We need more people on board for life extension in order to hit longevity escape velocity in our lifetimes. But most people have never heard of life extension, and even those who have often follow the same predictable arguments. “What if it doesn’t work?” “What if bad people live forever?” “What if humanity needs to refresh its stock every so often in order to make progress?” “What about heaven?”
We need more people working on AI safety so we don’t all end up dead.
We need more people to understand the coordination problem as the central problem in politics and economics.
For those of us in the business of spreading ideas, it can be a tough row to hoe (I had to look up this phrase to make sure I was saying it right). It can feel like an uphill battle but the way you model it can help guide you.
This is my model when thinking about spreading ideas, especially ones outside the Overton window. It applies less in the later stages of a movement when the Overton window has shifted.
It’s about three boxes. I like buckets but I already have an important post about three buckets so boxes it is.
There’s the giant box. This box has the people that don’t agree with you. In fact, they probably think you’re a terrible person just for talking about these ideas.
There’s the small box. This box has the people that already agree with you.
Then there’s the Tiffany-sized box. These are the people who you may be able to reach with your ideas. The box is much smaller than the giant box.
The obvious caveat is the EMH applies less to new or radical or uncommon ideas since people are less likely to have heard about them. Think transhumanism vs democracy or AI safety research vs Christianity.
3. More often than not, the truth is something we don’t want to hear or don’t want to be true. I would love if there was an eternal paradise but there’s not. It would be wonderful if everyone was born smart and beautiful but they aren’t. I would love if we knew for certain that cryonics would work but we don’t.
4. Rationality people can be worse at selling ideas than non-rationality people for a number of reasons:
a. Autism and other neurodivergence are overrepresented in the rationality community which can make people less socially skilled than normies.
b. Many are uncomfortable using the so-called “Dark Arts” of persuasion/influence.
c. Rationality people promote epistemic awareness and humility and recognize that things are often shades of grey. They often provide confidence levels as opposed to blanket statements, e.g. “I’m very confident that my model of Covid-19 is right.” or “I have low confidence in my model of what’s going on with AlphaZero.” They also recognize there are usually pros and cons to issues and nuance. This can be less of a sell than “This is how it works! Big Pharma is evil!”
So how should we act based on all this? What do we do with this model?
Here are some implications:
1. Try not to be discouraged by the giant box.
As a cynic, I know this can be hard. There are some things we can do to alleviate discouragement:
a. Surround yourself with the people in the small box — the good and smart people who are on the same page — so you can find relief in them. “I’m not the only sane one!” The trick (besides finding such people) is not just surrounding yourself with yes men or having your group turn into an echo chamber.
b. Avoid spending a lot of time reading annoying shit on the internet. It can be addictive to read flame wars on Twitter but this is mostly a waste of time and just gets us worked up and not much else.
c. Keep a list of people who inspire you. I’m starting to do this by writing about my heroes.
2. Put your effort into the Tiffany-sized box: the people who are likely to be open to your ideas and smart enough to understand them.
Libertarians would love if there were more women among them. But focusing on just getting more women might be a huge waste of resources in the same way that it would be a waste of effort to get more women to be loggers (99.1% men in 2016) or men to be kindergarten teachers (97.5% women in 2016).
To use your resources effectively in spreading ideas, it’s better to focus on more fertile ground first.
a. Notice what beliefs, etc. correlate with being open to the idea and focus on people with those.
In the libertarian example, they might focus more effort on converting women gun enthusiasts vs women at liberal arts colleges.
Now, if you’re promoting veganism, you’d want to switch that and focus on the liberal arts colleges vs gun enthusiasts.
I wish it weren’t like this and we could have all the best beliefs instead of having these irrational strong constellations of beliefs, but we don’t currently live in that world.
Remember that it can get easier and breakneck change is eventually possible
As your numbers and in turn resources grow, you’ll be in a better place to shift the Overton window. Or at least be a major player in the future Culture Wars.
Once the Overton window has shifted, change can happen very fast! Support can increase quite modestly and then things hit a tipping point where things change metaphorically overnight. Support and legalization of gaymarriage is the poster-child for this.
Major politicians of all parties (including Obama and the Clintons) were against gay marriage. While Bernie wasn’t 100% out and proud in supporting gay marriage, he was light years ahead of everyone else.
It’s a good thing to celebrate people changing their minds to better and more accurate beliefs. But when people just flip-flop because their tribe did or it’s politically expedient, that is less of a cause for celebration.
Nerdy, liberal girls who were tripping over themselves to identify as Ravenclaws, now think that J.K. Rowlingdeservesdeath.
Culture is weird and volatile. (Even if you think Rowling is worthy of death, it still is weird and sad that people’s beliefs change that fast.)
Capriciousness just means they’ll give up a reasonable and rational belief for whichever one is in vogue. That’s bad.
This kind of capriciousness makes me feel like there should be a different word for beliefs that have been worked out and evaluated and then supported or not, vs this kind of tribal emotional bullshit, but that’s for another post.
A future example is longevity treatment. Very few people today support longevity research despite them supporting something much less effective but in the same direction like breast cancer research, etc. This is because people are stupid.
But as Aubrey de Grey and others point out, the second we get real anti-aging treatment, you’ll have people overwhelmingly switch to wanting it. And bitching that they can’t have it despite actively not supporting it before, the fuckers…
What’s the point of getting people to change their minds now then if they’ll just end up changing them on their own in the future?
The point is to get support in the form of money or people working on research or public policy changes. Every day we remain lax on things like AI safety research increases the risk we die from AGI. Every day we don’t have longevity tech is 100,000+ people dying. 99% of the things people purport to care about absolutely pales in comparison to causes like these. That’s why we work to spread ideas.
So in summary:
There are three boxes:
The giant box: the people that don’t agree with you.
The small box: the people that already agree with you.
The Tiffany-sized box: the people who you may be able to reach with your ideas.
The lessons from the three boxes model are:
Try not to be discouraged.
Surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you feel less cynical.
Write about the people who inspire you.
Sow your seeds in fertile ground.
Remember that it can get easier and rapid change is possible
Don’t forget the stakes matter. Keep up the good fight.
Understand the three boxes? Wonderful! How about the three buckets which are much more important?
Would you ever take a course on how to defend yourself from knife attacks? What about a course on how to stab people?
I finally checked off one of my bucket list items training with Craig Douglas and doing his Edged Weapons Overview course. It’s a course on how to manage criminal interactions and survive knife attacks, and how to defend yourself with knives.
I’ve been interested in martial arts since I was a kid. I was enamored with the cool moves of Bruce Lee or the Shaolin monks.
I’ve always been a skeptic. Anyone who knows me knows I hate bullshit. That’s a big problem with martial arts: it’s full of bullshit — things that are ridiculous and don’t work in real life. There’s an important concept known as “pressure testing” in martial arts, where you see if it works with full resistance. The UFC and combat sports were great at providing a testing ground to see what works and what doesn’t. While you may not be able to repeat test eye gouges and groin kicks, it’s still the best we have. Even the “real self defense” stuff often has a massive amount of BS.
When I was either in 8th grade or a freshman in high school, I started researching martial arts on the internet. I first heard about Craig on “selfdefenseforums.com” where he would post as “SouthNarc”. That was his nickname because he was a “dope cop” (an undercover narcotics officer) in the South.
That forum was one of the places where people really tried to focus on what works. It was like Bullshido where there was a lot of criticism of traditional martial arts being ineffective.
So I’ve known about Craig for 20 years. He is the best in the world at what he does.
So the course was finally going to happen in San Francisco! It was rare to have it here because most people aren’t exactly the target demographic. So I signed up!
I immediately regretted it. The closer it got the more I wanted to cancel! Were Craig and Brian going to be assholes in real life? Were the other trainees going to be weirdos? Who signs up for a class to learn how to stab people??
I was going to be around a bunch of strangers in a very stressful environment. Shivworks famously has these “evolutions” where they do intense scenario-based sparring. For example: you have a knife and you’re being attacked by someone. Or you’re being attacked by a guy and you both have knives and his friend comes in to punch the shit out of you. The edits of these evolutions look very intense, and a lot of the attendees mentioned being intimidated by them.
It can feel embarrassing if you get beat up in front of the crowd of people encircling you. Many of these people have “years and years” of martial arts experience. More on that later.
I wanted to get them over with in the beginning, but that would of course have been pointless because the whole idea is to put together what we’ve learned and test it.
I also don’t enjoy being very out of breath or not being able to breath.
I was most worried about injury. If you’re reading this and haven’t sparred, you may think the common injuries are ones from being punched or kicked or whatever. They do happen, but the most common injuries are when someone moved wrong and your toe got bent or crushed. Or someone fell wrong and your knee is messed up. Not to mention the bruises that cover your body.
(The truth is, most people get way more injured from training than they do in violent encounters, unless you live in a very bad neighborhood.)
Anyways, I was anxious.
Different martial arts have different cultures. For example, judo is very academic, MMA has a lot of meatheads.
Getting there, I quickly saw the Shivworks people were overall very chill. (At least the ones coming to San Francisco.) They had a variety of backgrounds, but many people who trained off and on and had spent time in a lot of different martial arts.
The course was structured where Craig and his co-trainer Brian, provide an algorithm for dealing with sketchy approaches by people, which will honestly be the thing we all use the most in real life. Then you learn how to control people through wrestling, try to survive a knife attack, and learn how to use your own knife to stop adversaries.
I asked Craig a million questions — many about different martial arts and gun experts — to see what he thought. I’ll often ask people I trust about their peers in the field that I haven’t met and don’t know if they’re legit or not.
It was nice getting his insider view on the personalities I’ve heard about. Some good, many bad.
He talked about incidents where he was almost beaten or shot to death, and times where he had to shoot people. And he told me about times he used his service weapons.
I think stress inoculation — going through stressful experiences and building up resilience and knowing you got through that — can help you keep calm in other experiences. Training with my friend and MMA coach, Daron, helped me with knowing how to better move and strike, yes. But I also learned I could get through these intense and very uncomfortable training moments.
It also helped having the equipment ready to go like a cup and custom mouthguard.
There were a variety of skill levels in the class.
One problem trained grapplers have is that their BJJ gets them in trouble. They get attached to the person and may even get in a traditionally dominant position, but they get stabbed by their opponent, or stabbed or knocked out by their opponent’s friend. So you cannot get stuck to one person.
You learn how to deal with sketchy approaches and how to avoid getting knocked out by sucker punches.
They frequently emphasize that if you’re using this training, it’s going to be the worst day of your life.
To get really good at this or anything physical, you need to drill it a lot, and this was only a weekend. But sometimes having even a little knowledge and practice, along with an algorithm of what to do, can be a cheat code to win.
You can feel your adrenaline build up watching these primal fights in front of you.
I got to the evolutions and wasn’t feeling too nervous.
I’d rather play the defender first because being the attacker is much more fun. Especially when it’s two on one.
You get anxious not knowing who Craig or Brian are going to pick for you to fight. I don’t mind fighting people way more skilled than me but I didn’t want to fight some of the spazzes who had trouble following the rules in the moment. To avoid injury, you weren’t supposed to try hard to take people down or to really swing on them. Many people did these things anyways. “Shit happens,” as Craig said. But I like my face and joints and didn’t want shit to happen to me. But I was really lucky in that I had good sparring partners who weren’t spazzes.
Also, it’s sort of unspoken to go easier on less skilled people. Some people still go hardcore but I try to adapt when there’s a big skill disparity. Luckily the worst injury I got was messing up my thumb against this pro kickboxer’s iron abs.
Craig talked about how it takes courage to come to the seminars. I don’t like false empowerment but it’s true. You’re being vulnerable in front of a crowd of people.
I made some friends and have a new strong algorithm for sketchy approaches and weapons defense.
Overall, it was an honor to train with the legend. If you can, this is probably the shortest time you could spend and gain the most knowledge you would actually apply in a self-defense scenario. It lived up to all the hype and it’s cool to do something you’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Like finally seeing the Eiffel Tower and knowing what it’s actually like.
If you enjoyed this, you should definitely check out:
Imagine you’re on a plane to Russia to become the new president of an aluminum factory. Conditions are abysmal. People are dying every year due to unimaginable safety conditions. Corruption is everywhere from the mayor on down. You’ll have to deal with oligarchs who’ve assassinated people. You’ll even be robbed by the cops.
What would you do? How would you fix things?
This is the position Bill O’Rourke found himself in.
I first met Bill when we toured the Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh. I liked Bill right away and knew I needed to record an interview with him.
We talked about everything from growing up in Steel City in its heyday, to teaching Delta Force operators about ethics, to turning around a Russian factory that killed five people a year, to Putin stealing a Super Bowl ring.
Bill has not only led an incredibly interesting life but he’s also a man of integrity and character (and that’s something I would rarely say!).
Kelsey officiated and our two friends Jen and John witnessed it. It was at home, we didn’t have a wedding.
Oh, and the three of us are having kids! Adri and Kelsey are both pregnant!
Here are some questions and answers:
(CW: This will probably be upsetting to read if you don’t have a partner, or if you want kids but can’t have them.)
Did you propose?
Yes!
Adri and I used to go on long night walks when we lived in Berkeley. We went back to California for our 10th anniversary trip and spent the day walking around Berkeley, visiting all the places we used to visit. We had dinner at our favorite restaurant and caught up with an old friend there. Then we went walking in North Berkeley where we used to go so many years ago. I was anxiously texting Kelsey throughout the night. We stopped in front of a random church and I set up my Go Pro like I was taking a picture. Then I just dropped down on one knee and proposed! Spoiler alert: she said yes.
Kelsey and I picked out the ring. Adri doesn’t like how big the rock is but I wanted it to be at least one carat. Alas.
What about Kelsey?
We plan to propose to Kelsey sometime too!
Why did Adri and I get married rather than Adri and Kelsey or Kelsey and I?
If all three of us could get legally married, then we would. But we’re playing the game, we’re pragmatists.
We sometimes want to avoid social friction and discomfort as much as we can. If Kelsey and I are staying in the closet about being poly, we will usually individually mention Adri as our partner because otherwise our living in Michigan or Florida wouldn’t make sense.
Also, Adri and I being married is best tax-wise, so Uncle Sam robs us less.
We’re conscious of people like Kelsey’s family feeling weird in the back of their minds about her not being “really” married, despite us thinking government-sanctioned marriage is bullshit.
Does it feel different?
Not really. I guess it feels settled in the sense that we don’t have to go through the bureaucratic hoops anymore.
What about a wedding?
We may have a wedding sometime! We think it’d be really nice to celebrate our relationship with loved ones. We also think it’d be nice to have a wedding for the three of us, but that may feel extra weird for some people.
Relatedly, we know it can be psychologically taxing that our parents don’t have “normal” kids, hitting society’s milestones like getting married to one opposite sex person and having children, or not caring about things outside the Overton window like life extension and AI safety. But that’s the price you pay for having smart kids!
Overall, they’ve been pretty supportive!
You and Adri have been together for over 11 years. You, Adri, and Kelsey have been together over 6 years. Why are you getting married now?
Because we’re having kids!
To be clear: we didn’t get married because Adri was pregnant. We decided we should have kids so we got married before trying to conceive.
I wanted us to be married before we had kids because it felt trashy otherwise. Philosophically, I don’t think people need to be married before they have kids, but it was a thing that would have bothered me personally.
And besides the image, we of course wanted to get married for the ease of navigating medical situations and legal protection. We’re also doing all the legal paperwork we can for the three of us to have power of attorney, be responsible for the kids if one of us dies, etc.
Should you have kids?
(This section that may be upsetting for some to read, especially for women without children.)
The decision to have kids is a really unfair one.
Assuming you have a partner and that both of you are fertile, you have a very limited window in which to make the decision.
You also have to decide with imperfect information. Unless you’re one of those people who “always knew” you wanted kids, you have to guess if you’ll be net happier with or without kids.
How do you find out?
Maybe you look around and see what kids and their parents are like. But you’re not necessarily encouraged by what you see. It seems like for every nice moment with a baby laughing or kids happily playing, there are innumerable ones of kids screaming and crying, not to mention their exhausted and harried-looking parents.
Maybe you even know some parents around your age. You’ll hear them go into long tirades about how they haven’t slept in months since their baby was born. Of course, they’ll add a perfunctory “But it’s all worth it!” at the end of the spiel.
“Is it?” you think to yourself. Are they trying to convince you or themselves?
You try to probe them more but it’s not kosher to say you regret having kids or wish you hadn’t. You’d be seen as a monster, so only with really close friends behind closed doors might you hear those dark thoughts. There’s a selection effect: you’re never going to hear those horror stories about how people truly regret having kids. (We tried to find some of those stories on the Internet, places like r/nokids where people were very motivated to prove to themselves and each other that they made the right decision to *not* have kids, but the only stories they came up with seemed to be along the lines of: “I am a single mom with no social support who just had a baby two months ago and now I hate my life.”)
Your parents’ and grandparents’ generation will tell you it’s worth it to have kids. With mild or full-on condescension, they tell you that eventually you’ll want kids, that you will be happier with them even if you say you won’t.
The problem is that none of this is falsifiable. The parents don’t know what their lives would have been like without kids. And the people without kids don’t know what it would have been like with them. Would they have been happier? We can only guess.
Okay, those are anecdotes. “Let’s look at some ‘scientific’ data!” you say.
You look up some research. Hmm, the data is mixed. Some say parents are happier and some say they aren’t. When you look closely, it seems like parents can report being less happy at any given moment but they also say they’re “happier” overall. What accounts for this discrepancy?
Distinguishing between experiential happiness and reflective happiness helps clear up this mystery.
Experiential happiness is the pleasure you get from something in the moment. Like the taste of a succulent Chinese meal. Reflective value, on the other hand, is the value you get from having done it and looking back on it later.
Let’s say you’re visiting Berkeley and eating at the famous Cheese Board Pizzeria. You bite into a slice of pizza and it tastes so good! That’s experiential happiness.
Now, let’s say it’s a year later, and you’re reading a list of the best restaurants and see the Cheese Board listed. Now you’re thinking about what a great time you had there, and the friends you shared it with, and you feel glad you’ve visited one of the best restaurants! That’s reflective happiness. (Yes, you could argue this is also experiential happiness but it’s more about whether it’s from something in the moment or not.)
I usually end up having more reflective than experiential happiness. For example, when I’m traveling, I can often be stressed out. I may not actually be that happy in the moment. I may be too distracted and overwhelmed. But after the trip is over, I get a lot of reflective value about it either way.
A couple who is watching a movie or going on a trip to Paris may be happier in the moment than parents cleaning up their toddler’s mess. But the parents could feel more reflective happiness or “fullness” looking back at their life than the people who didn’t have kids.
Okay, maybe having kids is best in theory but what about in practice?
(Having kids? In this economy?)
That’s another annoying thing about the timing. There’s a tension between the biology and the economics of it. Biologically, the earlier you have kids, the better. Economically, the later you have kids, the better.
“And is this the world you want to bring them into?” people say while broadly gesturing at the world and pointing to some war or climate change or whatever.
Ironically for an AGI doomer, I think most people talking about how terrible the world is are misguided. I generally buy into the Better Angels of Our Nature argument that things are better now in many ways than they’ve ever been. Most of the things people point to as being worse are actually way better than any other time in history. So unless they’re arguing that no one should have ever had kids at any time in history (anti-natalism is a valid argument), their argument is inconsistent.
Okay, let’s say you’ve decided you want kids!
(This section may be triggering for people without good partners or who cannot have children.)
Great! Do you have a partner you want to have kids with and they want to have kids with you and you’re fertile? Great!
But what if you don’t have a partner? Okay, well how old are you? Because you need to start finding one ASAP.
There are some facets of modern society that make this difficult. I’m thinking of roughly three things that make it particularly hard.
First off, there are a lot of mental health problems and unhappiness in general from the decline of strong social connections, friendships, communities, and otherwise that people like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone have talked about.
For good and bad, humans are tribal creatures and we don’t thrive without strong social connections. Part of those social connections are relationships and families. Living in good economic conditions and in a high-trustsociety would make having kids much more appealing.
Second, there’s the growing infantilization of the current generation where independence has been delayed and adolescence has been more and more drawn out. Our grandparents were married and had kids before most of us figured out our college major.
Some of this is the shitty economy and some of this is other stuff. There are tons of depressing memes about this trend:
Now you may look at the current trend and say it looks great! I agree that we should have the freedom to do what we want.
If you’re happier not going down the traditional path, more power to you (and to me being in a poly triad!).
I just think it’s important to acknowledge the tradeoffs to both the individual and society.
It’s a mistake to tell people that they can focus on a career for the majority of their child-bearing years if one of their goals is to find a partner (or partners) to have kids with. They can’t expect the odds of success to be in their favor.
(This is a general problem people have in arguing. The right thing to do may be whatever they’re advocating, but they don’t give any ground in acknowledging the downsides and tradeoffs.)
I obviously believe in the freedom to go against traditional societal standards. Yes, women should be free to pursue whatever career path they want, and should be free to choose a career over children. But it’s a huge mistake to act like you have plenty of time to figure out finding a partner or having kids after that.
I acknowledge that this is totally unfair, and not the way I would design things if I could. We should be able to have our cake and eat it too!
However, people don’t acknowledge there are tradeoffs in life, and act like “I’m just going to have a career and have children and it’s going to be great!” and then they don’t actually find a partner they like or get around to having kids. Or they do have kids and don’t get to spend time with them. Either way, they aren’t happy with the results, and if they say they are, they are probably defensively lying about how happy they are.
This brings me to the third problem: the current dating market.
Dating apps have probably made things worse on average for the majority of people.
The majority of men lose, with just a small fraction of men getting all the women. And the majority of women lose because they get strung along by the most attractive men who want sex instead of a relationship.
Hookup culture, as fun as it can be, isn’t generally conducive to being in a happy relationship. (Come join the ethical non-monogamy side for that, peeps.)
Dating apps also contribute to women having unrealistic expectations and standards for potential partners. I don’t mean unrealistic like “not being an asshole”. I mean unrealistic like “6’2” college-educated athlete who makes six figures. Also not a conservative!”
Women reading this may think that sounds fine and that they shouldn’t feel bad for wanting such a man! But it’s important to know how few of these men exist and that you face great competition for them. Not to mention, most women would be uncomfortable reading the reverse: “I want a girl who’s skinny with big tits and also a great cook! Not to mention great between the sheets!”
There’s also a cynicism that develops from being on dating apps for too long.
One of the other inherent problems in the dating market is efficient market hypothesis. In a mostly monogamous society, the longer time goes on, the fewer “quality” mates are available because they are already in relationships!
“Wait a minute!” you might be saying. “I’m a quality partner! I’m exceptional even!” I hear you. I know plenty of quality, single people. But you’re like a Lamborghini. Many people want to drive a Lamborghini but most people can’t afford it. The more exceptional you are, the more exceptional you want your partner to be. And by definition, there are fewer exceptional people than normal people, so you already have a much smaller pool of potential partners, in the same way that fewer people can afford a Lamborghini.
So getting back to the kids thing, how in the heck are you supposed to have your dream career AND find a quality partner who has mutual feelings about kids, all long before age 35? I know women personally who have had to make the decision to either:
-Hold out for a good life partner and have kids with them whenever that happens
-Lower their standards and get whoever they can get to knock them up
Men have their own problems to deal with but I think because we have more time biologically to have kids, and women traditionally have more identity placed on having children or being mothers, it’s a bit different.
On the one hand, yes, and on the other hand, absolutely not.
I think the biological clock is always ticking in the sense that aging and entropy in general is always happening and fertility is decreasing.
It wasn’t ticking in the sense that we all felt a strong urge to have kids.
Adri never felt a natural maternal urge and always thought we wouldn’t have kids. Kelsey had mixed feelings about having kids. Historically, I’ve been open to doing whatever my partner wanted. When I was with my first partner, we talked about having kids. When I was with Adri, we talked about not having kids. We continued to assume we wouldn’t have kids when we all got together.
The only thing that changed when I got older was that I would notice myself feeling wistful or warm towards seeing sweet moments between parents and their kids.
This section may sound foreign to some of you. “We didn’t even think about it! We wanted kids so we had them!” Most people just do things. But we don’t take the responsibility of bringing new consciousness into the world lightly.
We recognized the implications of this decision, and that we have a limited window in which to make it. This was important enough to warrant a significant amount of time and consideration. By a lot of consideration, I mean *a lot*.
We ended up spending close to two years deliberating! And I don’t mean it just took that long to get around to it. I mean very long, difficult discussions, journaling, shared Google Docs, etc. We talked about pros and cons on walks, on drives, long into the evenings. I even paid someone to compile all the posts in the rationality sphere about having kids so we could go through them! Part of what we found difficult about this decision was that we didn’t identify with many of the reasons people seem to list for having kids (e.g. “I felt an emptiness that needed to be filled”, or “I love babies, I’ve just dreamed of having them my whole life!”).
Why we thought we should
Humans evolved to enjoy having children. The three of us are all unique snowflakes, but because we enjoy all the other things humans evolved to enjoy, like food and sex and status, we thought we’d enjoy having kids too.
We also think it’s best to try to avoid the biggest average downside surrounding children, which is being existentially upset we didn’t have them.
When I say average, I’m contrasting that with horrific but very unlikely potential downsides, like having kids with extreme health problems that make them suffer a lot and require a ton of care, or having a little Omen psychopath kid.
If you don’t have kids, you don’t have to worry about issues like that, but the biggest *average* downside surrounding children is regretting not having had them. We thought it best to let the most common potential downside guide our decision-making rather than extreme but very rare ones.
Based on our personalities and spontaneous desire for kids thus far, we do think we’d be less likely to be very psychologically affected by not having kids the way others are.
Why?
I think that much of this suffering comes from either being in a mediocre to bad relationship, or being single and alone.
People also have a lot of confusion about “meaning” and “life’s purpose” that contributes. They keep their preferences and desires in a Schrödinger cat’s state of uncertainty, so they don’t have to acknowledge they are in a shitty place in life.
I think some people’s hesitation in saying they want kids is the same type of copium where people say they’re happy being single. If they were in a great relationship, they’d feel differently.
We thought about freezing eggs or embryos to buy us more time, but it seemed like an extreme hassle, and the odds of success aren’tencouraging.
Even though all of us are the kind of people who would naturally stress about doing parenting “right”, it helps that we recognize that parenting matters very little for long-term outcomes. (Read Bryan Caplan.) Genes matter most.
We’ll also be raising kids in a very different world. One in which they can’t be competitive in a job market and one in which they won’t need to be competitive (because of AGI).
(It’s kind of a bummer considering the three of us would make some rapacious kids.)
All parents have children knowing their children will one day die. Some unfortunate ones live to see it.
We thought about waiting to have kids because (if humanity doesn’t kill itself first) we’ll probably develop the technology for people to have kids at any age.
This would be amazing because then you wouldn’t have to guess if you wanted kids in the future. You could just wait until you wanted them and have them then.
There’s also the benefit of being able to have *gasp* designer babies in the future, which would be better so we could eliminate disease, neuroticism, and other things that make people suffer. What I wouldn’t do to get rid of my unnecessary biodetermined suffering!
People against designer babies are usually hyper-empathetic to those less fortunate, and rather than trying to raise people up so no one suffers, they bring everyone down. It’s the equivalent of making more people poor rather than ensuring that other people can be rich.
They also feel insecure about themselves and their own characteristics and imagine no one wanting them.
They also don’t understand that sexual selection does the same thing, just less efficiently.
As for AGI and the AI apocalypse, we don’t think our children will suffer if it goes wrong. It’s likely AGI will wipe us out very quickly and indifferently, like by releasing a toxin in the air that kills us instantly.
Obviously, we’re hoping for the post-scarcity and post-suffering utopia for us and our children, and for everyone.
Why it’s a bit easier for us
First off, there are three of us. Having kids will be *much* easier with three people.
One of us can watch them while the other two go out on a date. Adri and Kelsey can sleep in different rooms while I stay up and watch a movie or play video games or whatever while the babies (hopefully) sleep.
There are tradeoffs. If we had kids, it would be more difficult for all three of us to travel, especially internationally. But this is a normal downside all parents face.
We’re also not poor. Parenting is stressful enough without being constantly worried about how you’re going to afford everything. I knew since I was young, I would never have kids while being poor.
The only real downside to having three parents is that it makes the poly thing even weirder for people. We already get funny questions at border crossings because there are three of us together. We usually say Adri and I are married and Kelsey is our friend, but as one border guard astutely pointed out, “You’re married and you live with your friend…?”
What has it been like so far?
The process of trying to conceive is stressful. If you don’t already have kids, it’s easy to ruminate on whether pregnancy is going to happen at all because you don’t know if you can until it happens. “Will this be the time?” It’d be especially stressful if you’ve struggled at all with infertility! Luckily for us, it happened very quickly.
And once you do conceive, you also have to try to not get too attached to the baby because there’s such a high rate of miscarriage in the first trimester.
How extreme should you get with your diet or not? How extreme should you get with your environment? Should we be taking extreme measures to reduce microplastics or fluoride? What is pseudoscience, and what is something that’s just understudied and probably best to avoid?
Some people might say, “Just don’t worry about it!” but would those people be okay with children ingesting lead paint or asbestos?
Other people might say, “Just don’t stress too much about it if you’re getting the lower-hanging fruit right,” and I would say they have something of a point. It’s easy to Pascal’s-mug yourself.
Liberals and conservatives both get science wrong.
Liberals think we should “believe” and “trust in science” which is mind-blowingly naive. (Remember the replication crisis? Or how in February and March 2020 when the Surgeon General and the CDC told everyone to not use masks for COVID?) This is coming from someone who mostly just cares about technological development which is based on science.
Conservatives get too into conspiracy theories. They have too many false positives and can reject life-saving things like measles vaccines. They fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy and don’t realize the universe is indifferent and hostile.
Clinicians and scientists also have their own problems. (Don’t get me started with bioethicists!)
Clinicians will give you this blanket list of things to avoid like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, more than 200mg a day of caffeine, raw fish, soft cheese, fresh fruit juice, and cold lunch meat. There’s no distinction between something that’s harmful in any amount, something that’s harmful above a certain threshold, and something that’s only harmful if it’s already contaminated. But then again, they have to make rules that are easy to follow for most people (and most people can’t follow rules as simple as “Take your heart medication”).
As for scientists, it’s very hard to run good studies and get good evidence. And nutritional science is one of the worst fields. This video illustrates this perfectly. One minute, eggs can be like smoking a cigarette and the next they can be essential.
So you can have the view that you shouldn’t worry about anything by default, and you only restrict something if the evidence meets a certain threshold.
Or you can have the opposite view, where everything is restricted until it meets the threshold of being safe.
Or you can be somewhere in the middle.
Ironically, I think medical professionals are too much on the side of the former: if there’s no evidence for it, they don’t worry about it. Some of this is practical because they don’t want to freak patients out about trivial things, and because most patients won’t change their behavior anyway, and they just want them to focus on not smoking or drinking or whatever. But if you’re trying to play a tighter game with regards to optimal baby health, you have to explore these things.
One way of doing this is to think about the ancestral environment and what we likely adapted to. This is more refined than just going by what’s “natural”. You’d have to take your own ancestral background into account. Maybe you’re not adapted to drink milk. Maybe you’re more adapted to a vegetarian diet, like if you’re from South Asia.
The 80/20 that’s recommended is to take folic acid and not smoke.
We know we got the most important thing right, though, which is choosing good partners to mate with. Adriana Lima got her beauty secret on point:
So here we are, nervous but excited!
It’s been quite the adventure getting here! Adri and my long journey here. The three of us getting together. Being in the closet for so long. Coming out to our family. Then coming out to everyone. And finally deciding to have kids!
Please hit us with all the advice you have!
What are your parenting tips?! Favorite resources?
If you enjoyed this, you should definitely check out:
What would you do if you thought the world was going to end? How would you live?
That’s the question Adri, Kelsey, and I have been asking ourselves.
I’ve been really existentially depressed lately and thought I should finally talk publicly about it.
Why have I been depressed?
I think humanity is going to be wiped out by artificial intelligence in less than 10 years. Maybe 15-20 years but probably less.
Normal people are going, “Wtf?! Isn’t that a bit alarmist?!” while those in the rationality community are going “Yeah, sucks big time…”
History of Apocalyptic Predictions
Apocalypticism is nothing new. The religious have been thinking they were in end times for millennia. The early Christians and Jesus himself (if he existed) believed they were living in end times. Modern-day Christians love to point to current events as fulfilling the eschatological (apocalyptic) prophecies described in Revelations.
People in the Bay Area will remember Harold Camping’s church’s billboards declaring Judgment Day coming on May 21, 2011.
Well, as everyone reading this knows, that day came and went…
Description and Dangers of Artificial General Intelligence
Why do we need to worry about AI so much? After all, the ones we have now aren’t really dangerous.
It’s artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that will kill us.
My description of AGI and why it’s so dangerous is going to be relatively short (because there are much better resources out there that I link to below.) A layperson can picture an AGI as the AIs that are depicted in movies. Picture Vision in the Marvel movies or C-3PO in Star Wars. They are generally intelligent in the way humans are in the sense that they can solve a variety of problems.
C-3PO isn’t just a fancy Google Translate. He can solve novel problems (albeit neurotically).
Contrast this with narrow AIs that can only do very specific things. A chess AI can easily beat the best human players in the world, but it can’t figure out how to make coffee or take the SAT for you.
Movies tend to have AGIs as casual characters but hyper-dramatically downplay how different things would be if they actually existed. They are depicted as smart assistants rather than entities that would completely change the entire landscape of the earth.
Okay, so an AGI could understand things and solve novel problems at least as well as humans do. Why is this a gigantic problem?
The Dangers from AI are Not What Most People Think
Artificial constructs have always struck fear into us, from the tales of the golem in Jewish folklore to Asimov’s laws of robotics failing to prevent mayhem in his stories.
But popular culture has made people confused about what the real dangers of AGI are.
People anthropomorphize AIs. They think the “oppressed” robots will rise up and overthrow their human slavemasters. Or that they’ll want to betray and kill humans for some other malicious reason like the Terminator.
Even worse, people are worried the AGI won’t be “fair” or will say an offensive word.
The main difficulty in safely building an AGI is the “alignment problem”. The alignment problem refers to the difficulty in building an AI that does what humans actually want rather than exactly what they asked for.
Toy example: parents and teachers want their kids to have better grades. The AI changes their grades in the computer. Even though this accomplishes the goal on paper, what parents and teachers actually want is for their kids to have learned the material.
The tl;dr is it’s incredibly, incredibly difficult to figure out what we as humans actually “want” and get an AGI to do that.
It might be the most difficult problem humanity has ever faced because we have to get it right on the first try. This hardly ever happens, the first iteration is never perfectly safe. We didn’t build a death-proof car on the first try. We still haven’t!
It’s like those old stories with a genie where you have to be super careful what you wish for because, while you may get exactly what you asked for, it wasn’t what you actually wanted.
The classic fictional example is Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer. Imagine you’ve started a company that sells paper clips. It’s a boring but honest living. Business is absolutely booming (paper clip jewelry has become all the rage on TikTok) so you tell your AGI to make as many paper clips as possible.
“The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.”
The story ends with a lot of paper clips and all of us dead.
“…given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.”
“Wait, why would we all die?”
One reason the AI might kill us is to ensure we don’t stop it from accomplishing the goal we originally gave it.
Another way it might kill us is by using up the resources we need to survive to help it accomplish its goal. It might help to picture FernGully or Avatar where people are chopping down the rainforest which kills off the species that live there. In this case, the AGI could chop down our “rainforest”.
I know what you’re thinking. “That’s stupid, John!” You’ve already thought of a bunch of solutions to this silly problem! Maybe we just keep the AI isolated in a box and it can only give instructions that we can just decide to ignore. Or we have a big red stop button we can push to turn it off. Or we come up with a set of rules it has to follow like Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
All good ideas on the surface that don’t work in practice. If you’re wondering why, please see the resources I link down below!
“Isn’t it silly to think an AI could get this powerful?”
Imagine you’re in a Rubik’s Cube solving contest with an AGI named Puzzler.
Solving a Rubik’s Cube for the first time with someone’s instruction takes a person about an hour. Solving it for the first time with no help takes a very, very long time.
Now, it’s the first time solving the Rubik’s Cube for both of you. All you know is what the Rubik’s Cube is supposed to look like when it’s solved and how you can move it.
The catch is that you have a minute to solve the cube and Puzzler has 100 years.
Think of everything that’s happened your whole life, and then multiply that by two or three or four. That’s how long Puzzler has to solve the Rubik’s Cube.
Not much of a competition, is it?
The real-life analogy here is that we are thinking in super slow-motion compared to an AGI. The AGI is like the Flash zooming around the globe at superspeed before you’ve even gotten up off the couch.
“Can’t we just not build AGI? Or wait until we’ve solved the alignment problem?”
Unfortunately, some of the most difficult problems humans face are called coordinationproblems. You could even argue they are the central problem humans face.
You’ll hear smug assholes who think they’ve solved the world’s problems by saying, “If only we could just…” For example, “if only we could all just be grown-ups” and get rid of nuclear weapons or agree not to go to war. People who talk like this don’t understand the game theory or perverse incentives involved.
If coordination problems were easy, then we wouldn’t have wasted trillions in the Cold War and would have elected better leaders than Trump and Biden.
Not building AGI is a coordination problem. Currently, the richest and most powerful countries and companies on earth are pouring billions of dollars into developing it as fast as they can because it will be insanely profitable right up until it kills us. This is even more difficult because a majority of those involved don’t truly understand AI safety.
Imagine there’s a spell that if cast destroys the world. Unfortunately, you have to be 99th percentile wisdom to realize that the spell destroys the world, if you have less wisdom than that, you will almost always think the spell saves the world.
It is much harder to build safe AI than to stop nuclear weapons development because nukes require resources that are much scarcer than those required to build an AGI.
Heaven and Hell
We’re probably going to fail and inadvertently kill us all.
But on the other hand, if we get everything right and successfully develop a safe AGI, we will be living in a post-scarcity and post-suffering paradise. It’ll be like our wish to the genie went more right than we could have imagined.
We’ll face tough philosophical questions like how to deal with wireheading, etc., but still, it will be heaven on earth. We’ll solve all problems facing humanity: scarcity, aging and disease, etc.
A part of me wants us to roll the dice on building AGI so our parents and other loved ones have a better chance of hitting longevity escape velocity. But I know that it’s far more likely we’ll build an unsafe AGI and all die instead.
“I’m skeptical this will happen!”
Let me just say it: I’m a bigger skeptic than you. Everyone knows I’m a huge skeptic, to the point of annoying them by not buying into most of their beliefs. “We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing.”
“But this sounds like science fiction!”
So does traveling thousands of miles in a few hours in a flying metal box, but we do it every day. Something sounding like science fiction now doesn’t mean it’s bullshit.
If you believe AI can never do the things a human can do, would you have believed AI could do all the things it can do now? Are you even aware of what AI can do now?
Would you have thought it could chat as well as LaMDA can or generate images like DALL-E can, or are those just novelties?
2018: The GAN is are failing at AI. Look, it can't even generate a consistent bedroom.
2022: DALL-E2 fails at AI, look it can't even generate "A donkey is playing tug-of-war against an octopus. The donkey holds the rope in its mouth. A cat is jumping over the rope." pic.twitter.com/CLSs8nXRdZ
In some ways, I’ve been a rationalist my whole life. But I discovered the rationality community many years ago when my friend, Robert, introduced me to the rationality blog and forum, LessWrong.
LessWrong is where I first learned about the dangers of AI and it all made sense to me. People in the rationality community, especially Eliezer Yudkowsky, have been among the very early advocates of the alignment problem.
I’ve been aware of this problem for years but am posting this now because it really feels like we’re getting close. The advancements in AI have only gotten more incredible, and I still haven’t seen any convincing arguments against the alignment problem.
There are debates about how fast and how dangerous AGI will be. Among the people aware of this problem, I’m firmly in the doomer camp, as opposed to the optimistic or at least slightly less doomer camps.
I think when you recognize some basic assumptions about AGI, it becomes clear.
It’s analogous to how I see the landscape around life extension. The average person doesn’t know anything about life extension and doesn’t support it even if they do. But the second we get life extension technology, they would be bitching they didn’t have it yet.
And even among those actively working in “anti-aging”, most of them are doing unimportant work and aren’t focused on the problems that actually matter. It’s the streetlight effect where they are working on things that are publishable rather than important.
‘Mathematician Richard Hamming was known to approach experts from other fields and ask “what are the important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”.’
So it is with AGI and AI safety work. Most AI researchers don’t care about safety at all or are worried about stupid shit like “fairness” or if the AI will create enough art with black people in it.
And even many people working in “AI safety” are confused about what the real problems are. In other words, the field is “Not great, Bob!”
Does it mean anything that many AI people and other “smart” people are not worried? Absolutely not. People who are supposed to be smart and are successful in certain areas say dumb shit all the time. Like believing in free will or buying into braindead political arguments. This is the natural state. Very few people are good at reasoning and taking their own beliefs seriously.
It’s Isolating
I feel isolated. Even more isolated than I normally do.
It’s been sucking away motivation to work on projects because it feels pointless if I’m just going to die in ten years, and in most cases it is.
I already have a problem with feeling too cynical. I already have a problem relating to most people and their conversations.
Everyone is so tribal. Climate change is basically a non-issue existentially, but that’s all people care about! (And if you do care about climate change but don’t support nuclear power, you’re worse than the rolling coal assholes!)
If you believe climate change is going to kill us, you can feel good watching Greta Thunberg. You can shit-talk big corporations while feeling smug with your friends.
If you’re conservative, you can lament to your fellow church members about how evil abortionists are, and talk about how society needs more Jesus in their lives and feel validated and connected.
With AI, there’s the rationality community that gets it (although, that isn’t universal) and then there’s everyone else. I wish more people in my daily life, and in general, got it.
Most people don’t understand these issues, and many of the people who do are kind of cold and not personable. Don’t get me wrong, some rationalists are among the warmest and best people I’ve met. But when you’re at Effective Altruism meetups and people are purportedly trying to do the most good while being some of the least warm people on the planet, it feels a little disillusioning.
There are so few truly smart people. It’s isolating and hard not to succumb to cynicism.
When I was a kid, it was always hammered into us that we could be a big (smart) fish in a small pond, but there was a great big world out there with even bigger (smarter) fish.
Well, where the hell are they?
Most of the people I interact with are physicians, PhDs, professors, programmers, engineers, accomplished artists, etc. They are in the 99th percentile of intelligence. And most of these people suck at thinking! They can’t reason through arguments or take beliefs seriously.
To be clear, I know super smart people exist, I’m just depressed at how few of them there are. Even fewer actually smart people exist than you’d think, because even most “super smart” people have an incredibly big hole in their ability to reason through things philosophically.
Most of the responses from the few people I’ve talked to about it have been pretty underwhelming. I know it’s a hard thing to process, but Jesus. Only a couple of people have had anything close to a rational response to it.
It’s like Don’t Look Up except with a working analogy.
What are we doing differently?
It colors most of our discussions. When Adri, Kelsey, and I talk about the future, it’s always with the assumption that the AI apocalypse is coming, and coming fast. We’ve stopped imagining past ten years into the future, and it’s a really bitter pill to swallow.
Our focus is switched now to maximizing the next five to ten years, especially the next five.
We’re considering sacrificing career capital (which may be rendered moot by near-term narrow AI anyways) and taking a lot of time off to travel. We’re less focused on doing a startup. I’ve been winding down projects to the few I really want to do. I’ve been reading the books and watching the movies and listening to the music I really want to before I die.
We’re lucky we haven’t had to make any hard trade-offs yet. An example would be if Adri had to do five more years of training, and she got accepted into a place like Mayo Clinic that is a great place to train but a pretty mediocre place to live. That would be a tough trade-off because she’s come this far (sunk cost or not) and loves what she does, but do we really want to spend the potential last years of our lives living in the middle of nowhere, far away from friends and family?
Luckily, her getting a fellowship position at UCSF is perfect. It’s her dream program, and we’ll be close to most of our family and friends.
Kelsey has been considering working in AI safety, but there’s a trade-off. We don’t know how much we could contribute, and if we’re going to die anyways, that time would be better spent trying to enjoy the time we have left.
It’s pretty hard to function when you know it’s more than likely that everyone you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever loved, everyone in the world is going to be dead soon.
Conclusion
As a kid, I was obsessed with the Terminator movies. That connection is not lost on me given that I feel how Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor felt — knowing the apocalypse is coming, and not only does no one give a shit, they actively try to stop them from doing anything.
Some smart people are doing their best. I feel gratitude toward the people who have been trying to do something about this and I really hope we can make it and come out alright.
Otherwise, I expect we’re all going to be dead by 2030.
There’s nothing more I’d love to be wrong about. Thanks for listening. I appreciate all of you.
Scott Alexander’s Superintelligence FAQ is probably the best succinct post for the smart layperson. Keep in mind, it was written six years ago so the technology has only gotten more insane since then:
“Eight villages in our district have had significant to total structural damage from mudslides. Furthermore, the weather conditions conducive to mudslides have only been increasing in the past decade.”
Professor Cristian Avendaño clicked the button and a list of temperatures, wind conditions, and annual rainfall popped up on the screen. He looked every bit the absent-minded professor in his weathered sport coat with elbow patches. But his mind was far from absent.
“As you can see, the water accumulation is a serious problem.”
More graphs and figures appeared.
The professor glanced up and saw half the council nodding politely and the other half trying to stifle yawns. Most of the villagers were on their phones or peering around the auditorium.
If they would have read the slide, they would have seen that the professor’s model predicted the chances of a mudslide destroying their village were one in three in the next five years.
The head of the council pressed down on his mic.
“Thank you for your presentation, Professor. We’ll take your suggestions under advisement. Now, Ms. Zelada, you have something you’d like to speak to us about?” his voice perking up at the end.
Eliza Zelada stood up confidently and smiled.
“Yes, thank you, Councilman Ricardo.”
Her stroll up to the lectern would have been equally at home on the runway with her long, red dress flowing around her. She leaned forward and tapped the mic.
“I am here today to talk to you about a grave problem that requires our immediate action,” she said, spreading her arms out for effect.
The villagers began sitting up in their seats and clearing their throats. The room was suddenly at attention.
She clicked the remote.
A giant photograph appeared on the screen. It was of a bunny huddled in a trash pile, surrounded by plastic bottles and dirty newspapers.
Gasps filled the room.
“Is the bunny okay, Mamá?” a little girl quietly sobbed.
Eliza paused and took in the moment before continuing.
“How can this be our lovely village? How can this be our Salgar? We must do something about this! Immediately!”
Cheers filled the room. Councilman Ricardo clapped the loudest of anyone. It had been rumored the councilman and Eliza were having an affair.
Gerardo the restaurant owner stood up. “From now on, I will only use sustainable products!”
Applause. Eliza nodded approvingly.
Mrs. Domingo, the matronly figure who watched many of the village’s children while their mothers worked, stood up. “We will switch to reusable diapers!”
The professor started scribbling some calculations on his yellow legal pad. His brow furrowed. Taking into account the energy required to manufacture reusable diapers and the cost of washing them, he doubted they would result in a net reduction in pollution. It might take years to break even. They would also pose an increased risk of spreading disease, especially given the shoddy hygiene standards of some members of the village.
Edgar, the shopkeeper, promised to get rid of plastic bags.
More cheers.
Eliza was speaking again. “Councilman, how much is in the emergency fund account?”
The councilman cleared his throat and adjusted his tie. Obviously, a little uncomfortable at having to actually put a figure on it. “Around 50,000.”
“It’s not nearly enough but it will be a start!”
All of the villagers stood up and met her words with thunderous applause. Councilman Ricardo looked a little less enthusiastic but clapped nonetheless. The cheering and assurances to act closed out the night.
The village held another meeting the following month.
“Now, an announcement! Reusable totes with a lovely illustration of a bunny on them will be available for purchase after the meeting. A percentage of the proceeds will go to the Beautify Salgar Project!”
Councilman Ricardo watched nervously as his wife and Eliza smiled and exchanged banter. Eliza had designed the bag and his wife had drawn the bunny. They had gone to great lengths to find material for the totes within the region after an anxious villager brought up “the importance of buying local”.
Avendaño knew that it was much cheaper and required much less energy to produce material in the East than here and that the efficiency in global transport would make the travel cost a pittance. He thought about proposing the village focus on its comparative advantage but had learned enough to know that the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo would be lost on the villagers.
“The bunny will soon be nesting among the totes.” he muttered to himself.
After the meeting, Eliza waved at him on his way out. “Have a good night, Professor. Oh, and take a bag!” She handed the professor one of the totes. The bunny on it was quite cute, he had to admit.
“Thank you, Eliza.”
Avendaño’s mother was getting up in years, so he would visit her every few months to be a good son.
He packed his clothes, some books, and the tote in his worn brown suitcase and lugged it to the bus stop. The clouds in the sky foretold rain. He felt his lips moving and realized he was mouthing a prayer of protection. Something his mother taught him when he was a boy. He knew it was superstitious and silly but couldn’t seem to shake the habit, especially in moments of worry like this.
The bus came and they were off. The bus’ lurching up and down the mountain roads made his heart race and he tried not to calculate the odds of a catastrophic accident.
His mother lived in a village even more remote than Salgar. The professor had made many fruitless attempts to set her up with a generator for electricity but she would have none of it. The old woman was stuck in her ways and happy enough.
At least it was a good opportunity to pour himself into his work. That is, when his mother wasn’t telling him stories of how different the world was back then. He looked around the humble home and wondered if his mother knew just how much the rest of the world had changed.
The rains came and poured and poured. He patched some holes in the roof to stop the leaks coming down. His thoughts went to his home and his village but he had no way to reach them.
Finally, it came time to leave. He kissed his mother goodbye.
“Focus on finding a wife, Cristian, as much as you focus on your books.”
“Yes, Mamá.”
She said the same thing each visit.
He walked in the rain to the bus stop, huddling under the awning with the only other person waiting.
“Hello,” said the man. A poor farmer by the look of him.
“Hello,” said the professor. He liked poor farmers. They were honest.
“Quite some rain,” the farmer said, looking up at the storm.
“Yes, quite some rain,” said Avendaño somberly.
The bus made its way back through the mountain roads and by a miracle, didn’t get stuck anywhere despite what seemed to be the driver’s intent.
It finally stopped and he waved goodbye to the farmer.
He suddenly felt light-headed. As he looked up, his knees buckled and he dropped to the ground.
Mud covered everything. The homes that once housed him and his neighbors were now mangled casualties of nature. The belongings of the villagers were now mixed among the mud and trash.
His village of Salgar was no more.
He cursed the villagers and cursed himself for not doing enough.
Some movement caught his eye. A white flash in the brown sea. It was the bunny, hopping off in the direction of the trash-strewn village of Magallo. The professor let out a defeated sigh and stood up to join it.
Epilogue
Six months later…
“Professor Avendaño, we appreciate your presentation on uh… ‘the likelihood of H. hampei destroying the local economy in the next five years’. A little bleak and alarmist but I suppose someone should play the pessimist.”
Avendaño sighed. The Councilwoman was already moving on to the next speaker.
“Santiago, you have something you like to talk about?”
“Yes, thank you, Councilwoman Medina. There is an issue we must do something about. An issue that absolutely requires immediate attention! Our church is in vital need of remodeling. Is the House of the Lord supposed to look like a rundown dump? Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe deserves the best!”
“Would the council like to vote on an emergency measure to increase the sales tax to raise funds for the church?” Mr. Castillo asked.
“Excellent idea, Mr. Castillo!” said Santiago. In fact, he had arranged for Castillo to ask the question at that very moment.
“Very well. All in favor?” Councilwoman Medina said, surveying the room.
The vote was a unanimous yes except for Salvador, the shopkeeper.
“Old Salvador!” called Santiago. “Always a holdout.”
Salvador scoffed. “I heard that your cleaning company got the contract for this job,” he said. “How much was the contract for, Santiago?”
“Come now, Salvador!” said Santiago with a smile. “We can’t only think of ourselves. How can you put a price on the beautification of our holy church?”
“You deserve to be beatified for your graciousness,” Salvador said, gritting his teeth.
A few weeks later, the professor and the bunny were on their morning walk along the coffee plant fields.
The church was as filthy as ever. Cleaning efforts were supposed to start last week but Santiago was holidaying in the city.
Mrs. Martinez passed by.
“What a lovely bag, Professor! We need something like that for Magallo.”
“Thank you, Julia.”
Just then, he noticed a small black beetle land on her shoulder. He peered down at it. H. hampei. The coffee borer.
Professor Cristian Avendaño groaned, wondering where he and the bunny would go next.
Background
I was writing a message to a friend about how to think better about cause prioritization and decided to write a short story to illustrate the points better.
I was trying to convey these themes:
Not all causes are of equal importance.
Things that seem more virtuous on the surface are often not, or at least they’re much more complicated than they appear (e.g. banning plastic bags or buying local).
Presentation and persuasive ability matter.
And these were some of the articles I was thinking about while writing:
Our biology affects our thinking more than our thinking affects our biology.
Grandpa
Grandpa always liked to tell you about his glory days, as a schoolboy and when he was a young buck in the Navy.
“I was so rowdy as a youngster. The dumb things us boys would feud about… mostly girls,” he says, winking.
He leans back in his chair and continues. “We’d puff our chests out, talking big and acting tough, and at least a couple of us would always go home with a fat lip or missing tooth. I feel dumb just thinking about it. We were so young and stupid. Take it from me: don’t act so foolish! Learn from Grandpa’s hard-won wisdom!”
Grandpa thinks he doesn’t do those things anymore because he’s gotten wiser.
I say Grandpa isn’t really wiser, he just has less testosterone. After all, why doesn’t Grandma have a bunch of stories of her getting into bar fights? Because Grandma was built different.
“I have a genetic condition. People like me are prone to violent fantasy and jealous rage; we are over 10 times more likely to commit murder and over 40 times more likely to commit sexual assault. Most prisoners suffer from my condition, and almost everyone on death row has it. Relative to other people, we have an abundance of testosterone, which is associated with dominance and aggression, and a deficit in oxytocin, associated with compassion. My sons share my condition, and so does my father.” –Paul Bloom
“Males and females play quite different roles in reproduction. It would be a striking coincidence if the distribution of abilities and behavioral patterns that was optimal for one sex turned out to also be optimal for the other, rather like two entirely different math problems just happening to have the same answer.” – David Friedman
Chris
Mary and Chris had been happily married for twenty-five years. They had three beautiful kids. Mary loved watching Chris play catch with the kids or seeing him teach them about one topic or another. Their friends felt envious of their close and loving relationship.
But, one day, Mary realized Chris had been acting differently. He hardly paid attention to her or the kids. He started acting erratically, making impulsive decisions, and spending recklessly. She wondered if he was having an affair or if it was something like a midlife crisis.
She tried talking to him. He agreed to go to a couples therapist. The sessions seemed to go well enough but there wasn’t any real change from them.
The sessions would go something like:
“Mary, it sounds like Chris was more frugal before and although you’re okay with some spending, you feel he’s going overboard. Chris, what do you think?”
“Life’s short, Doc. After all, what’s money for?”
One morning, Chris slammed into the trash cans as he was backing the car out of the driveway.
Mary came running out. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Where’d they come from?” said Chris. “I didn’t even see them!”
“Maybe we should make an appointment with the optometrist,” said Mary.
“Okay.”
A week later, Chris sat down in the optometrist’s chair. The optometrist said, “Cover your right eye, look at this picture of a barn, and tell me what you can see on the barn.”
“What barn?” said Chris. “I can’t see a barn at all. What are you talking about?”
“Hmm, that’s not good,” the optometrist said.
He ended up referring Chris to a doctor who had Chris get an MRI.
As he lay down in the giant magnet, Chris felt lucky he wasn’t claustrophobic like Mary. The hum of the machine was almost relaxing.
The imaging of his brain came back and showed a pattern that looked almost like a butterfly. It was a glioblastoma, a brain tumor.
“This explains the sudden behavioral changes,” the doctor told Mary.
Chris didn’t watch an inspirational talk on life being too short that imparted wisdom and caused his impulsive and erratic behavior. A brain tumor caused those changes.
Jane
The move from sunny California to not-so-sunny Minnesota was stressful but Jane made the best of it. She always did.
She felt lonely at first but luckily Jane was someone who tackled problems head-on. Soon she had signed up for most of the local meetups. The people were nice enough but Jane still felt down. A few months in and things hadn’t improved. In fact, they had gotten worse. She felt downright depressed. Her mood seemed to match the gloomy weather.
By chance, a coworker talked about how the bright lights he had gotten had cured his problem – something called seasonal affective disorder – and he finally felt happier than he had in years. She was skeptical lights were what caused such a big change, but he kept going on and on about it so she decided to try it.
She ordered the lights he recommended and set them up. They were so bright! She felt like a lizard in a terrarium. But then she noticed something. She had more energy! Her mood was like night and day compared to before.
Jane didn’t need positive thinking to fix her mood. She needed light therapy.
Summary
It’s easy to fall into these types of narratives about getting wiser. After all, they make sense right? The longer you live, the more knowledge and experience you accumulate, which naturally leads to becoming wiser, right?
Yes, people can grow wiser over time, and thoughts can cause physical and behavioral changes, but it is too easy to fall under the illusion that we’re more affected by wisdom than we actually are.
People like to talk about “hard work” as copium. Sure, someone may have incredible “natural talent” but they would be outperformed by someone who keeps putting in the work. So the myth goes. What people miss is that industriousness and related things like perseverance and grit are innate too. They would be better placed in the “natural talent” bucket.
This is why watching an inspirational video with a Navy Seal talking about perseverance, or a motivational speaker who still has a bright and bubbly attitude despite being severely disabled, won’t make the viewers watching it suddenly develop “grit” or lower their innate neuroticism.
Better evidence for an intervention is that it had *lasting* change on someone who didn’t already have those traits.
What should we do about this?
Now that we’re all a bit wiser 😉 after reading this, what should we do?
I’m glad you asked.
Let me tell you one of the biggest misconceptions people have when it comes to irrational thoughts and poor mood.
Ready?
Most people think they have irrational thoughts and then feel bad, when in actuality they are feeling bad and then having irrational thoughts.
Read that again.
Most people think they have irrational thoughts and then feel bad, when in actuality they are feeling bad and then having irrational thoughts.
They have the causal direction backward.
In the same way that researchers are wasting time focusing on curing Alzheimer’s or cancer rather than fixing the upstream problem of aging, we tend to focus on issues too far downstream.
So what should we be doing differently knowing that?
Focus on upstream interventions.
In other words, less Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, and more morning walks for exercise and sun exposure.
Those about to reply with the “Why not both?” GIF, if CBT-type exercises are effective for you, then by all means please keep at them.
Yes, if your executive function is broken it can be hard to work on anything, but experimenting with physical interventions often takes less work. If you greatly improve your sleep by taking melatonin at the right time, or fix your energy levels by supplementing vitamin B12, you’ve vastly improved your life without grappling with your executive function.
Plus, the energy and mood increases from easier interventions can give you more fuel to tackle harder improvements.
Find the path of least resistance to exercising. Exercising doesn’t have to suck. We evolved to be active. Put effort into finding movement that feels fun.
Keep it simple and just go for a walk outside. Play whatever music gets you most pumped. Watch inspirational videos or just workout videos on YouTube. Try different sports. Do a boxing workout one day and a yoga workout the other. Did you like one better than the other?
Let’s say we want to meet a stranger, say an interesting personality in the tech world or rationality sphere or whatever.
So I email them to set it up.
This would be easy if it was just me meeting them:
“Hey, would love to grab a coffee or whatever when we’re both free…”
(I don’t drink coffee or beer but it’s smoothest to say “grab a coffee” to indicate a casual meeting. “Or whatever” shows I’m flexible if an alternate activity works better like lunch or walking around or whatever, haha.)
It’s also easy for two of us:
“Hey, my wife and I would love to grab coffee or whatever when we’re all free…”
It’s a little non-standard to have your wife come to a meeting but not super weird.
But the three of us make it awkward no matter what:
“Hey, my wives and I would love to grab coffee when we’re all free…”
I sound like a polygamist living in the Utah desert now.
Okay, “wives” sounds really odd and no one uses it. How about “partners”?
“Hey, my partners and I would love to grab coffee when we’re all free…”
Now there’s an ambiguity problem. Does partner mean “wife” or “business partner”?
And it doesn’t acknowledge or show self-awareness that it’s a bit strange.
It sounds like something a neurotic hippie parent would lead with:
“Our son Caldex has to have his morning beet juice otherwise his day is completely thrown off. And he can’t be next to any WIFI signals. Or gluten.”
Even though most of the people I meet are weird or different in many ways, I still try to have the first interactions go as smoothly as possible given we have no rapport built yet.
Many people are chill with the poly thing but starting the interaction like that can feel a little high-maintenance. It’s like saying “Hi, I’m Anna and I have three dogs!” It’s like, “Okay, that’s cool but no one asked…”
Now, none of us mind being in the closet for the purposes of making an interaction less awkward. In this case, one of us plays the best friend.
But that’s awkward too…
“Hey, my wife and our best friend would love to grab coffee when we’re all free…”
Who brings their best friend to a meeting like this? Now we sound like weird people who blog about vacations together.
We can meta-communicate and explain that we’re poly:
“Hey, my partners and I (we’re in a poly triad and aren’t trying to make it weird but just want to give context as to why there’s three people there, haha) would love to grab coffee or whatever…”
But then it feels like we are those people who need to shove our outlier status in people’s faces. I’m not saying it should be like that but it *feels* like that. It feels like it misrepresents us.
I still haven’t found a perfect solution to this problem. In the end, we usually either meta-communicate that we’re poly, or someone plays the best friend.
Maybe in the email, I’ll just include a link to this post. (But then it looks egotistical and self-indulgent to link to my own posts. It’s signaling all the way down!)
Have any ideas/recommendations? Do you encounter any similar problems for your own particular situations you have to explain/give context for?
If you enjoyed this, you should definitely check out:
Stop quoting the time of the Doomsday Clock like it’s evidence of something. The Doomsday Clock is always predicting apocalypse. The earliest it’s ever been was 17 minutes to midnight in 1991. If your position is that humanity is always on the brink of extinction, then you really don’t need to check what the clock is at, do you?
I’m very much on Team Eliminate Existential Risk, but acting like humanity is at an ever-changing apocalyptic precipice isn’t helpful. It’s a political statement that doesn’t do much except inspire alarmism and hopelessness.
I was apprehensive about posting this for fear of close-minded judgment but given it was the opportunity of someone’s lifetime, I had to share.
Those who know me, know I love novel experiences. It pays to have friends in high places and friends in low places. I’m lucky enough to have both. When the opportunity was presented to me to try human flesh, I knew I couldn’t turn it down.
I was whisked away to an undisclosed location in a major city and taken to a lovely building in a quieter part of town.
A host, immaculately dressed, with an accent that was hard to place, and a face that made it hard to tell exactly how old he was, greeted me warmly. He took me through what seemed like the back entrance of a fancy restaurant and sat me in a room of my own.
The room was dark, with an impeccably set table: white table cloth, candle, the works.
I felt some trepidation and, blushing, asked the host as to the source of what I would soon ingest.
He laughed, quite ready for the question. He assured me the limb either came from someone who lost it in an accident (not disease) or someone with an abysmally low social-credit score. I immediately felt much better knowing it was humanely sourced.
He informed me that it was quite popular among certain elite bodybuilders and Olympic athletes, even venture capitalists and some senators. “There is no substitute when peak performance is a must!”
“Indeed,” I replied politely.
My host leaned down and whispered in my ear. “You’re in luck!” he said. “There is a rare opportunity to try a still-beating heart — the General Butt Naked special.” (For those not in the know, the good Liberian general is a former warlord who used to sacrifice children and eat their hearts. Luckily for the children, he found God and switched to converting people with religion instead.)
“The absolute peak of freshness!” the host said emphatically.
I had to agree it was, but I ended up declining. The thought of chewing through fibrous valves made the idea a bit too hard to swallow. I regret not doing it now, though, given how the rest of the experience went as you will soon see.
The host motioned and the sommelier came out. He greeted me and congratulated me for being so well-liked and well-connected. I nodded in gratitude. He recommended several vintages, all of the finest quality. The host came over and assured me that as a friend, it was on the house — normally they cost an arm and a leg. Even though I don’t usually drink, I couldn’t decline and told the sommelier I trusted him to choose for me. He seemed quite pleased at this.
After a minute, the wine was brought out in a large glass. “A nice Chianti,” the sommelier said.
I was surprised to find it had a lovely taste, almost of cinnamon. I raised the glass to the sommelier in approval. He smiled, obviously satisfied, bowed, and left.
The chef came out and we exchanged pleasantries. We shared anecdotes of our mutual friends and I inquired about his culinary history. He had started as a dish boy at Noma and worked his way up. Over time, he found that the long variety of pork was his favorite to work with.
“How would you like it prepared?” he asked.
“Chef, I’m in your hands,” I replied.
Like the sommelier, he was delighted to be so trusted. He excused himself and left.
I sat, taking it all in. The whole experience felt surreal.
After a bit of a wait and much built-up anticipation, the host brought out a silver tray with one of those silver covers that Wikipedia tells me is called a cloche. He hovered his hand over, paused with much showmanship, and lifted it up with a flourish.
There, in the center of the white plate, was a small piece of meat, cooked medium-rare.
I tried not to gasp, intimidated upon seeing it in the flesh.
I took the fork and knife in my hand, trying not to show how much my hands shook, and proceeded to cut off a small piece.
The staff was polite enough to give me space but I knew they were watching my reaction from the shadows.
I felt like an extra in a George Romero movie or a member of the White Glove Society in Fallout: New Vegas. Was I really going to do this? Could I really try human flesh?
As if answering for me, my hand speared the piece I cut off and brought it to my mouth.
Dear readers! Oh, dear readers! Words do not suffice to describe the delight, the absolute delight! Salty, juicy umami! I had tasted nothing like it and haven’t since. My face lit up in obvious joy and satisfaction.
The host and sommelier nodded at each other with smiles on their faces. The chef looked pleased, knowing it was another job most well-done.
I took another bite and was caught in between the pleasure it was giving me and the bittersweet feeling of knowing it would be over soon. I took a sip of the wine and noted how it paired perfectly. It was all too much and suddenly I was up on my feet enthusiastically shaking hands with everyone and bowing deeply to the chef.
For the rest of the evening, my hosts and I exchanged tales of our myriad adventures, of our romances and our dreams.
Late into the hours of the morning, we finally said our good-byes. As I walked out into the cool air, it seemed like a different world. One full of people who will never be lucky enough to experience the finest things in life.
I may not be William Seabrook, but I hope this gives you an idea of the culinary possibilities out there and inspires you to venture outside your own gastronomic comfort zone.
Overall, I’d definitely recommend this once-in-a-lifetime experience if you get the chance.
Have you ever tried human flesh? Would you?
If you liked this, you should check out other tales my from life and stories I’ve written:
