for people to eventually be able to be sexual with exactly all the people they want to who want them back, and not one less, whereas people want 1 or 1000 of those, and we managed in the meanwhile to contain the violence and mess that would otherwise have emerged from men becoming useless without a rise in violence, r@p3 or civil unrest.

The number of orgasms in the world probably increased by a significant fraction and sexual pleasure might be at an all time high whilst unwanted sexual encounters are at an all time low, since women don`t need to be wives anymore, men don`t need to go out to a smoke filled club to catch a whale and can just lose 15 minutes before going back to homework to hangout with AI face of eva green in some super porn star video.

We are in an adjustement period, so there`s some discontent and lots of talk happening. But ultimately we will find a way to do what we need, and the optimistic news is we`ve done it with food and transport already.

And what will emerge on the other side of that is a future the likes of which our ancestors could never have dreamed of, with rivers of milk and honey, harps playing in orgiastic paradise, and the entire variety of human desire satisfied by a combination of real consenting loving people, when the numbers match, and virtual, perfectly optimized algorithmic AIs, when the numbers are skewed one way or another.

The future is glorious!

There are three cutting edge thinking clusters I believe we should unite

1) The Incentive Tensors:
Bostrom, Daniel Schmachtenberger (closer to the blade), David Sloan Wilson, Brett Weinstein, Joon Yun, Thiel, Eric Weinstein (trailing).

Trying to find the basins and attractors that might stabilize future evolution (cultural, technological and memetic) away from Continue reading The Three Thinking Clusters We Should Unite →

Solving Christmas and Thanksgiving: How to get liberals and conservatives in your family to empathize with one another
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1) This probably won’t work, but give it a shot.
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2) If you’re the Conservative: Liberals have emotions related to liberty and care. Or fairness. They don’t care about groupish stuff like loyalty, authority, sanctity, and purity. So in order to make them understand you, you have to reframe the stuff you care about in terms of either care, or liberty. More lefty types are Care above all things (lots of agreeableness).

So what you have to do is Continue reading Solving Christmas and Thanksgiving: How to get liberals and conservatives in your family to empathize with one another →

SPOILER ALERT

1. This is a personal tale, written by Diego and for Diego
2. This text holds more contradiction, narcissism and humility than any other I have written.
3. To understand it, know that what I am doing here is finding out my own story amidst all the Putnamian/Quinean interpretations of the parts of my life I can remember. My goal is to use that story to motion myself into a better future, to get out of a stuck place, it is not to prove that this story is a good story for others to live, but only to myself.
4. There are spoilers of Game of Thrones all the way up to, and including, the last episode. Leave now if you haven’t watched. SPOILER ALERT!

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Continue reading Game of Thrones Has Shown Me My Narrative Was Never About Me →

You’re a good person. You know it, right? I mean, there was that one time you did that one thing, but, you were not yourself then. Partially, you regret it. Partially, you no longer identify with that, in fact, you’d rather just let go of that topic so you can go back to being the genuinely good person you want to be. Fair enough.

Now, when you are voting for someone else, there’s a problem. Your image of yourself can only strech so much. There are people out there who simply are more moral than you, and you know it. They have resisted temptation with more gravity than you have, in face of tougher odds. They’ve behaved in a way you can’t even convince yourself you’re capable of. So, is it morally acceptable to vote for them?

Will Darwinism and the Christianity Superorganism Unify? Meditations on Azathoth
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First a play on words: 1

Then a Chronology: 2

What I am bringing to the table: 3

How are Superoganisms damaged? 6

Political analysis and implications 7

A Darwinian Philosopher’s Glossary of Biblical Terms 8

After Artificial General Intelligence (Bostrom 2014) and Ending Aging (Grey 2007), it seems to me that the third most important venture of the 21st century will be whether Darwinism and Christianity can be unified. I propose thinking of Christianity as as superorganism and discuss evolutionarily stable strategies both biologically and culturally.

I expect very large inferential distance that I am simply unable to overcome in my description. So I write this for the few who will “get it” and call them to arms to help me understand this complex maze together so we eventually produce a more palatable version of the underlying insight. If you get it, try to find me in real life so we can clash minds. This is all but a complete analysis. 

 

First a play on words:

In the beginning of the process through which a second type of (replicator/intentional system/teleodynamic constraint cluster) was the Word, and the Word was with (God: a schelling coordination mechanism for the superorganism of Christianity to evolve at that level. In Clarke (2016 – A Levels of Selection Approach to Evolutionary Individuality) vocabulary, it is type two object, made of autonomous subagents, in process of becoming a type one object, an autonomous entity with mutually interdependent synergistic parts), and (the Word was God: The attractor state which gives Telos (Deacon 2011) to the Christianity superorganism was word, that is, memes. Meaning the formation of the superorganism was not possible without a distinctive evolutionary level in which the constraints that constitute the teleodynamic (Deacon 2011) are instantiated).

Then a Chronology:

1929: Chesterton conceives of the Chesterton Fence, the hypothesis that if you found a fence somewhere and you don’t know why it’s there, keep it there, or you may be attacked by an unknown thing you didn’t know it was protecting you from.

1978: In Neural Darwinism, Edelman proposes theory of brain function as evolutionary competition.

1997: In The Symbolic Species, Terrence Deacon formalizes the human specific constitutive processes of symbolic cognition and semiotics t

1999: In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson, drawing from Jung, lays the foundations for a theory of mythology and archetype which is compatible with and embedded in neuroscience and evolutionary theory. And it gives an interesting glimpse at the origins of some of the conditions leading to conflict in the 20th century.

2000: In Evolution and Conversion and other works, René Girard begins to carve a theory of the evolutionary anthropology of sacredness, and of the biblical texts.

2005: In Evolution in 4 Dimensions, Eva Jablonka suggests that evolution happens concomitantly in culture, niche construction (geography), genetics and epigenetics. Notice how those levels mimic the types of nationalism, racial, cultural, and civic (geographical).

2006: In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett begins to carve a theory of religion using the tools of contemporary dual-inheritance evolution and memetics.

2008: In The Superorganism, Holldöber and Wilson summarize what is known about species whose evolutionary process transformed them into a collective organism. From termites to Naked-Mole rats. They also confirm multi-level selection and the very occasional group selection as mathematically feasible and actually existing processes in nature.

2008: In Basic AI Drives, Steve Omohundro proposes that any sufficiently intelligent system (in his case an AI) will evolve a few basic drives.

2008: In The Wisdom of Nature, Bostrom and Sandberg propose reasons why evolution can at times  be considered a valuable and worthy moral guide, even taking the naturallistic fallacy and is-ought in consideration.  These complement the Chesterton Fence.

2011: In Incomplete Nature, Deacon proposes a theory of teleodynamics unifying the birth of semiosis, life, and meaning with a theory of constraint and work. An attempt to naturalize semantics that doesn’t require the Dennettian concession (1995) of assuming that all semantics is constituted by syntax and evolutionary algorithmic optimization.

2003-2017: Drawing on Jung and neuroscience, Jordan Peterson proposes a unification of evolutionary analysis and primatology with life-development history and the constitution of personality, and links them via the narratives which are used to orient the constitutive stages of personality in an individual.

2013: Dennett proposes the hypothesis of Feral Neurons, neurons that are striving to remain alive despite having been after 3.900 million years of unbroken continuity.

2013:Drawing on this, Kevin Simler hypotheses that different personalities, spirit possession, and the holy spirit or Jesus can be thought of in a similar light.

2013-2016: Ellen Clarke lays out in several papers a theoretical understanding of the process of evolutionary transition from many organisms to one superorganism.

2017: Jordan Peterson begins an analysis of the Biblical Stories as  guideline templates for behavior crystallized in archetypal form over the course of centuries in which the bible was written. He finds life history development narratives common to humans (and other primates at times) and reenacts them from this evolutionary angle.

2017: Curious about the evolution of religious terms, I attempt to find a translation schemata for religious terms into scientific vocabulary coming principally from neuroscience and evolutionary analysis. This  becomes a glossary (below) which several people, in particular Michael Tartre, help create.

2017- October: I conjecture that Christianity is better thought of as a Superorganism, as a teleodynamic system (Deacon 2011) than as a memeplex (Dawkins 1973: Dennett 2006; 2010) and draw attention from Memetics author Tim Tyler (2011)  and evolutionary anthropologist Sloane Shearman.

What I am bringing to the table:

 

I think all the things above are the precursors for something I’d like to begin developing.  A paradigm of unification for the intellectual children of Darwinism, namely:

Evolutionary psychology – specially late era 2005+ (Buss, Schmidt)

Cognitive Science

Artificial Intelligence – as a guideline for how minds could be, not how they are (Dennett 1978)

Evolutionary anthropology

Teleodynamics and symbolic cognition

Multi-level selection

Predictive Processing and neural darwinism at large

And our understanding of the development of Christianity and Western Civilization.

Here’s a rough sketch: Multi-level selection continues to operate strongly but ever since the emergence of language it found it’s way into creating organisms constituted of cultural units. Memetic intentional systems. But furthermore, the evolutionary process produced coevolving coalitions of of memeplexes and gene pool clusters, the descendants of tribes which share a cultural framework and genetic similarity, and a niche.

This super-organismal coalition became an actual superorganism, and the cultural units constituting it became immortal in the sense that genes are immortal. Like feral neurons, they sometimes produce deleterious adaptations for the superorganism or the individuals constituting it, but overall the constraining forces are sufficient to secure not the fidelity of replication, but the continuity of the teleodynamic process and its telos.

This distinction is relevant. A superorganism has agency, whereas a platform for replicators only has space and resources where things can multiply. A superorganism has sensors and fights back, it usually develops specialized castes and organises itself around interactions between specialized agents. Christianity has all of those features, frequently even explicitly stated in the gospels, e.g. in the suggestion of becoming the body of Christ, or his arms and hands.

Peterson claims, and Eric Weinstein contests, that there’s moral value in the biblical stories not only as a matter of contingent fact, but because it has survived for thousands of years and been written by many authors. Now let us look at this from the Dawkinsian Dennettian Meme’s eye view:

Memes survive because they can, without being particularly beneficial for their host’s interests. So if it is contagious enough, and makes you “sneeze” the idea far enough, it will infect more people.

Now let us take the Superorganismic Teleodynamic view I am proposing:

The entity that controls an anthill isn’t any individual ant, the intelligence itself is distributed (Holldöber & Wilson 2008), if Christianity is a superorganism, then we should analyse it the same way we analyse the processing of ideas in our minds, by its subcomponents, the feral neurons and neural columns. So the biblical stories should be considered not only the successful replication of the memes which constitute them (although that as well) but also being the product of an organized and designed process of maintenance of the telos of that system, by the system! Dennett frequently mentions competence without understanding. Ribosomes are marvelously complex entities that perform incredibly intricate operations without any representation of the operation they are incurring. If Christianity is, like us individuals, a combination of constraints, some biological, some physical, some cultural, some behavioral patterns, etc… that, like any living organism, attempts to preserve itself through time, then it makes sense that as time progresses it would self modify by editing it’s book with archetypal narratives of life-history development narratives for ints constituent parts, just like messenger RNA organises itself for the interests of the cell, not for the interest of the genes whose message it is carrying.  But very frequently, those goals will be aligned, and they are synergistically connected systems.
A teleodynamic system is a cluster of constraints that preserves itself over time, roughly it can be considered an intertemporal attractor of attractors which preserves these constraints over time (adapted from Deacon 2011).

Any system that grows into being intelligent enough over time will acquire some drives (Omohundro 2008. Bostrom 2012), including:

self preservation (no other God’s),

goal structure preservation (be in awe of you, surrender to everlasting life (literal life, in form of clusters of constraints, actually being preserved over time, not heaven)),

Goal-content structure preservation (literalists),

Resource acquisition (preaching and converting),

Cognitive enhancement (even increasing number of individuals allows for cognitive enhancement of the religious superorganism, enabling for instance distributed cognition),

Efficiency (Peterson spreading some biblical messages on youtube count here. But even the printing of Bibles, and the structure of church can be considered emergent technologies of transmission.)
Creativity (apparently that is where I come in. This is complex enough to merit a session, below.)

Sensing an attack from several different forces, the Christian superorganism is reaching out to someone high in openness and creativity to find a way to survive. While Bannon produced several movies and other sources of knowledge trying to spread alignment with the superorganism at a political level, which ended up leading him to the white house, Christians reached out to me using vocabulary I understood from my extended visit to the academic world, talking about feral neurons and agent hierarchies and memeplexes and software implementations of narrative centers of gravity. Of course the individuals like Shane Stranahan and Conor White-Sullivan don’t necessarily need to consciously know what they are doing. As Dennett reminds us, competence without understanding is nothing but frequent. So I conjecture that the Christian superorganism is trying to dilute the message of the new atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) and to reach out to someone implementing a Dennett simulation (me) to try and find a way to protect itself from the emerging cells brought for by Darwin when he discovered natural selection, and further developed through the last 160 years.
That’s because constituent cells that get infected by Darwinism turn against the machine. The machine wants to contain them, to make their circle of contagion as small as possible. And with internet and education, the strategy of merely trying to suppress it won’t do. They need to unify, or Christianity will perish. An organism with too many cells turning against it in apoptosis cannot remove them quickly enough. And Darwinists are not the only people turning against Christianity.

How are Superorganisms damaged?

Let us consider some biological analogues.

Two amoebas encounter one another. One of them moves lysosomes (acid) towards the border wall across which they are touching, after some accumulation, it lunges into the other one, breaking it’s boundaries, legions of transposon RNAs race forth behind the pool of acid, with the mission of cutting off some slices of DNA from the other one and bringing them back (sexual reproduction). The same can happen between two superorganisms. Instead of lysosomes, soldiers, instead of DNA, knowledge of physics.

An anthill invades another anthill and steals a colony of aphis.  In many human battles between societies with slaves, and societies without slaves, the society without slaves invaded in order precisely to steal slaves and have their own population of slaves.

Army ants: ferocious, deadly, quick. Eating whatever comes their way. A larger caste of soldier ants comes first when attacking large prey, with jaws that are large enough to open holes in the victim, allowing workers to flow in. Any sacrifice they make will benefit their colony.

Sometimes an anthill simply tramples and devours another one.

Sometimes two superorganisms find ways to survive together. Ants and aphis have been living together in some areas of the world for many years. Evolution doesn’t stop however, so one would predict, on a priori grounds alone, that ants would be less cooperative with Aphis than with ants, and that they would develop defection detection systems, to make sure that the other superorganism isn’t now with its goals no longer aligned, either because it evolved in a different direction, or because the environment changed enough that a symbiotic coexistence became parasitic. Of course the reverse is true of bacteria in our gut which probably started off parasitic, but ended up symbiotic.

Superorganisms can be damaged by many different factors. Here is a table, try to come up with your own parallels for the three last rows. 

 

Ants (Superorganism)	Neurons	Christianity/religion
Soldier caste	Motor neurons	Evangelists
Ants that go astray from pheromone path and get lost	Feral neurons	“I was lost but now I found”
Ant that stops serving the anthill and reproduces is usually suppressed by pheromones from queen	If a neuron starts misfiring for no reason for long, the surrounding area gets inhibited.	Someone declares to be second coming of Christ, and most people will ignore them in due time. (e.g. INRI Cristo)

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Political analysis and implications

Ultimately, I believe that having a better understanding of the Christian superorganism and the niche construction of Western Civilization made by it in which we live is crucial to understand the biggest political debate of our era, that is to what extent is it possible to generate cooperation between different moral tribes, and to what extend it that cooperation predicated or not in the homogeneities which were hallmark of moral tribes in the last 2 thousand years (ethnic, cultural, and geographical), but which no longer delineate boundaries in the same significant ways they did in the past. Was that globalizing and unifying movement the removal of a Chesterton fence? If so, was it a cultural one, a biological one, or a geographical one, a combination of two? All three?

We see the rise of all three kinds of nationalism the world around as a response to the weakening of the superorganism. Starting off with Brexit, and up until the latest Austrian election where a centre right anti-immigration politician being elected, there is some attempt to hold on to one of those elements, biology, geography, or culture, and fear of some invasion, biological, cultural or geographic.

Dawkins, no friend of religion, suggests that possibly Christianity has a manifold of problems, but it may be a “bullwark against something worse.” This is in alignment with a subset of the international right-wing that holds that

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A Darwinian Philosopher’s Glossary of Biblical Terms

Diego Caleiro 2017-10-10

Feel free to add terms below.
They need to be compatible with Darwinism, biocultural evolution, Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Peterson’s pragmatic interpretation of the Biblical narratives. Have fun!

Heaven – a visualization of an optimizing target worth going towards, when extrapolated to limit maximal goodness.

Heaven – the state of your strategy for existence being in harmony with the surrounding natural laws. Note Jesus’s descriptions of Heaven are that it is “at hand”, i.e. not restricted to the afterlife. It is simultaneously “not of this world” in the sense that it is primacy is in ideas, not in material.

Hell – The limit structure of the state of your strategy for existence running contrary to the surrounding natural laws.  The hypothetical place to which things will descend if enough people sin for long enough, or if we turn out to be really unlucky. Peterson: Hell is infinitely bad because no matter how bad a world you can imagine some stupid son of a bitch can make it a lot worse.

Sin – an action that, if compounded and iterated over different people across time will lead, in expectation, more towards hell than towards heaven.

Example: Masturbation is a sin because it prevents males from being extremely motivated to find mates, which, in a sin-less monogamous mating marriage world, means they need to outcompete the other males to get a high rank female. So even though humans are satisficers and have decreasing marginal returns on food and shelter, sex in sin-less societies is a positional good, incentivizing males to maximize resource production.

If sufficiently many males choose to masturbate instead of seeking mates, the system collapses. If this happens long enough, it runs out of resources and people starve – hell.

Example 2: Female sexuality. If women have sex with more than one male, they cause the same effect over the long run. That is why degeneracy is a sin.

Jesus – in the hierarchy of agents that compose our selves, Jesus is a software that you can install very high up, sometimes higher than your main “self” software. Jesus – for Peterson anyway – is the ape that can ascend atop all hierarchies, he is “the good player”.

Jesus – the human incarnation of the logos; that is, the individual embodying/exemplifying the mode of existence which brings individuals into harmony with Natural Law, which is the Holy Spirit. Also identical to the Logos in some weird ontological sense (welcome to the weirdness of the Trinity).

Jesus and God are also used to mean “the attractor in behavioral space to which you should aim your behavior.” Jesus has a stronger connotation of top down control within the person, whereas God, as in “doing God’s work” has more to do with the telos of the superorganism.

A rationalist saying goes “keep your identity small”. One reason why you don’t want to make your identity too large, besides being able to change in case you were wrong, is so that you don’t become too full of yourself.

One way to do that is to install Jesus at the highest level, and assume that when you do a right and good thing, you were merely channeling the Lord, so you don’t get too cocky, which would prevent you from going to the top of the hierarchy, because who can tolerate someone who both gets to the top and talks about it?

(half the population of the USA seems sort of ok with it, so bear this hypothesis with a grain of salt, although he does quote the bible pretty often)

So at a sub-personal level, you keep Jesus on top as the controller of your agency to prevent arrogance, thus keeping your identity small.

The Devil – And you metaphorically have a coalition of bottom up subagents trying to do a hostile takeover of the high level agent, that inserts bottom up sin into your mind. That’s the Devil.

God – God is a schelling coordination mechanism for the superorganism of Christianity to evolve at that level. In Clarke (2016 – A Levels of Selection Approach to Evolutionary Individuality) vocabulary, it is type two object, made of autonomous subagents, in process of becoming a type one object, an autonomous entity with mutually interdependent synergistic parts.

Holy spirit – the holy spirit is Jesus, but when thought of not at the personal level of high level software implementation, but as the way in which the God coordination mechanism is implemented as distributed cognition in the minds that are implementing the Jesus software. Like pheromone networks in ant communication (Wilson and Hölldobler 2008 – The Superorganism).

Spirit – the software of Christianity. Being “in the Spirit” means you’re running the software. Strong influences of “being rational”, since the spirit/flesh dichotomy comes from Stoicism and Platonism, but has some ideas of altruism grafted on. Coordination comes for free, since the claim is that you can, by living optimally with the local information given to you, act in a perfect way.

So Jesus is the individual level software, the Holy spirit is the system level description, and God is the name of the schelling point that denotes the cluster of humans who are participating in the evolutionary battle of making Christianity the unit of evolutionary selection. That’s the holy trinity: individual software, system network, and schelling point.

Flesh – non-rational objects of desire which emerge from the subconscious. Somewhat anthropomorphized as a subpersonality to exhibit the idea that your relationship to the Flesh is slow-moving over time. Your “non-rational personality”.

 

Temptation – an individual instance of disruptive subconscious emergence. Often a manifestation of bottom up systems.

Demon – personification of a class of temptations. To be “possessed by a demon” is the same sense as to be completely fixated on the object which emerges from the subconscious. See http://www.theoi.com/Phasma/PhasmaEidolones.html

Sin -Missing of the mark, as in archery. As living in according to the Spirit is the aim, sin is any instance in which you’re not quite doing it right. Often giving in to a bottom up sensor incentivizing you to do something the top agent wouldn’t.

Scapegoating – a conflict and violence resolution mechanism involving removing individuals who disturb the sexual hierarchy, literally or symbolically, too much from the system (Girard 200x Evolution and Conversion). Sometimes just a conflict or violence resolution mechanism to facilitate coordination when our moral condemnation sense failed at it’s task – namely minimizing third party cost, with no regard for actual right and wrong, gotta love evolution… (DeScioli2013 – A Solution to The Mysteries of Morality).

Dragon – representational natural kind of all the dangerous things except women. All the things vervet monkeys have separate alarms for. Flying predator, reptilian predator, and 4 legged predator. All in one. With fire!

Temptation – bottom up Darwinian processes trying to beat the software of Jesus and take over control of your high level structures.

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Can you think of more Darwinian explanations for biblical terms and concepts? Post them below! Even if they are just guesses!

Special Thanks to Michael Tartre for developing many of the above.

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A constantly updating version of this document exists here

Trying to solve relationships, 1st try.

I want to solve relationships, and I am not fully equipped to think about this yet, so I’m going to be posting about it here in public, and I’m looking for feedback. You may have noticed I often speak with confidence, and although there are things I am confident here, I would like input AS IF I didn’t have confidence.

First step: framing the problem.
The problem I want to solve is specifically this:
“How to have the most desirable relationship, when the man and the woman are not far from the highest mating value they’ll have in a lifetime, and when both parties are NOT interested in having children?”
The boundary constraints are:
“It is 2015-2025, the decade of fragmentation, of the polarization of the sexes, of dating apps, and of some entanglement between sexual strategies and political issues which caused the educational system to brainwash people about relationships, and the state is almost in an open war against families”

I am asking this question for selfish reasons, as I am alive in this decade, I would rather not have to have kids (I would like the choice), I also have an altruistic motivation in that I am saddened by many people who may fail to reach their full potential in a relationship.

Let me start off by mentioning the alternatives offered, and what I see as valuable and terrible in them.

Bachelor for life: Interesting, not the goal of this post.

Christian marriage: get’s a lot of things right, would be necessary to disentangle the things that are in the interest of the individuals versus the church there. The idea of the couple being under the caretaking of Jesus might have value if you think of that as putting the relationship as a third person whom both parties value above themselves.

Gorilla Mindset: Lift, spin plates (plates = girlfriends), never commit, peackock, and the women will flock. Although technically true, and certainly valuable, seems to me an innapropriate response to the problem of commitment, which I’ll discuss in depth below. I do think it makes women and men happy, so for short term oriented hedonists, I have few objections to becoming gorillas or seeking gorillas. (primatology nitpick, actual Gorillas do not behave like that at all, but the name is sticky so I’m keeping it)

Just getting Married: I consider this extremely naïve. Marriage was a vowel considered sacred, terminal, and created and organized at a time where women couldn’t really work, where people lived shorter lives on average, and where having kids was basically a given, also the world was poorer and property rights mattered far more. To “let’s just get married” now is to ignore all the obstacles to each of those former values instead of tackling them. If there was only one thing wrong, maybe people could solve it. But there are many, so I believe they need to be preemptively solved.

Serial monogamy (girlfriend-boyfriend): It is nice but it has one problem brilliantly described by Jordan Peterson: it makes the meaning of what being in a relationshp is be, in part “oh, well, you have some problems, but I can’t find anything more interesting than you, so I guess I’ll have to go with it until I find something better.” This destroys all the incentives, since both parties have both an incentive to give the minimum as well as to seek for better partners elsewhere instead of improving the ones they have and helping them be better.

Primal Poly (Evo Psych Enlightened polyamory): Quite likely a viable alternative. The most important obstacles that lie ahead in my opinion are that it also has the incentive problem of “and why shouold I not trade partners?” and it has no countermeasure viable in the age of fragmentation to the attentional collapse we are all going through.

Normal Poly: Normal poly is great for very high SMV people, but it is hard to maintain commitment in the longer run specially for women, given availability.
………………..

The problem of commitment

In the next few days I’ll discuss many problems, and propose solutions, and expect readers to propose solutions and mention problems as well. The one I think most important in the 21st century is the problem of commitment, it can be illustrated with a few questions:

1) I can have sex with so many people given dating apps, VR, etc… why should I commit? (usually asked by a man)
2) I can have relationships with so many awesome interesting people given polyamory, liberation and dating apps… why should I commit?
3) Ok, let’s say I already think commiting is valuable because it substantially changes our incentives from “give the minimum until I find someone better” to “make this person’s life as amazing as you possibly can and allow them to do the same for you, because you are together in this boat, and neither is going anywhere”, but unfortunately God died, and the abundance of potential mates is real and basically superseeded our evolutionary drive for long term pair bonding, so *how do you go about ACTUALLY commiting*?
4) Ok, let us hypothetically say you solved the problem of commitment. Now I’m here, commited by this unpoken mechanism, and I want out. Why can’t I just get out?

I have lots to say about these, but I want to start with my main proposal, which is to create a new commitment mechanism, with the following desiderata:
P1) It is not mediated by State (because the state has no interest in your wellbeing)
P2) It is not mediated by the Church (because not every single interest of the church aligns with yours)
P3) It does not last forever (because forever is a really long time and we live long and technological progress is accelerating exponentially)
P4) But you CAN’T LEAVE while it lasts. (because that aligns the incentives of the two parties the best in terms of improving themselves, see video in first comment, being the best possible partner, falling even more in love, having healthy sexual lives, etc…)
P5) It is renewable (you can do it again if when it ends you want to do it again with the same person)
P6) Human psychology can do it, and it game theoretically sound (the Nash equelibrium makes everyone happiest and that kind of thing)

Ok, so that is a tall ask, but we can import what worked:

To get people to commit and not leave, evolution invented pair bonding and the agonizing suffering of breakups, which is a deterrent, thanks evolution, but not a sufficient deterrent.
The church and primitive societies invented the public commitment “everyone saw them making vows, so it would be stupid to just ignore it” which kind of helps, but has been sufficiently discredited by ideologies since the 60’s that is hardly optimal as a mechanism.
The state used a legal enforçable contract which originally would make both parties take a heavy toll. But unfortunately a mixture of political opportunism and feminism made the contract so obviously horrendous for man that no man in his right mind would partake in state assisted childloss russian roulette, and who wants to not be a millionaire merged into one game.
Evolution and traditional culture together also used time as commitment device, so the longer it took to merge the organisms into the miracle of sex, the more investment the parties did, the less likely they used to be to depart. But due to fragmentation and abundance of perceived partners I don’t think this makes the cut any longer.

So what do we do?

What is important about these is that they are costly to leave. so my proposal is to cut the middle man, and make it directly very costly to leave. This could be a cost in money with an escrow, a cost in public shaming by soliciting public shaming, etc… Basically, I think love is great as a reward mechanism, fear of loss a decent deterrent, but both need a push in our ever accelerating times. So an explicit conversation and commitment to redouble efforts to make your partner’s life awesome – that’s the reward side – and actual enforçable mechanisms of quadrupling down on the cost of leaving. I’m dead serious. The reason people don’t do costly punishing with external locus of control is simple: it works.

What about time?

This whole thought process started for me when talking to Alton Sun who had mentioned something like a relationship where there is a “renewal meeting” of sorts where after a year both parties rething the relationship what they want from it and commit to doing one more year of it.
I think 4 years is the appropriate amount instead, and that is what I want to endorse. My thinking is that 4 years is a period long enough that you really care about improving the other, it is proportional to how long memories last in our mind (3ish years) before they plateau, during adulthood, it is close enough to how long evolution designed love without babies to last (the oxytocin trigger lasts 2-4ish years) and people change a fair amount during 4 years.
But then we have the incentive problem, which is that as the last round of any given cooperative game approaches, the incentive to be awesome diminishes. Granted that is a problem. Evolution addresses this by making iterated interactions where you never know how many more there will be. So randomness actually solves this problem to some extent.
Given you can renewal vowels, that helps a lot in the case I’m suggesting here. Because you want to be the best possible partner to have a higher chance of renewal.
That however is not enough, because a part of you may choose to back off, so you actually start slacking a little bit. To avoid that, I propose addressing this problem also directly. We (game theorists) don’t know how to solve this enforcement mechanism, but we do know that randomness helps a lot. So actually after 4 years, what happens is not that you do “the talk”, but instead you throw a dice which with 25% will make you be together 1 more year, and 75% you have “the talk” and decide to renewal vowels.

This utilizes everything I know about relationships, evolutionary psychology, game theory, constraint theory, time management, motivation reserch, and psychology I can think of.

I hope you can get past the fact that it sounds sort of strange when you compare it to the whole talking snake garden with almightly gods and that kind of thing which is the counterfactual, or with the State laying down in bed with you and your spouse and trying to pitch you against each other, or with an ideological commitment to feminism preventing you from living one of the most amazing experiences we get to have as the Symbolic species.

So, what do you think?
And also, which aspect should I write about two days from now?

(Edit: I would like this to be widely shared, so if you don’t mind sharing with your friends so they too comment here, that would be nice. I need good ideas and good objections to do this right)

I’m not leaving. – Jordan Peterson, on the value of commitment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=236hSZmD_GQ&t=2s