Welcome to the 'Accelerated Globalists' podcast. We focus on the effects of globalization and the weakening of cross-national boundaries on technological progress, economic development, and human flourishing. I'm your host, Al Bashko. My guest today is Robin Hanson, a professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the most contrarian and interdisciplinary public intellectuals around. In this episode we discuss topics of his recent interest: global fertility decline, cultural evolution, disappearing cultural diversity, and what we can do about it. You can find Part 1 of the conversation here.
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Timecodes
0:00 - Introduction
0:52 - Global Cultural Homogenization and Its Consequences
7:47 - Do We Need 100 Billion Humans to Restore Cultural Diversity?
13:10 - Cults, Charter Cities, and Other Sources of Cultural Innovation and Diversity
20:33 - Impending Civilizational Collapse and Possible Solutions
26:25 - Cultural Evolution, Cultural Selection, and Dysfunctional Prestige Markers
37:12 - Futarchy
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro
Global Cultural Homogenization and Its Consequences
[00:00:52] Al Bashko: So, if you think about cultural evolution and let's talk about cultural drift. Your argument is that at this point, as cultures are becoming more and more large-scale, we are moving towards a more or less unified or homogenized global culture. Over human history, the scale of societies was increasing from very small units of like 70 persons, then it goes to 1000, to 20,000, 100,000, etc. And over time, we are moving to larger and larger scales of human societies. At this point, we are moving towards a more or less homogenized global culture. Because there is no competition between cultures, we are becoming a more homogenized culture, and culture is drifting. Global culture or mainstream global culture is drifting in some random direction without being challenged by some kind of other culture, which would stimulate evolutionary pressures, selective pressures.
Why do you think this trend is not going to reverse?
[00:01:57] Robin Hanson: Because we understand the causes of this trend, that we understand how this is working. It's not just like some number fluctuating. So again, three centuries ago, the world had hundreds of thousands of cultures, almost all of which were near the edge of survival in terms of famines and pandemics and invading armies. Any small degree in which they went dysfunctional was quickly punished by being replaced by neighboring cultures. And then we created nation-states and now a single world, we see why this is happening. We see it's because of increased travel and communication, and lowering costs of those. That naturally causes cultural innovation and integration, especially when you share markets and products and division of labor and military campaigns. Those are all things that are going to cause sharing culture and a great reduction in the number of cultures.
In addition, being rich, peaceful, and healthy like we are means that things don't die so much, so there's greatly weakened selection pressure along with greatly reduced variety. On top of all that, you have an enormous increase in the rate of cultural drift. Cultures three centuries ago didn't change very fast, but now they're changing very rapidly. So it's the combination of these trends that's creating the key problem that our few cultures are just rapidly changing often in random directions.
So why is random bad?
I think the key idea in general and evolution also in this case, is that there's a vast space of possible configurations or designs, and most of that space is bad. Evolution is trying to find the corners in that space that happen to be good and keep things near there. Evolutionary selection over many generations and the selection pressures of weak things dying is what keeps the population near those functional corners, those functional little pockets where things are very good, at least compared to the vast majority of the space, which is bad. And that's plausibly also true for culture. Just random cultures are not good. So if you just wander off in a random direction, on average, it's going to be bad and you have to have a targeted force that moves you to a good place. You have to have some ability to see the good and be directed toward it in a controlled way. Otherwise, it goes wrong. It's like driving down a road. You can't just drive in random directions and hope that will go well. You have to constantly see the road and correct for deviations from the road so that you stay on the road. That's how you can keep going somewhere. Otherwise, you go wrong.
[00:04:51] Al: Yes, correct. I agree with you, this is what I was always willing to ask you. Of course, that's true. But there is one important component: in order for culture to stay unified and retain scale, the norms should be fit enough. Like packages of norms, values, etc., should be fit enough to maintain this large-scale culture. So if norms are drifting in a random direction and become less and less fit over time, this culture, which contains large numbers of people, is not going to be able to stay unified. That's why we had collapses like the Roman Empire, etc. Eventually, if culture becomes less and less fit, it's just going to disintegrate. And these evolutionary pressures are going to restart again. Therefore, it's quite unlikely that we are going to continue drifting in a random direction and culture is going to maintain its unity. So the most likely scenario if it continues to drift in a random direction without being challenged by any other cultures… It is just going to disintegrate and these evolutionary pressures are going to simply restart. So, that's why we can't say that we are desperate, because for our lifetimes, it's probably not going to be a good development, but it doesn't mean that human cultural evolution is going to stop.
[00:06:10] Robin:Now, clearly, a collapsed civilization that is our descendants is more vulnerable to other kinds of harm. That is, if there was a huge asteroid that struck the Earth or some virulent pandemic that killed huge fractions of people, they will drop farther as a result than if that happened in our world. There's this old saying that the reason to be afraid of slipping on the stairs as you go down is not that you might slip one step and hit your foot hard on that next step. It's that slipping one step would cause you to slip a second step, which would then cause you to slip a third step. In rapid succession, you could fall down the stairs. So that's a key motivation for wanting not to fall down the first step: you not slip and keep falling. So I would say that's a reason for us not to want civilization to collapse is because it's not guaranteed we would fall farther, but the risks of falling farther are larger the farther we fall.
But again, most likely humanity would survive and grow again. And so it's just about how long it takes to get anywhere and how much influence we now have over where that is. The more we collapse and the more other civilizations replace us, and more often that repeats, just the less what they become depends on who we are now.
Do We Need 100 Billion Humans to Restore Cultural Diversity?
[00:07:47] Al: And that's why I want to connect it back to fertility. Because the key idea is that in order to maintain cultural unity, you need to have some kind of set of norms that's able to maintain this large scale of the population. Successful cultural selection depends directly on population size and therefore directly depends on fertility. Because if our population were ten times larger, the likelihood that we would have a unified global culture would be much lower because any kind of culture that we have is less likely to keep unity on a much larger scale. That's why the problem of fertility can potentially solve all the other problems related to culture or at least partially solve them.
[00:08:34] Robin: If you took every person in the world and put one person right next to them, that doesn't make culture harder to survive. But if you have ten different planets like ours in our solar system, that would. So I think if you simultaneously make more people and spread them out farther from each other in communication and travel, that's what would cause more cultural variety. But merely putting more people right where they are now, I'm not so sure that does create the useful kind of cultural variety.
[00:09:05] Al: But at least it was observed in the previous stages of cultural evolution. A certain set of norms that were good enough to maintain a society of 70 persons were not good enough to maintain a society of 350 persons. Anthropologists observed in Papua New Guinea that inventing new religions and new gods was required to keep these groups larger because otherwise, they were always getting split into groups of 70 persons. To maintain a group of 350, they needed to introduce new gods. Similarly, later on, to have large-scale empires like the Persian Empire, we needed new religions that were able to maintain these large groups of people and cooperation among them on the scale of many, many millions. The more we go in that direction, the more complex our set of cultural norms should be to maintain these large-scale societies. Therefore, if our population increased ten times, we would need a new set of norms to maintain them together. Since we are even making our norms less fit over time, we probably would not be able to maintain these large-scale groups as a unified culture. Therefore, there is a high probability, in my opinion, that this cultural unity would not be maintained even though we have a common information space, etc. Many of the forces that drive these conformist pressures also create opportunities for people to challenge them. If you have more people in a large unified language group, like tens of billions, there is a higher probability that some of them are going to cooperate to drift away from the majority culture. Previous attempts were on a much smaller scale, but now with larger-scale society, there is a higher probability that some percentage of people will create a new society that goes against dominant norms. Unity is harder to maintain when the groups are much larger because there will be a higher number of people willing to challenge prevalent norms. There is no guarantee that current norms are good enough to keep 100 billion people as a unified culture.
[00:11:30] Robin: It certainly seems true that in the earliest days of group cultures of primates and humans, it required new capacities to support larger groups; otherwise, they would fragment. Humans had especially large groups of primates and we had some unusual mechanisms to manage that. Over the coming hundreds of thousands of years, the humans who had larger densities also had more complicated social structures. When their societies collapsed, they collapsed in total population, but also in group sizes; they fragmented. Over the last centuries or so, we've seen this different correlation of as population increases and the economy grows, we've had more convergence and integration of the world. Maybe it's hard to disentangle the different effects that are causing that. But I'm not sure what's at issue here in terms of our future. Still, we don't want to collapse if we can avoid it. The question is how. We'd like to not have cultural drift. The question is how. I'm not sure claims about the relationship between cultural complexity and population tell us the answer to those.
Cults, Charter Cities, and Other Sources of Cultural Innovation and Diversity
[00:13:11] Al: You think that it's not possible for culture to deviate into several directions without a cultural collapse?
[00:13:18] Robin: We see this increasing homogeneity of cultures worldwide in the last century, especially among elites. Then we see these small, very insular, fertile subcultures that are able to defy world culture and be different. My first estimation is just that parts of the world that don't have sufficient insularity will be drawn into the converging global culture, and parts that are sufficiently insular can then deviate and go their own way. At the moment those are very small, but some of them have very high fertility. They could over centuries come to dominate.
[00:13:56] Al: Do you think initiatives like charter cities and attempts to create new societies have any kind of future, any kind of hope in terms of creating something new?
[00:14:07] Robin: I know many people who take the problem seriously and say to themselves, "I want my family and my friends to have a different culture where we put a higher priority on fertility." They may well succeed at that, i.e., personally having more kids with their partners and associating preferentially with other people around them who also have more kids. But again, my key question is, are they on track to achieve sufficient insularity for that to be a thing that continues rather than just getting washed out? Like they raise five kids but then those five kids go off to college in five separate places and marry five people from very different places, and then move into the average world culture. That's my problem. I think the bar is pretty high. You basically need something like a cult. The world needs more cults. Cults can be insular enough to maintain a difference for a while, but most groups of similar friends who get along together and have some habits in common are just not insular enough to make something that lasts.
[00:15:19] Al:But that's happening when you are still remaining a member of a certain society which has certain dominant norms. If we see some kind of creation of new societies, start-up societies, etc., in that case, you're not going to be living among people with necessarily norms that you had in your country of origin. If you had new societies with different norms, and it's not just about fertility, but in general about new cultural norms, etc., then it might work.
[00:15:47] Robin: I actually joined a cult when I was a tween. People would call it that. They not only had their own group homes in the city where I lived, they had a compound out in Iowa where people lived there and farmed. Cults have famously tried to maintain themselves as cults by spatially isolating themselves. That's been a famous strategy of cults. The question is just how many new cults will form and how successful will they be? It is important to notice that the few examples we have of insular, fertile subcultures are very small in number compared to the number of cult attempts we've seen over the last few centuries. The world has generated an enormous number of wannabe cults, and very few of them have lasted long enough and had this high degree of fertility and insularity. If we just project the same rate of creation of those cults, as we've seen in the past, it's just not enough. If you look at the few cults we have now, like the Haredim or the Amish, they weren't created recently. They were created 50-100 years ago or longer, or hundreds of years ago. That suggests that whatever new cultures you're hoping for, they're already in the world right now. You shouldn't be hoping for the creation of new ones. You should be hoping that some of the ones that are currently existing out there get some traction and grow faster than they have.
[00:17:06] Al: But, in order to have a high potential to influence the global culture, you need to also acquire prestige somehow. Prestige is not entirely random. If you achieve simultaneous economic success and at the same time retain some kind of distinct norms, you are more likely to affect the global culture than if you are completely isolated and economically less successful. Therefore, you may retain your culture, but you're less likely to attain prestige in the eyes of the majority. Therefore, you're less likely to influence the majority as well.
[00:17:43] Robin: But Christians took over the Roman Empire mainly by growing their numbers. The Amish have doubled every 20 years since 1905, and almost none by recruiting outsiders. The same for the Haredim. It seems like the main strategy for long-term success here is just insular fertility without much recruiting.
But of course, I would love to see other deviations again. There's still centuries to go here and chances for world culture to change. I would be happy to encourage people to try, but I still think you should be realistic about the track record so far, what has in fact worked so far.
[00:18:23] Al: But, of course, we have different models. Christians were not as isolated as the Amish from the majority of the Roman population. They were still interacting with Roman society much more. They still had higher fertility rates. But returning to other issues, it's not necessarily immediately about fertility. The question is, if you have at least some increase in cultural variation, potentially it can also produce more cultural fitness. These new societies that we are talking about might not be immediately or initially about fertility. As you mentioned before, the biggest problem is lack of cultural variation. So any kind of new societies, not necessarily high fertility societies, but any kind of increase in cultural variation can be a positive change. Now, when it's easier to coordinate actions globally, we have a higher probability of these new societies being created than in the past.
[00:19:21] Robin: I'd love to see actually a data series on that. I'm not sure we have a data series. That would be a worthwhile effort for someone to do, to create a data series of the rate of creation of cult-like things, how quickly they grow, and then they die. The life cycle of them, to see whether your speculation is correct or whether they are being created in more or less numbers. Now, I don't know. We certainly see more creation of specialty fandoms of TV shows or songs or animes, things like that. But those specialty fan groups usually don't share very much else in terms of being a different attitude toward marriage, work, death, or things like that.
They just are oriented around their specialty fan features. So what? That doesn't help very much for variation in fundamental values. We're looking more for cults of the sort that will demand that you change your views on a great many fundamental things to join them. That's what would then produce large scale cultural variety.
Impending Civilizational Collapse and Possible Solutions
[00:20:33] Robin: But remember, it's a combination of three things: lack of variety, lack of selection, and fast drift. So solution, you know, reducing any one of those problems is helpful. Not just variety, but whatever we can do is what I recommend.
[00:20:53] Al: But isn't it pessimistic when you're just focusing on reducing drift? So if you're focusing on just reducing drift, it means that basically you are saying that what we have now is as good as we can get. So we're just going to reduce drift, stop it at a more or less stable condition. But we are no longer reliant on cultural variation or cultural selection. We're just at least going to try to keep things as they are.
[00:21:17] Robin:The smaller amount of variety might be enough variety because it's really about... So a key thing to think about selection is selection is a thing that affects differently on different timescales. That is, selection can be weak on a short time scale, but still strong in a long time scale. That's what we would see about the eventual collapse of civilization. We say, look, on a thousand year timescale, our civilization still has strong cultural selection pressures. It's just not very strong on a five year timescale. So, you know, thankfully, at least in the long run, there's still going to be strong cultural selection. And that's the thing that will save us in the long run. But we might rather things happened on a shorter timescale. And a way to ensure that is to reduce the rate of drift and to increase variety, along with finding a way to increase selection.
Now, I've tried to outline several different approaches to solutions, none of which are very satisfactory. One is an increase in variety, but also maybe an increase in an acceptance of variety. So I call that deep multiculturalism. That is the idea that we could just have a lot more cults, or very different cultures in our world, but still maybe share governance and share markets with them. So we can all have a division of labor and have a modern, rich economy, but still have enormous cultural variety. And the obstacle to that is people kind of hate cultural variety, and they tend to use whatever markets and governance they share as a weapon to beat their deviant cultures into submission. But that's one potential solution, is to create cultural variety and enough of an acceptance for it to have a lot of it.
Obviously, another solution is just to accept the collapse and reverse scenario and accept that you won't have much influence over the long run and maybe think about how you can maximize your small influence by, for example, focusing on technologies that might survive the collapse or contributions that they won't object to so much or things like that. That's another approach.
And then the third approach that I can think of is that somehow we take control over cultural change and we choose to make cultures go in a good direction, not because of random variation and selection, but because we choose good culture. And so I have a proposed governance mechanism that might be able to do that, but that's a big ask. First of all, it's a big ask to imagine a large region adopting such a governance mechanism. And secondly, to imagine adopting a set of values that would be consistent with not collapsing. So there are many such values you can imagine adopting. The problem is, would they inspire enough devotion and attachment to let people suffer the costs of whatever policies they would approve for the purpose of preventing collapse? And for that, I think you might have to pick inspiring values, like when do we get to the stars? If you get a civilization that says we want to get to the stars as soon as possible, we will implement a governance that will adopt policies that will induce that. And when it does things we don't like we might say, well, I guess that's the cost of getting to the stars and let it happen. And then civilization wouldn't collapse and then we might reach the stars. But I have to admit, that's a big ask, because the temptation would be, as soon as you saw that governance adopting policies at odds with the values you intuitively felt you had, say about caring a lot for children or gender equality or whatever else it was, then you would say, no, we must not allow that. We must change the values of this governance mechanism to be more in tune with how we feel at the moment, and then they would prevent it from working. But I don't have a good answer. These are all pretty bad answers.
[00:25:18] Al: Yes. And with respect to cultural selection on an interplanetary level, the idea is, if you have enough time to get there before the civilization collapses, there is a higher probability that then selection is going to be restarted because it's harder to maintain cultural unity on an interplanetary basis.
[00:25:39] Robin: There would be as much variety, at least as there were different star systems that the descendants were around. But still, even so, the descendants around any one star system would want enough internal variety to prevent collapse there. And then they'll be having to think about the same set of issues there. So at least if some star system manages not to collapse, then I guess they can figure out how to send their descendants to the other ones that do collapse, I guess. So at least you get some degree of faster growth that way. But I think still each star system will be asking how can we prevent local collapse? How can we prevent local drift and have enough local variety to not have to be replaced by colonists from other stars?
Cultural Evolution, Cultural Selection, and Dysfunctional Prestige Markers
[00:26:25] Al: Ok. But returning back to the cultural evolution that we are observing right now, why do you think that any kind of cultural change that we are seeing right now is simply drift? Because still we have some kind of selection, some kind of prestige-biased copying, and prestige is not necessarily fully based on some kind of random status or something like that. So, for example, governments of various countries are more likely to copy economically successful countries, more likely to copy policies of economically successful countries. And economic success is not random unless you are like an oil-producing country or something like that. It's not random, and therefore there is still some kind of selection. Of course, cultural selection is not the same as biological selection, because cultural evolution also happens through prestige-biased copying and prestige-biased copying is a part of cultural evolution. It is not some kind of deviation from it. And, similarly, prestige-biased migration. So people are moving towards societies which are more successful, make these societies more populous, etc. So there is still a process that's ongoing. And of course, on the other hand, there are also trends towards more homogeneity across certain traits. But you cannot say that cultural evolution has entirely stopped globally. And we are still copying norms of countries or societies which are more economically successful and therefore more prestigious. And so therefore, we cannot say that cultural selection stops completely. And therefore why... why do you think that these trends (when we are clearly going to see that some societies collapse because of low fertility)... Why don't you think that this is going to affect global culture and global cultural norms are going to become more pro-natalist? Because the global community is going to see how poorly countries which have extremely low fertility are faring at that point.
[00:28:21] Robin: So I have this essay on this subject called Beware Cultural Drift. And I spent most of my energy in that essay trying to address this point that you're raising now. So I'm acknowledging it's a good point because this is why I tried to focus on. So the key idea is that there's a difference in selection of cultures and selection within cultures. Those are different processes. Selection within cultures is selection of the things that are allowed to vary within the culture. But selection of cultures is a selection of the things that can't really vary much within a culture that then have to be varied as the cultures themselves change. So if you think about, say, fishing, if we can tell who catches the most fish when they go fishing, we can agree that that's what we want out of fishing is to catch more fish, and we can tell which aspects of their lives are related to fishing, i.e. the thing they do sitting next to the lake when they're fishing. Then cultural selection works wonderfully. If we look at that person and we look at what they're doing next to the place where they fish and when they fish, and we try to copy that stuff, and then we can all learn to fish better. That's the great power of cultural evolution. It works wonderfully when we can agree on what's the measure of success that we want to copy.
The problem is, when we don't know what the measure of success is. And so then we just copy the prestigious and we don't even know why we picked our particular measure as the measure of prestige. That's the sort of thing that just varies by culture. And the cultures can't change very much. And then you need selection of cultures to get selection of that. And unfortunately, a lot of these large scale things in our society tied to fertility are more the selection-of-cultures things rather than selection within, so, for example, if a prestige measure of societies was their fertility, and we could look around the world and see, oh, you know, the Haredim are doing better than the South Koreans, so we should act more like the first than the second. That would be cultural evolution applying to a thing. We agree that is the measure of the good. And then we could powerfully do that. We are quite rational and observant creatures, and clever and able to look at what works for the things we decide are good and try to achieve them. That's why we've had spectacular technical progress and progress and a great many other things in the world. We have these large cultures that can do enormous within-cultural evolution of the things we agree we want, like a profitable corporation or lower-cost food or more bits of communication, faster computer chips. Whatever we can agree we want more of. Then we can do spectacularly and getting more of that.
The problem is, what about our ultimate values or most basic values or the things we want? If we can't agree on those things and we just choose them by copying the prestigious, then that's just the thing that can so easily go off the rails. And unfortunately, people have not prioritized fertility as a key metric of prestige. And you might think that would be a more healthy thing. So one thing we can talk about is, can we imagine choosing better prestige markers as a solution, like pushing the dominant culture or deviant cultures to just have a more functional, effective prestige marker, which is better tied to sort of fundamental success and then allow our powerful system of copying the best to produce that. And again, if that were closely tied to fertility, then that would obviously solve the fertility problem. But it still might drift. So there's this metaproblem of whatever these markers are, we're letting them change rapidly, like the prestige markers of 70 years ago or 100 years ago are not the same as today. And no matter how functional those were, if we allow this process that rapidly change these markers to go wild, we won't necessarily last.
[00:32:42] Al: But still some amount of economic success remains a key prestige marker throughout human civilization. And so if society, some sort of society is going to become many times poorer, as a result of extreme aging of the population, lack of innovation, etc., it is going to be viewed as less prestigious, no matter how important other values are. So it's hard to imagine... I don't know, maybe you disagree, but it's hard to imagine that society that is getting five times poorer, but just because they want to preserve certain values, they're still going to agree to it.
[00:33:14] Robin: So here's a warning. Corporate cultures change rapidly. Managers of corporate cultures have enormous powers and incentive to keep their corporate cultures healthy so that the company can be profitable. Yet, nevertheless, corporate cultures typically just go bad, and the managers who create initiatives to try to improve them fail in those initiatives. And selection is the main thing that keeps corporate cultures healthy. So, like the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus near the peak of the Roman Empire, saw fertility declining among elites, instituted a lot of policies to try to reverse that and just failed. Further Emperors later on continued to see the fall, continued to dislike it, continued to want to adopt policies to prevent it, and failed. So obviously in the Roman Empire, the size of the population was a prestige marker of the Romans and their competitors, and the Roman population was falling because of falling fertility. And they could see that that was lowering their prestige, and they wanted to stop it, but they couldn't. Central governments are typically not up to that task of reining in culture when we're talking of the Roman Empire or even companies today. So it is quite a task to imagine that my alternative governance structure could succeed where those who failed. It might. But I can't at all offer a guarantee.
[00:34:39] Al: Yeah. But the Roman Empire is just one observation, obviously. But, I agree with you with respect to corporations. So most of the economic, technological progress is happening not because existing corporations become better, but because they are replaced by new corporations that push innovation and, yeah, that's true that already existing companies, they rarely are able to turn things around. And that's why, of course, it's so important to have the ability to start new countries, new societies.
And, with respect to, once again returning back... Why do you think we should focus only on cults? Because in this regard, we need to just have the ability to start new societies they don't have to...
[00:35:18] Robin: Cult is just the name we give to a very different culture in our world. That's all it really means. The word cults just means those people are really different. They're trying to be really different. And that's why we give them, you know...
[00:35:27] Al:But by cult you also mean that they should be isolated, But why do they have to be isolated? Because isolation, yes, is important to remain culturally distinct, that's true. But in this regard, if you just have more diverse societies that can start, that would already push, in a way cultural evolution...
[00:35:43] Robin: Influence tends to be symmetric. You can't influence the world unless you let the world influence you. Yes, it's very hard to do otherwise. So if you let the world influence you, then you lose your distinctive character and you melt into the rest of the world. There's I don't see much way around it. If you want to maintain distinctiveness, you need to be pretty insular.
[00:36:06] Al: But, and also, but also the ability... Because you don't have to differ dramatically from the world if you are introducing some new policies and it's not necessarily about having complete cultural difference immediately, but just trying different policies. And when you have more countries, more societies. There's a higher probability that some of those policies influence...
[00:36:26] Robin: Others would be inspired by what they see as your success, that we can get the win of people copying. That's the key thing about, again, like the fishing example for things that people know they want, and they can look at you and see that you've succeeded at the thing they know they want, then we can win by just having people try different things and seeing the successful and copying them. Unfortunately, I think there's this key problem we may not actually want high population enough compared to the other things we want. People are already lining up on the grounds of saying it's okay to let population decline if that's the price for getting people what they want.
I wanted to praise you. I was saying I think this has been one of the best conversations I've had on cultural drift. You know, you've done your homework and you've thought about things, so congrats. Good job.
[00:37:11] Al: Thank you. And maybe, as the last point, you maybe quickly explain the Futarchy idea as the solution to the problem. Just quickly.
Futarchy
[00:37:20] Robin: The concept is you set a metric like when do we reach the stars and you create an asset that pays off in proportion to that metric, and then you let people trade that asset which gives you an expected value of that asset. And then you let people trade that asset conditional on policies, which then gives you conditional expectation of that metric given policies, which then allows you to pick the policy that has the highest conditional expectation. So if you create a governance mechanism, the rule could just be whenever you have an alternative to the status quo that the markets estimate has a higher expectation of achieving the metric we've agreed on, then we just adopt that policy. So that would be a way of inviting the world to suggest policies and evaluate them on what could possibly make us achieve the goal, like reaching the stars sooner and plausibly the best way to reach the stars sooner is not to collapse civilization. So they would have a primary focus on figuring out what prevents collapse in order to achieve whatever metric you set for them. At least if it's the sort of metric that would be harder to achieve with a collapsed civilization.
[00:38:24] Al: Thank you. Thank you, Robin. Do you want to promote some of your upcoming projects or books or something like that?
[00:38:30] Robin: No, I'm happy to say I'm happy to talk. You can look up my blog, Overcoming Bias, my essay, Beware Cultural Drift that we talked about. Look up the word Futarchy and my name will be easy to find, my writings on that. And, thank you for talking.
[00:38:44] Al:Thank you. Thank you very much, Robin. It was a great talk. Thank you.
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