Measure is unceasing

When rich Americans fail

American’s base needs are met. American culture, for the rich Americans I get along with, is incredibly messed up, where people’s base needs are met (something historically uncommon), so they focus on the higher needs (acceptance, self-actualization, impact, status).

This is historically unusual. This state of affairs is historically uncommon. GDP per capita was lower than 10K even in the US and UK until early last century, and the world as a whole only reached that level in the 2000s.

Leading to pathologies. Instincts and ingrained patterns of behavior are trained in a domain where there are no superstimuli, and because neither culture nor biology has had enough training time in a domain of such abundance, they may fail to align short-term wants with long-term flourishing. Further, higher needs are less objectively defined, and indeed perhaps only defined with reference to one’s ingroup. So the strands of mimetic desire go awry as they are defined in an unanchored Keynesian Beauty contest

…particularly in politics: the choice of whom to vote for and with whom to align yourself politically that will give you the highest reward depends not only on how good those political parties are for you, but also on what your friends around you align themselves with. Combining Keynesian Beauty contests (unanchored in reality) with the folk theorem in game theory leads to arbitrarily disfunctional equilibria. This explains cancellations.

They also fail as rich Americans encounter scarcity, at all, which they aren’t accustomed to, in things like the number of years they can still have kids, the hours of their time they can spend watching Youtube videos, the years of one’s career one can throw into a dead-end PhD or academic career, etc. That’s right, I’m saying that the failure mode for Americans is that of a spoilt child: unaccustomed to constraints, if they fail they may flail ineffectively when they actually encounter significant tradeoffs for the first time, since they haven’t had to train that muscle that much.

More dangerously, strategies fail when the higher needs conflict with the lower but more necessary needs: being a vegetarian without knowing about nutrition and thus malnourishing oneself (probably happened to me), postponing kids forever because of one’s career, trading off base security for lofty ideals. Hence from rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations, when the second and third generation doesn’t have the training data that made the first generation successful, and pursue new directions without respecting the mechanisms that sustain the original wealth.

In that domain, new strands of strategy arise: you should exert incredible willpower to improve your beauty so that you can attract a great mate (descending into anorexia); you should align yourself with a community seeking to do the most good (EA); you should align yourself with a community that is aligned with God and improve yourself (~Jordan Peterson), etc. Because the space of strategies is so high-dimensional, people successfully displaying new strategies and seeing them through are a public good, not because their archetypes should be fully instantiated by everyone, but because they allow the masses to copy the good parts, and to see how sustained effort in one direction pays off. But because the environment keeps changing, this is worth doing anew. Perhaps I should talk more on the internet about why I moved to Paraguay.

My preferred solution to this whole conundrum would be to have strong priors of how a good life looks like, so that one can use them to come up with rational strategies for how to navigate one’s life. In this light, I find Aristotle useful: are you displaying the classic Aristotelian virtues, son?. The problem with this strategy is that past conceptions of the good just aren’t designed for the modern environment, and we just haven’t gathered enough training data to replace them, but also can’t because the environment keeps changing. Also, you learn more about your actual values as you get more powerful (power “corrupts”). On the other hand, I was in a flight with a Mnenonite leader the other day who was using Linux Mint to draft a sermon, so restrained strategies may fruitfully generalize.

If you think you have figured out how the good life looks like, let me know.

Other strands: