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.)

So what would the world look like with a Europe and Middle East that were still Christian and Muslim, but had classical philosophical communities as well? Existing alongside the religions, or as orders within them (Sunni, Shi'a, and Platonist Islam?) What would a Stoic or Epicurean colony in the New World look like?

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.

Why You Should Considering 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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.)
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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."
   
   
6. 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.

IMPORTANT: it's hard to start caring what others think later in life, because it doesn't come automatically, and you might start caring about everyone, or caring about the wrong people. It's kind of like trying to pick up a sport in adulthood. You're just not going to be as good at it as people who have been practicing since they were kids. So once you start caring about other people, as a guide think: does this person share my values? Do I want to be like them? Am I likely to spend more time around them in the future? Pragmatically, do they have some impact over your life? Then that's a good candidate for caring what they think about you. (Notice that this is still focused on real actual people, not some hypothetical person on the internet or at a club that you haven't met.)

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.