In The American Empire has Alzheimer's, we saw how the US had repeatedly been rebuffing forecasting-style feedback loops that could have prevented their military and policy failures. In A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform, we saw how Open Philanthropy, a large foundation, spent and additional $100M in a cause they no longer thought was optimal. In A Modest Proposal For Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) (unpublished), we saw how ACE had moved away from quantitative evaluations, reducing their ability to find out which animal charities were best. In External Evaluation of the Effective Altruism Wiki, we saw someone spending his time less than maximally ambitiously. In My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group (unpublished), we saw how an otherwise well-intentioned group of decent people mostly just kept chugging along producing a negligible impact on the world. As for my own personal failures, I just come out of having spent the last couple of years making a bet on ambitious value estimation that flopped in comparison to what it could have been. I could go on.
Those and all other failures could have been avoided if only those involved had just been harder, better, faster, stronger. I like the word "formidable" as a shorthand here.
In this post, I offer some impressionistic, subpar, incomplete speculation about why my civilization, the people around me, and myself are just generally not as formidable as we could maximally be. Why are we not more awesome? Why are we not attaining the heights that might be within our reach?
These hypotheses are salient to me:
- Today's cultural templates and default pipelines don't create formidable humans.
- Other values, like niceness, welcomingness, humility, status, tranquility, stability, job security and comfort trade off against formidability.
- In particular, becoming formidable requires keeping close to the truth, but convenient lies and self-deceptions are too useful as tools to attain other goals.
- Being formidable at a group level might require exceptional leaders, competent organizational structures, or healthy community dynamics, which we don't have.
I'll present these possible root causes, and then suggest possible solutions for each. My preferred course of action would be to attack this bottleneck on all fronts.
Post continued here. I'm posting to The Motte since I really appreciated the high quality comments from here on previous posts.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A couple thoughts: I refuse to type formidbiblaselkasdlk;jasdf, it is now FMBDS
Truth anticorrelates with FMBDS in the social sense; even if you are FMBDS if you never reach a position of liberty its like you never existed. See, Lyndon B Johnson in the telling lies sense and Napoleon/Mao/authoritarian of choice in the believing your own bullshit sense.
I think that a lack of safety net actually decrease FMBDS, which seems to corelate with risk. Might be why FMBDS historical people have been disproportionately aristocratic/completely dispossessed/mentally ill (EG Stalin). There could be lots of people with FMBDS qualities that never find out/use them because grandma needs health insurance or some shit. Like you said, trade offs where one side has infinite weight.
Finally: FMBDS might only exist in retrospect; it might be a pattern seeking hallucination where we assign values to qualities our monkey brains say make for successful individuals/groups, but only to the groups that succeed. Eg, suppose that Napoleon lost. Is he still FMBDS?
Basically, I think FMBDS is a valuable quality but also such a moving target you can't actually figure out if it there or not without doing a full autopsy.
Napoleon did lose. Twice :P Is he still FMBDS?
Yup.
But what if he loses on day one? What if Charles is born 10 years earlier gets ahold of the Austrian army at the same time as the levee?
Is he still FMBDS? I'd say no. So FMBDS must be relative, not absolute.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link