We Are Not Saved

A couple of months ago Gwern published a list of improvements since 1990. I thought it gave short shrift to the many changes which have been wrought upon society by technological progress. He does include a section on "Society" but it's woefully inadequate, and despite having a further theme to the list of identifying "unseen" changes he overlooks many of the intangible harms which progress might or might not have inflicted on us. To illustrate this I bring in the story of my great-grandmother, which I don't want to cheapen with a summary.

I got some pushback on the episodes I did about Afghanistan. Some of it was directed at the idea that "we are no longer a serious people". But this pushback, rather than talking me out of the position made me explore it even more deeply. This episode is the result of that exploration. As part of it I bring in recent difficulties experienced by the CIA, the Vietnam War, and the differences between right and left brained processing.

Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by: Michael J. Sandel Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills by: Jesse Singal Kingsport: (The Weird of Hali #2) by: John Michael Greer The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by: H. W. Brands Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by: Norm Macdonald Silmarillion by: J. R. R. Tolkien The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by: Carlo M. Cipolla The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole by: Roland Huntford How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion by: David DeSteno

There are at least two kinds of randomness in the world: normal, as in a normal distribution or a bell curve, and extreme. As humans we're used to the normal distribution. That's the kind of thing we dealt with a lot over the thousands of years of our existence. It's only recently that the extreme distribution has come to predominate. Nassim Taleb has labeled the first mediocristan and the second extremistan. In this podcast we explore the difference between the two and how the tools of mediocristan are inadequate to the disasters of extremistan.

As I record this Congress is debating whether they should pass a $3.5 trillion bill or only a $1.5 trillion one. The former would equal $27,000 per household, while the latter would only be $12,000 per household. And yet when people are asked whether they would pay more to deal with problems like climate change only 34% are willing to pay more than $10 a month. People have no skin in the game on the former and they can at least imagine they have skin in the game on the latter, and in this episode I argue that this makes all the difference.

Risk comes in lots of different forms. In Skin in the Game, Taleb's last, underrated book. He breaks risk down into ensemble probabilities and time probabilities. On top of that he demonstrates that risk operates differently at different scales. And that if we want to avoid large scale ruin—ruin at the level of nations or all of humanity—that we should be trying to push risk down the scale.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by: Carl R. Trueman Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by: Elizabeth Kolbert Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by: Julia Galef Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by: Mike Duncan This Is How You Lose the Time War by: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism by: Sharyl Attkisson Plato: Complete Works by: Plato Stillness Is the Key by: Ryan Holiday The Sorrows of Young Werther by: Goethe

As human beings we have a unique ability to recognize patterns, even when confronted events that are completely random. In fact sometimes it's easier to see patterns in random noise. We pull narratives out of the randomness and use them to predict the future. Unfortunately the future is unpredictable and even when we have detected a pattern the outcomes end up being very different than what we expected.

The US-backed regime in Afghanistan lasted 9 days from the taking of the first provincial capital to the taking of Kabul. After the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. That government lasted over three years. What was the difference? Why after spending two trillion dollars and twice as long in the country did we do so much worse? Francis Fukuyama has asserted that the are no ideologies which can compete with liberal democracy. And everyone seems to believe that, but if that's so why did we have such a hard time implanting it in Afghanistan?

Philip Tetlock has been arguing for awhile that experts are horrible at prediction, but that his superforecasters do much better. If that's the case how did they do with respect to the fall of Afghanistan? As far as I can tell they didn't make any predictions on how long the Afghanistan government would last. Or they did make predictions and they were just as wrong as everyone else and they've buried them. In light of this I thought it was time to revisit the limitations and distortions inherent in Tetlock's superforecasting project.