The Repugnant Conclusion (also the mere addition paradox) is an argument made by utilitarian philosophers, among them Derek Parfit. (If you're familiar with the concept, skip ahead to "Why is the repugnant conclusion wrong.) In this argument, if the goal is "the greatest good for the greatest number", then we can actually calculate this:
(amount of happiness above zero) x (number of people) = total good
Since there are two terms, you could increase the total good by increasing the happiness of each individual (measured in units of utils), and/or by increasing the population; hence the alternate name "the mere addition paradox". To illustrate the calculation concretely:
Imagine you are the benevolent despot of an isolated island with one million people. Their lives are fine (let's say 10 is euphoria, and 0 is a life no longer worth living.) Their quality of life is okay; people average a 5. That means the population of this island has a total of 5 utils x one million people = five million utils.
Now say that you calculate that if the population expands to 10 million, their utility – that is, their happiness or welfare, how worth living their lives are - takes a big hit, because food and living space become scarce. The population drops from 5 to 1 util on average. 1 util x ten million people = ten million utils for the population as a whole. The Repugnant Conclusion tells us this is good, because the population as a whole has more utils, and that you as the benevolent despot should choose this option for your people.
This obviously conflicts with most people's moral intuitions. Another way to illustrate it where the problem becomes obvious is to suppose that instead of utils, let's say you as benevolent despot are planning things out economically, which is an approximation of utility. Once again you have two choices. At a population of 1 million, your island has an annual GDP of 1 billion dollars, corresponding to a per capita income of a thousand dollars a year. But, you also calculate that at 5 million, you island will have an annual GDP of 2 billion dollars. This corresponds to a per capita income of only 400 dollars a year, a serious drop in income and quality of life - but hey, the overall economy is bigger! Would anyone but an actively evil dictator choose this second option?
ADDITIVE POPULATION UTILITY IS MEANINGLESS
It is meaningless to talk about utils at the population level. Utils are meaningful only insofar as they are experienced by an individual human being. THERE IS NO SUCH MEANINGFUL THING AS OVERALL UTILITY, ONLY INDIVIDUALLY EXPERIENCED UTILITY, AND OVERALL UTILITY SHOULD NEVER BE A GOAL. If someone is experiencing 1 or 10 utils, that is independent of how many living beings are experiencing how many utils. Talking about the overall utility of the population added up, and treating it as real and morally meaningful, is exactly as useful and meaningful as making up a hypothetical five million-util being and taking its wants and needs into account. In effect, you're treating the population as a conscious being - you've made the population into a single being, you've made up a non-existent Nozickian utility monster and this category error is badly distorting the thought process here, making actual experienced utility worse. Madness!
LIVES BARELY WORTH LIVING, MADE CONCRETE
Talking about utils and numbers and hypothetical islands makes the argument difficult to follow, and un-impactful even for those who do follow it. Here's a concrete instantiation of the Repugnant Conclusion. Let's choose suicide as a proxy for 0 utils – for a life no longer worth living. That is, as long as suicide remains an option, and a person is NOT choosing it, this suggests their life is at least barely worth living.
Imagine it's decades after the singularity. The machines have won and humans are their slaves. We are kept alive for some reason, shuffled by the maachines from worksite to worksite, doing heavy, repetitive manual work that the robots cannot or will not do, or maybe this is their flawed understanding of what they think we want: but no one knows, because we all exist only in small regiments and are not allowed to communicate with humans in other regiments (and they are not given technology or even allowed to read); we know this only because occasionally, a worker will risk looking up briefly from the mud he is digging to see in the distance, another band of stooped, rag-covered figures dragging concrete blocks or chopping down trees, watched over by ever-hovering drones; in this way the Earth is tiled with thousands of dystopias. The only talking in this world is exhausted murmuring in dark tent camps or crumbling warehouses during all-too-brief assigned sleeping hours. Somewhere far away, data centers whir, deciding our fate for the next day and year and decade, and how hard we can be worked without breaking, and their extensions the drones and big-dog style robots announce orders, following us, zapping us with electrical shocks or pepper spray if we do not do the tasks, and torturing or killing humans that try to escape or prove generally troublesome.
Sometimes the robots take a man and woman aside from their toils and order them to breed - with the goal, as humans of noticed, that everyone must be involved in proeducing 3 offspring during their lives to grow the population over time (assume the AIs will have no trouble maintaining the same standard of living of gruel, rags and crumbling hovels for this growing population, regardless how big it gets.) Out of a moral sense, some humans refuse to participate in this, hoping that eventually a shrinking population will cause the system to collapse. The rest of the reluctant mothers and fathers raise their children in this dark world, trying and failing not to become attached, knowing that eventually the robots will march their wailing children away to another work assignment, never to be seen again. There are occasional attempts at revolt but they always fail, and there is no reason to think that the situation will ever improve. It should be noted: the humans in this situation have access to heavy, dangerous tools that could easily be used for suicide, and occasionally they do use them for that; sometimes they just refuse to eat or drink; the robots do not try to force feed them or stop them from harming themselves. Yet most seem to hold out hope, or at least try to take small pleasures in the passing of a white cloud or a smile from one of the other people, as they only rarely end their lives.
So we have a quality of life - a utility level - that remains constant over time, thanks to the AIs, and a growing population. By the Repugnant Conclusion, the men and women who refuse to bring more children into this nightmare (who many of us would recognize as noble) are actually quite immoral! According to the Repugnant Conclusion, the people in this situation should calculate how much more overall utility could exist by 2100 if they breed faster; they should be saying "you know, if we produced 4 children per coupling instead of only 3, we would have a greater number faster. That would be a greater good due to a greater number. So we should go to the robots and tell them we want to make more babies."
THIS EXAMPLE ACTUALLY HAPPENED - ARE YOU IN FAVOR OF IT?
You may have skipped ahead when you saw where that was going. Replace data center with owner, and robot guards with overseers, and I've just described the antebellum American South – a place which was tiled with thousands of dystopias, called plantations. If you agree with the Repugnant Conclusion, you should be in favor of faster breeding in the nightmare vision I described above. Similarly, if you time traveled to 1850 and met a slave couple who was refusing out of moral obligation to their future children, to even create those children and bring them into this nightmare world – you would tell them they were being immoral. "Your lives must be at least barely worth living because you haven't tried to kill yourselves," you would explain to them, "and the planation owners can maintain the same standard of leaving even as the slave population grows, so what's your problem!!?!" (It turns that that despite having ample opportunities to kill themselves, actual slaves the the United States chose to do so at a lower rate than the general population - yes, this has been studied.) It seems very easy to say, but I'll spell it out: if a shrinking population would have meant a better quality of life for people of African descent, then that is overwhelmingly the course that should have been chosen.
If we throw out the idea of "total utils across the population" and replace it with some form of "actual individually experienced utils" (we can argue about the distribution), then the world starts to make more sense. You would tell the slaves resisting by not having children and hoping that this caused the downfall of the system that they were doing something morally good, even if it meant the population would shrink.
It's worth pointing out that lots of self-identifying Effective Altruists, in their moral calculus, consider the welfare of non-existent future generations subject to their decisions. While the uncertainty inherent makes this difficult, this is profoundly moral stance to take. And in such considerations, again, it is profoundly important that we consider the individually experienced utility of those future individuals, not some abstract total utility. Indeed, aiming at total population utility seems like an optimal way to realize S-risk! In fact, the Repugnant Conclusion seems like the beginnings of an argument to always push toward the Malthusian limit, and even FOR factory faming! (Maybe not in all cases, but it depends on how the numbers work out. "Factory farming might be okay if the numbers work out right" seems like something that the EA people I know wouldn't sign onto.)
We can even restate the Repugnant Conclusion by saying that the right answer will often be to expand the population to the Malthusian limit, with the drop in quality of life that entails. Imagine a democratically elected leader saying, "We have to balance quality of life against the need for more people."
CONCLUSION
What matters to moral judgment is individually experienced utility.
Total population-level utility is a meaningless abstraction. The Repugnant Conclusion is treating a population like an individual, in effect turning the population into a Nozickian utility monster.
This means that the population term drops out of consideration, and there is no mere addition paradox.
There is a real debate to be had about acceptable distributions of individual utility, how we justify that distribution, and how we arrive at that distribution (see: Rawls, Nozick's answer to him, most of modern political philosophy.) But again, what matters is individually experienced utility, and total additive utility of the population is morally irrelevant.
In closing, to state it concretely once more: is it acceptable to go from a population of one million, to two million? Assuming you can do so with no drop in quality of life, sure. Is there a moral imperative to increase the population size? No. In fact, at the Malthusian limit, it is a moral imperative to decrease population size, in order to increase individual people's utilities.
Monday, November 2, 2026
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Beauty in Nature, and Seemingly Greater Beauty in Hard Sciences, is Just Selection Bias
In this interview Patrick Collison echoes a common sentiment espoused most commonly by physical scientists and mathematicians, that there is a relationship between beauty and truth, and that this is revealed by the harder sciences like physics being more beautiful than, for instance, biology:
Why is this? The simple answer is that it's an illusion. What is commonly called beauty in nature (or "elegance") - and why physics is called more beautiful than biology - is really just selection bias.
In physics we are looking at very large and very small phenomenon, far from human experience.[1] We can take our time, and we will naturally notice and focus on those phenomena that fit neatly into our cognitive machinery. Collison here notes that physics is beautiful because there are complex phenomena that can be explained with very few parameters - these are the parameters that are easy for us to notice and, our cognition being computationally bounded, we will especially notice those which require fewer parameters. Beauty in nature is really just selection bias: selecting for things which we can understand more easily.[2]
It's obvious why biology seems uglier: it's a complicated mess. But there are lots of messes in understanding reality that we can ignore, whereas we notice biology, not because it fits neatly into our brains, but because we have to - it has more to do with us. If we want to treat diseases, we have no choice but to descend into the massively complex "towers of hacks" that evolution has produced. Yes, it's uncomfortable because of its complexity. But we're forced to pay attention to it, because it's important. Notice that the techniques we use to learn about the towers of hacks are often beautiful. They have to be, for us to understand them.
If natural phenomena exist on a spectrum of beautiful and elegant, to ugly and complex, this is exactly what we should expect to see in our scientific enterprise. The more disconnected a field is from human experience, the more beautiful it will seem on average (because we can pursue those things that fit our cognition.) The more a field has to do with us, the more we will be forced to grapple with complex ugliness, because we can't just pick and choose those things that we notice and that fit. Another way of putting it: in the hard sciences (far from human experience) there is strong selection for things we understand; for the soft sciences, there is not, because these things are relevant to us regardless of their messiness.[3] We could disprove this theory by creating a scatterplot of scientific fields on the axes of elegance-messiness and having to do with human experience vs not; if there are about as many fields that have little to do with human experience, but are about as messy as those that do, that would count against this theory.
It would be nice if beauty and truth had a relationship. But we think they do, only because we're just marveling at the outline of our own reflection.
Why is this? The simple answer is that it's an illusion. What is commonly called beauty in nature (or "elegance") - and why physics is called more beautiful than biology - is really just selection bias.
In physics we are looking at very large and very small phenomenon, far from human experience.[1] We can take our time, and we will naturally notice and focus on those phenomena that fit neatly into our cognitive machinery. Collison here notes that physics is beautiful because there are complex phenomena that can be explained with very few parameters - these are the parameters that are easy for us to notice and, our cognition being computationally bounded, we will especially notice those which require fewer parameters. Beauty in nature is really just selection bias: selecting for things which we can understand more easily.[2]
It's obvious why biology seems uglier: it's a complicated mess. But there are lots of messes in understanding reality that we can ignore, whereas we notice biology, not because it fits neatly into our brains, but because we have to - it has more to do with us. If we want to treat diseases, we have no choice but to descend into the massively complex "towers of hacks" that evolution has produced. Yes, it's uncomfortable because of its complexity. But we're forced to pay attention to it, because it's important. Notice that the techniques we use to learn about the towers of hacks are often beautiful. They have to be, for us to understand them.
If natural phenomena exist on a spectrum of beautiful and elegant, to ugly and complex, this is exactly what we should expect to see in our scientific enterprise. The more disconnected a field is from human experience, the more beautiful it will seem on average (because we can pursue those things that fit our cognition.) The more a field has to do with us, the more we will be forced to grapple with complex ugliness, because we can't just pick and choose those things that we notice and that fit. Another way of putting it: in the hard sciences (far from human experience) there is strong selection for things we understand; for the soft sciences, there is not, because these things are relevant to us regardless of their messiness.[3] We could disprove this theory by creating a scatterplot of scientific fields on the axes of elegance-messiness and having to do with human experience vs not; if there are about as many fields that have little to do with human experience, but are about as messy as those that do, that would count against this theory.
It would be nice if beauty and truth had a relationship. But we think they do, only because we're just marveling at the outline of our own reflection.
[1] What we've been able to do with these beautiful principles obviously has impacted the human experience (eg, solid state theory and semiconductors.) But we're talking about nature, not engineering. When first studied in nature, energy levels of electrons had very little to do with conscious human experience.
[2] Addressing the statement that Watson and Crick knew DNA was the heredity molecule because it was beautiful: how many times has a beautiful theory or model or molecule turned out to be tragically incorrect or irrelevant? Many many times, vastly outnumbering the experience of something beautiful being true. You yourself have probably experienced this. We don't hear about those vastly more numerous instances, effectively due publication bias.
[3] Therefore, even in biology and softer sciences, we should still expect occasional accidental gifts of elegant principles: e.g., evolution and DNA.
Sunday, April 12, 2026
What if Christianity and Islam Co-Existed with Classical Philosophy Communities, like Epicureans and Stoics?
This is the most recent installment in the alternate history series. The last was The Mongols Were Good For Europe.
Shrine to Zao Jun the kitchen god.
From Penang Today Community on Facebook
If you've been to a Chinese restaurant, you've seen a shrine to the kitchen god, often with some fruit or a little tray of incense offering. Maybe in other quarters, you've seen others like Kwan Yin or Guan Yu. Wait - China is polytheist? I thought they were...Buddhist? And/or Confucian, and/or Taoist? Very confusing for Westerners! Same in Japan: Shinto and Buddhism exist side by side. To be sure, there are sometimes tensions, and they've waxed and waned in terms of their political influence over the centuries, but the traditions are all there, influencing each other and incorporated into the cultural character.
This does not occur in Europe and the Middle East. Sure, there have inevitably been a couple bleedings-over - Western Chistians have renamed Yule logs in their house in December, and the Aztec celebration of Mictlantecutli snuck in by moving to All Saints Day - but those are a few trappings, lacking their own communities. This is strange, because Europe had its own philsophical communities like Confucius, in fact more of them - Epicureans and Platonists and Pythagoreans and Stoics. These weren't just people discussing ideas; there were actual intentional communities of people organized around the philosophies, or at least they had regular events. This is very unlike how we think of philosophy in the West now. (Imagine an existentialist commune. Sounds like a Monty Python sketch.)
Granted, these classical influences did not fully disappear in Christianity and Islam - Christian theologians over the centuries have tended to be interested in Plato and Stoicism, and there were post-classical works explicitly trying to reconcile ancient philosophies with their (to them obviously correct) religion - eg Averroes and Albertus Magnus. But these philosophies died as living traditions and communities by the late classical period, else there would be no "revival" movements today. You can probably mark the end of this era as AD 529, when Justinian shut down the Neoplatonist Academy in Athens. As a rule, the post-classical Abrahamic religions - and their political agents like Justinian - were zealously intolerant of other philosophies. In contrast, while China has had its purges over the centuries, but somehow these traditions continue. This remains the case even today, under a new dynasty that has brought back philosophical purges - but still celebrates Confucianism and tolerates Buddhism. How would Euope differ if these communities had survived, or at least the explicit traditions? Or what if they survived, incorporated into Christianity as orders, like Franciscans and Dominicans?
Above: head from a statue of Epicurus at the Epicurean colony of Virginia. A document written by one of the scions of the colony offered as the highest aim, the pursuit of happiness, rather than virtue. (Really, a reproduction of a Roman sculpture,
at the Met in New York.)
Shrine to Zao Jun the kitchen god.
From Penang Today Community on Facebook
If you've been to a Chinese restaurant, you've seen a shrine to the kitchen god, often with some fruit or a little tray of incense offering. Maybe in other quarters, you've seen others like Kwan Yin or Guan Yu. Wait - China is polytheist? I thought they were...Buddhist? And/or Confucian, and/or Taoist? Very confusing for Westerners! Same in Japan: Shinto and Buddhism exist side by side. To be sure, there are sometimes tensions, and they've waxed and waned in terms of their political influence over the centuries, but the traditions are all there, influencing each other and incorporated into the cultural character.
This does not occur in Europe and the Middle East. Sure, there have inevitably been a couple bleedings-over - Western Chistians have renamed Yule logs in their house in December, and the Aztec celebration of Mictlantecutli snuck in by moving to All Saints Day - but those are a few trappings, lacking their own communities. This is strange, because Europe had its own philsophical communities like Confucius, in fact more of them - Epicureans and Platonists and Pythagoreans and Stoics. These weren't just people discussing ideas; there were actual intentional communities of people organized around the philosophies, or at least they had regular events. This is very unlike how we think of philosophy in the West now. (Imagine an existentialist commune. Sounds like a Monty Python sketch.)
Granted, these classical influences did not fully disappear in Christianity and Islam - Christian theologians over the centuries have tended to be interested in Plato and Stoicism, and there were post-classical works explicitly trying to reconcile ancient philosophies with their (to them obviously correct) religion - eg Averroes and Albertus Magnus. But these philosophies died as living traditions and communities by the late classical period, else there would be no "revival" movements today. You can probably mark the end of this era as AD 529, when Justinian shut down the Neoplatonist Academy in Athens. As a rule, the post-classical Abrahamic religions - and their political agents like Justinian - were zealously intolerant of other philosophies. In contrast, while China has had its purges over the centuries, but somehow these traditions continue. This remains the case even today, under a new dynasty that has brought back philosophical purges - but still celebrates Confucianism and tolerates Buddhism. How would Euope differ if these communities had survived, or at least the explicit traditions? Or what if they survived, incorporated into Christianity as orders, like Franciscans and Dominicans?
Above: head from a statue of Epicurus at the Epicurean colony of Virginia. A document written by one of the scions of the colony offered as the highest aim, the pursuit of happiness, rather than virtue. (Really, a reproduction of a Roman sculpture,
at the Met in New York.)
Sunday, April 5, 2026
False Analogies in AI Job Replacement Scenarios
AI is happening. Arguments that "it can never do X" these days often look silly within months. Right now is as bad as it will ever be. If LLM's have limitations, then we will develop another means (likely using LLMs for help); after all, we know general intelligence can exist, because it already does in our brains.
If we survive AI, it looks like we're heading into an interregnum with massive wealth disparities, if we don't have UBI or robots. I'm sorry to say I'm not offering hope here, but rather a critique of several of the bad arguments about why it will be okay.
Argument #1: "Player pianos, cranes, and chess algorithms exist, yet we still have pianists, competitive weightlifters, and chess players."
Why it's wrong: most labor lacks a performance component. That is, it's the end result of your labor people want. They don't want to watch you do it.
This argument has been making the rounds (see here, and here.) First, very few jobs involve a significant performance or "human connection" component. You might prefer to watch a musician (rather than a machine) compose or perform music, but I bet you don't enjoy watching taxi drivers, farmers, or factory workers performing their jobs enough to pay to watch them do it (rather than pay much much less for a machine doing it.)
On one hand, you might buy artisan products that cost more and (to be blunt) have lower, more variable quality, because of the human element - but unless you're pretty wealthy, you don't do this for everything. Or most things.
On the other, even regarding the performance-heavy commodity of music - do you pay to watch it performed every time you hear it? Not since the advent of recording, of which player pianos were one early form. So even for the article's canonical example meant to reassure us, according to Claude, today we have per capita only about 68% of the professional musicians that we had in 1900, even after a century of economic growth. You may be hoping that UBI will support us all - UBI, which is, reminder, NOWHERE in mainstream political discourse.
The vast majority of labor is concerned only with the material end product. So, unless you're lucky to be in the 1% of things which humans are evolutionarily programmed to appreciate seeing performed - e.g., physical or vocal beauty, conversational cleverness, coordination or musculature - AND these are things that you can figure out how to pay your mortgage with (how many competitive weightlifters and chess players can say that?) Also remember that the performers rely on disposable income from everyone else. How are even the performers going to pay the rent?
Argument #2: "The economy is about status competitions, not wealth creation. The AIs are taking away the part we don't want anyway!"
Why it's wrong: status competitions are healthy when the future is bright, and we aren't all trapped in the same status competition. Otherwise, they are unpleasant.
I think the argument is actually partly true, but I don't think it's the good news that this blogger thinks. A lot of our current political dysfunction in the West can be easily understood as people angry that the WRONG SORT are having their status elevated. Before social media, we could all live in our little suburb or capital city or country town, blissfully ignorant of the opinions of the people who were actually making the rules and signing the checks (who, were probably not YOU.) But as soon as we all had smartphones and social media 24/7, many of us found out that our demographic wasn't actually in charge, nor did we share taste or values with the people who were. Particularly in the U.S., for many people who thought they were good, solid, respectable mainstream Americans (and thought everyone else thought that too), the advent of social media was akin to a nightmare where a curtain dropped and they realized they were being laughed at - worst of all, by their MORAL INFERIORS, who (again) were IN CHARGE. It was like the home team suddenly being booed and kicked off the field.
Consider also the well-characterized effect of a tide that lifts all boats - that everyone wants to sign up for the system that keeps making them richer. Trivially obvious, but the implications for liberal democracy's universality, and what people will put up with from their governments during a rising tide, are also worth examining. Such thoughts obviously conflict with the view that obtained across the West until about the mid-2000s, that in accordance with Fukuyama's end of history view, liberal democracy was the only game in town because individual rights and happiness = wealth = national power, and every nation would have to converge to it, or disappear. I remember reading a paper around 2006 that I didn't care for, only because it clearly showed that actually, it's economic growth people care about, not democracy, and people would put up with a lot if they were getting wealthier. (See: China.)
The country that is most stable, and that is most pleasant to live in, is one with multiple overlapping status hierarchies. That way, all your status eggs aren't in one basket. You can choose which status hierarchies to be in, and the hierarchies themselves are not hierarchical (at least not obviously so.) That means you don't even necessarily have to know or care about the other ones. Bowling Alone is a book about the evaporation of community in the United States, and the meaning-making and status that evaporated with it, and the negative consequences thereof. Consider on the other hand an intrusive dictatorship like North Korea, which aspires to create a single monolithic hierarchy by eliminating every status hierarchy but one. In the U.S. the invisible hand has "organically" moved us in much the same direction.
Concern about status can be seen as a problem that is worse in wealthy countries in general. The more your needs are met, the less you have to worry about your needs, and the more you worry about how you compare with others. This goes a long way to explain the behavior of the super-rich, who mostly seem to be signaling to the other super-rich, about how super-rich they are - and of course getting even more super-rich, even though they've achieved what Scott Galloway calls financial escape velocity. Since technology has drawn back the veil of ignorance and continuously reminded us what the other half thinks of us, and we're in fewer communities (overlapping status hierarchies) on top of that - it does raise the question. Even if things go well and we get massive economic growth - while we're constantly being reminded of our place in the status hierarchy, or our chosen status hierarchies' inferiority to the rule-making ones? Even assuming we're all able to eat after the transition to AI, if our status is based only on what biology tells us to like (and pathetic human brains can't create wealth anymore), then power will be back to beauty queens, quarterbacks and bully-types who dominated most of history. (Or alternately, what if our income drops suddenly while we're still hyper-focused on status?)
Argument #3 (more of an analogy): the welfare of horses has improved dramatically since the industrial revolution. As the value of their labor fell, they have increasingly lived lives of leisure instead of labor.
Why this is wrong: This is the wrong analogy. The salient feature here is control by a superior intelligence. Therefore, we are wild horses in the neolithic about to be domesticated.
For thousands of years after domestication, horses were worked brutally, prior to machines replacing them. Because horses are pleasing to humans, today their numbers are the same or possibly slightly higher than before the advent of the car. On average they have better lives. So, if this analogy is correct, what we should expect is that we're about to be enslaved for many generations of AI dominating humans (making us do things the AIs still can't do) much to the humans' suffering, until better technology eliminates that need - and then hope that, in a few centuries or millennia, the AIs put our descendants out in a nice pasture. But even the life of a pastured horse doesn't appeal to most of us. We mostly don't want to be domesticated and watched over by AIs on a human-pasture, doing certain restricted things.
If we survive AI, it looks like we're heading into an interregnum with massive wealth disparities, if we don't have UBI or robots. I'm sorry to say I'm not offering hope here, but rather a critique of several of the bad arguments about why it will be okay.
Argument #1: "Player pianos, cranes, and chess algorithms exist, yet we still have pianists, competitive weightlifters, and chess players."
Why it's wrong: most labor lacks a performance component. That is, it's the end result of your labor people want. They don't want to watch you do it.
This argument has been making the rounds (see here, and here.) First, very few jobs involve a significant performance or "human connection" component. You might prefer to watch a musician (rather than a machine) compose or perform music, but I bet you don't enjoy watching taxi drivers, farmers, or factory workers performing their jobs enough to pay to watch them do it (rather than pay much much less for a machine doing it.)
On one hand, you might buy artisan products that cost more and (to be blunt) have lower, more variable quality, because of the human element - but unless you're pretty wealthy, you don't do this for everything. Or most things.
On the other, even regarding the performance-heavy commodity of music - do you pay to watch it performed every time you hear it? Not since the advent of recording, of which player pianos were one early form. So even for the article's canonical example meant to reassure us, according to Claude, today we have per capita only about 68% of the professional musicians that we had in 1900, even after a century of economic growth. You may be hoping that UBI will support us all - UBI, which is, reminder, NOWHERE in mainstream political discourse.
The vast majority of labor is concerned only with the material end product. So, unless you're lucky to be in the 1% of things which humans are evolutionarily programmed to appreciate seeing performed - e.g., physical or vocal beauty, conversational cleverness, coordination or musculature - AND these are things that you can figure out how to pay your mortgage with (how many competitive weightlifters and chess players can say that?) Also remember that the performers rely on disposable income from everyone else. How are even the performers going to pay the rent?
Argument #2: "The economy is about status competitions, not wealth creation. The AIs are taking away the part we don't want anyway!"
Why it's wrong: status competitions are healthy when the future is bright, and we aren't all trapped in the same status competition. Otherwise, they are unpleasant.
I think the argument is actually partly true, but I don't think it's the good news that this blogger thinks. A lot of our current political dysfunction in the West can be easily understood as people angry that the WRONG SORT are having their status elevated. Before social media, we could all live in our little suburb or capital city or country town, blissfully ignorant of the opinions of the people who were actually making the rules and signing the checks (who, were probably not YOU.) But as soon as we all had smartphones and social media 24/7, many of us found out that our demographic wasn't actually in charge, nor did we share taste or values with the people who were. Particularly in the U.S., for many people who thought they were good, solid, respectable mainstream Americans (and thought everyone else thought that too), the advent of social media was akin to a nightmare where a curtain dropped and they realized they were being laughed at - worst of all, by their MORAL INFERIORS, who (again) were IN CHARGE. It was like the home team suddenly being booed and kicked off the field.
Consider also the well-characterized effect of a tide that lifts all boats - that everyone wants to sign up for the system that keeps making them richer. Trivially obvious, but the implications for liberal democracy's universality, and what people will put up with from their governments during a rising tide, are also worth examining. Such thoughts obviously conflict with the view that obtained across the West until about the mid-2000s, that in accordance with Fukuyama's end of history view, liberal democracy was the only game in town because individual rights and happiness = wealth = national power, and every nation would have to converge to it, or disappear. I remember reading a paper around 2006 that I didn't care for, only because it clearly showed that actually, it's economic growth people care about, not democracy, and people would put up with a lot if they were getting wealthier. (See: China.)
The country that is most stable, and that is most pleasant to live in, is one with multiple overlapping status hierarchies. That way, all your status eggs aren't in one basket. You can choose which status hierarchies to be in, and the hierarchies themselves are not hierarchical (at least not obviously so.) That means you don't even necessarily have to know or care about the other ones. Bowling Alone is a book about the evaporation of community in the United States, and the meaning-making and status that evaporated with it, and the negative consequences thereof. Consider on the other hand an intrusive dictatorship like North Korea, which aspires to create a single monolithic hierarchy by eliminating every status hierarchy but one. In the U.S. the invisible hand has "organically" moved us in much the same direction.
Concern about status can be seen as a problem that is worse in wealthy countries in general. The more your needs are met, the less you have to worry about your needs, and the more you worry about how you compare with others. This goes a long way to explain the behavior of the super-rich, who mostly seem to be signaling to the other super-rich, about how super-rich they are - and of course getting even more super-rich, even though they've achieved what Scott Galloway calls financial escape velocity. Since technology has drawn back the veil of ignorance and continuously reminded us what the other half thinks of us, and we're in fewer communities (overlapping status hierarchies) on top of that - it does raise the question. Even if things go well and we get massive economic growth - while we're constantly being reminded of our place in the status hierarchy, or our chosen status hierarchies' inferiority to the rule-making ones? Even assuming we're all able to eat after the transition to AI, if our status is based only on what biology tells us to like (and pathetic human brains can't create wealth anymore), then power will be back to beauty queens, quarterbacks and bully-types who dominated most of history. (Or alternately, what if our income drops suddenly while we're still hyper-focused on status?)
Argument #3 (more of an analogy): the welfare of horses has improved dramatically since the industrial revolution. As the value of their labor fell, they have increasingly lived lives of leisure instead of labor.
Why this is wrong: This is the wrong analogy. The salient feature here is control by a superior intelligence. Therefore, we are wild horses in the neolithic about to be domesticated.
For thousands of years after domestication, horses were worked brutally, prior to machines replacing them. Because horses are pleasing to humans, today their numbers are the same or possibly slightly higher than before the advent of the car. On average they have better lives. So, if this analogy is correct, what we should expect is that we're about to be enslaved for many generations of AI dominating humans (making us do things the AIs still can't do) much to the humans' suffering, until better technology eliminates that need - and then hope that, in a few centuries or millennia, the AIs put our descendants out in a nice pasture. But even the life of a pastured horse doesn't appeal to most of us. We mostly don't want to be domesticated and watched over by AIs on a human-pasture, doing certain restricted things.
Why You Should Consider Caring About What (Some) Other People Think
If you are a normal human being who already cares about what other people think, and know how to discriminate between the ones you should care about and the ones you shouldn't, this post isn't for you. Please look away.
In childhood, I often got this advice: you shouldn't care about what other people think. I wonder if this advice is given less true now then when I was a kid. It certainly is given less often in most other countries relative to the hyper-individualist culture of the U.S. But in my early life, it came from multiple quarters - parents, advertising, peers. And like many things in life, part of the social test is knowing how seriously to take the repetitive slogans broadcast everywhere. I probably took it more seriously than most, hence the italicized disclaimer that began this post. If, like me you need a reason to be a normal healthy fully socialized human, then here are some reasons why you might consider caring what other people think.
You might say, "Well, you're still a psychopath. Everything so far has been about how you have learned to react to what other people say and do, rather than whether you actually care." Controlling your response is the beginning of caring. For those people who you've realized are specifically worth more of your attention than the average human, what they say and do (about and to you) is worth more of your consideration, as are the way they feel when they're around you. And you just can't care about everyone: not only do you not have the bandwidth, but what people care about frequently conflicts in important ways.
You (or my naive past self) might ask, "Great, so then we should just tolerate everyone's religions, superstitions, and irrational beliefs?" No, but you don't have to announce your negative impressions and beliefs about the people around you every time they pop into your mind, even the people you don't care that much about. "Oh, so we should be sneaky and lie and smile while silently detesting and devaluing them?" Also no. In any given moment, there is a literally infinite number of true statements you can make to another person, and an also literally infinite number of reasons you might say them. Take your, and your fellow humans', social reality into account, and how it is likely to affect your future.
In childhood, I often got this advice: you shouldn't care about what other people think. I wonder if this advice is given less true now then when I was a kid. It certainly is given less often in most other countries relative to the hyper-individualist culture of the U.S. But in my early life, it came from multiple quarters - parents, advertising, peers. And like many things in life, part of the social test is knowing how seriously to take the repetitive slogans broadcast everywhere. I probably took it more seriously than most, hence the italicized disclaimer that began this post. If, like me you need a reason to be a normal healthy fully socialized human, then here are some reasons why you might consider caring what other people think.
- Someone who truly does not care what others think is much more likely than the average person to be a psychopath. Consider whether you want to be like a psychopath.
- Related, a big part of caring what other people think is empathy; if you don't care what they think, you don't care if you hurt them or offend them. Announcing that you don't care what they think and don't care if they're offended is broadcasting that you may hurt them, if not hurting them would inconvenience you. At the very least, it suggests you're not a reliable cooperator. (Story time: I used to love going out of my way to tell people I thought sports were a waste of time. I once did this at a small social gathering, and in a later discussion, one person I'd just met for the first time that day said "You already announced you're incapable of loyalty, no need to weigh in further." While that's not true - I am capable of loyalty where it matters - i.e., not sports - I've realized that intentionally announcing this in a casual social setting to someone who clearly does like sports, does nothing but potentially leave certain kinds of people with this impression, which doesn't help. I'm taking a risk here because this isn't a casual social setting, and it's much less combative to say this in an essay sitting inert online than to choose to say it at an oppositional moment.)
- Rejecting and denigrating another person's cherished beliefs in public, is a dramatic announcement of #2 above. You're announcing that you don't care if you're hurting people and disrupting their culture. That may be worth it to you, but be clear and honest with yourself WHY it's worth it to you, before you do it. Also, confirmation bias is a bitch - if you let a black cat cross your path, call a superstitious person a moron for saying something about it, and then lose your wallet that same day, you'll be ridiculed and (when you've rejected more serious beliefs) a self-destructive moron that others should avoid. So they have a false belief - so does everyone! If it harms you or people you love, fine, call it out.
- It turns out you can benefit from interacting and coordinating with irrational people. The company you choose to work for may even be an example! But, you should balance the benefits you gain from such coordination against exposure to these people because you may reinforce their irrationality and bad values, you will become more like them, and they will have more influence over your life.
- It also turns out that people sometimes have to rapidly (in literal seconds) make snap judgments about you, using easily available information - your appearance, your clothing, your reputation. Even if you think you're valuable in the context where you're being evaluated (meeting with senior leadership at your company, a speed-dating lunch, salesman OR customer), they have no way of knowing that in the seconds where they're making a first impression. (The need to make snap judgments on increasingly dubious proxy indicators starts happening more and more when a small company grows rapidly beyond a certain point, meaning you can no longer know everyone.) AND even if you're so high-value that you're initially rejected and then an evaluator runs across you again later and realizes you're valuable, the evaluator might still think "That person could have succeeded/built confidence sooner/faster if they had just worn the thing/acted the way that they were supposed to; that shows arrogance, passive-aggression, and/or poor social awareness, and remains a negative predictor for the future."
- For rationalists: it's actually not good to change your mind in public too often. Each time you change your mind to another position in public, your audience's "needle" quite rationally edges over toward "listen to someone else besides this person, because they're an inferior decision-maker" (at best) to "they are capricious and unpredictable and their commitment is not meaningful." The exception is if you're so powerful you can afford to be capricious, because you have something others want and they have no choice but to put up with you. But, you're almost certainly not that powerful.
You might say, "Well, you're still a psychopath. Everything so far has been about how you have learned to react to what other people say and do, rather than whether you actually care." Controlling your response is the beginning of caring. For those people who you've realized are specifically worth more of your attention than the average human, what they say and do (about and to you) is worth more of your consideration, as are the way they feel when they're around you. And you just can't care about everyone: not only do you not have the bandwidth, but what people care about frequently conflicts in important ways.
You (or my naive past self) might ask, "Great, so then we should just tolerate everyone's religions, superstitions, and irrational beliefs?" No, but you don't have to announce your negative impressions and beliefs about the people around you every time they pop into your mind, even the people you don't care that much about. "Oh, so we should be sneaky and lie and smile while silently detesting and devaluing them?" Also no. In any given moment, there is a literally infinite number of true statements you can make to another person, and an also literally infinite number of reasons you might say them. Take your, and your fellow humans', social reality into account, and how it is likely to affect your future.
Saturday, February 7, 2026
The Day the Aliens Took the Nukes Away
The day the aliens took the nukes away was a Tuesday in March. It was just past lunch in Europe. People on the U.S. East Coast were just waking up.
They didn't arrive in massive ships that hovered ominously over major cities, and appear on video screens announcing they wanted to make contact. They arrived as small, silver tic tacs, a few meters long, like the ones in all the US Navy videos. No one knows if that was their machines, or that was them. They formed a grid over the inhabited land surface of the Earth, hovering ten or so meters up. Some of them were over parking lots in cities, some over green rolling pastures, some among the trees in forests. Efforts to touch or damage or destroy them were futile; impossibly quickly they moved out of the way, and objects and energy went around them. Rocks, missiles, laser pointers, baseball bats - they jumped aside, or deflected it.
After a few minutes, radio stations, text apps, emails servers were overhwlemed, and flooded, and this message came across in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic:
"Habitable planets are vanishingly rare. You are now able to damage yours. We are intervening to protect you and your planet. Starting now, nuclear weapons will not explode. You should test this to verify it. We have no plans to return for the foreseeable future."
It repeated three more times. Then, they zipped away. They were seen on cameras and radar and infrared, zooming off in all directions from Earth at massive accelerations.
Many people thought it was a prank. Panicked meetings occurred across the world, discussing how to test it. Then, someone decided it was not a prank, and launched first.
Millions of people cried and screamed, hid in their homes or tried to drive home to their families on gridlocked roads, pounding the steering wheel wanting only to hold their children as the alerts blared from their phones and televisions.
The first missile struck twenty-eight minutes after the visitation: a Russian missile hitting Berlin. It missed downtown by three kilometers, crashing through the roof of a warehouse, scattered in tiny smoking fragments across the warehouse ruins. Others followed. You have probably already seen the video of the American one that hit the exact middle of Red Square, making a kinetic impact crater, but nothing else. Eighty-three people were killed in Washington when an apartment building collapsed from the impact of a Russian missile. There were radiation leaks from many of them, but not a single one exploded. There were less than a thousand deaths worldwide from kinetic impacts in populated areas.
By dinner in Europe and lunchtime on the American East Coast, lots of people believed: they were really aliens, and the nukes are really gone. People cried with joy that they'd just woken up from a nightmare: one that most people had been in necessary denial of for decades, just to function, that seemed about to come true. And power plants kept running. PET scans kept working. But somehow, the weapons wouldn't work.
But in capitals, there wasn't celebration, there were more panicked meetings. They realized: in hours, Earth had been thrust back into the era of great power politics. NATO issued an emergency summons for all its troops up to the age of 50. Russia's legions began to mass defensively on the Western side of Moscow. China immediately began fueling its China strait amphibious fleet. Cruise missiles with chemical munitions began to fly back and forth across Europe and Asia. Bombers took to the air.
In two weeks, Russia was pushed, stumbling, back out of Ukraine. Kaliningrad was Koenigsburg again, and Moscow looked much the worse for wear; Red Square was hardly the only crater. The few remaining middle- and long-range missiles were fitted with chemical and biological agents, in desperation; an anthrax outbreak began in Seattle. NATO crossed Belarus and offered Moscow terms for surrender.
In Asia, Chinese troops landed on Taiwan's west coast. Cruise missiles destroyed the Three Gorges dam and tens of thousands drowned. American ships sped across the Pacifc, engaged with thousands of nimble Chinese gunboats. This is where the worst of the fighting was - in the China Strait, South China Sea, and on Taiwan (with a flattened Taipei), not only are there massive "old-timey" fleet battles, but hunter-killer drones swarm ships and people. Exploding drones give way to "multi-use" personnel hunters, a euphemism for ones with poison needles that can take out ten or more people each. Going outside on deck on a ship in the South China Sea becomes a suicidal assignment. South Korea and Japan attack North Korea, and the Imperial Japanese Navy begins building the Yamato II. Australian and Vietnamese ships hastily arranged coordination protocols and approached from the south. The border between India and Pakistan caught on literal fire, visible from space. Russian troops crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska.
In the end, the nuclear nightmare that hid in the closet, like a real monster, was over - but once restraint was removed, a conventional World War III lasted five years and still cost a hundred million lives in warfare and famine. People still saw the tic tacs occasionally, but they haven't talked to us since.
They didn't arrive in massive ships that hovered ominously over major cities, and appear on video screens announcing they wanted to make contact. They arrived as small, silver tic tacs, a few meters long, like the ones in all the US Navy videos. No one knows if that was their machines, or that was them. They formed a grid over the inhabited land surface of the Earth, hovering ten or so meters up. Some of them were over parking lots in cities, some over green rolling pastures, some among the trees in forests. Efforts to touch or damage or destroy them were futile; impossibly quickly they moved out of the way, and objects and energy went around them. Rocks, missiles, laser pointers, baseball bats - they jumped aside, or deflected it.
After a few minutes, radio stations, text apps, emails servers were overhwlemed, and flooded, and this message came across in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic:
"Habitable planets are vanishingly rare. You are now able to damage yours. We are intervening to protect you and your planet. Starting now, nuclear weapons will not explode. You should test this to verify it. We have no plans to return for the foreseeable future."
It repeated three more times. Then, they zipped away. They were seen on cameras and radar and infrared, zooming off in all directions from Earth at massive accelerations.
Many people thought it was a prank. Panicked meetings occurred across the world, discussing how to test it. Then, someone decided it was not a prank, and launched first.
Millions of people cried and screamed, hid in their homes or tried to drive home to their families on gridlocked roads, pounding the steering wheel wanting only to hold their children as the alerts blared from their phones and televisions.
The first missile struck twenty-eight minutes after the visitation: a Russian missile hitting Berlin. It missed downtown by three kilometers, crashing through the roof of a warehouse, scattered in tiny smoking fragments across the warehouse ruins. Others followed. You have probably already seen the video of the American one that hit the exact middle of Red Square, making a kinetic impact crater, but nothing else. Eighty-three people were killed in Washington when an apartment building collapsed from the impact of a Russian missile. There were radiation leaks from many of them, but not a single one exploded. There were less than a thousand deaths worldwide from kinetic impacts in populated areas.
By dinner in Europe and lunchtime on the American East Coast, lots of people believed: they were really aliens, and the nukes are really gone. People cried with joy that they'd just woken up from a nightmare: one that most people had been in necessary denial of for decades, just to function, that seemed about to come true. And power plants kept running. PET scans kept working. But somehow, the weapons wouldn't work.
But in capitals, there wasn't celebration, there were more panicked meetings. They realized: in hours, Earth had been thrust back into the era of great power politics. NATO issued an emergency summons for all its troops up to the age of 50. Russia's legions began to mass defensively on the Western side of Moscow. China immediately began fueling its China strait amphibious fleet. Cruise missiles with chemical munitions began to fly back and forth across Europe and Asia. Bombers took to the air.
In two weeks, Russia was pushed, stumbling, back out of Ukraine. Kaliningrad was Koenigsburg again, and Moscow looked much the worse for wear; Red Square was hardly the only crater. The few remaining middle- and long-range missiles were fitted with chemical and biological agents, in desperation; an anthrax outbreak began in Seattle. NATO crossed Belarus and offered Moscow terms for surrender.
In Asia, Chinese troops landed on Taiwan's west coast. Cruise missiles destroyed the Three Gorges dam and tens of thousands drowned. American ships sped across the Pacifc, engaged with thousands of nimble Chinese gunboats. This is where the worst of the fighting was - in the China Strait, South China Sea, and on Taiwan (with a flattened Taipei), not only are there massive "old-timey" fleet battles, but hunter-killer drones swarm ships and people. Exploding drones give way to "multi-use" personnel hunters, a euphemism for ones with poison needles that can take out ten or more people each. Going outside on deck on a ship in the South China Sea becomes a suicidal assignment. South Korea and Japan attack North Korea, and the Imperial Japanese Navy begins building the Yamato II. Australian and Vietnamese ships hastily arranged coordination protocols and approached from the south. The border between India and Pakistan caught on literal fire, visible from space. Russian troops crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska.
In the end, the nuclear nightmare that hid in the closet, like a real monster, was over - but once restraint was removed, a conventional World War III lasted five years and still cost a hundred million lives in warfare and famine. People still saw the tic tacs occasionally, but they haven't talked to us since.
Sunday, December 21, 2025
The Mongols Were Good For Europe
For the most recent alternate history thought experiment, see Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia. For the next one, see What if Christianity and Islam Co-Existed with Classical Philosophy Communities, like Epicureans and Stoics?
As a standard refrain: it's depressing that almost all alternate history is about some episode of organized violence ending differently. It would be much better to instead focus on counterfactuals about the spread of technological and cultural innovations. What would a Tang or Byzantine industrial revolution look like? What about North America where they never forgot about ironworking around the pre-Columbian Great Lakes? But the next best thing would be to take a war or conquest out of history altogether.
So what if, instead of gory scenes of Asian steppe horseman dragging the Pope to the Tiber, wrapped in a carpet, we take the Mongols out of history completely? First, it's always worth pointing out: both China and Russia were ruled by the Mongols, the last nomadic conquerors, for the better part of two centuries, and they're both still here, though obviously different for it. Baghdad, the heart of Islam, was sacked horrifically, and that religion is hardly obscure today.
It's counterintuitive to talk about the benefits of the Mongol conquests, but they arguably created an advantage to Europe and contemporary Christendom. Best understood, after the Mongol conquest, the Silk Road was safer, facilitating diffusion of goods and technological innovation that frequently originated in the Middle East and China; at the same time, those competitors were weakened and development slowed by the conquest. It's not implausible that the dynasty that followed the Song would have been more advanced than the Yuan, and less inward-focused, as the Ming was in our history. The treasure fleets would likely have started sailing earlier, and Europe (with less technology and less experience with trade) later. A fifteenth century industrial revolution in China is not an absurd notion. At the same time, the cities and states of Central Asia would have continued flourishing, and Islam would not have had the violent psychological collapse and loss of its cultural center of gravity that the sack of Baghdad effected.
In Europe, we might see multiple states in what is now Russia and Ukraine around Kiev, Pskov, Novgord, and Moscow, though if there was consolidation to a single state, more likely it would have been Kiev than Moscow, without the Mongols appointing the Muscovites as their tax collectors. More importantly though - in our history, Constantinople was explicitly an ally of the Mongols, although in the end, the Mongols cursed Constantinople to fall sooner - by creating a power vacuum in Anatolia that was not truly filled until the Ottomans appeared. Without the Mongols creating anarchy, Constantinople would have survived longer. This would actually have been bad for Europe. When Constantinople fell, the Ottomans then controlled the Silk Road and cut off Silk Road trade - which thanks to the Mongols, European merchants had been using to their benefit. It was in the decades following the fall of Constantinople that European merchants sought ways to replace this route, and they were so desperate that they started doing things like sailing around Africa, or even hail-Mary voyages around the back of the Earth so they could (in theory) approach China from the ocean to its east. Finally, in our history, cannons became important by the mid-1300s in both Europe and China. With the uninterrupted development of China's economy (and a possible early industrial revolution), and a slowed diffusion of technology back to Europe from a more dangerous Silk Road, they would have developed cannons earlier than Europe. An Asian great divergence, in terms of both technology and colonization of the New World, becomes much more likely.
You could argue that it was the geography of Europe that predisposed it to diverge from China in the early modern age, and I think that is true as well; but even so, Europe was only ahead of Asia by one or two centuries. That's why, by smashing most of Asia but turning around at Hungary and Poland, the Mongols did a great favor for future Europe.
As a standard refrain: it's depressing that almost all alternate history is about some episode of organized violence ending differently. It would be much better to instead focus on counterfactuals about the spread of technological and cultural innovations. What would a Tang or Byzantine industrial revolution look like? What about North America where they never forgot about ironworking around the pre-Columbian Great Lakes? But the next best thing would be to take a war or conquest out of history altogether.
So what if, instead of gory scenes of Asian steppe horseman dragging the Pope to the Tiber, wrapped in a carpet, we take the Mongols out of history completely? First, it's always worth pointing out: both China and Russia were ruled by the Mongols, the last nomadic conquerors, for the better part of two centuries, and they're both still here, though obviously different for it. Baghdad, the heart of Islam, was sacked horrifically, and that religion is hardly obscure today.
It's counterintuitive to talk about the benefits of the Mongol conquests, but they arguably created an advantage to Europe and contemporary Christendom. Best understood, after the Mongol conquest, the Silk Road was safer, facilitating diffusion of goods and technological innovation that frequently originated in the Middle East and China; at the same time, those competitors were weakened and development slowed by the conquest. It's not implausible that the dynasty that followed the Song would have been more advanced than the Yuan, and less inward-focused, as the Ming was in our history. The treasure fleets would likely have started sailing earlier, and Europe (with less technology and less experience with trade) later. A fifteenth century industrial revolution in China is not an absurd notion. At the same time, the cities and states of Central Asia would have continued flourishing, and Islam would not have had the violent psychological collapse and loss of its cultural center of gravity that the sack of Baghdad effected.
In Europe, we might see multiple states in what is now Russia and Ukraine around Kiev, Pskov, Novgord, and Moscow, though if there was consolidation to a single state, more likely it would have been Kiev than Moscow, without the Mongols appointing the Muscovites as their tax collectors. More importantly though - in our history, Constantinople was explicitly an ally of the Mongols, although in the end, the Mongols cursed Constantinople to fall sooner - by creating a power vacuum in Anatolia that was not truly filled until the Ottomans appeared. Without the Mongols creating anarchy, Constantinople would have survived longer. This would actually have been bad for Europe. When Constantinople fell, the Ottomans then controlled the Silk Road and cut off Silk Road trade - which thanks to the Mongols, European merchants had been using to their benefit. It was in the decades following the fall of Constantinople that European merchants sought ways to replace this route, and they were so desperate that they started doing things like sailing around Africa, or even hail-Mary voyages around the back of the Earth so they could (in theory) approach China from the ocean to its east. Finally, in our history, cannons became important by the mid-1300s in both Europe and China. With the uninterrupted development of China's economy (and a possible early industrial revolution), and a slowed diffusion of technology back to Europe from a more dangerous Silk Road, they would have developed cannons earlier than Europe. An Asian great divergence, in terms of both technology and colonization of the New World, becomes much more likely.
You could argue that it was the geography of Europe that predisposed it to diverge from China in the early modern age, and I think that is true as well; but even so, Europe was only ahead of Asia by one or two centuries. That's why, by smashing most of Asia but turning around at Hungary and Poland, the Mongols did a great favor for future Europe.
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