A Brief Sketch of History: Subdivisions of the Iron Age

Large sedentary civilizations emerged where groups of people were forced to, and then rewarded by, central organization of labor - often in marginal environments (dry river valleys requiring irrigation, or in the special case that generalizes the rule, rice farming.) Because of the more rapid diffusion of ideas, the Silk Road regions (Asia, Middle East, Europe, North Africa) were advantaged over the rest of the world. (Hence, the description here is focused on the Silk Road macro-region.) Europe, in turn, was advantaged over China because geography predisposed the formation of multiple small states which acted like incubators for cultural selection; and Greece was advantaged over the rest of Europe given its peninsulas, mountains, and islands. This arrangement still allowed eventual cultural diffusion, overtaking China only with the printing press. The other factor which allowed Europe's situation to obtain was the separation of religious/moral authority and secular authority - a Pope, and kings (as opposed to the unity of these institutions throughout much of Islamic history, and the relative marginalization of religion in East Asian history.)

States demonstrate a natural cycle of 200-250 years. Even if a nation by the same name, on the same territory, with the same people, lasts longer than this, typically there is a transition period. The natural experiment of a large state on a fertile plain showing this pattern is China, but Rome also demonstrated the Principate and Dominate periods, the Ottomans had a similar pattern, and it can be seen elsewhere as well. In these rough divisions I am focusing on the Silk Road regions of the Old World - China, the Middle East, North Africa and and Europe.


THE IRON AGE: 1200 BCE-1800 CE

Early Iron Age: 1200 BCE-500 CE. Began in Europe with the Bronze Age Collapse, saw the rise of multiethnic administrative empires and coinage, and thus the Axial Age. In China, this contains the end of the Shang Dynasty, as well as the rise and fall of the Zhou and Han Dynasties. In Europe this can be further divided into Early Iron Age 1 (1200-600 BCE) featuring palace economies, and Early Iron Age 2 with the later development of oligarchic rule and early market economies.

Middle Iron Age: 500-1500 CE. Roughly co-extensive with the medieval period. in Europe this begins with collapse of Western Roman Empire, the weakening of the Eastern Roman Empire, the collapse of Persia and the spread of Islam. In China, it begins earlier with the end of the Han Dynasty. The Middle Iron Age is characterized by the spread of supra-ethnic philosophies and the dissolution of large empires, which can be thought of as an ecological model of cooperation within empires no longer exceeding competition within empires; oligarchies quarelled amongst themselves, and social or ethnic outsider groups benefiting from cultural diffusion (Germanic tribes in Europe, or the Yellow Turban Rebellion in China.) This period is marked by states and peoples developing a sense of identity if not patriotism, and especially by nomads occasionally overwhelming established states, with the Mongols as the military high water mark of nomads in history, with their decline signaling the end of this period.

Late Iron Age: 1500-1800 CE. In the West this contains the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Discovery and Enlightenment. In Russia, it starts with the Great Stand on the Ugra and eastward expansion. In China, it's the parallel end of the Yuan Dyansty. Ultimately it begins with the spread of gunpowder, as seen in the gunpowder kingdoms, as well as the printing press, which had its greatest impact in Europe both for the good (Europe's domination of the world starting in this period) and the bad (religious civil wars as Northern Europe could communicate more easily.) At this time, the technological advantage of sedentary societies began to overwhelm that of nomads. Simultaneously, the benefit of technological innovation in the crucible of a sort of geographically-enforced natural federalism in Europe allowed Europe to outstrip China and colonize the world. The use of gunpowder as a source of energy more powerful than human or animal muscle anticipates the Industrial Age. Like the Mongols, Napoleon was the high water mark of Iron Age warfare, and was ultimately undone by the home of the Industrial Age, the United Kingdom.


Though not the focus of the post, the Industrial Age comes with its own subdivisions: the first wave in 1790-1830 with steam and water power leading to factories, materials extraction and textiles, an interim with three "transition wars" in the West (the Crimean War, American Civil War, and Franco-Prussian War; the Taiping Rebellion still appeared very much like a late Iron Age religious War, like a Thirty Years War compressed into half the time) with the second industrial revolution 1870-1910 converting industrial power into consumer goods; this culminated in World War I, the first industrialized war.

Toward a Unified Account of Finding the Truth: Quine and Bayes on Dogma Versus Good Authority

Scott Alexander recently posted a great account (and critique) of reasoning and communication, beginning with criticism of science communication. He then expands this into an argument about how a real Bayesian evaluation of truth claims requires us to sometimes reject "higher standards" of evidence that produce results in conflict with what we think we already know. In so doing he begins to unify every day reasoning within a Bayesian framework. This is valuable, because honest rationalists have noticed gaps between what we consider high-quality evidence, and what we actually use to update - not because we are hypocrites, but because there are other considerations when we want to really get the right answer.

To begin with a critique of simplistic "levels of evidence": even those of us most enthusiastic about peer-review make almost every decision in life without it. You don't insist on a peer-reviewed journal when figuring out how to give yourself administrator rights to a PC you just got for free (a situation I just found myself in.) Your decision process is a combination of evaluations of the cost, time, and likely consequences of whatever you do, along with deciding what sources to trust based on the decisions' specialization beyond daily experience of subject matter, speed of feedback, and possible perverse incentives. In this case, I just watched a Youtube video and it worked like a charm. It's a free computer I'm playing with so I didn't care much if it was ruined by the attempt.

Taking all these things into account is actually Bayesian even if we aren't thinking explicitly about the Bayes equation. But it turns out the model we use in science is actually a special case of Bayesian reasoning - and even victims of dogmatism are using Bayesian reasoning. The second statement is much more controversial than the first; scroll down to that section if you like.


Recasting Popperian Falsification in Bayesian Terms

Karl Popper's model of hypothesis testing is that we can only falsify a hypothesis, we can never be sure it's true. Looking at Anscombe' quartet above, you can see that there are multiple data sets which can produce the same statistics. Stopping after inadequate positive predictions may lead you to the wrong equation. Therefore, the only answer that provides certainty is to falsify a hypothesis.

There are two important aspects to this approach to finding out the truth. The first, and the more underemphasized, is its appreciation of human psychology. Stephen Toulmin noted that the way humans actually reason is to start with premises and conclusion first, and then build a rhetorical bridge between them. If you're a rationalist, you make sure that your rhetorical bridge is not just verbal/emotional sleight of hand but rather an actual argument. The point is that even in Popperian science, we start with a conclusion. The difference is that we explicitly declare, in public, ahead of time, that we're not sure if the conclusion is right (it's less than a thesis - a "hypo" thesis, if you will.) Then you test it.

And, the way you test it is by creating an experience that will give you an unexpected result if it's wrong - to falsify it. The question is, does a hypothesis-supporting experiment (that produces the results we expect) really give us zero information? No, but it usually doesn't give us as much information as a falsification.

A falsification is usually more strongly weighted information - it "moves the needle" much more, because it's more likely to be surprising. Indeed to equate heavier weighting with surprise is almost tautology. So we can place Popperian hypothesis-testing in a Bayesian framework by saying, instead of a false binary of "support equals zero information equals bad" and falsification good", note that ideally an experiment is trying to create that experience which is most likely to produce a surprise, and most efficiently provide information.


Finding Truth in the Real World - Where Other Humans Also Live

But people don't always do this. We live in a complicated world and have had to learn to weight truth claims based on something besides immediate experience. You almost certainly have not done an experiment on biological evolution, and few if any true retrodictive studies.[1] You can't function otherwise, unless you live in a cabin in the wilderness by yourself.

One thing we use in the real world is a web of beliefs, in the Quinean sense. Recasting this in Bayesian terms, no belief is an island, with each belief in the web serving as part of the weighting for your prior. Most beliefs will have many other beliefs bearing on it, updating the belief in question and holding its prediction in place. If you have reasonable confidence in those many other beliefs, then a counterclaim or weird observation just doesn't outweight them. (I am not a statistician, but Elo ratings seem analagous to this. Just because the Packers had an off night and lost to the Detroit Lions doesn't mean you should bet against the Packers going forward - move your needle? Yes, but this is what it means for one loss to be a fluke.)[2] This is why in the linked article, Scott describes how it is right to reject peer-reviewed homeopathy studies - because they are on their face improbable, in large part because of our rich web of other beliefs about how the world works.

Another way we weight beliefs is by giving credence to authority. I think differing confidence in authorities (based partly on our innate cognitive/emotional makeup and partly on life experience) explains the majority of major differences people have in beliefs about the world - not their direct experience of things or reasoning ability. The truth is that people often say "I believe X because an authority I trust said so." In fact, fellow rationalist, you often say that. And again, to function, you must. (Education is a formal example of this. You don't need to do every experiment back to Newton to be a physicist.) Yet during the pandemic, it has become painfully clear that people differ in what authorities they listen to.


Why Dogmatists Are Actually Still Bayesians: Good Authorities and Bad Authorities

I once had the privilege to give a talk to the Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers (SacFAN) about the function of beliefs. At one point I stated that to have good beliefs, you had to pick good authorities. An audience member asked me "How do you define a good authority?" At the time I answered humorously, deflecting the question only because of my discomfort at realizing I didn't have a ready answer.

First let's define authority: a personal source of data (a person or institution) whose truth claims you weight more heavily than others' without first requiring evidence.

We all have our authorities. To function, we must. Sometimes they are formal (academic scientists); more often they are informal (someone you hike with who seems to know the trails and conditions in your part of the world.)

But there are many claimed authorities with poor justification for their beliefs, that promulgate false beliefs, and if we are updating based on what they tell us, we will be wrong too. A current near-canonical example for my likely readers would be a religious leader claiming that mRNA vaccines will kill you. But scientists can be wrong too, and not just because they haven't generated enough data to update their beliefs. Nobel Prize winners going off the rails are something of an institution now, so how do we know to ignore Kary Mullis or Linus Pauling's weirder moments? Not so scary, you say: partly the conflict with the web of beliefs as noted before, and partly because they're speculating outside of their expertise or reproducible experiment. Fair enough.

Returning to the pandemic, the CDC said for at least first month that masks didn't help. (Was this deliberate obfuscation to keep non-medical people from hoarding masks, or an error? Either way, that's what they communicated, and in any event I'm not sure which is worse.) If you still think, despite this, that the CDC is still a better authority than a preacher, why?


Is Someone Who Calls Himself a Rationalist Claiming Dogmatists are Rational?

In an article about people in middle America who refused the vaccine and got severe COVID, I was struck by the following statement (paraphrasing since I can't find the original): "We didn't think it was real, just like everybody else."

When you are surrounded by people who believe X, all of whom (along with you) admire a leader who believes X, and only people who everyone around you has told you are liars are telling you not-X - then, in the absence of (thusfar) immediately contradictory experience, you will continue to believe X. This is the case for COVID victims like those I paraphrased. Given the information they have, they were being good Quineans and good Bayesians.


Early Life Experience and Emotional Makeup Clearly Influence Our Weightings

You might be asking incredulously: is this guy seriously arguing that people following bad authorities are good Bayesians? And (assuming that's true), does that mean people are really in an inescapable hole if they follow the wrong authority, absent any profound contradictory evidence? The respective answers are technically yes, and sometimes no.

To the first point, you might object that many of these people certainly did have experts providing them better information, and they incorrectly underweighted this information, so they were NOT good Bayesians. But there's a problem: large inferential distance. Everyone around them has told them that (Fauci, academics, etc.) are bad, lying, immoral people who are trying to harm you, and should be ignored. With this information, and very little information about how to identity good authorities, from their perspective, if they give credence to Fauci, they have no justification for not also listening to every crank who comes along. Similarly, it's hard to see how someone in North Korea should somehow just know that people in the West really don't have it out for them. These people do not have trapped priors in the sense that that a belief is somehow innately more inert - as if it has a higher specific epistemological gravity - but their priors are pinned down by a dense web of beliefs whose strands are numerous and have strong weightings because they date to early life experience.

To the second question about whether it's hopeless to get people with bad authorities out of their delusion box, as often happens with the rationalist community, in our public discussions we're playing catch-up centuries after salesmen, politicians and religious leaders figured these things out, though in fairness, they had a greater incentive with more immediate feedback loops. The trick is to find someone who they recognize as an authority. Usually this is as simple as finding people providing better information who share with their audience superficial markers of cultural affinity - afiliations with religions or regions, class, dress, language. Yes these people should understand how to select an authority, but the inferential distance is too great. Put them in touch with someone with the same accent instead. Concentrate forces by looking for people who do not demonstrate "authority monoculture." You can also decrease inferential distance by engaging with people who are already having doubts. (Again, not a news flash, but it may help rationalists to understand if I put it in these terms. See what I did there?)


How to Differentiate Dogmatists from Good Authorities

Let's define dogmatists (or charlatans, or whatever other term you like) as someone who wants the benefits of being an authority, but is not interested in the the truth of the beliefs they promulgate, in terms of actions and consequences. Whether or not they genuinely believe they are interested in the truth is irrelevant, and either way, they will certainly claim they are committed to the truth. There's an analogy here to the relationship between tribal team cheers (shibboleths) that appear on the surface to be truth claims, and proper truth claims, like dolphins and fish. Similarly, dogmatists do their best to masquerade[3] as good authorities, but they're really something else entirely - dogmatists might be considered the viceroys to the good authorities' monarchs.

But there are characteristics of good authorities which are "expensive" for dogmatists to maintain. These are:

1. They have some feedback loop betwen their claims and outcomes (and are interested in it.) Example: physicians and patient outcomes; politicians and legislative impact.
2. They do not avoid being tracked by others in their outcomes or predictions.
3. They minimally appeal to or rely on those early-life, emotional, identity-overweighted beliefs in their audience's web.
4. Their feedback loop is not distorted by perverse interests. Example: TV news pundits trying to get ratings by avoiding predictions that conflict with their audience's values. Paraphrasing Charlie Munger, when you're dealing with a business, you have to understand their business well enough to know their incentives. (More here.)
5. They have a way of seeking out "legitimate surprise" (not mere confusion - can also be accomplished with dopamine hacking, i.e. meth.) Example, hypothesis testing in science. (This may be the hardest of these to do consistently due to inherent contradictions within any information-seeking entity.)
6. They communicate clearly, and they do not hold up incomprehensibility as a positive. (See: descriptions of John von Neumann, the first of Asher's Seven Sins of Medicine.) Insistence of formal or especially foreign or arcane language is one pernicious form. (See: modern legal language, use of Latin in Church, legal French in late Medieval England.)
7. Their claims to authority are limited in scope. Henry Ford had some great industral ideas but also thought people should listen to his hang-ups about cows and horses. Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel but recognizing that his domain of expertise did not extend to politics he said no.

Seeking good authorities, and preparing to reject one you may have liked when you realize they are just a viceroy, is uncomfortable - it's "software" imposed on the factory settings of humans as we operated in small groups for millennia. People who are constitutionally high in the moral dimensions of loyalty and authority will always find this difficult - the idea of checking their proposed authority runs counter to their nature.


For further reading: more formal syntheses of Quinean and Bayesian models here and here. A useful discussion of a possible conflict here, which the resolution that Bayesian reasoning can be a satisfactory way to contruct a Quinean web without arguing that Bayes is necessarily optimal.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Retrodiction sometimes upsets Popperians, but hypothesis-testing is about making a prediction, based on your hypothesis, about something that the predictor does not yet know, even if it already happened. It is always about the state of knowledge of the claimant when the hypothesis is formulated; it's irrelevant if the events already happened, just that they are not yet known.

[2] The ELO rating used in sports not formally an example of a belief web but it is analogous to one, and in this case behaves similar to one. Just as a single peer-reviewed homeopathy study should not make us throw away the rest of science, a great team somehow losing to a bad one should not make us think the great team is now worse than the bad one.

[3] It is a testament to the success of science that viceroys, especially religious ones in the U.S., increasingly co-opt its language. It is very rare to see this happening in the opposite direction.

Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?

Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is quite critical to discussions of public policy, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.

The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.

Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.

I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.

Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.


*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us less happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies here and here; writeup of both in Washington Post. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem.

The Roots of Universal Moral Authority in Medieval European Christendom - Benefits to States and Individuals

Reading about many conflicts in medieval European history - especially bitter protracted ones - you're often struck by the appeal to legal proceedings. Take this example about Joan of Arc's experience after being captured during the Hundred Years War:

The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The tribunal was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clerics, and overseen by English commanders including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. In the words of the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the trial was meant by the English Crown to be "a ploy to get rid of a bizarre prisoner of war with maximum embarrassment to their enemies". Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was suspect on a number of points, which would later provoke criticism of the tribunal by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.

Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case. Cauchon owed his appointment to his partisan support of the English Crown, which financed the trial. The low standard of evidence used in the trial also violated inquisitorial rules. Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, who was commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without such evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. Opening a trial anyway, the court also violated ecclesiastical law by denying Joan the right to a legal adviser. In addition, stacking the tribunal entirely with pro-English clergy violated the medieval Church's requirement that heresy trials be judged by an impartial or balanced group of clerics.

From this excerpt you can clearly see that her trial was hardly a model of justice and impartiality. But the very idea of a trial, and an appeal to fairness and an authority beyond the people with the most swords, is what is remarkable. Yes, the English bent rules, but there were rules to follow and they had to give at least a minimal appearance of following them. They didn't just immediately and gleefully execute her with no explanation beyond "she frustrated our goals and we don't like her."

Compare: confronted with the victorious army of Kublai Khan, the last Song emperor jumped to his death along with other high-ranking officials, rightly fearing their fates should they fall into the Mongols' hands. Was there a court they could appeal to for release or at least better treatment? An argument they could make to Kublai from universal moral authority, about what was the right and fair principle to obey? How could these concepts even make sense? For China and the Mongols, there could be no appeal, indeed no idea of an appeal beyond either's physical authority as it stemmed from each mans' desires - that is to say, force.

The benefit of an organization whose authority was mostly moral is something that those of us who are secular-minded may ignore, as it stemmed from supernatural claims. We are often tempted to write off medieval Europe as a thousand-year failure mode, an Iron Age Orwellianism, or a Mad Max dystopia from the standpoint of ancient Roman citizens. While it was all those things, the seeds of Europe's positive divergence were being sown, and having a superimposed moral authority, separate and acknowledged by all as above Earthly concerns, was a unique arrangement and seems likely to have been part of it. There are many ways to think about this - two might be that warring parties both respecting the Church's authority created an in-theory neutral arbiter; another is just that more players makes a richer political ecosystem that is less zero-sum. This ultimately made possible rule of law and not of men, the possibility of service to principle rather than person. The destructiveness of rational warfare in eg East Asia was possibly part of why Europe was able to pull ahead.

It may have been quite fortunate that the church was based in one city that fell to barbarians (Rome) and another that saw its territory shrink until it was overwhelmed by infidels. The Western Church then was a kind of virtual state that could coexist with the others fighting for survival in Western Europe. It was a fortunate accident of timing, with Europe's isolating geography (mountains near the coast and indented coastlines) favoring continued separation. In an alternate history where Belisarius succeeded in reuniting the Roman Empire, European religious history might look much more similar to that of the Middle East, where religious and political authority were inseparable (or Chinese history where it was clearly peripheral) and there was no chance for mediation to calm wars and allow the concept of rule of law to emerge.

This 2018 paper by Hill, recently covered on MR argues in more detail about why the concept of the rule of law emerged when it did, though I disagree that it's the ideology itself that was more disposed to resulting in such a concept, rather than the geographical, political and military context of each. That is to say, if we re-ran history with the holy books switched, eg Mohammed in a cave writing the Bible, and the Qu'ran getting vetted and adopted at the Council of Nicea, I think the result would have been largely the same.

In the twentieth century, the U.N. has clearly appealed to a sense of universal rights much more than previous international forums did - the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe before it were both practical negotiation venues, but the U.N. makes claims to mediating universal morality. I can't help but wonder to what extent that has been intentional, and can't help but worry even as an atheist that it's easy to for states and peoples to reject non-supernatural moral claims as being made up by human beings, only and always for pragmatic self-interest.

"What Do We Want?" "Not That" "When Do We Want It" "Now"

An as-ever prescient Orwell, on modern protest movements both left and right:

"[Nationalism] can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty."

- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

The Beginnings of a Voluntary State Free From the Tyranny of Territory

States are inefficient, with governments subject to severe free-riding (at the best of times) and exploitation by violent psychopaths (at the worst.) They are involuntary - you are in a state, usually, because of an accident of your birth. As animals that take up space and as modern humans dependent on agriculture, we occupy a territory that belongs to us, as does our state. The central job of the state is to maintain a monopoly on violence, in order to protect us from violence. (This is why the Somali "government" is a joke, because they can only protect you if you're within about four blocks of their office. You can emigrate, but at a massive price (learning a new language, new customs, new social network, etc. - ask people who are trained as physicians and leave their home country due to a civil war or persecution of their ethnic group, and end up driving a cab or running a shop somewhere safer.)

Consequently this lack of competition means there is a high barrier to emigration, and states often drag in perpetual suboptimality until invasion, civil war, or economic disaster brings about a fundamental transformation. (More on this here.) Much potential human flourishing is left on the table, so to speak. Charter cities are a partial attempt to free us from the tyranny of territories - if you can go across a bridge and be subject to the courts and business laws of a more sensible successful country than the one that governs your home, that minimizes emigration cost (you don't even have to, you just commute.) The end-goal of such arrangements would be that, if (for example) the DMV sucks in your state, you could announce you were subject to the DMV rules of another state. Of course this sounds absurd, and the tyranny of physical territory overrules this. The political scientist that could solve this problem would go down in history.

Of course there are supranational cultural entities that serve some of these functions somewhat - religions and corporations immediately come to mind - but there's a new attempt to get past this: Safetywing, which aims to become no less than a virtual country. It is starting as a safety net (of the sort that wealthy welfare states already provide.) Read more about this idea here. Of course this will cost money, and if you're already paying into your own country's safety net based on the tyranny of territory, you might not have money for a second one. This is why wealthy (or at least upper middle class) people from developed countries should buy into this early, both to make it sustainable, and also to give it prestige value.

I expect that should this actually take off, there will be massive resistance to it from the mutual-recognition cartel of the legacy states; see here for an example of the kind of reaction one might expect if you have physical territory to attack. The virtualness of the project may protect it in this regard, but I hope that Safetywing has anticipated that. Note that nation states are often openly hostile to supranational entities (see: Islamic states and other religions; China and any religion.) It could be that this virtual state could be the next supranational level of social organization, like religions and corporations, but it should expect to be identified as a threat in the same way that China sees Falun Gong.

I will be joining this, and I strongly encourage you to consider it.

Why Is Pursuit of Pleasure a "Third Rail" in Central Authoritarian Agricultural Societies?

A friend related the following to me. While she was an undergraduate, her grandparents came to visit and took her out to lunch. At the time she was dating a man of Middle Eastern descent. During the meal it became clear that her grandparents' true mission was not to buy her lunch, but to warn her about Middle Eastern men. They didn’t seem to be disturbed by her being with a non-Christian or ethnically different partner, so much as they were worried about her being in danger of abduction. "You know, when you get married and go back to their countries with them, you have no rights," her grandfather said. "Oh Grandpa," my friend responded somewhat innocently, "I really have no intention of marrying this guy." Her grandparents’ faces drained of color, and the conversation ended, and the rest of the meal was spent in icy silence.

To put it plainly: they were horrified that their granddaughter basically just told them that she was in this relationship for the sex, with no intention of commitment to marriage or reproduction. For them, this was far more serious than the prospect that she would be kidnapped and effectively enslaved! Why? Because she was acknowledging that she was making decisions in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Of course in American culture and in most places, there is a double standard between men and women, but men are not immune to such attitudes either, though the social consequences are rarely as severe.

This may be part of why homosexual relationships have produced negative reactions across so many cultures - certainly not in all, but in enough for it to be a pattern. At least as often as they are accepted, they are either ignored or reviled. Why? Because gay sex can only result in pleasure. By these standards, an abomination if ever there was one!

But it's not just sex; it's the discussion of pursuit of pleasure in general. In very formal settings, any acknowledgement that you do something just because you like it feels very inappropriate. At a morbidity and mortality conference (where surgical residents stand up and accept blame for bad outcomes of cases - few settings are more formal or tense) I noted with some surprise that a physician even noting that he enjoyed his breakfast was met with uncomfortable laughter, eye-rolling or shifting in seats. The acknowledgement of enjoying any sort of physical pleasure seems to decrease, the more formal the setting, and this was an excellent example.[1] This is so basic to social reality that we don't notice or question it. Why is this?

Allan Tate said that civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss. This is actually too limited. More to the point, civilization is an agreement to ignore affect - to ignore the primary drives in our basic animal code, and the reactions they cause in us, and the abyss causes anxiety. So it's not just the pursuit of pleasure we avoid, but the recognition of and response to affect in general - because affect can be dangerous. In social animals, affect is contagious, which is very effective for cohesion in hunter-gatherer groups below the Dunbar number (150 people.) But in any large civilization where we're constantly interacting with strangers in (necessarily) formalized settings, paying attention to and reacting to the affect on others' faces would seem to be inherently destabilizing. Try it when you go for a walk in a busy city some time - at best, you'll quickly be exhausted, and at worst you'll get into fights. And constantly talking about your pursuit of pleasure with strangers can make people resent you, or compete with you, or avoid you, and in general is a ticket to negative affect. The higher the stakes, the less we do it. In therapy training, we're "de-programmed" so that we don't just notice, but pursue affect, even when it flashes across faces for only a moment, and this de-programming is very difficult.

If this theory is correct, there should be other trends of affect-generating cultural practices that differ between hunter-gatherer and centralized agricultural societies, and that are at their most intense in the oldest longest-centrally-organized agricultural society (i.e. China and East Asia); and that are at their most intense in formal settings, like religion and many high-prestige professions.[2] To this end:

• I have found qualitative assertions (but not quantitative studies) that homosexuality is more tolerated in more traditional societies, often with specific institutionalized roles.
  
  
• Gender roles in general become more rigid in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
  
  
• There is a trend toward brighter colors in the art and clothing of cultures that more recently converted from hunter-gatherer to agricultural (or "small-village" agricultural to nation-state.) Yes, bright colors are often used in nation-states - in specific settings (religious displays, holidays, weddings.)
  
  
• Drums tend to disappear as a central musical instrument in this transition as well, only to have re-appeared recently in the West in rock and hip-hop - possibly because, ironically, our wealth has allowed us to ignore social restrictions and revert back to our "native state" as hunter-gatherers, as in Hanson's theory of farmers vs foragers.
  
  
• In the hunter-gatherer to centralized agricultural authority transition, hallucinogens become restricted (often to religious ceremonies) or outright banned.
  
  
• There are exceptions to these rules, in the sense that these things which disappear in the transition still do appear under closed settings controlled by and useful to central authority - war chants, group initiations, religious artifacts and ceremonies, and team sports with big audiences.
  
  
• Bright colors, rhythmic music, hallucinogens, the spread of gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities, and sex-openly-for-pleasure all reappeared in the West as we transitioned from agricultural back to hunter-gatherer values in the late 20th century, as per Hanson's theory.

These affect-restricting cultural practices can be thought of as a Dunbar's number multiplier, by decreasing the frequency of group fission events. Others are exapting family psychology to the state (leader as father figure, fellow soldiers as brothers) and organizing society into stable hierarchies (family, village, ethnic group, state.) If we assume that agricultural states ultimately win out over foragers - which they consistently have since the Great Stand on the Ugra and the fall of the Yuan Dynasty - then there is a form of selection for groups which develop such multipliers.[3]

A major cultural technology and Dunbar's multiplier is controlled tolerance. It is difficult for people with different moral systems to closely co-exist. The Ottomans had the millet system, China and the Mongols had a theocratically laissez faire approach, and in the modern West many countries build freedom of conscience into the law, though avoiding leg-breaking and pocket-picking by neighbors with different convictions was realistically much easier in Jefferson's wide-open agrarian utopia.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Psychiatrists are less formal than surgeons in our meetings and I am pleased to report much more comfortable talking about food.

[2] Americans in particular might object that there are many high-status arenas in the U.S. which are now fairly informal, for instance technology, the entertainment industry, or academia. I would argue that apparently informal, high-prestige professions are actually formal in a more complex way. This is clearest in academia, but true for the others, that this apparent informality is not so much superficial as an another layer of complexity to let the ambitious signal that they can maneuver even under the paradox of forced "relaxed collegiality." Sure someone can wear jeans to work and set their own hours - but come back in 15 years and see who's setting budgets, and it probably won't be them.

[3] The current greatest combination of Dunbar's number multipliers remains China at about 9.2 million.

Complex Dynamic Systems Like Cells, Humans, and Nations Cannot Avoid Cycles of Paroxysmal Disillusionment and Suffering

The following principles apply to any dynamic complex system, including organisms, individual people, or organizations - corporations, nations, or religions. They demonstrate that distortions will inevitably accumulate in the behavior of such a system, causing paroxysmal shocks and suffering.

Let's define a system as a set of components discrete from the rest of the universe. Let's define dynamic complex systems as ones that are high-information relative to the rest of the universe around them, high enough that in the absence of opposing forces, entropy passively favors irreversible changes happening to the arrangement of the system's elements which make it no longer discrete.[1] If such a set of components that exists now is going to exist more-or-less unchanged in the future, it has to perform actions[2] - it has to be dynamic - which reduce its own entropy at the expense of the rest of the universe.[3] The rest of the universe may include similar systems.[4] (Going forward, when I say "system" I mean "complex dynamic system.")

The seven principles are outlined below, then described in more detail.

1. A system must be mostly concerned with its own perpetuation, or it will not persist. "If a complex dynamic system has been around for a while, it's designed to last and expend energy to do so."
   
   
2. It must do this by reflecting - reacting to - aspects of the rest of the universe. Aspects of the rest of the universe important enough to make the system tend to develop ways to change its state in response to them are called stimuli. A more familiar statement of this principle: "That which gets measured, gets addressed."
   
   
3. A measurement always contains less information, and is therefore not a full or fully accurate representation, of the thing being measured. Perception cannot exactly be reality; "this is not a pipe."
   
   
4. Over time, the focus on self-perpetuation leads a system to become concerned with itself to the point of minimizing the importance of or responses to aversive stimuli to avoid altering its state (which is also aversive.) "Everything that gets measured, eventually gets gamed" or "All metrics eventually become useless." (Also known as Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law.)
   
   
5. The system's responses become increasingly un-moored from the external world, favoring its own perpetuation over other functions, and/or having a severely distorted model of the world and reaction to stimuli. "Eventually, everything becomes a racket [and/or gets delusional]." Another term for this is representational entropy.
   
   
6. The distortions accumulate until a sufficiently destructive stimulus occurs (a shock), which either reorients the system (usually accompanied by severe aversive stimuli), or destroys the system. If the system survives, such shocks will happen repeatedly, but necessarily unpredictably. This is called inherent cyclic crisis.
   
   
7. This is inherent to any self-perpetuating dynamic complex system, and because these shocks are correctly perceived as worsening survival, they cause inevitable suffering. We can call this the Final Noble Truth, a vague parallel to the Buddhist First Noble Truth.

Following is an expansion on each principle.

Principle 1: "If a complex dynamic system has been around for a while, it's designed to last and expending energy to do so." If a system is going to continue existing, a top priority on self-preservation is mandatory, and self-preservation must be the primary influence on perception by and reactions of the system. Since Darwin, thinking of organisms in this way is not revolutionary. But the same principle applies to any other complex system, including human organizations. Corporations have a relatively clear function in this way (they can't keep making money for shareholders if they don't keep existing) but it's more surprising for most of us to think of religions, countries, or volunteer organizations in this way. The converse: if a complex dynamic system is not expending energy on its self-perpetuation, it will not exist for long. (Many apparent mysteries, like the transparently weak business plans of many a Web 1.0 company, are resolved on realizing that they are not in equilibrium and will perish quickly. And indeed they did.)

Principal 2: "What gets measured, gets addressed." This seems obvious enough, especially to those of us at all interested in organizational dynamics, but principal 1 directs the kinds of things that have to be measured if the system will persist, and principal 2 says that there is always some difference between the measurement, and the totality of the outside world; that is, there is always going to be at least some important information missed, and what is missed cannot be acted upon. Concretely speaking, genes reflect the outside world by establishing sensor networks that interact across the inflection point (the cell membrane, or in the case of multicellular organisms, the body.) Some sensor networks have become very rapid and fine-grained reflections of the outside world - xenobiotic metabolism enzymes (which have reacted in only millennia, and the genetics differ considerably even between groups of humans), adaptive immune systems (which also differ between groups of humans and react in minutes), and of course nervous systems are the paragon.[5] But all of them make sacrifices and do not (cannot) sample all of the possible information available. It should be pointed out that living things do not have to constantly repeat the mantra "what gets measured gets addressed" because that's how they're already built and behave, automatically and obligatorily, as was the case for eons' worth of their ancestors. This is not the case with human organizations, which are new developments in nature, and may not be in equilibrium - so those organizations that you notice do not measure important (survival-supporting) data are unlikely to exist for long either. Whatever corporations or their descendants exist in a million years, it won't be ones that didn't respond to relevant metrics. (Added later: A more generalized description of this process is called value capture, as described by philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen at the University of Utah. Very briefly, value capture occurs when an individual encounters a group with a simplified, quantified version of their own values, often driven by considerations external to the agent. The additional component relative to "what gets measured gets addressed" is that in value capture, there is feedback from the simplified quantified value system to the individual, distorting and oversimplifying their own values.)

Principle 3: Perception cannot exactly be reality; "this is not a pipe." Representations - measurements - are never the same as the things themselves, and incentives are never aligned perfectly with desired outcomes (almost trivial; otherwise, perfect alignment means identity, that is, the incentives are the desired outcomes.) There must always be a limit on information collected, and inferences are not always correct. There is infinite information a system could in theory collect about the universe (looking for correlations between each datum or set of data), but the system is more likely to perpetuate itself the more the information it collects, and the more impactful the information it collects. It is this design choice by the system to sense survival-relevant data that turns one of infinite facts about the world around the system into a stimulus. Obviously, which things it chooses takes as stimuli - what it measures - are relevant. (Not to mention if the system is in competition, especially with others using the same resources, there are time and resource limitations on the system on how much data to collect before altering its state.) The implication is that there is a limited set of information collected out of all possible information - what the system receives as stimuli - and these stimuli are necessarily very heavily biased toward self-perpetuation.[6]

Principal 4: "Everything that gets measured, eventually gets gamed." This is similarly familiar, and here is where the tension is set up. Systems must perceive (measure) and react to their environment. Their measurements are not the same as the thing in the environment, only a reflection. Because of this, systems react to the measurement - the perception - not the thing that is being measured. This is not a trivial difference. Anyone who has worked at a large corporation or applied to professional school is familiar with this, and we all know examples where an endpoint was achieved in an only-technical, meaningless way that did not advance toward the real-world goal outside the organization that the endpoint was meant to incentivize. To "follow the letter but not the spirit" is an aphorism which expresses this. Case in point: many companies have sexual harassment or racial sensitivity training. These often take the form of instructional videos with quizzes after them. Most people skip and fast-forward through the videos as fast as possible to register as if they watched the whole thing, often having two different types of browsers open so when they get to the quiz they can go back if the answers aren't obvious. Of course this raises the question of whether there are some types of training where the written tests to get the credential have nothing to do with performing the actual work. For example, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, people became scientists because they liked being in labs, were good at organizing experiments, and in general got immediate feedback directly from their work, and therefore performed better, and therefore were recognized for it by peers and superiors, moreso than is the case now.[7] Do the best GRE scores (and administrative maneuvering, and recommendations, and tolerance of modern graduate school politics) really correlate with the best scientists? Or, does the same process produced skilled and caring physicians? (See Paul Graham's essay The Lesson to Unlearn.) For examples in individual humans, take your pick of any of a host of brain receptor-tricking molecules like opioids or alcohol, as well as immature psychological defenses like denial. Cancer is another example. Multicellular organisms have many checks on uncontrolled cell growth and spread, but there is a perverse natural selection our entire lives for cancer. Unlike infection or physical injury, cancer doesn't hurt until it's about to kill you, thanks to both the earlier reproduction of our ancestors relative to the later onset of cancer, along with the black swan of radiation and brand-new-to-nature chemicals that there was never any reason to develop an alarm system for.[5][8]

Another type of distortion has to do with the structure of the system, which effects the way it behaves, rather than perceptions per se. It's long been noticed that corporations become less "nimble" (responsive to market change; ie the relevant universe outside the corporation) as their surface area-to-volume ratio goes down.[9] The higher the surface area-to-volume ratio, the more information that can be collected and the more effective responses can be. Think of bloated giants like big automakers or old engineering companies, where in Dilbert-like fashion people think more about maneuvering in their jobs, coordinating with other departments within the company ("transfer pricing") or competing with other people within the company than they do about their outside-the-company competitors or serving the market. This certainly occurs within states as well, where to various extents for Chinese dynasties, the Roman Empire, and the Spanish colonial empire their downfall was more the result of special interest maneuvering and other intrigues directing attention consistent inward to the court - because what could be going on that's more important outside the palace walls where the barbarians are than inside where the power is? So we have Zheng He's fleet being recalled, Roman patricians scheming in the absence of a succession rule to get legions on your side, or Spanish royalty neglecting overseas possessions until the British and their offspring eat your lunch.[10] There's a final type of distortion which arises from the way that nervous systems save time and money: the more some stimulus-response pairing occurs, the less reward-sensitive it becomes. It moves from being a conscious act requiring effort and concentration, to a habit, to (in biology, programmed through evolution) a stereotyped movement, then a reflex. Once a stimulus-response pairing has started moving down the line it is almost impossible to move it back other than by over-writing it with another stimulus-response pairing.

Principle 5: "Eventually, everything becomes a racket [and/or gets delusional]." This quote is attributed to the late George Carlin. An occult paraphrasing of this in more specifically politics terms is "The state is primarily concerned with itself." Here we can see the full flowering of the problems buried in the earlier principles. There is a constant tension between the need for negative feedback, which the system avoids - that's what aversive stimuli are for - but because the measurement and the thing measured are not the same, the metric is game-able, and the system avoids these stimuli increasingly by gaming them rather than taking real action. (And simultaneously makes un-helpful-to-survival end-runs to pursue positive stimuli.) Consequently the stimulus-response arc gets more and more distorted with respect to the actual longer-term perpetuation of the system. This seems paradoxical in light of #1 above, but because systems are never perfect reflections of the universe around them, they necessarily always react based on at least limited information (especially with respect to long-term consequences) and sometimes with outright distorted information their machinery is feeding them. The necessary self-focus means that these distortions will tend to be in favor of pursuing pleasure; of avoiding pain and believing everything is alright when it is not, and over arbitrary time whatever non-self-perpetuating parts of a system's "purpose" previously existed, will atrophy, and its behavior will become more distorted in favor of comfort and perceived survival over actual survival.[11]

The distortions come not just from "gaming" pain. Organisms can hack themselves to fire off their reward centers without an actual survival enhancement, for example, with heroin, masturbation, or consuming resources they are driven by prior scarcity to consume as frequently as possible, but which have become "cheap" to the point where their over-consumption causes problems, e.g. in humans, fat, salt, and sugar. Opioids are in humans the thing closest to the artificial intelligence problem of "wireheading" where a self-modifying agent given a task can self-modify to be satisfied even though the task is completed.[12] Good examples of rackets are religions and charities that depart from their stated mission in favor of wealth-accumulation and self-perpetuation. (See Givewell's list of charities which maximize their mission rather than their income.) Profit-seeking entities whose products or services intrude into "sacred" (i.e. non-transactional) realms (best example: healthcare) often find that self-perpetuation wins out over their claimed mission. Organizations and individuals can also become delusional - humans are incorrigibly overoptimistic and discount the future.

Principle 6: inherent cyclic crisis. Eventually the stimulus-response arc becomes so distorted that it encounters a survival-threatening problem it can properly perceive and respond to, but by this time the gap between perception and reality is profound and it comes as a shock. Surviving the crisis, if possible at all, is quite painful.

Black swans are indeed one type of crisis, but missing impending black swans is the fault of the system only to the extent that the system could not reasonably have anticipated the black swan event, given the experience it had to draw on. More salient here are crises precipitated by the accumulated distortions in the system's perceptual machinery, where the system "should have known better". At the organizational level, nations might collapse because their ideology, increasingly un-moored from reality, led them to weakness on the battlefield out of refusal to update their armies with modern techniques and technology. Nations with dysfunctional (delusional) organization meet reality catastrophically on battlefields, and religions collapse (sometimes) when encountering reality. Crusades failed due to Christians' belief that God would intervene, medieval Europeans with a military hierarchy based on nobility got crushed by Mongols with rank based on meritocracy, Washington in the Seven Years War lost to the French because he insisted on fighting like a gentleman in rows, then the British lost to Washington in the American Revolution because they still insisted on this formation, and Washington no longer did. (Many of these could be considered examples of the advance of "rational" (and more destructive) warfare over traditional warfare.) For the young Washington and the later British Empire, the losses did not destroy them but came as painful shocks. In the case of many near-delusional Crusaders or the combined German-Polish-Hungarian forces in thirteenth century Europe, the shock did result in their destruction. On the individual level, any delusional or distorted behavior (psychosis, neurotic defenses, substance use) results in a painful shock in the result of adjusted behavior or shattered beliefs, or in some cases, the death of the individual. Someone might underestimate the risk of driving while intoxicated or in inclement weather, and crash, injuring or kill themselves or their family and updating their belief only in crisis. These crises occur more often and faster, the less (or more distorted) the feedback, as illustrated in very centralized arguments from authority (famine under Stalin using very divorced-from-reality - and unquestionable in Stalin's USSR - Lysenkoist theories of biology and agriculture.)

Principle 7: What to do about it? The Last Noble Truth is that cyclic crises are therefore inevitable in any complex dynamic system. As conscious complex dynamic systems called human beings, composed of complex dynamic systems called cells, being members in conglomerations of complex dynamic systems called nations and corporations and politics or religious belief systems, we will occasionally have shocks that kill us, or even when we "wake up" and adapt, still hurt us quite a bit. This happens in national collapses and revolutions as well. In arbitrary time, the problem will always re-emerge. Your measurement is not the same entity as the thing it measures. Unless a system comprises the whole and then there is no boundary, and of course no system.[13] How can we minimize the inherent problems that lead to this cycle?

• Constant testing and cross-checking between senses and expectations. In individuals we already do this automatically (corollary discharge, binding between senses and discomfort when our binding expectations do not match observation.) Cross-checking beliefs and assaying decisions at multiple points in ways that will quickly expose them if they were bad is helpful for individuals; it probably won't hurt to think twice about that turn you just made while hiking in the deep dark woods, even if you feel quite confident about it. Critical thinking is one form of this. Cognitive behavior therapy is another.
  
  
• Increasing the amount of feedback. This facilitates the suggestion above as well. It is good to decrease the consequence for objections in groups. Calibrate yourself - when people or organizations have secure egos and want to get better at something - running a mile, or making better decisions - they do this. This experiment about how to fool a computer in a "delusion box" showed that through a constant drive for being surprised - by learning new information - an agent gets out of being deceived faster. Of course this itself is also hackable (the machine could reset itself; you could convince yourself you're learning important new information but really you're just confirming your biases.) Pushing until you reach failure, in physical training or decision-making, is an instrumental rather than epistemic form of increasing your surprise.
  
  
• To the extent possible, rely on positive feedback. Negative feedback is that which by definition systems avoid, and they will avoid it by gaming it if necessary. Therefore, systems should put themselves in situations where the ratio of positive to negative feedback is higher, so we are less likely to avoid feedback.
  
  
• Simulating negative outcomes. In other words, expect the worst. You will never be disappointed, and you will have prepared yourself for the shock. Negative visualization as proposed in stoicism is a technique to do exactly this.
  
  
• Respecting a system's realistically unmodifiable constraints - especially if the system is you. This is especially true at the individual level. Humans as a species are not built to question close family relationships, especially without reason, without becoming depressed and damaging our relationships (asking if your daughter really loves you once a day will not help you or her.) For that matter, negative visualization actually causes quite a few people to reliably suffer rather than feel better (including me.) Constantly second-guessing every decision, like that turn you made in the woods, may erode your confidence and spark depression. Of course, your daughter really might secretly not love you, and your family might die, and you might have made a wrong turn (and you really can't fail without consequence at some things.) But it's probably going to make you suffer more in the long run not to think about this all the time, and you should pay attention to your reactions to see where your thresholds are.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Though not the purpose of this argument, this does set up a useful boundary for defining living and non-living things. Because it's quantitative it doesn't suffer from a problem of boundary cases, and sentience is nowhere considered, but it does appeal to common sense - stars and fire are at one end of the spectrum and things with nervous systems are at the other. Most current electronics are minimally dynamic, which makes them "less alive" than is often argued.

[2] It's implied that these actions are cyclic, like catalysis in biology or the Krebs cycle, or else the system would be unlikely to return to any previous state, and you don't have a self-perpetuating system.

[3] There's a strong argument to be made that defining a system as separate from the rest of the universe is arbitrary. However this becomes less true as the system develops additional complexity for its self-preservation. There is an increasingly sharp inflection point at some physical boundary of the system where the exchange of matter and energy between unit volumes drops, and also where an event on one side of that boundary events have much more impact to the future of the system than events outside of it. That is the self/non-self boundary. In cells this is easily recognized as the cell membrane. In nations, although the boundary becomes more complicated, ultimately the boundary is spatial, because of the primacy of space. Even in corporations or religions this remains the case. The individuals in those organizations, or carrying those beliefs, as physical beings are still dependent on predictability, safety, and resources permitted by more "basic" forms of organization. A good example is the early evolution of life, it is recognized that an RNA molecule (or RNA-protein) would not benefit from any reaction it could catalyze any more than another molecule in its vicinity, or at least not as much as it could if the reaction products were sequestered. Consequently when nucleic acids were enveloped in lipid membranes, natural selection accelerated, and the the self/non-self boundary became less arbitrary.

[4] In a zero-sum setting with limiting resources (which is a necessary condition given arbitrary time) this is a good definition for competition. Unless you count Boltzmann brains, it is likely that a system will find itself in a world with other similar systems.

[5] You may have noticed that there are no examples "below" humans in my examples in principle 4. There are many examples of behaviors in humans, and in human organizations, where metrics are gamed. There are far fewer examples of organisms besides humans where this is the case. Some species of pinnipeds dive deeper than any prey we know of, we think, just to alter their consciousness, and African elephants go out of their way to consume fermented (alcoholic) marula fruit. But there is nothing like the systematic distortions we see in human psychology. It seems likely that the simpler, the more fecund, the faster cycling an organism is, the less it is able to afford having a gap between its response to its metrics and what survival-affecting things are actually occurring in the world. That we don't see many organisms gaming their metrics could occur both because their stimulus-response arcs are simpler, and because a distortion in these arcs will more quickly kill off the organism so they don't come to our attention. This also implies that having a mind as complex and powerful as ours provides unique opportunities for distortions - that organisms which are focused on "survival, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality" (to quote a psychopath fictional android) in fact have a more accurate view of the universe (not incidentally, a central theme of the Alien films.) Having a complicated brain and surviving by imitating each other, our nervous system is constantly hijacked by self-reproducing ideas in a way that our genomes never were (lateral transfer events are incredibly rare) and those memes are selecting, as per principal 1, for their own self-perpetuation; they want to avoid killing us outright, and use us to spread them, so they can be slightly parasitic, occasionally symbiotic, but most are probably merely commensal. If there is an analogy, the meme complexes we get from our families are not genes but rather our microbiome. It should also be pointed out that as we congratulate ourselves for taking over the planet due to agriculture and combustion engines, we are living through the sixth mass extinction, suggesting that in fact we are not acting in our long-term best interests; and like cancer, ecocide might not hurt enough until it's too late, and that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end (a principle 8? That given arbitrary time, an inherent cyclic crisis will eventually destroy an entity, and the more complex the representational system, the more likely the crisis is to be endogenous.)

[6] There is a spectrum of arbitrariness, of how "symbolic" the perceived stimulus is relative to the thing being perceived. In the engineering of signal systems, the closer your signal is in a physical causal chain to the stimulus - the thing it is signaling about, or measuring - the less arbitrary it is. Digital systems are more powerful in many ways than analog systems but they accept increased arbitrariness and complexity in exchange for this. Case in point: people who fear assassination can build elaborate electronic sensing systems to avoid being approached while they sleep, but there are always questions: can they be hacked? What if a component fails? What if the power is out? Can a spy shut it down? Compare this to the system used by the Tokugawa shoguns - sleeping in the middle of of a large room with a wooden squeaky floor with many tatami barriers, and choosing a place to sleep on that floor at random each night.

[7] Of course other things have changed about the way science (and medicine) are practiced over the past half-century, not to mention that all the "low-hanging fruit" in terms of problems accessible to the specific strengths of human cognition may have been picked soon after the Enlightenment started. But it remains a concern that by (not unreasonably) trying to regularize and make transparent the application and career progression process, we're selecting for attributes that have little to do with being a successful scientist or physician, or even selecting against them, because we're using "artificial" endpoints distant from the relevant abilities, which can be and are gamed. Certainly this problem is not unique only to science and medicine, and whatever is causing the phenomenon, it's having real-world economic consequences. An interesting historical study would be to see if the health of the Chinese government across the dynasties waxed and waned with any relation to some aspect of civil service examinations.

[8] Referred visceral pain is an example of an aversive stimuli-sensing system that gives very inexact answers, because it was never important enough to improve. If your arm is hurt, you can point to exactly where even with your eyes closed. But when people get appendicitis, very often in the early phase they point to the center of their abdomen around their belly button, and then gradually the pain moves to the area immediately over the appendix - but only after the overlying tissue, which is innvervated by somatic ("outside"-type nerves) is irritated. Often people with a problem in their abdominal organs or even their heart feel extremely sick and anxious and in general uncomfortable but can't point to any specific spot. Why does this make sense? If a scorpion scrambles up onto your left elbow is stinging you there, it's worth knowing exactly where the stinging is happening so you can act in a way that improves the situation. But if you were sitting around a fire with your tribe in the African Rift Valley 100,000 years ago with appendicitis, what exactly could you do about it? If you had bad stomach pain, it didn't matter exactly where it was; you curled up in a ball where your family members were nearby to care for and protect you and hoped it passed.

[9] In contrast to corporations, single-celled organisms survive best not when they have a low surface-area-to-volume ratio (like successful nimble corporations) but a low one, which is why they are mostly near-spherical. Corporations, while competing with each other and in some ways with their customers, are still operating in an environment that is predominantly cooperative, so it's better to have lots of customer interaction surface. Bacteria exist in an environment of constant unpredictable ruthless lawless natural selection. It's really about how much the surface is an asset for information gathering by the system, versus a liability to attack from competing systems. Consequently, for bacteria, the sacrifice of knowing less about the outside world (which at that scale is less predictable than our world anyway) must be worth it given the overall survival advantage gained by being in the shape that most maximizes distance of any unit volume from the surface. In contrast, there are cells in biology that maximize surface: neurons, and nutrient absorption membranes deep in the GI tract. Both of these exist deep in the organism (especially neurons) in a web of profound cooperation (also especially neurons.) Of course, some bacteria are rod-shaped, which is a higher surface area-to-volume shape thought to confer an advantage in terms of nutrient absorption - when that is the growth-limiting factor rather than attack by other systems, that is the shape we would expect to see. The more fractal a complex dynamic system, the more likely it is to exist in an environment of predominant cooperation. The more spherical a complex dynamic system, the more likely it is to exist in an environment of predominant competition. In the case of corporations, the shape is somewhat "virtual", but corresponds to points of contact per customer and ease of contact, which ultimately are still going to require space. Nations are somewhere in the middle, though it would be interesting to see if nations now, more cooperative and less violent than they historically were, are more likely to have fractal borders, or shared zones (my predictions) than one or two centuries ago.

[10]This corresponds to Level 3 operations as described here, which explain how large organizations work but is not an argument that they should work that way, for Level 3 organizational decisions often lead to the downfall of the organization, unless the inner circle in the super-Pareto distribution has the best interests of the organization at heart. In politics, maintaining the state's best interests happens either because the leaders have a feedback loop in the form of being beholden to an informed electorate as in functioning democracies, or less likely, by luck as with benevolent dictators, e.g. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, or the "good" Roman Emperors.

[11] There's an apparent conflict here. On one hand I'm arguing that systems become distorted because they're focused on self-perpetuation and ignore metrics. On the other I'm arguing that they focus on the metrics, which they game and become distorted. Both can be true at different times, and vary depending on the aversiveness of different stimuli.

[12] Organisms are exempt from becoming "rackets." Rackets are systems which have a claimed mission besides their self-perpetuation but in fact are only self-perpetuating, and organisms are openly survival systems, full stop, and make no claims to the contrary. In other words, organisms cannot be rackets, because organisms do not have mission statements to deviate from.

[13]It may not have escaped your notice that one implied solution - expand the system until it comprises the whole universe, and there is no self/non-self boundary - is, at least on the individual level, one advocated by many mystical traditions. We actually achieve this when we die, so in individual terms this could be re-formulated as "lose your fear of death". Yet our read-only hardware makes this a terrifying and unpleasant experience, even, empirically speaking, for life-long meditators. For now, this is not a real solution.


APPENDIX: Analogous Terms

	Non-human Organism	Human	Organization
Input	stimulus	perception, belief, representation	measurement, metric, dogma
Reflection, Output, Reaction	response	belief, behavior	decision
Examples of Gaming	Rare; some higher animals seek out "highs"	Opioids, denial, delusion	Preserving letter but not spirit; false or incoherent religious or political truth claims
Examples of crisis	Death	Personal disillusionment or death	Revolution or collapse

Three Levels of Operations in Organizations

Humans are unspeakably complex objects, and the associations they form and the way their behavior affects those associations and is affected by, it even more complex. Nonetheless we can make some accurate predictions, the moreso when the number of individuals is higher. It's pretty difficult to predict if a single person will be worth more or less, or making more or less, a year from now (even with good information today), but we can make a decent guess about what the economy will do. That said, when we talk about groups of people - especially states - we oversimplify.

Level 1 thinking about organizational decisions and behavior - the single entity fallacy - is demonstrated when "Germany invaded Poland." "The Americans wanted to annex the territory all the way to the Pacific." "General Motors wants to buy Tesla." (I made that last one up.) These assertions are not meaningless, but they grossly (and probably necessarily) oversimplify the collective action of thousands or millions of people. We might picture a giant made of fused-together bodies serving the collective good. Something approaching this subsumption of identity and individual interests occurs more easily in smaller and more homogenous groups, and is easiest when individuals in those groups were programmed by pre-verbal and pre-rational early life experience to identify with the tribe and its authority. The leader in such a situation is showing transformational leadership, and this corresponds to Chapman's level 3. (See more about his model of levels at which humans derive meaning through their associations with each other.) Indeed, it has been argued from a philosophical standpoint that any group of people (married couple up to nation) cannot be said to have (consistent) preferences.

Level 2 thinking - the amalgamation of individuals fallacy - is more rarely seen, because it's more complicated and manifestly not how nations or individuals function. In this model, there are only individuals, constantly calculating what they're getting out of association with the group, and there is no group; or rather, the group exists only as a product of individual interests, and talking about the group's actions adds nothing to our understanding or to the accuracy of our predictions. Leaders in such situations are transactional, and this corresponds to Chapman's level 2. For obvious reasons, such associations tend to be unstable over time. This is more common in companies than states (since the former have a mostly or purely transactional mission), but even in companies, there is usually an identity-subsuming transformational aspect. And even in states, we do often see this in the a-ideological alliances and constant defections that occurred before the Enlightenment and democracy, and still occur in the developing world.

Level 3 thinking - There is a super-Pareto principle in how much the decisions of any individual in a (tribe, company, nation) affect every other individual, and this is helpful to come to a more useful and accurate model than the mere amalgamation of individuals. The people making the decisions are certainly influenced to some degree by personal interests that do not necessarily align with all the other individual members of the state (or company - for instance, institutional investors take note when a fund manager is nearing retirement, because s/he may start making decisions that benefit his/her retirement in the short term but not the company or its shareholders in the long term.) But they too likely have pre-rational tribal affiliation and also the concrete reality on the ground that this, and not some other tribe/company/nation is the one that they're in and helping to run. Furthermore, there is a constant feedback from the individual to the group (as in level 2) and then back from the group to the individual in the form of things like social norms. This is therefore the cyclic individual-within-group theory, and when companies or states seem to "make bad decisions", almost invariably they could be explained in the light of benefits or risks to individuals that don't track those to the organization overall. Interestingly, overproduction of elites is a core feature of Peter Turchin's predictions for the West and the U.S. in particular, and is an outstanding example of the cyclic individuals-within-groups model.

Violence Control and the Mutual Recognition Cartel

Modern states are a cartel that mutually recognize each other's right to hold a monopoly on violence within their territory. The prospect of seasteading is a fundamental threat to nearby nations' legitimacy, and in fact to the Westphalian idea of a state, since suddenly there is territory near yours which was previously not only uninhabited but uninhabitable, and poof - suddenly there are people outside your control on your borders. Consequently we should expect that seasteads will produce a rapid and disproportionate response from any nearby nation, using any excuse they can to commandeer or destroy it. That I know of, there has been very little discussion in the seasteading/voluntary society community about the likelihood of this happening, and how to avoid it. Previously , it was predicted that it would be "a few years at most before the nearby country finds an excuse to attack them", but in this case it was actually on the order of weeks.

This past week, the Thai government noticed a seastead platform just outside its international waters:

US bitcoin trader and girlfriend could face death penalty over Thai 'seastead'

US national Chad Elwartowski and his Thai girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet (aka Nadia Summergirl), are facing charges of threatening the Kingdom's sovereignty. Last Sunday officials from the Royal Thai Navy and Phuket Maritime boarded the structure saying it violated Article 119 of the Criminal Code and also posed a navigational hazard.

The couple launched the 'Ocean Builders' seastead on February 2 off the coast of Phuket. The structure is located to the southeast of Koh Racha Yai, approximately 12 nautical miles (22.2 kilometres) from the mainland.

Elwartowski has claimed that his seastead is outside Thailand's territorial waters, but Thai authorities insist that it violates Article 119 and challenges Thailand's territorial rights.

"The Royal Thai Navy has full authority and duty to protect national interest and marine sovereignty in the area," according to a Navy spokesperson. (from thetaiger.com)

Besides the disproportionate response, most telling is that Thailand has not even bothered to claim that the seastead is within their territorial waters. The couple previously inhabiting the seastead has fled in fear of their lives. Immediately Thailand shows what's really going on - whatever theory of state recognition you subscribe to, it all unfortunately returns to violence and the control of violence - control of it within your territory (the police, to maintain order) and outside your territory (the military, to at least prevent conquest, if not expand your territory.) If a country can't do those two things, it's not a country, and can't even convincingly pretend to be a country for long - e.g., no one is very impressed with the "Somali" government's claim to actually be the state of Somalia, that is, the organization which holds a monopoly on violence within the territory not claimed by surrounding countries.

One objection: Luxembourg (for example) appears to be a viable state, yet can Luxembourg really claim to be able to repel an invasion from Germany or France? No, but very likely the blowback from other countries in the mutual-recognition-cartel that could harm Germany or France in some way is enough to stop them. Dictators often test the resolve of the cartel - most obviously, Putin by invading Crimea. Ukraine could not repel such an invasion, nor could they count on the cartel to come to their aid. So they can say that Crimea is still part of Ukraine, but de facto, it is part of Russia.

It's also worth pointing out that both Vietnam and China have built not seasteads, but whole new islands in international waters in the South China Sea. They and their allies have made a lot of noise about the other state's islands, but aside from a few harassing passes by aircraft, there has been no full naval take-down of the settlements. Why? Because each country (or its allies) have the ability to hold their territory by inflicting and defend against violence, and as countries, are already in the mutual-recognition club by virtue of being able to use the threat of force to defend their territory. (Which is how they can have allies to begin with.)

In actuality, the Thai seastead and state response isn't the first one. This is stated not to diminish the accomplishment, but rather to point out that there was another would-be sea-platform microstate in the 1960s in the North Sea, which was allowed by the nearby United Kingdom to persist - though they may have been a bit nervous about this and hope to escape the UK's attention. Consequently we might ask - why don't seasteaders set up shop off the Somalian coast, most of which has no real government? For the obvious reason of piracy, i.e., unpredictable exercise of force by individuals with no claim to political legitimacy, protection of territory/prevention of others' violence, or promise of maintaining/improving conditions. In this, it's obvious that seasteaders would like to benefit from the nearby state's violence control, without paying taxes or following other rules. (In fact, Sealand had difficulty controlling violence within its borders, or preventing criminal behavior, and the UK's hands-off attitude had a lot to do with that.) A critique of "fundamentalist" little-l libertarianism in general is that it's only conceivable when there is already a state regulating commons and controlling violence that guarantees social arrangements - and a very similar argument can be made for socialism in states already wealthy-by-capitalism, also an unsustainable strategy. (Something very similar happened on Minerva reef in the Pacific in the 70s when Tonga suddenly decided it had to control the reef once settlers showed up.)

It's probably not good for anyone to dwell for too long on the basic fact that humans have never devised a system to organize themselves beyond the level of family without a threat of violence, and it seems that theories of state recognition are designed to be legalistic dances that distract us from this brute fact. The political scientist who imagines a system that allows the non-violent creation of new states that can actually take natural precedence over force will go down as the greatest philosopher in history - along with the one that figures out a way besides physical space to determine which laws apply to which people, thus making a more truly voluntary society. I'm very sad for the couple that tried to seastead off of Thailand, but they were more than a little naive. For now, I predict that any seastead, even one far out in the middle of the ocean inarguably in international waters, will quickly find itself dismantled by a state navy unless they have sufficient outward directed force - and will not be able to control their internal violence without pre-emptive threats of violence.

The Three Ways of Dealing with Outsiders: Sub-Humans, Ignorance, or Evangelism

Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders:

1. remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance)
2. considering them sub-humans and acting maliciously or merely neglecting them
3. evangelizing and assimilating them

By "outsider" I mean "people whose behavior is perceived to differ in morally important ways". Those morally important ways are often things like what moral authority you follow, supernatural or otherwise; what you eat; sexual practices; and boundaries of socially sanctioned violence.

You can be perceived as an outsider because you are of a different ethnic group, political system or party, or religion, among other things, whether or not your behavior actually does differ. This seems to offer hope, in case the perceived differences can be found to be mere labels with no real differences in behavior. But that is not always, or even usually, the case. It's not just perception; there are morally important differences. Either a man laying with another man is moral, or it is not. Either violently taking property from the bourgeoisie is moral, or it is not. Either honor killings are moral, or they are not. And inspired by an example from Robert Frank's Choosing the Right Pond: either it is okay to eat ponies, or it is not. It is very difficult to see what a mutually beneficial coexistence might be for people with conflicting views of these things.

We have now arrived at the central problem, which goes as follows.

a) There are genuine differences between groups of humans in moral behavior
b) This forces a choice as to whether morality extends to a morally different group or not
c) If we are living with a morally different group, they may not want your morality extended to them; if you don't extend your morality to them, you are implying that they are not human.

This is a dismal hypothesis, as these three ways are obviously sub-optimal for human dignity and the functioning of a modern multi-ethnic state, so it is imperative that we understand them, and possibly find new ones.

Name of strategy	Ignorance		Sub-humans	Evangelize
Interaction	Trade, at most*		Living with
Underlying strategy	(no strategy)		Degrade	Assimilate

This could be called either the triune theory of moral resolution, or ISE (sounds like "ice" - for Ignorance, Sub-humans, and Evangelism.) They are as follows.

1. Ignorance - for most of the lifespan of our species, humans have lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. Consequently we were spared from having to deal with outsiders. Even if you know they exist, if you don't have to interact with them, then you don't care that much how they behave. You might still interact with them minimally, transactionally, through trade* - often on neutral ground, and possibly not even sharing a common language. (When we behave transactionally, we're calculating and not engaging most of our social cognition.) They don't sleep in your territory and don't eat at your table, or only in settings which are carefully controlled by the tribe or state and prevent extensive contact between populations. This "non-strategy" is what obtained throughout all of pre-history, but starting in the Neolithic this strategy was no longer stable, as some populations began to expand into their neighbors' territories.


2. Sub-humans - unfortunately, the easy and automatic response when you live around people morally different from you is to consider them sub-humans. There is a wide spectrum of how we do this in terms of active, conscious malice. Starting on the more malicious end: you might outright condemn them as filthy animals and sometimes even actively exterminate them. You might just keep them sequestered in ghettoes or certain roles where they can't contaminate the rest of society. There might be a split between upper and lower classes of the dominant group, with the upper classes not worrying much about the sub-humans as long as they stay in their undesirable roles, and the lower class much more resentful, since they sometimes have to work alongside the sub-humans and their own jobs are more threatened by the sub-humans. You might appear to tolerate them because you aren't overly bothered by them, but it's only because the gentiles are dirty and going to hell anyway (or whatever the local terminology is) and you just accept that they can't help themselves. (Minorities with moral codes differing from the majority often take this last position of feigning tolerance and just keeping to themselves, as they're forced to do so if they're not going to agree that they themselves are in fact the sub-humans, and the other options aren't open to them - they're in no position to be exterminating anyone else.)

Most subtly and softly, as is often the case in modern states - you might even be horrified at the suggestion that you're capable of this - but there are groups of people in your society for whom you've drastically lowered your expectations. The Ottoman strategy of governing people, allowing a multi-confessional empire, seems quite modern in some ways - but I'm sure most people in the capital didn't regard with admiration the pork-eating Christians they allowed confessional self-governance. You may even have caught yourself, in the pony-eating example above, finding reasons to excuse the pony-eaters from full moral evaluation, though I doubt if you were told you were invited to a pony-eating party you would be excited.

We also sometimes categorize people in our own society as sub-human, usually based on class. The upper classes do this with the lower classes to explain why they "under-perform" (but might also try to evangelize them about how to improve, i.e., be more like the upper class.) The lower classes do this to the upper class to explain why the upper class has more money - it's not because they're better, it's because they're immoral, engaging in bizarre practices behind closed doors, and they have lots of dealings with dirty foreigners. The lower class of a dominant group rarely evangelizes the upper class, because this exposes that the lower class in the end would actually want to join the upper class, and exposes their self-comforting fiction.

Because moral rules sometimes place inconvenient restrictions on economics, multiple times throughout history conventions have evolved where a sub-human outsider is actually employed to perform morality-violating acts. (E.g., shabbas goys who tend fires on the sabbath, or eta in Japan. How exactly the employer or trading partner avoids naughty-points for this is quite mysterious.)

In some cases sub-humanism can be "escaped" by assimilation, which requires both the desire of those considered sub-human to be accepted by those considering them sub-human, and those considering them sub-human to want them to escape. This seems like evangelism (see below), but the difference is that there is no open recognition of the former sub-humans having joined the dominant group; indeed after the fact, they're loathe to note that there was ever anything different about them in the first place.

As mentioned, sub-humanism is the default option when morally differing people move out of the "ignorance" category, and this transition is all too easy. Very often this is discovered by traders who have overstayed their welcome. In the current populist surge, we are witnessing discussion of "globalists" now, either outsiders, or people tainted by outsiders through business loyalties. Persian merchants were slaughtered during the Guangzhou massacre for explicitly this reason. The Dutch merchants living near Nagasaki during the Tokugawa Shogunate never made the ignorance-to-subhuman transition because the Shogun kept them sequestered on an island, consistent with state practices that repeatedly appeared in history to keep the population ignorant.


3. Evangelism - This is a more difficult strategy in the sense that it is not innate to humans, but it has been very effective for expanding empires that aim to retain stability. In this strategy, you recognize your neighbors as human - and want to help them! (To avoid Hell, become more economically successful, etc.) So you Christianize them, or send advisors to make them more capitalist/communist, or otherwise "civilize" them in general, etc. Witness Thomas Jefferson's well-meaning attempts to civilize native Americans, the British white man's burden to educate and develop Africa, and communists' attempts to export revolution. (Reading about Che Guevara's frustrations in Bolivia or the Congo, you could almost do a find-and-replace with Thomas Jefferson's irritation with assimilation-resistant native Americans, or anyone working in an NGO in the Muslim parts of the developing world.) Compare the non-evangelical religions to the evangelical ones (better-adapted ones which appeared later in history) and note how they emphasize brotherhood in the faith over national origin. Obviously none of these were done with purely altruistic motives, but the impulse to assimilate rather than exterminate is on plain display.

If this strategy is made to work, it is dramatically successful - witness the success of the Roman Empire, the United States, Christianity, and Islam - although often the evangelized don't want to be assimilated (but that's just because they're incorrigible sub-humans, off with their heads!) This mode can fail as well - when Jews in Spain were forced to convert to Christianity after the final departure of the Moors, this wasn't satisfactory to the rest of the population, who could never be convinced that the conversos were not underneath their baptisms still sub-humans (and the more attempts to convince that the conversion was true, the more outraged the mobs became.) The populism in twenty-first century America is a turn from evangelism as well - from the ideal of the melting pot, to anger that too many foreigners are polluting the creed and are still, underneath their iPhones and Starbucks, sub-humans.

There are instructive differences between states that otherwise seem to have some of the same sorts of beliefs, but where one is more clearly evangelizing than the other. One example is the differences between the Soviet Union and modern China. The USSR was trying to export revolution, because (besides of course strategic reasons) they believed in the universality of communism. China has quickly regressed to the historical mean, and is concerned about their territory, and Chinese people, full stop, even producing tracts on the genetic superiority of the Han - but they don't seem to care much whether the people in Africa for whom they're building roads and stadiums agree. (When ethnic supremacy doctrines are espoused, a tribe or nation is lauding its own immutable and unobtainable heritage, a sure sign of the sub-human strategy instead of evangelism.)



Can There Be Any Solution?

The hypothesis can seem worrisome in the sense of unfalsifiability. It's tempting to play the game of putting every interaction between morally differing people into one of the three boxes - "Are you aware of their existence? You're not ignorant of them then. Do you think what they're doing is wrong, or not care? You consider them sub-humans. Do you want to help them? You're evangelizing." Indeed, most such interactions really do fit.

But we will hopefully never go back to being ten thousand disconnected tribes, able to ignore each other's differences. The way forward will likely depend on the aforementioned sometimes-present gap between perception and reality. In some cases, the perceived differences are not real concrete differences in behavior. For example: the country you live in predicts your moral sense better than your religion. You may claim you share convictions with Muslims or Christians, but your behavior is more likely to resemble your neighbor from another religion than it is someone in a developing country of your religion. I was struck by this when looking at examples of surveys of Christians and atheists in the United States. With rare exceptions, they make the same moral choices in the same situations. It's not just the cliche of focusing on similarities over differences; rather, we need to focus on the concrete outcomes of beliefs. What do our moral convictions actually make us do? If we do the same things for the same reasons, and we're all aiming for a world with more human flourishing, then that makes living together much easier. This approach (of actually dissecting the effects of beliefs) has really only begun in earnest in the past few decades, and it may be a fourth way. My hope is that the people and nations that are able to make this work, in at least part of their populations, will out-compete the other models, just as the evangelism strategy out-competed sub-humanism. I think explicit reasoning about and repudiation of slavery, and later racism, is one such example, although the increasing value of labor certainly helped (both ability to reason morally and increasing value of labor were themselves both products of increasing rationality, i.e. the Enlightenment.) Very metropolitan trade-oriented cities may also be early examples of the fourth way - trade cities on ports have long been thought of as more "relaxed" culturally than the hinterlands around them. I submit that they are not "less moral", nor are they evangelical places, but rather they're necessarily consequentialist. Ironically, it's precisely the transactionalism of New York or London that have driven this; thinking more abstractly about actual effects of behavior prevented conflict between traders during the "ignorance" mode, and it can (and is) again. Voltaire recognized the emergence of such a system of coexistence when he said

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son's foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn't understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.

You might object that a transactional relationship is not a full one, and you would be correct. Here we can take advantage of the millions of people who we live among in the modern age - you don't have to interact with every single member of your society, and the ones you choose to interact with, you choose at what level you do.

In one sense, this approaches the voluntary ideal. That said, it may be that the only solution to coexisting with people who perceive genuine moral differences is to limit the interaction in this way. And this does seem much better than sub-humanism or assimilation. In cases where concrete moral actions really do differ and people must live intimately together (especially with very limited resources), I have no solution. This should be added to the list of political science problems, along with how to organize a truly voluntary state that is not determined by physical territory (see also here.)


*A complicating observation of tribes (usually not nations) who are mostly ignorant of each other is that one of the "interactions" can be warfare. In traditional tribal warfare, there are ceremonies, there are few casualties relative to what might otherwise have occurred given the technology available, and there are agreed-upon conventions: we don't fight each other when it's raining because our warpaint runs off; we stand in order lines and kneel and fire our muskets because only cowards hide behind trees like savages; etc. (See the Aztec Flower Wars for a well-documented example.) Every so often we witnessed a sudden transition from traditional to modern warfare, with a disregard of previous conventions and much higher casualties (or even extermination; see here for discussion of this in Iroquois and Mongols) that in this framework represents a transition to sub-humanism. As with trade, in traditional warfare, you remain basically ignorant of the other tribe because you have very limited "interaction" with them. The complication is that clearly there must be some cultural norms shared between the two tribes for this arrangement to occur, although again, interaction is quite limited other than at the highest level of the tribe or state.