The natural state of affairs
We won't be able to agree on how to improve the world if we don't understand what triggers progress
I’ve been traveling a couple of weeks ago and during one of the dinners with colleagues and friends my argument (and that from so many others) to defend Bitcoin and trash altcoins was that trust minimization (or decentralization) is the only truly valuable property and that all other properties (like scalability, UI/UX, etc…) can only get better in increasingly more and more centralized systems.
And then I went on to say that owning the second most trust minimized cryptocurrency didn’t make sense because it would be like choosing between the best and the second best air raid shelter during a bombing, assuming a similar cost to access both. That’s my usual argument against altcoins.
The person I was speaking to said: “but that assumes there’s always a bombing”
I immediately replied: “that is indeed the case, violence is the natural state of affairs”
It got me thinking about how little memory there is about how we got here, understanding here as the progress we’ve achieved to date.
How did that happen and why? how have we been able to create such immense progress and why in these last centuries and not in the last few thousand years?
Nature is actually extremely cruel
When I hear people that say we need to degrow or to get back to nature because humans are somewhat designed to live in it, I know they have no idea what they are talking about.
That would only be true if humans, as the rest of the animals in nature, would run on genetic code alone.
One of the most important ideas from Deutsch is that humans have some very static genetic knowledge that moves forward very slowly following Darwinian ideas, while at the same time, we are able to create an infinite amount of explanatory knowledge which not only moves way faster than genetic one but that can also get us almost anywhere in an infinite progress journey.
Explanations of how reality works are code too. And we’re creating it all the time with new ideas that we infinitely refine and that we share reprogramming others too as a consequence.
Those explanations refine our understanding of reality and consequently our incentives and actions.
While genes and memes evolve in an identical way (nature finds errors in our genes and gets us dead, while memes die when they are criticized and then corrected), slower progress in genes makes us genetically ignorant in comparison: none of us is actually adapted to survive in any ecological niche.
If you drop a baby (or any human without prior training) in any of them it would die within hours in the best scenario, without being taken care of by his mum or someone else, while animals are wired to walk and eat almost instantly.
If you instead drop someone that has grown up in that kind of environment you’ll notice that person will survive by using his explanatory knowledge alone.
So trying to live back in nature as our ancestors did and so many currently defend is just as retarded as it gets, because either you won’t want it once you realize the piece of s*** it is or your kids will not want it once they find out alternatives or even worse consequences.
Hunger, poverty or imminent death are indeed the natural state of affairs, humans can only get out of them with explanatory knowledge.
Since nobody can build all knowledge and wealth he/she needs on his/her own, we need to cooperate with others.
But violence is the default state of affairs too in terms of cooperation in all its forms: physical violence, coercion, cheating...
It was Richard Dawkins that explained how beyond our kin, trust doesn’t scale and that consequently we are not wired to naturally cooperate with others we don’t share genes with.
He explained how in any observed exchange in the animal kingdom, even sometimes when both parties were kin, cheating was the most frequent outcome.
With kin though, you can sometimes expect reciprocity.
Cooperation and reciprocity are, as always, something humans started solving by solving problems, understood as situations that are generated when experience doesn’t match your theory of how something should work. And solving problems turns into knowledge, which is the actual source of wealth that we then can also embed into rules and protocols.
When violence is profitable instead, then zero sum games become more frequent than positive sum ones and the consequence is stagnation and lack of economic progress.
Institutions
If cooperation can only happen (sometimes) among your kin, then division of labor will be limited and so limited will be too the number of needs that humans will be able to satisfy.
I will not be able to exchange the knowledge I generate with the knowledge you do unless we devise a way to make cooperation more profitable than violence.
Embedding our knowledge in products and services will never turn into progress if we are not able to exchange it. In fact multiple great inventions have been found in the archaeological records but they were there, isolated, used in very small communities.
Making cooperation more profitable than violence is the role of institutions: structures of rules and protocols that enable us to cooperate enabling trust to scale beyond the default Dunbar number (or your kin), like money, laws, contracts, courts…
We embed our increasing knowledge in those rules and protocols and get progress back because rules and protocols restrict the range of possible interactions to only those that can be expected to provide a win win situation for both counterparties.
This is possible because value is subjective: you and I can perceive different value in the same product or service, so we can have the feeling we both have won in an exchange of the same product or service.
Violence or war are not only the default state of affairs but also the institution of last resort, the one we resort to when all others fail, which also explains why the ultimate arbiter of truth worldwide is always the one with the most powerful army, currently the USA.
Culture
All the progress we currently enjoy, either in technologies, artifacts, processes, institutions, political systems, has happened exclusively because around 300 years ago some very smart people in a very small area of the world realized humans are fallible and that consequently nobody can ever be sure of something to be true.
Consequently the only way to progress was to submit every single idea to criticism and error correction, which is the role of science.
This had multiple implications in every single aspect of our lives. Some cultures embraced this idea way faster than others accelerating knowledge creation and wealth as a result. Some still haven’t embraced it and respect rulers instead of rules and live in rather medieval cultures that by the way some Westerners to my complete surprise try to protect not only outside but also inside West’s borders. The former are way more developed than the latter and it is not at all a coincidence.
You can tell how advanced a country is exclusively by its culture, understood as the set of ideas they share.
Cascading consequences
My conjecture today is that most political arguments derive from disagreements about the basic facts I have just described:
For those that believe the default state of affairs sucks
If you don’t give progress for granted and believe the default state of affairs is what I have just described, then you’ll defend at all costs knowledge creation, which can’t happen without absolute freedom to iterate, create and most importantly, with the freedom to make mistakes along the way and to criticized and correct them.
Preserving the means of error correction is or should be then, as Deutsch says, our main goal.
If you believe knowledge creation is unbounded then you’ll realize that there is no such a thing as limited resources. For the same reason, oil or uranium were not resources 150 years ago. It was ideas from some folks that turned them into resources.
Understanding resources are limited only by the knowledge we are able to generate can make you think that all we need to do is to let everyone freely make their own mistakes in a way that knowledge can spread as fast as possible, protecting the means of error correction and the institutions that let us cooperate.
In such an understanding of reality, every resource will become expensive before being depleted and consequently will incentivize the search for more economic alternatives by again, growing our knowledge.
In such an understanding of reality, it will be fine the coexistence of obscenely wealthy people with obscenely poor in such a way that anyone will be able to focus on solving the problems of the latter by understanding its root causes and fixing them, instead of the current approach of subsidizing them to make sure they remain forever identical.
For those that believe the default state of affairs is amazing
For those that give for granted progress and believe resources are limited, a possible conclusion could be that we shouldn’t allow a few to take control over them (become wealthy) because that would only happen at the expense of others.
If you believe that everyone is equal and consequently entitled to a similar level of wellbeing as anyone else, you might think that avoiding problems by forbidding them, or giving rights to some that become obligations for others, might be the way forward.
Or perhaps you may think that there is a particular limited level of knowledge creation and progress that we can aspire to and that beyond that point we could run out of resources, in which case degrowing could make sense.
Linked ideas
Ideas are kind of linked between them in an infinite logical chain. If there is a hard logical discrepancy between one and another, you may have to dig deep back in yours in order to question previous assumptions, so that the new whole chain of ideas starts making sense all over again.
Idea chains constitute your identity and things like pride are very hurtful because if you are proud, every new idea might become deemed by you an attack.
If I’m right, then getting these most fundamental facts right might be the best way to reach consensus on how we can make the world a better place.