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At the time most of that stomping took place, your average farmer was stunted, malnourished, and sickly compared to his hunter-gatherer counterpart and beat them simply because they could sustain a much higher population of miserable peasants. Of course, if you are evaluating societies on a purely Darwinian basis of survival then whatever won out is superior, but that leaves out every moral and aesthetic consideration that informs most people's judgement of what makes life worth living.
As an example, if we extrapolate current trends in fertility, the median Motte user will be outbred and replaced by individuals with lower IQ and religious sects like the Amish and Hasidic Jews, whose descendants will most likely be either disinclined to or incapable of maintaining our current industrial civilization. Would that then make them better than us? (I know there's a half dozen ways to yes.chad this, but I'm just curious if you hold any of those positions)
If they're around and we're not, then they would be better than us. I subscribe to 'if you're so smart, why aren't you rich' logic on this. Unless we get wiped by something beyond our control like an alien invasion, we're responsible for our own destiny.
I say no, the Amish and Hasidics won't be around. If society breaks down you get warlordism and peaceful religious cults will get shredded by the violent ones. Something like the Taliban or a drug cartel is more competitive than Amish and Hasidics. Hasidics are very good at surviving in these credulous bureaucratic states that can be rules-lawyered. Amish technology is simple and robust in certain respects against EMP or supply chain breakdown. But their culture is not on the upward path.
If our civilization fails, someone else will use the methods of industrial civilization to subdue the rest, they'll re-establish the upward path. Someone will try course-correction, aggressively increasing fertility or embracing massive cloning or AI...
Aesthetic and moral considerations are secondary to survival. It's no good saying 'oh preindustrial civilization is so great' even if it's true, Ted should've had the wisdom to understand that nobody is going to pull back. Competitive dynamics prohibit it.
I mean, I care about the truth even if the truth is that the type of society that most people would want to live in given the choice will inevitably be destroyed by another type of society that is more fit in an evolutionary sense. That would be sad, just like the fact of our mortality or the eventual heat death of the universe are sad, but we all come to understand and accept such things in our own time, and in general asking questions irrelevant to our immediate survival is pretty central to my conception of what separates humans from worms and jellyfish.
But ours is the only civilization that can contemplate such abstract theoretical questions. We have words like philosophy, evolutionary, heat death of the universe. I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherers don't have that. They don't usually have writing, their language actually is limited to what's directly needed for survival.
I think we industrialized people shouldn't romanticize nomadic or pre-industrial life overly. Much of it would not be to our liking. India and the other poor countries are not enthusiastic about such a lifestyle.
Questions that are irrelevant to contemporary concerns can often be useful - but ideas that cannot possibly be implemented are much less so. Indeed, some knowledge can be harmful. Suppose that it is true, then we'd be forever unsatisfied trying to return to monkey and failing due to competition and coordination problems. Perhaps there'd be more terror groups in the style of Ted. Ignorance can be blissful in certain cases.
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The Amish and mennonites in Mexico seem to be doing great with the cartels, and the Hasidim can plausibly start doing something besides welfare fraud; indeed, I’ve heard they already are.
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Well, let's do a thought experiment. Suppose a civilization invents a technology that gives them an extreme competitive advantage but, for some contrived reason, it can only be powered by immense amounts of human suffering. Everyone gets plugged into the machine and subjected to intense unending physical torture, like an inverted hellscape version of The Matrix. Presumably, you would never choose to live in such a society, no matter how evolutionarily successful they were.
You could bite the bullet and say that, yes, because they survive and outlast, they are better - but this would only be the most abstract type of "better", because your revealed preferences would show that you could never actually accept such an arrangement.
You have the luxury of extolling the virtues of Darwinian competition because, coincidentally, the most dominant civilization on the planet right now is also the one that provides that most lavish opportunities for hedonism. The social organism itself becomes more competitive, while the individual is allowed to become more sedentary, more secure, increasingly protected from the vicissitudes of nature - a strange kind of "competition" indeed. If being competitive meant actually living the life of a drug cartel lackey or a post-apocalyptic warlord, if it meant actual physical competition and actual danger, then you would likely find that a reassessment of your fundamental values would be in order.
If the Pain Obelisk is inevitable, the Pain Obelisk is inevitable.
The only moral action is the minimization of entropy.
All we can do is pray that out creator isn't so cruel as to make this our destiny. But we can't change it.
Darwinian competition is natural law. It cannot be negotiated with. We can only irrationally hope evil doesn't win in the end.
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It's a pretty lame thought experiment if it requires made-up dynamics hugely divorced from common experience or conceivable logic. That nobody wants to build the Torment Nexus because it doesn't obviously create value is a strong argument for it not being competitive.
Industrialism was very unpleasant for some. You'd work long hours from a very young age in a polluted and unsafe working environment. But people still went to cities for jobs! Lots of people became richer and better off than before! Their children inherited the fruits of an advanced civilization and squandered much of it, yet there is much to squander and at least people aren't dying of tuberculosis much these days.
I won't get a choice, will I? If the Torment Nexus is on-path (for reasons I can't fathom), then it comes regardless of whether any individual wants it. My opinion does not matter at all. I wouldn't like it, nobody would like it but it would still be here and it would be better in the same way that machine guns are better than swords. Swords might be more aesthetic and manly and heroic and skill-intensive. They might be better socially, creating cultures where the best survive wars rather than the lucky... But none of that is nearly so important as the innate quality gap between the two.
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Fertility just isn’t going to be necessary in the near future with mass automation. Having 300 million useless mouths to feed vs 50 million is only going to be a drag on productivity and prosperity for those left. In addition, tfr in the rich world might well rise when most people are ‘retired’ and no longer have a career to provide a sense of purpose.
A few countries with extreme collapsing rates like South Korea and possibly China might struggle briefly while human labor is still widely necessary, but for the West, where native tfr still hovers above 1.5 in most countries, there’s more than enough time left. And as you note, the Amish, Hasidim and so on are - in a true ‘collapse’ scenario - sitting ducks for faction with modern weaponry.
Useless mouths still vote and affect culture. Enough useless mouths can theoretically reject automation in increasingly violent ways. Useless mouths can do a lot of damage. There’s a reason the Catholic Church wants you to raw dog your wife endlessly and have 9 children before she gets too old.
I agree, I think "a useless mouth and his clout are soon parted". To the extent that competition still operates at any scale, I worry that anti-automators will be eventually marginalized, no matter how many kids we have.
USA imported black slaves to pick cotton, not needed anymore, and they are now a net drain. They are not "soon parted" but have privileged status.
Good point. I agree they have de jure privileged status, and that this leads to some substantial concrete benefits. But I'd counter that, to the extent that competition operates, it naturally disenfranchises them from almost all angles and makes their own self-advocacy ineffective. E.g. affirmative action spots mostly go to non-ADOS, BLM was a corrupt waste of political energy (compared to e.g. the at least-somewhat effective ADL), high-income people move away leaving places like Detroit.
I'm saying that a human worker advocacy org, in a world of more sophisticated machine actors, would similarly end up being a useless skinsuit pretending to advocate on behalf of humans, but wouldn't be able to avoid the important sources of influence all naturally routing around human agency. E.g. if you were a rich human, would you use an inferior (by supposition) human-run investment firm to manage your assets, or a machine-based one?
So my ultimate claim is that we have to choose between freedom and competition versus the continued relevance of humans. I really don't want to have to choose between these things, but I think we do.
They vote. BLM wasn't just waste, it did a lot of damage.
I agree, but I'm saying that it also managed to not even help ADOS. And that a future "Human Lives Matter" movement would be similarly ineffectual at its ostensible aims. And that our future votes would similarly buy us a wretched welfare bureaucracy at best.
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The Hasidim might be up shit creek without a paddle, but the Amish do fine in cartel-ruled Mexico. As it turns out having a big peasant population lets you feed and pay your army better which lets you field a bigger one, and both peasants and warlords can figure that out.
The Mormons seem like they would form a militia that then turns into a garrison state- they do after all form a local majority, or at least notably large minority, in their core territory.
The Mormons would be fine: they’re already very over represented in the CIA and FBI, and gendarmerie and secret service officers tend to do the best after regime change or collapse.
In a regime collapse, yes, former secret police tend to do very well. In state collapse, on the other hand, they don't necessarily(not that anyone does). Cartel-run Mexico and the stateless parts of the middle east aren't ruled over by former spies and secret police officers, they're ruled over by whichever non-state actors have guns behind them.
That being said, cults(which is what the Amish are, even if they're popular) seem to do reasonably well in state collapse- that's where ISIS came from, and as noted the Amish are about as good off under the cartels as they were under the Mexican central government(although organizations which recruit military personnel literally by promising higher-quality rations[that's not a joke; cartel advertising to Mexican soldiers emphasizes better quality meals] will probably give high-productivity peasant farmers a better deal than they normally do).
Of course, state collapse is fantastically unlikely in the US because two levels of government would have to collapse, federal and state. In some areas one implies the other eventually, but not right up front. Regime collapse on the other hand is semi-plausible as a result of mismanaging a fiscal crisis, and just results in balkanization.
ISIS is not an ethnoreligion. It came from former Iraqi army members who happened to be Sunni and saw Shia oppressing them.
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