Doing the newsletter differently this week. I’ve been busy learning how to code. So, I haven’t spent as much time reading. Writing is easy when you’re reading a lot. Unfortunately, it’s a two-way street.
But I did manage to do some reading. Since I didn’t find a common thread, I wrote a fistful of summaries on the best pieces that my eyeballs ate.
The Roots of the Ecological Overshoot Crisis [Link]
A strange combination of climate scientists and advertising executives recently joined forces. The result: a paper about ecological overshoot. Symptoms of overshoot include climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. The authors argue that current attempts to solve this crisis are aimed at treating the symptoms, not the root causes.
What are the true culprits? Three drivers – forces pushing us into the crisis – are listed.
Economic Growth
Marketing
Pronatalism
The side-effects of these drivers are massive, often negative, ecological changes. From an evolutionary lens, this is what happened. Humans evolved to have certain impulses that favored the survival of our genes. The impulses to collect resources, reproduce, consume, and eliminate risks all benefitted us greatly as a species.
However, these impulses have been exploited by marketers and social engineers. Norms around consumption, waste, and families have been consciously taken advantage of. Even worse, the writers argue, is that these impulses have been magnified.
The conclusion of the paper is that psychological interventions are higher leverage (both cheaper AND more effective) than physical interventions. This is because it targets the root of the problem. And it’s a solution that can be distributed via existing infrastructure – advertising mediums.
“While the behaviours generating overshoot were once adaptive for H. sapiens, they have been distorted and extended to the point where they now threaten the fabric of complex life on Earth. Simply, we are trapped in a system built to encourage growth and appetites that will end us.”
Once again, protocol design is at the cutting edge of problem-solving techniques.
It’s Hard to Explain Our Battles [Link]
This essay puts forth an argument that values are incredibly hard to describe. We all have them, but it’s not always clear what they are. It’s not like we don’t have direction. Every day, the vast majority of us get up and start doing stuff. But we have things we do, and we have things that we fight for.
“In order to overcome the listless guilt, I strongly recommend remembering that you have something to fight for, but I also caution you against believing you know exactly what that thing is. You probably don't, and as you learn more about the world, I expect your goals to shift.”
It’s easy to say that we are an X (hedonic utilitarian, anarcho-syndicalist, protestant, pacifist, etc.) but any set of beliefs will contradict itself. There are exceptions to every rule. And the further you get in life, the more internal contractions you will collect. Being able to hold those in ourselves is kind of what makes us human.
Over time we are collectively computing finer-grain descriptions of our morality. But for now, “the world's in bad enough shape” that you can be imprecise, contradictory, and still a great person.
Against the Culture [Link]
This was a long book review of a series of novels that I didn’t read. It’s called the Culture series. It centres on The Culture – an almost-utopian, post-scarcity society of humanoid aliens and superintelligent AI. The analysis I read was wildly interesting on its own. I might read the book eventually. This is a summary of a summary of several other summaries, so if I start hallucinating like ChatGPT, don’t be surprised.
The Culture is a compassionate interventionist society. It’s a meme that seeks to replicate itself. It justifies this process by saving other societies from pain, disease, etc., and increasing their freedom. Citizens of the Culture still compete in status games, are mortal (voluntarily dying after ~400 years), and spend their time doing philosophy and art.
“The claim is: A society freed from the need to pay attention to reality, to produce, will be given over to intense memetic drift and competition.”
In my mind, this is the most interesting part of the analysis. As more people move from being producers to consumers, we begin to slosh around and chase each other’s preferences. It becomes an endless battle of one-upmanship. This works in a post-scarcity fictional world, of course. But perhaps not so much in the world we occupy today.
It reminds me of how metronomes naturally synchronize when on a floating surface. Since the swing of each metronome pushes energy into the ground below it, it nudges the metronome next to it. Gradually, all of the metronomes swing at the same tempo.
The goals we feel compelled to chase are going to change faster and with greater magnitude as technology matures. Like the attention span of the whole world is shrinking, but becoming more intense at the same time. We hyperfixate, move on, repeat.
