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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7612 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.

Some examples from history:

  • Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
  • Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
  • Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
  • Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

Prediction markets were probably viable as soon as the first stock exchange was established in 1602. But Robin Hanson did not invent them until 1988, and they are still mostly illegal. If humanity ever gets it act together, we are going to be kicking ourselves for a long time.

(Okay, yes, the idea relies on the efficient market hypothesis, which wasn't really popularized until 1970, but people had already noted that the market was unpredictable as early as 1900. The core insight of "market movement is unpredictable because the current price of an asset already incorporates everyone's best guess about its future value" took a surprisingly long time.)

As far as historical examples, we can add the printing press (much better than scribes), the codex (much better than scrolls), Arabic numerals with a dedicated zero symbol (much better than Roman numerals), and the alphabet (much better than logographs; looking at you, China).

and they are still mostly illegal

In the US. Licensed bookmakers in the UK can take bets on almost anything - betting on election results and royal baby names has been commonplace since well before 1988 - Robin Hanson did not invent prediction markets, and knows this. The commentariat on www.politicalbetting.com was the place to find the best non-partisan discussion of UK politics in the heyday of the OG blogosphere. I do not think that the existence of liquid prediction markets on UK politics (particularly after the foundation of Betfair reduced the large bid-ask spreads implied by dealing with a traditional bookmaker) has delivered the kind of benefits that US boosters of prediction markets expect.

My gut feeling is that the reason why prediction markets are currently the cool thing in non-leftist rationalist culture is:

  • There were two close elections in the US (2016 and 2024) where biased pundits mis-represented the polls (which said the election was too close to call) and implied that the Democrat was well ahead. Prediction markets outperformed the pundits to a much larger degree than they outperformed honest polling aggregators like Nate Silver.
  • Cryptobros looking for a less obviously anti-social use case for crypto than scams, ponzi schemes and ransomware.

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