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Slightly tangential to this excellent essay, some thoughts on Steven Pinker's much vaunted tome 'The Better Angels of Our Nature': "Mankind may be progressing but that does not mean that this is down to our philosophy of Progressivism. Pinker is one of those who take the recent ‘Rights Revolution’ (one of his ‘Six Trends’ that help to account for the decline of violence) entirely at face value. A campaigner for Social Justice is, to Pinker, simply driven by a desire for ...social justice (whatever that might actually mean). Gay-Rights and anti-Racist campaigners are simply dovish souls just wanting to be accepted for what they are. The conservative however is likely to also detect a souring whiff of cant; he notices the champagne in the socialist, the thought-policeman in the Gay Pride marcher, the racist in the anti-Racist, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it coquetry in the Cosmopolitan feminist. He is likely to exclaim to the pages of his Better Angels book: ‘Yes but souls like Me – and throughout all of history - probably never were violent, never were misogynistic, never did join a mob’. Just as when, on the tv news, he hears that the violent street protest was ‘caused’ by x,y or z, he will exclaim: ‘No! It was caused by people with a mob mentality’." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress

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I think systematic or doctrinaire cynicism or suspicion is a bad move, philosophically -- likely to make its practitioners as clueless as the ingenue. Nonetheless, there is value in reading its best exponents.

There is nothing in the woke predicament that a little LaRochefoucauld or Mandeville can't expose.

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Yes, the example of holy wars giving meaning to lives at the cost of millions dead is one (very negative) example of 'struggle and flight'. Yet Pinker could equally well have used, say, 'working hard to put food on the table for your family' as a more quotidian example. Strange that he didn't concede that meaning-giving activities involving 'struggle and fight' don't have to be negative.

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Interesting article. Here are a few thoughts.

First, even if computers are better at us at certain things, I’m not sure that we will find it less meaningful to engage in those activities. Computers destroy us at chess and machines can move faster than any human runner. But people still find it meaningful to play chess and run marathons.

Second, there are certain tasks that arguably computers can never do. Consider meditation. I enjoy meditation and I find it spiritually meaningful and challenging (I’m sympathetic to Buddhism). I don’t see how a computer could ever meditate for me and I also doubt that we’ll come up with a drug that can replace it, especially if, like me, you think there is spiritual value in the practice itself.

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Very nice discussion. Meanwhile, here is a challenge that lies right over the hill: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW

Could give meaning to millions.

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Nixon's summation of the issue is truly perceptive. As he spoke of dinners, hunting, games, I was reminded of Renoir's film "Rules of the Game," which makes some related points. There is a hunting scene about a third into the film which prefigures the various forms of social "hunting" that occur in the rest of the movie. When idle rich hit a certain point of ennui, they make prey of each other, rather than suffer complete anomie.

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This was a fantastic, integrative piece! I was just lecturing about some of this research today, and I wish I had had this article as a resource before I crafted the lecture.

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Something glaringly obvious - if you have babies or children (or granchildren) is your life meaningless?

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It depends on how you're defining meaning and value. There is no foundation for value. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/05/what-is-value.html

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This is an interesting article, but it is based on flawed assumptions.

I have written two books on material progress and have a Substack with over 400 articles on the topic, so I know something about the topic. Steven Pinker wrote a nice recommendation for my book series, so I understand his viewpoint.

I will skip the claim that happiness has not gone up in wealthy nations, which is likely not true.

My main concern is that you assume that we are nearing a state where there will soon be no physical or intellectual challenges. I find this highly unlikely.

And progress is also about lifting working-class, poor, and developing nations who currently have a much lower material standard of living. Progress benefits them for than others.

Perhaps someday in the distant future, progress will have advanced so much that there are no physical or intellectual challenges, but I just do not see this true for at least a few decades.

Yes, it is a legitimate concern for the distant future, but the future is very hard to predict. And judging human reactions to unknown societies is even harder.

I think you are concerned with a situation that will not likely happen within the lifetime of your readers. We can reassess if we get there.

And, more to the point, what is your proposed alternative? Stop economic growth and technological innovation? That cure is worse than the disease.

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"My main concern is that you assume that we are nearing a state where there will soon be no physical or intellectual challenges. I find this highly unlikely."

I agree.

"And, more to the point, what is your proposed alternative? Stop economic growth and technological innovation? That cure is worse than the disease."

We don't often agree, but on these points, we do.

See my comment on this article.

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High five!

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One could easily be forgiven for thinking Pinker isn't "going the distance". Aside from the left-inclined dismissal of his voluminous case for Progress, an impressive trio of Thiel, Taleb and Gray all deliver very damning rebuttals. Given how axiomatic his argument is does it not make sense to point out that the very economy that would depose his confidence is itself evidence to his leading point about human flourishing? Let's take Konstanin Kissin (sighs). What would he have been doing I wonder in 1975, 1992? Perhaps this sounds harsh but I can't help feeling as obviously capable as you both are, your argument reminds me of the contradiction in wanting to abolish fee-paying education but actually, when it really comes down to it, allowing an exception. Ok, your argument isn't about virtue! But honestly, you would not be so content to change places with an older timeline version of your self. People, and sometimes especially clever ones, are almost unfathomably unreliable! Purely going by the numbers, there are many many more people who are participating in meaning-making debates today. To talk about ennui itself is a marker of a deep search for meaning. A century that gave us Being and Time and Being and Nothingness is surely an addition to the previous century?

As well referenced as your piece is I couldn't help but feel you haven't at all bothered with Enlightenment Now (or Rationality). It is simply incorrect to assert his answers fail to convince because they are based on an unrealistically positive view of human nature. Remember that Pinker was a student of Tversky. He is very well versed in the contest between our irrational nature and the possibility of correction, albeit our biases can still entangle our best efforts. His argument works from cognitive error being the given. I concede Pinker has a weaknesses in identifying when the logic of progress leads to self-defeating outcomes but the notion our secularised prosperity is bound for a fall is best articulated when coming out of the very tradition of modernity itself, as oppose asymmetrically, barbarically. Thiel makes a significant, eloquent contribution to revaluating Progress but gets very heavy-handed (also I note, like Taleb and Gray) in holding the Enlightenment wholly culpable when the very concrete reality shows a world that, on balance, is able to improve, and even when bedevilled by hypostatization, stagnation, climate-change, excessive statism, anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces, still it retains significant capacity for reform. Indeed, that case for reform has never been louder. Just as our autonomy has been aided thus far by our ability to make machines, so technology has improved the common weal. As noted by Michael Magoon, you're shooting into an oncoming gale. Would you rather see a more cautious, regulated approach to AI? Where's the faith here in innovation? Like Kissin, I think you are getting caught up in small scale conflicts that you are mistakenly taking for much greater ones (perhaps he is more crassly incentivised). None quite so discontented as the intelligent. And, a perverse credit to our rising expectations.

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An ancient smart king wrote -

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.

He has even put eternity in their heart;

yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish.’’

Still wise, still true.

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Blithering Genius has written many essays and a book on the nature of technology, evolutionary mismatch, and finding purpose.

Most surveys and research on happiness are useless because they don't define "happiness", they don't have a philosophy of emotions to back them up, and they rely on self-reported data.

Blithering Genius has proposed "Rational Humanism" as a common belief system for people to adopt and a set of goals for people to strive towards in the pursuit of purpose and meaning. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2020/04/toward-rational-humanism.html, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRQN9T94

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The mistake is in thinking that if everyone is a millionaire and there is no war or crime , there would be nothing left to work on or to strive for or to argue about . That’s obviously nonsense . Millionaires just keep working and don’t suffer from a lack of meaning in life .

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As I've written elsewhere, in the absence of selection pressures, humans create their own. This I believe is partly responsible for the culture war.

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> "Losing one’s livelihood as a musician only to become a “prompt engineer” involves moving from a more meaningful activity to a less meaningful one. Technology is meant to automate the boring stuff, the drudge work – not the tasks that give us most enjoyment."

To complete the thought here, prompt engineering may be less meaningful an activity since it primarily relies on the capacities of the AI rather than those of the human merely eliciting them. The unique (coalitional) value of the human is then at once diminished and overshadowed by that of the AI.

Unfortunately (as I agree with the rest of the argument), the situation could be even more unstable than broad automation of meaningful work suggests: if AI capable of automating or greatly accelerating R+D (and surely "better than humans at most or all tasks that involve intellectual creativity") comes into existence, this could transform the economic environment faced by today's teens. Growth would explode, wages collapse and inequality soar. I don't understand the modeling approach, but this is the key result of Korinek and Suh (2024) [1] (lay presentation published by the IMF [2]). Korinek comes across to me as thoughtful about these issues [3], avoiding the dismissive stance typically assumed in the profession. Who knows what kind of future we'd be confronting at that point. Compelling arguments may no longer hold beyond this singularity, which in my mind makes AI very difficult to reason about.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32255/w32255.pdf

[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/Scenario-Planning-for-an-AGI-future-Anton-korinek

[3] https://youtu.be/t-p5Qd7LfVc?si=fYRSW2eGe_OLbTk5

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"Suppose that everyone on earth enjoyed a millionaire’s standard of living. Suppose there was no crime and no war. Suppose all our material needs were met and every intellectual problem was solved. Would this be a desirable world in which to live? For some, perhaps. But many would face profound ennui. There would be nothing left to work on, nothing left to strive for, nothing left to argue about."

The chance that humans will reach nirvana in the next million years is slim, and none.

Knowledge is the goal.

"Humans have never had more knowledge about diet, nutrition and exercise."

Correction: 'Humans have never had more access to knowledge about diet, nutrition, exercise, and everything else. That doesn't mean they utilize that knowledge.

"One technology that does have the potential to strip many people’s lives of purpose is artificial intelligence."

It is called ARTIFICIAL intelligence, and for a good reason: it has nothing to do with intelligence.

AI is algorithms written by humans. Computers only do what they are 'told' to do. Computers do an excellent job of sorting, grouping, and compiling extremely large data sets...something that humans are inefficient at.

"So far from enhancing our well-being, a world in which future civilisational advancements are largely automated could give rise to profound ennui. And even if we eventually adapt, the transition period won’t be easy."

Your article smacks of Luddism.

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The luddites actually had a lot of perfectly legitimate complaints, to be honest- as I understand it, living standards for the bottom 50% of the British population didn't improve until about 70 years into the industrial revolution.

I'm not sure I want to get into an extended discussion about AI capabilities, but it's fair to point out that the domain of uniquely human capabilities seems to keep shrinking over time, and my suspicion is that we're in an 'AI overhang' (with respect to hardware capacity exceeding requirements for AGI before the final algorithmic breakthroughs occur.) I don't know it for certain, but I wouldn't be too blase about this.

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"The luddites actually had a lot of perfectly legitimate complaints, to be honest- as I understand it, living standards for the bottom 50% of the British population didn't improve until about 70 years into the industrial revolution."

So, you would hold back progress and innovation because some people could not keep up.

"I'm not sure I want to get into an extended discussion about AI capabilities, but it's fair to point out that the domain of uniquely human capabilities seems to keep shrinking over time,..."

Only for menial work.

"I don't know it for certain, but I wouldn't be too blase about this."

It would be folly to hold back innovation. Knowledge is the goal.

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Do you usually lead conversation by presuming to tell other people what their objectives should be?

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"Do you usually lead conversation by presuming to tell other people what their objectives should be?"

That is precisely what you Luddites do.

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Pinker is Nietzsche's "last man." He just doesn't realize it.

Me, I'm old fashioned. While sometimes evolutionary or sociological conjecture can get us a fascinating insight or two, basic Aristotelian common sense more often puts us in the right ballpark on this.

Do we need "coalitional" value? Yes -- the first one, given to us by nature before any development, is the family. But the family's telos is the polis. The polis, ideally, should be to some degree both self-sufficient and yet harmonious. In a polis, people know you well enough to recognize your achievements, but not so well as to smother your "difference." Without the differences, the diversity of functions, the reason for a "polis" disappears.

The difficulty with a nation state is that it obscures these basic problems to some degree in its sheer scale. But being the kind of creatures we are, they're still there.

Tech raises the stakes, since the possibilities both for totalitarian control and anarchy are heightened.

What's needed is some kind of tech analogue to federalism, which was the best prior answer to the scale problem. I don't know what exactly that would be, but it's clear that people can't handle large scale social media, and that what the paranoid powers-that-be keep cooking up is far worse than the disease.

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"What's needed is some kind of tech analogue to federalism, which was the best prior answer to the scale problem. I don't know what exactly that would be, but it's clear that people can't handle large scale social media, and that what the paranoid powers-that-be keep cooking up is far worse than the disease."

This is insightful.

For quite a while now I have increasingly perceived than mankind's current state of *innate* social evolution tops out, comfortably, at the level of coherent ethnicity. Withing these bounds, unrelated strangers can have relatively comfortable transactions, but if we take strangers who are unrelated by ethnicity, we find that we've crossed the line that demarks the minimum level of trust for a comfortable daily experience.

And at the scale of domestic relationship--family, clan, spouse, spousal kin--ethnicity, while likely to be a factor, is not needed to provide a satisfactory trust-bond. Therefore, ethnicity is that unifying capstone for the unrelated/unattached.

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I agree. And I think the medievals already had some inkling of this, which is why the objective was to *augment* the nations with the authority of the church, but not to replace them.

Things haven't really changed for human beings in this case -- it's just that globalist liberalism, much like communism, is far more imperious in its political ambitions than any classical empire or religion was.

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Hi Race Realist, you might like the solution I suggest here: a world of competing small-scale polities in a never ending quest for sufficiency: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW

Unless I am mistaken, one nice thing about it is that the decades-long challenge of creating such a world would be (for oneself, family, friends, neighbors, and fellow townsfolk) an immediate source of meaning and purpose that is ripe for the seizing right now, particularly when viewed within the framework of the Judeo-Christian project that has always lain at the heart of Western civilization.

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