[Epistemic status: trolling.]
[Previous: Meditations on Moloch; Capturing Gnon. When I refer to Scott or Nyan, I am referring to those two posts.]
I.
Nyan asks, “Will the future be ruled by the usual four horsemen of Gnon for a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos or a future of dysgenic, insane, hungry, and bloody dark ages; or will the telos of man prevail for a future of meaningful art, science, spirituality, and greatness?”
The answer is “Gnon.”
When fighting eldritch horrors, you have basically two options. One: keep your head down, try to avoid attracting attention, and hope they don’t eat you. Two: open up the Necronomicon, start reading, and hope that you can control them.
Traditionally, the price of the second is insanity. However, I believe that this is missing the other, more important price; which of us would not willingly become insane to bind Cthulhu?
The other price is that you are meddling with beings beyond human comprehension.
And your spellbook was written by humans.
How sure are you that your spells bind Gnon? How sure are you that they do not just summon him? How sure are you that you comprehend something that is by definition beyond human comprehension?
It is one thing to try to cast small spells: the Elder Sign or a key that transports you back to your childhood dreamland; to campaign for stronger environmental regulations, to educate people about critical thinking. The upside is small, but the downside is small too.
It is another thing to change the entirety of society, to break the bindings that currently control Cthulhu and bind him again. Are you so sure that your bindings are better and stronger? Are you sure that you can bind him at all– that you will not simply wake him up?
Remember the last people who noticed that capitalism was a cruel optimization process that eliminates human values? Remember the last people who tried to implement a society that protected human values from this destructive optimization process?
Even this gamble might be worth it. If you think the current bindings are weak, if you fear they will break, it may be worth the risk. A chance of Cthulhu’s rise is better than a certainty.
But if right now the situation looks basically okay– do not open the Necronomicon. Do not go to Arkham University. Keep your head down. Survive.
II.
Scott recommends Friendly AI. Nyan recommends patriarchy, eugenics, rational theocracy, strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty, and a careful bottling of productive economic dynamics. I feel I, too, must offer a proposal for agents of Elua.
Scott suggests that this is the dream time: a brief period of excess carrying capacity, in which we can do silly nonoptimal things like art and music and love and philosophy and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.
I suspect that he is wrong, unless by “a brief period” he means “literally from the rise of consciousness until now.”
According to Wikipedia:
Since the 1960s, the consensus among anthropologists, historians, and sociologists has been that early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by capitalist and agrarian societies;[6][7] For instance, one camp of !Kung Bushmen was estimated to work two-and-a-half days per week, at around 6 hours a day.[8] Aggregated comparisons show that on average the working day was less than five hours.[6]
Subsequent studies in the 1970s examined the Machiguenga of the Upper Amazon and the Kayapo of northern Brazil. These studies expanded the definition of work beyond purely hunting-gathering activities, but the overall average across the hunter-gatherer societies he studied was still below 4.86, while the maximum was below 8 hours.[6] Popular perception is still aligned with the old academic consensus that hunter-gatherers worked far in excess of modern humans’ forty-hour week.[7]
The industrial revolution made it possible for a larger segment of the population to work year-round, because this labor was not tied to the season and artificial lighting made it possible to work longer each day. Peasants and farm laborers moved from rural areas to factories, and working time during the year increased significantly.[9] Before collective bargaining and worker protection laws, there was a financial incentive for a company to maximize the return on expensive machinery by having long hours.
Admittedly, we are in a brief period of decreasing working hours; but how long is that going to last?
Why? Physical limitations. A hunter-gatherer has no reason to obtain more food or possessions than they can carry: they put in their four to five hours of work, get what they want, and move on. After a certain point, putting more effort into your farm doesn’t actually produce more food, so you might as well take some time off and sing and make art and fall in love. You run out of other resources far before you run out of human time, so humans have free time to do human things in.
What happens if people have more babies than they can support? The Black Death sweeps through Europe and kills millions of people. There’s a bad winter, all the crops freeze and everyone starves to death. The king next door invades and puts everyone to the sword. After the population explosion of agriculture, with a combination of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and ordinary death, the population stays remarkably stable no matter how much people fuck, and Malthusian traps are avoided.
Cthulhu? How far can he spread if you have to copy out books by hand? How far can he spread if you don’t have books and everything has to be transmitted by word of mouth?
Ares? You can’t use all your peasants’ free time to fight wars: they have to stay near their fields. You maintain a warrior class and optimize them for fighting wars– but when you aren’t fighting wars, they have to have something to do, you can’t use them for anything very productive because then you’ll have no one to do it during wars, and maintaining a human body at the peak of condition doesn’t actually take that much time. Hence, warrior poets.
And then technology.
Machines can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no reason not to work your employees at the maximum that can be gotten from them.
We can cure diseases and prevent famines and there is literally nothing stopping our population rising to a Malthusian trap except that Azathoth is a blind god and didn’t evolve us to be motivated to have children, just to have sex.
The Internet allows every crackpot with an incredibly convincing meme to convince strangers a world away.
And technological society has allowed the horrifying invention of total war.
Transhumanists say, eagerly, that the last of the physical limitations will soon be burned away. Let’s make people who can modify their brains! Let’s make people who don’t need to eat or sleep or have any values other than gaining profit for the corporation they work for! Let’s make people who can modify themselves into being motivated to have as many offspring as possible and who can get rid of any obstacles to their reproductive fitness, especially things like love or art or consciousness! Let’s learn how human brains work so we can exploit them to have incredibly convincing memes that are totally uncorrelated with truth! Let’s develop more exciting technology that could be used for war!
Victory: Moloch.
The hope of some transhumanists is to make a computer that is an Elua maximizer. The problem with that is that if you fuck it up on any level, you wind up with a dark god crueler and stronger than any god we’ve had before.
I say: the answer is not more technology. The answer is not to enter further into the Optimization Time. The answer is to end technology and return to the dream time. The dream time has its weaknesses: there is no security; there are much fewer material goods. But poor folk do smile.
The only environment guaranteed to preserve human values is the one that created it.
Technology is no friend to Elua. Technology is Elua’s mortal enemy.
Thing of Things 
Assuming this is true, how on earth do we co-ordinate to make sure nobody uses technology?
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Surely that will become easier as our technology for spying on one another steadily improves.
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[JackieChanAdventures]Only technology can defeat technology![/JackieChanAdventures]
Except that implementing said technology means having said technology that risks destroying Elua. It’s a catch-22!
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The thing about runaway technology to note here is that it either fixes almost everything or exterminates everything- long term dystopias don’t seem likely, what purpose is their in torturing useless power-wasters? A sadist AI does not seem likely, and all “pragmatic” forms of oppression, torture and labor are rendered obsolete by tech. That leaves only purely ideologically motivated disutility. Which I suppose could happen- but Cthulhu is dominating and that sort of thing seems unlikely to be severe and likely enough to make the final difference in weighing things.
I don’t know what the odds of extinction vs utopia vs not utopia but better than before are. I suspect the latter two dominate, but even if extinction has a high probability, I think tech wins.
Because tech-dystopia is not likely, what this comes down to is this: If we go the primitive route, humanity will continue to suffer and die for a very, very long time. If we go the tech route, we might end up killing everyone, most of whom would also die in the primitive path, but if it works we are saved.
So really, it comes down to whether you are an individualist or a collectivist, and whether you accept the repugnant conclusion or not.
I am an individualist and do not accept the RC, so I’ll take my chances messing with the Dark Gods.
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There should be an “if you accept that extinction has high enough odds,” after the “So really”.
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Is this any different from the {we should submit to Gnon} perspective that Scott argued against in “Meditations on Moloch”?
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Nope! Hurlock and I are presumably getting it from the same place– Chesterton’s Fence and Hayekian concerns– but mine is cooler because LOVECRAFT METAPHORS.
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Then Scott’s counterargument would seem to apply: you can’t coordinate well enough over the whole universe to ban all technology, so sooner or later you’ll get outcompeted by somebody who defects.
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People were hunter gatherers for a really long time. Bombing humanity back to the stone age might buy us another twenty million years.
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…Okay, that’s a new one. But remember, the single greatest technological culprit is agriculture. Can you undo that by dropping a lot of bombs? I suspect not. And a lot of other technologies might similarly prove resistant to eradication, which would mean that you killed probably billions of people and have got nothing to show for it.
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Why would you think it could buy us 20M years? Most species don’t exist for more than a fraction of that time.
In the long run we’re all dead… unless we can figure out a way around that little problem. I expect that technology more advanced than flint knapping will be required for that to happen though.
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Technological progress has increased exponentially, but so have its costs and consequences. A progressively larger portion of all tech exists to mediate concerns that previous tech created. Energy demands swell at gaining pace.
The second derivatives of the costs and the consequences – the rates at which their rates-of-increase increase – are higher than the second derivative of the progress they accomplish.
Returns diminish, and risk goes infinite before reward.
So a dark singularity looms in front of the bright one, eclipsing it. Moloch only wins until he loses. Elua only loses till she wins.
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One thing that I think gets lost in the whole talk of powers and principalities is that they don’t exist. There is no Cthulhu swimming leftward, there are only people. People decide “Hey, being liberal and gradually expanding our circle of concern.” do. Moloch doesn’t exist. People saying “I want more stuff and more status, even when it compromises the speed of that circle-expansion.” do.
So, the problem with “Hey! Why don’t we all resist Noun and do things this way instead?” is that you’re really fighting an emergent property of people, and the answer is almost always “We don’t wanna.”
I don’t know if this is Dreamtime or Optimization Time or what. I know that predicting the deep future has historically been a mug’s game at best, so I try to solve the problems of tomorrow over the problems of 25 years.
Also, as a side note, I think there’s a really good compromise solution; get a job in tech, cultivate an ascetic aesthetic and embrace stoicism, invest half your salary, and retire at 40. That gets you close to the leisure time of a hunter-gatherer and the advantages of modern society.
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Find out what you can minimise in terms of price, then ‘spend’ that on reduced hours. Avoid expensive 0-sum status games like the plague.
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@Robert Liguori — +1
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One thing that I think gets lost, strongly seconded.
Certainly there seem to be ways for individuals to escape the cycle of expected labor, provided that you are able to start from an advanced enough position. My preference is to see stronger coordination mechanisms built so that many people can reach that lifestyle of expansive leisure.
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The truth is this: the stars are right. The stars have been right for a long time. The only hope is to avoid summoning the dead gods. The only hope is to trust to Elua.
The truth is this: the stars are right. The stars have been right for a long time. It is all to easy to sacrifice to the Elder Gods, to fulfill the Molochian promise, to become the avatar of Nyarlathotep in this world. To prevent It from existing requires strong coordination. It requires Elua.
The truth is this: the stars are right. The stars have been right for a long time. The Great Old Ones are there whether or not you believe in them, but Elua is only there if we create it.
The truth is this: the sword has two edges. The greatest threats to Elua are also the greatest weapon against the Outer Gods. The instruments of hostile optimization are also the tools of coordination.
The truth is this: that is not dead which can eternal lie. Scott speaks of killing Moloch, but that is looking at things the wrong way. Moloch is not physical, to be killed with physical weapons, or mental, to be destroyed by Elua. Moloch is Nyarlathotep, the Soul and Messenger of Azathoth, waiting in the iron laws of nature.
The truth is this: If you reject technology, someone else will not. If you attempt to slow down Moloch, someone else will make the sacrifice for power. If you weaken yourself for Elua, you summon Nyarlathotep.
The truth is this: the difference between Nyarlathotep and Elua is that Elua can be killed. But the other difference is that Elua can act on its own. Which one wins?
The truth is this:
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My proposal remains the same as always: make a pact with Slaanesh so we can have endless pleasure regardless of whatever else happens in the world.
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That’s not for the Greater Good, Gue’vesa. Not for the Greater Good at all!
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I’m pretty sure that for a gue to make a pact with Slaanesh is more or less the diametrical opposite to their being a vesa to the Greater Good.
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The trick is that Elua gives you an option to wirehead (probably), whereas Slaanesh doesn’t allow anything but. For my value set, at least, there’s not a whole lot of distinction between wireheading and, say, the Hansonian Disneyland with no children. That means that you have the opportunity to cooperate with me, but not vice versa.
(The preceding paragraph is either jargon or gibbering, and I’m still not sure which.)
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FYI, the “Disneyland with no children” is from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. I don’t think Robin Hanson’s projected em-future involves the elimination of consciousness; he probably wouldn’t be quite so sanguine about it if it did.
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Thanks for the correction! I had thought that subsentient ems were also a Hanson thing, although not one he thought likely.
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In addition to the point (made by many other replies) that the coordination to make this outcome stable is impossible, there’s another major problem with this: It’s not good enough.
Specifically, it’s not good enough compared to the possible alternatives. At best, this solution yields a total utility barely above zero; and given all the death involved, I’m not sure it’s in fact positive.
You are giving up the possibility of using (human-like) uploads on solid-state technology to efficiently use negentropy to run minds. That costs you several orders of magnitude of possible good experiences over the ideal outcome.
You are giving up the possibility to colonize other planets, solar systems, and galaxies. This costs you more orders of magnitude.
You aren’t even using this /one/ planet particularly well. No disassembly for more living space, no stellar engineering to keep it habitable for longer, and you’ll sacrifice most of the supportable population in favor of maintaining a neolithic lifestyle. There’s some more orders of magnitude in there.
This would not be a win. It would be a horrific, extreme loss, to so many decimal points that in the grand scheme of things it’s virtually indistinguishable from total annihilation.
And that’s before I consider what kind of experiences will never be possible for such a culture at all, and how much I should penalize it for that. This part is a subjective question. Personally, I strongly value the experiences of programming, reverse-engineering and abstract problem solving; but to make these truly interesting requires a higher technology base than you’re envisioning, and I suspect even our current technology base only enables us to see the lowest, most primitive layers. I want more.
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Well, unless you’re Average Utilitarian, in which case it’s only the last, subjective part that matters.
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I’m going to nitpick that, because it matters – it’s specifically only true if you’re both average utilitarian, and only consider the people you can personally affect to count towards the average – or else expect there to be ~no sapients anywhere else in the multiverse.
I strongly suspect our multiverse is very large, and there’s plenty of sapients elsewhere. Under that hypothesis, a global average utilitarian still ends up caring about the total magnitude of local utility, since that affects how strong an influence the local (and high-utility-optimized) part has on the global utility average.
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Whenever I see the “hunter-gatherers had so much leisure time” argument, I wonder if people have stopped to think about what they would do with it. I wouldn’t trade modern technology away for having three times as much leisure time, because I would likely then be bored out of my skull most of that leisure time. Not only do I not have access to the Internet or any sort of electronic entertainment, but I don’t have access to anything that requires components made with industrial precision, or that can only be produced at scale.
This is an argument that may not generalize to the average human, but I bet it generalizes to the average reader of these blogs.
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This might not be sufficient depending on your level of introversion, but I imagine many people could have a lot of fun telling stories and playing games with their friends(/family). For the more abstraction-minded, there’s having philosophical debates, doing math, experimenting, and so on.
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Remember that you’ve been reduced to the bicycle, if that. You have a lot less choice of friends than you do now.
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Doing math is going to be a lot harder and less fun when:
1. There’s no good global communication system; determining what’s known and what’s not will go from being already often difficult to near impossible. Want to keep up with the research on a particular problem? Want to make sure you’re accounting for what’s known about it? Too bad!
2. If there’s anyone out there interested in your work, they’re a lot less likely to come across it.
3. All computations have to be done by hand.
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@Sniffnoy yeah, Le Guin thought of communications in Always Coming Home too.
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It’s never too clear to me whether hunter-gatherers having more leisure time really does argue for anything. Aren’t modern-day population densities vastly higher than hunter-gathering could ever support, even if people wanted to go that way?
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Wow, I don’t even know what to say because it seems to me self-evident that a life with no technology but full of leisure (and closeness to nature even) is immensely better than a life of work with technology. I didn’t expect anyone to argue against this.
Maybe the problem is that your idea of fun activities is shaped by your experience of life with technolgy. If you had grown up without technology, you’d be able to think of other, different fun activities.
Personally my experience of boredom is that the only way you can ever get bored is when you’re forced to do some repetitive task. I don’t see how it’s possible to feel bored when you’re free, with or without technology.
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I mean, I didn’t expect anyone to argue against this not in the sense that I expect everyone to want to live like that, but in the sense that I expect everone to at least see where the advantages of such a life are.
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I think there are a few major downsides to the leisurely hunter-gatherer lifestyle, such as
-Increased odds of violent death.
-More danger from witch-hunting activities (we have similar activities today, but they usually destroy careers, not lives).
-More danger of death from health problems, especially if you’re a woman.
-More ignorance about the world around you (many people seem to value learning as an end in itself, so the lack of popular science and history would be a problem).
I think you’re right that a tech-free leisurely life is comparable, and maybe even better, than a technological life full of hard work, if we’re considering lives of similar lengths. But the hunter-gatherer lifestyle features an awful lot of ways to die.
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Yes, I would never argue against that, I was just arguing against Matthew who wrote:
“Whenever I see the “hunter-gatherers had so much leisure time” argument, I wonder if people have stopped to think about what they would do with it. I wouldn’t trade modern technology away for having three times as much leisure time, because I would likely then be bored out of my skull most of that leisure time. Not only do I not have access to the Internet or any sort of electronic entertainment, but I don’t have access to anything that requires components made with industrial precision, or that can only be produced at scale.”
I must have made a mistake; my comment appeared in the wrong place. If it had appeared in the right place it would have been clearer what I was arguing against.
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No, wait, apparently my comment did in fact appear in the right place.
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Just as an aside, what always amazes me is the indefatigable optimism that a longer lifespan’s problems would always scale up more slowly than the benefits. Consciousness is complex to say the least. The belief all its problems can be solved when we don’t understand consciousness, much less its problems, boggles me.
The confidence consciousness _must_ be soluble is even more boggling.
I’ve spent a lifetime peering up the anus of humanity. It’s called “studying history and watching the world outside my window”. All the million little callous acts and failures of principle over impulse. The heartbeat of Moloch was always thundering in my ears.
Then I realized it was so loud because it was inside me, too.
I always wanted to understand the threat to me from other peoples weaknesses. Then I realized my threat to myself from my own weakness was often even worse. Then I realized I had no workable idea how to address my own weaknesses. No matter how many years I tried, no matter how many plans. So how am I going to address those of anyone else?
Some may cry “sour grapes, you’re just a loser, shut up and wither in your loserliness well-deserved torment”. And I’d remind them that their success is about the fortuitous alignment of their hunger for carrots matching up to the supply and proximity of carrots offered and their talent for getting them. All it will take is just a little nudge to that equation and they’re in hell with me.
But of course that’s crazy talk. They are living examples, triumphs of strength, striding toward the Great Work to do what the weak cannot. They have nothing in common with the wretched.
The real original sin is the innate bent to weakness and self destruction in our consciousness. The only way to escape it is to redefine the goalposts of happiness and unhappiness.
I think individualism is the great failed survival gambit. We have excellent reason to think that our “unitary consciousness” is just a mishmash of drives and reflexes knit together under a story in our heads centered on us.
Humanity is the storytelling animal. And we’ve stumbled upon a whole category of story which is just bad business. We can no more be happy as individuals than our isolated paraphilias or terrors or ecstasies could be if we separated them out and gave each of them a body of their own to inhabit with no collection or relation to any body around them save what they stumbled on by luck or were coerced into by circumstance.
We never realized that happiness is the emergent property of being part of a genuine collective. Not the bastardized things the totalitarians have wet dreams about.
They have these dreams because they dimly understand we are too incomplete to be happy if our sense of identity is first and foremost about ourselves.
But the individualist story is to the consciousness like agriculture is to hunter gatherers. In theory, it can be let go of, in practice, its an unbreakable addiction. And all addiction is misery.
This _is_ what the Buddha became famous for understanding. Because the last thing an addict wants while there’s any hope of appearing “normal” and “fitting in” is to admit they’re an addict.
So sure, pursue your ascension tech solutions to giving the individual immortality. I will count myself lucky to have returned to dust. And if you aspiring uebermensch gain your immortality, I hope it doesn’t turn into the nightmare I expect.
But I think you’re fools for thinking you can escape the true original sin of misery and self destruction written in our neurons by countless generations and the Moloch heuristic. And the price of your folly will be the whole civilization of miserable wretches like yourselves, trapped in the habit of living long after death would have been the only sensible outcome.
I will die in the unverifiable hope when this civilization crumbles, the tribal story will emerge again because it isn’t 100% dead. And I think the misery of having 21st century hungers in iron age technology with a few odd clusters of technology that don’t rely on high energy, resource intensive applications will lead to extinction or even voluntary cultural suicide. Such suicide has happened before and maybe this time it will happen to the people causing the problems and not the people with the best (albeit so imperfect) solution.
And maybe after enough iterations of rise and fall of humanity, the stories the tribes tell themselves, after each new resurgence of Moloch, will become deft enough and subtle enough to stamp out any new outbreaks before they can begin the ascent to misery and disaster.
And if you say “I’m not miserable” then why do you need the highly stimulating, highly complex diversions of the 21st century so badly you would rather be dead than forced to adapt to living as a hunter gatherer?
When the silence of being stuck in your skull without distractions is torture, maybe that’s a sign there’s something basically wrong with your picture. If you think life’s greatest prize would be to be immortal, why is it intolerable without constant stimulation and “meaningful” activity?
Suicide from distress is as far as I understood it essentially unknown in hunter-gatherer societies. I remember thinking we can tell how cruel factory farms are because the chickens sometimes hang themselves from the holes in the chicken wire. It takes determination and ingenuity (relative to a chicken’s brain) but they can manage it.
No one in here but us chickens now, is there?
There are worse things than human extinction.
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Are you advocating the murder or suicide of most humans?
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Or perhaps just a less extreme version of the voluntary human extinction movement (to be precise, minus the extinction part)
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Well, even if the initial people are all sterilized rather than killed, you’re still committing mass murder by preventing modern and future medicine, security, etc.
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Have you read Always Coming Homw by Ursula Le Guin? It’s about giving up agricultural civilization and having a hunter-gathere-ish one, but with fairly high-tech underpinnings.
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The thing I don’t like about this theory is that it is time-inconsistent. Evolution and Technology made you who and what you are. You wouldn’t want to go back to 1900. You wouldn’t want to go back to 3000BC. You wouldn’t want to go back to being something like a chimp. So doesn’t it just seem a little bit arbitrary to say “this far and no further”? What would you say to the person from the past making the same argument you’re making now? How could you justify your own existence as anything other than an abomination to them?
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If anyone wants to live without full time work, this is suprisingly easy to achieve simply by learning how to spend much less money.
Instead of using your probably considerable brain power to think of how to maximize your income like everyone does, use your brain power to find ways to minimize expenditures.
If you can live on a four figure income, then you don’t have to work that much. This I think is the way to happiness, the ultimate lifehack.
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>The only environment guaranteed to preserve human values is the one that created it.
Something I am surprised no one brought up is that halting/reversing technological progress does not necessarily guarantee the long-term preservation of a human-values friendly environment. True, the odds of runaway technology destroying humanity goes down. But the odds of a natural event, such as an asteroid, supervolcano, or plague destroying humanity goes way up.
Technology puts us in greater danger from Moloch, but it reduces the danger from natural disasters. Getting rid of technology will not keep us safe, it will replace one danger with another. Which danger is worse, and what an appropriate trade-off between them is, is a complicated question I’d need a lot more time and research to answer.
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