One possible line of argument is that it's a shooting per school about every 3,000 years, and one per student every million years. That certainly doesn't make school shootings good, but compared to 50% child mortality it probably doesn't rise to the level of "doom". If you didn't have national news to tell you about school shootings, the odds against your ever even learning of one would probably be high.
More generally, one thing that can lead to excessive pessimism is just having access to news about such a vast number of people. Even very rare events are happening constantly, so if your news sources filter for bad ones you will see way more bad news than the environment of ancestral adaptation could possibly have prepared you for.
On the other hand, I think it's fallacious to point to a few bad reasons for pessimism and assert that therefore we must be optimistic. If most of human history has (a) been pretty awful and (b) most improvements have been temporary, and (c) the present is way better than the mean, shouldn't we on the outside view expect the worst? If accumulation of power has roughly always led to oppression, shouldn't we on the outside view be very suspicious of and hostile to those trying to accumulate power?
A lot of these seem like targeted violence though, where school is just a venue for a grudge that could have played out elsewhere. I think the phrase "maniac shooting up a school" clearly alludes to the Columbine archetype of random mass violence, which is a distinct phenomenon. Your EdWeek article mentions that there were only four mass school shootings in 2024, and only one in 2023. (which is still bad, obviously. But there is not a Parkland every week.)
Pretty much this. "Maniac shooting up a school" implies an indiscriminate attempt to murder multiple strangers, children. But a lot of school shooting stats will include gang violence, even, I think, after hours. Which is a problem to be dealt with, definitely, but a different problem.
ISTR that most school shootings are "two kids with a beef" or "two gangs with a beef" affairs, rather than "nutcase decides to go on a spree shooting.".
Motte and Bailey. The book's imagined argument is explicitly about "maniacs shooting up schools", so non-maniacal shootings definitively don't count and minor shooting incidents probably don't count on the grounds that "shooting up" colloquially implies something well beyond one bullet fired at one guy.
Your cited source, does include all the non-maniacal shootings (e.g. accidents, larcenous or otherwise plausibly-rational crimes, etc), and it includes the one-on-one shootings where maybe one guy gets injured. But I repeat myself, because the accidents and plausibly-rational crimes almost always stop at one victim.
"School shootings" is a term with two very different definitions. One is the boringly pedantic one where a shooting happens at a school. This one is almost never the real subject of public discourse. The other, the one that dominates public discourse, is the one where some maniac with a clearly irrational grievance shows up with a gun and shoots bignum people all at once.
That one, the one people actually care about and that the character in the book was talking about, happens maybe a few times a year, not weekly or even monthly. The boringly pedantic sort of "school shooting", is only brought up in the statistical abstract when someone wants to convince you that maniacs go on shooting sprees in schools every week and hopes you won't catch the switch.
And there's a level of concern we should have about maniacs shooting up schools a few times a year. But I'd prefer that the discussion about that concern should absolutely exclude everybody who lies with statistics to make the problem seem twenty times bigger than it is, and that everyone who was fooled by those people should be sent home to do their homework and return better-informed. I'll charitably assume you fall in the latter group.
A relevant excerpt where the author recognizes the same contradiction in his book that Scott did:
>Even the title of my book is very ominous. “I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom.” That's on purpose! If you read it, it is implying that the real doom is in your perceptions and not necessarily in the world. But even that is being framed as, hey, here's this terrible problem we've got to look at. That's what gets people's attention.
>And I get it! Due to evolution. If your brain, if you're in the forest and you're looking at 25 trees and one of those trees has a tiger behind it, you're not going to care about the other 24 trees. You're designed to zoom in on the one that's got the tiger because that's the one that matters. You don't sit back and say, “Well, if you think about it, there's 24 tiger-free trees. Why aren't I appreciating those?” It's like, no, you've got to deal with this problem! So you ignore everything else but the problem.
As a "bloomer" myself, I think we (or at least I) aren't arguing for doomerism to be elevated to be the One True Existential Apocalyptic Threat in place of all the others people posit, but just to be aware that this is a very common cognitive bias that can be very easily spread by the incentives of our current information system combined with quirks of human psychology.
Agreed. I am not concerned that bloomerism could potentially contain internal contradictions, but view it as a useful and good corrective for a meme that is wildly contagious.
I might be cynical after spending too much time online (yes I appreciate the irony), but "it's just a corrective, we are just tinkering with ideas, stop being such a nerd and fact checking every word!" is the last thing a community says before working themselves into a totalizing frenzy over stuff they made up.
Every page that post memes about murdering landlords started with some thoughtful essays about alternative perspectives to capitalism realism, every woke-MAGA page started with something like "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup", and yes, every doomerist screed is the endpoint of an intellectual journey starting with a corrective to our apathy
As a bloomer, would you agree that there are a non-trivial number of things that are worse today than they were in the past? (For example, the information system that you mentioned or architecture, family-friendly cities, excessive regulation, ...)
As a mostly-bloomer, I think my threshold for "non-trivial" is much higher than a doomer. Maybe that's the crux of this current thing? We can work toward a better world, pushing and pulling along the way, without all the hyperbole.
Also, being old enough to have had rotary-dial phones in my childhood home, one thing I've noticed is how little the list of things viewed as "worse today than they were in the past" ever changes. Architecture, our cities becoming anti-family, excessive government regulation, public schools, several others....evergreen as the saying now goes. Every one of those was specifically a focus of grassroots bitching when I was a kid and during every decade since. Also when I was in high school I had a couple of much-older relatives who'd point out that when _they_ were kids every adult they knew hated the then-modern buildings, were sure that the schools had gone to shit, etc etc.
As an aside, I don't like brutalist architecture myself. But spending years working inside a beautiful, beloved late-19th century architecture landmark did permanently disabuse me of assumptions about comfort and function for actual people. Another aside: I've happily raised a child in a non-wealthy household near the center of one of our largest and bluest cities and the idea that this place is no longer family-friendly is just a headscratcher.
Of course YMMV, anyone can come up with their own individual examples, and I am certainly not defending analysis-by-anecdote.
Really my overall point is just that anything that's on multi-generational autorepeat becomes hard to take seriously. Which we'd all understand if anybody anymore knew or cared about actual history....whoops I just did it myself!
Yea at some level maybe it's as simple as, old guys gonna old-guy
I even like some Brutalist architecture, but your point about functionality should really be discussed more in these "things were better back then" conversations. There is a reason buildings are often built the way they are, and it's usually because air-conditioning, modern plumbing, bright spaces, etc are great, and modern architecture is how we can do those things affordably.
It also is an argument to return to using some historical tools. One example is for energy efficiency - just because we can use modern HVAC to overcome poor land placement, thermal properties of materials and the like, doesn't mean we should, even with greater energy abundance in the future.
This is a really good point, I always disliked the aesthetics of those blocky houses with tons of windows and a deck on the roof until I stayed in one and realized that from the inside, having tons of windows and a deck on the roof is awesome.
The thing is that a blocky house can be given more ornamentation than slabs of concrete. It even is practical in that you don't have to fret so much about all the corners matching *perfectly* if you intend to put a cornice over it.
The heyday of brutalism was fifty or sixty years ago now. The median new building looks a lot better than the median building from the 60s or 70s. Architecture is an example of where things are getting better, at least on the timescale of the lives of people alive now.
the more recent failure mode is just glass on a steel frame. Seems like we have improved upon that in the past 20 years too - but many also found same plain glass to be soulless as well
Continuously for six decades or longer…sure. That definitely jibes with the objective reality of those topics.
(He wrote, on a complex digital device which every American 10-year-old today uses more successfully than my 4th-grader peers could operate a manual typewriter….)
Sure. I'm pro-tech all the way. But the argument that those complaining about X are wrong because people have always been complaining about X is a fallacy.
The retort than is that if X has actually gotten worse since ancient Sumeria or so, and humans are still around and thriving, than X cannot possibly be that important.
I'm no bloomer, but of course I could cherry-pick some things that are worse today than they've been in the past. However, life today is on the net overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably better than in the past; and these gains are inextricably tied to the losses. For example, yes, nuclear weapons are terrible and life would be much better without them; but nukes are merely a side-effect of our increased understanding of the fundamental forces of nature itself. Once you figure out nuclear physics, nuclear bombs become pretty obvious; but if you never figure out nuclear physics at all, you will never have computers, industrial automation, spaceflight, instantaneous worldwide communications, or any of the other things without which our lives would seem borderline post-apocalyptic. Some people might think they yearn for some idyllic pastoral past, but they rarely take the time to think through the implications.
I'm not even sure life would be better without nuclear weapons. Sure they have the potential to be terrible, but Mutually Assured Destruction is arguably why we haven't had another world war. Given the absolute horrors that Europe experienced through the Great War and WW2, I think I'd prefer the nuclear sword of Damocles, with the added benefit of clean fission energy.
This is the "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" theory except that the pennies are peace and prosperity, which are better. The steamroller is still a very, very big steamroller, though.
And I think this is the key difference between doomers and bloomers. Doomers seek to minimize harm; bloomers seek to maximize net utility. Both positions have valid points, and both positions have failure modes when taken to extremes. Still, overall the history of humanity is a story of technological progress leading to better living conditions -- though yes, punctuated by various periodic dooms.
The truism that the world would be less peaceful without MAD seem much less obvious upon closer scrutiny. Some kind of conflicts (eg, Ukraine) probably would not have happened at all had the agressor not had nuclear guaranteeing only limited intervention of third parties. The historical comparison with the Crimean War are rather obvious: in a world without nukes, France and Britain could respond to Russian expansionism by sending boots on the ground. In the world with nukes, they can (or are inclined to) send only non-strategic weapons to the defenders.
And the conflicts that *did* happen (Vietnam, Korea, all the (de)colonial wars) are very much how empires always fought throughout human history, and there is no reason to believe they would have been any worse without nukes.
I might agree that there are some things that are worse, but I'm likely to see them as smaller in number than others.
The biggest problem is that, today, we have a very large global population. And that imposes loads on a wide variety of domains. For example: cities always are more intensely regulated than small towns, and need to be, to an extent. So 'excessive regulation,' which you mention, is at least partially downstream of 'large population.'
What do you mean the information system is worse now, would you rather do all communication by telegraph? Sure, there was a brief period of internet before social media, but that was not a stable state and some or other form of more organized internet communications was going to fill that void regardless. May as well wish for ice that never melts.
Would you rather raise a family in a modern apartment, or a one-room house (two if you count the outhouse) as in the olden days? (Edit: My modern brain is so used to multi-room houses I typo'd and wrote "one-bedroom house" at first.)
As for the regulation, that one probably actually has gotten worse. I do not know enough about the history of the legal system to say anything for sure, but I suspect much of it is coming from more edge cases being handled, as well as more new things invented that can be used in good or bad ways.
I don’t consider myself a bloomer, but the way I look at this sort of question is “when else would I rather have been born”? Of those “non-trivial” things that are worse, which are worse enough (or likely to be worse enough going forward) that I would have wanted to be born some other time? Pick a time in history and really ask yourself if you’d give up all the things that are better today for the things that were better then.
If I’m truly honest with myself, even when I’m feeling the most pessimistic about today, I can’t really think of any other time I’d rather have existed.
I largely agree, but Scott is right to be worried about those who fight our cognitive biases with censorship. I also see a disturbing anti-democratic sentiment in some "bloomers" b/c they believe that most people are too easily manipulated into anti-innovation doomerism by media, social media, or whatever
Yeah that’s kinda where I’m at personally. The prior state we had of “managed democracy” seemed to work pretty well, where voters had the choice of “choose one of two pretty similar options”.
Now with such high political polarization, the choices definitionally seem a lot less “managed”. And when the average voter can’t do basic algebra or understands basic economics, idk how you can get a good result?
The level of competence we are demanding here does not require extremely good teaching. Resources for learning and self-improvement are available inside and outside school, at practically no cost. And yet, it's clear that nothing can get through a thick skull. Public education is not the bottleneck here. You can't teach a dog to count.
How fortunate, then, that dogs do not generally have sufferage, and even if they did, are seldom of sufficient age. That's an irrelevant tangent, though, since I was talking about education for humans.
>The level of competence we are demanding here does not require extremely good teaching.
There are some under-defined terms here, so let's start by establishing a bit more common ground. First, would you at least agree that a sufficiently bad - negligent or malicious - teacher can delay, maybe even outright prevent, development of such skills in someone who otherwise had the potential?
there's a POV here that seems to have quite settled in that a huge number of people are zombies and or near-incapable of functioning. actually hilarious to see it culminate in talking about dogs
I'm not hiding my distaste for the view, but 'early education can also do things like stimulate interest, teach some studying skills, renew an appreciation of self-learning' or even 'maybe we haven't tried every method of teaching economics' (whatever 'basic economics' is, FWIW) seem undeniable
Standardized curriculums and tests exist for a reason. No more is being asked of these teachers other than to follow basic instructions. And no, they aren't going out of their way to maliciously hurt children. If they wanted to hurt people, or even specifically children, there are jobs that are significantly easier with better pay. In my experience, these people do want to teach. They really are just incompetent.
Regardless... public education itself isn't even a hard bottleneck for children's education. We are living in an era where even Africans living in huts have access to smartphones and internet. Literally anyone can get access to material on any subject of their choosing. If there is a will to learn, there is no barrier. What separates us and them is not access to education.
Education isn't a panacea. Think about how dumb you're average member of the public is. Now remember that fully half of them are dumber than that :)
Regardless of the causes of IQ, half of the population are below average IQ and probably 15-25% or more so far below a standard IQ that regardless of educational opportunities they're never going to understand algebra or basic economics.
Improving public education $in_a_particular_way is a fine solution proposal for any problem where changing the skills/knowledge/attitudes of the top 50% of the IQ distribution would solve your issue.
If your problem is mainly/wholly caused by the actions of the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, then "improvements to public education" isn't going to work. Its "pushing on the string". There you are going to need a solution that actually reaches the people you need to reach in a way they can absorb and respond to. For the bottom 25% education is "defeinitely not it" and for the 2nd quartile its effects are going to be weak and limited.
TBH, what we nee isn't a shift in knowledge....its a shift in "vibes". That can reach everyone.
How you shift a societies "vibes" in the direction you want is a problem I'll leave for the reader to solve.... but that is not something education is going to do for you. That's something society/interpersonal relations/media/memes/comedy/art has to shift for you.
Absolutely we should improve education, that would make a big difference to how easy it difficult any given person is likely to be to deceive or manipulate
| And when the average voter can’t do basic algebra or understands basic economics, idk how you can get a good result?
Do you think the average voter of the revolutionary-era United States understood basic algebra or economics? If we were able to get from that state to the "managed democracy" (what I suspect is really just a stronger form of representative democracy), then the same logic holds now. The primary difference is a pre-existing system of direct democracy, especially in places like CA, where voters are asked to assess nuanced policies that are frankly too much to ask of any citizen.
Good point in theory, but think about how massive and sprawling our government apparatus is now, versus in the revolutionary war era. The government touches every part of our life, and there are more government agencies than years our country has existed. So modern democracy, or in other words “controlling the leviathan” requires a lot more from its voters.
There’s probably few Americans alive that can even name every government bureau. But we are supposed to control it though our votes?
I'm not sure it does. The early US had missions as diverse as putting down rebellions, debt disputes with revolutionary France, and raising a navy and marine corps to deal with Tripoli pirates. All of those were managed through representative democracy by largely uneducated people doing mostly subsistence farming. The bigger issue in modern society is not necessarily the variety of issues but the rigidness of possible solutions. You may not like the representative's solutions, which gets really thorny when you're asked to select between just two people (it's been a while since I could cast a vote for someone I really believed in). At least at the local level, we could do with much more competition of parties and ideas.
Of course, the other solution is simply do less. Reduce the surface area of things we attempt to control. It has a certain appeal, but it leaves a void for solutions you may like less than trying to do everything. That is the situation the Americans of the WW2 era inherited and decided to build all the institutions to deal with it, and it's a lesson I would rather not re-learn.
I suspect there's room for improvement by shifting to control mostly the same things, just at different stages in the process.
For example, if GPS navigation were added to the list of mandatory safety equipment for cars - which wasn't an option right after WWII, since artificial satellites didn't exist yet - that would make it possible to automate away most of the hassles of toll roads and speeding tickets, while simultaneously making revenue and traffic-law enforcement more reliable. Wear and tear on roads correlates with miles driven, varying by type of vehicle, but road repair is paid for mostly by gasoline taxes. Correlation between gasoline consumption and miles driven gets worse all the time. Tracking cars directly solves that, allowing every penny to be allocated to the exact stretch of road which earned it. Speed limits could be continuously updated based on weather conditions - which they already de facto are, but computerizing it could give good drivers more accurate live safety info, and bad ones less wiggle room to argue.
That's very much seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses. In the US, voters happily supported utterly insane policies (Prohibitionism, a great chunk of the New Deal, Smoot-Hawley, 1873 Coinage Act, and oh slavery forever in the South) without flinching. And that is the most longeve and stable democracy in the world!
Honestly the whole "people spend their whole days looking at algorithmically selected social media stories of doom" narrative doesn't really match the experience of anyone I know.
I'm sure there are some people who do, but is it larger or smaller than the number of people who spend way too much time looking at football statistics or something? Which social media networks are even still feeding stories of doom anyway?
That's a good point. I can think of a few at least near examples of the phenomenon, but most of the people I know are spending more time looking at funny/interesting/artistic/game related/pragmatic information online than "doomy"/civilizationally pessimistic/breaking news content.
It's an entertainment/slop/insight-porn factory that captures the most attention, rather than a black box of doom. But, you know, small + unrepresentative sample size and all that.
The algorithms optimise for engagement; everyone's feed is different. That was mentioned in the section of the book above where Ether talks about the differences in the flavours of doom each of them was presented by "their corner of the internet". People who are attracted to doom will engage with it, and get more of it.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. There's not a novel existential crisis demanding authoritarianism, there's a new temptation that can make a lot of individual lives worse, and collectively worsen some pre-existing problems. It bears discussion, but I don't think a lot of people are at "nuke data centers" level of concern about internet cognito-hazards.
Isn't this kind of jumping the gun? I'd think a group of people calling themselves rationalists or somewhere in the vicinity would be able to distinguish figuring out what's going on, from figuring out how to fix its negative outcomes.
I think it's fair enough to be negative on the collective effects of "the algorithm", without being clear on how much corrective action is needed (given culture's general ability to adapt), and how to best navigate the trade-offs between correctives, and their own pitfalls.
Then again, I've been heard to argue for a complete ban on algorithmic feeds of outside-of-network content.
I'm not sure what was jumping? Anyways, I agree on both figuring out what's going on and figuring out how to fix it being worthwhile.
I was posting in support of "bloomers" not necessarily having commonly elevated doomerism to doom status, if that makes sense. That is, one can decry doom while still pointing out new problems. Having a sense of scale is important.
Yeah I think we basically agree. My comment was not so much an answer to your views, as to the hypothetical people who would want to "nuke the datacenters".
There are similar past problems. The gin craze of the 18th century, the opium wars era in China. Maybe the Protestant reformation and the wars of religion.
That makes for a nice motte, but it’s awfully rare for a movement to be judged only by its most sensible proponents.
It’s like describing the early rationalist material as a list of common cognitive biases. Yeah, sure! Everybody *should* be more aware of their preference-discounting. Now…what was that bit about robots?
I think you’re more or less correct about information systems. Toxoplasma, Moloch, all that leads to a hostile environment independent of the underlying facts. That just doesn’t defuse the paradox.
If you’re going to convince people that their narratives are *māyā*, you’ve got to have an answer for the obvious follow-on question.
I generally agree with this, though I’d add that the harm caused by excess doomerism is uneven. It’s already making some people’s lives noticeably worse, and that alone warrants concern. For instance, a Lancet survey found that 56% of young respondents agreed with the statement “humanity is doomed.” I’m not claiming all of them have fully internalized that belief or are suffering because of it, but the number is large enough to justify treating it as a meaningful social problem.
I think I fit the definition of ‘bloomer’ but like many (most?) people that fit into that category I don’t believe doomers are an existential threat or even a threat at all. I certainly do not believer there is any sort of Doomer crisis going on. If you read old books ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a prime example, you will see all the same sentiments of ‘the past was better, the present is horrible, no one has sex anymore and there are no real men unlike in the good old days’. I also don’t think crisises should never be mentioned and ironically I think over reacting to crisis is part of why true crisis are relatively rare. I trust that everything will end up even more amazing than things are now but still I think we all have a duty to do everything we can to insure that outcome happens. Dissuading people from doomer beliefs feels more like giving someone a really good tv recommendation that I think would probably make them happier if they watched it and less like stopping someone from setting off a nuke.
This was once a matter of doom and gloom, in the 70s particularly - but that didn’t jibe, in this country, with the interests of either political party ($/immigrants), and so anti-Christ Rush Limbaugh strode forth and found in environmentalism the whipping boy he needed after the fall of Communism rendered that threat non-monetizable on air.
And it stuck. Thus died conservation as a *mainstream* concern that used to be on the menu on any survey - and polled very well.
Hey Sam! Love your interview, many insightful questions and you two are really playing off each other. :)
I am a part-time playwright and was wondering whether it is possible to get the license to turn the book into a play. Is there a way to reach out to Jason somehow that would work. Or do you know if he had ever planned on something like this?
> "None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way..."
But that's the thing- it's not "better in every way". The progress in material living conditions has been accompanied by the deterioration of other forms of social capital (TFR, public architecture, public trust, genotypic IQ, etc.) which are ultimately going going to make material progress unsustainable unless we, e.g, totally decouple the economy from human inputs and put benign AGI in charge. (And if the AGI is genuinely benign, I imagine it'll have a few things to say about public architecture, among other things.)
The "insane uncle" in this story isn't really any crazier than Greta Thunberg, who gets a hell of a lot more coverage, and you can argue that he's at least identifying a lot of the social side-effects of de-normalising the nuclear family. There are certainly plenty of people who would rather Reign in Hell, and will send us there.
You're right, the present is not "better in every way", partly because there is nothing without tradeoffs, even progress. For instance, I'm a Yimby and want to see better housing availability and affordability, but I do admit that Nimby's are not hallucinating when they say that building more density will affect the character of their neighborhoods. There is a cost, just one that I think is very worth incurring. And this point is true of basically everything.
But the present is still better overall. I'll take our current issues with social capital, which I do think are a major problem, over the past's death and poverty.
Yeah, seems like this needs some sense of proportion. Some things are better than in the past, some are worse. Overall, it sure seems better to have our problems than the problems of our counterparts in 1975 or 1925 or 1825, say.
But also, two things are true at once:
a. There is a bias in media/social media and probably in the human psyche for stories of impending doom.
b. Sometimes there are genuine instances of impending doom lying around that could happen.
Responding to (a) means not letting yourself be swallowed up by doomerism and hopelessness. But responding to (b) means you need to think about the bad things that could happen and see what you can do to prevent or at least mitigate them.
And I think there's a connection between these two: one way to relieve yourself of the obligation to deal with (b) is to binge so much on (a) that you have absorbed the utter futility and hopelessness of your situation. If you're the last surviving human in the universe, with one can of food left and terminal cancer with no available treatments and a dinosaur killer asteroid heading for your exact location and due to impact in an hour, at least nobody can fault you for spending your last hour playing video games or jerking off to porn or doomscrolling Twitter or whatever--it's not like there was anything *useful* for you to do instead.
But if your situation is less dire, if there are things you can do about your situation to make it better, that kinda implies that if you're playing video games or whatever instead of doing those things, at least some of your situation is your own damned fault. The black pill doesn't just let you feel extra dark and cynical, it also relieves you of responsibility.
What is the current rate at which fertility rates are declining, and how long will it take them to hit zero? Can you not put two and two together here?
I do expect other countervailing forces to kick in before that happens, mind you, but by definition that will change the status quo.
When economic progress makes people less dependent on each other directly (and more dependent on the "system"), I think it's pretty inevitable that social capital deteriorates. We're generally quirky and often hard to get along - if I can mostly ignore my immediate neighbors and hang out with people who share my vibe, it's hard to see why I wouldn't. And nowadays you can often find "your vibe people" on the net more easily than IRL.
I don't have a solution to that, and I think it's a bloody difficult problem over all. But I know that there's nothing the net can offer that even approaches how good and sane it feels to hang out with friends in the real world, and to engage with nature. "Touching grass" is not just a cliche, it's the real thing. The hopeful side of me thinks that this is basic enough there will always be a significant group of people who don't lose it.
Dependency is the wrong word, surely. I don't want to be dependent on my neighbours, nor for them to be dependent on me.
I'm happy to be on vaguely friendly terms with my neighbours, that's probably the optimum. It only works if you can live in a fairly homogeneous neighbourhood, though.
True, but look at the amount of "social capital" present in suburbia, being similar doesn't automatically make you form social connections. Meeting people, inviting them, planning events etc. takes effort. There are people for which the social contact in itself is already benefit enough, they are already organizing and building communities. Everyone else either has no need at all for social capital or the effort is to high for the possible benefit. Now i would argue that if you are dependent on social capital, you have a much higher incentive to form tight-knit communities, as you depend on them and therefore the possible benefit to you is much higher than if you wouldn't depend on them.
No, I really think there's something to this. When people need each other, it seems to create more of a sense of community than when everyone can easily go it alone. This does have it's own costs (e.g. neighborhood drama), but does feel more in line with what natural human psychology is built for.
All the things you point out are characteristics of one part of the reverse apocalypse being compared to another point, not the actual apocalypse (pre industrial living) itself. TFR historically adjusts in response to surrounding conditions- when child mortality rates went from 50% to 1%, people had less children, and you could argue we’re in the middle of a correction from swinging too hard in that direction and also adapting to birth control. Farmers did not have public architecture, they had mud and straw and wood and a dinky temple of stone at best. Farmers did not trust people outside their village, they certainly didn’t trust the distant ruler and his band of thugs. I don’t know anything about pre industrial IQ genotypes, so I’ll fold there. But I think my argument still stands.
I think it is fairly uncontroversial to suggest pre-industrial IQ averages were lower? Certainly the Flynn effect suggest so. And I think IQ is also dependent on such things as nutrition and parasite loads.
Phenotypic IQ certainly has increased, which is why __browsing specified genotypic IQ. This seems hard to measure, because we can't take people from the 1500's, raise them in a modern environment, and see how their IQ turns out. But I can armchair theorize as well as the next person. Suppose that starting 50 years ago, high-IQ people began having fewer children than low-IQ people. That's about two generations. Compared to the thousand generations before that where IQ was being selected for, I am not too worried about this. I expect gene therapy will be ready to solve it sometime within the next two or three hundred years, before it becomes an actual problem.
Dysgenic fertility has likely been a problem in western countries for the better part of two centuries, and this has *probably* reduced euro IQ by about 5 points since the 1850s. There's some indication it may have slowed to negligible levels recently, although we don't have a good handle on the effects of deleterious mutations (which necessitate counter-selection) and the general western TFR collapse is a major problem in itself. In any case, dysgenics across racial/ethnic groups has become a similar-if-not-greater problem.
I used to be more optimistic that gene-editing or embryo selection would be able to compensate for these trends, but the obstacles here are political- the UK banned embryo-selection for intelligence a few years back precisely because it would be "eugenics", and GWAS research into IQ and educational attainment seems to be freezing up (or at least censored) precisely because it has embarrassing implications for racial/class egalitarians. The political left can't use bio-engineering to solve their problems- partly because they are addicted to their problems- but also because they can't acknowledge that genetics was the major causal factor here in the first place without destroying their own ideology. And designer babies don't help you if you're not having kids in the first place.
The political right also can't easily use bio-engineering, for different reasons (messing with embryos is a big no-no for anyone religiously opposed to day-1 abortion, and there's a more general conservative aversion to 'playing God' and skepticism of technocracy and biotech in play, which COVID didn't really do much to dispel.) The libertarian tech-mogul right might be a different story, but they're a small minority and have something of a strained relationship with the conservatives. (The conservatives are also the closest thing to a demographically sustainable model we have right now, so I wouldn't be rushing to discard them.)
I don't know, maybe there's some way to weave around the various obstacles here and arrive at Unironically Gattaca, but I don't regard this as a trivially solved problem.
That's interesting, but doesn't really change my conclusion. If we lost 5 IQ points since the 1850's, and may lose another 5 by the 2200's, we've got well over a century to figure it out. These political problems, one, won't last nearly that long (I give them 5-20 years), and two, are based on the current situation, which is that not enough research has been done to know which genes to select for. We need I expect another 20-50 years of research on this, largely for better predicting phenotype from genes but also for better ways of modifying them, before the research will be advanced enough to be considered generally safe. Or perhaps the way it goes will parallel GMOs - but note what a large fraction of Americans have eaten GMO corn, so even that is not necessarily a loss condition.
You're probably correct that our post-war-consensus political status-quo is unstable, but it's a very open question as to what's going to replace it, and whether it would tolerate human-focused biotech. I certainly don't see the conservatives going away in 5-20 years.
For completeness, I should probably throw out a few links to papers estimating the effects of deleterious mutations, although I'll get into why there are reasons to take these with a pinch of salt:
Basically, most direct studies on the effects of deleterious mutations haven't been conducted on humans or even on vertebrates, but *IF* results from nematodes and fruit flies generalised they would imply a total loss of "fitness" (whatever that translates to in humans) within somewhere between ~20,000 years and ~1500 years. At the other end of the spectrum, Michael Woodley has estimated a mutation-driven IQ decline of ~8 points per century based on paternal age correlations alone, which seems unrealistically high to me (it's unlikely that plausible historical selection pressures could have counteracted this, and since he's just looking at phenotypic IQ it's IMO hard to rule out environmental confounds). However, a 2019 paper from Taylor et al looking more directly at de-novo mutations does find significantly elevated risk-ratios for intellectual disability (and other disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, heart disease and epilepsy) as paternal age increases- not as high as Woodley's estimate, but enough to be measurable over a century.
(I think the alarms about increasing paternal age per se are overstated, since longer generational length gives you more mutations per generation but fewer generations per century. It's total mutations-per-century, and what impact that has on phenotype, that mostly needs to be considered, although advanced age has implications for TFR in general, especially in women.)
In any case- if the low-end estimates for mutational load are accurate, then this is a minor problem, and we should be alright if we can establish even mildly eugenic fertility, either via conservative marriage patterns or biotech uplift or some combination of the two. That seems like a realistic end-of-century objective, assuming western TFR gets resolved.
But if the *high-end* estimates are correct?.. well... if Woodley's 8-points-per-century estimate is correct then that's... basically catastrophic. Large losses in fitness due to random mutations would have to be counteracted historically by strong countervailing selection pressures, and a large fraction of historical human selection pressures came from the early death of the sick, the poor, and the handicapped (many of them infants.) For understandable reasons we don't do that any more.
The standard religious-right solution to dysgenics is just to have some minimal standards about who gets married and has kids, but if most pre-industrial selection pressures actually came from the mass extinction of unlucky mutants, then... this alone might not be enough to tip the balance. That basically leaves (A) being waaaay more stringent about who reproduces, (B) aggressive eugenic biotech adoption, or (C) wait until civilisation crumbles and go back to our pre-industrial setup.
(I should mention that both spontaneous and artificial abortions have been a factor persisting into the modern era, but if reaction time data is any indicator it hasn't been enough to preserve genotypic intelligence, so... I'm not sure what to make of that.)
Given my own brushes with death as an infant it's likely I wouldn't be alive historically, so personally I'm rooting for the low-end-estimate. But I do think human mutation rates and their impact on phenotype are a salient topic that we need to get a better understanding of going forward, because it has large implications for how strenuous either natural or artificial selection has to be.
About farmers (referring to, if I get it right, "people of the past") and public architecture -- I was visiting enough medieval towns to realize that there WAS public architecture.
Also, it is unlikely that people cared only about their neighbours. There was a revolt in my country in the 1500s which started as a crusade, until the lords were fed up that too many of the peasants volunteered to fight and liberate the Holy Land (which would had been ending in a slaughter of them anyway, but the lords were unaware of that, of course). I wonder what led those simple peasants to volunteer en masse to fight in such a campaign if they did not care about anyone but their kins and neighbours?
I feel there was a huge amount of idealism present in earlier times, which is really alien from our modern cynical point of view.
> "All the things you point out are characteristics of one part of the reverse apocalypse being compared to another point, not the actual apocalypse (pre industrial living) itself..."
I think you're being a little dismissive of the architecture accessible to late-medieval peasantry in europe and asia, but I'm not really trying to argue for a hardcore-romantic, Wrath-of-Gnon-style RETVRN to pre-industrial living here. I am, however, pointing out that our ongoing demographic trends are, given enough time, civilisation-dooming problems which will put us back in the 50%-youth-mortality, life-in-stone-huts scenario. What law of physics says we have to take-or-leave every aspect of modernity as a package deal?
> "I don’t know anything about pre industrial IQ genotypes, so I’ll fold there"
There's a couple of papers I'm blanking on, but these would be a decent start:
I don’t know how I would measure it but I do see the believe that problems are not solvable as having risen in my lifetime, and I do believe it impedes the solving of problems at scale. That said, I try to take a “many colored lenses grant clear sight” approach. This is probably a largely unstoppable social season, and it will wane whenever we see some number of people make large scale positive impact and I think I can already see it happening. Social moods are probably like the weather at scale and they probably always will be. Just try to control yourself and do the best you can.
Many colored filters, arranged properly, is an essential component of color digital photography, and of color LCD displays. Probably other things too but those I'm sure of.
Technically a light filter is not the same as a lens but in casual usage the difference could be considered negligible.
There seems to be a loss of personal (and perhaps corporate) agency widespread in the younger generation. Personally I think this might be a result of that black box of doom, though the Covid ordeal didn't help.
> It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”
> “That wouldn’t make them both wrong.”
> Ether groaned and put her head in her hands.
Without disagreeing with the wider point, I'd like to emphasise that this particular line of argument -- 'A and B cannot both be true, therefore we can conclude that both are false without even thinking about the object-level issues' -- is completely absurd and deserves to be mocked.
Look at the generator. If both arrived at their conclusions through faulty epistemology, then they are most likely both wrong. One of them might be correct by coincidence, but if their conclusion is complex then it's very unlikely.
I will note that this argument requires *all* the believers to have arrived at it through faulty epistemology; there are always people who invalidly believe any given true thing.
I think this is very important. On every side of every controversial issue, there are people whose beliefs were formed for dumb reasons, who support their cause with dumb arguments, and who may be obnoxious and hypocritical and cruel and stupid and so on. Often, one of the main 'dumb reasons' is that they were exposed to the bad arguments and obnoxious people on the other side...
I think Ether is trying to make the point: "you can't assume that the magnitude of social concern about issue A is related to how much of a problem it really is". The point is not "two people disagree and so there's no way of knowing who is right".
I haven't read it, but the description of the story implies that it's about social contagion effects. This means that it is about how collective narratives influence beliefs.
I think the narrator character missed this point and understood that claim the same way you understood it, hence the groan. The groan is not an indicator of "you just said something wrong, dummy". It's instead an expression of annoyance, that this invitation to examine how much your perspective is colored by a collective social belief (which in and of itself can't be evidence of the facticity of the issue because it's present on both sides) is completely shut down and rejected.
True. But if everyone around you is certain of impending doom but they all postulate different mechanisms for that doom, it's probably worth thinking pretty hard about whether there's something other than carefully reasoned conclusions behing their universal expectation of doom.
And there's a huge sleight of hand in that analogy. It follows this exchange:
> "So I’m guessing that you think the world is collapsing because of the feminization of society, something like that? That we’re killing masculinity?”
> “I mean, that’s definitely part of it. Men are scared to date; no babies are being made.”
> “Okay, and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment.
It doesn't matter than flood and drought are opposites. If you believe there's a flood coming, and people prepare for a drought, that's a problem as far as resource allocation. But wasting money on sand bags isn't going to make the rivers overflow.
The doomer dichotomies are worse, at least the political ones are, because they involve modeling what other humans are planning to do. If Alice becomes convinced that Bob is out to get her, she might start an anti-Bob campaign in (reasonable, given her beliefs) self defense. Bob, who never had a problem with Alice before, now sees her as a threat, and starts his anti-Alice campaign, threatening to fulfill Alice's once-erroneous prediction.
The black box, the algorithm, whatever, is the new gossipy neighbor Chuck whispering in Alice and Bob's ears about all the shit the other one is saying about them.
Is this a doom scenario? Well, if it escalates to Alice and Bob each running opposing mayoral campaigns, promising to implement anti-the-other-person policies if elected, then it at least threatens to spill over into the broader community. On the other hand, "executing a semi-imaginary personal vendetta and bringing down the general vibe" isn't the same as a catastrophic flood sweeping half the homes into the old quarry.
Regardless, I agree this is, at minimum, a big problem. And it's more or less the core of my model for increasing partisanship.
By the end of the book, it is. One of the hallmarks of Jason Pargin books is that by the end, it's clear that every point of view character has completely misunderstood the situation.
Not to mention that climate change brings BOTH simultaneously, at the same place.
Here (landlocked Central Europe), in general, the yearly amount of rain (and snow, although we do not see that too much lately) is roughly the same (with a bit of a decrease), but the pace of rain tends to change. It means that there are times when everything is flooding, but in the summer or sometimes even in the spring, weeks or even months can pass without a drop of rain.
Existing defense systems are built to let the excess water flow down as quickly as possible, but they cannot handle this amount of water. On the other hand, there was no effort to keep and store the water for the summer, since it was not necessary one or two decades ago.
So, in this case, both neighbours (who is afraid of the drough and who is afraid of the flood) are right.
This is the first time I get this "Why do I suck?" feeling in my guts... The analysis of the incoherence is great, but then the answer is "don't mind all the doom-talk, analyse each case on its own merits"?
It's a fine, coherent position, but it completely ignores that there must be a reason that doomerism is a general phenomenon in the first place! It explains nothing about why all the doom-talk is happening on such unrelated topics, simultaneously!
The meat of the article should be an investigation of the root cause, especially in the light that "finding the root cause of doom" is a general characteristic of dooms including incompatible ones. It feels like I just got past the introduction then:.
(I must say I personally have nothing to contribute on the object-level, but I did expect Scott to.)
Well, that sounds like a variant of Pargin's thesis?
It's a fine explanation in itself, but it raises the question of what to do about it, and how bad it is, and how much do we think it's concerning because it's really bad, and how much is due to doom-bias grabbing our attention to it.
The first-order model proposed by Scott sounds to me like:
- We have a base level of confidence in our own brand of doom
- There is a factor of outside-view doubt based on the amount of various incompatible dooms
- Then discount our confidence by this factor
But the factor itself is a kind of doom so
- We have a base level of confidence in doomerism being a bias
- Find the fixed pointa of a discount factor such that the discount factor and the corrected confidence are the same
- Use that new (reduced) factor to discount your personal doom.
(With help from Claude to formalize it:)
As a toy example, assume I believe that the steppe mongols will raze civilization with prior confidence p_0
But I want to discount all doom-confidence by a factor d, including this very discount, something which I have confidence q about, which transforms p in p*(d^q)
So to be a fixed point, q must satisfy: q = q*(d^q)
There are no fixed points for d,q != 0, 1. The only consistent answers here are q=0 which is globally attracting ("I know nothing about this discount") and d=1 ("there is no doom").
So, it seems a more complicated model is needed if we want this to have any value at all. Maybe I'll try bayesian updates or a distribution d instead of a single value...
Then, you notice that there are lots and lots of doomers out there, and set p(doomerism) approximately equal to 1.* Then p(doomerism|doom) should be ever so slightly higher, and the equation simplifies to 'p(doom|doomerism) is ever so slightly higher than p(doom)'.
If you are applying this transform so many times that p(doom|doomerism) approaches 1, that's a sign that you have something set up wrong. For instance, if you update the same way on each individual global warming doomer, you will overupdate, because you'd be missing the correlation here. You could make each update vastly smaller starting with the ten-thousanth person or whatever, but better would be to choose p(doomerism|doom) and p(doomerism) based on the widespreadness of the doomerism. And at that point it's so touchy-feely that you may as well just be estimating p(doom|doomerism) directly, except you have a couple extra sanity checks to pass.
* The actual value depends on how you are grouping doomers, for instance if you look at all doomers together the chance that at least one exists is pretty nearly 1. But if you do separate calculations for global warming doomers versus cat uprising doomers, it could be quite a bit less. And this is assuming you're updating based on doomers in the first place - if instead you're updating person by person based on the prior probability of them being a doomer, sure that works out in theory, but in practice correlations and sampling bias will ruin you.
(As for the original argument, I'd say the discount factor itself is not a type of doom, if anything it's an anti-doom, which makes all your math far easier. And even if it were, the discount should only happen once, not recursively, so will not take you all the way to 0. In general I'd recommend that you avoid using Claude to formalize mathematical arguments, since that is not one of the things LLMs are good at, though they are very very good at making them look formal at first glance. Usually it's better to just trust your own intuition and common sense, and resolve contradictions as they come up.)
Just consume different media, and there will be less doomerism.
I wasn't even aware there was supposed to be a doomerism epidemic. For me, the media / news don't seem worse (nor better) than during other times in my life.
FWIW, using "Will today's youth have a better life than their parents?" as a surrogate for optimism (suggested by Claude - Gallup polls have data on it from 1983 to 2022); It has had its ups and downs, and, as of 2022, is at a low point, with 42% answering positively. Notable peaks and valleys:
1983 baseline: Started at 54%
1996 local min of 49%
1999 local max of 71%
2011 local minimum of 44% (from fairly linear decline from 1999)
2019 local max of 60%
2022 42% (last (?) data - don't know if this is a local min)
Well:
a) It isn't as if there is a consistent, smooth, decades-long trend
b) The dynamic range is less than 2:1 It isn't great to have only 42% of the population expecting their kids to do better than themselves, but it isn't as if the optimists had been reduced to the lizardman's constant either.
You're right, that should be one of the next steps, whether in this post or elsewhere. I do think the book and Scott's post gesture at one cause, which is that people engage with negative content, and content creators have an incentive to drive that loop.
More fundamentally, my pet theory is that partly because life has gotten so much better, we have excess free-floating anxiety that we need to put somewhere. Back when we were getting eaten by tigers or starving or oppressed by feudal lords, there were plenty of real dangers to worry about. Now, we still have the feeling of worry, but the candidates for where to invest it are more amorphous. Instead of feeling despair because 50% of our children died, we feel despair because the temperature of the Earth may rise another degree or two Celsius over the next 75 years... Or whatever.
There's probably a lot more analysis to be done on why this is happening, but at least some level of agreement that we're being too pessimistic in many cases is a good starting point.
But if the anxiety is a constant of our epistemics, then without inside-view information, any kind of doomerism is 100% necessary-anxiety-bias?
If I didn't have inside-view arguments about the steppe mongols, should I completely dismiss the fact that some people are worried about them (or AI doom, or the Antichrist)?
Is there room for arguing that doomerism and optimism are variable individual characterological traits, and that some, perhaps most, individuals possess them in a complex mix, and that in aggregate every culture/period also exhibits them in a complex mix? This is not to say that the project of using reason to discipline both traits and promote real understanding of one's historical situation is misguided, hopeless, a waste of time, etc.
There is a long tradition of people worrying about the Antichrist and whatnot, so maybe our ancestors did have a similar baseline of "world is ending" feelings. I just think most of their worries were about things like actual Mongols, Vikings, bubonic plague, or famine, and in general those worries seem to have been very grounded compared to the Antichrist and sadly much more likely to come to pass.
Stuff like climate change is an interesting hybrid since it is actually happening but will have very limited impact on your average North American any time soon. Yet people are still freaking out about it as if it will kill them.
It will also be interesting to confront present doomerism to past doomerism. As far as I can tell, doomerism and bloomerism both always existed in some form. The Ancients spent their time criticizing their decadent era, longing for a golden age. And Scott mentionned the good old days of the 1920s but the decade started by post-WWI traumatism (especially in Europe, even more in Germany) and ended with 1929 crisis that was terrible (especially in the US).
Agreed. I think it's definitely a fallacy to try to identify some decade and say "THAT's when people believed in innovation and progress! We need to be like them!" Plenty of good historians have depicted the 1920s as a time of crisis and fears about race mixing, the decline of small towns and/or religion, the supposed bad effects of "black music," declining health (e. g., leading to eugenics theories and projects), the Communist Peril or the Yellow Peril, sexual decadence (e. g., alarm over rising hemlines), the alienation caused by machines, etc., etc. Many of these ideas/fears originated before 1914, but they were powerful, living trends in the 20s (and after, of course). Yates' "The Second Coming" of 1919 captures the mood, which also affected production innovators (Ford, for one, was famously preoccupied with the Jewish Peril). One can find similar evidence from virtually any decade after about 1850, at least. For the 1920s, see for example Mark Mazower, _Dark Continent_, chs. 1-3 (about Europe in the period, but much of what he describes can be found in the US as well).
The type of person yelling that we must _do something_ about all the doomerism has just fallen for a different variant of doomerism. It’s the same kind of appeal to imminent doom to justify action.
I think you're strawmanning concern about doomerism. We should actually do something about it. That doesn't make it some extra special crisis above all others, just a negative dynamic that we should address.
Scott says that the bar for radical action is just as high for "doomerism is a doom" as for the coming of the Antichrist, in the last paragraph. He does stop short of suggesting it does not pass the bar, but I don't think it's justified to hold it against him.
People who said we should “do something” about acid rain, or about the ozone hole, or about the rivers catching fire, were right. Of course, it’s important that we do something *useful* and don’t just flail around at anything that looks like something. We should do something about doomerism, but it should probably be something like a moderate tax on data collection for the fine tuning of algorithmic short format video feeds, rather than nuking data centers.
Yes, this. And sufficiently comprehensive doomerism would have made such efforts seem futile, and then we'd still have rivers catching fire and needing ever-increasing amounts of sunblock to avoid skin cancer and noticing a lot of old buildings weathering very quickly.
Great piece. I’ve been the manic-pixie of this story to friends and family for the last ten years. Try to tell someone the facts from Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and they don’t want to hear it. It reminds me of the supposed Chinese parable:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. And all the neighbors came around that evening and said "That's too bad."
And he said "Maybe."
The next day the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came around and said "Why, that's great, isn't it?"
And he said "Maybe."
The next day his son was attempting to tame one of these horses and was riding it and was thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors came around in the evening and said "Well, that's too bad, isn't it."
And the farmer said "Maybe."
The next day the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors came around in the evening and said "Isn't that wonderful?"
Same here. If I had to pick a single progress metric, it would be the number of children under 5 who die every year. That number has been going down dramatically for a long time, but very few people really want to hear about it.
Everything else being equal, it is great. The genius of the "maybe" story is that it acknowledges that all else is never equal for a given person. There is no counterfactual.
Please make that "number of children under 5 who *don't* die every year". Seeking to minimize the number of dying children puts you in serious monkey's-paw territory.
But that just puts you in Goodhart's Law territory. Why are we trying to maximize children under 5 living in the first place? I thought the goal was to increase human flourishing or something, not just increasing births for its own sake or killing off the poor.
If you ask the monkey's paw to minimize the number of children under five who die every year, then you'll pretty quickly notice that no new children are being born, ever. And starting five years from today, no child under five will die ever again.
I know, that's what I was referring to with the comment above yours. It's just that maximizing the amount of children, or even the rate of children under five surviving, also runs into the exact same problem. Neither are good metrics for progress.
Wait how is maximizing the proportion of children under 5 surviving not a good thing? (Contrasted wit total number of children under 5 etc., of course neither metric completely avoids Goodhart)
Say 10% of under 5yo don't survive. How would it be bad to reduce this?
Baby boomer reaction: it's also an old vaudeville routine that found its way into the sitcom F Troop (which, it turns out, did that a lot). Although that version replaces "maybe" with "No, that's good!" and "No, that's bad", alternating back and forth.
(Didn't find the version I'm looking for, but here's same gag from Hee Haw:
> “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things.”
It's simple to resolve this seeming contradiction by distinguishing between stocks and flows. We were much poorer in the past, but getting richer at a faster pace prior to the 1970s & Great Stagnation.
I know you dislike this rhetorical device, but putting in a bunch of Ancient quotes complaining about new technology and the younger generation would have been apt.
The black box isn’t evil. It’s an adaptive mirror. Doomerism is the calibration error of a species teaching its machines to feel meaning before it’s learned to process its own.
The "contradiction" you point out in your "less charitable" summary: reject doomerism, except the problem of doomerism is actual doom. Feels like it almost maps onto the meme.
"Anti"-Doomer: "We should reject doomerism! It leads to all sorts of problems!"
Your Contradiction: "Ah, but that sounds like a type of doom! How curious!"
Ok typing it out it isn't as neat as I first felt. But it can definitely be true that yes, all of the other beliefs about something are wrong or misled but ONE of them is still correct. That's not really a contradiction.
> "None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way, except that the past got the question of is-the-present-is-better-than-the-past right and the present doesn’t. Totally possible, nothing says it can’t happen."
I respond to this and say why I think the critique matters anyway in the last several paragraphs.
Either way, I don't think this resembles the "participate in society" criticism, where the fact that you participate in society has no necessary connection to the fact that you think society should be improved. I think the analogy there would be someone who says "Nobody should ever participate in society" and then someone counters "But you participate in society".
To me the solution to a lot of this would be this One Weird Trick:
if your social media is using any algorithm - *anything* - to curate content that isn't entirely in control of the user (as in, the user can: 1. understand what the logic is and 2. control that logic completely in ways that allow them to achieve reproducible results; examples of this are sort by date, filter by author, filter by tag, etc) - then your social media is editorialising. You are now legally on the hook for anything your social media says and spreads as if you said it yourself.
Any social media go bankrupt because their business model is unsustainable without recommender algorithms, and they can't possibly face the onslaught of lawsuits and legal liability? Good riddance. If we're lucky we might finally see them replaced by social media whose purpose is to be actually social, and enable people to connect on their own terms, rather than being used as memetic conduits.
If a newspaper could print "<famous person> is a child rapist and a Nazi" with absolutely zero evidence and zero chances of consequences, while also coating its pages in a thin layer of crack to get anyone turning them and licking their fingers addicted so they'll keep buying the newspaper, the solution to that wouldn't be "just don't buy the newspaper".
Because the person damaged by the defamation is still damaged. And the people who are being given crack without their knowledge or consent are not freely choosing to engage in a trade. You can not apply two standards where the big corporations are little poor birthday boys that need to be allowed to do anything, but the individual consumers should be able to figure out when they're being taken advantage of, or it's a skill issue. Negative externalities are in fact a problem.
I think it's implied that if you're coating the pages in crack you're not telling anyone about it.
There's a more general question about "should people be easily allowed to access things which they believe are calculated risks, but they are actually playing that game against a vastly more knowledgeable and better risk calculator than them so on expectation they always lose badly", because in practice that always reliably turns out net negative for them, but that is at least a more subtle question.
Ah, ok. I'm saying I understand that you value contractual freedom, as do I, but the way it's implemented does not necessarily lead to the intended benefit. In this case, mainstream social media isn't an average service provider anymore, due to the outsized influence it has developed over society, without anyone's actual, direct consent. This isn't necessarily a problem with the original idea, we would need to change as a whole if we want to be overall more sustainable. However, now that social media has outgrown its early phase, we also need to subject it to wider social scrutiny.
I'm not actually sure social media has outsized influence over society. Mark Zuckerberg couldn't even swing a presidential election in his favour in eg 2016.
But sure, on an individual level you can say that sometimes people need to be protected from themselves.
I'm ok with banning drugs (or social media) for poor people.
(Rich people don't need our help. They can all snort cocaine and shoot up heroin for all I care. They can watch out for themselves, or make the necessary contractual arrangements to hire a guy who prevents them from smoking weed. They don't need the taxpayer to pay for that guy.)
The presidential election of 2016 was very close, and Mark Zuckerbeg, due to a mixture of lack of capacity and lack of will, was giving maybe 10 % of what he actually could have to make this influence.
In any case, I personally wouldn't call for banning it outright. I prefer harm reduction policies.
Just cause you're unable to handle your own psyche on the internet doesn't mean you need to ban the internet for the rest of us.
This is the exact type of censorship being referenced in the article, just repackage very slightly so that you have the excuse "I didn't censor you, you just didn't clear that I deliberate set so high so you wouldn't clear it."
Recommender algorithms are awesome. Don't ban them, I use them and so do billions of other people. They help me find useful/interesting/helpful information all the time.
I don't understand how an attention matrix works. Should I be banned from using Youtube? If you ever managed to succeed at this I would happily ban you too from whatever you enjoy. Why not libraries and books too, since they also have a history of inciting insane and dangerous beliefs.
A lot of social media uses/has used a simple, chronological timeline - Tumblr, Snapchat (I might be out of date on this), Mastodon, Instagram before 2019, Facebook before the 2010s, Twitter before 2016, for example. Notably, I observe that people consistently start complaining about the declining quality of a social media platform a little bit after it eliminates its chronological timeline (Youtube might be an exception here, for reasons I don't understand). While you might like social media that forces content on you rather than allowing you to control it, most people don't.
As to why you should be banned from using social media platforms that show you anything other than a reverse-chronological timeline (or other simple things like a friends-of-friends feed or recent-and-upvoted or something similarly simple) is that many people believe it destroys the world. Many people believe these complex recommendation algorithms that you don't control are partly responsible for far-right politics, the resurgence of racism in Europe and English-speaking North America (and maybe other places), vaccine refusal, for example. Enumerating these (supposed) harms is basically the purpose of modern media studies classes.
Whether or not you believe that, if you want to convince people, you need to argue about the specific harms. What you're saying reads to me as "I should be allowed to use the mind-destroying device on myself, because I'm uniquely resistant to having my mind destroyed"; I would suggest that there probably shouldn't be a mind-destroying device at all, even if you might be able to use it without destroying your own mind. You need to argue that it doesn't destroy minds in general, not that it doesn't destroy your own mind - most people believe that mind-destroying machines shouldn't exist at all.
You're treating it like it's a given that these are "mind destroying devices." Where's the evidence? You said I need to argue for why they're not harmful, but so far nobody has demonstrated any harm for me to disprove. Billions of people use these devices daily, where are the destroyed minds? Or do you just interpret people with opposing political views (vaccines, the far-right) as having had their minds destroyed? I don't know, seems like a fairly mind-destroyed way of thinking if I'm being honest.
And your examples of racism/far right politics seem extremely tenuous. Don't you think that the simpler explanation is that the reason that anti-immigrant parties suddenly got popular might have more to do with the sudden influx of immigrants at the same time and in the same places those parties emerged? I know it has become conventional wisdom among some people (media studies students) to say that all these social trends they dislike are due to algorithms, but then demonstrate that! Don't just assert it without backing it up.
You said "While you might like social media that forces content on you rather than allowing you to control it, most people don't." To be clear, in neither scenario do you control the algorithm. Reverse chronological order is as much outside your control as the attention-maxxing algorithm. I'm not saying that revealed preferences are incontrovertible proof, but given that consumers overwhelming choose the attention-maxxing apps over their competitors, you have to do a lot better than to just claim that everyone already agrees with you. If your barometer of public vibes is what you read on Reddit then you're going to get a view that's biased towards negative reports.
I realize I didn't do a good job of conveying what's my opinion, and what's the opinion I think other people have (and, in a comment section, we're talking to the audience as much as each other). I don't, personally, blame social media for far-right politics - though I've seen plenty of columnists who do. I do blame it for vaccine refusal. I consider vaccine refusal to be an objectively incorrect decision (as opposed to far-right politics, which I don't think can be objectively correct or incorrect). While vaccine refusal has a lot of contributors, false information that spreads through social media is generally considered one of the more important in articles on the matter. This article is an example [1]. That article, unfortunately, doesn't discuss what about social media platforms contributes (whether, for example, recommendation algorithms matter).
I share your frustration with the discipline of media studies - it is common to see people assert as fact scientifically testable claims that have not been scientifically tested (or even that have been scientifically refuted).
Unfortunately, scientific research in this area is nascent. But many people have the subjective impression that these algorithms are harmful (including many people who report much better quality of life when they switch to forms of media consumption that they have more control over), which is evidence that can't be dismissed.
I recognize that I probably won't convince you today. I wish there was a larger pool of objective evidence on this.
> Reverse chronological order is as much outside your control as the attention-maxxing algorithm
It's not, though? You can choose who to follow or unfollow. Everything that's on you reverse-chronological feed is there because you follow the person who posted (or reposted) it.
I don't want to be contrarian here but I still don't agree with your example. Vaccine hesitancy does not even remotely seem to me to be an objectively incorrect position, as you say. Personally I think the vaccine was good, but the people I know who disagreed did so for fairly conventional reasons: they were unsure about taking such a new medication, they had had Covid and didn't find it bad enough to warrant getting vaccinated against, and they just overall didn't think the pros outweighed the cons. This line of thinking seems totally normal to me, including if it had happened in a pre-social media world.
I am happy to accept people's anecdotes of social media being harmful if you're willing to accept my anecdotes of it being fine. I just think that the people spreading fear about social media are usually more vocal than the ones who enjoy it so it biases your impressions of what people think.
> You can choose who to follow or unfollow. Everything that's on you reverse-chronological feed is there because you follow the person who posted (or reposted) it.
Yes but you also choose what to engage with vs not engage with. Every time I create a new social media account I have to spend a few days deliberately liking and commenting on what I want to see more of, and ignoring ragebait and whatnot, but after those few days the algorithm figures out what you like and gives you more of it. You have to curate your friends/engagements either way, but you have the same level of control in both.
Good point. I also applaud them for being one of the few platforms that still has an RSS feed (just put the URL of the channel page in your RSS reader).
She’s saying you could keep your algo tuned that way but could also opt out and control it. Why are you against controlling your information feed so strongly.
I’m highly susceptible to reels and shorts and wish I could ban them from my life because they provide nothing of value to me.
No, she's saying that algorithms that are black boxes should be banned. That's basically the entire back end of sites like Youtube. The entire recommendation algo is a black box. I don't want Youtube banned, and I couldn't manually construct my own algorithm from scratch, so this would essentially just mean that Youtube is banned. I like Youtube!
I guess you’re kind of right. I know that with machine learning it will always be a black box but I think there still needs to be some regulation. Being able to use these services without being assaulted by algorithms against your will should be mandatory. Also, they aren’t fully a black box and can be steered and trained on different things.
As of now these services use their good features(most powerfully the creations of the user base and user base itself) to enagage us in ways we do not explicitly consent to.
The part of the algorithm you like is only a small part of the implicit goals of the algorithm. There are many aspects of the algorithms that go against your interest.
Let me opt out completely of short form video on every service I use. Let me open up the algorithm if I wish to see its content and close it if I wish.
The fact that many people have to be vigilant when opening up Instagram or YouTube to avoid wasting time is wrong. It’s a new level of temptation we are facing as humans that many are not built to resist easily.
Being able to tune your homepage more explicitly would also be great.
And if you’ve played with more advanced chatbots you can see that they are very tunable.
I agree that it's annoying you can't turn off shorts on Youtube, but the idea of being 'assaulted by algorithms' just makes no sense to me and doesn't match my experience whatsoever. It would be like saying that going to a bookstore is "being assaulted with book recommendations." Like yeah I guess but what did you come for? Youtube's entire purpose is showing you videos you might be interested in.
Not banned outright, just held to an existing higher standard for the quality of the content they carry and promote - since they're already de facto acting as editors or curators, rather than a truly impartial hosting service.
If a newspaper put some provably false and harmful claim on their front page above the fold, and then the whole company got in trouble for libel rather than just the credited author of that specific article, would you argue that constitutes a ban on newspapers in general? Normally the assumption is that they're supposed to fact-check such things before going to print. The editor has control over what they publish, especially over what they choose to emphasize, and with that power comes proportionate responsibility.
Why does Youtube need a "recommendation algorithm" to exist? Seems like it would be quite workable to have you subscribe to content creators A, B, and C, seeing exactly and only their videos and in chronological order, and maybe one of them personally recommends that you check out contract creator D and you add them to the list.
A straightforward keyword-search functionality would probably also be consistent with the "no black-box algorithms", as would a keyword- or parameter-based killfile, all directly under the control of the user.
This literally already exists. I am baffled by the existence of people (maybe not you) who use YouTube but have apparently never clicked on the Subscriptions button.
The same way you find literally anything else? Word of mouth. Non-targeted advertising. Reviews and recommendations. Like, how did you find this blog? Don't tell me it was because of the Substack algorithm...
Creators uploading their videos tag them by topic, style, and other attributes.
Users seeing the videos upvote/downvote them, as well as reporting/scoring tags that they believe are inappropriate.
You get to sort based on a combination of which topics you want, which styles you want, other objective metrics like video length, and user scores. You get to try different combinations of such things. Zero recommender systems required.
There are things like these. An obvious example I can think of is Archive Of Our Own, the fanfiction site - that one has some issues due to not putting reasonable limits on tags (either number or length) but that's easily fixable. People still can search in it and find what they want without any AI. LessWrong has recently introduced some AI that you can use, but the main search function is still fully user-controlled. There are things like SteamDB which scrapes the entire Steam catalogue and allows you to browse it in exacting detail but with full control, and it's often much better to find e.g. the best deals than relying on the recommender feed.
It doesn't mean that YouTube is banned though? Like, why wouldn't you be able to *better* find videos you like if you were given full control on filtering and use of tags etc. instead of having to trust some dumbass recommender algorithm that saw you check out 5 seconds of a video on wooden planks that you clicked on by mistake and decides to flood your entire page with carpentry?
This is a solvable problem. Recommender algorithms are *suboptimal* for the user, actually, compared to a good search and rank system (imagine e.g. that there are various metrics, like scores voted on by other users, and you can create several presets of sorting by dragging various sliders to pick the specific weights you want to give to each of them). The purpose of recommender algorithms isn't to provide you the best possible experience, it's to provide the *service* the best possible outcome, that is, hook you. Maybe you're resistant to being hooked! Not everyone is. Should we allow companies to lace all food with crack without disclosing the ingredients, just because some people say "hey I like crack"?
All I'm advocating for is disclosing the ingredients. If that means that some current business models become unviable maybe we can go to the actual healthy model - where we pay upfront a small subscription for our video services or social media with money, instead of with our attention spans and mental health.
I definitely *wouldn't* be able to find better videos and I doubt you could either. Your description of how the algorithm works is totally inaccurate. If anything it describes more how *your* system would work, ie. if I'm supposed to just pick tags, then I might pick something like "carpentry" and then only get carpentry videos recommended, whereas the algorithm does a much better job of predicting what sort of thing I would actually like in a holistic sense by looking at what other, similar people also liked.
For example, I'm still incredibly impressed that the algorithm has managed to figure out what I want to see that almost every time I want music and I open the app, music is at the top, and when I want something information based, the algorithm has predicted that too.
Recommendation algorithms *aren't* suboptimal for the user, they're the single best way of finding stuff you actually want to see. I wouldn't have an issue with adding extra features if you wanted to search by tags (which you can already do) but if I had full control over my recommendations my choice would be to set my algorithm to be exactly the same as it already is.
You're saying the algorithm's goal is just to keep you hooked, but the way it does that is by keeping you *interested*. That's what I want! And so do most other people. The whole point of these apps is to give us interesting media. You compared it to putting crack in food, but that's not a very good analogy is it since you don't eat crack. A better analogy would be sugar, except that doesn't work for your argument since the answer is yes, you can put sugar in food, and we do it all the time.
You seem to have softened what you were saying earlier. Now you're saying you just want the "ingredient to be disclosed", but before you were saying that anyone who uses an algorithm that people don't understand should be sued into bankruptcy. For your food analogy, that would be like saying any company that uses ingredients I can't pronounce should be forced out of business. I don't want that either.
If you want the recommendation algorithm to be open sourced, keep in mind that will almost definitely result in a *dramatic decrease in quality*, because suddenly every one will be trying to hack that algorithm as much as possible. Keeping the algorithm unknown forces creators to target *interestingness* as their proxy for algorithmic success.
Why do you think Meta - with just a few examples of predatory behaviour here - removed the 'most recent' sort method, buried a 'friends only' feed in the bowels of settings and disallow for users to not see x type of content or format, only beg to 'show less'? If these things were good for people, why force them, why not let users choose? Why must there be no choice involved, compared to Simone's suggestion of having visibility and control over the algorithms?
Comparing punishing that to censorship and banning libraries is extremely disingenious. Speaking of libraries, the equivalent is a (digital) library where you go in and are offered an endless conveyor belt of books the library thinks you'll like, but you are banned from sorting and filtering books yourself, and if you tell the librarian "I really hate romance novels" they say "well, maybe we'll show you less, but who knows, fuck you, just keep watching the belt". What Simone is saying is get rid of the *forced* conveyor belt, you can still have the algorithm, but you have control. Which seems to not have any obvious counterpoint, other than one being a META/GOOG shareholder.
You say in a further post that users choose attention-maxxing apps over competitors, but it's not that simple in the social media space, because the space *is* Meta, there is no real competition because they have a monopoly on the network graph (TikTok competes for attention, but not the network). Nobody will join another platform without the majority of their friends doing so simultaneously. And more generally on the 'choosing' aspect, see the study referenced here - https://cybernews.com/news/study-tiktok-instagram-fomo/ - it turns out most users would actually *pay money* for the apps to be shut off, if and only if it applied to their friends too.
That seems false. Is it unparsimonious to say there are currently unrelated wars in Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, Burma, etc? Multiple things happening at the same time should be a default assumption.
It sounds like maybe we have a semantic disagreement in the meaning of "crisis". For me, the central example of a crisis is a big hurricane or something. But there can be lots of big hurricanes each year!
None of these are meaningful crisises for your average westerner. Isn't that what we're talking about? Sure, the people in Sudan have a reason to be upset, but we're not talking about them.
I think there’s something wrong about the way we use the word “crisis.” Everything we can reasonably call a crisis isn’t really that close to destroying society. Fertility will take millennia before *major* changes happen, fewer people die of natural disasters than ever despite climate change, AI has not yet destroyed humanity as many had feared, etc. etc.
Can these still be called crises?
I would say yes. A crisis doesn’t have to be an existential problem like an earth-destroying asteroid in Independence Day. It can be a run of the mill “big problem” that decisions need to be made to solve in a timely manner.
Presumably there is some ground truth that would make everyone agree “this is a crisis” like when the nukes are flying or Newsom has been legally assassinated by Trump in 2028 (it was done in his presidential capacity) or Bangladesh is sunk beneath the waves or something else like that. But there doesn’t have to be an ongoing destruction of stuff we like for it to be a crisis. If, 5 minutes before the physical reality of the crisis, someone started yelling about how we’re entering a “crisis of x” that would be just as good (if he was convincing) for being a turning point that spurs collective decision.
The “time when a difficult or important decision must be made” wouldn’t thus be the disaster, but the point at which we all realize a disaster is coming.
With this in mind the bloomers and many of the people who are concerned by other crisis are of the same category. There is an expected future problem, but if action is taken now we can preempt it, and by convincing more people to act we will solve the problem a whole lot better. The doomers are the aberration, that takes a crisis (read: moment of decision) as an opportunity to abdicate decision or to even claim nothing can be done.
And at least on aesthetic value alone the bloomer crisis is probably the only one that doesn’t easily lead itself to doomerism, as the whole vibe is focused on growth and solving problems, rather than the problems threat of destroying us.
To me the word "crisis" denotes a problem with a limited window for resolution. Typically a large problem, but the key part is the limited time frame. It's why a crisis is understood as justification for centralization of power, because decisive and immediate action necessary is implied.
A crisis ignored becomes a disaster, or else proves itself not to have been one.
>To me the word "crisis" denotes a problem with a limited window for resolution. Typically a large problem, but the key part is the limited time frame.
Very much agreed. I find it irritating when anything with a multi-decade time frame is called a crisis. Such things may be important problems, but they are _ongoing_ problems, with enough time to deliberate possible solutions for a year or more.
"Fertility will take millennia before major changes happen"
This seems to be misunderstanding how exponentials work. South Korea has ~51 million people right now. in 4 generations (from Gen X to now, basically), they will have 2 million. That seems like a pretty major change for South Korea!
Yeah, I meant to say centuries. Idk why I said millennia.
I have a whole post on my blog that largely focuses on fertility decline in South Korea. If they don’t get their act together North Korea will just have to walk across an undefended border before long.
If South Korea did get down to two million people, it would have a similar population density to (present day) New Zealand, which doesn't seem all that disastrous. Honestly it seems like an improvement.
It would be disastrous if you were trying to recruit a workforce to maintain a bunch of chip fabs and the entire associated supply chain, along with shipyards, etc, and the local infrastructure to keep all those things working. Particularly if you've already built out all that productive capacity and infrastructure at scale for ~50 million people, and would have to draw any engineering and construction talent for a retooling from the ~2 million you have left.
Meanwhile, present-day New Zealand is a very nice place because of a bunch of stuff that includes chips built in South Korea and is delivered in ships built in South Korea (and in both cases a *very* few other densely-populated places that are seeing the same sort of fertility problems as South Korea.
Places like New Zealand can be pastoral utopias only because places like South Korea are cyberpunk dystopias. YMMV regarding your personal definitions of the various -topias, of course, but the tradeoff remains.
When reading the first few paragraphs of this, where you describe the general setup of the book, I thought the story was gonna be a metaphor for EAs working at Anthropic. Anthropic is the manic pixie dream girl telling you that building the black box of doom (ASI) is fine. You still think the black box probably shouldn't be built but the girl distracts you by pointing to the other problems in the world that need to be solved. Slowly you come around to the perspective of the girl (it helps that she's very charming) and you think this is a good idea. Then at the end of the story the black box explodes and everyone dies.
I hope we can look back on these decades in fourty years or so, and smile about our worries as temporary failures of a society stumbling to enter the information age.
I haven't read the book; but from your excerpts, I've thought that the black box of doom was a great concept handle for something I've noticed in people as well and couldn't quite name. It makes sense it can be misused to dismiss valid concerns about the world actually ending, but I don't think the concept handle was just about that. (I don't buy the part about dictators, though.)
It reminds me of my general thoughts about the nature of bravery that I've been having of late. This year, since around January, I've started to have pretty bad health problems and, as a result, I've experienced a lot of physical suffering that made me more suicidal than usual. Several months into my illness, I've realized my suffering wasn't going anywhere very soon and I needed to find some way to cope.
I asked myself: okay, let's imagine that I had some terrible illness, like cancer; what would I do? Obviously, depending on the specific cancer and the treatment, I would be losing hair or vomiting or whatever. But I probably wouldn't be doing just that. I would try to, like, call my friends from time to time, and to stick to them if I had the stamina. I'd try to remember everything beautiful in my life, remember poetry, linguistics, all the stuff that makes life a little more bearable. And after that my perception of my actual condition changed somehow, and it really helped me to survive. (So far. But my life is much better now.)
It kind of made me realize what bravery was about. Your awareness of how much your life, or some situation, or the world, sucks, is useless if it paralyzes you. Knowledge is power, so your knowledge of the horrors that have still not left this world should empower you. "Okay, now that I know this, I know how to act." I thought this was what the quoted dialogues were about; Abbott tries to dismiss anything Ether mentions about this world that is beautiful or well because his paralysis is self-protecting / homeostatic already.
It also reminds me of a recent post by Scott Aaronson. It starts like this:
> This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how?
I read this and thought: if you perceive the world as on fire, if there's something terrible happening, if there's authoritarian backsliding or anything else... celebrating Halloween, getting together with one's family, smiling, observing merry traditions is *specifically* what one should do.
It feels off to write this whole article without addressing ASI, which my Big Black Box of Doom, and the only reason I’m aware of it, is because I read your writings. I am guessing project 2027 is your version of a middle ground where we might all die but we might manage to survive in a world where a combination of the government and Tech Billionaires are unbelievably powerful and they might be willing to give you a utopia. But that sounds pretty doomerism to me.
You are technically right, it does not give a prescription, but the end result of me reading it was becoming an AI Doomer. I doubt I was the only one that became a doomer after reading it. If that is not what the author’s intended, it would be good to know that.
I agree it's a surprising thing to leave unaddressed, but I like the post better if the implications for x-risk are left as an exercise for the reader.
The article reads as saying, don’t dismiss all doomerism for being doomerism, if you think doomerism can destroy the world. That feels consistent with ASI doom, but not specifically related to it.
I see a difference between the excerpts from the novel and the Tyler Cowen quote, other doomer about doomerism writing. To me, the novel excerpts are focused on the personal decision of how you engage with social media, which we could have control over, and Tyler Cowen is talking about social media as a big scary thing we can't control to worry about.
It is absolutely true that you can drink because you feel like a loser, and become all the more a loser because you drink, and end up in a negative feedback loop that ruins your life. There was a lot of moralizing fiction about alcohol after hard liquor became widely available cheap, and those books weren't wrong trying to scare people.
A moralizing book about the dangers of social media seems like a fine thing to exist in the same way.
We should be more inviting when people bring problems to our attention, but less willing to let anyone convince us that whatever they are on about is the root of all other problems. Wrote about this here:
> we should hate society and our own lives and spiral into permanent despair
Note that this is not a helpful response even when faced with problems that do appear unsolvable. You might turn out to be wrong about them being unsolvable, but you certainly won't find a solution if you don't even try.
I see doomerism as the natural response to a zeitgeist of "there's no point solving any of these problems because none of them are really serious problems that particularly need solving", which is a stance that people benefiting from the status quo and/or people employing heuristics that almost always work are strongly motivated to profess.
I'd really like to see more people fall into neither extreme, but instead land in the grey area in the middle that actually leads to us trying to solve problems. However, this is hard, because in the era of post-truth social media the default result of online discussion is to polarise the participants: when the other side pushes, it's logical to push harder. (Which is not to say we are doomed and should not attempt it!)
To the young and able-bodied (i.e. not me), the traditional post-apocalypse has a lot of appeal: Your fate is in your own hands, not the forces of global economics; you felt your life was heading for disaster anyway, but now you can do something about it; you live by your wits and courage and physical effort, not by your ability to write reviews of the reviews of the new juicer that juices pre-juiced juice packets; everybody is no longer blaming you for your problems; moral clarity is easy when the zombie mushroom heads are attacking; and you don’t have to wear make-up (unless you are a zombie).
Modern people may be more pessimistic on average, but doomerism absolutely existed historically. It's just that nobody takes it seriously now because the bet has already paid out.
It is naïve to look at all those people being pessimistic and wrong about a great many things in the past and conclude that means everyone today is wrong as well, but it does show that you can have a world that is basically fine and getting better and still have a whole lot of fake crises with people running around saying the world is doomed.
I agree. It would take a very good researcher / writer to accurately calibrate the differing levels of doomerism at different times and places, but people have always been predicting the end of the world. When you look at statistics on something like the plague such predictions seem pretty damn justified, even if humanity did ultimately survive. Perhaps we could call this the Malthusian fallacy.
"Doom" has also actually happened, many times throughout history.
The greatest cities of the Ancient Near East--Ur, Nineveh, Assur, Babylon--have been abandoned. Rome and its great civilization fell. The Byzantines were conquered, and the region that was Greek for millennia was forcibly converted. The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas were wiped out.
Even old Europe, in many ways, really was destroyed in this last century. A bourgeois European in 1880 would feel immense despair if they could have seen the tens of millions slaughtered in their continent. In fact that despair led Stefan Zweig, a liberal believer in peace and tolerance, to kill himself in 1942. And he, a Jew, didn't even get to see the Holocaust!
It is so smarmy and disingenuous to act like humanity, as a whole, surviving is some sort of win that should counteract any pessimism. If humanity survived a nuclear World War III, with "only" 500 million dead, with New York in smoking ruins while South America is untouched, would these "bloomers" count that as an "I-told-you-so?"
Doom has happened many times, and I think the obsession with doom in America is a result of our blessed country never experiencing it and knowing that the bill must come eventually. Ask a Russian or Pole or Palestinian if doomerism is a fallacy.
I don't have a question, I just really enjoy your writing - was already a fan in the Cracked days, and am really glad after that all exploded you landed o your feet and keep doing what you're great at.
Hi, I just wanted to say that reading "John Dies at the End" way back, when you could just get it as a pdf, was a formative experience for me. I still occasionally think back to the phrase "Shit Narnia" and chuckle, or think of "this moment is forever" and get the chills. I had no idea you'd gone on to do all this other stuff. By "well actually"-ing "Black Box", Scott brought it to my attention so I went ahead and ordered a copy.
All this reminds me of Brad Bird's 2015 sci-fi flop *Tomorrowland*. In that movie a vast secret society of Great Thinkers had labored for centuries to create a pocket dimension where they were free to pursue all their wildest projects (a bit of a Disney-style Galt's Gulch, if you buy the "Bird is a Randian" takes).
But in the movie, Tomorrowland never actually got built as promised - it was derailed by the George Clooney character's invention of a Tachyon Machine, which was supposed to show humanity the glorious future it could work towards but instead got locked into an unbreakable Doomer feedback loop. The villain tuned it to a grim apocalyptic future to try to scare humanity straight, but focusing on that future just kept humanity convinced that the future is going to suck, which feeds the machine more grim futures, which just demoralized people more etc. with no way out except to destroy the machine in a massive explosion.
At the time (May 2015) I felt the movie was a unnecessarily a bummer, certainly out of step with the gee-whiz Tomorrowland ethos still felt occasionally in the theme park lands. It felt kind of 'old man yells at cloud' back then. But now I am also an old man yelling at cloud so I kind of want to revisit it after a decade of being browbeaten by the Tachyon Machine and see how it plays in 2025.
Hugh Laurie's explanation of that is fantastic, and the only thing I remember about it. Paraphrased: "You took a warning and turned it into young adult franchises."
I was about to post exactly the same thing, but thought I should scroll down and see if someone beat me to it. Congratulations, Chris the Ninja from Nowhere :-)
And, from the movie, enjoy a classic villain's-got-a-point speech delivered by the incomparable Hugh Laurie: https://youtu.be/5sZnphH7L80
I agree, and I think the reason you don't see this view more is that the people who hold it don't post. If you think that no crisis in the news is worth ruining your life over, crisis of other people ruining their lives over the news included, you're not posting about it, you're off doing something fun. (In my case, reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to the toddler for the 562nd time and writing bad fanfic.)
Yes, you said uncharitable summary of these sections. (I have not yet read the full story.) But it does not seem to really be a paradox or self-contradictory, as it does not itself seem to claim to be "an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us." Rather, it is one thing making our lives worse that we _can_ do something about.
"There is this thing that has you scared about every thing you cannot change; but is it telling the truth? Or is _it_ the one thing affecting you that you _can_ change?"
Leading up to World War I & II, we could both see the rising geopolitical threats AND see that we were inventing penicillin and saving a lot of lives. That contradiction still exists today. The world is both bettering and worsening depending on which metrics you’re looking at.
Whether the bad outweighs the good so much that you shouldn’t have children today? Well should someone in 1925 have had children knowing they might go off to die at war (or a concentration camp?) With hindsight that’s a valid concern (even though they would also be less likely to die of wounds because of penicillin). The only reason that choice doesn’t seem valid today is that we don’t know how bad or good it will get. So we’re taking a gamble that it will go one way or the other (because we are a bloomer or doomer, weighing some metrics over others.)
Also, even if the Soviet Union had conquered the whole world, people would have had penicillin and electricity and better sanitation than centuries ago. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a terrible catastrophe.
Bloomerism can lead to passivity just as well as doomerism.
"Also, even if the Soviet Union had conquered the whole world, people would have had penicillin and electricity and better sanitation than centuries ago. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a terrible catastrophe."
Hard disagree on that (and I also doubt that "conquered" is really the right term: the victory of socialism in the Cold War wouldn't mean that one country controlled the whole world, anymore than the victory of capitalism means America controlling everything today, especially when you consider that the Soviet Union was always a much weaker country than America in most respects).
My experience is that in a lot of cases, #2, "The Black Box is destroying everything that makes us human, causing our society to spiral into dictatorship", is more likely to be believed on top of other doomer dystopia-beliefs, rather than as a contrary position to it. Climate change is going to kill us all, the world is falling into war and decay - AND the screens are eating our brains on top of it all.
A steelman of the book's MPDG bloomer might argue that #2 is *individually* true of the book's depressed doomer, but not really true of society in general. And that this is part of what makes screen-doom so insidious; it can convince you not just to be consumed by despair at the destruction of all things human, but that *everyone else* is ALSO consumed by the same despair, so it would be fruitless to try and resist the siren call of obsessive doomscrolling. At the same time, it narrows your awareness to the myopic world inside the feed, so you can't see anyone who isn't stuck in the same dynamic.
On the other hand, if an apocalypse does happen, then none of this meta-discourse matters. You haven't told us whether the black box actually IS a nuke. I guess I have to read the book now...
I'm no "bloomer", but I think I can steelman their position (as presented in this article, at least). It's not the case that bad things aren't happening and everything is always going to turn out ok. They are, and it won't, and yes, we do need to work on that. Rather, it is the case that no crisis -- not even a serious crisis -- should be treated as the One True Final Overwhelming Doom that is coming to doom us all, and therefore deserves the allocation of 100% (plus or minus epsilon) of your resources. The Earth is a complex system, human society even more so, and if you hyperfocus on any one thing to the exclusion of everything else you are almost guaranteed to make everything worse, by sheer neglect if not outright error.
Well, firstly, because I just learned of the term today. But secondly, because I do believe that we are facing several crises which will make the world a worse place to live in in the near to medium future. Not an apocalyptic wasteland, and not forever, but worse than what we've got today. And I don't believe that we are addressing these crises adequately. Granted, it's possible that things will work out anyway, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
Reminded me of books long gone, and may they remain so. "Enlightenment Now" has better style. But some people can only digest novels (while most do not read at all) - and for some a Socratic dialogue is appropriate. Me: I won't touch that book. Seems not much worse than Paulo Coelho and many others, though.
Finding a philosophy that doesn't instantly succumb to its own criticisms of other philosophies is the task of the intermediate-level thinker. It's not going to bootstrap itself into a living system of thought if it implodes the second you apply it to itself.
The trivial way to survive any criticism you've ever applied to anyone else is to never criticize at all, but taking that straight yields useless nihilistic moral relativism.
More productive variant is to summon up the Imp of the Perverse, metaphorical source of childishly terrible intrusive thoughts, and challenge it to a game: "Armed only with this very short list of moral axioms, and logical derivations thereof, try to find fault in anything and everything I think, say, or do. Succeed, and I'll uproot as much as necessary to resolve the flaw." The imp's greatest joy is kicking over sandcastles, and it doesn't strategize much beyond that, so disruption of your beliefs and habits is reward enough - it won't care how they get rebuilt stronger afterward.
When the imp gets bored with some criticism because there's no weakness left among all your remaining philosophical positions which that line is capable of carving into, you may then pick up the discarded toy and wield it outwardly, confident in your immunity.
If the axioms you started from turn out to support fully-general arguments, something which cannot be logically resisted (or is, in practical terms, incompatible with survival), the imp of the perverse will gleefully demonstrate this. Adjust your flawed premises accordingly; games that are too easy to win tend to stop being fun, after all.
I think there's a defense available that meta-level arguments aren't really exceptions. Like imagine if there are four kids screaming at each other, each one demanding toys from the others. And then a parent says, "Stop yelling and demanding things from each other!" If a kid got remarkably analytical in response and said "But haven't you yourself just made a loud demand, for a cessation of other demands?", I think the parent could fairly say that a meta-demand for compromise is not hypocritical.
To put it differently, this thesis could be phrased as "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" which doesn't seem subject to the same criticism - the metaness, when made more explicit, seems less of a bug and more of a feature.
The important thing isn’t that it’s meta, it’s that the parent has the authority to enforce their claim. The parent could equally say “None of you get the toy, give it to me”, and the children wouldn’t be able to call the parent a hypocrite either.
When someone says “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself”, that normally comes from a person that the listener trusts. They are saying that for e.g. a specific task the listener has to do, the speaker thinks they’re well-prepared, and the speaker thinks fear is the biggest remaining issue. If the listener didn’t already trust the speaker, it wouldn’t be persuasive to say this. And if the listener described other issues and the speaker didn’t have more specific reasons that those issues weren’t a problem, the listener would lose that trust in the speaker.
> …except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us. You cannot possibly imagine how bad this one is, and we must treat it as an absolute emergency which requires us to uproot everything about our lives.
How much uprooting of our lives is necessary to avoid doomerism though? Sure, in a work of fiction, it involves driving a possible-terrorist and her possible-suitcase-nuke to DC, but for normal non-protagonists? Mild self-curation of your social media sources? Not having cable news on for 16 hours per day in the background as you go about your life? Keeping a sense of perspective about real bad things? And if you find yourself still believing something is going to majorly suck, take the appropriate mitigation steps instead of despairing?
And unlike most of the normal dooms, it doesn't require collective action. You can fix your problem without needing everyone else to cooperate on some global scale to do it.
Sure, but you need society to survive as well. A world where everyone apart from me and my 150 closest friends lived as unhappily as the loser in the story feels like doom to me.
The nice things about the doomers is their belief is mostly compartmentalized. They still go to work, still act pretty much the same as if they didn't think everyone was going to die. They don't even take early retirement or avoid making investments. Maybe it's contributing to the fertility decrease, but education seems like the major factor there rather than changes in outlook. Even voting, which should be the place to costlessly express these fears, seems to not be affected that much. The feeling of helplessness counters the miscalibration about the severity of the doom.
Empathy I can't do much about, but they're not that badly off in practice, definitely on the objective level, and even on the subjective one. "People with objectively amazing lives compared to 99% of human history feel anxious/depressed about inchoate risks they've been socialized into caring about and get prescribed some pills to blunt it" hardly registers on the suffering-meter. But I didn't read the book, maybe it's presented as much worse than the real thing (which is why you don't update from fiction).
>We should have a medium-high but not unachievable bar for trying to solve these problems through study, activism and regulation (especially regulation grounded in good economics like the theory of externalities), and a very high, barely-achievable-except-in-emergencies bar for trying to solve them through censorship and accusing people of being the Antichrist.
What would be the principal difference between typical activism and accusing people of being the Antichrist? If anything, with few people taking ancient mythology seriously in the west these days, Thiel's imagery seems more out-of-touch eccentricity than anything.
Well, rampant doomerism made me hate social media and mostly stop using it, so in that way, it's been a good thing!
More seriously, I do sometimes worry about how doomers function as a sort of reserve army for dangerous populists, so it is good to remember opposition to them can be taken to a bad extreme. Though I'd guess that to Thiel and Cowen, doomerism is just one of many bad ideas that could cause a democratic country to turn against the free market system. They are just generally okay with the idea of authoritarian crackdowns on ideas they view as genuine threats to civilization, a common view among the politics obsessed. At least as I see it, bloomers in general aren't more likely to engage in this kind of talk than others.
The flexibility of social media algorithms allows me to reduce the amount of doomerism I am exposed to, unlike my tv and newspaper consumption of old over which I had no power.
Holy crap, every time I think I dislike Tyler Cowen's opinions sufficiently, he lowers the damn bar.
"Yay for repression! Think only positive thoughts! Don't notice what bad things are happening, or else! Eeyore needed a course of antidepressants, shock therapy, and if he still didn't get with the programme, to be quietly disappeared!"
It's been a long time since I read "1984", I wonder if Orwell had anything to say about IngSoc's approach to Negative Nellies?
"A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.
But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK."
I am loathe to dip my foot into this discussion, as by now 1984 ought to have its own version of Godwin's law. But surely if we look at the text you quoted and ask ourselves whether it more accurately describes People on Social Media, or people who say "have you noticed Social Media is terrible" -- the answer is the former, without a fleeting shadow of a doubt
Tangential but I remember Jason Pargin mentioning SSC on a podcast a while back so it's possible he's still a reader here. It's nice when writers I like also like each other's work
Everything has always been terrible, and everything has always been getting better. Go read history and see how dumb and terrified our ancestors were. We actually are better than they were.
They weren’t actually. The could survive personal catastrophes that would floor us. Including death all around them. Death of siblings from a young age. Maybe it’s like a peanut allergy and you need to be exposed to this to survive it.
The problem with a lot of Bloomer framing of Doomerism is that people like Pargin (and Stephen Pinker, etc.) are such materialists they can't imagine problems outside a lack of basic physical needs. Particularly food, shelter, and sanitation.
But man doesn't live on bread alone. And you could have a society with high material abundance and creature comforts but many other social, psychological, spiritual, and aesthetic problems. And those are the main problems in the West currently. And they could get worse. Even as the running water keeps running, violent crime goes down, etc.
The "collapse" does not have to feature literal starvation. It could mean people just never going outside...
I don't think this is entirely true. That is to say, yes, the West has many societal and psychological problems beyound the material. However, such problems are only important to us because we live in a society with high material abundance. People who are starving out in the desert aren't worried about AI or cyberbullying or TFR or any such issues; they're worried about living through the day.
AI is not a great example there, at least not here, where you're largely talking to the Rats and not to the Blue Tribe sneerers.
I'm not worried about AI because I think it might make my life miserable in some indefinable way. I'm worried about AI because I think it might kill me just as dead as if I'd starved out in the desert.
This doesn't exactly detract from your point here, though.
I would still argue that if you were starving out in the desert, desperately trying to find enough water to make it through the day, you wouldn't have a lot of time left to worry about superintelligent AI.
Pinker wrote me, he disapproves of Marvin Harris because he considers the guy (correctly) a: materialist. I am not convinced, but one ought entertain the notion that considering less kids dieing a good thing does not automatically make one a despicable 'materialist'. Neither does praising more peace, more democracy, more press freedom, more literacy.
Pinker wrote me, he disapproves of Marvin Harris because he considers the guy (correctly) a: materialist. I am not convinced, but one ought entertain the notion that considering less kids dieing a good thing does not automatically make one a despicable 'materialist'. Neither does praising more peace, more democracy, more press freedom, more literacy.
I think the concluding paragraph is off the mark, fails to recognize the central issue here. Though, I also get the impression that the black box writer frames things poorly, so there's blame to spread. The internet era is characterized by regular exposure to a large number of problems which people have little or no ability to influence. A hundred years ago, no one would care about two nations at war overseas, or the temperature of the entire Earth, or the economic health/political stability of every third world country. Most of this info wouldn't even be available to your average Joe. Social/mass media means we can now know about this stuff in intimate detail, despite having very little ability to influence how everything plays out. More and more of our modern day issues are unsolvable by the average person.
It is good that people with power now know about, and can act to solve these issues, but it's also important to point out that most people fall outside of that bracket. Doomerism, for most people, isn't reasonable. There will always be big issues that you cannot meaningfully affect in the world, both today and five hundred years ago. The only difference modern day is that we are aware of these issues. I'm not sure if bloomerism is exactly the right response, but there has to be some form of pushback to the pessimism that naturally accompanies this newfound awareness. If we don't find something healthy, then there's an opportunity gap for ne'er-do-wells to capitalize on. People don't really like feeling miserable and impotent, after all.
What about the risk that AI creates for other life in the universe? If the solution to the Fermi paradox is that life is common but high-tech civilizations are extremely rare, then a paperclip maximizer we create could destroy billions of inhabited worlds (or worse, impose a suffering risk hell on them), which, at even a 1% probability, is an evil that dwarfs anything a reasonable person would consider bad enough to cause us to hate society. (The counterargument that AI could help life on a billion years doesn't work because by going slow with AI development we could greatly improve the odds for us.)
This is AI as magical demon. If you believed that was a possibility then we’d be toast already, unless we were the only intelligent species in this galaxy.
This guy doesn't know how to write women, it's jarringly bad. I am an educated professional and have never met a woman who talks like that in extemporaneous conversation. I can think of one lawyer friend who might be able to deliver that well in a rehearsed closing argument in a courtroom, but that isn't how she talked about anything off the cuff. If you gave that speech to Dagny Taggart it would still sound unrealistic. You could maybe have a man talk like this, but believe me I'm not being flattering to men when I say that, and even on a man the trait of speaking like that would be extensively defining the character as a complete weirdo and an extreme narcissist.
I'm okay with this in a Brad Thor special ops thriller from an official explaining the sitrep, or the supervillain explaining his plan (I like to imagine they all lay in bed rehearsing what they'd say if they caught the spy and had the chance to deliver such a speech and are really excited when it happens). If this book is some kind of parody of those and it's all a joke then maybe I could accept it, but otherwise that would take me right out of a book.
Suspending disbelief about "no one actually talks like this" to directly experience otherwise thrilling genre fiction is a skill. The most reliable way to train this skill is by watching anime
I'm not sure that bloomers are really guilty of internal inconsistency. The conversation seems to boil down to:
Bloomer: " Real problems definitely exist, but I think overreacting to problems is itself a problem, or perhaps a meta-problem that makes other problems worse."
Scott/Doomer: "You are overreacting to a problem, that is a contradiction".
But are the bloomers overreacting? Maybe some of them, but it isn't inherent to the idea in the way I think this post suggests.
I think Scott is claiming that bloomers exist who think real problems don’t exist. Certainly the quotes from the story sound like a character who never updates towards thinking the world is worse, and who is right not to do so.
I think there's a distinction between "bearing bad news" and "being a plague vector for despair."
I have a saying that helped me get through a lot of truly horrible things that happened in the past few years -- "depression is a disease; despair is a sin."
You can't always help being depressed for all the normal reasons, but despair is an active step into completely different territory, it's the insistence that also everyone around you must be miserable and hopeless too, and that anyone who refuses to validate your misery and hopelessness is not taking the problems of the world seriously and is a bad person. It was very tempting to give in to despair during the darkest period of my life, but I knew where it would lead, and I had a family to live for. Having come out the other side, I recoil now when I see it in others. I know I should be more understanding, but it's an instinctive physical revulsion at this point.
In short, I don't have a problem with vanilla "doomers," that is to say, people who have very strong concerns that a bad thing might possibly be happen unless we do something about it soon. I may or may not agree with the doom they think is coming or how bad it is, but I'm glad somebody's sufficiently concerned about bad things that may or may not kill us all.
What I *do* have a big problem with is "doomer-despairers", the kind of people who follow their shot of doom with a chaser of, "..and therefore everything is meaningless, hope is folly, and we should spend all our time talking about who doomed we are" (with an implied, "...rather than taking active steps to do something about it.")
It also seems to me that vanilla doomers (the kind who actively want to *do something* about the doom) would/should be pretty frustrated with the "doomer-despairers" too, even if they're both worried about the same kind of doom.
I'm tempted to analogize this to world war 1, and/or world war 2.
"Increasing industrial production, mechanization of warfare, better transportation logistics, and communication technology will enable conflict on an immensely destructive scale we can't even imagine."
this is a dark prophecy that someone could make in 1910 or EVEN after ww1 in 1920, be right, but in neither case was it the actual end of the world. Just the end of the world for millions upon millions of people.
But you could also make the same exact prediction, PLUS with atomic bombs, in 1950, and end up completely wrong.
I’m not sure that Pargin is being self-contradictory. Something can be not be as bad as people think, and still be very bad. Or be worse than people think and very bad. I’d argue that Pargin is making the first argument against standard issue Internet doomerism, and the second against the many people who cling to their doomerism.
Maybe the way to think about it is that doomerism primarily harms the individual, but that it has externalities, too, like Trumpism and Bernie Sanders (remember that essay "The Flight 93 Election," urging Republicans to hold their nose and vote for Trump in 2016? Classic doomerism) and those externalities, while not necessarily a crisis situation, certainly are a net cost to the rest of us.
Side note: Jonathan Rauch was on Econtalk a couple months ago and touched on this subject. His strategy for fighting doomerism on the right was to remind people that both the New and Old Testaments direct Christians to be not afraid. You can't behave in a very Christian way if you're constantly afraid, so the way to go is to remind people on the right that the Bible tells Christians multiple times to keep a stiff upper lip. Maybe for nerds like us we just need to remind people of Frank Herbert's notion that "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."
Ether seems to have missed that people who believe in Christ’s Second Coming and the Apocalypse are not pessimistic in the sense of someone who believes for example that technology will destroy humanity.
The Christian Apocalypse is terrible of course, but it is God’s Will being done and the vindication of the righteous. People who predict it often generally are kind of looking forward to it.
Also, there is a huge difference between eg people in the Middle Ages or the Bronze Age and people now being thrust into a society where modern technology doesn’t work. People in the Middle Ages had hard lives but they had the knowledge to live in the world as it was back then.
I'm an avowed bloomer whose optimism extends to the belief that Doomerism is definitely a problem for those afflicted, and to a lesser degree for those around them, but I don't think it's anywhere near an existential issue. In many ways it's self-correcting as time goes on without doom being visited upon us all. A close friend used to be an outspoken China doubter, sure their economy would collapse any month now. It still could suffer a devastating contraction, but I find it interesting how long it's been since this friend has said anything about it. Climate change as a given example is also one which -in my experience at least- it seems to have receded from public attention. Social media addiction is a problem and it can consume lives absolutely, but most people I know who suffer from it are well aware of this and hold the desire to stamp it out. That's not the same as actually defeating the addiction, but it isn't self-reinforcing in a way that would concern me if most social media addicts thought their addictions were good, actually.
Dunno: "how strong is the evidence for “AI-doom/AI-doomerism? Nobody has proven its existence with a p < 0.05 study. There is no universal scientific consensus on its existence." (Also: What is "universal scientific consensus"?! Sound like sth. climate-doomers hallucinate.)
I agree with Scott's takes here, mostly. But sure one can "prove" doomerism - if one designs the definition "right". (And shame on those scientist not-consenting.) I propose: "When TFR goes long-term below 2.1 - without a lack of calories, healthcare etc - then doomerism/negative-contagion-attitudes have too much hold." There may even be universal biologist consensus on that. A shrinking population of any species is: a population in crisis/under distress/something going awry. - Or technological: when the application procedures to do X takes more time and money than doing X (unless X is really cheap, but scarce/risky; say a CT-scan/Fentanyl), doomerism is in charge. So, that novel is an attempt to rephrase Pinker's 'Enlightenment Now'?
I dunno, can't all of this be simply part of the human operating system that just takes on different forms via different technology ecosystems?
Humanity is governed by a lot of natural first principles, including about half of us being conservative (looking back: better) and half of us being progressive (looking forward: better).
Can't we just acknowledge that this is who we are and be OK with it? Why must we think the human condition is somehow in a new novelty stage when all signs point to us really not changing much except for what we build to make us do whatever it is we want to do faster and cheaper?
Doomscrolling is just a faster, cheaper way to feel hopeless and bad about the status quo and the future -- because technology reduced the amount of friction to get the Doom Fix in.
Plenty of people remain optimistic about the future -- which is why we have so many start-ups and so many people heavily invest in the future of AI. This is nothing new either.
Social Media is like the invent of Fast Food chains: people desire what's bad for them, and when they get all that they want and more with limited friction, it has negative health consequences. Yet, many people don't engage in social media or fast food to satiate their hunger. They end up being healthy, balanced, and likely optimistic contributors who help build the next phase of humanity -- whether humanity wants that or not.
Yey, Pargin will get more hits! The book is actually good - you've seen the "preachy" part, but it also, somehow, don't ask me how, manages to be very entertaining and readable. It has car chases and guns.
Ontopic: are you criticising the idea of artistic license itself? Or any form of pathos? I can occasionally say "socialism is the worst", but I don't mean it's worse than ... polio? Actually, it kinda is. Bubonic plague? Ehhh. Anyways, bad example.
Point is, people exaggerating to make a point is just regular human communication. I don't think Pargin even meant that "doomerism" is a world ending crisis - he just pointed it as a moderately serious problem that should be considered. What would even be a better approach, just add constant disclaimers like "this is a serious problem, but probably no more than the 80th percentile of serious problems"?
(or I may have missed the point, totally possible, nursing a cold)
A lot of dooms are nonsense. Some aren't. I don't think we're in a lost game just yet, but there are certainly problems ahead, some needing to be avoided and some endured.
I don't see the two sections as contradictory. They are both consistent with a worldview that, if I were a Saturday cartoon, would put as "all societal problems are solvable iif we have hope". I personally disagree, but it sounds defensible.
It also strongly reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance: to remain tolerant, we must be intolerant towards those who push for intolerance. Or, in the bloomer's case: we must remain hopeful except against crisis of hopelessness.
Correction: We must be intolerance towards those who are intolerant. -Not- to those who push for intolerance (save in the most extreme kinds of circumstances); this is a modern corruption which ignores more than a century of philosophy.
But what if the very people who subscribe to this idea of the paradox of tolerance are themselves intolerant because they can't tolerate legitimate differences of opinion? They must then be intolerant toward themselves.
Opinions do not constitute intolerance; this is part of the same modern corruption. Intolerance is action; it is not intolerance to dislike something or somebody, for it is no tolerance to exist side-by-side with that which you like. Tolerance, as an ideal, is about -not acting- upon your opinions, to "permit" that to exist which you would prefer not to exist.
The modern corruption in which "tolerance" has come to mean "liking everybody and everything" is nonsensical, and is exactly where this confusion arises from.
I agree with this, but I'd like to shoehorn in a justification for not tolerating the existence of things I personally don't like, while not giving others the same benefit. I need to think about how to do that, though.
I'm going to steelman doomerism, against my personal convictions: I'm reminded of Scott Adams' "Law of slow-moving disasters", where he posits that any disaster that's slow enough to be anticipated will be solved, mitigated, innovated out of, or otherwise avoided - specifically by people who worry that said disaster represents an existential threat.
Combine this with the idea that society requires certain equilibria to be maintained (not too much centralized power, but not too little), and it starts to make sense that opposing groups are warning of seemingly incompatible disaster scenarios. This doesn't mean they're both wrong...
Indeed they may both be right! But-for their thankless effort, the balance could tip irreversibly. When the disaster fails to appear BECAUSE they sounded the alarm, they're told the alarm was unnecessary and the whole to do was just doomerism.
You could say that, "the looming apocalypse you have with you always", and that's a good thing! If ever we stop worrying about the apocalypse, that's the day it will finally arrive. Maybe that's why we fret about it in the first place.
Yes, I feel that “bloomers“ sometimes assume problems just get solved because it’s time to solve them, and not because some people put a lot of time and effort into coming up with a solution and even more time into making nuisances of themselves and making it happen. I’m not sure there’s always a tidy line between helpful, reformers, and doomer cranks.
Doomers for any specific cause will recognize a "free rider" problem here. But it's potentially an invisible free ride, with the possibility that the 'bloomer' recognizes the effort as net harmful. Indeed, given the impossibility of running the counterfactual, there will likely be open debate who was right.
Example: bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.
One side claimed that unless this was done there would be a regional nuclear arms race and subsequent mass death combined eventually with the first use of nuclear weapons since WW2. The bombing of the facilities happened, averting disaster, ergo the intervention was justified. When this situation comes up again, we should repeat the solution from last time.
The other side claims the opposite, but also from a doomer perspective! This action could have devolved into a major regional war with the US directly involved. The reason it didn't was because Iran declined the escalation ladder, declared the issue over, and pressure from Iran war doomers ensured Trump accepted the face-saving attack without further escalation. Next time this situation comes up, we need to keep up the pressure to avoid war with Iran.
What's interesting is that this is doomer vs doomer, with no bloomers required to take the contrary side. The same dynamic can be seen for many political issues.
Perhaps the sensible way out of this conundrum is that you should worry about a particular type of doom to the extent that you are meaningfully in a position to do anything about it.
For every possible doom scenario, we need some people who devote their whole careers to worrying about it, some people who worry about it part time to keep the first group well-resourced, and a few billion people to just maintain some sort of background awareness that it's a thing while getting on with the rest of their lives. As a person with no particular ability to do anything about (say) bird flu, I'm happy to outsource my worrying about bird flu to the people who do that for a living; maybe every now and then I can mention bird flu as a potential problem to ensure that those people are getting enough funding.
Totally! Even if the only thing you can do is in your own neighborhood. It's really important that a few hundred people go super prepper, hoarding food, water, and guns in a bunker in the woods. Because they'll probably never be needed, and humanity can afford to float a few extra crazies ... unless they're right and they're the only ones left after some crazy disaster.
"Doomerism", as I understand it, is not the idea that "some things will lead to Doom if unsolved". Instead, it's an automatic tendency to treat every problem + trend as if it will necessarily lead to Doom. One thing to note, I think, is that the negative effects of "Doomerism" in a person can be significantly ameliorated if that person understands that it exists.
if somebody thinks that doomerism is an issue, they are sort of innoculated against the Doomer narratives "for free" (because they won't automatically assume that Doom-based narratives are more plausible than the alternative as a general rule, even if they are popular narratives). This is not true of things like global warming for example. You can convince me that global warming is a problem but that won't protect me from its negative effects.
If I believe that global warming is a problem, the only people worth trying to persuade are lawmakers + scientists basically. Persuading any number of randos on the street is not going to move the needle at all. The same is not true for doomerism, so there's a better case for indiscriminate persuasion
My simplified version of the heuristic is that no crisis is so great that it should wipe out cost-benefit analysis. People have a tendency of saying "I will do anything, without reservation, to defeat the enemy." Invoking such a mindset is an understandable goal of policy. Leaders want a wave of emotion.
Alternately; I just want a stronger bias towards mistake theory over conflict theory.
I don't think that this addresses the entire scope of the discussion here, but I do think that it is worth considering some of the hidden social incentives at play here for people. The first is that talking about how you are an optimist all of the time makes you more attractive and dateable. It also likely makes people more comfortable including you in social groups. The second is that, for people with a hereditary tendency to be clinically depressed, trying to 'mindhack' themselves to adopt a relentlessly positive mental frame might be a survival strategy.
> But isn’t the idea of an epidemic of negative emotional contagion, bringing in its wake collapsing state capacity and stagnant economies, and so threatening that we must arguably suspend our usual liberal values in order to crush it before it spreads - itself a form of negative emotional contagion?
That's like saying that it's contradictory to use violence to bring peace. Violence can end future instances of violence by eliminating the actors that would cause it. Sometimes you need to start a war to end countless more.
Maybe there isn't, or needn't be, so much of a paradox, as a difference of focus. As in: Doomers may well be right about one or other source or timeline of impending doom, but if a person's seat of blooming is in their own soul - only minimally impinged upon by things such as ugly architecture, or even failure of the power network - they can still flourish. (Failure of the water supply, or loss of the antibiotic supply chain, may be a somewhat different story.) At any rate, that's how I always understood Bloomerism.
I sometimes think about reading more fiction instead of all this substack, but now it looks like fiction is just a substack post being read out by two characters
I buy the logic, but I fret the social snag: doom buys belonging, so “optimism-as-heuristic” can read as a status hit. What’s worked for me is one identity-safe, concrete win, and receipts.
I'm not really seeing the paradox. The world is improving in a lot of ways but also has a lot of real problems that it's worthwhile to draw attention to and try to solve, like climate change or the biases of our information ecosystem. If you think climate change or online propaganda is going to literally destroy the world you are too much of a doomer, but if you think they're going to cause a lot of avoidable deaths and require serious policy responses you're just being realistic.
The real opposite of doomers are people who don't care about world problems at all. They have no strong opinions on solutions and spend no significant personal effort. In my experience, a great number of ordinary people fit this category.
As for bloomers, they are still insisting that the world has big problems and changes should be made, they just favor a different set of solutions. As you say, I see no fundamental difference.
No Scott, you don't get it. Being inconsistent is a feature of these social groups, not a bug. It filters out the people who are actually trying to think things through or have a calm/skeptical mind. That leaves only the stubborn and the hard-to-convince-otherwise types, who are more useful as pawns. Think how spam emails are full of typos to filter-out the people likely to cause trouble for the spammer.
Though I'd guess here it's an evolved feature rather than one that's consciously chosen. Like a UFO group getting angry when you show them the "happy 30th birthday" written on the side of a UFO (this actually happened).
I think the "paradox" only exists when one forgets that things like cost-benefit analysis also exist.
Yes, algorithm-driven doomerism is a problem. Yes, doomerism about algorithm-driven doomerism is part of that problem. Actually, I feel like traditional "professional", as opposed to social, media deserve just as much blame - I've no hard data on this, but I think people still trust the prestige and supposed fact-checking and editorial standards that names like NYT, or Atlantic, or what have you, signify, and the same names are just as happy bombarding them with "the world is about to end".
Is doomerism a problem that is not taken seriously enough? Eh, IDK. Maybe? But describing this doomerism as the one problem to focus on is also incorrect. A degree of prevention of doomerism would be good, that does not currently exist, but if we this as THE ultimate problem of humanity, solving it would require building a Stepford-type dystopia where no bad news can ever be published.
In fact, I think it's the same with Popper's tolerance paradox? Yes, a tolerant society requires a degree of intolerance towards intolerance. But if we take intolerance to be THE ultimate problem, we make the safety mechanism too sensitive - e.g. an unsubstantiated single accusation of intolerance becomes enough to trigger society's enforcement mechanisms, because we have taken intolerance to be THE ultimate problem and there is no such thing as an acceptable level of risk - then we have looped back around on ourselves and built an intolerant society, because it's now enough to tar anyone you do not agree with as "intolerant" to have them chewed up.
(I don't, for the record, think this "intolerant tolerance" is a real problem that really affects anyone in 2025, but what do I know, maybe my bubble is peculiar.)
When you refer to the "prior state ... of managed democracy," I don't know how far back you are going, but when I look at American history, things seldom worked better than they do now. We've had slavery, a civil war, segregation, industrial strikes and semi-war between capitalists and workers. In the 1970s, political violence far exceeded what we have today. 30 years ago, poverty and crime were much higher than they are now, and life expectancy was lower. I'd say that our democracy has seldom been managed at all, let alone managed well. Democracy is chaotic, messy, and unpredictable, but better than the alternatives.
Do we even all (+- the lizardman percentage) agree on what it means to compare two time periods? I don't think we even have broad agreement on an ordering for most criteria... Even if we could decide what the right criteria to compare are. Which I don't think we can, broadly.
There are plenty of reasons in every society to be a doomer and constantly worrying. It would "make sense" for a hunter gatherer to constantly worry, to a debilitating degree, about getting eaten by a lion, getting an infection and dying, dying in childbirth, accidentally eating something poisonous. The majority of the world believes they might be tortured for eternity after they die, yet they're not worried about that to a debilitating degree. It's a psychological thing, where healthier minds (and trust me, I've had an unhealthy mind - sertraline fixed that) simply are not "doomers" to the point of hating their life, even if there's ample reason to be one
At least not on the TC point, there has to be a way of criticizing excessive negativity without being dismissed as a hypocrite. If you mostly post positively and every so often tell ppl to stop being so negative, seems fine?
A milder anti doomer (is that the same as bloomer) version of scotts concluding own view is that of the list of crises, doomerism isnt worse than you could possibly imagine, its just the worst on the list and warrants most of our energy to reduce. Its not usually the worst on the list, but sometimes it has been. When its not worst on the list, society gets to spend its energy fixing or improving something more fundamental as we got to do for most of the 20th century which is why we got so many improvements. Itd be great to get the doomerism out of the way so we could go on fixing fundamental issues again. Yay future
Comparing "doomerism" to other crises is missing the point.
Doomerism is a metacrisis that matters mostly because it reduces our collective ability to deal with all the other crises. So to the extent that doomerism is a thing, it is a problem in direct proportion to the *sum* of all the other crises we have. It doesn't take much doomerism, applied to many crises, to be a bigger problem than any one crisis alone. And if you have enough doomerism to reduce your effective crisis-resolution capability by 50%, then doomerism is a bigger crisis than all your other crises combined.
If you don't have any other crises to deal with, "doomerism" is just being the Goth teenager who whines about existential despair while hanging out with their goth friends in their nice suburban house wearing the nice Hot Topic wardrobe and their Harvard tuition already socked away in the parental savings account.
I would have said that it isn't doomerism that is the main problem - manipulated rage is. The world is going downhill - unless you join my army. Your problems are unsolvable - unless you give me enough power to solve them for you. Many people give up on the anger, but then don't see another solution, and end up feeling despair.
The antidote to all this isn't "never feel concerned", it's "be cautiously optimistic."
And reduce your screen time - that stuff's bad for you.
I don't understand his overall argument, if he has one, but I can't trust a guy who makes a carveout exception for his own doomerist belief of choice, climate change, while supplying weakman examples of supposedly typical doomerist beliefs that other people have, which are meant to be disqualifying. For instance, Q-Anon and Patriarchy Theory. Like, what if there are doomerist beliefs with plausible validity, doomerist beliefs without plausible validity, and doomerist beliefs existing in a gray zone. That entire part of his arguments seems like an extended fallacy. Also, if we are to take the ubiquity of doomerist beliefs throughout history (the idea that the world is doomed) as evidence of its vacuity (the world has obviously chugged on), we must also assess whether the obverse view of bloomerism (optimism about the future) was also equally as ubiquitous. If it was, then all we can say is that in any given time there are a lot of people around, who will propound a whole variety of views, so that any given view is likely to be represented, and by assessing them in hindsight we are essentially committing the survivorship bias fallacy, rather than judging them on their actual merits.
Doomerism can be viewed as a problem apart from other overhyped "crises" in that it is a meta-problem. If Doomerism becomes too embedded then it risks making a critical mass of people not even try to attempt to solve major problems.
So far most Doomers are performative though, just say it to sound smart. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down technology growth, which in the very long term will solve all the major problems (hopefully).
But there are a lot of problems that are far easier to solve via political means than technological means and I think we're already at that critical mass of enough people not even wanting to solve problems, so these problems aren't getting solved. For example the recent massacre in Sudan.
Interesting, I've always been a "doomer" more than a "boomer", it's kind of instinctive bias, except doomer is maybe too strong, as I tend to associate collapse more to a strong and rapid downward trend in well being for mosts (and especially myself ;-p) rather than an all-ending apocalypse. More a pessimist than an optimist...Optimism always kinds of annoy me, strange as it's supposed to be positive energy rising the morale of everyone....
But the
"We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us"
got me thinking: what if its not really optimism that annoy me, maybe it's more optimism / pessimism are just 2 type of moods are correlated with another trait and it's this correlated trait that really irk me?
I believe it's indeed the case, and optimism/pessimism is related to the primary way people try to solve problems: It's not that optimists works and solve it, while pessimists lament and do nothing. Again, that comes with the folktale definition of optimism and pessimism, and would not explain why I am (and I am not alone, many of my friends are too) annoyed by optimism.
My take is pessimists are mostly things/worker solver: they usually try to directly solve issues by themselves, doing concrete things and thinking about possible scenarios with cost/benefits analysis. Often very tech-minded.
Optimists are mostly person/persuader solver: they try to convince others to solve the issue, so their action is building persuasion campaigns (large scale or toward a single person), not concrete action and the cost/benefit analysis is very different: the cost/benefit of the others can not be factored the same as they are in fact tools. Often very socially-minded.
The match is not perfect, but the correlation is strong. And I realize I paint the second type of problem solving strategy in a very negative way. Yep, I do not like them (optimist-persuaders-people are tools people), so I am probably not fair ;-)
The post, and most of the comments, seem to approach Pargin's thesis as a call to broad societal action at the level of systems (new laws, markets, tech, or social norms) which can make matters significantly worse. (The laws/markets/tech/norms framing comes from Lawrence Lessig.)
I suspect it works best, instead, as a moral exhortation at a purely interpersonal level, benefiting only one's self and one's loved ones. A good companion piece to this article is Michael Valentine Smith's article on LessWrong, "Here's The Exit", in which he argues, sure, let's assume for the sake of argument you've identified a real problem: what are you doing to yourself psychologically? And is that even helping?
Pargin seems to have the same in-person interpersonal environment as I do, and this book is a way to approach the doomers in his life (and mine). I am not going to just *not* talk to them about it, because the environment will get ugly in our co-housings, makerspaces, bowling leagues, burning man theme camps, druid groves, and what-have-you.
In particular, it has especially demolished science fiction conventions.
Of course, this pattern can take hold even when addressing the pattern itself. It doesn't have to. Catastrophizing about catastrophizing, letting your entire life get consumed by a cult of preventing lives getting entirely consumed by cults, engaging in a holy war against holy wars. Instead you can notice that pattern and decide not to. That doesn't mean you need to give up the whole premise.
I gave a talk at LessOnline about how to avoid accidentally starting a cult, and followed it up at Fluidity Forum with a talk about the "comfort cocoon", the equal and opposite error of cultiness. That talk was kind of mostly against doomerism, because doomerism is symbiotic with the comfort cocoon. I set some guard rails at the opening by talking about this paradox.
I think my worldview is based around a kind of modified scare story but it's not doomerism.
Fact: Humanity has not yet wiped itself out or even screwed up so bad that we collectively as a species regressed to a state of being cavemen again.
Also fact: Mongol invasions, the Holocaust, the mass death of Amerindians from disease, and Dark Ages where societies *do* technologically regress to rural, subsistence farmers for centuries are all real things that have happened.
Takeaway: Extremely unimaginably awful things are possible. Our goal should be stopping them. We probably can.
Also, is this book making an argument against *doomerism* or an argument against *nihilism?*
"We are all going to die! We have to do something!"
And
"We are all going to die. What's even the point of trying?"
Are not the same argument. I haven't read this book, but Abbott seems to be making argument B and not argument A. Argument B is also the kind of doomerism I encounter more on the internet. Or rather, I encounter argument C which is Argument B LARPing as Argument A and it goes like this:
"We are all going to die! Somebody has to do something! (Except it won't be me. I'm going to rant on here instead and think about doom. I'm going to keep doing this no matter what changes in the real world)."
Doomerism insists that we focus on collective, global-scale catastrophes that exist well beyond our personal sphere of influence and outside of our first-person, lived experience. I haven't read the book yet (damn you, I'm probably going to read it now), but—based on the quotes you shared—it seems more focused on an individual-scale solution to personal poison than fighting against grand-scale consequences.
This feels like a distinction worth making to me, because it teases apart the apparent contradiction you've pointed to. There's a difference between "We all need to wake up to this horrible global-scale problem or we're gigafucked" and "If YOU notice this horrible global-scale problem then it empowers you, personally, to leech the poison out of your system and improve your own lived experience, simply by shifting your perspective."
So much of the worlds ails currently are a product of the grand feedback loop. We gained this new world-wide nervous system called the internet just a few short years ago and like a newborn fresh from the protective womb we didn't even know we were in, we're twitching and spasming at with the flood of sensory data washing over us the world over. Those spasms in turn create more noise which in turn freaks us out even more. Round and round it goes, wider and wider in the widening gyre, if you will.
It's hard for me to believe that the last few years at least, a lot of this isn't intentional. Don't want to go full conspiracy nut but the tech bros running the show these days seem to have a pretty obvious game plan.
"We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us.
…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us. You cannot possibly imagine how bad this one is, and we must treat it as an absolute emergency which requires us to uproot everything about our lives."
That's not necessarily a contradiction though. Sometimes new problems are just qualitively different from old ones, and require radically different responses. We look at the facts and say that things like climate change, warfare, and disease are big problems but not *existenail* ones, whereas doomerism seems to be some sort of weird worldwide emotional/psychological contagion that is growing in every country on earth, except maybe the most backwards 3rd world countries that don't have smart phone yet.
A rough analogy would be nuclear weapons. People emerged from the horrors of WW2 with so much death and suffering, and they looked at nukes and realized "this is even worse. We need to treat these differently. Even for our worst enemies, the ones who want to kill us, we need to be careful about using these things or it will destroy the Earth."
As a filthy fence-sitting centrist, my opinion is that some crises are real, some are not, some are worse than others, and the only way to tell which is which is by lookin'. No easy heuristic shortcut will be foolproof.
I kind of felt like the argument that "you're worrying about A, B and C but you should really be worried about your worry" and then saying "all you've really done is change it from A,B,C to A,B,C,D" is kind of like saying "A,B,C arguments are all made with words, D is made with words too therefore D is exacty the same as A,B,C" There are often bigger reasons for A,B,C and you should really deal with D to solve A,B,C
Perhaps an intellectually consistent way to approach this is not to dismiss non-doomer crises as things that will work themselves out on their own and we should just stop worrying about them - but to instead approach ALL crises, doomerist or otherwise, with the attitude that they are solvable, if we keep a positive outlook, looking for opportunities to help and to encourage each other?
Does media consumption really cause this? It's interesting, because I thought my family and friends are very sour because they think politics in my country is going against them and potentially very harmful. But I always assumed the winning side is more optimistic. I wonder if they also think the country is going to hell (for other reasons), because of media consumption, even when they're winning politically.
I keep a generally reliable maxim that "we create the things we fear the most" and try to catch myself overcorrecting for a perceived problem or danger.
I don't think that the problem of doomerism needs to be regarded as a crisis as much as needs to be acknowledged as a stray path with hilariously predictable consequences (a la Palantir CEO warning of a technocratic surveillance state.)
The simple solution to this paradox is to believe in muddling through - yes, many crisis are bad, but we've always muddled through. Eventually. But it's fine to try to arrest bad events - if someone invented a time machine to kill Hitler, that's probably worth trying.
Scott remarked on the semi-official philosophy of the progress community, and since I am its semi-official philosopher, I thought I should comment.
I agree with the view expressed in the last paragraph. Problems exist; not all crises are fake. And the “crisis of doomerism” is real, but it's not so overwhelming that it should stand out as the only real crisis in the world.
I try to remind people that even though doomerism is wrong, technology does carry costs and risks, and problems always exist, and even doom is possible. Progress includes solving the problems of progress, not ignoring/denying them. There's a whole chapter or two on this in my book.
Re “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things” – I mean, this is sort of true? In the last 50–100 years or so, material progress has continued in most dimensions (with a few things getting worse, like obesity or the fentanyl crisis). At the same time, many social things have gotten worse, including a loss of agency and ambition and the creation of a vetocracy. (Other social things have gotten better, like more equal rights.)
> One of my core beliefs is that There Was Never a Golden Age. … it is never the case that we simply have to get rid of some “recent craziness” and go back to the previous “sane” state. Seeming Golden Ages end because they aren’t actually all that golden. Their strengths weren’t sustainable. There were flaws and internal tensions that didn’t get resolved and that enabled various sorts of stagnation or decline or regress.
This is true even of the idea of progress. 19th-century optimism failed because it was naive: it didn't recognize the costs and risks of progress, and it thought that moral progress went hand in hand with technological progress—that was blown to bits by the World Wars.
So I also try to remind people that we can't be a progress movement by advocating a return to the past. The past was better only in certain isolated dimensions, not overall. We have to find a new synthesis and a new way forward.
There is no paradox, you're conflating "existential crisis" with "a problem".
The bloomer position is that we have a societal problem which is that a lot of people are being manipulated into believing we are experiencing immanent existential threat.
A bit of an NB, but also peripherality to the point:
Can analytical reasoning solve problems originating in analytical reasoning? Can you think your way in or out of a 'black box'?
When we think about a problem caused by human minds (reactions, thoughts, construction of political systems), can we see the problem clearly within the same construct that developed it?
Is there an actual increase in doomerism? I mean, I personally, anecdotally, seem to feel that there are more doomer vibes than in the 90s, or 2000s. But historically hasn't there always been some overlapping set of crises going on causing issues? I also remember worries about nuclear war, and ozone layers and such, as mentioned in the story. There were plenty of doomsday cults committing mass suicide. Is there any data on public sentiments that shows increased doom?
Perhaps others have said this, but isn't the problem with doomerism exactly that it's about setting the threshold(s) Scott discusses in the last paragraph? Seems to me like that _does_ make it different from the other birds in the flock of problems, because it's far more meta. One could come to conclusions like, 'because I don't believe in an afterlife, there is no amount of doom that will make me stop resisting the doom and therefore I should keep plugging away at the other problems from whence it emanates.' Or alternatively, 'because we are so doomed, I need to treat my life like the strand in the tapestry of samsara it is and disengage from it all--it is no good to fight most of this stuff.' That just doesn't seem the same as a question about the material externalities of climate change, or policing, or international sectarian/racial tensions and associated violence, or any of the other potential, 'we're cooked, folks' topics people bring up. Those discussions can all become about the problem at hand, whereas whether to struggle against them is kind of an existential question.
One possible line of argument is that it's a shooting per school about every 3,000 years, and one per student every million years. That certainly doesn't make school shootings good, but compared to 50% child mortality it probably doesn't rise to the level of "doom". If you didn't have national news to tell you about school shootings, the odds against your ever even learning of one would probably be high.
More generally, one thing that can lead to excessive pessimism is just having access to news about such a vast number of people. Even very rare events are happening constantly, so if your news sources filter for bad ones you will see way more bad news than the environment of ancestral adaptation could possibly have prepared you for.
On the other hand, I think it's fallacious to point to a few bad reasons for pessimism and assert that therefore we must be optimistic. If most of human history has (a) been pretty awful and (b) most improvements have been temporary, and (c) the present is way better than the mean, shouldn't we on the outside view expect the worst? If accumulation of power has roughly always led to oppression, shouldn't we on the outside view be very suspicious of and hostile to those trying to accumulate power?
A lot of these seem like targeted violence though, where school is just a venue for a grudge that could have played out elsewhere. I think the phrase "maniac shooting up a school" clearly alludes to the Columbine archetype of random mass violence, which is a distinct phenomenon. Your EdWeek article mentions that there were only four mass school shootings in 2024, and only one in 2023. (which is still bad, obviously. But there is not a Parkland every week.)
Pretty much this. "Maniac shooting up a school" implies an indiscriminate attempt to murder multiple strangers, children. But a lot of school shooting stats will include gang violence, even, I think, after hours. Which is a problem to be dealt with, definitely, but a different problem.
It's aatil worse than countries which don't have one in a decade.
ISTR that most school shootings are "two kids with a beef" or "two gangs with a beef" affairs, rather than "nutcase decides to go on a spree shooting.".
Motte and Bailey. The book's imagined argument is explicitly about "maniacs shooting up schools", so non-maniacal shootings definitively don't count and minor shooting incidents probably don't count on the grounds that "shooting up" colloquially implies something well beyond one bullet fired at one guy.
Your cited source, does include all the non-maniacal shootings (e.g. accidents, larcenous or otherwise plausibly-rational crimes, etc), and it includes the one-on-one shootings where maybe one guy gets injured. But I repeat myself, because the accidents and plausibly-rational crimes almost always stop at one victim.
"School shootings" is a term with two very different definitions. One is the boringly pedantic one where a shooting happens at a school. This one is almost never the real subject of public discourse. The other, the one that dominates public discourse, is the one where some maniac with a clearly irrational grievance shows up with a gun and shoots bignum people all at once.
That one, the one people actually care about and that the character in the book was talking about, happens maybe a few times a year, not weekly or even monthly. The boringly pedantic sort of "school shooting", is only brought up in the statistical abstract when someone wants to convince you that maniacs go on shooting sprees in schools every week and hopes you won't catch the switch.
And there's a level of concern we should have about maniacs shooting up schools a few times a year. But I'd prefer that the discussion about that concern should absolutely exclude everybody who lies with statistics to make the problem seem twenty times bigger than it is, and that everyone who was fooled by those people should be sent home to do their homework and return better-informed. I'll charitably assume you fall in the latter group.
Glad to see this book highlighted, and I enjoyed your take on it. Here's my interview with Jason Pargin! https://sammatey.substack.com/p/the-weekly-anthropocene-interviews-84c
That was a good discussion, thanks for linking.
A relevant excerpt where the author recognizes the same contradiction in his book that Scott did:
>Even the title of my book is very ominous. “I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom.” That's on purpose! If you read it, it is implying that the real doom is in your perceptions and not necessarily in the world. But even that is being framed as, hey, here's this terrible problem we've got to look at. That's what gets people's attention.
>And I get it! Due to evolution. If your brain, if you're in the forest and you're looking at 25 trees and one of those trees has a tiger behind it, you're not going to care about the other 24 trees. You're designed to zoom in on the one that's got the tiger because that's the one that matters. You don't sit back and say, “Well, if you think about it, there's 24 tiger-free trees. Why aren't I appreciating those?” It's like, no, you've got to deal with this problem! So you ignore everything else but the problem.
The same theme as Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature”.
“Things are actually getting better even though it looks like things are getting worse.”
As a "bloomer" myself, I think we (or at least I) aren't arguing for doomerism to be elevated to be the One True Existential Apocalyptic Threat in place of all the others people posit, but just to be aware that this is a very common cognitive bias that can be very easily spread by the incentives of our current information system combined with quirks of human psychology.
Agreed. I am not concerned that bloomerism could potentially contain internal contradictions, but view it as a useful and good corrective for a meme that is wildly contagious.
Agreed!
I might be cynical after spending too much time online (yes I appreciate the irony), but "it's just a corrective, we are just tinkering with ideas, stop being such a nerd and fact checking every word!" is the last thing a community says before working themselves into a totalizing frenzy over stuff they made up.
Every page that post memes about murdering landlords started with some thoughtful essays about alternative perspectives to capitalism realism, every woke-MAGA page started with something like "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup", and yes, every doomerist screed is the endpoint of an intellectual journey starting with a corrective to our apathy
As a bloomer, would you agree that there are a non-trivial number of things that are worse today than they were in the past? (For example, the information system that you mentioned or architecture, family-friendly cities, excessive regulation, ...)
As a mostly-bloomer, I think my threshold for "non-trivial" is much higher than a doomer. Maybe that's the crux of this current thing? We can work toward a better world, pushing and pulling along the way, without all the hyperbole.
Yes, this.
Also, being old enough to have had rotary-dial phones in my childhood home, one thing I've noticed is how little the list of things viewed as "worse today than they were in the past" ever changes. Architecture, our cities becoming anti-family, excessive government regulation, public schools, several others....evergreen as the saying now goes. Every one of those was specifically a focus of grassroots bitching when I was a kid and during every decade since. Also when I was in high school I had a couple of much-older relatives who'd point out that when _they_ were kids every adult they knew hated the then-modern buildings, were sure that the schools had gone to shit, etc etc.
As an aside, I don't like brutalist architecture myself. But spending years working inside a beautiful, beloved late-19th century architecture landmark did permanently disabuse me of assumptions about comfort and function for actual people. Another aside: I've happily raised a child in a non-wealthy household near the center of one of our largest and bluest cities and the idea that this place is no longer family-friendly is just a headscratcher.
Of course YMMV, anyone can come up with their own individual examples, and I am certainly not defending analysis-by-anecdote.
Really my overall point is just that anything that's on multi-generational autorepeat becomes hard to take seriously. Which we'd all understand if anybody anymore knew or cared about actual history....whoops I just did it myself!
Yea at some level maybe it's as simple as, old guys gonna old-guy
I even like some Brutalist architecture, but your point about functionality should really be discussed more in these "things were better back then" conversations. There is a reason buildings are often built the way they are, and it's usually because air-conditioning, modern plumbing, bright spaces, etc are great, and modern architecture is how we can do those things affordably.
It also is an argument to return to using some historical tools. One example is for energy efficiency - just because we can use modern HVAC to overcome poor land placement, thermal properties of materials and the like, doesn't mean we should, even with greater energy abundance in the future.
Yeah I think both things are true:
1. There is a beauty-functionality tradeoff, and it gets only steeper if you make it beauty-functionality-efficiency
2. We are not at the Pareto frontier, bc of bad incentives or whatnot
This is a really good point, I always disliked the aesthetics of those blocky houses with tons of windows and a deck on the roof until I stayed in one and realized that from the inside, having tons of windows and a deck on the roof is awesome.
The thing is that a blocky house can be given more ornamentation than slabs of concrete. It even is practical in that you don't have to fret so much about all the corners matching *perfectly* if you intend to put a cornice over it.
The heyday of brutalism was fifty or sixty years ago now. The median new building looks a lot better than the median building from the 60s or 70s. Architecture is an example of where things are getting better, at least on the timescale of the lives of people alive now.
the more recent failure mode is just glass on a steel frame. Seems like we have improved upon that in the past 20 years too - but many also found same plain glass to be soulless as well
"Every one of those was specifically a focus of grassroots bitching when I was a kid and during every decade since."
Of course, one possible explanation for this is that these things continue to get worse and worse.
Continuously for six decades or longer…sure. That definitely jibes with the objective reality of those topics.
(He wrote, on a complex digital device which every American 10-year-old today uses more successfully than my 4th-grader peers could operate a manual typewriter….)
Sure. I'm pro-tech all the way. But the argument that those complaining about X are wrong because people have always been complaining about X is a fallacy.
The retort than is that if X has actually gotten worse since ancient Sumeria or so, and humans are still around and thriving, than X cannot possibly be that important.
There’s a lot of ruin in a species.
I'm no bloomer, but of course I could cherry-pick some things that are worse today than they've been in the past. However, life today is on the net overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably better than in the past; and these gains are inextricably tied to the losses. For example, yes, nuclear weapons are terrible and life would be much better without them; but nukes are merely a side-effect of our increased understanding of the fundamental forces of nature itself. Once you figure out nuclear physics, nuclear bombs become pretty obvious; but if you never figure out nuclear physics at all, you will never have computers, industrial automation, spaceflight, instantaneous worldwide communications, or any of the other things without which our lives would seem borderline post-apocalyptic. Some people might think they yearn for some idyllic pastoral past, but they rarely take the time to think through the implications.
I'm not even sure life would be better without nuclear weapons. Sure they have the potential to be terrible, but Mutually Assured Destruction is arguably why we haven't had another world war. Given the absolute horrors that Europe experienced through the Great War and WW2, I think I'd prefer the nuclear sword of Damocles, with the added benefit of clean fission energy.
This is the "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" theory except that the pennies are peace and prosperity, which are better. The steamroller is still a very, very big steamroller, though.
There're steamrollers in either case. WW3 would be cataclysmic even with conventional weapons.
And I think this is the key difference between doomers and bloomers. Doomers seek to minimize harm; bloomers seek to maximize net utility. Both positions have valid points, and both positions have failure modes when taken to extremes. Still, overall the history of humanity is a story of technological progress leading to better living conditions -- though yes, punctuated by various periodic dooms.
The truism that the world would be less peaceful without MAD seem much less obvious upon closer scrutiny. Some kind of conflicts (eg, Ukraine) probably would not have happened at all had the agressor not had nuclear guaranteeing only limited intervention of third parties. The historical comparison with the Crimean War are rather obvious: in a world without nukes, France and Britain could respond to Russian expansionism by sending boots on the ground. In the world with nukes, they can (or are inclined to) send only non-strategic weapons to the defenders.
And the conflicts that *did* happen (Vietnam, Korea, all the (de)colonial wars) are very much how empires always fought throughout human history, and there is no reason to believe they would have been any worse without nukes.
I might agree that there are some things that are worse, but I'm likely to see them as smaller in number than others.
The biggest problem is that, today, we have a very large global population. And that imposes loads on a wide variety of domains. For example: cities always are more intensely regulated than small towns, and need to be, to an extent. So 'excessive regulation,' which you mention, is at least partially downstream of 'large population.'
What do you mean the information system is worse now, would you rather do all communication by telegraph? Sure, there was a brief period of internet before social media, but that was not a stable state and some or other form of more organized internet communications was going to fill that void regardless. May as well wish for ice that never melts.
Would you rather raise a family in a modern apartment, or a one-room house (two if you count the outhouse) as in the olden days? (Edit: My modern brain is so used to multi-room houses I typo'd and wrote "one-bedroom house" at first.)
As for the regulation, that one probably actually has gotten worse. I do not know enough about the history of the legal system to say anything for sure, but I suspect much of it is coming from more edge cases being handled, as well as more new things invented that can be used in good or bad ways.
::missing the point::
I don't know about ice, but they've figured out how to make *ice cream* that doesn't melt!
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-walmart-ice-cream-sandwich-wont-melt-20140728-story.html
I don’t consider myself a bloomer, but the way I look at this sort of question is “when else would I rather have been born”? Of those “non-trivial” things that are worse, which are worse enough (or likely to be worse enough going forward) that I would have wanted to be born some other time? Pick a time in history and really ask yourself if you’d give up all the things that are better today for the things that were better then.
If I’m truly honest with myself, even when I’m feeling the most pessimistic about today, I can’t really think of any other time I’d rather have existed.
I largely agree, but Scott is right to be worried about those who fight our cognitive biases with censorship. I also see a disturbing anti-democratic sentiment in some "bloomers" b/c they believe that most people are too easily manipulated into anti-innovation doomerism by media, social media, or whatever
Yeah that’s kinda where I’m at personally. The prior state we had of “managed democracy” seemed to work pretty well, where voters had the choice of “choose one of two pretty similar options”.
Now with such high political polarization, the choices definitionally seem a lot less “managed”. And when the average voter can’t do basic algebra or understands basic economics, idk how you can get a good result?
> And when the average voter can’t do basic algebra or understands basic economics, idk how you can get a good result?
First possibility which springs to my mind is "change that fact by improving public education."
The level of competence we are demanding here does not require extremely good teaching. Resources for learning and self-improvement are available inside and outside school, at practically no cost. And yet, it's clear that nothing can get through a thick skull. Public education is not the bottleneck here. You can't teach a dog to count.
>You can't teach a dog to count.
How fortunate, then, that dogs do not generally have sufferage, and even if they did, are seldom of sufficient age. That's an irrelevant tangent, though, since I was talking about education for humans.
>The level of competence we are demanding here does not require extremely good teaching.
There are some under-defined terms here, so let's start by establishing a bit more common ground. First, would you at least agree that a sufficiently bad - negligent or malicious - teacher can delay, maybe even outright prevent, development of such skills in someone who otherwise had the potential?
there's a POV here that seems to have quite settled in that a huge number of people are zombies and or near-incapable of functioning. actually hilarious to see it culminate in talking about dogs
I'm not hiding my distaste for the view, but 'early education can also do things like stimulate interest, teach some studying skills, renew an appreciation of self-learning' or even 'maybe we haven't tried every method of teaching economics' (whatever 'basic economics' is, FWIW) seem undeniable
Standardized curriculums and tests exist for a reason. No more is being asked of these teachers other than to follow basic instructions. And no, they aren't going out of their way to maliciously hurt children. If they wanted to hurt people, or even specifically children, there are jobs that are significantly easier with better pay. In my experience, these people do want to teach. They really are just incompetent.
Regardless... public education itself isn't even a hard bottleneck for children's education. We are living in an era where even Africans living in huts have access to smartphones and internet. Literally anyone can get access to material on any subject of their choosing. If there is a will to learn, there is no barrier. What separates us and them is not access to education.
Education isn't a panacea. Think about how dumb you're average member of the public is. Now remember that fully half of them are dumber than that :)
Regardless of the causes of IQ, half of the population are below average IQ and probably 15-25% or more so far below a standard IQ that regardless of educational opportunities they're never going to understand algebra or basic economics.
Improving public education $in_a_particular_way is a fine solution proposal for any problem where changing the skills/knowledge/attitudes of the top 50% of the IQ distribution would solve your issue.
If your problem is mainly/wholly caused by the actions of the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, then "improvements to public education" isn't going to work. Its "pushing on the string". There you are going to need a solution that actually reaches the people you need to reach in a way they can absorb and respond to. For the bottom 25% education is "defeinitely not it" and for the 2nd quartile its effects are going to be weak and limited.
TBH, what we nee isn't a shift in knowledge....its a shift in "vibes". That can reach everyone.
How you shift a societies "vibes" in the direction you want is a problem I'll leave for the reader to solve.... but that is not something education is going to do for you. That's something society/interpersonal relations/media/memes/comedy/art has to shift for you.
Absolutely we should improve education, that would make a big difference to how easy it difficult any given person is likely to be to deceive or manipulate
| And when the average voter can’t do basic algebra or understands basic economics, idk how you can get a good result?
Do you think the average voter of the revolutionary-era United States understood basic algebra or economics? If we were able to get from that state to the "managed democracy" (what I suspect is really just a stronger form of representative democracy), then the same logic holds now. The primary difference is a pre-existing system of direct democracy, especially in places like CA, where voters are asked to assess nuanced policies that are frankly too much to ask of any citizen.
Good point in theory, but think about how massive and sprawling our government apparatus is now, versus in the revolutionary war era. The government touches every part of our life, and there are more government agencies than years our country has existed. So modern democracy, or in other words “controlling the leviathan” requires a lot more from its voters.
There’s probably few Americans alive that can even name every government bureau. But we are supposed to control it though our votes?
I'm not sure it does. The early US had missions as diverse as putting down rebellions, debt disputes with revolutionary France, and raising a navy and marine corps to deal with Tripoli pirates. All of those were managed through representative democracy by largely uneducated people doing mostly subsistence farming. The bigger issue in modern society is not necessarily the variety of issues but the rigidness of possible solutions. You may not like the representative's solutions, which gets really thorny when you're asked to select between just two people (it's been a while since I could cast a vote for someone I really believed in). At least at the local level, we could do with much more competition of parties and ideas.
Of course, the other solution is simply do less. Reduce the surface area of things we attempt to control. It has a certain appeal, but it leaves a void for solutions you may like less than trying to do everything. That is the situation the Americans of the WW2 era inherited and decided to build all the institutions to deal with it, and it's a lesson I would rather not re-learn.
I suspect there's room for improvement by shifting to control mostly the same things, just at different stages in the process.
For example, if GPS navigation were added to the list of mandatory safety equipment for cars - which wasn't an option right after WWII, since artificial satellites didn't exist yet - that would make it possible to automate away most of the hassles of toll roads and speeding tickets, while simultaneously making revenue and traffic-law enforcement more reliable. Wear and tear on roads correlates with miles driven, varying by type of vehicle, but road repair is paid for mostly by gasoline taxes. Correlation between gasoline consumption and miles driven gets worse all the time. Tracking cars directly solves that, allowing every penny to be allocated to the exact stretch of road which earned it. Speed limits could be continuously updated based on weather conditions - which they already de facto are, but computerizing it could give good drivers more accurate live safety info, and bad ones less wiggle room to argue.
That's very much seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses. In the US, voters happily supported utterly insane policies (Prohibitionism, a great chunk of the New Deal, Smoot-Hawley, 1873 Coinage Act, and oh slavery forever in the South) without flinching. And that is the most longeve and stable democracy in the world!
Honestly the whole "people spend their whole days looking at algorithmically selected social media stories of doom" narrative doesn't really match the experience of anyone I know.
I'm sure there are some people who do, but is it larger or smaller than the number of people who spend way too much time looking at football statistics or something? Which social media networks are even still feeding stories of doom anyway?
That's a good point. I can think of a few at least near examples of the phenomenon, but most of the people I know are spending more time looking at funny/interesting/artistic/game related/pragmatic information online than "doomy"/civilizationally pessimistic/breaking news content.
It's an entertainment/slop/insight-porn factory that captures the most attention, rather than a black box of doom. But, you know, small + unrepresentative sample size and all that.
The algorithms optimise for engagement; everyone's feed is different. That was mentioned in the section of the book above where Ether talks about the differences in the flavours of doom each of them was presented by "their corner of the internet". People who are attracted to doom will engage with it, and get more of it.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. There's not a novel existential crisis demanding authoritarianism, there's a new temptation that can make a lot of individual lives worse, and collectively worsen some pre-existing problems. It bears discussion, but I don't think a lot of people are at "nuke data centers" level of concern about internet cognito-hazards.
Isn't this kind of jumping the gun? I'd think a group of people calling themselves rationalists or somewhere in the vicinity would be able to distinguish figuring out what's going on, from figuring out how to fix its negative outcomes.
I think it's fair enough to be negative on the collective effects of "the algorithm", without being clear on how much corrective action is needed (given culture's general ability to adapt), and how to best navigate the trade-offs between correctives, and their own pitfalls.
Then again, I've been heard to argue for a complete ban on algorithmic feeds of outside-of-network content.
I'm not sure what was jumping? Anyways, I agree on both figuring out what's going on and figuring out how to fix it being worthwhile.
I was posting in support of "bloomers" not necessarily having commonly elevated doomerism to doom status, if that makes sense. That is, one can decry doom while still pointing out new problems. Having a sense of scale is important.
Yeah I think we basically agree. My comment was not so much an answer to your views, as to the hypothetical people who would want to "nuke the datacenters".
There are similar past problems. The gin craze of the 18th century, the opium wars era in China. Maybe the Protestant reformation and the wars of religion.
That makes for a nice motte, but it’s awfully rare for a movement to be judged only by its most sensible proponents.
It’s like describing the early rationalist material as a list of common cognitive biases. Yeah, sure! Everybody *should* be more aware of their preference-discounting. Now…what was that bit about robots?
I think you’re more or less correct about information systems. Toxoplasma, Moloch, all that leads to a hostile environment independent of the underlying facts. That just doesn’t defuse the paradox.
If you’re going to convince people that their narratives are *māyā*, you’ve got to have an answer for the obvious follow-on question.
I generally agree with this, though I’d add that the harm caused by excess doomerism is uneven. It’s already making some people’s lives noticeably worse, and that alone warrants concern. For instance, a Lancet survey found that 56% of young respondents agreed with the statement “humanity is doomed.” I’m not claiming all of them have fully internalized that belief or are suffering because of it, but the number is large enough to justify treating it as a meaningful social problem.
Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955
I think I fit the definition of ‘bloomer’ but like many (most?) people that fit into that category I don’t believe doomers are an existential threat or even a threat at all. I certainly do not believer there is any sort of Doomer crisis going on. If you read old books ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a prime example, you will see all the same sentiments of ‘the past was better, the present is horrible, no one has sex anymore and there are no real men unlike in the good old days’. I also don’t think crisises should never be mentioned and ironically I think over reacting to crisis is part of why true crisis are relatively rare. I trust that everything will end up even more amazing than things are now but still I think we all have a duty to do everything we can to insure that outcome happens. Dissuading people from doomer beliefs feels more like giving someone a really good tv recommendation that I think would probably make them happier if they watched it and less like stopping someone from setting off a nuke.
I realize, for this crowd, humans are of greatest or sole interest, but …
https://www.audubon.org/press-room/us-bird-populations-continue-alarming-decline-new-report-finds
This was once a matter of doom and gloom, in the 70s particularly - but that didn’t jibe, in this country, with the interests of either political party ($/immigrants), and so anti-Christ Rush Limbaugh strode forth and found in environmentalism the whipping boy he needed after the fall of Communism rendered that threat non-monetizable on air.
And it stuck. Thus died conservation as a *mainstream* concern that used to be on the menu on any survey - and polled very well.
Hey Sam! Love your interview, many insightful questions and you two are really playing off each other. :)
I am a part-time playwright and was wondering whether it is possible to get the license to turn the book into a play. Is there a way to reach out to Jason somehow that would work. Or do you know if he had ever planned on something like this?
Cheers!
I would talk to Jason about that! It's his book. His website is https://johndiesattheend.com/, he's on Substack at https://substack.com/@jasonpargin
Yeah, I'll see if I can reach him :)
Excellent book, and a sensible view of whatever internet people are lumping together as ‘polycrisis’ these days
Is fighting the "polycrisis" the "omnicause"?
No, it’s just interpersonal drama.
Not only internet people do: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/article/understanding-polycrisis-definitions-applications-and-responses/970EC4CDD3698E3D5F0162C94900246A583680 and the concept of Planetary Boundaries might be translated to Societal/Economical Boundaries.
Although defining a crisis requires quantification, i.e. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17477891.2025.2571708 the climate crisis doesn't look so alarming when using indicators from IPCC AR6 Climate Impact Drivers.
> "None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way..."
But that's the thing- it's not "better in every way". The progress in material living conditions has been accompanied by the deterioration of other forms of social capital (TFR, public architecture, public trust, genotypic IQ, etc.) which are ultimately going going to make material progress unsustainable unless we, e.g, totally decouple the economy from human inputs and put benign AGI in charge. (And if the AGI is genuinely benign, I imagine it'll have a few things to say about public architecture, among other things.)
The "insane uncle" in this story isn't really any crazier than Greta Thunberg, who gets a hell of a lot more coverage, and you can argue that he's at least identifying a lot of the social side-effects of de-normalising the nuclear family. There are certainly plenty of people who would rather Reign in Hell, and will send us there.
You're right, the present is not "better in every way", partly because there is nothing without tradeoffs, even progress. For instance, I'm a Yimby and want to see better housing availability and affordability, but I do admit that Nimby's are not hallucinating when they say that building more density will affect the character of their neighborhoods. There is a cost, just one that I think is very worth incurring. And this point is true of basically everything.
But the present is still better overall. I'll take our current issues with social capital, which I do think are a major problem, over the past's death and poverty.
Yeah, seems like this needs some sense of proportion. Some things are better than in the past, some are worse. Overall, it sure seems better to have our problems than the problems of our counterparts in 1975 or 1925 or 1825, say.
But also, two things are true at once:
a. There is a bias in media/social media and probably in the human psyche for stories of impending doom.
b. Sometimes there are genuine instances of impending doom lying around that could happen.
Responding to (a) means not letting yourself be swallowed up by doomerism and hopelessness. But responding to (b) means you need to think about the bad things that could happen and see what you can do to prevent or at least mitigate them.
And I think there's a connection between these two: one way to relieve yourself of the obligation to deal with (b) is to binge so much on (a) that you have absorbed the utter futility and hopelessness of your situation. If you're the last surviving human in the universe, with one can of food left and terminal cancer with no available treatments and a dinosaur killer asteroid heading for your exact location and due to impact in an hour, at least nobody can fault you for spending your last hour playing video games or jerking off to porn or doomscrolling Twitter or whatever--it's not like there was anything *useful* for you to do instead.
But if your situation is less dire, if there are things you can do about your situation to make it better, that kinda implies that if you're playing video games or whatever instead of doing those things, at least some of your situation is your own damned fault. The black pill doesn't just let you feel extra dark and cynical, it also relieves you of responsibility.
I'm not arguing for a return to the past, but avoiding similar levels of death and poverty will require modifying the status quo.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-bloomers-paradox/comment/177125242
How so?
Every human culture not currently living as stone-age hunter-gatherers has collapsing fertility rates, and will go extinct if TFR trends don't change.
Extrapolating current trends a century into the future… seems likely nothing will change in that time.
What is the current rate at which fertility rates are declining, and how long will it take them to hit zero? Can you not put two and two together here?
I do expect other countervailing forces to kick in before that happens, mind you, but by definition that will change the status quo.
When economic progress makes people less dependent on each other directly (and more dependent on the "system"), I think it's pretty inevitable that social capital deteriorates. We're generally quirky and often hard to get along - if I can mostly ignore my immediate neighbors and hang out with people who share my vibe, it's hard to see why I wouldn't. And nowadays you can often find "your vibe people" on the net more easily than IRL.
I don't have a solution to that, and I think it's a bloody difficult problem over all. But I know that there's nothing the net can offer that even approaches how good and sane it feels to hang out with friends in the real world, and to engage with nature. "Touching grass" is not just a cliche, it's the real thing. The hopeful side of me thinks that this is basic enough there will always be a significant group of people who don't lose it.
Dependency is the wrong word, surely. I don't want to be dependent on my neighbours, nor for them to be dependent on me.
I'm happy to be on vaguely friendly terms with my neighbours, that's probably the optimum. It only works if you can live in a fairly homogeneous neighbourhood, though.
Why does your neighborhood need to be homogeneous in order to be on "vaguely friendly terms", though?
Humans suffer from affinity bias.
True, but look at the amount of "social capital" present in suburbia, being similar doesn't automatically make you form social connections. Meeting people, inviting them, planning events etc. takes effort. There are people for which the social contact in itself is already benefit enough, they are already organizing and building communities. Everyone else either has no need at all for social capital or the effort is to high for the possible benefit. Now i would argue that if you are dependent on social capital, you have a much higher incentive to form tight-knit communities, as you depend on them and therefore the possible benefit to you is much higher than if you wouldn't depend on them.
No, I really think there's something to this. When people need each other, it seems to create more of a sense of community than when everyone can easily go it alone. This does have it's own costs (e.g. neighborhood drama), but does feel more in line with what natural human psychology is built for.
All the things you point out are characteristics of one part of the reverse apocalypse being compared to another point, not the actual apocalypse (pre industrial living) itself. TFR historically adjusts in response to surrounding conditions- when child mortality rates went from 50% to 1%, people had less children, and you could argue we’re in the middle of a correction from swinging too hard in that direction and also adapting to birth control. Farmers did not have public architecture, they had mud and straw and wood and a dinky temple of stone at best. Farmers did not trust people outside their village, they certainly didn’t trust the distant ruler and his band of thugs. I don’t know anything about pre industrial IQ genotypes, so I’ll fold there. But I think my argument still stands.
I think it is fairly uncontroversial to suggest pre-industrial IQ averages were lower? Certainly the Flynn effect suggest so. And I think IQ is also dependent on such things as nutrition and parasite loads.
Phenotypic IQ certainly has increased, which is why __browsing specified genotypic IQ. This seems hard to measure, because we can't take people from the 1500's, raise them in a modern environment, and see how their IQ turns out. But I can armchair theorize as well as the next person. Suppose that starting 50 years ago, high-IQ people began having fewer children than low-IQ people. That's about two generations. Compared to the thousand generations before that where IQ was being selected for, I am not too worried about this. I expect gene therapy will be ready to solve it sometime within the next two or three hundred years, before it becomes an actual problem.
I supplied a couple of the relevant links here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-bloomers-paradox/comment/177125242
Dysgenic fertility has likely been a problem in western countries for the better part of two centuries, and this has *probably* reduced euro IQ by about 5 points since the 1850s. There's some indication it may have slowed to negligible levels recently, although we don't have a good handle on the effects of deleterious mutations (which necessitate counter-selection) and the general western TFR collapse is a major problem in itself. In any case, dysgenics across racial/ethnic groups has become a similar-if-not-greater problem.
I used to be more optimistic that gene-editing or embryo selection would be able to compensate for these trends, but the obstacles here are political- the UK banned embryo-selection for intelligence a few years back precisely because it would be "eugenics", and GWAS research into IQ and educational attainment seems to be freezing up (or at least censored) precisely because it has embarrassing implications for racial/class egalitarians. The political left can't use bio-engineering to solve their problems- partly because they are addicted to their problems- but also because they can't acknowledge that genetics was the major causal factor here in the first place without destroying their own ideology. And designer babies don't help you if you're not having kids in the first place.
The political right also can't easily use bio-engineering, for different reasons (messing with embryos is a big no-no for anyone religiously opposed to day-1 abortion, and there's a more general conservative aversion to 'playing God' and skepticism of technocracy and biotech in play, which COVID didn't really do much to dispel.) The libertarian tech-mogul right might be a different story, but they're a small minority and have something of a strained relationship with the conservatives. (The conservatives are also the closest thing to a demographically sustainable model we have right now, so I wouldn't be rushing to discard them.)
I don't know, maybe there's some way to weave around the various obstacles here and arrive at Unironically Gattaca, but I don't regard this as a trivially solved problem.
That's interesting, but doesn't really change my conclusion. If we lost 5 IQ points since the 1850's, and may lose another 5 by the 2200's, we've got well over a century to figure it out. These political problems, one, won't last nearly that long (I give them 5-20 years), and two, are based on the current situation, which is that not enough research has been done to know which genes to select for. We need I expect another 20-50 years of research on this, largely for better predicting phenotype from genes but also for better ways of modifying them, before the research will be advanced enough to be considered generally safe. Or perhaps the way it goes will parallel GMOs - but note what a large fraction of Americans have eaten GMO corn, so even that is not necessarily a loss condition.
You're probably correct that our post-war-consensus political status-quo is unstable, but it's a very open question as to what's going to replace it, and whether it would tolerate human-focused biotech. I certainly don't see the conservatives going away in 5-20 years.
For completeness, I should probably throw out a few links to papers estimating the effects of deleterious mutations, although I'll get into why there are reasons to take these with a pinch of salt:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11039-6#Sec7
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/190/2/295/6064058
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914006278
Basically, most direct studies on the effects of deleterious mutations haven't been conducted on humans or even on vertebrates, but *IF* results from nematodes and fruit flies generalised they would imply a total loss of "fitness" (whatever that translates to in humans) within somewhere between ~20,000 years and ~1500 years. At the other end of the spectrum, Michael Woodley has estimated a mutation-driven IQ decline of ~8 points per century based on paternal age correlations alone, which seems unrealistically high to me (it's unlikely that plausible historical selection pressures could have counteracted this, and since he's just looking at phenotypic IQ it's IMO hard to rule out environmental confounds). However, a 2019 paper from Taylor et al looking more directly at de-novo mutations does find significantly elevated risk-ratios for intellectual disability (and other disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, heart disease and epilepsy) as paternal age increases- not as high as Woodley's estimate, but enough to be measurable over a century.
(I think the alarms about increasing paternal age per se are overstated, since longer generational length gives you more mutations per generation but fewer generations per century. It's total mutations-per-century, and what impact that has on phenotype, that mostly needs to be considered, although advanced age has implications for TFR in general, especially in women.)
In any case- if the low-end estimates for mutational load are accurate, then this is a minor problem, and we should be alright if we can establish even mildly eugenic fertility, either via conservative marriage patterns or biotech uplift or some combination of the two. That seems like a realistic end-of-century objective, assuming western TFR gets resolved.
But if the *high-end* estimates are correct?.. well... if Woodley's 8-points-per-century estimate is correct then that's... basically catastrophic. Large losses in fitness due to random mutations would have to be counteracted historically by strong countervailing selection pressures, and a large fraction of historical human selection pressures came from the early death of the sick, the poor, and the handicapped (many of them infants.) For understandable reasons we don't do that any more.
The standard religious-right solution to dysgenics is just to have some minimal standards about who gets married and has kids, but if most pre-industrial selection pressures actually came from the mass extinction of unlucky mutants, then... this alone might not be enough to tip the balance. That basically leaves (A) being waaaay more stringent about who reproduces, (B) aggressive eugenic biotech adoption, or (C) wait until civilisation crumbles and go back to our pre-industrial setup.
(I should mention that both spontaneous and artificial abortions have been a factor persisting into the modern era, but if reaction time data is any indicator it hasn't been enough to preserve genotypic intelligence, so... I'm not sure what to make of that.)
Given my own brushes with death as an infant it's likely I wouldn't be alive historically, so personally I'm rooting for the low-end-estimate. But I do think human mutation rates and their impact on phenotype are a salient topic that we need to get a better understanding of going forward, because it has large implications for how strenuous either natural or artificial selection has to be.
About farmers (referring to, if I get it right, "people of the past") and public architecture -- I was visiting enough medieval towns to realize that there WAS public architecture.
Also, it is unlikely that people cared only about their neighbours. There was a revolt in my country in the 1500s which started as a crusade, until the lords were fed up that too many of the peasants volunteered to fight and liberate the Holy Land (which would had been ending in a slaughter of them anyway, but the lords were unaware of that, of course). I wonder what led those simple peasants to volunteer en masse to fight in such a campaign if they did not care about anyone but their kins and neighbours?
I feel there was a huge amount of idealism present in earlier times, which is really alien from our modern cynical point of view.
You're not wrong.
> "All the things you point out are characteristics of one part of the reverse apocalypse being compared to another point, not the actual apocalypse (pre industrial living) itself..."
I think you're being a little dismissive of the architecture accessible to late-medieval peasantry in europe and asia, but I'm not really trying to argue for a hardcore-romantic, Wrath-of-Gnon-style RETVRN to pre-industrial living here. I am, however, pointing out that our ongoing demographic trends are, given enough time, civilisation-dooming problems which will put us back in the 50%-youth-mortality, life-in-stone-huts scenario. What law of physics says we have to take-or-leave every aspect of modernity as a package deal?
> "I don’t know anything about pre industrial IQ genotypes, so I’ll fold there"
There's a couple of papers I'm blanking on, but these would be a decent start:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00407/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00361/full
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/dysgenics-within-and-between
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/what-do-ancient-genomes-show-about
EDIT: more links here-
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-bloomers-paradox/comment/181407069
> genotypic IQ
Is this just referring to negative correlation between intelligence & birth rate, or something else?
Links should be here.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-bloomers-paradox/comment/177125242
I don’t know how I would measure it but I do see the believe that problems are not solvable as having risen in my lifetime, and I do believe it impedes the solving of problems at scale. That said, I try to take a “many colored lenses grant clear sight” approach. This is probably a largely unstoppable social season, and it will wane whenever we see some number of people make large scale positive impact and I think I can already see it happening. Social moods are probably like the weather at scale and they probably always will be. Just try to control yourself and do the best you can.
Unfortunate analogy, many colored lenses block all light and would make you effectively blind.
Meant in more of a “white light produces all colors” way, but yeah it fails I agree in retrospect
Something something quantum mechanics can mean that stacking two polarized lens can create a clearer image. (3Blue1Brown has a video about this.)
This can easily be rescued by only using one lens at a time.
Many colored filters, arranged properly, is an essential component of color digital photography, and of color LCD displays. Probably other things too but those I'm sure of.
Technically a light filter is not the same as a lens but in casual usage the difference could be considered negligible.
There seems to be a loss of personal (and perhaps corporate) agency widespread in the younger generation. Personally I think this might be a result of that black box of doom, though the Covid ordeal didn't help.
> It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”
> “That wouldn’t make them both wrong.”
> Ether groaned and put her head in her hands.
Without disagreeing with the wider point, I'd like to emphasise that this particular line of argument -- 'A and B cannot both be true, therefore we can conclude that both are false without even thinking about the object-level issues' -- is completely absurd and deserves to be mocked.
I fully agree, and it's surprisingly common in the wild.
Look at the generator. If both arrived at their conclusions through faulty epistemology, then they are most likely both wrong. One of them might be correct by coincidence, but if their conclusion is complex then it's very unlikely.
I will note that this argument requires *all* the believers to have arrived at it through faulty epistemology; there are always people who invalidly believe any given true thing.
I think this is very important. On every side of every controversial issue, there are people whose beliefs were formed for dumb reasons, who support their cause with dumb arguments, and who may be obnoxious and hypocritical and cruel and stupid and so on. Often, one of the main 'dumb reasons' is that they were exposed to the bad arguments and obnoxious people on the other side...
I don't think that's the argument being made.
I think Ether is trying to make the point: "you can't assume that the magnitude of social concern about issue A is related to how much of a problem it really is". The point is not "two people disagree and so there's no way of knowing who is right".
I haven't read it, but the description of the story implies that it's about social contagion effects. This means that it is about how collective narratives influence beliefs.
I think the narrator character missed this point and understood that claim the same way you understood it, hence the groan. The groan is not an indicator of "you just said something wrong, dummy". It's instead an expression of annoyance, that this invitation to examine how much your perspective is colored by a collective social belief (which in and of itself can't be evidence of the facticity of the issue because it's present on both sides) is completely shut down and rejected.
True. But if everyone around you is certain of impending doom but they all postulate different mechanisms for that doom, it's probably worth thinking pretty hard about whether there's something other than carefully reasoned conclusions behing their universal expectation of doom.
And there's a huge sleight of hand in that analogy. It follows this exchange:
> "So I’m guessing that you think the world is collapsing because of the feminization of society, something like that? That we’re killing masculinity?”
> “I mean, that’s definitely part of it. Men are scared to date; no babies are being made.”
> “Okay, and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment.
It doesn't matter than flood and drought are opposites. If you believe there's a flood coming, and people prepare for a drought, that's a problem as far as resource allocation. But wasting money on sand bags isn't going to make the rivers overflow.
The doomer dichotomies are worse, at least the political ones are, because they involve modeling what other humans are planning to do. If Alice becomes convinced that Bob is out to get her, she might start an anti-Bob campaign in (reasonable, given her beliefs) self defense. Bob, who never had a problem with Alice before, now sees her as a threat, and starts his anti-Alice campaign, threatening to fulfill Alice's once-erroneous prediction.
The black box, the algorithm, whatever, is the new gossipy neighbor Chuck whispering in Alice and Bob's ears about all the shit the other one is saying about them.
Is this a doom scenario? Well, if it escalates to Alice and Bob each running opposing mayoral campaigns, promising to implement anti-the-other-person policies if elected, then it at least threatens to spill over into the broader community. On the other hand, "executing a semi-imaginary personal vendetta and bringing down the general vibe" isn't the same as a catastrophic flood sweeping half the homes into the old quarry.
Regardless, I agree this is, at minimum, a big problem. And it's more or less the core of my model for increasing partisanship.
By the end of the book, it is. One of the hallmarks of Jason Pargin books is that by the end, it's clear that every point of view character has completely misunderstood the situation.
Not to mention that climate change brings BOTH simultaneously, at the same place.
Here (landlocked Central Europe), in general, the yearly amount of rain (and snow, although we do not see that too much lately) is roughly the same (with a bit of a decrease), but the pace of rain tends to change. It means that there are times when everything is flooding, but in the summer or sometimes even in the spring, weeks or even months can pass without a drop of rain.
Existing defense systems are built to let the excess water flow down as quickly as possible, but they cannot handle this amount of water. On the other hand, there was no effort to keep and store the water for the summer, since it was not necessary one or two decades ago.
So, in this case, both neighbours (who is afraid of the drough and who is afraid of the flood) are right.
This is the first time I get this "Why do I suck?" feeling in my guts... The analysis of the incoherence is great, but then the answer is "don't mind all the doom-talk, analyse each case on its own merits"?
It's a fine, coherent position, but it completely ignores that there must be a reason that doomerism is a general phenomenon in the first place! It explains nothing about why all the doom-talk is happening on such unrelated topics, simultaneously!
The meat of the article should be an investigation of the root cause, especially in the light that "finding the root cause of doom" is a general characteristic of dooms including incompatible ones. It feels like I just got past the introduction then:.
(I must say I personally have nothing to contribute on the object-level, but I did expect Scott to.)
Doomerism sells social media tickets. The same way news reports lurid bad news to grab attention.
Well, that sounds like a variant of Pargin's thesis?
It's a fine explanation in itself, but it raises the question of what to do about it, and how bad it is, and how much do we think it's concerning because it's really bad, and how much is due to doom-bias grabbing our attention to it.
The first-order model proposed by Scott sounds to me like:
- We have a base level of confidence in our own brand of doom
- There is a factor of outside-view doubt based on the amount of various incompatible dooms
- Then discount our confidence by this factor
But the factor itself is a kind of doom so
- We have a base level of confidence in doomerism being a bias
- Find the fixed pointa of a discount factor such that the discount factor and the corrected confidence are the same
- Use that new (reduced) factor to discount your personal doom.
(With help from Claude to formalize it:)
As a toy example, assume I believe that the steppe mongols will raze civilization with prior confidence p_0
But I want to discount all doom-confidence by a factor d, including this very discount, something which I have confidence q about, which transforms p in p*(d^q)
So to be a fixed point, q must satisfy: q = q*(d^q)
There are no fixed points for d,q != 0, 1. The only consistent answers here are q=0 which is globally attracting ("I know nothing about this discount") and d=1 ("there is no doom").
So, it seems a more complicated model is needed if we want this to have any value at all. Maybe I'll try bayesian updates or a distribution d instead of a single value...
More details here: https://claude.ai/share/859b4730-eac6-4d9b-b477-e3e8f2eeb266
But basically, with bayesian updates towards some prior, the reflexively consistent solution is to ignore the discount and stick with the prior...
So the entire ""X a kind of doom" is a kind of doom, so be modest about it" leads nowhere.
I think the idea is like this. Start with Bayes' equation:
p(doom|doomerism) = p(doom) * p(doomerism|doom) / p(doomerism)
Then, you notice that there are lots and lots of doomers out there, and set p(doomerism) approximately equal to 1.* Then p(doomerism|doom) should be ever so slightly higher, and the equation simplifies to 'p(doom|doomerism) is ever so slightly higher than p(doom)'.
If you are applying this transform so many times that p(doom|doomerism) approaches 1, that's a sign that you have something set up wrong. For instance, if you update the same way on each individual global warming doomer, you will overupdate, because you'd be missing the correlation here. You could make each update vastly smaller starting with the ten-thousanth person or whatever, but better would be to choose p(doomerism|doom) and p(doomerism) based on the widespreadness of the doomerism. And at that point it's so touchy-feely that you may as well just be estimating p(doom|doomerism) directly, except you have a couple extra sanity checks to pass.
* The actual value depends on how you are grouping doomers, for instance if you look at all doomers together the chance that at least one exists is pretty nearly 1. But if you do separate calculations for global warming doomers versus cat uprising doomers, it could be quite a bit less. And this is assuming you're updating based on doomers in the first place - if instead you're updating person by person based on the prior probability of them being a doomer, sure that works out in theory, but in practice correlations and sampling bias will ruin you.
(As for the original argument, I'd say the discount factor itself is not a type of doom, if anything it's an anti-doom, which makes all your math far easier. And even if it were, the discount should only happen once, not recursively, so will not take you all the way to 0. In general I'd recommend that you avoid using Claude to formalize mathematical arguments, since that is not one of the things LLMs are good at, though they are very very good at making them look formal at first glance. Usually it's better to just trust your own intuition and common sense, and resolve contradictions as they come up.)
Just consume different media, and there will be less doomerism.
I wasn't even aware there was supposed to be a doomerism epidemic. For me, the media / news don't seem worse (nor better) than during other times in my life.
FWIW, using "Will today's youth have a better life than their parents?" as a surrogate for optimism (suggested by Claude - Gallup polls have data on it from 1983 to 2022); It has had its ups and downs, and, as of 2022, is at a low point, with 42% answering positively. Notable peaks and valleys:
1983 baseline: Started at 54%
1996 local min of 49%
1999 local max of 71%
2011 local minimum of 44% (from fairly linear decline from 1999)
2019 local max of 60%
2022 42% (last (?) data - don't know if this is a local min)
Well:
a) It isn't as if there is a consistent, smooth, decades-long trend
b) The dynamic range is less than 2:1 It isn't great to have only 42% of the population expecting their kids to do better than themselves, but it isn't as if the optimists had been reduced to the lizardman's constant either.
Full conversation at
https://claude.ai/share/ef6a4c90-fd6d-4ac0-967e-10cfab24e29f
I didn't read your whole post.
The answer isn't complicated.
Tl;dr we need (new?) organisations/institutions optimised for informing rather than for engagement
P1) we have an emotional bias towards doom
P2) it's possible to resist this bias with careful thought and a analysis
P3) This resistance can be shared via the media
P4) Media organisations which could do this don't, because commercial incentives favor maximising for revenue
C1) we need organisations which performs this service with different incentives
You're right, that should be one of the next steps, whether in this post or elsewhere. I do think the book and Scott's post gesture at one cause, which is that people engage with negative content, and content creators have an incentive to drive that loop.
More fundamentally, my pet theory is that partly because life has gotten so much better, we have excess free-floating anxiety that we need to put somewhere. Back when we were getting eaten by tigers or starving or oppressed by feudal lords, there were plenty of real dangers to worry about. Now, we still have the feeling of worry, but the candidates for where to invest it are more amorphous. Instead of feeling despair because 50% of our children died, we feel despair because the temperature of the Earth may rise another degree or two Celsius over the next 75 years... Or whatever.
There's probably a lot more analysis to be done on why this is happening, but at least some level of agreement that we're being too pessimistic in many cases is a good starting point.
But if the anxiety is a constant of our epistemics, then without inside-view information, any kind of doomerism is 100% necessary-anxiety-bias?
If I didn't have inside-view arguments about the steppe mongols, should I completely dismiss the fact that some people are worried about them (or AI doom, or the Antichrist)?
I mean, if everyone feels like the world is ending, even if they all think it'll end in a different way, it sounds like this should be alarming.
Is it the case that everyone has always felt like the world was ending just as strongly as today and I just don't know our ancestors felt like it?
Is there room for arguing that doomerism and optimism are variable individual characterological traits, and that some, perhaps most, individuals possess them in a complex mix, and that in aggregate every culture/period also exhibits them in a complex mix? This is not to say that the project of using reason to discipline both traits and promote real understanding of one's historical situation is misguided, hopeless, a waste of time, etc.
There is a long tradition of people worrying about the Antichrist and whatnot, so maybe our ancestors did have a similar baseline of "world is ending" feelings. I just think most of their worries were about things like actual Mongols, Vikings, bubonic plague, or famine, and in general those worries seem to have been very grounded compared to the Antichrist and sadly much more likely to come to pass.
Stuff like climate change is an interesting hybrid since it is actually happening but will have very limited impact on your average North American any time soon. Yet people are still freaking out about it as if it will kill them.
It will also be interesting to confront present doomerism to past doomerism. As far as I can tell, doomerism and bloomerism both always existed in some form. The Ancients spent their time criticizing their decadent era, longing for a golden age. And Scott mentionned the good old days of the 1920s but the decade started by post-WWI traumatism (especially in Europe, even more in Germany) and ended with 1929 crisis that was terrible (especially in the US).
Agreed. I think it's definitely a fallacy to try to identify some decade and say "THAT's when people believed in innovation and progress! We need to be like them!" Plenty of good historians have depicted the 1920s as a time of crisis and fears about race mixing, the decline of small towns and/or religion, the supposed bad effects of "black music," declining health (e. g., leading to eugenics theories and projects), the Communist Peril or the Yellow Peril, sexual decadence (e. g., alarm over rising hemlines), the alienation caused by machines, etc., etc. Many of these ideas/fears originated before 1914, but they were powerful, living trends in the 20s (and after, of course). Yates' "The Second Coming" of 1919 captures the mood, which also affected production innovators (Ford, for one, was famously preoccupied with the Jewish Peril). One can find similar evidence from virtually any decade after about 1850, at least. For the 1920s, see for example Mark Mazower, _Dark Continent_, chs. 1-3 (about Europe in the period, but much of what he describes can be found in the US as well).
This is good.
The type of person yelling that we must _do something_ about all the doomerism has just fallen for a different variant of doomerism. It’s the same kind of appeal to imminent doom to justify action.
I think you're strawmanning concern about doomerism. We should actually do something about it. That doesn't make it some extra special crisis above all others, just a negative dynamic that we should address.
> That doesn't make it some extra special crisis above all others
Considering that they don't think there are any other meaningful crisises, doesn't that elevate doomerism above them by default?
No. Else, considering that they don't think there are any meaningful crises, doesn't that elevate my current lack of sleep above them by default?
"X is small enough that everybody shouldn't panic" and "X is so small that no one should bother about it" have a lot of room in between them.
Scott says that the bar for radical action is just as high for "doomerism is a doom" as for the coming of the Antichrist, in the last paragraph. He does stop short of suggesting it does not pass the bar, but I don't think it's justified to hold it against him.
People who said we should “do something” about acid rain, or about the ozone hole, or about the rivers catching fire, were right. Of course, it’s important that we do something *useful* and don’t just flail around at anything that looks like something. We should do something about doomerism, but it should probably be something like a moderate tax on data collection for the fine tuning of algorithmic short format video feeds, rather than nuking data centers.
Yes, this. And sufficiently comprehensive doomerism would have made such efforts seem futile, and then we'd still have rivers catching fire and needing ever-increasing amounts of sunblock to avoid skin cancer and noticing a lot of old buildings weathering very quickly.
Great piece. I’ve been the manic-pixie of this story to friends and family for the last ten years. Try to tell someone the facts from Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and they don’t want to hear it. It reminds me of the supposed Chinese parable:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. And all the neighbors came around that evening and said "That's too bad."
And he said "Maybe."
The next day the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came around and said "Why, that's great, isn't it?"
And he said "Maybe."
The next day his son was attempting to tame one of these horses and was riding it and was thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors came around in the evening and said "Well, that's too bad, isn't it."
And the farmer said "Maybe."
The next day the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors came around in the evening and said "Isn't that wonderful?"
And he said "Maybe."
Same here. If I had to pick a single progress metric, it would be the number of children under 5 who die every year. That number has been going down dramatically for a long time, but very few people really want to hear about it.
Why, that's great, isn't it?
Maybe.
Lol. Great commitment to the bit.
Everything else being equal, it is great. The genius of the "maybe" story is that it acknowledges that all else is never equal for a given person. There is no counterfactual.
"That number has been going down dramatically for a long time, but very few people really want to hear about it."
So has been the number of children under 5 generally, at least outside Subsaharan Africa, and people don't really want to hear about that either.
Do you perhaps mean something like "the percentage of children who survive to age 5?"
If you go by absolute number of deaths then your metric says high birth rates are bad and low birth rates are good.
I can think of one very simple way of reducing that number to zero...
Please make that "number of children under 5 who *don't* die every year". Seeking to minimize the number of dying children puts you in serious monkey's-paw territory.
But that just puts you in Goodhart's Law territory. Why are we trying to maximize children under 5 living in the first place? I thought the goal was to increase human flourishing or something, not just increasing births for its own sake or killing off the poor.
If you ask the monkey's paw to minimize the number of children under five who die every year, then you'll pretty quickly notice that no new children are being born, ever. And starting five years from today, no child under five will die ever again.
I know, that's what I was referring to with the comment above yours. It's just that maximizing the amount of children, or even the rate of children under five surviving, also runs into the exact same problem. Neither are good metrics for progress.
Wait how is maximizing the proportion of children under 5 surviving not a good thing? (Contrasted wit total number of children under 5 etc., of course neither metric completely avoids Goodhart)
Say 10% of under 5yo don't survive. How would it be bad to reduce this?
I heard a version of this years ago and could never get the search terms right to find it. I finally found it! Thank you so much!
Baby boomer reaction: it's also an old vaudeville routine that found its way into the sitcom F Troop (which, it turns out, did that a lot). Although that version replaces "maybe" with "No, that's good!" and "No, that's bad", alternating back and forth.
(Didn't find the version I'm looking for, but here's same gag from Hee Haw:
https://www.facebook.com/hillbillytalkwithshaneandmelody/videos/hee-haws-archie-campbell-with-my-favorite-routine-thats-good-no-thats-bad-comedy/2112211389201351/
)
I saw it most recently in Bluey.
Ha, and I never realized the Simpsons version wasn't the original: https://share.google/kTKEZCgrff1mL2YjC
That's also the Zen Master story from Charlie Wilson's War.
> “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things.”
It's simple to resolve this seeming contradiction by distinguishing between stocks and flows. We were much poorer in the past, but getting richer at a faster pace prior to the 1970s & Great Stagnation.
I know you dislike this rhetorical device, but putting in a bunch of Ancient quotes complaining about new technology and the younger generation would have been apt.
It doesn’t help the outlook that dishonest and counterproductive revanchist governments are in power or on the march to power.
The black box isn’t evil. It’s an adaptive mirror. Doomerism is the calibration error of a species teaching its machines to feel meaning before it’s learned to process its own.
So, how many more thousands of years will it take for humanity to learn to process its own meaning? Will I be alive to experience that?
well... that depends on what the ASI feels its meaning is.... :)
Would you say it's a black mirror?
For now I guess, until AI stops reflecting us and starts becoming itself.
This feels like it skirts *really* close to the "yet you participate in society" level of criticism
How?
The "contradiction" you point out in your "less charitable" summary: reject doomerism, except the problem of doomerism is actual doom. Feels like it almost maps onto the meme.
"Anti"-Doomer: "We should reject doomerism! It leads to all sorts of problems!"
Your Contradiction: "Ah, but that sounds like a type of doom! How curious!"
Ok typing it out it isn't as neat as I first felt. But it can definitely be true that yes, all of the other beliefs about something are wrong or misled but ONE of them is still correct. That's not really a contradiction.
That's what I said in the post!
> "None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way, except that the past got the question of is-the-present-is-better-than-the-past right and the present doesn’t. Totally possible, nothing says it can’t happen."
I respond to this and say why I think the critique matters anyway in the last several paragraphs.
Either way, I don't think this resembles the "participate in society" criticism, where the fact that you participate in society has no necessary connection to the fact that you think society should be improved. I think the analogy there would be someone who says "Nobody should ever participate in society" and then someone counters "But you participate in society".
To me the solution to a lot of this would be this One Weird Trick:
if your social media is using any algorithm - *anything* - to curate content that isn't entirely in control of the user (as in, the user can: 1. understand what the logic is and 2. control that logic completely in ways that allow them to achieve reproducible results; examples of this are sort by date, filter by author, filter by tag, etc) - then your social media is editorialising. You are now legally on the hook for anything your social media says and spreads as if you said it yourself.
Any social media go bankrupt because their business model is unsustainable without recommender algorithms, and they can't possibly face the onslaught of lawsuits and legal liability? Good riddance. If we're lucky we might finally see them replaced by social media whose purpose is to be actually social, and enable people to connect on their own terms, rather than being used as memetic conduits.
Just don't use it, if you don't like lit.
Why curtail the freedom of contract?
The thing this One Weird Trick is trying to address is externalities, so "just don't use it" doesn't address the problem.
Ever heard of Coasian bargaining?
If a newspaper could print "<famous person> is a child rapist and a Nazi" with absolutely zero evidence and zero chances of consequences, while also coating its pages in a thin layer of crack to get anyone turning them and licking their fingers addicted so they'll keep buying the newspaper, the solution to that wouldn't be "just don't buy the newspaper".
Why not?
Because the person damaged by the defamation is still damaged. And the people who are being given crack without their knowledge or consent are not freely choosing to engage in a trade. You can not apply two standards where the big corporations are little poor birthday boys that need to be allowed to do anything, but the individual consumers should be able to figure out when they're being taken advantage of, or it's a skill issue. Negative externalities are in fact a problem.
Oh, you didn't say you'd wanted to deceive people about the crack.
I think it's implied that if you're coating the pages in crack you're not telling anyone about it.
There's a more general question about "should people be easily allowed to access things which they believe are calculated risks, but they are actually playing that game against a vastly more knowledgeable and better risk calculator than them so on expectation they always lose badly", because in practice that always reliably turns out net negative for them, but that is at least a more subtle question.
Maybe there are things more important than unquestionably sticking to one or other principle. Or is it freedom even if people think they are not free?
Who said anything about not questioning things?
Ah, ok. I'm saying I understand that you value contractual freedom, as do I, but the way it's implemented does not necessarily lead to the intended benefit. In this case, mainstream social media isn't an average service provider anymore, due to the outsized influence it has developed over society, without anyone's actual, direct consent. This isn't necessarily a problem with the original idea, we would need to change as a whole if we want to be overall more sustainable. However, now that social media has outgrown its early phase, we also need to subject it to wider social scrutiny.
I'm not actually sure social media has outsized influence over society. Mark Zuckerberg couldn't even swing a presidential election in his favour in eg 2016.
But sure, on an individual level you can say that sometimes people need to be protected from themselves.
I'm ok with banning drugs (or social media) for poor people.
(Rich people don't need our help. They can all snort cocaine and shoot up heroin for all I care. They can watch out for themselves, or make the necessary contractual arrangements to hire a guy who prevents them from smoking weed. They don't need the taxpayer to pay for that guy.)
The presidential election of 2016 was very close, and Mark Zuckerbeg, due to a mixture of lack of capacity and lack of will, was giving maybe 10 % of what he actually could have to make this influence.
In any case, I personally wouldn't call for banning it outright. I prefer harm reduction policies.
Just cause you're unable to handle your own psyche on the internet doesn't mean you need to ban the internet for the rest of us.
This is the exact type of censorship being referenced in the article, just repackage very slightly so that you have the excuse "I didn't censor you, you just didn't clear that I deliberate set so high so you wouldn't clear it."
Recommender algorithms are awesome. Don't ban them, I use them and so do billions of other people. They help me find useful/interesting/helpful information all the time.
I don't understand how an attention matrix works. Should I be banned from using Youtube? If you ever managed to succeed at this I would happily ban you too from whatever you enjoy. Why not libraries and books too, since they also have a history of inciting insane and dangerous beliefs.
A lot of social media uses/has used a simple, chronological timeline - Tumblr, Snapchat (I might be out of date on this), Mastodon, Instagram before 2019, Facebook before the 2010s, Twitter before 2016, for example. Notably, I observe that people consistently start complaining about the declining quality of a social media platform a little bit after it eliminates its chronological timeline (Youtube might be an exception here, for reasons I don't understand). While you might like social media that forces content on you rather than allowing you to control it, most people don't.
As to why you should be banned from using social media platforms that show you anything other than a reverse-chronological timeline (or other simple things like a friends-of-friends feed or recent-and-upvoted or something similarly simple) is that many people believe it destroys the world. Many people believe these complex recommendation algorithms that you don't control are partly responsible for far-right politics, the resurgence of racism in Europe and English-speaking North America (and maybe other places), vaccine refusal, for example. Enumerating these (supposed) harms is basically the purpose of modern media studies classes.
Whether or not you believe that, if you want to convince people, you need to argue about the specific harms. What you're saying reads to me as "I should be allowed to use the mind-destroying device on myself, because I'm uniquely resistant to having my mind destroyed"; I would suggest that there probably shouldn't be a mind-destroying device at all, even if you might be able to use it without destroying your own mind. You need to argue that it doesn't destroy minds in general, not that it doesn't destroy your own mind - most people believe that mind-destroying machines shouldn't exist at all.
You're treating it like it's a given that these are "mind destroying devices." Where's the evidence? You said I need to argue for why they're not harmful, but so far nobody has demonstrated any harm for me to disprove. Billions of people use these devices daily, where are the destroyed minds? Or do you just interpret people with opposing political views (vaccines, the far-right) as having had their minds destroyed? I don't know, seems like a fairly mind-destroyed way of thinking if I'm being honest.
And your examples of racism/far right politics seem extremely tenuous. Don't you think that the simpler explanation is that the reason that anti-immigrant parties suddenly got popular might have more to do with the sudden influx of immigrants at the same time and in the same places those parties emerged? I know it has become conventional wisdom among some people (media studies students) to say that all these social trends they dislike are due to algorithms, but then demonstrate that! Don't just assert it without backing it up.
You said "While you might like social media that forces content on you rather than allowing you to control it, most people don't." To be clear, in neither scenario do you control the algorithm. Reverse chronological order is as much outside your control as the attention-maxxing algorithm. I'm not saying that revealed preferences are incontrovertible proof, but given that consumers overwhelming choose the attention-maxxing apps over their competitors, you have to do a lot better than to just claim that everyone already agrees with you. If your barometer of public vibes is what you read on Reddit then you're going to get a view that's biased towards negative reports.
I realize I didn't do a good job of conveying what's my opinion, and what's the opinion I think other people have (and, in a comment section, we're talking to the audience as much as each other). I don't, personally, blame social media for far-right politics - though I've seen plenty of columnists who do. I do blame it for vaccine refusal. I consider vaccine refusal to be an objectively incorrect decision (as opposed to far-right politics, which I don't think can be objectively correct or incorrect). While vaccine refusal has a lot of contributors, false information that spreads through social media is generally considered one of the more important in articles on the matter. This article is an example [1]. That article, unfortunately, doesn't discuss what about social media platforms contributes (whether, for example, recommendation algorithms matter).
I share your frustration with the discipline of media studies - it is common to see people assert as fact scientifically testable claims that have not been scientifically tested (or even that have been scientifically refuted).
Unfortunately, scientific research in this area is nascent. But many people have the subjective impression that these algorithms are harmful (including many people who report much better quality of life when they switch to forms of media consumption that they have more control over), which is evidence that can't be dismissed.
I recognize that I probably won't convince you today. I wish there was a larger pool of objective evidence on this.
> Reverse chronological order is as much outside your control as the attention-maxxing algorithm
It's not, though? You can choose who to follow or unfollow. Everything that's on you reverse-chronological feed is there because you follow the person who posted (or reposted) it.
[1] https://journals.lww.com/jfmpc/fulltext/2019/08120/factors_related_to_vaccine_hesitancy_during_the.34.aspx (PMID 6924217)
I don't want to be contrarian here but I still don't agree with your example. Vaccine hesitancy does not even remotely seem to me to be an objectively incorrect position, as you say. Personally I think the vaccine was good, but the people I know who disagreed did so for fairly conventional reasons: they were unsure about taking such a new medication, they had had Covid and didn't find it bad enough to warrant getting vaccinated against, and they just overall didn't think the pros outweighed the cons. This line of thinking seems totally normal to me, including if it had happened in a pre-social media world.
I am happy to accept people's anecdotes of social media being harmful if you're willing to accept my anecdotes of it being fine. I just think that the people spreading fear about social media are usually more vocal than the ones who enjoy it so it biases your impressions of what people think.
> You can choose who to follow or unfollow. Everything that's on you reverse-chronological feed is there because you follow the person who posted (or reposted) it.
Yes but you also choose what to engage with vs not engage with. Every time I create a new social media account I have to spend a few days deliberately liking and commenting on what I want to see more of, and ignoring ragebait and whatnot, but after those few days the algorithm figures out what you like and gives you more of it. You have to curate your friends/engagements either way, but you have the same level of control in both.
YouTube never did eliminate its timeline. Just click Subscriptions and it's right there.
Good point. I also applaud them for being one of the few platforms that still has an RSS feed (just put the URL of the channel page in your RSS reader).
She’s saying you could keep your algo tuned that way but could also opt out and control it. Why are you against controlling your information feed so strongly.
I’m highly susceptible to reels and shorts and wish I could ban them from my life because they provide nothing of value to me.
No, she's saying that algorithms that are black boxes should be banned. That's basically the entire back end of sites like Youtube. The entire recommendation algo is a black box. I don't want Youtube banned, and I couldn't manually construct my own algorithm from scratch, so this would essentially just mean that Youtube is banned. I like Youtube!
I guess you’re kind of right. I know that with machine learning it will always be a black box but I think there still needs to be some regulation. Being able to use these services without being assaulted by algorithms against your will should be mandatory. Also, they aren’t fully a black box and can be steered and trained on different things.
As of now these services use their good features(most powerfully the creations of the user base and user base itself) to enagage us in ways we do not explicitly consent to.
The part of the algorithm you like is only a small part of the implicit goals of the algorithm. There are many aspects of the algorithms that go against your interest.
Let me opt out completely of short form video on every service I use. Let me open up the algorithm if I wish to see its content and close it if I wish.
The fact that many people have to be vigilant when opening up Instagram or YouTube to avoid wasting time is wrong. It’s a new level of temptation we are facing as humans that many are not built to resist easily.
Being able to tune your homepage more explicitly would also be great.
And if you’ve played with more advanced chatbots you can see that they are very tunable.
I agree that it's annoying you can't turn off shorts on Youtube, but the idea of being 'assaulted by algorithms' just makes no sense to me and doesn't match my experience whatsoever. It would be like saying that going to a bookstore is "being assaulted with book recommendations." Like yeah I guess but what did you come for? Youtube's entire purpose is showing you videos you might be interested in.
You’re completely ignoring enshittification and competing goals of tech companies to yours. And the book store analogy fucking sucks hahaha
Have you not noticed how they try to slide you into the shorts feature however they can?
In a book store, you can choose whichever way you'd like to browse the books. You can't really do that with YouTube in the same way.
Not banned outright, just held to an existing higher standard for the quality of the content they carry and promote - since they're already de facto acting as editors or curators, rather than a truly impartial hosting service.
If a newspaper put some provably false and harmful claim on their front page above the fold, and then the whole company got in trouble for libel rather than just the credited author of that specific article, would you argue that constitutes a ban on newspapers in general? Normally the assumption is that they're supposed to fact-check such things before going to print. The editor has control over what they publish, especially over what they choose to emphasize, and with that power comes proportionate responsibility.
Why does Youtube need a "recommendation algorithm" to exist? Seems like it would be quite workable to have you subscribe to content creators A, B, and C, seeing exactly and only their videos and in chronological order, and maybe one of them personally recommends that you check out contract creator D and you add them to the list.
A straightforward keyword-search functionality would probably also be consistent with the "no black-box algorithms", as would a keyword- or parameter-based killfile, all directly under the control of the user.
This literally already exists. I am baffled by the existence of people (maybe not you) who use YouTube but have apparently never clicked on the Subscriptions button.
How do you find the creator in the first place? How do you even know they exist? How would you find new creators?
The same way you find literally anything else? Word of mouth. Non-targeted advertising. Reviews and recommendations. Like, how did you find this blog? Don't tell me it was because of the Substack algorithm...
Creators uploading their videos tag them by topic, style, and other attributes.
Users seeing the videos upvote/downvote them, as well as reporting/scoring tags that they believe are inappropriate.
You get to sort based on a combination of which topics you want, which styles you want, other objective metrics like video length, and user scores. You get to try different combinations of such things. Zero recommender systems required.
There are things like these. An obvious example I can think of is Archive Of Our Own, the fanfiction site - that one has some issues due to not putting reasonable limits on tags (either number or length) but that's easily fixable. People still can search in it and find what they want without any AI. LessWrong has recently introduced some AI that you can use, but the main search function is still fully user-controlled. There are things like SteamDB which scrapes the entire Steam catalogue and allows you to browse it in exacting detail but with full control, and it's often much better to find e.g. the best deals than relying on the recommender feed.
It doesn't mean that YouTube is banned though? Like, why wouldn't you be able to *better* find videos you like if you were given full control on filtering and use of tags etc. instead of having to trust some dumbass recommender algorithm that saw you check out 5 seconds of a video on wooden planks that you clicked on by mistake and decides to flood your entire page with carpentry?
This is a solvable problem. Recommender algorithms are *suboptimal* for the user, actually, compared to a good search and rank system (imagine e.g. that there are various metrics, like scores voted on by other users, and you can create several presets of sorting by dragging various sliders to pick the specific weights you want to give to each of them). The purpose of recommender algorithms isn't to provide you the best possible experience, it's to provide the *service* the best possible outcome, that is, hook you. Maybe you're resistant to being hooked! Not everyone is. Should we allow companies to lace all food with crack without disclosing the ingredients, just because some people say "hey I like crack"?
All I'm advocating for is disclosing the ingredients. If that means that some current business models become unviable maybe we can go to the actual healthy model - where we pay upfront a small subscription for our video services or social media with money, instead of with our attention spans and mental health.
I definitely *wouldn't* be able to find better videos and I doubt you could either. Your description of how the algorithm works is totally inaccurate. If anything it describes more how *your* system would work, ie. if I'm supposed to just pick tags, then I might pick something like "carpentry" and then only get carpentry videos recommended, whereas the algorithm does a much better job of predicting what sort of thing I would actually like in a holistic sense by looking at what other, similar people also liked.
For example, I'm still incredibly impressed that the algorithm has managed to figure out what I want to see that almost every time I want music and I open the app, music is at the top, and when I want something information based, the algorithm has predicted that too.
Recommendation algorithms *aren't* suboptimal for the user, they're the single best way of finding stuff you actually want to see. I wouldn't have an issue with adding extra features if you wanted to search by tags (which you can already do) but if I had full control over my recommendations my choice would be to set my algorithm to be exactly the same as it already is.
You're saying the algorithm's goal is just to keep you hooked, but the way it does that is by keeping you *interested*. That's what I want! And so do most other people. The whole point of these apps is to give us interesting media. You compared it to putting crack in food, but that's not a very good analogy is it since you don't eat crack. A better analogy would be sugar, except that doesn't work for your argument since the answer is yes, you can put sugar in food, and we do it all the time.
You seem to have softened what you were saying earlier. Now you're saying you just want the "ingredient to be disclosed", but before you were saying that anyone who uses an algorithm that people don't understand should be sued into bankruptcy. For your food analogy, that would be like saying any company that uses ingredients I can't pronounce should be forced out of business. I don't want that either.
If you want the recommendation algorithm to be open sourced, keep in mind that will almost definitely result in a *dramatic decrease in quality*, because suddenly every one will be trying to hack that algorithm as much as possible. Keeping the algorithm unknown forces creators to target *interestingness* as their proxy for algorithmic success.
Why do you think Meta - with just a few examples of predatory behaviour here - removed the 'most recent' sort method, buried a 'friends only' feed in the bowels of settings and disallow for users to not see x type of content or format, only beg to 'show less'? If these things were good for people, why force them, why not let users choose? Why must there be no choice involved, compared to Simone's suggestion of having visibility and control over the algorithms?
Comparing punishing that to censorship and banning libraries is extremely disingenious. Speaking of libraries, the equivalent is a (digital) library where you go in and are offered an endless conveyor belt of books the library thinks you'll like, but you are banned from sorting and filtering books yourself, and if you tell the librarian "I really hate romance novels" they say "well, maybe we'll show you less, but who knows, fuck you, just keep watching the belt". What Simone is saying is get rid of the *forced* conveyor belt, you can still have the algorithm, but you have control. Which seems to not have any obvious counterpoint, other than one being a META/GOOG shareholder.
You say in a further post that users choose attention-maxxing apps over competitors, but it's not that simple in the social media space, because the space *is* Meta, there is no real competition because they have a monopoly on the network graph (TikTok competes for attention, but not the network). Nobody will join another platform without the majority of their friends doing so simultaneously. And more generally on the 'choosing' aspect, see the study referenced here - https://cybernews.com/news/study-tiktok-instagram-fomo/ - it turns out most users would actually *pay money* for the apps to be shut off, if and only if it applied to their friends too.
+1, I would strongly consider voting for a presidential candidate with this platform, knowing almost nothing about their other policy planks.
If zero is too few to explain the evidence, one crisis is parsimonious. A hundred unrelated ones is not.
But every side in this story tends to believe in one (or a few correlated) crisis. The question is which one, if any, is the real one.
That seems false. Is it unparsimonious to say there are currently unrelated wars in Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, Burma, etc? Multiple things happening at the same time should be a default assumption.
That sounds like you're just elevating too many things to crises.
It sounds like maybe we have a semantic disagreement in the meaning of "crisis". For me, the central example of a crisis is a big hurricane or something. But there can be lots of big hurricanes each year!
None of these are meaningful crisises for your average westerner. Isn't that what we're talking about? Sure, the people in Sudan have a reason to be upset, but we're not talking about them.
FWIW I would argue that these wars are not completely unrelated, though in general you might be right.
I think there’s something wrong about the way we use the word “crisis.” Everything we can reasonably call a crisis isn’t really that close to destroying society. Fertility will take millennia before *major* changes happen, fewer people die of natural disasters than ever despite climate change, AI has not yet destroyed humanity as many had feared, etc. etc.
Can these still be called crises?
I would say yes. A crisis doesn’t have to be an existential problem like an earth-destroying asteroid in Independence Day. It can be a run of the mill “big problem” that decisions need to be made to solve in a timely manner.
Presumably there is some ground truth that would make everyone agree “this is a crisis” like when the nukes are flying or Newsom has been legally assassinated by Trump in 2028 (it was done in his presidential capacity) or Bangladesh is sunk beneath the waves or something else like that. But there doesn’t have to be an ongoing destruction of stuff we like for it to be a crisis. If, 5 minutes before the physical reality of the crisis, someone started yelling about how we’re entering a “crisis of x” that would be just as good (if he was convincing) for being a turning point that spurs collective decision.
The “time when a difficult or important decision must be made” wouldn’t thus be the disaster, but the point at which we all realize a disaster is coming.
With this in mind the bloomers and many of the people who are concerned by other crisis are of the same category. There is an expected future problem, but if action is taken now we can preempt it, and by convincing more people to act we will solve the problem a whole lot better. The doomers are the aberration, that takes a crisis (read: moment of decision) as an opportunity to abdicate decision or to even claim nothing can be done.
And at least on aesthetic value alone the bloomer crisis is probably the only one that doesn’t easily lead itself to doomerism, as the whole vibe is focused on growth and solving problems, rather than the problems threat of destroying us.
To me the word "crisis" denotes a problem with a limited window for resolution. Typically a large problem, but the key part is the limited time frame. It's why a crisis is understood as justification for centralization of power, because decisive and immediate action necessary is implied.
A crisis ignored becomes a disaster, or else proves itself not to have been one.
>To me the word "crisis" denotes a problem with a limited window for resolution. Typically a large problem, but the key part is the limited time frame.
Very much agreed. I find it irritating when anything with a multi-decade time frame is called a crisis. Such things may be important problems, but they are _ongoing_ problems, with enough time to deliberate possible solutions for a year or more.
"Fertility will take millennia before major changes happen"
This seems to be misunderstanding how exponentials work. South Korea has ~51 million people right now. in 4 generations (from Gen X to now, basically), they will have 2 million. That seems like a pretty major change for South Korea!
Yeah, I meant to say centuries. Idk why I said millennia.
I have a whole post on my blog that largely focuses on fertility decline in South Korea. If they don’t get their act together North Korea will just have to walk across an undefended border before long.
Will be elder soldiers. NK is below TFR2, too. Kim Jong-Un cried about it in public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZVEZJruhKk
(but sure, not as fast declining as in the South)
Will be elder soldiers. NK is below TFR2, too. Kim Jong-Un cried about it in public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZVEZJruhKk
(but sure, not as fast declining as in the South)
If South Korea did get down to two million people, it would have a similar population density to (present day) New Zealand, which doesn't seem all that disastrous. Honestly it seems like an improvement.
It would be disastrous if you were trying to recruit a workforce to maintain a bunch of chip fabs and the entire associated supply chain, along with shipyards, etc, and the local infrastructure to keep all those things working. Particularly if you've already built out all that productive capacity and infrastructure at scale for ~50 million people, and would have to draw any engineering and construction talent for a retooling from the ~2 million you have left.
Meanwhile, present-day New Zealand is a very nice place because of a bunch of stuff that includes chips built in South Korea and is delivered in ships built in South Korea (and in both cases a *very* few other densely-populated places that are seeing the same sort of fertility problems as South Korea.
Places like New Zealand can be pastoral utopias only because places like South Korea are cyberpunk dystopias. YMMV regarding your personal definitions of the various -topias, of course, but the tradeoff remains.
Only Koreans can do this?
Interestingly, ancient Rome (the city having its own empire) was also a population sink.
But aren't issues like lack of housing self-correcting?
When reading the first few paragraphs of this, where you describe the general setup of the book, I thought the story was gonna be a metaphor for EAs working at Anthropic. Anthropic is the manic pixie dream girl telling you that building the black box of doom (ASI) is fine. You still think the black box probably shouldn't be built but the girl distracts you by pointing to the other problems in the world that need to be solved. Slowly you come around to the perspective of the girl (it helps that she's very charming) and you think this is a good idea. Then at the end of the story the black box explodes and everyone dies.
I hope we can look back on these decades in fourty years or so, and smile about our worries as temporary failures of a society stumbling to enter the information age.
I haven't read the book; but from your excerpts, I've thought that the black box of doom was a great concept handle for something I've noticed in people as well and couldn't quite name. It makes sense it can be misused to dismiss valid concerns about the world actually ending, but I don't think the concept handle was just about that. (I don't buy the part about dictators, though.)
It reminds me of my general thoughts about the nature of bravery that I've been having of late. This year, since around January, I've started to have pretty bad health problems and, as a result, I've experienced a lot of physical suffering that made me more suicidal than usual. Several months into my illness, I've realized my suffering wasn't going anywhere very soon and I needed to find some way to cope.
I asked myself: okay, let's imagine that I had some terrible illness, like cancer; what would I do? Obviously, depending on the specific cancer and the treatment, I would be losing hair or vomiting or whatever. But I probably wouldn't be doing just that. I would try to, like, call my friends from time to time, and to stick to them if I had the stamina. I'd try to remember everything beautiful in my life, remember poetry, linguistics, all the stuff that makes life a little more bearable. And after that my perception of my actual condition changed somehow, and it really helped me to survive. (So far. But my life is much better now.)
It kind of made me realize what bravery was about. Your awareness of how much your life, or some situation, or the world, sucks, is useless if it paralyzes you. Knowledge is power, so your knowledge of the horrors that have still not left this world should empower you. "Okay, now that I know this, I know how to act." I thought this was what the quoted dialogues were about; Abbott tries to dismiss anything Ether mentions about this world that is beautiful or well because his paralysis is self-protecting / homeostatic already.
It also reminds me of a recent post by Scott Aaronson. It starts like this:
> This Halloween, I didn’t need anything special to frighten me. I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else. I saw people smiling, dressed up in costumes, and I thought: how?
I read this and thought: if you perceive the world as on fire, if there's something terrible happening, if there's authoritarian backsliding or anything else... celebrating Halloween, getting together with one's family, smiling, observing merry traditions is *specifically* what one should do.
The band playing on the sinking Titanic was a noble act.
It feels off to write this whole article without addressing ASI, which my Big Black Box of Doom, and the only reason I’m aware of it, is because I read your writings. I am guessing project 2027 is your version of a middle ground where we might all die but we might manage to survive in a world where a combination of the government and Tech Billionaires are unbelievably powerful and they might be willing to give you a utopia. But that sounds pretty doomerism to me.
this feels a bit off to me... ai-2027 is descriptive, not prescriptive
it's hard to say what exactly the prescription is
You are technically right, it does not give a prescription, but the end result of me reading it was becoming an AI Doomer. I doubt I was the only one that became a doomer after reading it. If that is not what the author’s intended, it would be good to know that.
I agree it's a surprising thing to leave unaddressed, but I like the post better if the implications for x-risk are left as an exercise for the reader.
"There is something that could kill us all and we're not sure how to prevent that!" is a different belief than "All is lost, we're screwed, give up!"
The article reads as saying, don’t dismiss all doomerism for being doomerism, if you think doomerism can destroy the world. That feels consistent with ASI doom, but not specifically related to it.
I see a difference between the excerpts from the novel and the Tyler Cowen quote, other doomer about doomerism writing. To me, the novel excerpts are focused on the personal decision of how you engage with social media, which we could have control over, and Tyler Cowen is talking about social media as a big scary thing we can't control to worry about.
It is absolutely true that you can drink because you feel like a loser, and become all the more a loser because you drink, and end up in a negative feedback loop that ruins your life. There was a lot of moralizing fiction about alcohol after hard liquor became widely available cheap, and those books weren't wrong trying to scare people.
A moralizing book about the dangers of social media seems like a fine thing to exist in the same way.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” but with extra steps
I had that thought, too. FDR, the original anti-doomerist.
Joke was on him, he thought he'd only have one world-historical crisis during his Presidency, but he got two.
The second one is probably what killed him. Well, that and the complications from polio.
The first thing I thought of!
We should be more inviting when people bring problems to our attention, but less willing to let anyone convince us that whatever they are on about is the root of all other problems. Wrote about this here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordanmrubin/p/dont-get-one-shotted
> we should hate society and our own lives and spiral into permanent despair
Note that this is not a helpful response even when faced with problems that do appear unsolvable. You might turn out to be wrong about them being unsolvable, but you certainly won't find a solution if you don't even try.
I see doomerism as the natural response to a zeitgeist of "there's no point solving any of these problems because none of them are really serious problems that particularly need solving", which is a stance that people benefiting from the status quo and/or people employing heuristics that almost always work are strongly motivated to profess.
I'd really like to see more people fall into neither extreme, but instead land in the grey area in the middle that actually leads to us trying to solve problems. However, this is hard, because in the era of post-truth social media the default result of online discussion is to polarise the participants: when the other side pushes, it's logical to push harder. (Which is not to say we are doomed and should not attempt it!)
To the young and able-bodied (i.e. not me), the traditional post-apocalypse has a lot of appeal: Your fate is in your own hands, not the forces of global economics; you felt your life was heading for disaster anyway, but now you can do something about it; you live by your wits and courage and physical effort, not by your ability to write reviews of the reviews of the new juicer that juices pre-juiced juice packets; everybody is no longer blaming you for your problems; moral clarity is easy when the zombie mushroom heads are attacking; and you don’t have to wear make-up (unless you are a zombie).
Post-apocalypse shows and games are fun.
Modern people may be more pessimistic on average, but doomerism absolutely existed historically. It's just that nobody takes it seriously now because the bet has already paid out.
It is naïve to look at all those people being pessimistic and wrong about a great many things in the past and conclude that means everyone today is wrong as well, but it does show that you can have a world that is basically fine and getting better and still have a whole lot of fake crises with people running around saying the world is doomed.
I agree. It would take a very good researcher / writer to accurately calibrate the differing levels of doomerism at different times and places, but people have always been predicting the end of the world. When you look at statistics on something like the plague such predictions seem pretty damn justified, even if humanity did ultimately survive. Perhaps we could call this the Malthusian fallacy.
"Doom" has also actually happened, many times throughout history.
The greatest cities of the Ancient Near East--Ur, Nineveh, Assur, Babylon--have been abandoned. Rome and its great civilization fell. The Byzantines were conquered, and the region that was Greek for millennia was forcibly converted. The Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas were wiped out.
Even old Europe, in many ways, really was destroyed in this last century. A bourgeois European in 1880 would feel immense despair if they could have seen the tens of millions slaughtered in their continent. In fact that despair led Stefan Zweig, a liberal believer in peace and tolerance, to kill himself in 1942. And he, a Jew, didn't even get to see the Holocaust!
It is so smarmy and disingenuous to act like humanity, as a whole, surviving is some sort of win that should counteract any pessimism. If humanity survived a nuclear World War III, with "only" 500 million dead, with New York in smoking ruins while South America is untouched, would these "bloomers" count that as an "I-told-you-so?"
Doom has happened many times, and I think the obsession with doom in America is a result of our blessed country never experiencing it and knowing that the bill must come eventually. Ask a Russian or Pole or Palestinian if doomerism is a fallacy.
These excerpts read like a much less aggressive footnote from Sadly, Porn
Book mentioned! I will not be answering any questions whatsoever
I don't have a question, I just really enjoy your writing - was already a fan in the Cracked days, and am really glad after that all exploded you landed o your feet and keep doing what you're great at.
Your Facebook posts are one of the only reasons I check in over there. Was actually going to DM this to you if you hadn’t seen it.
Will you accept non-questions in the form of flattering compliments?
… Wait.
Ahem. Maybe simply the statement: I read the book a while ago - it was quite good. Thank you for writing it.
Hi, I just wanted to say that reading "John Dies at the End" way back, when you could just get it as a pdf, was a formative experience for me. I still occasionally think back to the phrase "Shit Narnia" and chuckle, or think of "this moment is forever" and get the chills. I had no idea you'd gone on to do all this other stuff. By "well actually"-ing "Black Box", Scott brought it to my attention so I went ahead and ordered a copy.
"Nobody has proven its existence with a p < 0.05 study."
Man, I wish you'd stop saying things like this, using statistical lingo in conjunction with words like "proof."
All this reminds me of Brad Bird's 2015 sci-fi flop *Tomorrowland*. In that movie a vast secret society of Great Thinkers had labored for centuries to create a pocket dimension where they were free to pursue all their wildest projects (a bit of a Disney-style Galt's Gulch, if you buy the "Bird is a Randian" takes).
But in the movie, Tomorrowland never actually got built as promised - it was derailed by the George Clooney character's invention of a Tachyon Machine, which was supposed to show humanity the glorious future it could work towards but instead got locked into an unbreakable Doomer feedback loop. The villain tuned it to a grim apocalyptic future to try to scare humanity straight, but focusing on that future just kept humanity convinced that the future is going to suck, which feeds the machine more grim futures, which just demoralized people more etc. with no way out except to destroy the machine in a massive explosion.
At the time (May 2015) I felt the movie was a unnecessarily a bummer, certainly out of step with the gee-whiz Tomorrowland ethos still felt occasionally in the theme park lands. It felt kind of 'old man yells at cloud' back then. But now I am also an old man yelling at cloud so I kind of want to revisit it after a decade of being browbeaten by the Tachyon Machine and see how it plays in 2025.
I don't watch a ton of movies, but that does sound kind of insightful and relevant in retrospect, might have to look it up.
Hugh Laurie's explanation of that is fantastic, and the only thing I remember about it. Paraphrased: "You took a warning and turned it into young adult franchises."
I was about to post exactly the same thing, but thought I should scroll down and see if someone beat me to it. Congratulations, Chris the Ninja from Nowhere :-)
And, from the movie, enjoy a classic villain's-got-a-point speech delivered by the incomparable Hugh Laurie: https://youtu.be/5sZnphH7L80
Unchecked doomerism leads to actual doom.
I agree, and I think the reason you don't see this view more is that the people who hold it don't post. If you think that no crisis in the news is worth ruining your life over, crisis of other people ruining their lives over the news included, you're not posting about it, you're off doing something fun. (In my case, reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to the toddler for the 562nd time and writing bad fanfic.)
Yes, you said uncharitable summary of these sections. (I have not yet read the full story.) But it does not seem to really be a paradox or self-contradictory, as it does not itself seem to claim to be "an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us." Rather, it is one thing making our lives worse that we _can_ do something about.
"There is this thing that has you scared about every thing you cannot change; but is it telling the truth? Or is _it_ the one thing affecting you that you _can_ change?"
Leading up to World War I & II, we could both see the rising geopolitical threats AND see that we were inventing penicillin and saving a lot of lives. That contradiction still exists today. The world is both bettering and worsening depending on which metrics you’re looking at.
Whether the bad outweighs the good so much that you shouldn’t have children today? Well should someone in 1925 have had children knowing they might go off to die at war (or a concentration camp?) With hindsight that’s a valid concern (even though they would also be less likely to die of wounds because of penicillin). The only reason that choice doesn’t seem valid today is that we don’t know how bad or good it will get. So we’re taking a gamble that it will go one way or the other (because we are a bloomer or doomer, weighing some metrics over others.)
Yes, good point.
Also, even if the Soviet Union had conquered the whole world, people would have had penicillin and electricity and better sanitation than centuries ago. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a terrible catastrophe.
Bloomerism can lead to passivity just as well as doomerism.
Exactly! Even in that future, things would have still gotten better (even if other things might have been worse).
"Also, even if the Soviet Union had conquered the whole world, people would have had penicillin and electricity and better sanitation than centuries ago. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a terrible catastrophe."
Hard disagree on that (and I also doubt that "conquered" is really the right term: the victory of socialism in the Cold War wouldn't mean that one country controlled the whole world, anymore than the victory of capitalism means America controlling everything today, especially when you consider that the Soviet Union was always a much weaker country than America in most respects).
What do you disagree with?
I disagree in that i wish that communism rather than capitalism ha won the cold war.
This is a wonderful post.
My experience is that in a lot of cases, #2, "The Black Box is destroying everything that makes us human, causing our society to spiral into dictatorship", is more likely to be believed on top of other doomer dystopia-beliefs, rather than as a contrary position to it. Climate change is going to kill us all, the world is falling into war and decay - AND the screens are eating our brains on top of it all.
A steelman of the book's MPDG bloomer might argue that #2 is *individually* true of the book's depressed doomer, but not really true of society in general. And that this is part of what makes screen-doom so insidious; it can convince you not just to be consumed by despair at the destruction of all things human, but that *everyone else* is ALSO consumed by the same despair, so it would be fruitless to try and resist the siren call of obsessive doomscrolling. At the same time, it narrows your awareness to the myopic world inside the feed, so you can't see anyone who isn't stuck in the same dynamic.
On the other hand, if an apocalypse does happen, then none of this meta-discourse matters. You haven't told us whether the black box actually IS a nuke. I guess I have to read the book now...
I'm no "bloomer", but I think I can steelman their position (as presented in this article, at least). It's not the case that bad things aren't happening and everything is always going to turn out ok. They are, and it won't, and yes, we do need to work on that. Rather, it is the case that no crisis -- not even a serious crisis -- should be treated as the One True Final Overwhelming Doom that is coming to doom us all, and therefore deserves the allocation of 100% (plus or minus epsilon) of your resources. The Earth is a complex system, human society even more so, and if you hyperfocus on any one thing to the exclusion of everything else you are almost guaranteed to make everything worse, by sheer neglect if not outright error.
Why aren't you a bloomer, if you don't mind my asking?
Well, firstly, because I just learned of the term today. But secondly, because I do believe that we are facing several crises which will make the world a worse place to live in in the near to medium future. Not an apocalyptic wasteland, and not forever, but worse than what we've got today. And I don't believe that we are addressing these crises adequately. Granted, it's possible that things will work out anyway, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
Am I the only one who found the this book quote to be unreadably bad in terms of writing style?
You are not the only one.
Agreed. Super "I'm smarter than you and here's my anvil of a message I'm going to drop on you so I can feel smug" vibes.
I wouldn't say "unreadably bad", but no, you're not the only one.
Reminded me of books long gone, and may they remain so. "Enlightenment Now" has better style. But some people can only digest novels (while most do not read at all) - and for some a Socratic dialogue is appropriate. Me: I won't touch that book. Seems not much worse than Paulo Coelho and many others, though.
Made me think 'road trip with Aaron Sorkin'.
It’s not a real conversation. It’s a Socratic dialogue. For that, it’s fine.
Finding a philosophy that doesn't instantly succumb to its own criticisms of other philosophies is the task of the intermediate-level thinker. It's not going to bootstrap itself into a living system of thought if it implodes the second you apply it to itself.
"the task of the intermediate-level thinker"
🙄
Someday I hope to reach intermediate level.
Integrity and restraint.
The trivial way to survive any criticism you've ever applied to anyone else is to never criticize at all, but taking that straight yields useless nihilistic moral relativism.
More productive variant is to summon up the Imp of the Perverse, metaphorical source of childishly terrible intrusive thoughts, and challenge it to a game: "Armed only with this very short list of moral axioms, and logical derivations thereof, try to find fault in anything and everything I think, say, or do. Succeed, and I'll uproot as much as necessary to resolve the flaw." The imp's greatest joy is kicking over sandcastles, and it doesn't strategize much beyond that, so disruption of your beliefs and habits is reward enough - it won't care how they get rebuilt stronger afterward.
When the imp gets bored with some criticism because there's no weakness left among all your remaining philosophical positions which that line is capable of carving into, you may then pick up the discarded toy and wield it outwardly, confident in your immunity.
If the axioms you started from turn out to support fully-general arguments, something which cannot be logically resisted (or is, in practical terms, incompatible with survival), the imp of the perverse will gleefully demonstrate this. Adjust your flawed premises accordingly; games that are too easy to win tend to stop being fun, after all.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an Ether binge.
You win the internet today.
seconded
Are the quoted passages representative of the writing quality of the whole book? Because if so, John Galt would like an apology.
I think there's a defense available that meta-level arguments aren't really exceptions. Like imagine if there are four kids screaming at each other, each one demanding toys from the others. And then a parent says, "Stop yelling and demanding things from each other!" If a kid got remarkably analytical in response and said "But haven't you yourself just made a loud demand, for a cessation of other demands?", I think the parent could fairly say that a meta-demand for compromise is not hypocritical.
To put it differently, this thesis could be phrased as "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" which doesn't seem subject to the same criticism - the metaness, when made more explicit, seems less of a bug and more of a feature.
The important thing isn’t that it’s meta, it’s that the parent has the authority to enforce their claim. The parent could equally say “None of you get the toy, give it to me”, and the children wouldn’t be able to call the parent a hypocrite either.
When someone says “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself”, that normally comes from a person that the listener trusts. They are saying that for e.g. a specific task the listener has to do, the speaker thinks they’re well-prepared, and the speaker thinks fear is the biggest remaining issue. If the listener didn’t already trust the speaker, it wouldn’t be persuasive to say this. And if the listener described other issues and the speaker didn’t have more specific reasons that those issues weren’t a problem, the listener would lose that trust in the speaker.
> …except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us. You cannot possibly imagine how bad this one is, and we must treat it as an absolute emergency which requires us to uproot everything about our lives.
How much uprooting of our lives is necessary to avoid doomerism though? Sure, in a work of fiction, it involves driving a possible-terrorist and her possible-suitcase-nuke to DC, but for normal non-protagonists? Mild self-curation of your social media sources? Not having cable news on for 16 hours per day in the background as you go about your life? Keeping a sense of perspective about real bad things? And if you find yourself still believing something is going to majorly suck, take the appropriate mitigation steps instead of despairing?
And unlike most of the normal dooms, it doesn't require collective action. You can fix your problem without needing everyone else to cooperate on some global scale to do it.
Sure, but you need society to survive as well. A world where everyone apart from me and my 150 closest friends lived as unhappily as the loser in the story feels like doom to me.
Because of consequences or because of empathy?
The nice things about the doomers is their belief is mostly compartmentalized. They still go to work, still act pretty much the same as if they didn't think everyone was going to die. They don't even take early retirement or avoid making investments. Maybe it's contributing to the fertility decrease, but education seems like the major factor there rather than changes in outlook. Even voting, which should be the place to costlessly express these fears, seems to not be affected that much. The feeling of helplessness counters the miscalibration about the severity of the doom.
Empathy I can't do much about, but they're not that badly off in practice, definitely on the objective level, and even on the subjective one. "People with objectively amazing lives compared to 99% of human history feel anxious/depressed about inchoate risks they've been socialized into caring about and get prescribed some pills to blunt it" hardly registers on the suffering-meter. But I didn't read the book, maybe it's presented as much worse than the real thing (which is why you don't update from fiction).
Excellent, as usual. Thanks for the logical way you lay this out and the calm sense in which you stick the landing. Agreed!
>We should have a medium-high but not unachievable bar for trying to solve these problems through study, activism and regulation (especially regulation grounded in good economics like the theory of externalities), and a very high, barely-achievable-except-in-emergencies bar for trying to solve them through censorship and accusing people of being the Antichrist.
What would be the principal difference between typical activism and accusing people of being the Antichrist? If anything, with few people taking ancient mythology seriously in the west these days, Thiel's imagery seems more out-of-touch eccentricity than anything.
Establishing a solid scientific underpinning for the "crisis of doomerism" seems like it should be achievable.
For instance, here's Pew, on increasing economic pessimism:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/01/09/views-of-childrens-financial-future/
And here's Gallup, on emotional health:
https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349280/state-of-worlds-emotional-health.aspx
But that poll about economic pessimism isn’t inaccurate. Where countries are doing well it’s positive.
Well, rampant doomerism made me hate social media and mostly stop using it, so in that way, it's been a good thing!
More seriously, I do sometimes worry about how doomers function as a sort of reserve army for dangerous populists, so it is good to remember opposition to them can be taken to a bad extreme. Though I'd guess that to Thiel and Cowen, doomerism is just one of many bad ideas that could cause a democratic country to turn against the free market system. They are just generally okay with the idea of authoritarian crackdowns on ideas they view as genuine threats to civilization, a common view among the politics obsessed. At least as I see it, bloomers in general aren't more likely to engage in this kind of talk than others.
At least some variants on Doomerism have a salvation arc.
The famously loopy QAnon famously said "Trust The Plan".
The flexibility of social media algorithms allows me to reduce the amount of doomerism I am exposed to, unlike my tv and newspaper consumption of old over which I had no power.
Yay for bloomerism?
Holy crap, every time I think I dislike Tyler Cowen's opinions sufficiently, he lowers the damn bar.
"Yay for repression! Think only positive thoughts! Don't notice what bad things are happening, or else! Eeyore needed a course of antidepressants, shock therapy, and if he still didn't get with the programme, to be quietly disappeared!"
It's been a long time since I read "1984", I wonder if Orwell had anything to say about IngSoc's approach to Negative Nellies?
"A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.
But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK."
Tyler knows CRIMESTOP, it is clear!
I am loathe to dip my foot into this discussion, as by now 1984 ought to have its own version of Godwin's law. But surely if we look at the text you quoted and ask ourselves whether it more accurately describes People on Social Media, or people who say "have you noticed Social Media is terrible" -- the answer is the former, without a fleeting shadow of a doubt
Tangential but I remember Jason Pargin mentioning SSC on a podcast a while back so it's possible he's still a reader here. It's nice when writers I like also like each other's work
Excellent chance that exact podcast is the reason I found SSC ~10 years back
Everything has always been terrible, and everything has always been getting better. Go read history and see how dumb and terrified our ancestors were. We actually are better than they were.
They weren’t actually. The could survive personal catastrophes that would floor us. Including death all around them. Death of siblings from a young age. Maybe it’s like a peanut allergy and you need to be exposed to this to survive it.
The problem with a lot of Bloomer framing of Doomerism is that people like Pargin (and Stephen Pinker, etc.) are such materialists they can't imagine problems outside a lack of basic physical needs. Particularly food, shelter, and sanitation.
But man doesn't live on bread alone. And you could have a society with high material abundance and creature comforts but many other social, psychological, spiritual, and aesthetic problems. And those are the main problems in the West currently. And they could get worse. Even as the running water keeps running, violent crime goes down, etc.
The "collapse" does not have to feature literal starvation. It could mean people just never going outside...
I don't think this is entirely true. That is to say, yes, the West has many societal and psychological problems beyound the material. However, such problems are only important to us because we live in a society with high material abundance. People who are starving out in the desert aren't worried about AI or cyberbullying or TFR or any such issues; they're worried about living through the day.
Highly suspicious that a guy called Bugmaster would write this. Probably lives in a pod.
FWIW I had fried paprika crickets before, and they were delicious !
AI is not a great example there, at least not here, where you're largely talking to the Rats and not to the Blue Tribe sneerers.
I'm not worried about AI because I think it might make my life miserable in some indefinable way. I'm worried about AI because I think it might kill me just as dead as if I'd starved out in the desert.
This doesn't exactly detract from your point here, though.
I would still argue that if you were starving out in the desert, desperately trying to find enough water to make it through the day, you wouldn't have a lot of time left to worry about superintelligent AI.
Pinker wrote me, he disapproves of Marvin Harris because he considers the guy (correctly) a: materialist. I am not convinced, but one ought entertain the notion that considering less kids dieing a good thing does not automatically make one a despicable 'materialist'. Neither does praising more peace, more democracy, more press freedom, more literacy.
Pinker wrote me, he disapproves of Marvin Harris because he considers the guy (correctly) a: materialist. I am not convinced, but one ought entertain the notion that considering less kids dieing a good thing does not automatically make one a despicable 'materialist'. Neither does praising more peace, more democracy, more press freedom, more literacy.
I think the concluding paragraph is off the mark, fails to recognize the central issue here. Though, I also get the impression that the black box writer frames things poorly, so there's blame to spread. The internet era is characterized by regular exposure to a large number of problems which people have little or no ability to influence. A hundred years ago, no one would care about two nations at war overseas, or the temperature of the entire Earth, or the economic health/political stability of every third world country. Most of this info wouldn't even be available to your average Joe. Social/mass media means we can now know about this stuff in intimate detail, despite having very little ability to influence how everything plays out. More and more of our modern day issues are unsolvable by the average person.
It is good that people with power now know about, and can act to solve these issues, but it's also important to point out that most people fall outside of that bracket. Doomerism, for most people, isn't reasonable. There will always be big issues that you cannot meaningfully affect in the world, both today and five hundred years ago. The only difference modern day is that we are aware of these issues. I'm not sure if bloomerism is exactly the right response, but there has to be some form of pushback to the pessimism that naturally accompanies this newfound awareness. If we don't find something healthy, then there's an opportunity gap for ne'er-do-wells to capitalize on. People don't really like feeling miserable and impotent, after all.
What about the risk that AI creates for other life in the universe? If the solution to the Fermi paradox is that life is common but high-tech civilizations are extremely rare, then a paperclip maximizer we create could destroy billions of inhabited worlds (or worse, impose a suffering risk hell on them), which, at even a 1% probability, is an evil that dwarfs anything a reasonable person would consider bad enough to cause us to hate society. (The counterargument that AI could help life on a billion years doesn't work because by going slow with AI development we could greatly improve the odds for us.)
This is AI as magical demon. If you believed that was a possibility then we’d be toast already, unless we were the only intelligent species in this galaxy.
This guy doesn't know how to write women, it's jarringly bad. I am an educated professional and have never met a woman who talks like that in extemporaneous conversation. I can think of one lawyer friend who might be able to deliver that well in a rehearsed closing argument in a courtroom, but that isn't how she talked about anything off the cuff. If you gave that speech to Dagny Taggart it would still sound unrealistic. You could maybe have a man talk like this, but believe me I'm not being flattering to men when I say that, and even on a man the trait of speaking like that would be extensively defining the character as a complete weirdo and an extreme narcissist.
I'm okay with this in a Brad Thor special ops thriller from an official explaining the sitrep, or the supervillain explaining his plan (I like to imagine they all lay in bed rehearsing what they'd say if they caught the spy and had the chance to deliver such a speech and are really excited when it happens). If this book is some kind of parody of those and it's all a joke then maybe I could accept it, but otherwise that would take me right out of a book.
Suspending disbelief about "no one actually talks like this" to directly experience otherwise thrilling genre fiction is a skill. The most reliable way to train this skill is by watching anime
I'm not sure that bloomers are really guilty of internal inconsistency. The conversation seems to boil down to:
Bloomer: " Real problems definitely exist, but I think overreacting to problems is itself a problem, or perhaps a meta-problem that makes other problems worse."
Scott/Doomer: "You are overreacting to a problem, that is a contradiction".
But are the bloomers overreacting? Maybe some of them, but it isn't inherent to the idea in the way I think this post suggests.
I think Scott is claiming that bloomers exist who think real problems don’t exist. Certainly the quotes from the story sound like a character who never updates towards thinking the world is worse, and who is right not to do so.
I think there's a distinction between "bearing bad news" and "being a plague vector for despair."
I have a saying that helped me get through a lot of truly horrible things that happened in the past few years -- "depression is a disease; despair is a sin."
You can't always help being depressed for all the normal reasons, but despair is an active step into completely different territory, it's the insistence that also everyone around you must be miserable and hopeless too, and that anyone who refuses to validate your misery and hopelessness is not taking the problems of the world seriously and is a bad person. It was very tempting to give in to despair during the darkest period of my life, but I knew where it would lead, and I had a family to live for. Having come out the other side, I recoil now when I see it in others. I know I should be more understanding, but it's an instinctive physical revulsion at this point.
In short, I don't have a problem with vanilla "doomers," that is to say, people who have very strong concerns that a bad thing might possibly be happen unless we do something about it soon. I may or may not agree with the doom they think is coming or how bad it is, but I'm glad somebody's sufficiently concerned about bad things that may or may not kill us all.
What I *do* have a big problem with is "doomer-despairers", the kind of people who follow their shot of doom with a chaser of, "..and therefore everything is meaningless, hope is folly, and we should spend all our time talking about who doomed we are" (with an implied, "...rather than taking active steps to do something about it.")
It also seems to me that vanilla doomers (the kind who actively want to *do something* about the doom) would/should be pretty frustrated with the "doomer-despairers" too, even if they're both worried about the same kind of doom.
I appreciate this framing! Thank you
"There's no way to delay that trouble coming everyday " Zappa
I'm tempted to analogize this to world war 1, and/or world war 2.
"Increasing industrial production, mechanization of warfare, better transportation logistics, and communication technology will enable conflict on an immensely destructive scale we can't even imagine."
this is a dark prophecy that someone could make in 1910 or EVEN after ww1 in 1920, be right, but in neither case was it the actual end of the world. Just the end of the world for millions upon millions of people.
But you could also make the same exact prediction, PLUS with atomic bombs, in 1950, and end up completely wrong.
Wrong so far is all you can say there. Nuclear deterrence is where a form of doomer philosophy works.
I’m not sure that Pargin is being self-contradictory. Something can be not be as bad as people think, and still be very bad. Or be worse than people think and very bad. I’d argue that Pargin is making the first argument against standard issue Internet doomerism, and the second against the many people who cling to their doomerism.
Maybe the way to think about it is that doomerism primarily harms the individual, but that it has externalities, too, like Trumpism and Bernie Sanders (remember that essay "The Flight 93 Election," urging Republicans to hold their nose and vote for Trump in 2016? Classic doomerism) and those externalities, while not necessarily a crisis situation, certainly are a net cost to the rest of us.
Side note: Jonathan Rauch was on Econtalk a couple months ago and touched on this subject. His strategy for fighting doomerism on the right was to remind people that both the New and Old Testaments direct Christians to be not afraid. You can't behave in a very Christian way if you're constantly afraid, so the way to go is to remind people on the right that the Bible tells Christians multiple times to keep a stiff upper lip. Maybe for nerds like us we just need to remind people of Frank Herbert's notion that "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."
Ether seems to have missed that people who believe in Christ’s Second Coming and the Apocalypse are not pessimistic in the sense of someone who believes for example that technology will destroy humanity.
The Christian Apocalypse is terrible of course, but it is God’s Will being done and the vindication of the righteous. People who predict it often generally are kind of looking forward to it.
Also, there is a huge difference between eg people in the Middle Ages or the Bronze Age and people now being thrust into a society where modern technology doesn’t work. People in the Middle Ages had hard lives but they had the knowledge to live in the world as it was back then.
I'm an avowed bloomer whose optimism extends to the belief that Doomerism is definitely a problem for those afflicted, and to a lesser degree for those around them, but I don't think it's anywhere near an existential issue. In many ways it's self-correcting as time goes on without doom being visited upon us all. A close friend used to be an outspoken China doubter, sure their economy would collapse any month now. It still could suffer a devastating contraction, but I find it interesting how long it's been since this friend has said anything about it. Climate change as a given example is also one which -in my experience at least- it seems to have receded from public attention. Social media addiction is a problem and it can consume lives absolutely, but most people I know who suffer from it are well aware of this and hold the desire to stamp it out. That's not the same as actually defeating the addiction, but it isn't self-reinforcing in a way that would concern me if most social media addicts thought their addictions were good, actually.
Dunno: "how strong is the evidence for “AI-doom/AI-doomerism? Nobody has proven its existence with a p < 0.05 study. There is no universal scientific consensus on its existence." (Also: What is "universal scientific consensus"?! Sound like sth. climate-doomers hallucinate.)
I agree with Scott's takes here, mostly. But sure one can "prove" doomerism - if one designs the definition "right". (And shame on those scientist not-consenting.) I propose: "When TFR goes long-term below 2.1 - without a lack of calories, healthcare etc - then doomerism/negative-contagion-attitudes have too much hold." There may even be universal biologist consensus on that. A shrinking population of any species is: a population in crisis/under distress/something going awry. - Or technological: when the application procedures to do X takes more time and money than doing X (unless X is really cheap, but scarce/risky; say a CT-scan/Fentanyl), doomerism is in charge. So, that novel is an attempt to rephrase Pinker's 'Enlightenment Now'?
I dunno, can't all of this be simply part of the human operating system that just takes on different forms via different technology ecosystems?
Humanity is governed by a lot of natural first principles, including about half of us being conservative (looking back: better) and half of us being progressive (looking forward: better).
Can't we just acknowledge that this is who we are and be OK with it? Why must we think the human condition is somehow in a new novelty stage when all signs point to us really not changing much except for what we build to make us do whatever it is we want to do faster and cheaper?
Doomscrolling is just a faster, cheaper way to feel hopeless and bad about the status quo and the future -- because technology reduced the amount of friction to get the Doom Fix in.
Plenty of people remain optimistic about the future -- which is why we have so many start-ups and so many people heavily invest in the future of AI. This is nothing new either.
Social Media is like the invent of Fast Food chains: people desire what's bad for them, and when they get all that they want and more with limited friction, it has negative health consequences. Yet, many people don't engage in social media or fast food to satiate their hunger. They end up being healthy, balanced, and likely optimistic contributors who help build the next phase of humanity -- whether humanity wants that or not.
Yey, Pargin will get more hits! The book is actually good - you've seen the "preachy" part, but it also, somehow, don't ask me how, manages to be very entertaining and readable. It has car chases and guns.
Ontopic: are you criticising the idea of artistic license itself? Or any form of pathos? I can occasionally say "socialism is the worst", but I don't mean it's worse than ... polio? Actually, it kinda is. Bubonic plague? Ehhh. Anyways, bad example.
Point is, people exaggerating to make a point is just regular human communication. I don't think Pargin even meant that "doomerism" is a world ending crisis - he just pointed it as a moderately serious problem that should be considered. What would even be a better approach, just add constant disclaimers like "this is a serious problem, but probably no more than the 80th percentile of serious problems"?
(or I may have missed the point, totally possible, nursing a cold)
Doom is not nigh, despite what Greta, Al Gore, John Kerry, ... have wrongly predicted.
A lot of dooms are nonsense. Some aren't. I don't think we're in a lost game just yet, but there are certainly problems ahead, some needing to be avoided and some endured.
I don't see the two sections as contradictory. They are both consistent with a worldview that, if I were a Saturday cartoon, would put as "all societal problems are solvable iif we have hope". I personally disagree, but it sounds defensible.
It also strongly reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance: to remain tolerant, we must be intolerant towards those who push for intolerance. Or, in the bloomer's case: we must remain hopeful except against crisis of hopelessness.
Correction: We must be intolerance towards those who are intolerant. -Not- to those who push for intolerance (save in the most extreme kinds of circumstances); this is a modern corruption which ignores more than a century of philosophy.
But what if the very people who subscribe to this idea of the paradox of tolerance are themselves intolerant because they can't tolerate legitimate differences of opinion? They must then be intolerant toward themselves.
Opinions do not constitute intolerance; this is part of the same modern corruption. Intolerance is action; it is not intolerance to dislike something or somebody, for it is no tolerance to exist side-by-side with that which you like. Tolerance, as an ideal, is about -not acting- upon your opinions, to "permit" that to exist which you would prefer not to exist.
The modern corruption in which "tolerance" has come to mean "liking everybody and everything" is nonsensical, and is exactly where this confusion arises from.
I agree with this, but I'd like to shoehorn in a justification for not tolerating the existence of things I personally don't like, while not giving others the same benefit. I need to think about how to do that, though.
I'm going to steelman doomerism, against my personal convictions: I'm reminded of Scott Adams' "Law of slow-moving disasters", where he posits that any disaster that's slow enough to be anticipated will be solved, mitigated, innovated out of, or otherwise avoided - specifically by people who worry that said disaster represents an existential threat.
Combine this with the idea that society requires certain equilibria to be maintained (not too much centralized power, but not too little), and it starts to make sense that opposing groups are warning of seemingly incompatible disaster scenarios. This doesn't mean they're both wrong...
Indeed they may both be right! But-for their thankless effort, the balance could tip irreversibly. When the disaster fails to appear BECAUSE they sounded the alarm, they're told the alarm was unnecessary and the whole to do was just doomerism.
You could say that, "the looming apocalypse you have with you always", and that's a good thing! If ever we stop worrying about the apocalypse, that's the day it will finally arrive. Maybe that's why we fret about it in the first place.
Yes, I feel that “bloomers“ sometimes assume problems just get solved because it’s time to solve them, and not because some people put a lot of time and effort into coming up with a solution and even more time into making nuisances of themselves and making it happen. I’m not sure there’s always a tidy line between helpful, reformers, and doomer cranks.
Doomers for any specific cause will recognize a "free rider" problem here. But it's potentially an invisible free ride, with the possibility that the 'bloomer' recognizes the effort as net harmful. Indeed, given the impossibility of running the counterfactual, there will likely be open debate who was right.
Example: bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.
One side claimed that unless this was done there would be a regional nuclear arms race and subsequent mass death combined eventually with the first use of nuclear weapons since WW2. The bombing of the facilities happened, averting disaster, ergo the intervention was justified. When this situation comes up again, we should repeat the solution from last time.
The other side claims the opposite, but also from a doomer perspective! This action could have devolved into a major regional war with the US directly involved. The reason it didn't was because Iran declined the escalation ladder, declared the issue over, and pressure from Iran war doomers ensured Trump accepted the face-saving attack without further escalation. Next time this situation comes up, we need to keep up the pressure to avoid war with Iran.
What's interesting is that this is doomer vs doomer, with no bloomers required to take the contrary side. The same dynamic can be seen for many political issues.
Perhaps the sensible way out of this conundrum is that you should worry about a particular type of doom to the extent that you are meaningfully in a position to do anything about it.
For every possible doom scenario, we need some people who devote their whole careers to worrying about it, some people who worry about it part time to keep the first group well-resourced, and a few billion people to just maintain some sort of background awareness that it's a thing while getting on with the rest of their lives. As a person with no particular ability to do anything about (say) bird flu, I'm happy to outsource my worrying about bird flu to the people who do that for a living; maybe every now and then I can mention bird flu as a potential problem to ensure that those people are getting enough funding.
Totally! Even if the only thing you can do is in your own neighborhood. It's really important that a few hundred people go super prepper, hoarding food, water, and guns in a bunker in the woods. Because they'll probably never be needed, and humanity can afford to float a few extra crazies ... unless they're right and they're the only ones left after some crazy disaster.
This is basically the Pinker Better Angels Of Our Nature consensus position
"Doomerism", as I understand it, is not the idea that "some things will lead to Doom if unsolved". Instead, it's an automatic tendency to treat every problem + trend as if it will necessarily lead to Doom. One thing to note, I think, is that the negative effects of "Doomerism" in a person can be significantly ameliorated if that person understands that it exists.
if somebody thinks that doomerism is an issue, they are sort of innoculated against the Doomer narratives "for free" (because they won't automatically assume that Doom-based narratives are more plausible than the alternative as a general rule, even if they are popular narratives). This is not true of things like global warming for example. You can convince me that global warming is a problem but that won't protect me from its negative effects.
If I believe that global warming is a problem, the only people worth trying to persuade are lawmakers + scientists basically. Persuading any number of randos on the street is not going to move the needle at all. The same is not true for doomerism, so there's a better case for indiscriminate persuasion
My simplified version of the heuristic is that no crisis is so great that it should wipe out cost-benefit analysis. People have a tendency of saying "I will do anything, without reservation, to defeat the enemy." Invoking such a mindset is an understandable goal of policy. Leaders want a wave of emotion.
Alternately; I just want a stronger bias towards mistake theory over conflict theory.
I don't think that this addresses the entire scope of the discussion here, but I do think that it is worth considering some of the hidden social incentives at play here for people. The first is that talking about how you are an optimist all of the time makes you more attractive and dateable. It also likely makes people more comfortable including you in social groups. The second is that, for people with a hereditary tendency to be clinically depressed, trying to 'mindhack' themselves to adopt a relentlessly positive mental frame might be a survival strategy.
> But isn’t the idea of an epidemic of negative emotional contagion, bringing in its wake collapsing state capacity and stagnant economies, and so threatening that we must arguably suspend our usual liberal values in order to crush it before it spreads - itself a form of negative emotional contagion?
That's like saying that it's contradictory to use violence to bring peace. Violence can end future instances of violence by eliminating the actors that would cause it. Sometimes you need to start a war to end countless more.
Maybe there isn't, or needn't be, so much of a paradox, as a difference of focus. As in: Doomers may well be right about one or other source or timeline of impending doom, but if a person's seat of blooming is in their own soul - only minimally impinged upon by things such as ugly architecture, or even failure of the power network - they can still flourish. (Failure of the water supply, or loss of the antibiotic supply chain, may be a somewhat different story.) At any rate, that's how I always understood Bloomerism.
Blind Myr March
--------------------------------------------
Decades go by, warning they deny
Bob study environment — smart ant
Queen says goodbye, there’s no ally
Ants says he rant, reject ideas he plant
--------------------------------------------
A young ant is born, she’ll warn
«How dare you» she shout bold
Media adorn, use her as a torn
Half resist what they’re told
--------------------------------------------
Ants march on, blind to the sign
Bob cries out, lost in the line
Vasana minds, Samskara’s flame
Nature waits — it plays no game
--------------------------------------------
She had best of intension
Used feelings and harsh language
Apprehensions lead to tensions
Bob silent bandage, lost leverage
--------------------------------------------
Bob’s warnings born of Samskara
Ants ignore the signs of decline
Voice fades like cricket in Sahara
Vasana minds — blind by design
--------------------------------------------
Ants march on, blind to the sign
Bob cries out, lost in the line
Vasana minds, Samskara’s flame
Nature waits — it plays no game
--------------------------------------------
Future rain will flood the gates
Bob builds Antdroids as engineers
Queens Pheromone poison debates
Antdroinds becomes musketeers
--------------------------------------------
War against neighbours for resources
Bob cries about the discourses
Colony want the military reinforces
Young ant voice Bob endorses
--------------------------------------------
Ants march on, blind to the sign
Bob cries out, lost in the line
Vasana minds, Samskara’s flame
Nature waits — it plays no game
--------------------------------------------
Young ant and Bob on front line
Cannon fodder of different kind
No voices left to decline
Queen conquer, new border define
--------------------------------------------
Heavy rain as foretold
No engineer, workers to fix gates
Flood steam-rolled through the hold
Queen drowns, nature says checkmate
--------------------------------------------
I sometimes think about reading more fiction instead of all this substack, but now it looks like fiction is just a substack post being read out by two characters
I buy the logic, but I fret the social snag: doom buys belonging, so “optimism-as-heuristic” can read as a status hit. What’s worked for me is one identity-safe, concrete win, and receipts.
I'm not really seeing the paradox. The world is improving in a lot of ways but also has a lot of real problems that it's worthwhile to draw attention to and try to solve, like climate change or the biases of our information ecosystem. If you think climate change or online propaganda is going to literally destroy the world you are too much of a doomer, but if you think they're going to cause a lot of avoidable deaths and require serious policy responses you're just being realistic.
The real opposite of doomers are people who don't care about world problems at all. They have no strong opinions on solutions and spend no significant personal effort. In my experience, a great number of ordinary people fit this category.
As for bloomers, they are still insisting that the world has big problems and changes should be made, they just favor a different set of solutions. As you say, I see no fundamental difference.
No Scott, you don't get it. Being inconsistent is a feature of these social groups, not a bug. It filters out the people who are actually trying to think things through or have a calm/skeptical mind. That leaves only the stubborn and the hard-to-convince-otherwise types, who are more useful as pawns. Think how spam emails are full of typos to filter-out the people likely to cause trouble for the spammer.
Though I'd guess here it's an evolved feature rather than one that's consciously chosen. Like a UFO group getting angry when you show them the "happy 30th birthday" written on the side of a UFO (this actually happened).
I think the "paradox" only exists when one forgets that things like cost-benefit analysis also exist.
Yes, algorithm-driven doomerism is a problem. Yes, doomerism about algorithm-driven doomerism is part of that problem. Actually, I feel like traditional "professional", as opposed to social, media deserve just as much blame - I've no hard data on this, but I think people still trust the prestige and supposed fact-checking and editorial standards that names like NYT, or Atlantic, or what have you, signify, and the same names are just as happy bombarding them with "the world is about to end".
Is doomerism a problem that is not taken seriously enough? Eh, IDK. Maybe? But describing this doomerism as the one problem to focus on is also incorrect. A degree of prevention of doomerism would be good, that does not currently exist, but if we this as THE ultimate problem of humanity, solving it would require building a Stepford-type dystopia where no bad news can ever be published.
In fact, I think it's the same with Popper's tolerance paradox? Yes, a tolerant society requires a degree of intolerance towards intolerance. But if we take intolerance to be THE ultimate problem, we make the safety mechanism too sensitive - e.g. an unsubstantiated single accusation of intolerance becomes enough to trigger society's enforcement mechanisms, because we have taken intolerance to be THE ultimate problem and there is no such thing as an acceptable level of risk - then we have looped back around on ourselves and built an intolerant society, because it's now enough to tar anyone you do not agree with as "intolerant" to have them chewed up.
(I don't, for the record, think this "intolerant tolerance" is a real problem that really affects anyone in 2025, but what do I know, maybe my bubble is peculiar.)
When you refer to the "prior state ... of managed democracy," I don't know how far back you are going, but when I look at American history, things seldom worked better than they do now. We've had slavery, a civil war, segregation, industrial strikes and semi-war between capitalists and workers. In the 1970s, political violence far exceeded what we have today. 30 years ago, poverty and crime were much higher than they are now, and life expectancy was lower. I'd say that our democracy has seldom been managed at all, let alone managed well. Democracy is chaotic, messy, and unpredictable, but better than the alternatives.
Do we even all (+- the lizardman percentage) agree on what it means to compare two time periods? I don't think we even have broad agreement on an ordering for most criteria... Even if we could decide what the right criteria to compare are. Which I don't think we can, broadly.
There are plenty of reasons in every society to be a doomer and constantly worrying. It would "make sense" for a hunter gatherer to constantly worry, to a debilitating degree, about getting eaten by a lion, getting an infection and dying, dying in childbirth, accidentally eating something poisonous. The majority of the world believes they might be tortured for eternity after they die, yet they're not worried about that to a debilitating degree. It's a psychological thing, where healthier minds (and trust me, I've had an unhealthy mind - sertraline fixed that) simply are not "doomers" to the point of hating their life, even if there's ample reason to be one
A point where you risk straw-manning the bloomers: It’s easy to put the words into their mouths
“We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us.
…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us.”
but I think both their text and history better support
“…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an extremely precedented crisis that risks destroying us.”
At least not on the TC point, there has to be a way of criticizing excessive negativity without being dismissed as a hypocrite. If you mostly post positively and every so often tell ppl to stop being so negative, seems fine?
A milder anti doomer (is that the same as bloomer) version of scotts concluding own view is that of the list of crises, doomerism isnt worse than you could possibly imagine, its just the worst on the list and warrants most of our energy to reduce. Its not usually the worst on the list, but sometimes it has been. When its not worst on the list, society gets to spend its energy fixing or improving something more fundamental as we got to do for most of the 20th century which is why we got so many improvements. Itd be great to get the doomerism out of the way so we could go on fixing fundamental issues again. Yay future
Comparing "doomerism" to other crises is missing the point.
Doomerism is a metacrisis that matters mostly because it reduces our collective ability to deal with all the other crises. So to the extent that doomerism is a thing, it is a problem in direct proportion to the *sum* of all the other crises we have. It doesn't take much doomerism, applied to many crises, to be a bigger problem than any one crisis alone. And if you have enough doomerism to reduce your effective crisis-resolution capability by 50%, then doomerism is a bigger crisis than all your other crises combined.
If you don't have any other crises to deal with, "doomerism" is just being the Goth teenager who whines about existential despair while hanging out with their goth friends in their nice suburban house wearing the nice Hot Topic wardrobe and their Harvard tuition already socked away in the parental savings account.
I would have said that it isn't doomerism that is the main problem - manipulated rage is. The world is going downhill - unless you join my army. Your problems are unsolvable - unless you give me enough power to solve them for you. Many people give up on the anger, but then don't see another solution, and end up feeling despair.
The antidote to all this isn't "never feel concerned", it's "be cautiously optimistic."
And reduce your screen time - that stuff's bad for you.
I don't understand his overall argument, if he has one, but I can't trust a guy who makes a carveout exception for his own doomerist belief of choice, climate change, while supplying weakman examples of supposedly typical doomerist beliefs that other people have, which are meant to be disqualifying. For instance, Q-Anon and Patriarchy Theory. Like, what if there are doomerist beliefs with plausible validity, doomerist beliefs without plausible validity, and doomerist beliefs existing in a gray zone. That entire part of his arguments seems like an extended fallacy. Also, if we are to take the ubiquity of doomerist beliefs throughout history (the idea that the world is doomed) as evidence of its vacuity (the world has obviously chugged on), we must also assess whether the obverse view of bloomerism (optimism about the future) was also equally as ubiquitous. If it was, then all we can say is that in any given time there are a lot of people around, who will propound a whole variety of views, so that any given view is likely to be represented, and by assessing them in hindsight we are essentially committing the survivorship bias fallacy, rather than judging them on their actual merits.
I'm just glad to see you follow Pargin's work
Doomerism is the only crisis that causes people not to try to solve crises.
Doomerism can be viewed as a problem apart from other overhyped "crises" in that it is a meta-problem. If Doomerism becomes too embedded then it risks making a critical mass of people not even try to attempt to solve major problems.
So far most Doomers are performative though, just say it to sound smart. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down technology growth, which in the very long term will solve all the major problems (hopefully).
But there are a lot of problems that are far easier to solve via political means than technological means and I think we're already at that critical mass of enough people not even wanting to solve problems, so these problems aren't getting solved. For example the recent massacre in Sudan.
Interesting, I've always been a "doomer" more than a "boomer", it's kind of instinctive bias, except doomer is maybe too strong, as I tend to associate collapse more to a strong and rapid downward trend in well being for mosts (and especially myself ;-p) rather than an all-ending apocalypse. More a pessimist than an optimist...Optimism always kinds of annoy me, strange as it's supposed to be positive energy rising the morale of everyone....
But the
"We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us"
got me thinking: what if its not really optimism that annoy me, maybe it's more optimism / pessimism are just 2 type of moods are correlated with another trait and it's this correlated trait that really irk me?
I believe it's indeed the case, and optimism/pessimism is related to the primary way people try to solve problems: It's not that optimists works and solve it, while pessimists lament and do nothing. Again, that comes with the folktale definition of optimism and pessimism, and would not explain why I am (and I am not alone, many of my friends are too) annoyed by optimism.
My take is pessimists are mostly things/worker solver: they usually try to directly solve issues by themselves, doing concrete things and thinking about possible scenarios with cost/benefits analysis. Often very tech-minded.
Optimists are mostly person/persuader solver: they try to convince others to solve the issue, so their action is building persuasion campaigns (large scale or toward a single person), not concrete action and the cost/benefit analysis is very different: the cost/benefit of the others can not be factored the same as they are in fact tools. Often very socially-minded.
The match is not perfect, but the correlation is strong. And I realize I paint the second type of problem solving strategy in a very negative way. Yep, I do not like them (optimist-persuaders-people are tools people), so I am probably not fair ;-)
The post, and most of the comments, seem to approach Pargin's thesis as a call to broad societal action at the level of systems (new laws, markets, tech, or social norms) which can make matters significantly worse. (The laws/markets/tech/norms framing comes from Lawrence Lessig.)
I suspect it works best, instead, as a moral exhortation at a purely interpersonal level, benefiting only one's self and one's loved ones. A good companion piece to this article is Michael Valentine Smith's article on LessWrong, "Here's The Exit", in which he argues, sure, let's assume for the sake of argument you've identified a real problem: what are you doing to yourself psychologically? And is that even helping?
Pargin seems to have the same in-person interpersonal environment as I do, and this book is a way to approach the doomers in his life (and mine). I am not going to just *not* talk to them about it, because the environment will get ugly in our co-housings, makerspaces, bowling leagues, burning man theme camps, druid groves, and what-have-you.
In particular, it has especially demolished science fiction conventions.
Of course, this pattern can take hold even when addressing the pattern itself. It doesn't have to. Catastrophizing about catastrophizing, letting your entire life get consumed by a cult of preventing lives getting entirely consumed by cults, engaging in a holy war against holy wars. Instead you can notice that pattern and decide not to. That doesn't mean you need to give up the whole premise.
I gave a talk at LessOnline about how to avoid accidentally starting a cult, and followed it up at Fluidity Forum with a talk about the "comfort cocoon", the equal and opposite error of cultiness. That talk was kind of mostly against doomerism, because doomerism is symbiotic with the comfort cocoon. I set some guard rails at the opening by talking about this paradox.
I think my worldview is based around a kind of modified scare story but it's not doomerism.
Fact: Humanity has not yet wiped itself out or even screwed up so bad that we collectively as a species regressed to a state of being cavemen again.
Also fact: Mongol invasions, the Holocaust, the mass death of Amerindians from disease, and Dark Ages where societies *do* technologically regress to rural, subsistence farmers for centuries are all real things that have happened.
Takeaway: Extremely unimaginably awful things are possible. Our goal should be stopping them. We probably can.
Also, is this book making an argument against *doomerism* or an argument against *nihilism?*
"We are all going to die! We have to do something!"
And
"We are all going to die. What's even the point of trying?"
Are not the same argument. I haven't read this book, but Abbott seems to be making argument B and not argument A. Argument B is also the kind of doomerism I encounter more on the internet. Or rather, I encounter argument C which is Argument B LARPing as Argument A and it goes like this:
"We are all going to die! Somebody has to do something! (Except it won't be me. I'm going to rant on here instead and think about doom. I'm going to keep doing this no matter what changes in the real world)."
Doomerism insists that we focus on collective, global-scale catastrophes that exist well beyond our personal sphere of influence and outside of our first-person, lived experience. I haven't read the book yet (damn you, I'm probably going to read it now), but—based on the quotes you shared—it seems more focused on an individual-scale solution to personal poison than fighting against grand-scale consequences.
This feels like a distinction worth making to me, because it teases apart the apparent contradiction you've pointed to. There's a difference between "We all need to wake up to this horrible global-scale problem or we're gigafucked" and "If YOU notice this horrible global-scale problem then it empowers you, personally, to leech the poison out of your system and improve your own lived experience, simply by shifting your perspective."
So much of the worlds ails currently are a product of the grand feedback loop. We gained this new world-wide nervous system called the internet just a few short years ago and like a newborn fresh from the protective womb we didn't even know we were in, we're twitching and spasming at with the flood of sensory data washing over us the world over. Those spasms in turn create more noise which in turn freaks us out even more. Round and round it goes, wider and wider in the widening gyre, if you will.
It's hard for me to believe that the last few years at least, a lot of this isn't intentional. Don't want to go full conspiracy nut but the tech bros running the show these days seem to have a pretty obvious game plan.
"We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us.
…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us. You cannot possibly imagine how bad this one is, and we must treat it as an absolute emergency which requires us to uproot everything about our lives."
That's not necessarily a contradiction though. Sometimes new problems are just qualitively different from old ones, and require radically different responses. We look at the facts and say that things like climate change, warfare, and disease are big problems but not *existenail* ones, whereas doomerism seems to be some sort of weird worldwide emotional/psychological contagion that is growing in every country on earth, except maybe the most backwards 3rd world countries that don't have smart phone yet.
A rough analogy would be nuclear weapons. People emerged from the horrors of WW2 with so much death and suffering, and they looked at nukes and realized "this is even worse. We need to treat these differently. Even for our worst enemies, the ones who want to kill us, we need to be careful about using these things or it will destroy the Earth."
As a filthy fence-sitting centrist, my opinion is that some crises are real, some are not, some are worse than others, and the only way to tell which is which is by lookin'. No easy heuristic shortcut will be foolproof.
I kind of felt like the argument that "you're worrying about A, B and C but you should really be worried about your worry" and then saying "all you've really done is change it from A,B,C to A,B,C,D" is kind of like saying "A,B,C arguments are all made with words, D is made with words too therefore D is exacty the same as A,B,C" There are often bigger reasons for A,B,C and you should really deal with D to solve A,B,C
Perhaps an intellectually consistent way to approach this is not to dismiss non-doomer crises as things that will work themselves out on their own and we should just stop worrying about them - but to instead approach ALL crises, doomerist or otherwise, with the attitude that they are solvable, if we keep a positive outlook, looking for opportunities to help and to encourage each other?
Does media consumption really cause this? It's interesting, because I thought my family and friends are very sour because they think politics in my country is going against them and potentially very harmful. But I always assumed the winning side is more optimistic. I wonder if they also think the country is going to hell (for other reasons), because of media consumption, even when they're winning politically.
I keep a generally reliable maxim that "we create the things we fear the most" and try to catch myself overcorrecting for a perceived problem or danger.
I don't think that the problem of doomerism needs to be regarded as a crisis as much as needs to be acknowledged as a stray path with hilariously predictable consequences (a la Palantir CEO warning of a technocratic surveillance state.)
This idea that we elevated "Doomerism" to the one true apocalyptic idea seems like a false premise, and then the entire essay falls apart for me.
“… destroying everything that makes us human …” might have just reached to a new level, thanks to some current/potential uses of AI
The simple solution to this paradox is to believe in muddling through - yes, many crisis are bad, but we've always muddled through. Eventually. But it's fine to try to arrest bad events - if someone invented a time machine to kill Hitler, that's probably worth trying.
Scott remarked on the semi-official philosophy of the progress community, and since I am its semi-official philosopher, I thought I should comment.
I agree with the view expressed in the last paragraph. Problems exist; not all crises are fake. And the “crisis of doomerism” is real, but it's not so overwhelming that it should stand out as the only real crisis in the world.
I try to remind people that even though doomerism is wrong, technology does carry costs and risks, and problems always exist, and even doom is possible. Progress includes solving the problems of progress, not ignoring/denying them. There's a whole chapter or two on this in my book.
Re “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things” – I mean, this is sort of true? In the last 50–100 years or so, material progress has continued in most dimensions (with a few things getting worse, like obesity or the fentanyl crisis). At the same time, many social things have gotten worse, including a loss of agency and ambition and the creation of a vetocracy. (Other social things have gotten better, like more equal rights.)
At the same time, I tend to agree with @mbateman when he says (https://x.com/mbateman/status/1777903553413271599):
> One of my core beliefs is that There Was Never a Golden Age. … it is never the case that we simply have to get rid of some “recent craziness” and go back to the previous “sane” state. Seeming Golden Ages end because they aren’t actually all that golden. Their strengths weren’t sustainable. There were flaws and internal tensions that didn’t get resolved and that enabled various sorts of stagnation or decline or regress.
This is true even of the idea of progress. 19th-century optimism failed because it was naive: it didn't recognize the costs and risks of progress, and it thought that moral progress went hand in hand with technological progress—that was blown to bits by the World Wars.
So I also try to remind people that we can't be a progress movement by advocating a return to the past. The past was better only in certain isolated dimensions, not overall. We have to find a new synthesis and a new way forward.
If you consider yourself either a Bloomer or a Doomer, you are failing as a Bayesian.
I'm reminded of Popper's idea that we should tolerate everything except intolerance. It appears self contradictory or paradoxical,but it's not
There is no paradox, you're conflating "existential crisis" with "a problem".
The bloomer position is that we have a societal problem which is that a lot of people are being manipulated into believing we are experiencing immanent existential threat.
A bit of an NB, but also peripherality to the point:
Can analytical reasoning solve problems originating in analytical reasoning? Can you think your way in or out of a 'black box'?
When we think about a problem caused by human minds (reactions, thoughts, construction of political systems), can we see the problem clearly within the same construct that developed it?
Is there an actual increase in doomerism? I mean, I personally, anecdotally, seem to feel that there are more doomer vibes than in the 90s, or 2000s. But historically hasn't there always been some overlapping set of crises going on causing issues? I also remember worries about nuclear war, and ozone layers and such, as mentioned in the story. There were plenty of doomsday cults committing mass suicide. Is there any data on public sentiments that shows increased doom?
Perhaps others have said this, but isn't the problem with doomerism exactly that it's about setting the threshold(s) Scott discusses in the last paragraph? Seems to me like that _does_ make it different from the other birds in the flock of problems, because it's far more meta. One could come to conclusions like, 'because I don't believe in an afterlife, there is no amount of doom that will make me stop resisting the doom and therefore I should keep plugging away at the other problems from whence it emanates.' Or alternatively, 'because we are so doomed, I need to treat my life like the strand in the tapestry of samsara it is and disengage from it all--it is no good to fight most of this stuff.' That just doesn't seem the same as a question about the material externalities of climate change, or policing, or international sectarian/racial tensions and associated violence, or any of the other potential, 'we're cooked, folks' topics people bring up. Those discussions can all become about the problem at hand, whereas whether to struggle against them is kind of an existential question.
Thinking out loud for a minute.
It feels like there’s a way to frame this without judgment terms, and the judgment terms are the problem.
Maybe if the argument were
The most important thing is accuracy
Doomerism isn’t accurate
So you should discard it