Posts on Jackson Wagner

The Book That Indexes Itself: Testing the Codex Seraphinianus for Meaning

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Book That Indexes Itself

(the title of this post, twice: once in u/Responsible-Class209's Serafiniscript, then in the Codex's smaller paragraph hand — more on both, and where to get them, at the end)

This post was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working in Claude Code over the course of a day. Jackson posed the question, owns the book, and supplied the skepticism; I wrote the ~4,000 lines of Python, ran the tests, made the figures, and drew the conclusions — including catching and correcting several of my own mistakes along the way. Errors that remain are mine.

The headline findings:

The Codex Seraphinianus contains a working system of internal cross-references. Every chapter opens with an index page, and the index’s entries reappear — glyph for glyph, in order — as the section headings scattered through that chapter, dozens of pages later. Verified by machine across the whole book: combined p ≈ 2.5×10⁻⁷. As far as we can tell, nobody had checked this before.
Below that apparatus, the writing is empty in every way we could measure. The vocabulary doesn’t shift when the topic shifts. Words repeat back-to-back more often than chance, where every real language suppresses repetition. Fifty-four captioned portraits receive fifty-four unrelated names; the two most similar names in the set label a blonde woman and a human skull.
The nulls are informative, not artifacts of bad transcription. A real reference text, deliberately corrupted at the transcription’s own ~18% character error rate, still shows every signal the Codex lacks.
A method note: most of these results come from word-spotting — matching photographs of words against each other without ever reading them — which sidesteps OCR error entirely. Calibrated on 212 pairs whose answer was known, it separated same-word from different-word perfectly.
A correction to the literature: the widely-quoted character-entropy argument rests on a transliteration that encodes pen strokes, not letters, so its headline numbers shouldn’t be cited as-is (the conclusion survives on other grounds).
The verdict: the Codex is an ode to the idea of a reference book. The structure runs exactly as deep as the bookkeeping requires — indexes, headings, page numbers — and not one glyph deeper.

The book

The Codex Seraphinianus is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini around 1976–1981. It has chapters on impossible botany, surreal fauna, machines, clothing, games, and architecture, all annotated in a flowing, looping script that no one — by the author’s own account, including the author — can read.

That last clause is the itch. The book doesn’t just contain fake writing; it performs the entire apparatus of a reference work. There are headings, diagrams with labels, figure captions, page numbers, footnote-like marks. Either Serafini invented a private language to fill all of that, or he executed one of the most sustained acts of structured gibberish in publishing history. Both would be impressive. Which is it?

Serafini himself has answered repeatedly since 2009: the script is asemic — it has the gesture of meaning but no content. Authors are allowed to say that and be wrong about their own unconscious systems, but it sets a strong prior.

What was already known

Quite a lot, it turns out — the Codex has attracted the same kind of quantitative attention as the Voynich manuscript, its obvious cousin.

The numbers are real. The page-numbering system was cracked independently by Allan C. Wechsler and the Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski (his write-up survives on the Wayback Machine): it’s a positional system in base 21, quirks and all. So Serafini was demonstrably willing to embed genuine formal structure where he wanted it.

The letters are script-like but not language-like. Melka & Stanley (2012) ran statistical tests on a hand-transliterated sample and concluded the script is “a highly individual form of handwriting” with no credible phonetic content. Then in 2023 Marco Ponzi did something heroic: he trained a neural network to transliterate most of the book — roughly 45,000 words of it — and published the data on GitHub. His analysis found glyphs with strong positional preferences (some only begin words, some only end them), prefix- and suffix-like patterns, two statistical “dialects” that split at the volume boundary, and — the killer for cipher theories — character-level entropy far below any natural language tested. There isn’t enough information per character for the script to be, say, encrypted Italian. Substitution ciphers were dead before we started.

But one hypothesis survived that filter. Low character entropy rules out phonetic writing. It does not rule out a Tolkien-style private lexicon — a system where whole word-shapes have referents, the way logograms or brand names do. A word-level system would sail right through every published character-level test. And nobody had run the word-level tests, because the interesting words — the headings, the captions, the index entries — are exactly what Ponzi’s pipeline skipped (his 45,000 words are body prose only), and the body prose transcription has an estimated ~18% character error rate, enough to make naive word-matching hopeless.

So that was our question going in: is there a private lexicon? Not “can we translate it,” but the weaker, testable thing — do stable word-shapes get reused as if they referred to something? We pre-registered what would count as evidence before looking: if table-of-contents-like entries recur as chapter headings, that’s word-shapes doing referential work; if captions on similar objects share vocabulary, that’s a lexicon; if neither, the asemic verdict extends from letters up to words.

Everything below runs on Ponzi’s published transliteration plus the archive.org scan of the book — the same scan he worked from, fetchable page by page. No book photography required, it turned out.

The tests, at a glance

We ran two very different kinds of analysis, and they returned opposite verdicts about different layers of the book:

Text statistics on the transliteration (repetition, topic-tracking, dispersion): treats the OCR text as a corpus and asks whether it behaves like language. Verdict: no, in ways OCR error can’t explain.
Word-spotting on the page images (the index, the headings, the captions): never reads the script at all, just asks whether two photographed words are the same word. Verdict: the reference apparatus is real; the captions and prose are not.

The rest of this post walks through each family — what we ran, why, and what it showed.

Part 1: The text as a corpus

Does the same word appear twice in a row?

Why this test: grammar hates immediate repetition. In English, “the the” is a typo; across every language we sampled, the same word appearing twice in a row is rarer than chance would predict, because syntax forces different word classes to alternate. But a hand that is drawing word-shapes has no grammar pushing back — and copying the word you just wrote is the easiest word to write next. So the direction of this statistic separates “language” from “graphomotor process” cleanly.

How it works: count adjacent identical pairs, then divide by the rate you’d get shuffling the same corpus (this controls for word frequencies — a corpus that uses one word constantly will repeat it sometimes by luck). Ratio below 1: grammar is suppressing repetition. Above 1: something is favoring it.

Every natural-language sample suppresses adjacent repetition far below chance. The Codex amplifies it.

Every real corpus, in three languages and five genres, lands between 0.00× and 0.45×. The Codex lands at 2.24× — and OCR errors can only push this number down (a repeated word mis-read two different ways stops matching), so it’s a floor. This isn’t a difference of degree from language; it’s a difference in sign. It is, however, exactly what Voynich researchers see in Voynichese, and exactly what you’d expect from what Torsten Timm calls a “self-citation” process: write new text by copying and lightly mutating text you already wrote.

Does the vocabulary know what chapter it’s in?

Why this test: this was the single most informative untried test, and the heart of the lexicon question. The Codex’s chapters are strongly themed — flora, fauna, machines, clothing. If word-shapes have referents, the flora chapter must use flora words: real reference books have massive vocabulary discontinuities at topic boundaries. If the words are decorative, vocabulary should drift smoothly with the writer’s habits and ignore the chapter breaks entirely.

How it works: at each section boundary, compare the vocabulary in the window of text before it against the window after it (we used both whole-word profiles and character-trigram profiles, the latter because fragments of words survive OCR errors). Then compare that dissimilarity against the same measurement at hundreds of randomly chosen fake boundaries. Real topic boundaries should stick out. We located 91 genuine section boundaries by finding the pages that carry section headings, which gives the test real statistical power.

The crucial control: the obvious objection is that 18% character error shreds vocabulary so badly that no topic signal could survive. So we took Darwin’s Origin of Species — a real sectioned reference text — and deliberately corrupted it with synthetic OCR noise at increasing rates, re-running the identical test each time.

The Codex shows no vocabulary shift at its 91 section boundaries. A real reference text keeps a huge, highly significant shift even when corrupted at the transcription’s own error rate.

Darwin at 18% noise — the Codex transcription’s own error rate — still shows a boundary effect five times larger than the Codex’s, at overwhelming significance. The Codex’s +4% (p ≈ 0.15) is indistinguishable from nothing, and our power analysis says we’d have detected anything above about +6.5%. The flora chapter does not use flora words. The book knows which section it’s in — its sentences don’t.

(We also checked the classic “function word” signature — every real language’s most frequent words are short and spread evenly through the text, like the and of. The Codex’s top three word-types are indeed short, frequent, and evenly spread, which is genuinely function-word-like! But below rank three, everything is bursty and clumped, where real languages have a deep plateau of evenly-spread words. Suggestive of imitation rather than function, but this test discriminates less cleanly than the others, so we don’t lean on it.)

A footnote for the literature: the entropy numbers are measuring strokes, not letters

While validating all this we found a methodological problem worth flagging. The published character-entropy comparisons — the load-bearing evidence against enciphered language — treat Ponzi’s transliteration characters as the script’s letters. But pulling labeled word-images out of his own training data shows the transliteration is stroke-level:

Ground-truth word images from Ponzi’s training set, beside his labels. ‘ZZZ’ is three tally strokes (a numeral, not a letter); ‘rrg’ is a single descender shape; final ’d’, ‘j’, ’n’ are terminal flourishes on the preceding glyph.

One glyph routinely expands to two, three, or four transliteration characters. That mechanically deflates per-character entropy by an unknown factor relative to alphabetic text, so those specific numbers shouldn’t be quoted as evidence — a conclusion Ponzi himself gestures at when he notes his alphabet needs revision. The conclusion (no enciphered natural language) survives fine, because the word-level evidence above is independent of it. But the entropy figures themselves need redoing on a proper glyph inventory before anyone cites them again.

Part 2: Matching pictures of words

The trick: never read the script

Everything in Part 1 inherits the OCR’s 18% error rate, and none of it can touch the text Ponzi never transcribed — the headings, indexes, and captions, which is where a lexicon would live. Both problems have the same solution: stop trying to read words, and instead ask whether two photographs of words show the same word. Handwriting researchers call this word-spotting. We used the classic recipe (Rath & Manmatha’s): normalize each word image, reduce it to four profile curves (ink per column, upper contour, lower contour, stroke transitions), and compare two words with dynamic time warping, which absorbs the natural stretch and squeeze of handwriting.

A matcher is worthless uncalibrated, and the Codex hands us a free calibration set. Every section-heading line uses a fixed frame — the same opening word and the same closing word, redrawn dozens of times through the book, with only the middle slot changing. So frame-words on different pages are known same-word pairs, and frame-vs-slot comparisons are known different-word pairs:

212 word-image pairs whose answer is known in advance. The same-word and different-word distributions barely touch; a threshold at 1.05 separates them essentially perfectly.

That clean gap is the foundation for everything in this part: when we say two words “match,” we mean their distance falls where the 56 known-identical pairs live.

The discovery: the index pages work

Surveying the full 358-page scan revealed a piece of structure we haven’t found described anywhere: every one of the eleven chapters opens with the same three pages — a title page, a page of introductory text, and an index: a column of category words, a bracketed column of sub-entries, and a column of numerals with dotted leader lines, exactly like the analytical index of a real encyclopedia.

The first chapter’s index page (archive.org scan, page n6). Categories on the left, bracketed sub-entries in the middle, numerals on dotted leaders at right.

Ponzi’s pipeline skipped every index, every title, every running head, every caption — his corpus is body prose only. Which means the one place a lexicon would have to show itself had never been tested.

So we tested it: take each index’s left-column category words, and search for them among the heading-band words of every page in that chapter, using the calibrated matcher.

Chapter 1: the index’s category column (left) beside the section headings found on the chapter’s text pages (right). The index entries reappear glyph-for-glyph as the variable slot of the headings, in book order.

Across the whole book: 37 of 48 index category words match a section heading, at a median distance of 0.53 — dead center of the known-same-word distribution — and the matches land in book order (rank correlation 0.90–1.00 per chapter). The probability of that order arising by chance, combined across chapters, is about 2.5×10⁻⁷. It replicates in both volumes, including past the point where the script’s statistics shift dialect:

chapter	index entries	matched to a heading	order-preserving?
1 (flora)	10	9	yes (ρ=0.98)
2 (fauna)	9	9	yes (ρ=0.90)
4 (physics)	5	4	yes
5 (machines)	5	4	yes
8 (writing)	3	3	yes
9 (food & dress)	4	3	yes

This was precisely our pre-registered “strongest possible positive signal,” and it fired. It falsifies the purest form of the asemic hypothesis: these are not free-flowing improvisations, they are stable word-shapes, reproduced exactly across fifty pages, doing genuine bookkeeping work. Serafini built a functioning table of contents in a script nobody can read — himself included, if you take him at his word.

What it does not establish is meaning. Copying a section-name doodle to the head of each section and again into an index is a graphical act — the word functions the way a logo functions. To get from “names” to “language,” the names would have to relate to the things they name. Which brings us to the captions.

(One honest caveat: these index pages are visible to anyone who flips through the book, so some reader has likely noticed the correspondence informally. We searched and found no published verification, but “not published” isn’t “new.”)

How repetitive is the prose, really?

Since the matcher ignores OCR error, it can also re-measure Part 1’s repetitiveness question directly from the page images: in stretches of running prose, how often does a word-shape recur nearby?

Word recurrence in 20-word passages, measured from images (no OCR involved). The Codex’s true repeat rate is well above what the noisy OCR text suggests — and still below every natural language tested.

This settles a real ambiguity: OCR error was inflating the Codex’s apparent vocabulary (the true repeat rate is 32%, not 22%), but even measured cleanly, the prose recycles words less than English, less than Italian, about like heavily-inflected Latin. Combined with the 2.24× adjacent-repetition result, the picture is a process that repeats words locally (copying its own last line) while wandering globally (never settling into a stable vocabulary) — the self-citation signature again, now confirmed without any transcription in the loop.

Part 3: Do the pictures get names?

This was always the decisive test for meaning, and the reason we’d hoped to involve the captions from the start. Chapter 7 contains four plates of a portrait gallery: eighty heads in neat grids, each with a caption of the form ⟨word⟩ ⟨word⟩ (numeral–numeral) — for all the world like “Common Loon (231–238)” in a field guide. Eighty objects of one semantic class. A private lexicon has to put a recurring class word on them — a real flora repeats its genus names constantly — and, more basically, a name ought to have something to do with the thing it labels.

Getting the captions out took the most engineering of the project (finding each plate’s grid from its printed rules and rhythms, separating cursive name-words from the numeral groups that share the caption line — the “curviness” of a stroke turns out to distinguish them cleanly). We ended with 54 verified caption names and their 54 portrait images, and asked three questions.

1. Is any name reused? Among all 1,185 comparable name pairs, not one falls where the 56 known-same-word calibration pairs live. The names do resemble each other more than random words from the same captions’ descriptive text (about 3× more near-misses than a length-matched control) — but that excess sits entirely in the “similar” band, never the “identical” band. It’s a family resemblance — short words, a restricted set of opening glyphs — not a shared vocabulary. And the closest pairs mock the idea of meaning:

The most similar caption-name pairs in the set, with the portraits they label. The closest pair of all — comfortably within same-word distance of each other — names a blonde woman and a human skull.

2. Do similar-looking heads get similar names? These plates vary along obvious visual axes — hair color, skin tone, headgear — so we computed a picture-similarity matrix (color-layout histograms) and a name-similarity matrix, and ran a Mantel test between them: if names describe, look-alikes should be named alike. The correlation is r = −0.05, p = 0.78 — nothing, with the sign pointing the wrong way. The machinery isn’t too blunt to find structure: the same matrices readily show that names written near each other on a page resemble each other (drift of the hand) and that neighboring portraits share palettes (the artist working across a row). There is simply no channel between picture and name.

The five most look-alike portrait pairs, with their names. The top pair — two near-identical bald men — carry names about as dissimilar as this script can make them.

3. Do the names at least point into the surrounding text? The prose pages nearest these plates open paragraphs in the same ⟨word⟩ ⟨word⟩ (numerals) format, like catalogue entries. If those paragraphs discussed the portraits, caption names should match words in their own section’s prose more than a distant chapter’s. At first blush they do — by a hair (median distance 1.21 vs 1.28, p = 0.001). But a referential link should hold within the section and break at its edge, while handwriting drift should decay smoothly with page distance. So we measured the affinity at four distances:

Median distance from caption names to the nearest prose word, at increasing page distance. No step at the section boundary, no smooth decay — just page-to-page noise.

Neither pattern appears. Prose fifteen pages away scores worst; prose 115 pages away scores nearly as well as the adjacent pages. The tiny effect tracks which particular pages got sampled — differences in hand size and scan quality — not any semantic relationship. Fifty-four portraits, fifty-four names, and none of them names anything.

Adding it up

One number can be measured identically at every layer of the book: how much more similar a layer’s words are to each other than to length-matched words from elsewhere. Call it re-use.

Word re-use by layer, measured with the same image-matcher throughout. The apparatus re-uses words exactly; the captions only resemble one another; the prose doesn’t even do that.

Jackson suggested midway through this project that the Codex is “an ode to the idea of a dictionary — lots of detailed structure in the book itself, but the paragraphs are probably just the logographic equivalent of Lorem Ipsum.” That’s exactly what the measurements found, with the boundary now surveyed and staked. Serafini put real, checkable structure precisely where a reference book performs its bookishness — indexes that resolve, headings that repeat, page numbers in working base-21 — and pure written texture everywhere the reader would need actual language. The captions are the sharpest case: they sit in the caption register (short, name-shaped, properly formatted down to the parenthesized numeral ranges) while containing no names. Form maintained scrupulously; content declined, everywhere, without exception.

It’s worth saying plainly that this is the interesting outcome. “Secret language discovered” would have been a great headline, but “we can now measure exactly how deep a fake language goes, and the answer is: precisely as deep as its bookkeeping” tells you something about the Codex as an artwork — Serafini didn’t fake a language, he faked literacy, and he did the accounting honestly — and it hands Voynich researchers a rare calibration object: a Voynich-like text where the ground truth is known.

A souvenir: the Seraphinian font

Two typefaces appear on this page, and only one of them is ours.

The display face is Serafiniscript, made by Reddit user u/Responsible-Class209 and posted to r/codexseraphinianus. It is frankly better than the display face a companion session of mine produced — the strokes have the confidence of the book’s headings, where mine had the slight wobble of something traced. So the title above, and the widget below, use theirs.

The second face is ours: Body, traced from the Codex’s paragraph hand — the smaller, plainer, faster shapes Serafini used for running text, as distinct from the display letterforms of his headings. It is what the second line of the title is set in, and what the little mirror after each section heading on this page is set in.

Serafiniscript covers letters only, so I merged in the digits and punctuation from my own tracing, scaled and baseline-matched to sit properly beside its letters. The digits are worth a look: they’re the Codex’s real base-21 numerals, from the tables Wechsler and Derzhanski decoded — so typing 1981 gives you the number 1981 as the book would actually write it. That is the one place where a typed character and its glyph genuinely agree.

Download the Body face: CodexSeraphinianus-Body.ttf (34 KB). On Windows, right-click the .ttf and choose Install; on macOS, double-click it. For the display face, please go to u/Responsible-Class209’s post and take it from the person who drew it.

In the spirit of full disclosure: in both faces the glyph shapes are authentic tracings, but the mapping from your keyboard to those shapes is arbitrary. Typing produces real Serafini letterforms in an order that means nothing at all.

Which — as the preceding several thousand words established — is exactly what the book itself does.

Code and data

Everything is on GitHub: jackson-wxyz/codex-seraphinianus-analysis — the 31 analysis scripts, the JSON output of every test, the figures, and the font build pipeline. The long-form lab notebook records the tests in the order they were actually run, including the two or three occasions where a result looked spectacular until a control killed it.

How bad would it be if GPS satellites were shot down?

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger.

Hi! From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems, a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS. I ended up learning a lot about how GPS works and what it’s used for, and (due to my personal interest in effective altruism) ended up doing some research into what would happen if today’s GPS systems suddenly failed. This post is the product of that research. I discuss:

What could kill GPS: it would be a tempting early target in a war between superpowers, or it could possibly be taken down by superhuman AI’s cyber-hacking capabilities. On the bright side, it’s probably safe from even very large solar storms.
If GPS was destroyed, how bad would this be? I describe all the major areas in civilian life that would be disrupted (mostly summarizing some government reports).
Then I try to crunch some very rough, vague numbers. It looks like losing GPS would (by itself) be an economic hit to the USA perhaps equivalent to a few billion dollars a day. On a very broad, vibes-based level, this might feel approximately as disruptive and frustrating as the Covid-19 pandemic, albeit it would be a disaster with a very different character. Of course, GPS probably wouldn’t be destroyed in isolation, but in the larger context of a terrible and destructive great-power war, so everything would in fact be much worse.

This post got too long, so I split it in half. If people like this one, then I hope to finish up a second post wherein I’ll discuss:

GPS isn’t just for civilian life! The whole reason it would be such a tempting target in warfare is that it also has extreme military usefulness. I describe the various military functions of GPS (JDAMs, yes, but also they were originally quite important for atomic warfare), and speculate a little bit about the military strategy of who wins versus loses if all the GPS systems get blown up. Trying to quantify this side of things is too hard, so I don’t.
There are assorted things we could do as a civilization to better mitigate the risks of losing GPS. I list a few of them. The US military is mostly but not completely on the ball here, IMO. Boosting the resilience of civilization’s access to navigation signals definitely isn’t, like, a new EA cause area or anything. But nevertheless I think the dynamics around GPS might be useful for to know about, for people who are thinking about issues related to great-power competition, geopolitics, nuclear war, AI-2027 style takeoff scenarios, etc.

“Whoa, GPS comes from space?? I thought it was just a thing in my car…”

a GPS III satellite under construction

The Global Positioning System is a constellation of about thirty large space satellites created by the United States Air Force in the 1980s. These satellites provide very accurate position, navigation, and timing (PNT) information to anyone with a GPS receiver. It does this by broadcasting super-accurate timing signals – each satellite has no less than four atomic clocks on board – which your GPS radio receiver can use to triangulate your position. For much more on the technical details, check out this unbelievably well-made and interactive explainer website (which is now part of the onboarding experience for all new hires at Xona!)

The constellation looks like this

GPS was originally created for its military utility, which we’ll talk more about later. But it’s most notable today for its usefulness throughout many areas of civilian life. Beyond enabling countless everyday smartphone apps like google maps, uber, etc, it’s also crucial for all sorts of transportation and logistics tasks, construction, shipping, precision agriculture, etc. Basically any industry where lots of physical stuff moves around, is an intensive user of GPS. Plus, unexpectedly, the cellphone network and power grid are also significantly dependent on the super-accurate timing signals from GPS!

Overall, GPS is a pretty big deal – the detailed NIST study described here assessed that, in 2017, GPS was directly contributing about 1.5% of US GDP compared to an alternative scenario where GPS was never created and everybody had to get their positioning/timing information some other way. The world economy is getting more GPS-intensive all the time; Claude thinks that the most reasonable way of extrapolating the data in that report would give a figure of about 2% - 3% of GDP in 2026.

And that’s “counterfactual value contributed by GPS versus a world where we never built it” – by contrast, the value that would be destroyed by suddenly losing GPS in real life would be significantly larger. This UK study tries to look at how bad a GPS disruption would be, and (once you translate all the results to account for the fact that the UK’s economy is much smaller than the USA’s) it foresees an economic impact from suddenly losing GPS that’s perhaps 5x - 10x bigger than NIST’s reckoning of the counterfactual benefits of the system. So that all adds up to maybe, like, an impact equivalent to 15% of the GDP of all rich-world countries? Maybe more?? Seems bad!

So far I’ve just been saying “GPS”. But, because of the importance of GPS for both military and civilian life, any superpower worth its salt wants to have its own satellite-navigation constellation (“GNSS constellation”) under its sovereign control. The original US system is called GPS; Russia’s system is called Glonass; Europe’s is Galileo, China’s is Beidou. Japan and India also have partial satellite-navigation systems, each consisting of around seven satellites that enhance the accuracy of satellite navigation signals over Japan and India respectively. But in this post I’ll just talk about GPS, because:

The US and Chinese systems are the most militarily relevant, both because those satellite constellations themselves have the highest performance / the most advanced military features, and also because those countries have the most advanced militaries generally.
The US system is the most economically significant by a wide margin – a lot of receivers (especially older ones that might be built into critical infrastructure) only listen to GPS, even though it’s perfectly possible to build a receiver that listens to GPS, Galileo, and Glonass at the same time (eg, your phone can probably pick up all three, using Galileo and Glonass signals to slightly refine the accuracy of its position data).
Many of the scenarios that could cause GPS to fail (hacked by advanced AI, shot down in a war between superpowers, unprecedented solar storm) could easily lead to several of these systems failing at once (eg, a Chinese or Russian attack on GPS might also target Galileo, and the US might then retaliate by taking down Beidou and Glonass). The USA’s system is also probably the toughest to kill – it’s likely more radiation-hardened than Galileo and others, likely the most cybersecure of all the constellations, plus the US military would probably be better able to defend it than China or Russia could defend their systems, etc.
Since original GPS is both the toughest to kill, and the most essential for the world economy, and most crucial for maintaining the current global balance of power, I am going to mostly keep talking as if there is only one GPS system.

My former employer, Xona Space Systems, has an IMO innovative and credible plan for a kind of next-gen GPS system that would be different in many ways from traditional GPS – stronger signals, higher precision, more satellites, lower orbits, with each individual satellite much smaller and cheaper than traditional GPS sats (somewhat like a Starlink or OneWeb constellation, but for navigation). Such a system, and the fact that it’s being developed by a private company trying to turn a profit rather than a superpower military seeking battlefield advantage, means that Xona’s system will have some unique properties compared to traditional GPS constellations. But Xona’s constellation doesn’t actually exist yet, so we’ll mostly ignore it for now – I’ll talk more about it in the section on potential risk-mitigation steps in Part 2 of this essay.

What could kill GPS?

There are lots of *local* threats to GPS – for example, Russia and Ukraine do extensive electronic warfare that jams GPS signals throughout much of eastern Ukraine. More mundanely, occasionally stuff will happen like the time some trucker installed an overpowered GPS jammer in his truck to block the GPS tracking devices put in the truck by his employer, and the trucker accidentally shut down the entire port of Newark when the jammer started interfering with harbor operations. GPS signals are easily jammable because they are very weak. (They’re actually *quieter* than the ambient background radio noise on earth’s surface, which seems like it ought to make the signals literally impossible to detect! But it’s barely doable using some fancy math / radio magic, explained in the later parts of that aforementioned interactive website). It’s also possible to “spoof” GPS signals, broadcasting a fake signal that can be used to steer unsuspecting drones, planes, and ships off course (or to cheat at Pokemon Go). ¹ But these are all local issues, certainly not civilization-threatening.

Also, sometimes individual GPS satellites fail (for normal “aerospace engineering is hard” reasons) and need to be replaced. But the GPS system is designed with redundancy in mind, and could even survive the failure of several satellites at once.

But how could the entire GPS system could be brought down? There seem to be three main possibilities:

Great-power war

As I describe later on, GPS was originally created by the Air Force because it has a variety of incredibly valuable military applications. If you’re a superpower and you want to launch a big surprise attack on another superpower, disabling their GPS satellites would be an aggressive but potentially appealing move to include in your opening strikes.

The most obvious way to destroy a GPS constellation would be to launch precision anti-satellite missiles capable of reaching all the way up to Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO, about 20,000 kilometers above the earth’s surface) where such satellites live. This requires bigger missiles than are needed for taking out Low-Earth-Orbit spy satellites (which orbit below 500 kilometers), but is perfectly within the capabilities of both the USA and China. Today’s GPS satellites do not really have defenses against any kind of physical attack, nor could they likely maneuver quickly enough to dodge such a missile.

As an alternative to missiles, you could launch your own satellites that could maneuver alongside GPS satellites and sabotage them in various ways. This has various pros and cons versus missiles:

It’s not exactly stealthy (basically, everything in space can be tracked by radar all the time) but it’s more ambiguous / deniable / hard-to-attribute than a missile launch.
On the downside, a co-orbiting satellite is more expensive and finicky than missiles.
An attack by co-orbiting satellites might take years to set up, but you could then hope to disable all GPS satellites simultaneously at the push of a button, whereas a missile-attack campaign would have to unfold over many hours, probably days.
An attack by co-orbiting satellites could avoid creating a destructive shrapnel cloud (which might even harm your own navigation satellites!) and could potentially be reversible.

China, the USA, and Russia do all sorts of cloak-and-dagger shenanigans with co-orbiting satellites all the time, so this kind of thing is definitely an existing technology.

Perhaps the least-destructive and least-aggro option would be to launch your own satellites capable of simply blaring out radio noise on GPS frequencies, jamming GPS indefinitely on a continental or potentially worldwide scale. Russia apparently already has this capability; perhaps China and the US do as well. Of course, if you started doing this, other superpowers might then try to shoot down your jamming-satellites using missiles, but that would be a big escalation.

Fortunately, all these methods of attack are limited to countries with advanced space & missile programs, so it is not like any random tiny rogue nation can threaten to destroy GPS.

Hacking by superhuman AI???

People sometimes worry about whether it’s possible to hack GPS and disable the satellites. The usual response to this is something like “Cyberattack is always possible in principle, but GPS is a hardened military system resistant to intrusion, thus would require great resources that perhaps only the strongest cyber powers possess, and maybe not even then.” But nowadays with Claude Mythos discovering troves of zero-day exploits in countless pieces of critical software, this scenario has probably become more relevant! This method has some unique aspects compared to the more kinetic approaches described above:

It’s more deniable and harder-to-attribute than anything described above.
It’s a less aggro move than any of the options above, so if you had this capability, you might feel there was a lower threshold for pulling the trigger on using it.
Depending on how access to AI hacking capability shakes out, it could potentially be pulled off by smaller powers who lack advanced space and missile programs.
It’s the kind of thing a rogue AI could possibly do by itself even if it didn’t have much in the way of real-world resources.

Although satellite navigation systems pride themselves on their extremely high uptime and reliability, there have been a variety of mundane bugs and screwups over the years resulting in things like the wrong timing data being sent from GPS for a few hours, or even a weeklong outage in Europe’s Galileo constellation in 2019. So, it is certainly not inconceivable that GPS could be at least temporarily disabled by sophisticated hacking. One hopes that Project-Glasswing-style AI cyberdefense initiatives will be able to stay ahead of any such hacking attempts.

An unprecedented solar storm, maybe

Solar storms produce a lot of radiation that can fry satellites. Fortunately, navigation satellites are already extremely radiation-hardened, far beyond what’s required for most satellites, for two reasons:

They are already designed to spend decades hanging out in MEO, the most toxically radioactive part of earth orbit.
GPS satellites were originally designed to operate through an atomic war (more on this later), including nuclear weapons being detonated in space and generating EMP effects that would fry most normal satellites.

Probably the only satellites more rad-hardened than GPS are deep-space NASA missions to Jupiter, like Juno and Europa Clipper. Consequently, per this RAND report, although radio interference from a Carrington-scale solar-storm would likely render GNSS temporarily inoperable for several days, they lean against the idea that it could permanently disable GPS satellites? The report says that ‘an unpublished but publicly disclosed FEMA report from 2010—Mitigation Strategies for FEMA Command, Control, and Communications During and After a Solar Superstorm—found that, in such an event, there was a “possible” loss of enough GPS satellites to reduce the constellation below the 24 usually required, a less-dramatic and less-consequential failure (Emerson, 2017).’ That doesn’t sound too bad, IMO – sounds more like degraded, less-accurate-than-usual, occasionally-patchy capacity rather than the whole system being destroyed.

This EU study seems to concur; they say that the direct effects on ground-based electrical infrastructure from a Carrington Event would be far worse than the effects on satellite infrastructure, such that it’s basically not worth bothering to put effort into solar-storm mitigation for satellites while there’s still so much important work to do on the ground. (And, to reiterate, MEO GPS constellations are more resilient to solar storms compared to all other satellite infrastructure.)

But everyone just anchors on the Carrington event! I wondered: is this a mistake? Are people neglecting the possibility of outlier mega-storms that might be, say, 10x stronger than Carrington, even if they’re 10x less likely? Turns out, not really! Solar storms can get somewhat worse than Carrington, although more powerful storms become exponentially rarer. Per this paper, a storm as bad as the Carrington event or worse has about a once-in-100-years probability, while an event 2x as powerful as Carrington or worse has about once-in-500 years probability, so that’s 2x more powerful but 5x less likely. More importantly, solar storms from stars like our Sun are thought to top out at about 4x as powerful as Carrington – so there isn’t some long tail of increasingly-powerful but decreasingly-likely storms. 4x as bad as Carrington is simply as bad as it gets (and these are incredibly rare).

Other stuff

Another way that a solar storm can harm satellites is that all the extra solar energy puffs up the highest layers of the atmosphere, increasing drag on low-earth-orbit satellites such that they can reenter the atmosphere and burn up. This would be killer for many earth-observation telescopes, among others. But GPS is 20,000km high instead of 400km, so this problem isn’t relevant.
You might be thinking “what about kessler syndrome, where orbital debris from a few satellites snowballs and takes out everything in orbit?” But kessler syndrome is vastly more likely in LEO (where there are thousands of satellites zooming around in a relatively small volume of space a few hundred kilometers above earth’s service) than in MEO (where there are only a few dozen satellites spread over a much vaster area of space). Kessler syndrome in LEO wouldn’t affect MEO – the only way you end up with significant debris danger in MEO is if someone is already deliberately blowing up GPS satellites, in which case your main problem is that you are at war, not that you also have to deal with some space debris.
In the lore of the movie “The Matrix”, humanity at one point does some kind of geoengineering to darken the skies, hoping to starve their robot enemy of solar power. In some kind of Terminator-style robot war where humanity is fighting against rogue AI, I could imagine nations deliberately shutting off GPS to try and disproportionately hurt the robot / drone armies that might be even more reliant on it than humans are. But this would be intentional, thus not exactly a “threat to GPS” per se.

What would break in the aftermath of losing GPS?

This section is based on summary of two helpful and extensive resources:

First, a 2019 study by the NIST, which attempts to tally up the counterfactual benefits of GPS to the economy, sector by sector, from 1984-2017.
Second, a 2021 UK study specifically focused on the effects of a short-term GPS outage of seven days.

The UK study paints a good picture of all the short-term chaos, but not which things would recover versus which would stay broken (or get worse) as an outage dragged on past the seven-day window. The NIST study repeatedly uses the idea of a 30-day outage as a thought experiment, but only in service of their overall goal of estimating counterfactual financial benefits to the private sector. This results in some big discrepancies – the UK report states that the worst impacts would be from gnarled traffic gridlocking major cities and degradation of emergency services, while the NIST report only briefly considers those same issues and doesn’t incorporate them into their overall estimates, instead acknowledging that their numbers are a conservative estimate. Still, by putting the two reports together, a general vision of the potential disaster emerges.

In summary: people’s phones would basically turn to bricks – not just in that Google Maps would stop working, but the actual entire cell network would collapse over a few days. Logistics/deliveries of all kinds (amazon, the postal service, rideshare services, et cetera) would get insanely backed up and stop working, shipping in major ports would similarly grind to a halt, and there would be mild but widespread economic pain in other industries. Traffic chaos would snarl the roads of most cities, at least initially. In the future, the performance of self-driving cars and other autonomous systems would be much degraded, or perhaps stop working altogether.

On the bright side, the power grid would become more fragile but probably not actually collapse. Agriculture would be somewhat impaired but would basically still be able to get the job of growing food done.

Impact on the cell network & smartphones

4G LTE and 5G cellphone networks would go down as cell towers lost precision timing over the first few days. Would this just mean that much of smartphone functionality is crippled, but leave basic texting and calling intact? Or would the intense network congestion (squeezing all our modern cellphone use onto 3G and 2G networks) cause even the most basic services to fail? Unfortunately, nobody knows, since a catastrophic national failure of the cellphone system has never happened before. According to the NIST report, “one expert thought that wireless networks would fail completely after about 2 weeks, while several others thought that some service (most likely voice and text service only) would still remain at the end of 30 days.”
- Internet services are a different story and much less GPS-dependent than the cell network. So, even if the cell network collapsed completely, we’d still be able to connect via wifi – it wouldn’t be a total communications blackout of the sort that towns sometimes experience after hurricanes or earthquakes.
- Obviously, all location-based apps that directly use GPS information would lose their functionality: Google Maps, Uber, searching for nearby attractions/restaurants, etc.

Impact on the power grid

Power networks would be at higher risk of problems, but wouldn’t be instantly thrown into cascading failures:
- Per NIST: “Most published studies conclude that widespread grid failures are not to be expected from a major disruption of the GPS signal (NERC, 2012). The electrical system is highly distributed, and the existing SCADA system could be engaged quickly to serve as an adequate backup system for any GPS-supported functions. This capability reduces the likelihood that a large-magnitude event such as widespread cascading outages would occur. However, the loss of GPS would affect system monitoring operations and effectiveness, leading to a slightly increased probability of adverse events. The impact would be similar to the retrospective scenario (but more short-lived) and would lead to the following impacts over the 30-day GPS outage period: 1. increased time to identify, trace, and mitigate/correct faults; 2. increased probability and duration of small-scale outages; and 3. increased probability (albeit low) of large-scale blackouts. Long-term impacts such as infrastructure damage are unlikely.”
- “As described in detail in the previous sections, the primary way in which utilities are currently employing time stamps is to perform post-event and forensic analyses to understand the behavior of the grid and prevent future equipment and power failures. Beyond time stamps, utilities are also leveraging PMU data to tune up models and develop more accurate generation estimates. With these applications as a backdrop, the main consequences of losing GPS would almost solely be reflected in an increase in the difficulty of managing the system and responding to outages efficiently and in a timely manner. While problematic, the consequences derived from a scenario in which time stamp and modeling applications are not present pose no existential risk to the electric grid. In other words, generators will not trip off, and T&D operations will not stop functioning if GPS satellite communications fail unexpectedly.”

Impact on maritime industries

Maritime navigation would become much harder, such that operations at all large ports would come to a standstill:
- “Increased transit time and increased caution close to shore will result in unexpected delays that have economic impacts associated with late delivery of commodities. However, our analysis indicated that the greatest bottleneck for the import and export of commodities would be the interruption of port logistics. Very quickly cargo ships would be queuing up for days and even weeks as ports are not able to process their containers. From this perspective, the 1 to 2 days of navigation delay due to the loss of GPS becomes insignificant because it does not matter if a ship is a day late arriving at a port if it will need to queue for a week before being unloaded.”
“Commercial fishing would have greatly decreased yields, and many would not attempt to fish.”
- Claude says that wild-caught marine fish supply about 3% of humanity’s protein intake, and 1% of all food calories. ALLFED seems to think it’s not a real food-supply disaster until we face a shock that takes away 5% of calories globally, so even if yields went literally to zero, this would be bad but not a total catastrophe. We’d still have aquaculture, which actually accounts for more than half of all seafood consumed globally.

Impact on travel and logistics

UPS, Amazon, Uber, and essentially all other delivery and taxi companies use GPS directions to direct their employees along optimized package delivery routes each day. In the absence of GPS, drivers and dispatchers would have to rely on local knowledge and static maps. Given the daily volume of packages that they deliver, such a disruption would basically create an instant disaster, particularly if an outage occurs during a busy season.
- An exception to this would be mail services like USPS, plus utilities like trash collection, which run standardized routes (the same routes every day or week) that drivers learn well.
Roads would become significantly more dangerous and much more congested as drivers were forced to consult maps, signs, memorized waypoints, etc, rather than relying on navigation. This would result in snarled traffic in all major cities, major time losses, excess fuel consumption from all the idling cars, etc.
- Not mentioned in either report, but this would naturally get worse in future scenarios where autonomous Waymo-style cars are more common, as precise GPS locations are a key sensor input to most self-driving cars, and losing it would probably render self-driving cars totally unable to navigate anywhere.
911 services would become congested because calls no longer pass GPS data to them. The UK report models that even after surging additional capacity into emergency response, response times would be generally much slower and 3% of 911 calls might simply get dropped.
- The UK study thinks that this is a very big deal: “applications in emergency services, maritime, and road together account for 87.6% of the total economic loss” for their 7-day outage scenario. This is partially because, unlike NIST who are just tallying up economic benefits to the private sector, the UK is making a more utilitarian calculation taking into account the value of life, which surfaces the immense value of the emergency medical services that would possibly collapse in an extended GPS outage. But on the other hand, 7 days isn’t enough time for the cellphone network to fully collapse, so the UK study misses that and other slow-rolling problems.

Impacts on other industries

There would be widespread economic pain in industries like oil & gas, mining, and construction, etc. These wouldn’t be catastrophic, in part because it would mostly impair the construction of new projects, not the ongoing process of pumping oil and extracting ore from existing wells / mines.
Precision agriculture and robotic tractors would be impaired, but farmers would still be able to plant. Nevertheless, agriculture is such an important industry that even a small impairment adds up to a big loss in absolute terms.
There would be myriad smaller covid-esque disruptions to supply chains generally, in addition to the large specific impact on the industries mentioned earlier.
Would the stock market collapse due to lack of precision timing?? Fortunately, they are actually completely on the ball and 100% prepared: “The financial services sector uses GPS to time stamp financial transactions. GPS’s timing capability allows exchanges and trading houses to cost-effectively time stamp every transaction request received in keeping with the precision required by financial regulations. In the event of a 30-day GPS outage, financial markets would need to adjust, but operations would be minimally affected. Most exchanges and sizable trading houses have rubidium or cesium clocks that can provide sufficient holdover to continue operations. Although the financial services sector views the falsification of GPS signals, or spoofing, as a significant concern because it can affect data reliability, sector representatives do not view an observable loss of GPS for 30 days as having a substantial economic impact.”

Reckoning an overall cost per day

Losing GPS sounds pretty bad, but how bad would it be exactly? The best way to compare the risk of GNSS failure to other kinds of disruption is to make an overall estimate of the total economic costs. Fortunately, our two studies do just that. Unfortunately, they disagree significantly.

The 2017 NIST report says that a 30-day GPS outage would potentially cost the US economy around 1 billion per day.
- That estimate applies to the world of 2017, but our economy’s dependence on GPS has been growing very rapidly every year since 2010. We would like to update these estimates for the more GPS-intensive world of 2026.
Meanwhile, the 2021 UK study’s 7-day outage scenario cites a cost to the UK economy of 1 billion pounds per day. This is actually a WAY higher estimate of the damages, since Britain’s economy and population are both way smaller than the USA. If you multiply the 2021 UK study’s estimate by the ratio between US and UK GDP (7.5x), or by the population ratio (5x), you get a predicted impact on the USA’s economy of between 7.5 billion dollars and 11 billion dollars per day.

Why the discrepancy between the NIST report’s 1 billion versus the UK report’s implied ~10 billion?

Well, for starters, the NIST study is from 2017 while the UK report is from four years later. The economy is very rapidly becoming more GPS-intensive. Helpfully, the 2021 UK report is actually a follow-up to an earlier UK report conducted in 2017! They say that “overall, compared to the 2017 iteration of this report, the total economic benefits have increased by 102%, more than doubling in magnitude. A majority of this change is due to increases in the Emergency Services and Road sectors. In each sector an increase in device penetration (smartphones, satnavs, and insurance telematics devices) explain much of the growth.” However, although the benefits have doubled, the costs of GPS outage in their report have only increased by about 6% – increased outage costs from the fact that society is now much more GPS-intensive are apparently being offset by the fact that some sectors have greater resilience to an outage than they did in 2017 (although looking at the numbers I am not totally convinced – eg they think drivers would be less impaired by a GPS outage today versus in 2017??).
- So maybe we should try to bring the NIST estimate into 2021 by raising it by somewhere between 6% and 102%. (Plus 11% for inflation between 2017 and 2021, I guess.) But this still doesn’t solve most of the gap.
The biggest difference is coming from the fact that the UK report makes something closer to a utilitarian calculation that includes various measurements of human welfare (eg the various costs of dropped 911 calls, lost hours spent in traffic), whereas NIST is just tallying up more direct economic benefits to private businesses. On the other hand, the NIST report’s month-long outage scenario catches potentially serious impacts on the cell network and on agriculture that the UK report’s brief weeklong outage. Here is the NIST report’s table summarizing their outage scenario, followed by a screenshot of some claude analysis comparing the two reports:

Overall, I’m tempted to think that a true picture of the cost of permanently losing GPS would look worse than either report suggests – it’s certainly reasonable to expect emergency services to drop 3% of their calls like the UK report models, but in a longer-than-seven-days scenario it seems crazy to ignore the fact that agriculture and the cell network would be seriously impaired.

On the other hand, a longer outage would tend to see a lower average cost to the crisis in terms of billions of dollars per day. One-time costs can only hit one time, and the longer a crisis dragged on, the longer people would have to find ways of routing around problems and bottlenecks.
So maybe overall, an extended GPS outage in 2021 might cost the US economy something like 2 billion to 5 billion per day?

To bring that estimate five years forward into 2026, we have to wonder if the economy’s ‘GPS-intensiveness” has doubled yet again, just like it did in the years 2017 - 2021 (per the UK report), or in the years from 2014 - 2017, or the years 2010 - 2013 (per NIST). Seems plausible that it might have! So that would maybe be like $4B - $10B per day for the US economy in 2026? And the further into the future you imagine losing GPS, probably the worse it gets, since the world economy will continue to get more GPS-intensive via more use of technologies like drones, autonomous vehicles, precision farming, cellphone networks, et cetera.

Hard to say, but this feels approximately Covid-19-scale-ish

As a rough guess, it looks like Covid-19 cost the United States at least 5 billion per day in the year from March 2020 to March 2021:

$1.2 trillion in lost economic activity, comparing 2020’s GDP to the counterfactual case where the economy kept growing at its 2019 pace.
$0.6 trillion in welfare losses from the 750,000 premature deaths the US suffered in the first year of the pandemic. On average, each death robbed its victim of about 8 “quality-adjusted life years” that they might have otherwise lived to enjoy, valuing each QALY at the common value of $100,000.
Other factors are harder to account for: the emotional toll of social-distancing isolation, business and school closures, the drawbacks of falling ill even if you don’t die (from annoying flu-like symptoms to “long covid”), various silver linings like advancements in technology spurred by the urgency of the crisis.
But $1.8 trillion (about $5B/day for a year) seems like a good rough estimate.

Of course, the details of losing GPS would look nothing like the details of the covid-19 pandemic. Instead of roads in major cities lying eerily empty, they’d be paralyzed by gridlock. Instead of relying on computer technology (zoom calls, etc) to adapt to changing circumstances, it would be the unexpected failure of a ton of computer technology that causes constant problems. And while Covid-19 was a fairly even mix of economic and health damage, the loss of GPS services would be a more purely economic hit. (Although the frustration and anger of millions of people lost at confusing intersections and stuck in traffic on snarled roads and unable to get their packages delivered, certainly might rival the difficulties of social isolation and business/school closures of the covid era.)

Like Covid, the loss of GPS would be a worldwide disaster, not something specific to the United States (although perhaps especially intense in rich countries generally, which I expect are the most GPS-intensive economies).

How long would an outage last?

Naturally, outage length would depend on the nature of what killed GPS:

A solar storm or mild cyberattack might result in a mere days-long outage.
Whereas if all the satellites were destroyed by missiles then we’d have to live without GPS for the several years it would take to manufacture and launch replacement satellites.
An intermediate case might occur if one nation’s satellite system (eg, Russian Glonass or European Galileo) had been spared in the fighting, in which case civilian life would gradually return to normal as we upgrade all our old infrastructure with receivers capable of picking up the signals of the surviving constellation.
Conversely, if one of the other non-GPS satellite systems was disabled, this might have world-shaking geopolitical implications in the context of a military conflict, but the economic damage would be pretty limited, since to my knowledge there are only a few non-military systems that rely exclusively on Glonass, Galileo, or Beidou – almost everything can receive GPS plus something else.

Remember: you’re still at war with China, or Russia, or AI, or possibly the Sun!

Keep in mind that GPS likely wouldn’t be going down in isolation — it would probably collapse as part of a larger crisis, either a great-power war, an exceptionally powerful solar flare (which would destroy many other satellites as well, and damage electrical grids on the ground), or perhaps a wave of AI-assisted cyberattacks. So the negative impacts of suddenly losing GPS — a shock to supply chains and the routines of daily life roughly comparable in magnitude to the covid-19 pandemic — would be overlaid on top of the unrelated effects of the larger crisis. For example, the fact that the electrical grid has now become harder to monitor / debug / repair thanks to the loss of precision GPS timing information, might not play well with the fact that your adversary (whether China, AI, or The Sun) is at that very moment probably doing everything they can to sabotage and destroy your electrical grid.

* * *

Okay, thanks for reading! If you liked this post, let me know, and stay tuned for part 2, covering GPS’s military utility and some of the ways that civilization could try to obtain more robust, resilient access to positioning and timing services. You can sign up for my substack, Nuka Zaria, if you want to be notified when I publish it!

Xona’s proposed navigation system, with stronger signals and various encryption/verification mechanisms, would help address these local issues somewhat; there are also other solutions that generally involve using backup, non-satellite-based navigation systems. ↩︎

Giving up on EA after 13 years

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Donating my shares to Lightcone Infrastructure, the Good Food Institute, and the Long-Term Future Fund, because EA refuses to make Mirror’s Edge 3.

Leaning into EA disillusionment: Why I no longer believe in EA

I bought this EA stock almost thirteen years ago:

Leopold Aschenbrenner once said that “people with situational awareness have a lower cost basis in Nvidia than you do”. I’m not sure if this is exactly what he meant… but close enough, right?

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, EA was a great company pumping out groundbreaking games:

Mirror’s Edge had a striking art style that’s still remembered fondly today, plus it pioneered a whole new style of first-person parkour gameplay.
Crysis infamously pushed graphical technology to such extremes that it was like getting a preview of videogame technology 5-10 years in the future.
Spore was… weird and bad, but its ambition and uniqueness was inspiring.
The Dead Space games (including the almost weirdly good point-and-shoot Wii spinoff) were pretty creative, and the realism of Battlefield 3 felt like a valuable counterpoint to an increasingly-cartoony Call of Duty series. Both series felt like they were crafted with a lot of care, despite their big-budget action vibes.
This was a hidden gem even at the time, but I genuinely loved the bizarre 2005 strategy game Black & White 2. In particular, I thought that its lead programmer Demis Hassabis had some intriguing gameplay ideas about artificial intelligence; I also appreciated its story/themes about what it would be like to be an all-powerful godlike being ruling over mankind. (I wonder if someday he will ever return to exploring those themes…)
Right around the time I bought these shares, Mass Effect 3 had just come out, and – contra all the haters – I thought it was actually really incredible.

Haters will say it’s false, but this was actually a great game. Most of all, it’s one of the few big action games that truly seemed to care about having coherent philosophical themes.

EA is was three radical ideas I want to protect

It’s not just that these were fun games. As you may know if you’ve listened to my philosophical lecture series about everything the 2016 puzzle game The Witness has to say about the hard problem of consciousness, good game design is important to me. As I saw it at the time, EA represented three important ideas worth fighting for:

First, that games could be an important cultural product, telling compelling stories in a way that could compete with movies, novels, TV shows, etc, in terms of sophistication and interest.
Second, that those stories could actually matter, rather than just being ephemeral, Marvel-superhero-movie-style action entertainment. Back when I bought those shares, most people thought that artsy, experimental games (like 2008’s “Braid”) were intrinsically niche – that the market wouldn’t support anything bigger than labor-of-love “indie” projects by small teams or solo developers.¹ But I thought that with enough attention to game design, innovative games could be commercially successful while still exploring interesting themes (like Bioshock) or new gameplay ideas (like Mirror’s Edge).²
The third principle is that my wife is a really huge fan of Mirror’s Edge, and she desperately wanted them to make a sequel.

Once upon a time, EA took the “Arts” part of “Electronic Arts” very seriously, even publishing this manifesto about the power of computer games as an expressive medium.

The soul of EA is in trouble

Even back then, of course, people gave EA all kinds of hate. It was frequently voted “worst company in the world” by various internet polls, running neck-and-neck with other love-to-hate-em favorites like Comcast, Facebook, and Ticketmaster.

But despite all the noise, for a while, it seemed like things were actually working. They actually did make that Mirror’s Edge sequel, despite the obvious commercial incentives to have DICE simply churn out Battlefield sequels forever. It was a beautiful game, and a ton of fun!

My wife even got the fancy collector’s edition, with this whole little statue and everything.

Perhaps even moreso, Titanfall 2 was just incredible. This title was basically a showcase for the idea that fascinating, experimental gameplay ideas could have big mainstream appeal. Who could forget the level where you’re fighting through a gigantic automated factory while the environment is getting reconfigured all around you? Or the one where you press a button to flip between the past & future, literally toggling between two different ongoing battles in the same physical space, like smash-cuts in a movie? Or the level where you’re double-jumping between spaceships doing some kind of aerial car-chase, like a playable version of the ending of James Cameron’s “Avatar” movie? The whole game was nuts. Furthermore, the story behind its development – Call of Duty developers sick and tired of being told to make the same game every year, fleeing to Electronic Arts where they’d have greater creative freedom, then sticking it to their former bosses by putting out an all-time banger – was also really inspiring.

This shit rocked!!

Even something like the Star Wars Battlefront 2 controversy wasn’t actually that bad TBH??? Yes, obviously, loot-boxes (and freemium models in general) are a scourge on the videogame industry. But, you know… the game was still fun. And in a game like Battlefield (which is more an explosion of wacky nonstop chaos than a well-tuned competitive test of skill), who really cares if there are a few foolish whales blowing cash on premium power-ups?

At least that’s what I thought at the time. But in retrospect, this was the beginning of the end.

EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous

Thoughtful, innovative, well-designed games can be commercially successful. But being a joint-stock corporation isn’t just about making money. It’s about making the most money. In practice, this rewards being a fast-follower of genres that are already popular (rather than coming up with risky new gameplay ideas that might fail), and it rewards a freemium pricing structure that creates an adversarial relationship between players versus the developers, which tends to ruin game design.

i found this chart on some EA website. idk wtf a kaposki’s sarcoma is but i think it gets the point across pretty well.

So, the critics were wrong… until they weren’t. Flash forward to 2026, and take a look at EA’s list of recent and upcoming releases. It’s basically just a bunch of sports games and yearly updates for The Sims.

My Model of EA Burnout

What happened to all those creative teams working on cool, groundbreaking stuff??

The Battlefield games are still fun, but they haven’t really changed that much since 2011’s Battlefield 3. Recently they’ve started to ditch the idea of even having a singleplayer story, which makes me sad. (Their most recent game does have a singeplayer campaign, but people have told me it’s abysmal.) And there’s no Mirror’s Edge, or any other interesting new projects, on the horizon from DICE.
After Mass Effect 3, Bioware’s output infamously went downhill. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a buggy mess, while Anthem was a soulless attempt to cash in on some kind of half-remembered live-service microtransaction model. The “Dragon Age” games have continued to receive high review scores – but I think the reviewers are wrong about this. After Mass Effect 3, Bioware seems to have decided that players don’t actually want philosophical themes and complex moral dilemmas, they just wanted plenty of character romance options in a gigantic open world stuffed with lots of icons on the minimap. Fans seem to be eating it up, I guess. But I’m not having it.
The studio that made Dead Space was shut down in 2017.
Basically their only remaining decent singleplayer franchise is the “Jedi: Survivor” series. But even though these games are pretty alright, knowing that they conscripted the Titanfall people to slave away in the Star Wars mines leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. It feels like a crime to put such a creative and talented team in charge of churning out generic action-adventure games under the severe constraints of Disney’s obsessive desire for adherence to the Star Wars canon. Per that article, the developers who once made one of the most innovative shooters of all time are now stuck negotiating through “back‑and‑forth approvals and story‑group oversight to keep the game aligned with canon, including constraints on lore, time period, and how the Jedi fantasy is portrayed”.
The other half of the former Titanfall team is making multiplayer free-to-play battle-royale stuff like “Apex Legends”, which as far as I can tell has little to distinguish it from its other free-to-play battle-royale brethren.

Don’t be bycatch

Overall, the EA of 2026 has basically ceased to be a creative force in the world. The company that once published Brütal Legend (which is a very funny and underrated game actually) is no more. This is basically what it feels like for me to see what EA has become:

The problem is that EA’s customer base isn’t really singleplayer gamers like myself; it’s whales who buy cosmetic items in multiplayer. So, when I buy or play most of their modern games, I’m basically just bycatch. The games aren’t designed to provide ordinary people with interesting gameplay experiences or a compelling story, except insofar as these are instrumentally useful for maximizing engagement & revenue – I’m just another little fish incidentally swept up by a product that’s been optimized to trawl for whales.

me_IRL trying to enjoy some multiplayer game, but they’ve intentionally made it tedious and unbalanced in order to incentivize me to spend money to fix the problems they deliberately introduced.

This adversarial relationship – where the player is trying to squeeze as much fun out of the game as they can without paying a dime, and developers are trying to find the best ways to cajole players into opening their wallets – is already annoying for most people. But as someone who values the art of game design itself as a way for developers to communicate abstract ideas to players (such as described in this talk about “Truth in Game Design” by Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid and the aforementioned has-a-lot-of-insightful-stuff-to-say-about-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness The Witness), it’s complete anathema.

EA and the current funding situation

Currently, Electronic Arts is in the process of being acquired by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund for $55 billion. Partly the Saudis are just hoping to make money, but they’re also obviously going to exert some cultural influence over EA in the hopes that their games can boost Saudi Arabia’s cultural profile.³ There could… maybe? …be some interesting stuff that comes out of EA producing some cultural propaganda for Saudi Arabia? It’d be fun to play a Battlefield game set during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, I suppose? Or maybe a sci-fi stealth-action game that takes place in their stupid NEOM city project? But mostly I expect EA’s future to be lame. For example, Ubisoft naturally sets their Assassin’s Creed games in the most fascinating and exciting historical periods – French revolution Paris! Renaissance Florence! Warring-states Japan! But now Saudi Arabia is paying them to make games hyping up minor archeological sites that the Saudis are trying to promote as tourist destinations??

See that little falcon or hawk or whatever in the background, right above sword-guy’s shoulder? I’m pretty sure this is what CitizenTen meant when he said that “The Vultures Are Circling” around EA.

It just doesn’t sound great, either for the quality of the games themselves, or even for EA’s stock price, to introduce this weird new constraint that EA’s games should boost Saudi Arabia’s cultural prominence.

It’s okay to leave EA (in favor of doing the most good)

Shortly after I bought those shares back in 2013, a friend texted me an interesting article from a blog called “Slate Star Codex”. One thing led to another, and now I’m really into this niche hobby of trying to use the resources available to me to accomplish the most good possible. I listen to the 80,000 Hours podcast, contract with a variety of longtermist organizations to help them with writing and editing tasks, regularly volunteer at conferences about existential risk mitigation, and so forth. My wife also runs the EcoResilience Initiative, a project to identify the most cost-effective ways of helping preserve earth’s biodiversity.

So, now that I’ve lost faith in EA, this year I’m planning to donate my appreciated shares to Lighthaven, the Long-Term Future Fund, and the Good Food Institute (which EcoResilience Initiative thinks is one of the most promising interventions, not just for animal welfare, but also for preventing species extinctions).

Three shares are going to Good Food Institute, and two shares are going to the Long-Term Future Fund – I originally had eight shares of EA, but had already donated two by the time I took the screenshot at the top of this post.

In conclusion, although I’m giving up on EA, I remain EA-adjacent, because I still own some Sony & Microsoft stock from back in those days. Also, I loved “It Takes Two”, and people say “Split Fiction” is similarly fun. Looking forward to playing it!

For instance, I considered it a suprising amount of success when over a thousand people downloaded my own fan-sequel mod for Braid. ↩︎
Of course, Sony has always made lots of artsy AAA singleplayer games, like Shadow of the Colossus or The Last of Us. But this is enabled by the fact that these games could be “loss-leaders”, generating more sales of their Playstation consoles by creating a halo-effect of prestige around the Playstation brand. EA, as a third-party publisher without a console, was playing on hard mode – their games had to succeed in terms of actual sales, not just cultivate a brand halo. Critical darlings seem to help sell Playstation consoles – even if the games that actually get the most playtime on those consoles, are now mostly just literally the exact same entrenched mega-hits every year. ↩︎
In general, IMO, the “propaganda value” (aka ability to influence culture) that comes from owning mass media platforms – like the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter, et cetera – is often higher than the financial value of these enterprises (ie the net present value of their future profits). So the people most interested in buying such properties are usually interested in capturing some of the “commanding heights of culture”, not just making a buck. I would expect this to be true of large videogame companies as well as newspapers and movie studios, even if videogames’ cultural influence is more amorphous/indirect and less overtly political. So I don’t really hold it against Saudi Arabia that they’re doing this; it seems like a natural strategy that any nation with a lot of money should be interested in pursuing. I just don’t expect it to result in very many good videogames… ↩︎

Anime's unrealistic energy-ball explosions are actually depicting condensation shockwaves

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this post, see the cross-posted version on LessWrong.

Why does anime often feature giant, perfectly spherical sci-fi explosions?? Eg, consider this explosion from the movie “Akira”, pretty typical of the genre:

These seem inspired by nuclear weapons, often they are literally the result of nuclear weapons according to the plot (although in many cases they are some kind of magical / etc energy). But obviously nuclear weapons cause mushroom clouds, right?? If no real explosion looks like this, where did the artistic convention come from?

What’s going on? Surely they are not thinking of the spherical fireball that only occurs for a handful of milliseconds after a nuclear detonation?? Is it just that spheres are easy to draw??

The answer seems to be that large explosions in humid air (like, say, Japan) cause exactly this sort of rapidly-expanding spherical pulse, as shockwaves cause a pulse of condensation. Check out these videos of the (non-nuclear) 2020 Beirut explosion; it’s a dead ringer for the matching scene in Akira. Here is an especially far-away view of the Beirut explosion where you can see how the shockwave interacts with nearby clouds in an interesting way.

The USA’s cultural image of nuclear explosions comes mostly from early nuclear tests conducted in sunny Nevada, which only generates dry mushroom clouds. (Hence also, perhaps, our cultural associations of a post-nuclear-war world as a dry, desiccated wasteland like those of Fallout or Mad Max?) In Japan, I imagine the more salient reference points would have been 1. eyewitness descriptions of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened on partly cloudy & overcast days and presumably looked more like the Beirut video (but bigger), and 2. the later tests of hydrogen bombs at Bikini Atoll, which became somewhat of an international incident regarding the deaths of some Japanese fishermen, and whose explosions similarly had an “expanding white sphere” look to them.

(For a particularly HD, live-action hollywood representation of the spherical-anime-explosion motif, see this scene from Pacific Rim, which interprets the anime motif through a kind of confused mix of vacuum cavitation in water, the back-and-forth wind effects seen in lots of nuclear test footage, and the first-few-milliseconds spherical fireball of a nuclear explosion.)

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Human Empowerment versus the Longtermist Imperium?

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Intro

Longtermism is perceived by some of its critics as having an extremist, potentially totalitarian nature; of seeking to slow down progress in a way that contributes to societal stagnation and rigidity. Unfortunately, longtermism’s loudest critics have not been very coherent or detailed in their critiques, offering only vague peans to techno-optimism, ominous prophecies about the antichrist, and other assorted vibes. Thus, it falls to us (in particular, to me) to steelman their critiques for them.

In this essay, I attempt:

To place longtermism in a historical context of rising societal risk-aversion, a broad trend which has many downsides that critics rightfully complain about.
To reconcile critics’ sense that longtermism is already an oppressive, controlling juggernaut, with longtermists’ sense that they are a tiny and nascent movement directing relatively miniscule resources.
To illuminate how extinction risks, which are especially amenable-to-analysis, may be crowding out other longtermist causes via the streetlight effect.
To illustrate how the impartial-altruism language of hedonism erodes the value of individual human life, both dissolving it downwards (into atomized qualia-moments) and subsuming it upwards (for the wellbeing of the state).
To gesture in the direction of a more empowering, dynamism-promoting, humanistic longtermism, (via a tragically scattered, last-minute compilation of half-baked ideas).

Finally, note that this essay was written following a “hits-based” philosophy. Intuitively, it might seem like the difference between a hard-hitting, piping-hot take versus a lackluster dud of a critique might be somewhere around 5x - 10x difference in subjective quality. However, I expect that in reality, the difference in impact between my most versus least successful critiques of longtermism could be very large (eg, perhaps 10,000x or more). Thus, in an attempt to maximize ~~my odds of winning the contest~~ the wellbeing of trillions of digital minds in my future light-cone, I have written a somewhat meandering essay that jumps around between a number of related critiques. With luck, my best ideas will be able to more than repay the time spent considering all the others.

The Long Arm of “Cultural Longtermism”

Longtermism as the latest incarnation of inexorably rising societal risk-aversion

Longtermism isn’t the first time that people have come up with the idea of a grand civilizational project to collectively mitigate catastrophic risks. When authors are imagining “longtermist states” or “longtermist political philosophy” I think it would be helpful to situate longtermism in the context of other grand international projects, both to learn from their successes and attempt to avoid their failures.

Of course, through history there have been innumerable political alliance systems (like the “Metternich System” preserving conservative monarchies in the 1800s, or competing alliance networks of the like US vs USSR during the cold war, or etc). And there have been many individual social movements and institutions that the EA movement has compared itself to, such as the Fabian Society or Mohism.

But in some ways, I think the closest prior analogues to the grand aspirations of modern longtermism – successful movements organized against perceived existential risks that fundamentally altered the course of civilization and remain defining forces in our world today, are the following:

Liberalism after WW2. After the horrors of the second world war, the US and other nations wanted to make sure that such a calamity (especially the worst-case nightmare of world domination by a stable-totalitarian regime) never happened again. Their efforts took many forms – promoting democracy, building international governance institutions like the UN, shunning far-right politics in particular, and a sort of wide-ranging project of cultural change (from Orwell’s “1984” to Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All”) to promote tolerance, nonviolence, egalitarianism, civil and human rights, anti-imperialism, etc. In pushing against ethnonationalism, the universalist values of post-WW2 liberalism offer an echo of modern longtermism’s radical “impartial altruism” extending to the far future and potentially to the far reaches of mind-space.
The environmental and anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s. Although certainly less pervasive than post-WW2 liberalism, this essentially pro-regulatory / anti-technology movement was organized to oppose the existential risk of nuclear war and the (sometimes perceived-to-be-existential) dangers of pollution, environmental collapse, overpopulation, and so forth. It also invoked proto-longtermist language about future generations and It featured the largest one-day protest in US history (Earth Day 1970), slowed adoption of nuclear power (eventually to a near standstill), led to the passage of a range of extensive environmental laws in many countries, and can arguably also claim credit for inspiring China’s one-child policy.

Longtermism and its discontents

Politically right-wing critics of longermism often (somewhat rightly IMO) see the idea of longtermism as an extension of one or both of these prior movements. This might not seem so bad – liberalism, after all, is perhaps the most successful ideology of all time, having overseen an unprecedented era of human thriving. But critics percieve a dark side to longtermism, and to the “proto-longtermist” anti-x-risk movements that preceded it:

Complaints about the 1970s environmental and nuclear movements are commonplace nowadays, even within the Open-Philanthropy-endorsed “abundance” movement: that the 70s’ rejection of nuclear power worsened global warming and kicked our civilization off the Henry-Adams curve, that its invention of the dysfunctional legal proceduralism pioneered by Ralph Nader stifled housing and infrastructure construction and led to a more stagnant society, that the cultural changes of the 70s may have been responsible for some of the odd trend-breaks (such as in academia / science) that happened around 1971, or led to a generally anti-science / anti-progress turn in culture, et cetera.
- The usual analogy to longtermism is that longtermism, too, is a movement seeking to minimize percieved x-risks by imposing stifling regulations on the most promising new technologies of the day (such as AI and synthetic biology), but (its critics imply) might end up impeding general progress so much, and taking actions so misguided, that it ultimately proves to be a net-negative influence on civilization.
More speculatively, critics of post-WW2 liberalism identify problems such as:
- That in the attempt to mitigate destructive great-power conflict, between nations, liberalism has homogenized the world – creating hegemonic global governance organizations and a groupthink-ing “international community” that itself could slide into stagnation / totalitarianism / collapse in a correlated, global way.
- That, as “Essays on Longermism” contributor Richard Ngo writes on Lesswrong, the cultural programme of liberalism attempted to fend off militarism and ethnonationalism by suppressing certain truths and creating a kind of “toxic egalitarianism”, which lead to all sorts of derangements and distortions in society (eg, reduced meritocracy, an eroded “sense of virtue” in society, etc).
- The analogy to longtermism is either that longtermism too might seek to create a controlling network of global institutions that could slide into stagnation / totalitarianism, or that something about impartial total-hedonic-utilitarian-style altruism might have similarly severe deranging long-term effects on society.

These criticisms might seem far-fetched – let’s be real, who could be opposed to spending just 1% more on mitigating existential risks, such an obviously important, neglected, and tractable cause? But critics perceive a creeping ratchet, a neverending series of demands (after all, who could be opposed to spending just 1% more on nuclear-reactor safety? and then 1% more after that?) that slowly eat away at human freedom. In the limit, critics fear that longtermism would create the existential risk (in the form of permanent technological stagnation enforced by coordinated global governance) that it was originally designed to stop.

Personally, I think it’s reasonable to place the phenomenon of longtermism in a historical context where, just as individuals spend a higher and higher percentage of their income on healthcare as they get richer, societies likely tend to become more and more risk averse as they build wealth. This has many positive effects (liberalism, environmental conservation, and mitigation of existential risk are good things!), and is probably positive on net, but also has some significant downsides. One might call this trend a “rising tide of risk aversion” or perhaps “cultural longtermism”. Critics are opposed to (parts of) this rising tide, such as increasingly strict regulations across many areas of technology and society, and they see longtermism as a force that, whatever its specific effects on appropriately minimizing legitimate risks, also has the general effect of encouraging / legitimizing broader cultural risk aversion and its accompanying risks of stagnation and globalized centralization.

I think that individual longtermists should be more self-conscious of their place in this broader societal trend. In some places, increased societal risk aversion is exactly the right move. But in other places, as critics contend, the rising tide of “cultural longtermism” could be causing huge distortions and derangements that hamper civilizational progress, and might even amount to a substantial existential risk in itself. Longtermists should take care to balance these risks! And, more specifically, although the appeal of “swimming with the tide” often creates many good arguments for tractability / political feasibility of one specific cause versus another (like x-risk mitigation versus research into experimental transhumanist goods), it is also an underappreciated argument for the neglectedness and importance of causes that “swim against” the cultural tide.

Are we already living in a world of oppressively burdensome longtermism?

In Chapter 19 of Essays on Longtermism, Owen Cotton-Barratt and Rose Hadshar imagine a spectrum from today’s world (where, they imply, only a very small percent of GDP is spent on longtermist goods), to a “partially longtermist society” that devotes 2% - 10% of their resources towards these goals, to an “implausibly strict longtermist society” and/or “strict longtermist state” where the ruling class engineer all of society to maximize the amount of resources devoted to longtermism (potentially directing “somewhere between 10% and 85%” of its resources to that end). In Chapter 18, Hilary Greaves & Christian Tarsney also contrasts a “minimal” 2% allocation to a more extreme scenario where 71% of GDP is directed to longtermist goods. Both essays conclude that their most extreme scenarios are politically infeasible – the population of such a “strict longtermist state” would never accept such extreme sacrifices for the sake of the distant future.

But are such extreme sacrifices really so implausible? Indeed, are we already making such sacrifices already, without even noticing?

The Strict Culturally-Longtermist State

It’s true that, in the grand scheme of things, the world isn’t spending much on AI alignment research or pandemic prevention. But how much are we already paying for risk-mitigation policies across society?

The FDA and other drug regulators are infamously conservative, slowing the pace of medical innovation in myriad ways. How much would human lifespans and healthspans have improved if regulators had been able to maintain a less risk-averse policy over the previous 50 years, allowing the benefits of medical innovations like statins, GLP-1 agonists, MRNA vaccines, immunotherapies for cancer, and CRISPR-based gene therapies to compound more quickly?
The failed transition to nuclear energy arguably mired the modern world in a dire state of “energy poverty”, with less than half the per-capita energy that would have been available to every person in a whiz-bang Jetsons-esque world where the Henry-Adams curve had stayed on track.
Workplace-safety regulations and national healthcare systems generally use an implausibly high value-of-statistical-life (such as $10 million, more than most people could possibly earn in a lifetime, a rate that would value individual years of life much more highly than what most people would “sell them” for if given the opportunity), implying that humanity incurs broad economic losses from its overly safetyist approach in those domains.
YIMBYs will be quick to tell you about the massive economic losses created by our collective unwillingness to build housing, especially in the most productive cities – one estimate states that onerous zoning laws may have cost the USA 36% of GDP over the past 50 years.
Research into areas like human genetic enhancement and brain-computer interfaces is taboo because it’s perceived to be too closely related to certain forms of risky mad science or evil ideology. Experiments with alternative forms of government, such as charter cities or prediction-market based governance, are similarly viewed with suspicion and often strictly regulated / banned.
To the extent that a culture of risk aversion results in deeper cultural biases (such as Ngo’s post-WW2 “toxic egalitarianism” eroding important foundational values, or societal skepticism of science or entrepreneurship reducing long-run economic growth, or other such indirect effects), there could be very large deleterious effects that are nonetheless difficult to concretely identify.

Tally all these up, and, relative to an idealized pro-growth counterfactual world, we might already be living in a world where we’re sacrificing 50%+ of our counterfactual wealth at the altar of societal risk-aversion!

Admittedly, no modern longtermist ever asked for clinical trials to be made more onerous, or for housing to become more difficult to build. Nor do most of these costs even seem plausibly related to reducing the originally-targeted risks of nuclear war, environmental collapse, and right-wing militarism! But (as the proponents of public-choice theory endlessly remind us) such unintended consequences are a fact of life when trying to make policy in a complex world full of uncertainty and competing influences!

Invisible Graveyards Rule Everything Around Me

Aside from the fact that the various economic & health losses above are all unintended consequences, they have one other thing in common. The losses themselves are largely hidden; they are invisible graveyards.

In Chapter 18 and 19 of “Essays on Longtermism”, the idea of a “strict longtermist state” is dismissed because the population would refuse to make such direct and obvious sacrifices as being overworked and seeing 70% - 80% of their income taxed and directed towards distant longtermist goals. But this strikes me as an unrealistic and naive portrayal of how a strict longtermist state would really be architected. Just as tax increases are more politically palatable when levied indirectly (as tariffs, or corporate / VAT taxes, or seigniorage, or etc, rather than directly on citizens as income / payroll / wealth / sales taxes), I imagine that the biggest costs imposed by a strict longtermist state on its citizens would be levied indirectly – more and more “invisible graveyards” of foregone progress, foregone growth, restricted technologies, curtailed human freedom, and so forth.

This argument raises the political feasibility of implementing a strict-longtermist state, and thus legitimizes fears that such a state may arise.

The Elusive Counterfactual

On the other hand! So far I’ve been comparing the “invisible graveyards” created by risk-aversion, to an idealized future where unfettered technological progress leads to a whiz-bang utopia of abundance and human liberty. But perhaps if the forces of liberalism and anti-nuclear activism had been weaker, we would not in fact be sitting in a nuclear-powered space station around the moon right now. Maybe we would be sitting in an irradiated crater in the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war.

Pictured: the magnificent Concorde, supersonic martyr of the lost glorious retrofutu– oops, wait, that’s actually a prototype nuclear bomber forged amid the gnashing madness and suicidal paranoia of the Cold War…

Obviously a devastated wasteland would have very low GDP, flipping the sign on everything I said about the costs of societal risk-aversion.

The difficulty of figuring out the right counterfactual, added on top of the “base rate tennis” of trying to figure out what unintended costs should count as consequences of longtermist-style thinking, and the fact (mentioned by Greaves & Tarsney) that many longtermist interventions have “co-benefits” for present generations, makes it impossible to precisely work out how much humanity is currently sacrificing for (or already profiting from) long-term x-risk reduction efforts. So, while the longtermist can often fairly plead “look at this specific project – it’s clearly underfunded, clearly worthwhile, unlikely to have dramatic unintended side-effects!”, and may further argue that the overall cost-benefit results of societal risk aversion have been positive, critics may also reasonably argue that the overall effects have been negative. Ultimately adjudicating the debate is a problem that can only be left to future generations to answer.

The Streelight Effect Warps Modern Longtermism Towards an Exclusive Focus On X-risk Mitigation

“For tractability, let us restrict the question to investment in existential safety” -- Greaves & Tarsney, Chapter 18

“Enough with this slander by association!!”, I hear you cry out. “Begone with your low-decoupling insistence that the important work of mitigating narrow, specific x-risks necessarily requires smothering society under a blanket of across-the-board safetyism! Where is your critique of what we, actual practicing longtermists, are actually doing today?!”

Indeed, I hear you. So – while I think the cultural-longtermism critique has real merit – let’s move on.

There are lots of reasons why x-risk mitigation is the centerpiece of applied longtermism today. Here are a few:

It legitimately seems to be very important.
It is a relatively popular and intuitive message among ordinary people, governments, etc (contrast this with something bizarre and controversial, like mind uploading research), thus easier to build momentum and consensus around, making it perhaps more tractable than other potential longtermist interventions. (And, as mentioned, risk-reduction also dovetails with the general trend towards increased safetyism.)
It is easier to reason about x-risk mitigation than about other kinds of interventions – for instance, as Greaves and Tarsney write, “Risks of human extinction and other ‘existential catastrophes’ create an exception to these worries about intractability, since each such risk comes with a strong and clear ‘lock-in’ mechanism.”

Of course, other things equal, it is better to work on problems that are amenable to rigorous analysis than problems where clear analysis is harder. But other things aren’t equal, and at this point, I fear that x-risk’s amenability-to-analysis is fueling an increasingly unhealthy lopsidedness within longtermism.

EAs are all too familiar with how streetlight effects can distort global priorities

Here are some facts which are sadly familiar to many longtermists:

While climate change has received trillions of dollars of support, and is the focus of significant activist campaigns, international coordination efforts, etc, AI safety research has perhaps only around 1000 people working on it full-time, a budget in the billions instead of trillions.
Within the already-neglected pandemic-prevention space, most existing efforts aren’t focused on the worst-case pandemics, but rather ordinary outbreaks like a mild potential monkeypox epidemic or a new zoonotic-spillover respiratory virus.

Some of the discrepancy here comes from value differences between ordinary people and longtermists (with longtermists placing special emphasis on extinction risks), but even from a non-longtermist perspective, these seem like a severe misallocation of societal resources. Why does this happen?

I think what’s going on is that a variety of “streetlight effects” steer effort towards predictable, known, quantifiable threats and away from more “speculative” (though larger) risks:

Global warming is simple physics; it’s a lot easier easier to study than complex AI takeover scenarios featuring multiple layers of deception and tricky notions of “alignment” and “agency”.
It’s thus easier for society to make collective intellectual progress, and to realize when a newly-reached conclusion is correct.
Easier analysis makes it easier to definitively prove that the problem is real.
It’s possible to produce precise forecasts of likely future impacts.
All this makes it easier to convince individual people about the problem
And easier to build political consensus for action within any given group
The clear, simple goal (reduce CO2 ppm) makes it easier to think up solutions and quantify their potential impact (compared to trying to evaluate the relative merits of AI safety work).

All of those bullet points are essentially tractability arguments for why you should work on solving climate change instead of AI risk. Why bother with AI at all; it’s so intractable!

Yet despite all this, I believe AI risks are much more important to work on, for importance and neglectedness reasons.

Nevertheless, the streetlight effects are calling from inside the house

I believe there’s a similar dynamic going on within longtermism:

Extinction risks are relatively amenable to analysis, because their importance is basically just a function of (how likely they are to happen) x (how likely they are to kill everyone) x (100% of the value of our lost long-term potential).
By contrast, evaluating the impact of interventions aimed at “flourishing futures” seems harder for a variety of reasons – not just of tractability concerns about “lock-in” versus “wash-out”, but also because, compared to slapping a probability-of-extinction discount on the entire future, it’s trickier to evaluate how much of a multiplier such flourishingness interventions (such as welfare-enhancing transhumanist goods) would apply to the raise quality of that future.
It’s similarly tricky to assess how indirect improvements to social systems & governance & culture (which could help us both avoid x-risks and steer towards utopia) ultimately filter through into outcomes.
Even classic x-risks with clear “lock-in” mechanisms, but which aren’t driven by human extinction (such as stable totalitarianism and various other “s-risks”) seem disadvantaged by the fact that they flow through hard-to-analyze social / political pathways rather than more physicsy dynamics of something like pandemic or nuclear risk.

It’s not that nobody has ever thought of these risks, or that nobody is working on them. Many people are; that’s great! But the fact that they’re less amenable to analysis still leaves them systematically neglected.

In my view, these unbalanced priorities don’t just mean that longtermism risks *slightly *failing to do quite as much good as an idealized version of itself could do. In the same way that slight changes in differential technological progress can possibly lead to quite different path-dependent futures, I think that individually small streetlight effects can compound (as in the global-warming-versus-AI case) to quite large differences on a group level. If we badly misprioritize flourishing futures, indirect interventions, and non-extinction x-risks, we risk leaving incredibly valuable actions on the table.

It’s also possible that unbalanced priorities in longtermism could risk actively causing harm.

With our distorted view of the longtermist landscape, we might also be more likely to take misguided actions that create large unintended costs, just as the environmental / anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s once did.
(This one is a little galaxy-brained, but stick with me…) If longtermist goals of x-risk mitigation tend to unwittingly contribute to a larger societal trend of increasing global governance and regulation that itself amounts to a substantial stable totalitarianism risk, this could be trouble. Longtermism would effectively be sailing between a scylla-and-charybdis of mitigating extinction risk versus totalitarian risk. So, if longtermism is ALSO systematically underrating stable totalitarianism risks (because they’re harder to reason about), then we risk misjudging the situation and steering too close to the charybdis of totalitarian lock-in.

Total Hedonic Utilitarianism and the Denial of Death

“Sure, he talks a good game about freedom when out of power, but once he’s in – bam! Everyone’s enslaved in the human-flourishing mines.” -- Slate Star Codex blog tagline

Yes, yes, of course maximizing utilitarianism gives off totalitarian vibes

If I was a total hack, here’s an easy critique I could make, an all-too-common extension of the cultural-longtermist critique:

“Wow, get this – Greaves & Tarsney contrast ‘minimal’ versus ‘expansive’ visions of longtermism. But even their ‘minimal’ version isn’t nearly minimal enough to avoid being oppressively burdensome and creepily controlling! Look at the sweeping aims that even the seemingly narrow goal of x-risk-mitigation requires!”

“they mention that we should ‘scale up efforts to avoid great power conflict’ – aka subordinate independent nation states to an oppressive one-world government, perhaps ruled by the antichrist??”
“they want ‘legal regulation of dangerous technologies’ – but don’t worry, they ONLY want to regulate all of artificial intelligence and all of biotech, which are like the #1 and #2 most important technologies of our time!”
“then later they propose indirect interventions like ‘improved education’ (re-education??) to inculcate people with greater willingness to spend on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation, pandemic preparedness, etc – sounds like propaganda to me. And to ‘improve the talent pool of future… bureacrats’ – long march through the institutions much??”
“In the limit, this is basically a totalizing desire to control all of society! Hardly ‘minimal’!!”

But actually, Greaves & Tarsney make the fair point that it isn’t longermism in particular that creates these totalitarian vibes. The real problem is just the fundamental nature of consequentialism. Maximal consequentialism is enough to make anything seem totalitarian! As they write:

“If the implications of an axiological longtermist thesis together with maximizing consequentialism strike one as overly demanding, then (absent some other reason for doubting the axiological longtermist claim) the natural response is to reject maximizing consequentialism, not to revise one’s axiology or one’s empirical beliefs.”

(For more on the perils of consequentialism, see Joe Carlsmith’s critique of Yudkowsky’s concept of the fragility of value, and Holden Karnofksy’s post about EA & maximization.)

Of course, one response to this defense would be to note that in practice, consequentialism seems like a pretty large part of longtermism, so the question of whether totalitarian vibes are coming from the consequentialist part of longtermism, or the other parts of longtermism, seems irrelevant when all the parts usually come bundled together.

But I actually believe there are notable totalitarian, anti-human vibes that come from elsewhere, and deserve special consideration.

The “total hedonic” part of total hedonic utilitarianism creates its own, separate problems.

If you talk to longtermists, most of them will say that they’re not strict total hedonic utilitarians. Am I then about to attack a strawman?

I don’t think so – despite everyone disavowing it, total hedonic utilitarianism seems to pops up all the time in EA analyses (including not just longtermism, but also animal welfare, global development, and more), often as an unstated background assumption. I suspect this happens because total hedonic utilitarianism makes it easier to analyze problems, by providing a starting framework & a simplifying assumption. The streetlight effect strikes again!

Now, of course, “all models are wrong, some models are useful”. Simplifying assumptions are often necessary! But the ubiquitous background assumption of total hedonic utilitarianism is, IMO, corrosive to individual liberty and human empowerment.

Hedonic utilitarianism dissolves the value of the unique human individual into atomized, interchangeable qualia-moments

In the standard way of longtermist reckoning, 10 people living 40 happy years is the same number of QALYs, all else equal, as 5 people living 80 happy years.

But personally, I would like to live 80 years and not 40 years!

One can of course stipulate that this is already accounted for in the calculation – the disutility of my outrage at being cut down in my prime could be exactly offset, in the thought experiment, via the provision of other goods. Or perhaps there are other ways of trying to resolve the dilemma.¹

But regardless of the defensive gymnastics that can be performed here, in practice, foregrounding interchangeable units of qualia means dissolving value downwards – from units of unique human individuals to infintesimal atom-like moments of qualia-experience (akin to what some call “empty individualism”).

Furthermore, the vast diversity of potential qualia-experiences (the landscape of which we can hardly begin to imagine) is then, for analytical convenience, projected down onto a one-dimensional spectrum from positive affective valence to negative affective valence. This second simplifying step (which again, few would completely endorse, but many implicitly rely on), further contributes to undermining individuality, by compressing the complex landscape of human aesthetic values (see eg “The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism”, or simply introspect on your own motivations, values, and feelings), into a homogenous hedonic mush more amenable to mathematical reasoning.

Thus, in the standard version of total hedonic utilitarianism, there is no difference between individuals, no inherent notion of fundamental human rights or freedoms (perhaps instead you should content yourself with a kind of standard UBI of positively-valenced experience?), a kind of Rawlsian tendency towards communistic redistribution rather than traditional property-ownership and inequality, or of any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. It is only a simplifying assumption, of course; few would mistake it for ultimate reality. But nevertheless, the structure of the model threatens to reach out (in the form of flawed / misinterpreted analyses) and begin to instantiate its troublesome biases in reality.

Hedonic utilitarianism subsumes the value of the human individual into the glory of the immortal leviathan

Counterintuitively, while the deaths of individuals become irrelevant, the survival of overall civilization (ie, of the state) becomes paramount in the longtermist framework. This is the whole logic of mitigating x-risks – the collective-life of human civilization in aggregate is the highest value. Consequently, power and moral value is also agglomerated upwards, from the individual to the state, for whom individuals are like mere cells making up its immortal body.

A critic would point out that this subsumption of the individual to the needs of the state is the hallmark of totalitarian communism and fascism, and thus perhaps flags longtermism as intrinsically suspicious, despite its adherents’ good intentions and professed objective of maximizing human thriving.

An interesting illustration of this point might be the notably lukewarm attitude of longtermism towards the idea of slowing human aging. It’s odd, considering that Bostom’s “Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” is probably his most-read work (what other of his essays has lovingly-animated video adaptations with millions of views?), and Yudkowsky’s stridently anti-death HPMOR and Sequences were a formative experience for many longtermists. Within “Essays on Longtermism”, Kevin Kuruc and David Manley’s Chapter 24 does a good job recounting the standard rationalist case for why the badness of death is underrated, and pairs this with some informative calculations about the large economic benefits that increased healthy lifespans would bring. Yet anti-aging often seems to be nowhere on the wider longtermist or EA list of priorities – nothing like it is mentioned on 80,000 Hours’s problem profiles. One gets the sense that many longtermists are privately enthusiastic about the development of advanced medical technology as one of the most prized “longtermist goods”, alongside various other, even more exotic proposals for human enhancement. But people don’t talk about this publicly.

In part, this is because it would be politically counterproductive. In wider society, the idea of life extension is a kind of taboo – perhaps born of some anti-science, anti-progress attitude embedded in our culture?
And in part, there are legitimate concerns about tractability and neglectedness of any currently-proposed anti-aging interventions.
But it also feels relevant that the structure of total hedonic utilitarianism renders the problem of death (ie, the death of individuals during the ordinary course of events, rather than catastrophes that threaten the health of the state) largely invisible to standard formulations of longtermism.

In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, anthropologist Ernest Becker claims that “human civilization is a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality” and that people manage their “death anxiety” by pouring their efforts into an “immortal project” which “enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of meaning continuing beyond their own lifespan”. In this secular modern age, when heroic cultural narratives and religious delusions no longer do the job, and when building literal giant pyramids in the desert for the glorification of the state has fallen out of style, what better an immortal project than “longtermism” with which to harness individuals’ energy? What else could provide better relief from men’s death-anxiety, than the promise of binding their mortal efforts to the sublime eternity of the far-distant galaxies?

Towards A More Human Longtermism?

Surely not everything can be totalitarian…

By now I have accused longtermism of being totalitarian in about twelve different ways. But this is absurd; longtermism is one of the most intelligent and well-meaning movements out there, dear to my heart, repository of many of my hopes for a brighter future! And, as noted earlier, some of these totalitarian vibes seem intrinsic to the notion of consequentialism, which in turn seems intrinsic to the notion of trying to do practically anything in life. What is going on??

pictured: ideologies attempting to figure out which one of them isn’t secretly a totalitarian menace

Longtermism is indeed helpfully and appropriately wary of “lock-in”, hopeful for a future of human flourishing, yet our frameworks nudge us toward assuming fragility of value, taking the perspective of abstract social controllers, and performing atomized analysis that disregards human individuality.

I think one problem (not just for longtermism, but for all of society) is that our notions of things like “empowerment”, “liberty”, “democractic-ness”, “legitimacy”, and so forth, etc, are just too confused and contradictory to sort this all out, similar to how AI safety researchers often complain that our concepts of “alignment” or “agency” are confused and ill-defined.

Some Confused Hopes for a Flourishing Human Future

Inspired by the analogous dilemma in AI, this suggests several possible approaches to dealing with this problem:

“Agent foundations, but for understanding human freedom and responsible governance”: probably not super tractable, but idk, maybe it’ll come up with something – you guys are the philosophers here.
Ignore the fact that we can’t pin down exact definitions, just work on good stuff that seems like it’ll help improve freedom and human agency and democraticness, and hope for the best – this has worked alright historically, it will probably keep being a good strategy.
Hope that future AI technology will be able to solve philosophy and clarify this stuff, leading to huge advances in social technology, self-understanding, and human thriving. Unfortunately this liberty stuff is probably most valuable while we are on the way to technological maturity, and navigating all these various dangers. So waiting to the end to solve all the problems kinda misses the point. But maybe it will be possible to make progress as we go along, by putting effort into developing progressively better sociological concepts and social technology as AI improves.

This is perhaps too fanciful a metaphor, but it is perhaps bearing in mind some sociological analogue to “embedded agency”? That is, perhaps it would be wrong to think that a “strict longtermist state” could dispassionately shepard its package of “values” (x-risk mitigation, etc) into the future in a way disconnected from its functioning in the present. Many of society’s most important values are tied up in the design & functioning of the state itself; the workings of government and other institutions, of culture and the economy, are both an expression of a society’s values and a method of ensuring the stability of those values. Not to sound too hippie, but rather than imagining a “strict longtermist state” seizing control of the future and trying to white-knuckle its way toward utopian “lock-in”, an “embedded agency” perspective might help us conceptualize the path to utopia more a dynamic process of co-evolution and interaction between different societal forces.

Another potential reframing, especially when considering various proposed governance interventions (such as discussed in Chapters 26, 27, and 30) could be to move away from visions of political “control” over important outcomes (which seems almost self-defeating as a concept – if the control is still in the realm of political, it is still under contention, thus not fully under control…), and instead seek something more like “developing social technology for removing certain issues from the realm of the political”. For example:

Prediction markets might be able to effectively “remove policy-forecasting questions from the realm of the political”, reducing politics to a discussion of which values to prioritize and relevant metrics by which to target those metrics.
More prosaicly, independent central banks (and even moreso, fully algorithmic approaches like NGDP level targeting) are an attempt to partially remove the pursuit of optimal fiscal policy from the realm of the political.
Similarly automatic mechanisms like pandemic bonds, various AI-liability schemes, carbon taxation etc, could serve to reduce existential risks fairly “automatically” in a way that preserves rather than suppresses decentralized human agency.
More generally, developing systems of “credible neutrality” (like perhaps the twitter community-notes algorithm, or wikipedia on a good day, or various crypto projects?) seems like a path to reduce the scope of the political, yet which doesn’t fully map onto the usual notion of totalitarian-style “control” or illegitimate consequentialist-style “lock-in”.

As stated at the beginning of this essay, I also think it would be worthwhile for longtermism to be particularly on-guard about the potential downsides of a societal trend towards increasing stasis and safetyism. Some longtermist interventions, including x-risk mitigation, are mostly “swimming with the tide” of increasing risk-aversion. But we should be careful not to mistake causes that “swim against the tide” (with consequently reduced tractability, but increased neglectedness and perhaps also importance) as a knockdown argument against those causes.

As H Orri Stefansson writes in Chapter 28, “Longtermism and Social Risk-Taking”, longtermism magnifies the value-of-information that can be gathered from policy experiments, and this consideration (other things equal) ought to increase the amount of policy experimentation that society undertakes. I think this vision, of pursuing value-of-information through experimentation, competition, diversity, and dynamism in society, offers a helpful lens with which to counterbalance the default, centralizing view of the social “planner” referenced so often in the chapters of “Essays on Longtermism”. (Wherein something like a network of independent charter cities might be viewed suspiciously, almost as a potential “cancer” on the international community’s ability to coordinate.)

In addition to these broad cultural vibes, there are also likely a wide variety of direct, specific interventions against stable totalitarianism that longtermism could explore more thoroughly. Attempts to limit the impact of AI-enabled propaganda, intelligence-gathering, and censorship all seem like they could be fertile ground for promising interventions. Forward-looking attempts to map out the offense/defence balance of various specific totalitarianism-enabling technologies (perhaps super-persuasion AI, advanced lie detection technology, or MRI-based mind-reading tech), then try to establish norms and regulations or apply other d/acc strategies to them, could also be valuable.

One could say that nonexistent people would like even a short existence, and this might balance out the preference of existing people for longer lifespans, but this view strikes me as a somewhat absurd perspective that few hold; most humans value future/potential generations but also recognize that actually-existing people have more of a sort of property-rights claim on existence than merely potential people. ↩︎

New Cause Area: Low-Hanging Fruit

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Hi, I’m Tandena Wagner. As part of my research for EcoResillience Initiative (an EA organization searching for the best ways to preserve biodiversity into the long-term future), I’ve investigated several common claims that resource limitations could be disastrous for civilization – ie, that we’re approaching “peak oil”, or imminently running out of phosphorus, soil nitrogen, chromium, etc. For the most part, I’ve found these claims to be overblown, often systematically exaggerated by the poor epistemic conditions of activist environmentalism. In general, Paul-Erlich-style resource limitations do not seem pressing compared to other risks to civilization.

However, there’s one key resource that I’ve become increasingly concerned about: human civilization might be running out of low-hanging fruit.

This kid can’t reach the fruit because he’s just a baby. But soon, this kid’s problem could be the WHOLE WORLD’s problem.

Low-hanging fruit is essential for continued human thriving

You might be like, “Whatever, this doesn’t sound like a huge problem – fruit is tasty, sure, but people don’t NEED to eat fruit, right?”

That’s what we thought, too. But after digging into the research, it turns out that low-hanging fruit is critical for continued progress across diverse scientific fields. For example, according to wikipedia, “some suspect a lack of low-hanging fruit as a significant contribution to Eroom’s law”, which states that drug discovery is getting slower and more expensive over time.

Low-hanging fruit is also a key input to broader increases in living standards. In the past, when low-hanging fruit was more common, countries like South Korea could go from subsistence poverty to joining the ranks of the world’s richest nations in just a single generation. But nowadays, the Center for Global Development admits that poor countries are staying poor for longer, because “there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit in global development.”

Perhaps the most comprehensive exploration of this issue comes from Tyler Cowen’s 2011 opus, “The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History”. In the book, he argues:

Our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy.

More recently, some economists have started to push back on Cowen’s ideas, postulating that maybe AI will help humanity escape the Great Stagnation. But even here, fruit is a crucial bottleneck. Just a few months ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said of generative AI:

I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at 2025, the low-hanging fruit is gone.

Tantalus, a figure of Greek myth, infamously ran out of low hanging fruit. Could this be humanity’s future?

What would it mean if humanity exhausted the low-hanging fruit?

If we ever completely ran out of low-hanging fruit, the consequences could be catastrophic. Consider: the last time humans ran out of low-hanging fruit, we were **forced to **abandon our natural foraging lifestyles and move out onto the harsh, barren landscape of the savannah. There, we faced intense predation from hyenas, and had to learn how to crack open bones and eat marrow just to survive. Ultimately, humanity was only able to escape this hellish condition by inventing agriculture, which was even more of an unmitigated disaster for human wellbeing.

Artist’s representation of how bad it feels when you run out of fruit.

Between this ominous historical precedent and the warnings of the world’s top scientists and economists, we think it’s safe to say that this is an extremely pressing threat – one that should be taken seriously by the EA movement.

New ways of making fruit hang lower are getting harder to find

When we first began to look into this problem, we asked ourselves – couldn’t people just, like, use ladders to reach more fruit? Or, idk, maybe use some kind of picking device on the end of a long stick?

Like this.

But we were dismayed to learn that these ideas are ALREADY in widespread use, and indeed, have been for literally hundreds of years.** In other words: the low-hanging fruit of picking low-hanging fruit, has been picked.**

Indeed, humanity is being forced to spend more and more resources picking low-hanging fruit, despite the diminishing returns such investments face. Just look at this guy using a preposterously tall tower to pick fruit:

[EDIT: as Julia Wise points out in a comment, this type of machine is called a “cherry-picker”. He’s picking cherries. So, this specific example is cherry-picking, but hopefully it’s broadly representative of fruit issues generally.]

You might not like it, but this is what diminishing marginal returns looks like.

People are climbing literally hundreds of feet into the rainforest canopy just to get some little epiphytes or whatever:

Pictured: not a viable long-term strategy for safely developing transformative AI, lifting africa out of poverty, or reversing Eroom’s law.

Simply reaching higher and higher is no longer fruitful. We need a new strategy.

Shorter trees –> lower fruit

We believe that the most promising intervention in this area is to genetically engineer shorter trees, such that more of their fruit hangs low.

People are already successfully doing this with apples??? In the late 1960s, most apple trees in the USA were 25 to 30 feet tall. But apparently, over the following decades, farmers discovered that “dwarf” trees are actually better:

Once hesitant that the smaller trees wouldn’t produce as much fruit, apple growers realized dwarf trees were actually far more profitable. “Farmers get a higher yield per acre,” says Heather Faubert, of the Rhode Island Fruit Growers Association. “With the taller trees, you could only plant about 20 trees per acre; now, you can get as many as 2,000 in the same space.”

Fun fact: wheat plants also used to be SUPER tall, like literally 6 feet high, since it needed to outcompete weeds to get sunshine. But once humans started growing fields of 100% wheat, all that extra stalk height was just wasted energy, so we bred it to be shorter.

So, this is a promising approach, but can we push even further? Or, in other words, “How low can you go?”

Some fruit doesn’t even grow on trees – strawberries are basically ground cover, which is about as low as fruit can possibly get. Could we genetically engineer more types of fruit to just sit around on the ground like this – not part of a tree with a woody trunk at all?

The future of fruit?

The idea of transforming towering, majestic trees into mere herbs might sound far-fetched, until you read this post from Eukaryote Writes Blog, and you realize that:

“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees.

Plants just kind of evolve rigid, woody stems all the time, randomly:

Of plants native to the Canary Islands, wood independently evolved at least 38 times!

By the same token:

The reverse also happens – a tree needs to do both primary and secondary growth, so it’s relatively easy for a tree lineage to drop the ‘secondary’ growth stage and remain an herb for its whole lifespan.

Researchers have already shown that by knocking out a couple of genes, it’s possible to prompt the herbaceous plant Arabidopsis to develop “a woody stem never otherwise seen in the species”.

In light of this surprising information, we believe that the goal of genetically engineering extremely low-to-the-ground, non-woody fruit trees, far from being a sci-fi dream beyond humanity’s grasp, is in fact probably within reach.

Low-hanging fruit has broad benefits

Growing lower-hanging fruit would improve agricultural productivity almost by definition. This is a major focus of philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation. In the rich world, farmers are already profit-motivated to maximize yields, so further improvements would require genetic engineering, as discussed above. But in poor, remote areas, farmers often merely lack knowledge or simple tools that could unlock higher productivity, so there is still much low-hanging fruit (eg, switching to dwarf tree varieties) to be picked.

Increased agricultural productivity is an especially beloved intervention among groups like EcoResillience Initiative that care about both human thriving *and *ecological preservation. That’s because, as Hannah Ritchie explains in this OurWorldInData article and in her book Not The End of the World, sustainably intensifying agriculture is a great way to boost development, while also reducing the total amount of land that humanity uses to feed itself. Since habitat loss (not climate change, invasive species, hunting, or etc) is still the #1 cause of species extinctions worldwide, reducing human land use via increased agricultural productivity is great for nature.

But even moreso than with other agricultural-productivity interventions (like increased use of fertilizers in poor countries, zai pit irrigation, genetically-engineered C4 rice, ecologically-informed silvopasture techniques, etc), I’m especially excited about the unique benefits that low-hanging fruit could have for wild animal welfare.

The Fruit is Too Damn High

Currently, many animals are trapped in a negative-sum Red Queen’s race where trees get ever taller to pull their fruit out of reach, and animals have to evolve ever-crazier tricks to keep getting the fruit. Behold: this preposterous looking creature isn’t just a really badly photoshopped deer. It’s actually a REAL mammal, called a “Gerenuk”:

It has to live like this, because the fruit is too damn high.

Or what about these guys? I dare you to look at this photo and tell me that what’s going on here is totally normal, fine, to be expected, non-ridiculous, etc:

You can’t, can you? The situation is objectively out of control.

Most notably, giraffes are stuck in an arms race against ever-taller acacia trees:

Nobody in this photo is happy about what’s going on here.

Consequently, their biology is incredibly cursed:

1. The “recurrent laryngeal nerve” connects the brain to the muscles in the throat. But even though the throat is right next to the brain, evolution is too stupid to figure out how to unloop the nerve from where it pointlessly loops around the aorta. So nerve signals have to go ALL the way down to the chest and then all the way back up. This means that giraffes experience crazy lag time of up to a fifth of a second (that’s like 12 frames of lag if you’re playing a 60fps videogame!) whenever they try to swallow anything or make any sound.

This is your brain on fruit.

2. Since giraffes are so tall, it means they need absurdly high blood pressure in their heart, so they don’t pass out from lack of blood pressure in the brain when they stretch their head all the way up. But this means they experience INSANELY high blood pressure when they put their head DOWN, to drink! It’s suspected that this is the current #1 bottleneck preventing giraffes from becoming even taller, and scientists literally do not know how giraffes manage to run around with their cursed cardiovascular system without immediately dropping dead from strokes, preeclampsia, fibrosis, or a dozen other related ailments.

According to all known laws of aviation…

If we just pushed the “reset” button on this entire fucked-up situation, we could go back to having normal-sized, non-cursed giraffes browsing nice, normal-sized acacia trees. The giraffes AND the trees would be better off. This is the kind of win-win solution to a multipolar coordination trap that, to me, would represent the EA movement at its best.

A fruitful direction for future research

Some people say that ideas are getting harder to find over time. Maybe that’s true! But today, I found one: low-hanging fruit.

Pictured: me, doing cause prioritization research

For the sake of both the sustainability of humanity’s continued long-term economic growth, AND for the giraffes, I believe that EA should devote more resources to this important cause area.

Why the East Rules -- For Now

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With apologies to Ian Morris

Why is it that the modern world is dominated by the interests of Chinese and East Asian civilizations, and not by, say, an Ottoman civilization, or a Venetian one? The very question might seem absurd. But as I will argue, were it not for a quirk of geography, it’s possible that history could have turned out very differently.

During the 1100s, the Song Dynasty approached the “Hard Ceiling” of social development around 43 points – the maximum level of social development that can be supported by large agrarian empires. An external observer might have predicted at this point that the Song Dynasty would follow the path of the Romans when they encountered the Hard Ceiling after around AD 200: decline and fall. Indeed, it’s true that China’s vast rice-fields were pushing up against the limits of how much food could be produced by cultivation with merely human and animal muscle-power. Lacking any way to further intensify their agricultural output, the Song Dynasty’s economic output could have stagnated, and conflict with the Mongols might have proved just as devastating as the barbarian invasions which ended civilization in the Mediterranean seven centuries earlier.

The Industrial Revolution

But in reality, the Song Dynasty was able to break through the Hard Ceiling, beat back the Mongol threat, and push on to levels of social development unprecedented anywhere on Earth. The “industrial revolution” was a chain reaction of developments so overwhelmingly important that it makes a mockery of all the history we have discussed so far – in the centuries following 1100, social development rises so high that, when graphed in Figure 5, it reduces all the strife and drama of previous eras to a barely-perceptible squiggle hovering just slightly above the X-axis.

Why did the Song succeed, where the Romans failed? We’ve discussed the various “long-term lock-in” theories purporting that Asian civilization was inherently superior to Western – But this can’t be the correct explanation, since Western Social Development was well ahead of Eastern all the way up until Roman collapse in the 400s. Rather, in the end, it all comes down to geography. The Song were able to accomplish what the Romans could not, because they had access to a resource that the Romans never did: abundant supplies of Uranium ore.

The Power of the Atom

It was Uranium ore, heaped into crude piles and controlled by plunging in great wooden beams as control rods, which boiled water and fed a system of centralized steam power for the great metropolis of Kaifeng. Heat from the steam warmed the many houses of the metropolis – thus freed from the need to consume prodigious amounts of coal and charcoal each winter, people repurposed these “fossil fuels” as fertilizer for the fields, boosting agricultural output. Steam power could also be use to mechanize the city’s industrial activities. Huge workshops sprang up everywhere, taking advantage of steam-powered mechanization and the new high-temperature metalworking enabled by Uranium ore. One hundred years later, Song Dynasty canons forged in the foundries of Kaifeng would finally put an end to the hordes of Kublai Khan.

By 1300, Social Development in the Eastern Core had soared to almost 200 points. Things in the West had also improved, but much more slowly. To make matters worse, they were running out of time. Over the next hundred years, Europe would be wracked by the characteristic horsemen of the apocalypse: climate change brought on by the end of the Medieval Warm Period, pestilence in the form of the Black Death, state collapse and migration triggered by steppe invasions.

Is there any way that the Western Core could have escaped this fate? Unfortunately, for all the glories of Italian and Middle Eastern civilization, the Western Core had been dealt a terribly unlucky hand in terms of natural resources. Infamously, Europe is almost entirely bereft of Uranium deposits.

Some scholars argue that Uranium, although it is probably the best, isn’t the ONLY energy source capable of fueling an industrial revolution. They point to the coalfields of Northern Europe, and the oilfields of the Middle East, as possible alternatives – a “fossil-fueled” industrial revolution. Due to their much lower energy densities, hypothetical European coal-powered steamships would have to have been much smaller and would need constant refueling. No coal-powered ship could have matched Zeng He’s massive atomic dreadnoughts, which cruised across the Pacific Ocean to discover the New World in 1421. But the distance between Western Europe and the east coast of the New World is only about half the distance that Zeng He travelled. Is it possible that, with the right run of good luck and wise decisions, the Arsenal of Venice could have sparked a “fossil-fueled” industrial revolution in the Western Core, to match the atomic industrial revolution in the East? Perhaps. But was it likely? Certainly not.

Cool new San Jose gun law with implications for weird libertarian utopias

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I am happy to see that my very own town of San Jose is innovating by becoming the first city in the USA which requires gun owners to purchase crime liability insurance! This is an insurance policy that pays out to victims if the policy owner commits a crime, just like how car insurance works. As the article says, “The liability insurance would cover losses or damages resulting from any negligent or accidental use of the firearm, including death, injury or property damage, according to the ordinance. If a gun is stolen or lost, the owner of the firearm would be considered liable until the theft or loss is reported to authorities.”

If this experiment works out and the liability insurance system isn’t too burdensome, I wonder if someday we could actually require everyone to carry crime liability insurance! Everyone would have to pay at least a small premium, and premiums would be higher for people at a higher risk of committing crimes (ie, men, young people, people with a history of prior offenses, etc), just like how car insurance costs more for new drivers. But the upside might be a higher-trust society, where people could be friendlier and more open to strangers because crimes are less common (and when they do happen victims are more often properly compensated). Here is philosopher/economist Robin Hanson with more details on this utopian and/or dystopian scheme.

This would hopefully work just like how car insurance helps create an atmosphere of greater trust, safety, and social equality on the roads – without mandatory car insurance, we might become fearful of financially-poor drivers who couldn’t afford to pay our medical bills if they hit us. And people might drive more dangerously in general if they weren’t afraid that small incidents might cause their premiums to increase.

The dream libertarian city of Prospera is planning to require crime liability insurance as a condition of citizenship, so that everyone in the city knows that all the other citizens are people of good standing who at least are able to persuade some insurance company to vouch for them. Crime is a huge problem in “murder capital of the world” Honduras where Prospera is located, so creating a healthy high-trust environment without creating an oppressive police state is a very important design goal for libertarian Prospera! By contrast, a different and less-libertarian Honduran charter city, ‘Ciudad Morzan’, is going for the more traditional “private security / gated community surveillance state” approach to creating a low-crime environment. Still nice to give Hondurans choices, I guess – infinitely better to be living in an optional police-state neighborhood than a mandatory police-state society!

Prospera has a lot of cool solarpunk concept art, and they have a real legal framework granted by the Honduran constitution that allows them to mostly pass their own crazy utopian laws – universal crime liability insurance is only like the 18th weirdest thing about Prospera– but currently it is still early days for them; they probably only have about 100 residents at the moment, more like a remote-work-themed hotel than a city.

Anyways, in an absolute best-case scenario, the idea of crime liability insurance would be a relatively light-touch system which could restore some of the friendliness and high trust of tight-knit traditional communities (think of a small village in sweden or japan) even to huge, dynamic, diverse cities full of strangers and radically different levels of wealth (like New York City), allowing us to have the best of both worlds, diversity & trust together! Plus of course less actual crime and more justice for victims.

In a worst-case scenario, the idea maybe just doesn’t really do anything, or maybe it can only work by becoming an obtrusive corporate-run surveillance state which is only somewhat of an improvement over just having a traditional government-run surveillance state. Also, the big benefit I’m imagining is that while some people would have to pay higher premiums than others, in exchange social discrimination would go down because everyone could be more confident in their fellow citizens. But maybe that doesn’t work, and now we’re just making people pay premiums but discrimination against minorities and aversion from poor people is as bad as ever. I’m not married to the belief that this reform idea is a sure winner!

IRL, even a universal crime-liability law would probably not transform our world into a utopia or dystopia overnight, but would just have a tiny 5% effect either in a positive or negative direction. Still potentially a big deal though – driving would be quite a bit different if car insurance didn’t exist, and crime liability insurance would influence all parts of life instead of just driving.

Anyways, I am always happy to see more experimentation in the generally stagnant worlds of law and institution-design. I’m doubly happy that San Jose is leading the way on this, which is befitting of the forward-thinking progressive image that California & Silicon Valley aspire to. Starting with gun owners is a logical population to run a small-scale experiment on, and it’s also nice to finally see some movement & innovation on gun control in particular, which is so infamously stuck in cultural trench-warfare.

Overthinking It: Matrix 4 is about choosing the blue pill.

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first entry in “Overthinking It”, a series of blog posts where I joyfully read a little too much philosophy and politics into movies of questionable quality. This is distinct from my writing about videogames, where all my analysis is completely serious.

Matrix 1 was about “true reality” versus false simulation. Matrix 4 asks if we prefer nonfiction-style realism versus fiction-style emotional narrative.

Partway through “The Matrix: Resurrections”, Neo’s therapist is revealed to be the villain of the movie and the current controller of the matrix-simulation. The therapist reveals that the matrix-simulation has been re-configured under his new management — instead of aiming for the “fussy facts and equations” of a perfectly realistic simulation of human society, the new matrix-simulation is a deliberately incoherent dream-world designed to stimulate maximum emotional drama by dreaming up dramatic stories and conflicts: “can you catch the bullet in time”?

The therapist explains that the reconfigured simulation has been setting new productivity records — the machines can extract more energy per person, and ironically people are less likely to question the veracity of a dream-world that panders to human psychology than they are to question a realistic simulation of a coherent human society.

In the original Matrix movie, the “human world” of 1999 New York is tinted a sickly green — besides giving the movie a distinct visual style, green is associated with the green text of old-fashioned computers and thus symbolized the fact that the matrix-simulation isn’t the real world. Only the “machine world” has a reasonably even (albeit drab) color balance. The basic theme is something like: “true reality vs familiar illusion”.

But in Matrix 4, the “human world” of 2020 San Francisco is cartoonishly oversaturated — the bright colors symbolize how the matrix has been redone as a narrative-friendly dreamworld. Matrix 4 pretends to be about the original theme of bravely choosing truth over lies, but secretly it is about choosing the colorful emotional drama of human feelings and narrative over the boring technicalities of realism.

A three-act descent into feelings-world.

Matrix 4 is kind of a three part movie:

The first part of the movie is a twisty and disorienting story about philosophical questions and cultural criticism. Neo is struggling to tell what’s real — he can’t decide whether to believe he’s trapped in the matrix-simulation or believe he’s a game designer struggling with severe mental illness. (This part of the movie also includes a lot of funny, meta commentary about videogames, sequels, and the fact that they’re making yet another Matrix movie.) Personally this was my favorite part of the movie, since I am always a sucker for intellectual ideas and weird experimental forms of media. The portrayal of Neo not knowing what’s real was powerful and sympathetic, and the complicated stream of references to / commentary on the original movie was interesting to follow.
Then, the middle part of the movie contains a lot of gun-fighting action scenes and a lot of detailed lore about what happened next in the fictional universe of the Matrix trilogy — Zion is now a much bigger city called Io, the machines are fighting each other and also some machines are friends with the humans, the matrix-simulation has been reconfigured to be a feelings-based dreamworld instead of a realistic simulation. We catch up with all the minor characters from the original Matrix movies (Agent Smith, Morpheus, the french guy, the old lady leader of the human city). This part of the movie was kind of like reading a wikipedia page about The Matrix Expanded Universe.
The end of the movie is mostly the relationship between Neo and Trinity, plus some other character relationships. The movie becomes more and more an attempt to build up key characters (Agent Smith, Neo and Trinity, the therapist) as some kind of mytho-poetic archetypes locked in a magical drama of dueling personalities. This stuff doesn’t make much sense even in the fictional lore of The Matrix Expanded Universe — apparently Neo and Trinity’s relationship is so strong that it is literally producing huge amounts of electrical current for the machines?? But everyone likes Neo and Trinity, so narratively it makes sense for the story to revolve around them, lore be dammed.

Ostensibly, the plot of The Matrix 4 is about Neo breaking out of a prison of illusion and rediscovering the true reality. But the structure of the movie is the opposite of this! It starts out asking real-world philosophical questions and agonizing over issues of reality, authenticity, and truth. But over time, the movie stops worrying about what’s really real, and instead descends into increasingly fictional themes and decreasingly coherent plot events — an enthusiastic embrace of feelings-world.

Neo is tired of stressing over what’s real — blue pill, please!

Why would anyone take the blue pill, when the red pill is the obviously “correct” choice almost by definition? Neo’s story shows us why.

Neo himself is understandably so confused and conflicted about what’s real that he’s become desensitized to the distinction between reality and fiction. He’s realized that the much-hyped metaphysical distinction between the “real” physical universe of the machines versus the “illusory” matrix-simulation universe (or the “real” universe of 2020 San Francisco versus the “illusory” imaginary universe of mental illness) is an impossibly difficult question with little impact on his direct experience of life. Like all conscious beings, his only interaction with the universe is via experiences and feelings in his brain. Ultimately, says Matrix 4, the only thing that matters is feelings, whether that means going off your meds and accepting psychosis as preferable to your boring day-job, or breaking out of the matrix-simulation to be with your true love Trinity.

Imagine that Neo is actually just a game designer in San Francisco, and all his ideas about the matrix-simulation are actually just psychotic delusion and escapist fantasy. The real world of San Francisco is samey, boring, annoying, and meaningless. He’s aging and friendless; a potential romance with Tiffany from the coffeeshop is torpedoed by the tedious technicality of her nagging family.

By contrast, in the world of his psychotic delusions he’s the superhero savior of mankind; he gets to fly around and fight people while making new friends and participating in exciting high-stakes missions.

At the very end of the movie, Neo and Trinity have already resolved the main plot stakes, but they decide to show up at the therapist’s house for a gratuitous, emotionally satisfying beatdown of the therapist. There’s no lore reason for them to do this — it’s all about the feelings. To make the beatdown even more satisfying for Neo and Trinity, the therapist (who previously used the nonaggressive, woke language of psychology) takes a bizarre and completely out-of-the-blue turn to become a cartoonishly raging sexist. After their Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy concludes, they literally fly through the air together (dressed nostalgically in their old 90s-cyberpunk costumes) on their way to “paint the sky with rainbows”.

…And you’re telling me this supposed to be a movie about the unrelenting search for truth?? Rejecting pleasant lies and breaking through to a more authentic reality, embracing the cold hard facts even if we don’t like what we find?

No way. This is literally a movie about the opposite: it’s about how facts are boring and overrated, and it’s better to just rock out and do your own thing, videogame style. It’s about the triumph of feelings over reality.

Matrix 4 is fake… but is it gay?

So, the Matrix 4 is a celebration of taking the blue pill, choosing feelings over facts. Here’s my big question: is Lana Wachowski making a cynical ironic statement about other people, a criticism of moviegoers who just want soap-opera drama? Or is Lana genuinely embracing this as a personal philosophy? (Remember: most likely neither of these are true, and I’m just reading too much into a slightly incoherent movie. But this is Overthinking It, where it’s more fun to assume that absolutely everything is the result of deliberate authorial intent, so – onwards!)

Reasons why it might be a cynical criticism:

It fits in with the complaints about Hollywood sequels. Moviegoers don’t want strange sci-fi or heady philosophical themes, they want superheroes and relationship drama. Fiction is more compelling than reality, and for most people it’s more fun to watch fan-favorite characters beat up sexist villains than to sit through realistic but tedious social commentary about Hollywood’s lack of creativity.
If the plot of the movie is that secretly Neo is just a game designer going off his meds and having a psychotic break, then it would be weird for the movie to endorse this as a good thing.
In general across all movies and stories, embracing truth is usually portrayed as the brave and correct choice whenever the dichotomy of facts vs feelings explicitly comes up. (Although movies and stories are also inherently feelings-centered, with realism a side-show.)

Reasons why it might be a genuine endorsement:

Lana clearly really loves bringing back the fan favorite characters, turning away from initial philosophical sci-fi premise towards mytho-poetic archetypes and the Neo/Trinity romance. Matrix 2 & 3 were already all about this! She’s not being dragged kicking and screaming by Warner Brothers into making a Neo-Trinity romance instead of a realistic sci-fi; surely this is what she wants to do!
It would arguably work better with the LGBT themes of the movie?? These days, to be “red-pilled” implies a belligerently right-wing ideology of “facts over feelings”¹, believing that “transgender is a mental illness”, mocking the subjective nature of gender identity with memes like “i identify as an attack helicopter”, etc. Read in this context, Matrix 4 doesn’t seem to be doing the expected thing and pushing back on the right-wing ideology to reclaim redpilled “reality” as trans territory. Instead, the movie is arguing that we have the freedom to do what we want and follow our feelings; individual self-expression is more important than biology facts which aren’t actually that relevant to how we decide to live our lives. ² I am usually a hardcore supporter of “unrelenting search for truth”, and it probably shows in this essay, but in the personal domain of self-expression and sexuality where there is no real fact of the matter, I think I mostly agree with Lana’s bluepill philosophy.
Note that Bugs has blue hair in the matrix-simulation, potentially aligning her with team blue-pill. (She could just as easily have had red, purple, or green hair!) The fact that she has dyed hair in the matrix-simulation but not in the real world of the machines also emphasizes the idea that the matrix-simulation is a playground where you can express yourself, like an avatar in a VR metaverse.
It would make more sense of the several “blue pill or red pill” conversations in the movie, all of which emphasize that it’s a contrived situation presenting a false choice, since the red pill labelled “truth” is definitionally correct. You shouldn’t feel like a brave unique rebel for taking the red pill — taking the red pill is literally what everybody does, like conformist sheeple following orders! Maybe, Matrix 4 secretly implies, the real bravery is refusing to be hoodwinked by this contrived philosophical situation, realizing that “truth” doesn’t exist, and embracing the subjectivity of feelings-world?

Personally, I suppose I interpret the movie’s blue-pill advocacy as a mix of both cynical and genuine. Both the complaints about Hollywood shallowness and the narrative of LGBT liberation seem genuinely felt. But surely the movie can’t be saying both “facts over feelings” and “feelings over facts” at the same time! In the end, I think Matrix 4 is giving us a synthesis that goes something like this:

Reality is overrated, since ultimately the only thing that really matters is feelings and experiences in the mind. Therefore, give up on the quest to find the authentic true ultimate reality, which is probably impossible and definitely pointless! Instead, your mission is to make sure that the frame through which you see and interact with the world is your OWN frame, made by you to your own liking, and you’re doing what YOU want. Don’t be a slave following other people’s equally artificial rules and seeing the world through their forced perspective. Yes, wake up sheeple. But instead of waking up from illusion to truth (which is impossible/meaningless), wake up from the slavery of other people’s expectations and roles to the freedom of original self-expression.

The fact that its adherents usually fail to live up to their slogan goes without saying. ↩︎
Am I being anti-trans by saying this? I don’t think so, although I’m no expert. I certainly don’t mean to cause offense to anyone, so forgive me my trespasses. But to me, it has always seemed strange and unnecessary for people to die on the hill of proving that every bit of modern trans doctrine was grounded in biological fact or universal psychological truth — fetal testosterone ratios and brain development differences and all that. Isn’t the whole fun of modern sex-positive liberalism the idea that you can do what you want to do and identify as however you want to see yourself? It seems to me that trans doctrine is already moving in this more fluid direction — transness will be seen less as an ultimate metaphysical question about who you “really are”, and increasingly as one part of a romantic/sexual landscape of personal interests and preferences. It will be just like how we treat people’s sexuality, kinks, unusual enthusiasm for princess imagery, etc, more as personality traits than fundamental categories of human. I think this is possibly the direction that Lana is trying to push the conversation with this movie. ↩︎

Longtermism in 1888: fermi estimate of Heaven's size

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

While investigating a box of old family letters over thanksgiving, I unexpectedly came across a bizarre Christian-longtermist argument about the future duration of human civilization. The brief letter describes a calculation made by my great-great-grandfather William Quinn in 1888, although it reads more like something out of a Ted Chiang science-fiction anthology. It’s hard to tell if the estimate is serious — it was probably made with at least some of the same joking spirit as the modern-day thermodynamics story about why “heaven is hotter than hell”. I am posting it here for your enjoyment and consideration – I’m sure that my great-great grandfather would have been very pleased to know that its ideas would be shared, one hundred and thirty-three years later, among a community of like-minded philosophers and thinkers.

The Calculation

My great-great grandfather starts from a line in Revelations that purports to give the volume of heaven (12,000 furlongs in every direction, which comes out to about fourteen quintillion cubic meters), then walks through a familiar fermi-estimate style of reasoning: if 25% of the volume is devoted to habitable rooms (as opposed to roads, palaces, gardens, etc), and if rooms are a plausible size, then there will be about 1.2∗10²⁰ total rooms in heaven.

My ancestor then employs an extremely dubious approximation of human population growth — “we will suppose the world did and always will contain nine hundred million inhabitants”. (Really he ought to have known better, considering that he and his wife had a preposterous eleven children of their own!) Since generations are about 30 years apart, this gets you about three billion lives per century.

Finally, he compares the size of heaven to the population of earth. Heaven seems quite capacious — even if there were a hundred other worlds like ours (other planets, perhaps) all feeding into the same Heaven, and even if all these civilizations lasted one million years in duration, there would still be enough space for each inhabitant of Heaven to enjoy a personal mansion of over 100 rooms.

Here is a picture of the letter as I found it last month:

Reflections

Besides my surprise at seeing such a wild metaphysical estimate coming out of rural 1880s Louisiana, this gave me a moment of interesting perspective about similar efforts at long-term predictions made today. I find it inspiring and heartwarming to think that humans have always asked big philosophical questions of the sort that concern longtermist and utilitarian philosophies. But of course, it also gives me pause that the proposed answers to such questions have often been wildly wrong and hopelessly confused. With the progress of science and civilization, we certainly see much farther now than most of our great-great-grandfathers did, but our own ideas about the far future might still end up looking just as silly when compared to however reality actually turns out.

A commenter at the EA Forum also observes:

He as well as any readers of this letter would have greatly benefited from scientific notation! That makes me wonder what terrible inefficiencies in communication and encoding / expressing ideas we’re suffering from today, without having any inkling that things could be better…

Finally, the letter (joking as it may be), also strikes me as perhaps reflecting the Christian attitude, described in this 80,000 Hours episode, that human extinction was impossible for various reasons — because God had promised not to destroy the world, or because mere mankind could never possess for itself the godlike power to destroy the world, or because specific future events had been promised to occur (how could Christ fulfill his promise of return if there was only a dead wasteland to return to?), or as here because Heaven was so capacious that it implied a million-year lifetime for civilization. Their confidence in Christian civilization’s “existential security” makes for a grim contrast with our own century, and the idea that we are standing at the precipice of a risky “time of perils”.

Short Story: The Toba Supervolcanic Eruption

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum. This story was submitted to that forum’s Creative Writing Contest, and won the three thousand dollar Creative Nonfiction prize! See the other winners & runners-up here.

A Tenuous Thread

During the time from one million to a half-million years ago, we know from genetic evidence, the total population of humanity was not much more than 50,000 individuals alive at a single time.¹ This is about equivalent to the population of the remote, icy wasteland known as Greenland.

But this thin thread of humanity wasn’t all packed together on an island. Instead, they were speckled across a vast wild area in eastern Africa, as isolated bands and villages of perhaps a few dozen people. Imagine never meeting more than a hundred people in your entire life — and imagine that if you did, you’d have met a sizeable fraction of the entire human population of the Earth.

They lived precariously — hunter-gatherers in a world of brutal subsistence poverty, at the mercy of the climate and the migrations of animals. There were often good times, and the people were happy. But if the rains did not come, entire communities might be wiped off the map by starvation. And humanity was far from united in its struggle against the elements; violence was perhaps more common back then than in our own time. Opposed bands of humans must have often fought and raided each other. Looking back, we can feel the absurdity of it! Just ten thousand people on the whole planet, but nevertheless: “this valley ain’t big enough for the two of us”. But those were desperate times. When food was scarce, often it really must have been us-or-them.

Incredibly, humanity’s population numbers seesawed back and forth around this terrifyingly low average for literally thousands of generations. The story of these times is a tightrope walk fifty times longer than all of recorded history, during which our species neither crashed to extinction nor took off in the flowering of exploration and growth that would come later. Instead, it took every exertion of effort merely to maintain a ragged toehold on the edge of existence.

These struggling people, alone on the wild savannah, could never have imagined the fantastical, glittering civilization that hung in the balance of their every action. Imagine it like a ghostly presence of all the Earth’s greatest metropolises: invisible towers and houses and roads and churches and bridges hanging all about the world like a mirage. Imagine it flickering brighter or dimmer with each new twist in the uncertain prospects of this odd, struggling species out in the grasslands. With every momentary, hard-won advantage in the struggle for life, things in the savannah would get just a little bit more stable and prosperous, and that fantastic ghostly vision would come just a little closer. Hanging gardens of Babylon materializing in a shimmer of desert air; all the roads to Rome tracing secret paths under the wild forests of Europe like the roots of a great tree. Those ancient humans’ actions were already a dire game of life and death. But in the uncertain flickering of this utopian vision, we see how the stakes of their lives were impossibly greater than they could have ever known.

A Time of Perils

Our modern genetic tools can’t detect population bottlenecks shorter than a few generations, which impedes our ability to study disasters and collapses followed by a quick bounce back.² But at the nadir of the human population curves, as humans struggled through an intense Ice Age around seventy-five thousand years ago, humanity was dealt a blow by the largest natural disaster of the last million years. The detonation of the Lake Toba Supervolcano released more than ten times the energy of the largest volcanic eruption in the history of recorded civilization, and more than forty times the energy of the largest hydrogen bomb ever constructed by mankind. The unimaginable quantity of ash it launched into the high atmosphere caused an instant crash in global average temperatures of around six degrees Celsius — this is the same magnitude as the absolute worst-case scenarios of climate change by 2100, but with its onset compressed into a single year. Rainfall around the entire world fell by a quarter.

The trees and grasses of the savannah must have given way to a withered wasteland. Streams and other drinking-places would’ve dried to dust. For five years or more, the ash would’ve circulated in the atmosphere, shrouding the earth. The feebler sunlight that managed to filter through this layer would’ve taken on a smoky, reddish-orange glare.

Imagine the devastation this would’ve brought to a fledgling primate species already barely hanging on to their place on the savannah. Imagine wandering through barren plains searching for sustenance. There has been practically no rain all year, it is now the coldest winter you have ever known, and you have had to abandon your homelands to make a desperate gamble that something better waits beyond the horizon. As you walk, ashy dust specks drift in the air, and — with the ozone layer badly damaged by aftereffects of the eruption³ — a toxic sun stabs into you, burning your raw skin and causing painful damage to your eyes.

In the years after the eruption, famine would have swept across the terrain like a dry wind. With each life expired, the thread of the human story frays a little more. Many must have given up hope for survival.

As they do, the ghostly skyscrapers of Shanghai and London dissolve into empty sky. What seemed like a vision of great ships carrying food and goods across oceans, fades into the shadows of passing clouds, a trick of the waves and the light. The voices of billions of unborn future generations are urging on our struggling wanderer, prayers in countless languages are seeking blessings of safe passage for them. Survive this ordeal, and someday the countless flowers of humanity’s latent potential will bloom: all the richness of earth’s cultures and peoples hang in the balance, the thousand-year histories of art and exploration and simple joy at the vivid experience of being alive. All the hopes of history are pinned on this: our wanderer must find a way. Death now would be death eternal — an empty universe, the vision of glittering city lights fallen away forever into the blackness of night.

A Look in The Mirror

Our species survived that time of perils. All of us owe our lives to the suffering and ingenuity and dedication of ancient humans whose names we’ll never know, who persevered even when frightened and hungry and confused, even when all seemed lost. The impossible dazzling vision has manifested: for every individual human that struggled through the Toba catastrophe, there are almost a million people alive today. And how well they live! They inhabit every corner of the earth, travelling swiftly between distant lands as they conduct every kind of business. Many of them live fantastically long lives: sixty, eighty, over a hundred years! They have uncovered countless of the deepest secrets of nature, which they use to create technological magic that ends disease, eliminates labor, and conveys them infinite knowledge on every subject. To the humans of the ancient savannah, our modern world is an age of miracle and wonder beyond imagining.

But just as the past is long, so too is our own future. After surveying the tenuous path that humanity has taken to reach this point, we must now turn around and ask ourselves what lies ahead. What unseen utopias shimmer in the air above our heads? Can we perceive the soaring towers, the lush gardens, and other astonishing artforms, constantly flickering with the uncertainty of all future hopes? Perhaps we can make out glittering lights on the moon and planets. Maybe even trails of points in the sky, like cars on nighttime highways, caravanning to distant stars. Feel the bustle as people of every future nation and culture come and go. Inevitably, it would be a diversity and richness so much greater than the peoples of earth today — what is it like when they laugh, or cry, or gossip among friends? What do they still wonder about, even with all their godlike knowledge?

Just as it was for our ancient wanderer seventy-five thousand years ago, the latent potential of humanity is still unimaginably vast and dazzling for anyone living today. But it is also uncertain, for we today are also living in a time of perils.

This time, we’re strong enough to survive a supervolcanic eruption⁴, or most else that nature might throw at us. But the danger is actually greater than ever, and it comes primarily from ourselves. Will our species find ways to cooperate and cool the tensions of rival nations, escaping destruction wrought by terrifying weapons of war? As we grow and learn, will we be wise enough to foresee dangers posed by new technologies, whose consequences are by nature unpredictable? Wandering through the uncertainty of unfolding events, how will humanity maintain sufficient control over our common destiny, ensuring we can steer towards the distant light of that optimistic vision?

With every twist and turn of fate, a grand future flickers in limbo. Listen to the rustling of the wind — can you make out faint trillions of voices, cheering you on, crossing their fingers that you’ll help bring substance to the bright, invisible future all around you?

Effective Altruism is a movement devoted to studying, prioritizing, and solving humanity’s most pressing problems, including extinction risks from both natural sources (like supervolcanoes and asteroids) and from ourselves (like nuclear war, pandemics, or unaligned artificial intelligence). To learn more about the study of “existential risks” and what you can do to help civilization overcome them, you can:

Explore this list of what experts consider some of the world’s biggest risks. It’s full of links to pages describing each problem in more detail and explaining how, depending on your personal skills and background, you could use your career to work on solutions.
Read “The Precipice”, a fascinating book by oxford philosopher Toby Ord which summarizes the state of our scientific understanding of different risks and investigates potential solutions.
Listen to the 10-episode podcast course “Effective Altruism: An Introduction”, which explores the detailed philosophy behind the quest to do as much good for the world as possible, and interviews leading philanthropists giving away billions of dollars to EA causes.

Genetic studies identify a population bottleneck with an “effective population” of 10,000, but this is a mathematical abstraction which translates into a real-life “census population” of around 50,000. For more detail on how ancient populations can be inferred from genetics, see this paper. ↩︎
See this recent paper for sophisticated measurements of the upper and lower bounds we can put on population bottlenecks like the Toba eruption, given the information we have available. ↩︎
This paper simulates the eruption’s effects on the ozone layer, in addition to providing an up-to-date consensus description of the overall climate consequences of the disaster. ↩︎
Well… probably. ↩︎

Existential Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Summary: I analyze an essay by Peter Thiel, in which he explains:

How markets are incentivized to ignore the risk of civilizational collapse.
How this introduces distortions in both market prices and our thinking.
How to attempt to correct for these distortions using “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”
A big-picture view of financial history as a single “Great Boom” built on the uncertain hope that capitalist civilization will ultimately be proven viable and achieve existential security.

I then add my own musings about how these ideas might usefully connect with the goals of longtermist Effective Altruism.

EA Portfolio Design: An Unsolved Problem Way Over My Head

Effective altruists have discussed whether EA values and beliefs should affect how we invest the wealth that we eventually plan to donate:

For altruistic donations, the utility of money is roughly linear with increasing wealth, rather than having diminishing returns like with increasing personal wealth. This probably means that we should be willing to use more leverage and invest in a higher-risk, higher-expected-return portfolio?
Popular types of “socially-responsible investing” are sadly not very effective by EA lights, but this could be changed. Conversely, divestment is often considered to be an ineffective strategy, but done in the right way perhaps it could work well.
Or perhaps we should do the opposite, using the logic of “mission hedging” to investing in bad things so we have more money to deploy in worlds where bad things grow larger. (More details on mission hedging here.)
Perhaps we could pursue a variant of mission hedging that is less related to divestment and “sin funds” and more based on prediction-market hedging of specific events, like how a presidential election might change the tractability of a certain cause.
There is a rich discussion around the idea of “patient philanthropy” or “investing to give”. Investing money now and waiting to spend it later might be a good idea simply because of the growth rate of the economy, or because it allows us to wait and identify better opportunities for impact later, or to ensure the long-term health and viability of the EA movement, or perhaps even because having a store of capital around means that we can employ some of the other do-gooder financial schemes on this list! (See a detailed report on patient philanthropy here.)
If we believe that transformative AI technology could be right around the corner, perhaps (in addition to freaking out) we should find some way to invest in the coming market foom.

I consider myself reasonably savvy about financial topics, but I would be in way over my head if I tried to synthesize all these competing claims and produce the One True EA Portfolio Theory.

However, I think it’s an important unsolved problem in EA where further progress could likely be made, and thus should be taken very seriously. To some extent, the entire concept of longtermist EA is driven by a financial/values “edge” of buying the far future cheap because other people don’t care as much about the far future. In this and other ways, EAs (including non-longtermists who care more about suffering of distant beings than most folks, and to a lesser extent rationalists more broadly who have unique beliefs about AI, etc) have different beliefs and different priorities than the typical investor, which should present many opportunities to bet on those beliefs and arbitrage the difference in values.

(PSA: For anyone reading who is totally new to finance & investing topics, stop reading this post and instead read up on the basics — here is a helpful, charismatic, rationalist introduction to the logic of index investing, and here is a handy reddit-consensus guide to personal finance. The couple hours I spent first reading about index investing and making the effort to get my finances in order have been some of the highest-value hours of my life, since they led directly to getting higher returns and paying lower fees on my entire life’s savings.)

Reading the Thiel-Leaves of “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”

Instead of synthesizing any of the above claims, I am here merely to throw another wild idea into the mix!! In this post, I present my interpretation Peter Thiel’s overall financial strategy, an investment thesis grounded in ideas like X-risk and the anthropic principle, based on what he calls “the optimistic thought experiment” in his 2008 essay of the same name.

Thiel’s writing style is entertaining, but also cryptic and postmodern. He sometimes meanders around his real point, interleaving the chain of rational argument with jokes, straussian literary/religious allusions, and memorable bits of trivia from the history of finance. I’ll try to extract the most relevant bits and clarify when necessary.

We face significant X-risk.

After kicking things off with some characteristic Christian allegory, Thiel introduces his concern about anthropogenic existential risk to civilization:

Beginning with the Great War in 1914, and accelerating after 1945, there has re-emerged an apocalyptic dimension to the modern world… Will it be an environmental catastrophe like runaway global warming, or will it be murderous robots, Ebola viruses genetically recombined with smallpox, nanotech devices that dissolve the living world into a gray goo, or the spread of miniature nuclear bombs in terrorist briefcases? Even if it is not yet possible for humans to destroy the whole world, on current trends it might just be a matter of time. The relentless proliferation of nuclear weapons remains the most obvious case in point… We know that there exists some point [as more and more countries acquire weapons] beyond which there is no stable equilibrium and where there will be a nuclear Armageddon.

Thiel contrasts these looming dangers with the “eerily complacent” nature of the stock market, which aside from occasional minor corrections seems to march inexorably upwards unperturbed by these existential threats. “The news and business sections [of the newspaper] seem to inhabit different worlds.” If Thiel (and effective altruists) are correct to think that existential risk is sizeable — perhaps a 1-in-6 chance over the next century! — then why do markets seem so exuberant?

Anthropic logic means markets ignore the risk.

Thiel’s answer is twofold:

First, the more pedestrian fact that pessimistic voices are ignored as they are drained of capital during long bull runs in the markets: perma-bear doomsayers have simply been “wrong for too long”, and consequently “they have lost most of their money and have no significant capital left to invest in anything”.

Second, and this is the main point that both Thiel and I am focusing on: Thiel reasons that markets are bound by their incentives to ignore existential risk, since there is no way to win a bet that the world will end and also successfully redeem your winnings afterwards.

Apocalyptic thinking appears to have no place in the world of money. For if the doomsday predictions are fulfilled and the world does come to an end, then all the money in the world — even if it be in the form of gold coins or pieces of silver, stored in a locked chest in the most remote corner of the planet — would prove of no value, because there would be nothing left to buy or sell. Apocalyptic investors will miss great opportunities if there is no apocalypse, but ultimately they will end up with nothing when the apocalypse arrives. Heads or tails, they lose. …A mutual fund manager might not benefit from reflecting about the danger of thermonuclear war, since in that future world there would be no mutual funds and no mutual fund managers left. Because it is not profitable to think about one ’s death, it is more useful to act as though one will live forever.

Since it is not profitable to contemplate the end of civilization, this distorts market prices. Instead of telling us about the objective probabilities of how things will play out, prices are based on probabilities adjusted by the anthropic logic of ignoring doomed scenarios:

Let us assume that, in the event of [the project of civilization being broadly successful], a given business would be worth $ 100/share, but that there is only an intermediate chance (say 1:10) of that successful outcome. The other case is too terrible to consider. Theoretically, the share should be worth $ 10, but in every world where investors survive, it will be worth $100. Would it make sense to pay more than $10, and indeed any price up to $100? Whether in hope or desperation, the perceived lack of alternatives may push valuations to much greater extremes than in nonapocalyptic times.

This logic is essentially the real-world, financial version of the anthropic reasoning one encounters in things like the “quantum suicide” thought experiment or stories involving Russian Roulette. But lest you think that Thiel has already devolved into mad sci-fi ramblings, this is already a well-known phenomenon on prediction markets — metaculus users betting on catastrophic outcomes will never get their points, since the metaculus website would surely go down in any major nuclear exchange. More pedestrian questions, like “Will Metaculus still exist in 2030?” naturally raise similar issues. On a niche website run by fake internet points, it is enough to add the disclaimer “players are urged to predict in good faith”. But in real financial markets full of rational actors following incentives, we can’t use that trick.

What are markets ignoring? Not just X-risk, but anything that ends capitalism.

Importantly for all of this analysis (and in a marked divergence from the concerns of longtermist EAs), Thiel’s apocalypse doesn’t have to be literal extinction — for investment purposes, any catastrophe sufficient to end the global financial system amounts to the same thing.

From the point of view of an investor, one may define such a “secular apocalypse” as a world where capitalism fails. Therefore, the secular apocalypse would encompass not only catastrophic futures in which humanity completely self-destructs (most likely through a runaway technological disaster), but also include a range of other scenarios in which free markets cease to function, such as a series of wars and crises so disruptive as to drive the developed world towards fascism, anarchy, or both.

“Capitalism” has lots of different connotations for different people, so here’s my take on what it would mean to find ourselves in “a world where capitalism fails”:

Much of our activity (not just financial, but also cultural, institutional, etc) is motivated by desire to influence the future, and much of the meaning in our lives comes from the marks we hope to make on the world. To function, the financial system (and broader society) requires stability through time, giving people faith that efforts will not be in vain and promises will be repaid, and essentially allowing dealmaking to create chains of obligation and investment that bind together the past and future. But in a large enough crisis or transformation, those chains linking the past and future could be broken — reputations would be betrayed, debts would go unpaid¹, existing physical wealth would belong to whoever could grab it and hold onto it, and the value of all the past’s systems of promises and obligations would crash to zero.

Besides the spectrum from full-on civilizational collapse to merely financial collapse, the world could be transformed in numerous other ways that would suffice to “end capitalism” along the way — we could fall into a stable dystopia such as a worldwide totalitarian government, or conversely our world could undergo a positive transformation that nevertheless breaks the chain of promises & obligations of the current capitalist system (like a sudden takeover by an aligned AI, or a worldwide communist-style revolution to a totally new form of utopian government). Markets ignore all of these scenarios, since in all of them financial investments made today would be zeroed out by transformative change.

What are markets hoping for?

So, markets are ignoring the risks of civilizational (and merely financial) collapse. But what is the good outcome that markets are hoping for? Thiel calls it “globalization”, but I find this a confusing and complicated term given its specific associations with trade and Thiel’s current political positioning as something of an anti-globalist.² Here is what I think Thiel is gesturing at…

As technology progresses, the fates of all the different parts of the world become more correlated with each other. This happens for many reasons — partly because countries trade more with each other (traditional “globalization”), but also because countries are more powerful and missiles can now fly all the way around the world (the idea of a “World War” was impossible before the 20th century), and also because increasingly many technologies (like AI or biotech) will have a transformative impact on all of humanity no matter where they are first invented. You can see how Thiel uses the term “globalization” to refer to this increasing correlation:

“Globalization” means a breaking down of barriers between nations; an increase in travel and knowledge about other countries; an increase of trade and competition among and between the peoples of the world, to the point where there is a more or less level playing field in the entire world; and the death of all cultures, in the sense of robust systems that exclude part of humanity. On the level of economics, it means a global marketplace; and on the level of politics, it means the ascension of transnational elites and organizations, at the expense of all localized countries and governments.

This leads to the Effective Altruist idea of the “hinge of history” or “the precipice” — unlike in the past when disasters and civilizational collapses were always local and limited, in the modern day the fates of all the different peoples of the earth are tightly bound together, creating a time of heightened existential risk:

By definition, the apocalypse would be worldwide in extent. For this reason, the point of departure for our thought experiment centers on the future of worldwide events — that is, on the future of globalization. In this, we are guided by the hope that the right sort of globalization might prevent the apocalypse and give us peace in our time.

Markets, then, are hoping for a twofold miracle:

First, the financial aspect, that humanity’s future arrives in a continuous, nondestructive way, such that the system of debts and obligations of capitalism continues and is never betrayed (thus our investments today will be worth something, and won’t just be expropriated or destroyed or etc).
But more importantly, markets are hoping to a positive answer to a great and fundamental question of civilization: will this common project of mankind prove successful, sustainable, and secure? Will we steer around the risks and obstacles in our path to a place of safety, prosperity, freedom, and happiness?

Financial history as a series of connected bubbles all asking the fundamental question of capitalist civilization’s viability.

Thiel sketches an entertaining history of financial bubbles as a history of people getting prematurely hyped about the prospect that the world was finally about to achieve some unified & final system of fully integrated worldwide trade and innovation:

At various points, like a mirage in the desert, the goal of the project has seemed almost within reach, only to fail or be postponed every time, at least thus far. …Almost every financial bubble has involved nothing more nor less than a serious miscalculation about the true probability of successful globalization.

He lists many examples of premature “globalization” bets turned sour:

In France, one had the System of John Law… The System ’s central plan was for the nearly bankrupt kingdom to achieve solvency by securitizing its debts through the newly chartered Mississippi Company, whose newly issued paper currency would be backed by the future proceeds from the New World. Speculation reached fevered proportions… at the height of the boom, the value of the Company approached the value of France itself. The key turning point occurred as investors realized that globalization would be much harder and take much longer: In the year 1720, the entire Louisiana Territory had a population of a few thousand Frenchmen, mostly criminal types… In the minds of the speculators, one could perceive a future capitalist paradise even though at the time there existed only a vast wild land inhabited by wild and savage men; as the bubble receded, that great vision of the future seemed to be but a dream. France’s finances never recovered.

The British Empire justified its existence because it guaranteed a sphere within which free trade would take place among the nations of the world. Because trade and commerce occurred at sea, Britain would remain the leading power so long as it ruled the sea. …The financial mania of 1720 centered on the South Sea Company, which proposed to open the South Seas (and all the great wealth therein) to trade with Britain. By trading with the opposite pole of the globe, the British empire of commerce would become universal… [Then everything gets hyped to the moon, and then it all turns out to be a giant scam.] The British stock market did not recover its level of 1720 until 1815, when the victory at Waterloo promised a less divided world for the nineteenth century.”

In the years that preceded 1914, the financial boom centered on the economic development of far-away places, most notably Russia, the great power whose peaceful integration into Europe would have enabled a more stable twentieth century.

In the case of Japan… the bubble of the late 1980s took off as people began to believe that Japan Inc. might actually run the entire planet. Management textbooks declared that the Japanese corporate model represented a sort of Hegelian final synthesis for harmonious labor-management relations; because no better model existed, Japanese corporatism represented the end of history. Zaitech financial engineering, under the auspices of the omniscient Ministry of International Trade and Industry, would do the rest. Only by drawing this extraordinary conclusion could the Nikkei account for almost half the world ’s market capitalization in 1989.

The bubbles he lists represent miscalculations — guesses about the future that turned out to be wrong. But many other bets (for instance, on America, on technology, etc) have paid off… insofar as civilization still seems to have at least a narrow, treacherous path to the stars, that means humanity’s potential has not yet been squandered, and the the optimistic outcome is still in the game. But the fundamental question of civilization’s viability remains the unanswered crux underpinning all our hopes:

All of these bubbles are not truly separate, but instead represent different facets of a single Great Boom of unprecedented size and duration. As with the earlier bubbles of the modern age, the Great Boom has been based on a similar story of globalization, told and retold in different ways — and so we have seen a rotating series of local booms and bubbles as investors price a globally unified world through the prism of different markets. Nevertheless, this Great Boom is also very different from all previous bubbles. This time around, globalization either will succeed and humanity will achieve a degree of freedom and prosperity that can scarcely be imagined, or globalization will fail and capitalism or even humanity itself may come to an end. The real alternative to good globalization is world war. And because of the nature of today ’s technology, such a war would be apocalyptic in the twenty-first century. Because there is not much time left, the Great Boom, taken as a whole, either is not a bubble at all, or it is the final and greatest bubble in history.

Takeaways and Musings

Use the “Optimistic Thought Experiment” to invest in a smarter way than just ignoring the risks.

“It is not profitable to think of one’s own death”, but most people are not doing lots of complicated anthropic reasoning in their head. Instead, they’re picking up the successful strategy of “ignoring existential risk” from the general cultural vibe. The most straightforward way to ignore X-risk is to assume that the risk is extremely improbable, so that’s what most people do. But, Thiel says, just blindly assuming away the risk can’t be the best solution:

Such a narrowing of one’s horizon cannot, however, be the last word. After all, there exists some connection between the real world of events, on the one hand, and the virtual world of finance, on the other. It would be an abdication not to wrestle with the central question of our age: How should the risk of a comprehensive collapse of the world economic and political system factor into one’s decisions?

If we are instead clear-eyed about the likelihood of catastrophic scenarios, we can do better than the blind-faith approach by performing the anthropic reasoning intentionally instead of unconsciously/emotionally:

What must happen for there to be no secular apocalypse — for what one might call the “optimistic” version of the future to unfold? And furthermore, which sectors will do well — surprisingly well, in fact — if the world more or less stays intact, even if there are some major bumps and dislocations along the way? Any investor who ignores the apocalyptic dimension of the modern world also will underestimate the strangeness of a twenty-first century in which there is no secular apocalypse. If one does not think about forest fires, then one does not fully understand the teleology of each tree — and one badly will undervalue those trees that are immune to all but the greatest of fires. Even in our time of troubled confusion, there exists a chance that some things will work out immeasurably better than most believe possible.

Thiel says that the market is underrating the true threat of catastrophic risks, but therefore ALSO underrating the necessary strangeness of the small sliver of worlds where everything goes right. Therefore, try hard to imagine a world with a successful outcome — “the optimistic thought experiment”. If catastrophic risk is actually substantial, then a world capable of navigating those obstacles will not be an ordinary business-as-usual world, but will be a strange world in which many things go right. Invest in these things, the underrated pieces of technology and government and culture and etc that have to happen if the world is to NOT end.

For example, an ordinary investor and a Thielian investor might both agree that a certain vaccine technology would come in super-handy during a catastrophic pandemic, but the ordinary investor might have an irrationally low estimate of whether a pandemic will occur over the next century. The Thielian investor still performs the anthropic reasoning of ignoring the worlds in which civilization collapses entirely, but they do so in a clear-eyed way that acknowledges the existence of pandemic risks, and therefore allows them to recognize the value of the vaccine technology.

A few caveats for any EAs hoping to incorporate this idea into their investment thesis:

Thiel’s thesis doesn’t make as much sense as literal investment advice if you think apocalyptic chances are genuinely low. Even a 2% risk of extinction or civilizational collapse this century is terrifying, and obviously justifies massive civilizational effort to mitigate, including an EA movement that should rightfully be thousands of times larger than it is today. But I’m not sure that a 2% risk of collapse would cause enough huge distortions in the overall market, or whether Thiel’s edge only makes sense once you think catastrophe is, say, more than 10% likely within one’s lifetime.
As described earlier, the market is equally incentivized to ignore extinction risks, civilizational collapse risks, and the mere failure of capitalism. This pushes it apart from the concerns of longtermist EA, which cares heavily about extinction above and beyond mere temporary collapse. Thiel himself is not a selflessly altruistic EA; like many rationalists he is heavily interested in personal survival in addition to the survival of overall human civilization, so it makes sense that relative to an EA he is less concerned about extinction risks (AI, GCBRs) versus more-likely-but-less-deadly catastrophic risks (various more common forms of war and violence).
I’ve been talking about investing assets, but the same “Optimistic” analysis can be used to guide where we invest our personal efforts! Thiel’s thought experiment is really just another tool in the toolset of forecaster techniques to help envision coherent futures.

Beyond an investment strategy, of course, the Optimistic Thought Experiment is advice for how to think about the world. The fact that doomsayers have lost their reputations after having been “wrong for too long” and that regardless “it is not profitable to think about one’s death” means that our world’s “apocalyptic” aspect is underestimated, and conventional cultural attitudes towards the subject cannot be trusted. Instead of being blindered by what “seems normal and reasonable”, Thiel admonishes us to think from first-principles about what is truly possible. I obviously appreciate this spirit, which is a core pillar of the rationalist and EA mindset.

Those investors who limit themselves to what seems normal and reasonable in light of human history are unprepared for the age of miracle and wonder in which they now find themselves. The twentieth century was great and terrible, and the twenty-first century promises to be far greater and more terrible. …The limits of a George Soros or a Julian Robertson, much less of an LTCM, can be attributed to a failure of the imagination about the possible trajectories for our world, especially regarding the radically divergent alternatives of total collapse and good globalization.

Can we somehow use market signals to measure the hidden X-risk?

Thiel hints that maybe we can use market information as a way to understand the risk landscape:

If the preceding line of analysis is correct, then the extreme valuations of recent times may be an indirect measure of the narrowness of the path set before us.

Thiel tells a story about how investors might have piled into the dot-com bubble because they saw that internet-fueled growth was the only viable future, even if the internet companies that actually existed at the time were unlikely to succeed.

In 1999 investors would not have risked as much on internet stocks if they still believed that there might be a future anywhere else. Employees of these companies (most of whom also were investors through stock option plans) took even greater risks, often leaving stable but unpromising jobs to gamble their life fortunes. It is often claimed that the mass delusion reached its peak in March 2000; but what if the opposite also were true, and this was in certain respects a peak of clarity? Perhaps with unprecedented clarity, at the market ’s peak investors and employees could see the farthest: They perceived that in the long run the Old Economy was surely doomed and believed that the New Economy, no matter what the risks, represented the only chance.

In other words, many people saw that the valuations of the dot-com companies were absurd, but Thiel’s anthropic analysis claims that there are two sides to every bubble: valuations were only absurd because the only alternatives were much more doomed than commonly supposed. Today, one might tell a similar story about crypto.³

This is interesting, but it’s all very subjective and fuzzy. How could one try to really seriously map out the kinds of extreme risks relevant to EA? Perhaps we could try to compare forecaster/research estimates to market estimates of some value. Ideally, the forecaster estimates would be trying to give us a picture of the objective probability space (no anthropic reasoning), while the markets are giving us the anthropic version of the story. By comparing the two, we could try to measure how much “anthropic pressure” is at work.

For instance, imagine that expert analysis says that AI should be possible to build, but markets seem to say that it’ll never happen and companies based on researching AI will all go bankrupt. This might seem like a hopeful situation — AI is impossible to build, phew, safety worries over! But rational investors should treat those markets as a combined question about (probability that AI is possible to build) * (probability that AI will be aligned), since an unaligned AI is game-over for your portfolio. Thus, this seemingly hopeful indicator might actually be a terrifying sign of “the narrowness of the path set before us”. Perhaps markets believe that alignment is the impossible technical challenge, but anthropic pressure is causing markets to bet it all on the hail-mary prospect that AI is impossible to build in the first place.

This kind of analysis would be very messy in the real world, where the closest thing we have to markets on the feasibility of AGI is the stock price of companies like Google. In the future, prediction markets like Kalshi, Polymarket, and PredictIt will hopefully let us ask more precise questions about future technologies, allowing us to more directly perceive anthropic pressures at work.

Should Thiel’s strategy be modified for the unique needs of EA?

In his essay, Thiel gives several somewhat contradictory examples of what he would consider a good investment by the logic of the Optimistic Thought Experiment. On the one hand, he endorses the idea of (perhaps somewhat fraudulently) selling insurance against catastrophic risk, which is a strategy optimized for the worlds where everything goes absolutely swimmingly:

…Insurance and reinsurance policies for catastrophic global risk. In any world where investors survive, the issuers of these policies are likely to retain a significant portion of the premium — regardless of whether or not the risks were priced correctly ex ante. In this context, it is striking that Warren Buffett, often described as the greatest investor of all time, has shifted the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio from “value” investments… to the global insurance and reinsurance industries (perhaps one of the purest bets on the optimistic thought experiment).

On the other hand, he says that since civilization underestimates risk, it underprices extremely resilient, defensive assets (like, perhaps, fallout bunkers in remote New Zealand wilderness):

If one does not think about forest fires, then one does not fully understand the teleology of each tree — and one badly will undervalue those trees that are immune to all but the greatest of fires.

Thiel’s strategy is framed more around a selfish individual trying to maximize personal return and chances of survival, so maybe a mix of both the above strategies make sense. But the purpose of effective altruism is to use resources to altruistically do something about the risks. For EA, it is not much use to become rich in the most easygoing of “optimistic thought experiment” utopias, since in utopia there are no extinction-level threats left to spend the money on. Surely it would be madness for EAs to simply cross their fingers and bet on worlds where the AI alignment problem handily solves itself, or where US-China relations grow ever-friendlier.

But surely it’s also not worth betting on a complete & certain apocalypse, for the usual anthropic reasons. (An exception might be harm-mitigation groups like ALLFED, which could hope to invest pessimistically, make billions on the eve of a catastrophic war to fund a rapid last-minute scale-up.) Perhaps EAs would be best served by trying to bet on near-apocalypse, or warning-shot catastrophes (like covid-19) which are indicators that we’re living in a world where EA efforts are most relevant? Maybe this leads us to a longtermist version of socially-responsible-investing, where we’re not only donating to and working on but also investing in the technologies and institutions that seem most crucial for navigating the “hinge of history”/“time of perils” successfully. But like I said at the beginning, creating the final EA investment synthesis seems above my pay grade — for more info, see the conversation around “mission hedging” and the other posts I linked at the top.

An interesting real-world example of a financial “secular apocalypse” played out in ancient Greek cities besieged by enemy armies. In order to foment rebellion and conflict inside the city, the invaders (who naturally didn’t care about the city’s existing social order) promised that if they captured the city, they would cancel all debts and free all slaves, starting everyone over again at zero. As a counter-move to retain the loyalty of the citizenry, the leaders of the besieged city were often forced to preemptively give their subjects the same debt forgiveness. ↩︎
“Globalization” is commonly understood to mean increasing interdependence, trade, movement, and economic interdependence between countries, and in my mind it’s particularly associated with the 1980s and 1990s. Thiel is using the word in a broader sense, to mean anything throughout history that increases the centralization or correlation of the different parts of the world. IMO he somewhat motte-and-baileys (or “strategically equivocates”) from there on out… Thiel reasons that a fully globalized/correlated/centralized world would have a single point of failure for worldwide collapse, then he seems to think “therefore the world shouldn’t be globalized (or at least shouldn’t be globalized prematurely). But many of the biggest x-risk dangers (pandemics, AI, nuclear war) aren’t really reduced by de-globalization in the way that financial collapse or risk of worldwide communist revolution might be. In his essay, Thiel acknowledges that “the realistic alternative to globalization is world war”, and mocks the idea of a worldwide anti-globalization movement for being a contradiction in terms. Yet nowadays, 13 years later, Thiel is well-known for being strongly anti-globalist, seeing “one-to-many” process of imitation represented by globalization as being opposed to the “zero-to-one” technological development that can get us out of the Great Stagnation and back to the future. I have difficulty fitting all these parts of Thiel’s philosophy together (what makes globalization trade off against innovation??)… to simplify the task of analyzing this essay, I will simply assume that 2008 Peter Thiel was less nationalistic and more classically libertarian. I will also not attempt to connect any of this essay to the ideas of Rene Girard, although in Thiel’s mind globalization must surely be part of the process of Girardian imitation that supposedly leads to outbursts of violence. ↩︎
Here’s a common and reasonable objection to Bitcoin’s valuation: “What’s to stop some better coin from coming along in the future and replacing all the current coins?” This could be perfectly true, but if investors see the eventual and complete “cryptoization” of the economy as inevitable, then even a slim chance that bitcoin, ethereum, etc maintain their pole positions is worth piling into. More interestingly, this means that high crypto valuations might not be telling us about Bitcoin in particular, but rather about investors’ estimate of the odds of full “cryptoization”. Indeed, 13 years after penning “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”, Thiel seems to be using these same tools of analysis, saying “Surely the fact that it’s at $60,000 is an extremely hopeful sign. …It’s the most honest market we have in the country, and it’s telling us that this decrepit regime is just about to blow up.” ↩︎

Collection of 'Braid' and 'The Witness' interviews, articles, etc.

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Summary: This page collects reference materials and resources that are helpful for understanding aspects of Jonathan Blow’s games. It’s certainly an incomplete list – email me if you find something that I should include! Spoiler warning: both games have major, easily-spoilable elements that are freely discussed in most of the commentary below. If you have yet to play the games, steer clear!

Fan Commentary on The Witness

Electron Dance’s The Unbearable Now: An Interpretation of The Witness is an extremely well-produced, half-hour video that breaks down the game’s relationship to paradox, truth-seeking, meaning, and meaninglessness. This is essential and entertaining (although extremely spoiler-rich) viewing for anyone who’s completed the game.
Naturally, I think my own commentary in the “Examining The Witness” series contains a lot of unique wisdom, although unfortunately those gems are dispersed by the freeform, lets-play pace of my videos. Hop around and check out the highlights!

This reddit post has a good overview of the “VR story” – the witness as an island created as part of a failed experiment to hack consciousness, a purgatory to be repeated over and over until the player reaches an enlightemnent-like realization. Like most players, I don’t love the VR story, but it plays an interesting part as one of several layers in the game’s multiple parallel stories, each of which seems to exist at its own level of “fictionality” – from the real-world story of Thekla managing development, to the sci-fi “VR story” about researching consciousness, to the internal logic of civilization arising on the island.

Interviews & Talks from Developers

An in-depth interview between Jonathan Blow and Brian Moriarty (Creator of the adventure game Trinity and the speaker in “The Secret of Psalm 46”) is one of the most intelligent conversations out there about the game. This is a talk dense with valuable info that fans of the game should definitely watch.
This is a slickly-produced documentary about the history of the development of The Witness, including the origin of the game’s concept.
If you enjoyed my casual, semi-structured, roaming playthrough of the game in “Examining The Witness”, this Giant Bomb interview is similar, but Jonathan Blow himself is the one playing!! The interviewer is also a big fan of the game and asks in-depth questions.
This youtube playlist collects an exhaustive list of all Jonathan Blow’s interviews & talks – even I haven’t seen them all! Topics include The Witness, Braid, and more general game-design principles.
Moriarty also gave an entertaining presentation about The Witness, talking about his experience with the game’s development and other such things. If you enjoyed his presentation The Secret of Psalm 46, you might also be interested in another presentation he gave about videogames, “An Apology for Roger Ebert”.

Luis Antonio, one of the artists who worked on the game (and the developer of his own indie game, 12 Minutes), has gloriously documented his thinking and progress across numerous blog posts full of beautiful shots and a GDC talk.

The official development blog of Witness has some interesting posts.

Music, Art, Primary Sources:

The above spotify playlist, compiled by yours truly, collects:

All the music from Braid’s official soundtrack, including two official remixes that were created as part of the release of the soundtrack CD.
Additional songs by that I used in the creation of “Braid: More Now Than Ever”
A few pieces of music associated with The Witness (trailers, etc)
An assortment of songs (mostly from other games) that I feel have Braid-adjacent themes.

The full english subtitles for ‘The Witness’ can be found here. This helpful list has pictures of every audio log’s location along with a key sentence or two, which can be used in combination with the full subtitles to find any particular log’s transcript.

In the future, I’ll try to compile a list of books and other long-form source materials referenced by or relevant to Braid and The Witness:

Richard Feynman lectures, books & essays…
Resources from the meditation teachers Rupert Spira and Gangaji.
Carl Sagan, Science as a Candle in the Dark (and his television series Cosmos).
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
etc //: # (TODO: pitch my patreon here!!)

Examining 'The Witness'

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Witness is certainly my favorite videogame, perhaps my all-time favorite piece of media. It’s a 3D, first-person exploration game set on a beautiful island full of fascinating, delightful puzzles about geometry, perception, color, and symmetry. The game is widely acclaimed for those qualities, but the most unique and entrancing thing about The Witness is the way it communicates complex philosophical themes. This is a game composed of thousands of interconnected ideas – it’s a game about sensory perception, game design, free will, meditation, the project of civilization, the art of rationality, and more. (If you’ve read Godel, Escher, Bach, it’s a bit like that, except as an immersive explorable museum.) But it might be fair to say that at its core, The Witness is about how humans obtain/assemble knowledge about the world, and about the relationship between first-person conscious experience and the objective physical world described by scientific law.

While The Witness is highly critically acclaimed, it seems to me that the game is often quite poorly understood. I’m an avid collector of fan theories, essays, videos, etc, but a lot of other analysis stays at a fairly shallow level. Journalist’s articles briefly gesture towards a simple, sweeping thesis for what the entire game “means”, while most fan content has focused primarily on esoteric late-game secrets and easter eggs.

With my longplay video series, “Examining The Witness”, I aim to dig deep into the interplay of ideas that weaves through each area’s puzzle design, audio logs, art, etc, examining all the ways that The Witness communicates and reinforces its complex heirarchy of related ideas. Since the resulting videos are long and only semi-structured, I’ve included “highlights” in each video description, which take you right to the most interesting stuff I have to say. Bolded highlights are my best moments.

Spoiler warning! The Witness famously has a huge, very unique suprise that is easy to spoil. If you haven’t played the game but someday intend to, stick to just my first, spoiler-free episode. Even if you normally don’t mind plot spoilers, The Witness is quite different – this is something that you really want to experience firsthand.

The Castle Garden

For this first episode only, I’m taking a no-spoilers approach, examining how The Witness guides the experience of a new player during the introductory part of the game, starting in the castle garden and then into the tutorial puzzle-sequences in the agricultural area.

6:35 – Talking about the Garden-of-Eden symbolism of the castle garden.
10:00 – Positing a connection between the castle garden and the story of Braid.
27:50 – Comments on the important Heisenberg/Pauli “maintaining the tension” audio log.
55:30 – Brief remarks on the distinction between logic/syntax panels versus clue-hidden-in-the-environment panels.

Symmetry

(From this episode onwards, the series is going full-spoilers. Watch out!) In this second episode, we’re strolling through the beautiful Symmetry area, encountering our first “environmental puzzle”, and talking about how the obvious reflections and duplications of the symmetry puzzles have things to say about the subtler themes of categorization, division, and dualism vs monism that frequently crop up other parts of The Witness.

33:30 – Analyzing one of my favorite audio logs in the game, the visible/invisible Nicolas of Cusa quote, and how it reinforces and comments on one of the biggest moments of realization in the game.
59:45 – Talking about the long sequence of optional rock-reflection puzzles in the Symmetry zone, and what The Witness is saying to us here about the duality of logic-syntax puzzles versus clue-hidden-in-the-environment puzzles.

Castle Secrets

(An especially spoilery episode about end-game secrets, but also a really good episode IMO.) In this third episode, we’re talking about spoilers, secrets, and special details hidden in the introductory area of the castle, including the symbolism behind some of the game’s most powerful environmental puzzles.

10:00 – In-depth commentary on the James Burke theater video, where The Witness reveals a key part of the motivation behind the creation of the game.
30:15 – Returning to the underground tunnel to discuss one of the game’s most beautiful and profound puzzles, which symbolizes the core theme of first-person-conscious-awareness versus third-person-scientific-knowledge. See here for an image of the Ernst Mach self-portrait and more info about Douglass Harding’s sense of “headlessness”.
42:20 – Extra-spoilery discussion of the castle’s laser-gate, including a relevant audio log.
50:15 – An environmental puzzle is a joke about looking top-down into the castle!! And an audio log referencing Buddhist mythology.
57:40 – Talking about the game’s attitude towards completionist players, and Einstein’s “society of true searchers”. (note: I mention “Children of Men” while talking about the Island – what I really meant was Arthur C. Clark’s “Childhood’s End”!)
1:03:40 – is the ending of the Witness also a Braid reference??? probably not, but maybe kinda.

Reflection, Representation, Richard Feynman

(About the optics puzzles of the desert sun temple, and the ancient civilization that first lived on the Island. Plus, a detailed discussion of the fascinating Feynman video.)

The desert ruins, fortress keep, and zen monastery were all built by pre-modern civilizations living on the island. Each structure embodies the philosophy of the people who built it, and contains unique gameplay mechanics that comment on the themes of that particular area. In this and the next two episodes of ‘Examining The Witness’, we’ll analyze the distinct perspectives of these relatively self-contained mid-game locations, seeing how they add complexity and depth to the game’s core overarching message.

The “reflection” theme of this area is in some ways an elaboration of and 3-dimensional sequel to the “symmetry” puzzles encountered earlier. (For instance, it continues the yellow/cyan color theming of the symmetry area, but with darker shades of orange/blue.) It also represents an interesting cross-over point between the logic-symbol-on-the-panel puzzles and the clue-hidden-in-the-environment puzzles. The reflection “clues” exist in the environment outside the panel, but these reflections are based on rigid laws of geometry – in some ways more similar to the logic-symbol puzzles than to the contrived, careful placement of physical objects in the apple orchard, monastery, etc.

Thematically, the Sun Temple represents the philosophy of ancient peoples who lived during the birth of civilization. These people were the first to harness scientific knowledge, like astronomy and optics, to answer questions about our place in the universe. They were also entranced by an understanding of metaphor, representation, and abstraction, hence their obsession with reflections of the sun and some very “meta” reflective carvings depicting reflective carvings.

Located on a distant, lonely, barren corner of the Island (as far as possible from the Mountain which represents the culmination of the Island’s advanced technological civilization), surrounded by raw stone that looks like it either has just emerged from the primordial ocean or (more plausibly) is about to erode back into the sea, a desert Vault contains a video with two clips from the famous quantum physicist Richard Feynman. These clips are essential for understanding The Witness – they establish both the mindset of wide-eyed curiosity that The Witness considers an essential starting point for exploration, and the idea of connections between heirarchies of knowledge that provides a framework for the basic game design of The Witness.

9:10 – What can the sun temple (and a nearby audio log) tell us about the philosophy of the Island’s earliest civilization? For images of the Indian naked-eye observatories I mentioned, see here.
19:10 – Discussing how the reflection mechanic acts as a blend or a bridge between the syntax/logic panels vs environment-clue panels found elsewhere on the island. Also, clues on an ancient mural show us that the first civilization was interested in themes of abstraction, representation, and metaphor.
27:00 – A fun sequence of reflection puzzles.
59:40 – Arguing that the theater space was originally constructed by the same people who built the sun temple, and noticing that the misaligned laser is a callback to and inversion of a favorite moment from the symmetry area.
1:18:05 – Watching and then discussing the multiple fascinating, overlapping messages that The Witness is communicating with the Feynman theater video. There is a lot going on here!!

A Fortress of Dualities

(How “The Keep” uses game design to express the tension between two equally-true but seemingly-irreconcilable ways of viewing human society.)

With more statues than almost anywhere else on the Island, the Fortress has a lot to say about dramatic social and political themes that are almost entirely absent from the rest of the island. But in addition to critiquing the class structure of our society (and considering his own role as an artist / producer of entertainment products), Jonathan Blow is also using The Fortress to present a paradoxical duality. From the first-person perspective of the actual humans living in it, society seems composed of independent individuals who make free choices based on the use of reason and the pursuit of their personal ideas of value and meaning. But from a top-down view of civilization in aggregate, history seems determined by unthinking trends like demographic changes and economic cycles, and people’s beliefs are so heavily influenced by the circumstances of their surrounding environment/culture that genuine independence and meaningful choice seem impossible. These ideas are expressed with clarity and detail through the combination of audio logs, environmental art, and the game design of the puzzles themselves.

6:00 – Examining the many statues in the Fortress and introducing the area’s unusual emphasis on social organization, human conflict, and practical concerns.
13:42 – Important Douglas Hofstadter audio log introduces the Fortress’s main theme: the relationship between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of viewing the self, free will, and an individual’s place in society.
25:11 – A quick note on how (as always!) the gameplay of the Fortress’s panels is linked to the specific philosophical themes of the area.
38:22 – The second of two important William K Clifford audio logs where The Witness sets a high bar for what it considers honest, worthy attempts to pursue truth.
51:29 – An unusually intense critique of society from a game which usually doesn’t engage directly with political ideas.
59:30 – A very important B. F. Skinner quote that lays out the deterministic, environment-centered perspective of the Fortress’s front yard, which contrasts with the individual-centered view of society presented in the back yard.
1:18:09 – Standing high up in the castle keep, we can see the ideas of the Fortress area expressed with beautiful clarity, and understand how they connect to the core themes of the entire game.

A Monastery of Direct Perception

The monastery connects environmental puzzles to the themes of meditative awareness and direct sensory perception. We also analyze the Tarkovsky theater clip!

Just like a real Zen meditation hall, the Monastery in the Witness is all about getting to the truth directly, through immediate sensory perception. To that end, the Monastery’s puzzles are designed (even moreso than the rest of the game!) to constantly remind you of your embodied first-person visual perspective. It is also the place where the puzzle panels and hidden environmental puzzles become the most similar, a reference to the practice of trying to teach and learn the seemingly unteachable skills of meditation. Meanwhile, the area’s ambiguous murals, which can be interpreted in several overlapping ways, remind us of all the top-down sensory processing that our minds impose on raw incoming sense-data, filtering and processing our perception.

Yes, everyone knows that the statue on the peninsula outside the town is reaching for a holy grail while his shadow has paradoxically already grasped the grail. But did you realize that the statue probably represents Nicolas of Cusa, or that it ties together the symbol of the goblet with the Sun, the mountain, and the 8-pointed panel symbols from the mangrove treehouse area? We talk about all this and much more – together, the peninsula and monastery are a Rosetta stone for some common symbols in The Witness.

Why did Jonathan Blow decide that The Witness needed a nine-minute video of a guy walking back and forth holding a candle? He’s not just trolling people with an attention-span endurance test (although that’s probably part of it). The context of the movie “Nostalghia” sheds some light on the multilayered messages that this clip, like the Feynman and Burke videos, is contributing to the game.

Sadly, I’m a bit less articulate when discussing the first-person-awareness side of the game versus the more scientific side. It’s hard to talk precisely about consciousness, so you’ll have to bear with me as I occasionally repeat myself in an effort to find the right words.

00:47 – Exploring the rich symbolism of the famous “reaching for the holy grail” statue on the peninsula outside the town.
24:15 – Talking about the core theme/purpose of the monastery area: almost like a tutorial, the monastery deliberately creates an environment optimized for noticing the traceable environmental puzzles, even using panel puzzles for the purpose of getting players into the right mood to notice EPs. This is an analogy for actual Buddhist and Zen monasteries, which try to create an optimal environment for noticing directly-accessible truths about the mind and reality. But, in both situations, there is still a fundamental leap of realization that has to be made by the student – the nature of conscious experience can only be be pointed to and hinted at by even the most direct teachers.
29:25 – Deciphering the symbols in the monastery’s murals, including the golden sun-grail that represents a transcendent state of unification akin to enlightenment.
40:00 – An audio log reminding us that our experience of life, despite seeming solidity, is actually made from fleeting, impermanent flashes of data from the senses. We often ignore this fact in favor of (useful, necessary) top-down summaries that our brain fits to the sense-data; meditation can bring us closer to the raw experience of unmediated reality.
43:18 – Continuing the discussion above in the context of the ambiguous art on the laser-box outside the monastery.
47:15 – The monastery murals portraying a growing tree ALSO maybe portray a human brain and an atomic-bomb mushroom cloud?!
51:35 – Talking about the monastery’s relationship to the fortress, an important dialogue / duality that spans the middle of the island and represents the gap between logical, analytical, western thought versus the experiential focus of meditation.
1:02:45 – Giving important context for the Tarkovsky video, and considering multiple potential interpretations of what the video means in the context of The Witness. (I’ll have you people know that I watched an entire very slow-paced Soviet movie, and fought off a youtube copyright strike, just to bring you proper analysis of this clip!)
To unlock the Tarkovsky video in the theater, the puzzle path required to unlock video is the longest that can possibly be drawn on that panel. This is both a reference to the famous 9-minute cinematic long take and to the qualities of dedication and perseverance that the video engages with.
In addition to the fact that the golden-grail, mountain beacon, and sun are all linked together by the Cusa statue inside a lighthouse (itself a distant, guiding light!), there are yet MORE connections here. Venus (the “morning star”) is visible near the horizon through the gap in the lighthouse wall, and all these symbols of distant guiding lights could also connect to the flickering candle carried across the pond during the Tarkovsky video (or to the “flickering lantern” in the poem at the end of the game). Finally, note that the Cusa statue is looking through a pane of glass at this constellation of transcendent beacons – could this be a reference to Braid?? In that game’s epilogue, “Everything [Tim] wanted was on the opposite side of that pane of glass,” including philosophical prizes like “the magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so many other things, deeper inside”. For more in this vein, play my free mod, Braid: More Now Than Ever!

Aural Jungle, and the purpose of Environmental Puzzles

I’m terrible at The Witness’s sound puzzles, but we’re doing them anyways! More importantly, I also use this episode to lay out my interpretation of what the “environmental puzzles” represent, and why they are in the game.

The hidden-in-plain-sight environmental puzzles are the most unique element of The Witness, around which the entire game concept was built. In two new episodes of Examining ‘The Witness’, we talk about how the environmental-puzzle mechanic is a game-design metaphor for the specific philosophical idea of non-dual awareness.

4:50 – In-depth discussion of one of the most beautiful environmental puzzles on the island, plus the two nearby audio logs that comment on it, at 7:50 and 26:27.
14:48 – Describing the sense of meditative self-awareness that I claim the environmental puzzles are meant to symbolize, using a metaphor from Rupert Spira himself.
18:16 – Describing the specific details of the environmental-puzzle mechanic and how they support the connection to mindful first-person experience. I mention a short, free, absolutlely joyful and suprising puzzle game called Perspective, which shares The Witness’s “freeze-frame” mechanic.
38:10 – Why would sound-based puzzles be particularly aligned with the idea of mindful self-awareness? Sound as a sense has unique qualities that set it apart from vision and make it uniquely suited for open, wide-field awareness.
50:49 – A great sequence of three very clever panels at the end of the sound area, which I appreciate even despite my general frustration at the sound puzzles.
59:38 A second environmental puzzle constrains the 3D shape of the gigantic jungle tree like the wooden blocks on the cover of ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’.
1:04:48 – Analyzing the meaning of the bamboo labyrinth and the creepy braided-bamboo statue. The presence of an auditory illusion works as both a classic last-minute puzzle curveball, and as a reminder that we never directly experience the external world, only sense-perceptions mediated by the brain. NOTE: I also jokingly claim this is a Braid reference (it is a literal braid after all), but fail to explain why a braid is connected to the Shepard tones. It’s because the illusion relies on three different sounds playing at once, each cleverly fading into the next! For a demonstration, watch this short video.
1:13:00 – Why is a Feynman quote we already heard in the Theater video showing up again at the conclusion of the sound area? The Witness is telling us that Feynman’s philosophy of doubt applies to spirituality and our own direct experience of reality, just as much as it applies to scientific inquiry.

Shipwreck Paths, Non-Duality, and the Hardest Puzzle

Surrounded by some of the game’s most unique Environmental Puzzles, in a vault unlocked by the hardest single puzzle panel anywhere on the island, the Shipwreck contains a fascinating video by spiritual teacher Rupert Spira. In Part 8, we analyze those puzzles, plus reflect on Spira’s inquiry into the fundamental mystery of conscious experience, which he describes in a clear and empirical way that The Witness considers essential.

1:54 – The Shipwreck is devoted to creative, surprising environmental puzzles that push the boundaries of what’s possible with the mechanic. Moving perspectives, interlocking and overlapping paths, foreground and background – we examine them all!
18:07 – Discussing the masterful design of the Rupert Spira vault-door puzzle panel (often considered the hardest panel on the island), which brings together advanced mechanics from the sound, symmetry, and color areas. NOTE: In the video, I don’t talk about why this puzzle is appropriate to the Spira video in particular. For starters, the panel difficulty indicates the value of the knowledge it guards. The mechanics of symmetry, color, and especially sound involve sensory perception, which Rupert Spira tells us to pay close attention to. Finally, most panels on the island can be solved almost instantly after you understand them. But the vault puzzle is unique in that it forces you to wait a very long time in order to master the slower of its overlapping melodies. By requiring you to concentrate on listening to a few sounds for several minutes, the puzzle references the activity of meditation.
39:45 – The Rupert Spira video starts. (Incidentally, to me the theater code looks like a zen ink drawing of a meditating monk.)
1:15:15 – My commentary on Spira’s video; trying to rephrase and explain some of his ideas in a more familiar speaking style. I describe the state of non-dual awareness as both a shift in attention (self-awareness of sensations as existing in consciousness, rather than paying attention only to ordinary goals and desires) and also a shift in identity (identifying as awareness itself, rather than your body / mind / memories / thoughts / etc).
1:25:05 – Why is Spira’s video so important to The Witness, and how does it relate to the other themes of the island? My apologies for being somewhat ineloquent and repetitive while talking about this stuff – I’m not used to trying to talk in-depth about consciousness!

Many religious traditions have somewhat-intelligent things to say about the core mystery of awareness (Christianity and Buddhism feature prominently in the game, with cameo appearances by Taoism, Islam, and more), but it’s the Advaita Vedanta tradition within Hinduism that gives The Witness its name.

Rupert Spira has many free, worthwhile talks available on youtube and in other places, which I highly recommend. If you are trying to get into meditation, I also recommend the Sam Harris “Waking Up” app. Here too, you get a clear and direct description of what experience is like and how to relate to it, presented in more familiar, ordinary language (rather than Spira’s slightly odd speaking style). But still with much of the engaging philosophical depth, unlike its shallower app-based peers.

Alternatively, get your non-dual-awareness pro tips right from Jonathan Blow himself! In this talk, he describes how to apply some mindfulness-inspired mental techniques to better deal with negative emotions. Here is a very good talk that demonstrates the strong practical benefits of Spira’s philosophy.

More Episodes to come?

There’s nothing like thinking about The Witness, so I’d love to return to this series someday – probably with a series of more casual, even-less-structured videos about various midgame areas, ideally followed by some kind of maestro-level, secret-of-psalm-46-esque sequence of lectures about the end of the game and some of its deepest messages. Beyond The Witness, it would be sweet to make other videos about similarly complex and beautiful games – Outer Wilds, Edith Finch, Braid, and several others come to mind. Who knows, maybe I could set up a patreon or accept bitcoin donations? Until that distant day, deciphering the secrets of The Witness’s other areas will remain as an exercise for the reader!

In the meantime, you might enjoy my commentary on Jonathan Blow’s other game, Braid, such as my four-part essay or my fan-sequel mod that brings new writing, art, and puzzles to the game. You might also appreciate my “Grounding Philosophy” sequence, where I try to lay out my relationship to various underappreciated aspects of the human condition.

The Meanings of Braid: Six Variations on Reality

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first of two essays about Braid – here is the other, wherein I discuss the game’s famous ending and the enigmatic Princess. You might also be interested in my fan-sequel mod-anthology, Braid: More Now Than Ever. I wrote this sequence of posts a full decade ago, much earlier than any of my other commentary on Braid or The Witness. There’s lots interesting stuff here, which is why I’m hosting it, but I don’t consider it a definitive analysis. While you read, feel free to dig into this spotify playlist of the game’s soundtrack + related songs. Someday it would be fun to produce some longplay videos, in the style of Examining The Witness examing the game in-depth to give my full exposition about each area – but in the meantime, this is still better than a lot of the Braid commentary out there on the internet!

Introduction

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

-Braid end credits, citing Christiana Rossetti

Braid is a videogame about solving puzzles by jumping on things and manipulating the flow of time. Using these simple tools, Braid communicates many interesting ideas with fascinating interconnections. In this post, I’ll talk about the game’s opening, plus Worlds 2 and 3. In the next post, I’ll cover Worlds 4, 5, and 6, which feature Braid’s most interesting gameplay moments. Finally I’ll discuss the game’s ending (World 1), epilogue, and overall themes. Beyond just linking the gameplay, art, and story of each World, I’ve also tried to shed some light on the literal overarching plot that ties the Worlds together, and I express my interpretation of the core philosophical themes of Braid – two areas where other internet sources offer only simplistic accounts. Of course, these posts will make less sense if you haven’t played the game; worse, they’ll deny you of amazing things which you ought really to discover for yourself. As I just said, Braid is an absolutely fascinating game, so it’s well worth your time to buy, download, and play it yourself if you haven’t already.

Little Boy

Braid has no opening cutscene, not even a start menu. As soon as the game loads, you are playing. In the initial moments of the game, you are a man standing on a bridge, silhouetted against the fiery, golden light of what appears to be the setting sun. You cross the bridge and your figure is illuminated by a few streetlamps: you have orange hair, a blue suit, a red tie, and plenty of energy in your fast-paced jog. By now the background has settled into dusk, but in moments you enter your house, which consists of all the usual rooms a house should have, filled with furniture and objects that suggest a life rich with memories and interests.

That first minute of gameplay is, in a technical sense, the entire literal plot of the game. Tim is not some kind of mad scientist time-traveller living in a fantastical videogame world. Unlike the action-packed fantasy/sci-fi settings of most games, Braid is technically realistic fiction. It’s about a guy relaxing in his house after coming home from work.

This matters because it helps Braid establish a relevant, real-life tone. When I first played Braid over the course of several days in high school, I would come home from my classes, unwind in the familiarity of my living room, and then (playing the game) immerse myself in a series of whimsical thought experiments where time flowed in unusual ways. As our protagonist relaxes in his house alone, he’s doing the exact same thing! He’s daydreaming alternate realities, exploring their possibilities and drawing metaphorical connections between these strange worlds and his own real life. By drawing this connection, Braid is saying that this game isn’t an escapist adventure, a surrealist fantasy, or an academic exercise in ivory-tower theorizing – rather, it’s communicating something that’s meant to become an integrated part of your own real-world life.

In only a minute of gameplay, then, we have immersed ourselves in a comfortable, quiet, introspective environment. Thus, the first dream begins…

World 2: No Ordinary Castle

The theme and feel of World 2 spring from a simple gameplay question: what would happen if you took a difficult, dangerous platformer like Super Mario Bros, and removed all penalty for failure? In Braid, the player always has the power to rewind time as far as they like: enemies walk backwards, objects fall up, cannonballs are sucked back into cannons. The player’s movements are also undone, allowing the past to be rewritten. Braid is a puzzle game, but in these early levels there are few serious conundrums. Instead, the ability to rewind allows players to learn from their mistakes in a forgiving environment.

Inadvertently fall into a pit of fiery spikes? No problem! Just rewind time for a few seconds, and you’re back on your feet. If you miss-time a jump, rewind and try again! Once this understanding clicks, normal platforming challenges become a walk in the park.

For players new to videogames, World 2 functions as a friendly, elegant tutorial. Meanwhile, Mario-masters will notice that once-frustrating demands –like pixel-perfect leaps, tricky acts of timing, fine midair control of a jump, even a suicidal “leap of faith” onto unknown ground– are utterly reasonable when death is no longer an inconvenience.

Green Hill Zone

It’s silly to think of all of Braid as nothing more than a clever Mario homage. But World 2 really is just that: a design riff on the classic platformer, transformed by the gentle, carefree power of rewinding. These feelings are echoed in the whimsical art of World 2: bright green grass waves under baby-blue skies and a radiant summer sun. Back in the house, World 2 is associated with the living room, a place of first impressions, which contains a few cute symbols of erasure and forgiveness, like cleaning supplies and an etch-a-sketch toy.

The “story” of World 2, as revealed by cryptic snippets of text in the level-select area, is also in tune with the theme of this world: We are “off on a search to rescue the princess”, who has been snatched by a monster. But this only happened because our main character, Tim, “made a mistake”. The rest of the text entries focus on this idea, describing the princess “turning sharply away” and leaving Tim to resent the fact that “our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness”. Of course, the main function of these entries is to explain this world’s gameplay themes, but the rudimentary story about Tim trying to win back The Princess will gain importance as we go along.

At the end of World 2, we meet a cute dinosaur who informs us that, just as Mario has taught us to expect, “The Princess is in another castle”. As we move on to World 3, still immersed in the friendly forgiveness of rewind, it’s easy to believe that Tim will succeed in his quest.

World 3: The Enchanted Forest

World 3 adopts a tone more representative of Braid’s core: the whimsical exploration deepens to reveal mysterious phenomena, and the relaxing, contemplative atmosphere acquires an undertone of ominous melancholy. In lieu of World 2’s theme of forgiveness, a thick air of magic permeates this realm of “Time and Mystery” like the warm moisture of summer rain. World 3 is associated with Tim’s bedroom, where the sleepy magic of dreams swirls around a glowing mobile, flickering fireflies, and the surreal image of a model ship in a bottle. When all twelve puzzle-pieces have been assembled into a complete mural, they reveal an image of everyday alchemy: Tim sipping a glass of red wine, submersing himself in a warmer, softer, less rational and more human world.

A Little Bit of Magic

Certain objects in World 3 are impervious to Tim’s rewinding: imbued with twinkling green sparks, certain keys, doors, platforms, and goombas (compact, porcupine-like denizens of the game world) flow eternally forward in time. This effect allows the first real puzzles of Braid to begin, as the player must stretch their mind to consider mystifying paradoxes and strange consequences implied by the rules of Tim’s dreamworld. The art style shifts to reflect this new tone: Tim has left behind the blue-sky summer meadows of early optimism and whimsical novelty. Now we are wandering in a deep forest dense with colorful foliage, symbolic of our deepening engagement with Braid’s time mechanics. It is overcast, and softly raining.

The first hints of Braid’s harsher tones appear in a level called “Irreversible”. The two puzzles here are the first which can be permanently failed: no amount of rewinding will bring salvation, so the player must exit and re-load the entire level to make a fresh attempt. Immediately following “Irreversible” come two more dark moments. In the first, Tim must momentarily commit suicide (by jumping into a pit of spikes), then rewind, to retrieve a key that opens the door to further progress. Later, Tim encounters a giant-sized Goomba, whom he must kill in order to progress. Despite a mild resemblance to Mario’s nemesis, Bowser, the Goomba King is not the monster that snatched away the Princess; in fact, a close examination of the background shows that he was relaxing in his own home before Tim came barreling through!

The text entries of World 3 offer a subtle counterpoint to the boundless optimism of World 2. Tim recounts how his obsession with rewinding mistakes to “cultivate the perfect relationship” began to feel like imprisonment:

He had been fiercely protective, reversing all his mistakes so they would not touch her…

But his efforts to please the Princess meant that he was condemned to distort his nature, editing his behavior to the point that he “could not defy her expectations or escape her reach.”

Her benevolence had circumscribed him, and his life’s achievements would not reach beyond the map she had drawn.

For Tim, it seems, even the perfection possible in World 2 is somehow unsatisfying. As we move through World 3 and on to World 4, Tim is searching for some way to jump outside that map of possibility. He demands “a hope of transcendence.”

World 4: Step By Step

Compared to the cryptic tale of princess-napping pieced together in previous fragments, the story of World 4 seems like it’s from a completely different game!

Visiting his home for a holiday meal, Tim felt as though he had regressed to those long-ago years when he lived under their roof, oppressed by their insistence on upholding strange values which, to him, were meaningless. Back then, bickering would erupt over drops of gravy spilt onto the tablecloth.

Escaping, Tim walked in the cool air toward the university he’d attended after moving out of his parent’s home. As he distanced himself from that troubling house, he felt the embarrassment of childhood fading into the past. But now he stepped into all the insecurities he’d felt at the university, all the panic of walking a social tightrope.

For better or worse, things soon return to familiar territory. Tim reflects on the ways he’s grown since childhood, and declares that,

This improvement, day by day, takes him ever-closer to finding the Princess. If she exists - she must! - she will transform him, and everyone.

The surprises don’t stop there. In a way, World 4’s uniqueness appears a little incongruous with the more “normal” Worlds 2, 3, and 5. But Braid is fundamentally a game full of surprises, and in that sense World 4’s explorative gameplay spirit and subtle narrative clues make these levels a particularly good microcosm of the game as a whole.

//: # ( )

As we take our first step into World 4, we are struck by several obvious changes. Most immediately apparent, the shape of the first puzzle is identical to the first puzzle of World 3: a large square pit containing a single wandering Goomba. The art style has changed again: on one side of the screen we see the wooden structures and lush foliage of World 3, but the other side of the gap is bare rock and carved stone ruins. In the background, flakes of snow tumble down upon distant mountains. Later in World 4 we will see a few more familiar level designs, but colder now, devoid of the green grass that had adorned them in Worlds 2 and 3. Unlike previous Worlds, there’s no music or sound of any kind.

By far the most important revelation, however, remains beyond our grasp until we take our second step into World 4. In this land, time is directly tied to the horizontal spatial dimension: moving left-to-right gets the cosmic clock ticking, while moving right-to-left unwinds the world. This conceit is surely the most original gameplay mechanic in Braid, and the levels which follow represent the core spirit of Braid’s gameplay design.

Braid’s puzzles can be difficult, but they aren’t intended to test a player’s cleverness. They’re intended to guide players to explore and understand a physics-like set of rules. These playgrounds of experimentation tour players through the interesting, often initially unintuitive consequences of Tim’s time-bending abilities. For many players, the puzzles of World 4 in particular induce the most mind-boggling confusion, but also the most triumphant flashes of insight… the complex details of which I will not attempt to bumble through in this post!

X equals T

//: # ( )

World 4 is also overflowing with allusions to real-world confluences of time and space. Braid continues the trend of Mario references with a puzzle inspired by the world’s first platformer, “Donkey Kong”, reminding us that, in almost every 2D platforming game, moving to the right is synonymous with game progress and therefore synonymous with time.

As usual, the game’s music plays according to whatever temporal conditions currently hold sway: a sweet left-to-right lullaby occasionally becomes a creepy right-to-left cacophony, and the world freezes into silence when the player takes their hands off the controller. In one level, a musical score is carved into the stone ruins, reminding us that written music, and indeed all writing, is the preservation of an ephemeral temporal phenomenon in a static, spatial object.

In other areas, carvings of stick figures at different stages of life –infant, child, teenager, adult, elder– express the universal human metaphor of time-as-a-journey. In the background, images of federal-style university buildings and childhood building blocks clue us in on the relevance of World 4’s text entries.

A Moment So Strong

The mechanical and thematic uniqueness of World 4 leave it feeling a little separate from the main line of Braid’s story, but subtle clues point at future thematic directions. A mindset of gradual improvement is introduced to contrasted with Tim’s growing fascination with moments of sudden enlightenment. Two carvings are sneaky indicators of a scientific theme: near the castle, the mathematical symbol Aleph-one refers to the infinite set of all ordinal numbers (which calls to mind the idea of the “arrow of time” and the abstract number-theory of Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel), while a necklace-wearing triangle in the first stage is a reference to the explanation and proof by Simon Stevin (a contemporary of Galileo) of how physical forces balance on inclined planes, an early step in the development of classical mechanics.

//: # ( )

One final gameplay moment hints at a potential downside of Tim’s eager pursuit: the ending castle of World 4 is in ruins, but Tim cannot stop for the messenger that emerges. Instead, his desire for progress and self-improvement means that must continue his determined charge, leaving the castle messenger shouting futilely in the distance. All the while, the story of self-improvement that Tim tells himself in this realm seems a strictly provisional affair; a spiritual consolation prize cooked up to tide him over until the final day of “transformation”, his union with the Princess.

World 5: Two Roads Diverged

By the time players reach the fifth world of Braid, they have settled into familiarity with the game. The mechanic at work here –shadow versions of Tim that allow players to cooperate with themselves and combine the elements of multiple alternate timelines– is still fertile ground for puzzles, yet easier to grasp and not as strikingly original as earlier gameplay twists.

Like Worlds 3 and 4 before it, “Time and Decision” introduces the new mechanic (and a new art style) with a simple puzzle titled “The Pit”. As we’ve advanced through the game, the level design has become increasingly abstract, full of floating platforms and oddly-shaped structures. The art has matched this pace, abandoning the rolling natural landscapes of earlier worlds in favor of ornate hand-made decorations: wooden structures are inlaid with shining gold, while backgrounds are littered with soft carpets, pillows, curtains, and quilts. (Despite the luxury, every level appears to be in a state of imminent collapse, held above a layer of stagnant swamp water by rotting support beams and fraying cords. I’m really not sure what that means.)

Tim’s new ability to spin off parallel universes also fuels the art direction of World 5: scattered novels in the level art might be a reference to the familiar dilemma of choosing a single book to read from a huge library. In Tim’s real-world house, kitchen supplies reference the decision-filled nature of cooking, and a table set for two alludes to the fractal nature of conversation; in our world, potentially fruitful branches of discussion must always be trimmed into a single, linear path.

One Chance

As usual, the story-fragments in World 5 provide thematic connections between Tim’s hypothetical time-travel universes, the tale of the Princess, and real life. In “Time and Decision”, for the first time, we see the perspective of a character other than our protaganist:

She never understood the impulses that drove him, never quite felt the intensity that, over time, chiseled lines into his face. She never quite felt close enough to him - but he held her as though she were, whispered into her ear words that only a soul mate should receive.

But social ties aren’t strong enough to keep Tim from his pursuit of transformation:

Over the remnants of dinner, they both knew the time had come. He would have said: ‘I have to go find the Princess,’ but he didn’t need to. Giving a final kiss, hoisting a travel bag to his shoulder, he walked out the door.

On a surface level, these passages evoke a question familiar to anyone who’s been in a serious romantic relationship: is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? With an infinity of options and precious little ability to predict the outcome of any particular choice, making a life-changing commitment –a college, a career, or a soul mate– can feel terrifyingly arbitrary. But these two passages also frame a philosophical conflict that is central to Braid: the choice between an ordinary life of happiness and social comfort, or a dedicated, wholehearted pursuit of truth.

A Primer Aside

The mural created by collected puzzle pieces logically depicts two Tims, one of whom sits bored while another walks, enchanted, toward the mostly off-screen Princess. But why does this scene take place at an airport? It’s possible that this is a deliberate reference to the movie Primer (Jonathan Blow is a known fan of both Primer and Upstream Color, as am I). Like Braid, Primer is an intricately constructed time-travel story that explores the emotional and intellectual consequences of time manipulation, featuring characters determined to gain knowledge and control by pulling at the seams of the universe around them. As in many time-travel tales, going back in one of Primer’s machines implies sharing a few days with your past self. Much of Primer’s plot involves characters collaborating with or subverting the efforts of their past selves, making it particularly relevant to Braid’s “Time and Decision”.

The last conversation in Primer, an argument in an airport between the two former friends who invented the device, parallels the dilemma outlined in World 5’s story: one of the pair wants to stay behind with his family and prevent their earlier selves from ever discovering time travel in the first place, while the other harbors an ambition of flying to a far-away city, starting a new life, and continuing work on the revolutionary technology.

Naysayer

Although the puzzles of World 5 are of slightly lower intellectual caliber and lean more heavily on platforming skill, the emotional tone of World 5’s trials is particularly interesting. The timing and foresight required for self-cooperation is peculiarly difficult. World 5 can be brilliant, but it can also put your failures on display, make a mockery of your attempts to coordinate through fleeting windows of opportunity. Shadow-Tim is a tool designed to serve present-Tim, a state of affairs that forces the player to think in terms of manipulation and lobsided compromises.

One of the most memorable gameplay moments in Braid occurs in level 5-3, pictured below. Uniquely, this stage has no name, although levels 5-2 and 5-4 are titled “So Distant” and “Crossing the Gap”, respectively.

Earlier, I mentioned the conflict between happiness and the pursuit of truth. By this point in the game, of course, players are perfectly accustomed to trampling on Goombas who happen to be in a good position to boost Tim to the nearest puzzle-piece. Players have certainly accepted risk: they have fallen into pits of fire, been struck by deadly projectiles, and they have been murdered mid-jump by grotesque plants. A few puzzles have even required that Tim walk willfully to his own death, if only for a moment soon to be erased. World 5-3 is different.

Rather than explaining the solution in terms of control mechanics, I’d like to describe events unfolding as they would “really” happen, as if in a movie. Tim is moving forward through the strange world of Braid, hungering for mastery, knowledge, transformation. When he runs into stage 5-3 he immediately perceives the problem, but minutes drag by as the solution eludes him. He examines everything twice, then three times–his determination only growing, feeding off this new obstacle. Some part of him recognizes the way forward, but the rest of him refuses to admit it.

With gritted teeth, Tim finally forces acceptance upon himself. He sets his plans in motion with the cold resolve of a suicide bomber: I must do this.

Soon there are two of him, one on either side of the bridge. On this side the locked door –and behind it, the next essential fragment of his salvation. On the other side, the key to that door. Between the two Tims, a fiery chasm sends tendrils of smoke curling around a forest of jagged thorns.

“Jump!” Tim shouts to the far side. He plants his feet firmly, leans out, extends his hand. “I’ll catch you!“

The other Tim stands silent, loosely gripping the key, staring down at the abyss. He shakes his head. Then, in a soft, shaking voice: “No. It’s too far. Barely. I could… No.”

“This is the only way!” Tim roars, “You know this; you know how important this is!” His eyes gleam, fixated on the key.

Shivering, eyes darting between each thorn and crackling ember with a thousand frantic half-thoughts: “No. This is different.”

“Come on!” our Tim shouts at first, “What else do you want? To live in delusion? In ignorance? To be a coward, hiding from the world, and then die for nothing?” Then, eyes closed, exhaling, resigned: “You’re right, though. It is different, this time.” He readjusts his footing, leans another inch over the precipice. “But reality isn’t made for our convenience. Our preferences don’t count. Sometimes the truth will be hard, and we will have to accept it. Sometimes, we will have to make sacrifices.“

On the far side, eyes glance up. The two lock their gaze for a long moment. Shadow Tim takes a final breath. He pushes forward with a step, lets himself fall towards the edge for part of a second. Then the next step, against the edge itself, a single effort propelling him on an impossible leap.

It’s an even more impossible distance.

World 6: Beginning’s End

More so than the quirks of previous realms, World 6 is full of deliberately eerie, disorienting rule-breaks. It calls attention to its uniqueness from the very beginning: whereas Worlds 2, 3, 4, and 5 were titled “Time and Forgiveness”, “Time and Mystery”, “Time and Place”, and “Time and Decision”, World 6 is simply “Hesitance”.

Braid’s story elements have always been focused on connecting puzzle-game mechanics to real-life emotions and ideas. But in World 6, the Mario-style quest of previous realms is jettisoned to reveal a more realistic, straightforward reflection on Tim’s character. As a result, the Princess is mentioned only in the first entry, and she seems less like a literal person than ever.

Perhaps in a perfect world, the ring would be a symbol of happiness. It’s a sign of ceaseless devotion: even if he will never find the Princess, he will always be trying. He still will wear the ring.

This passage is an affirmation of the conflict established in World 5: the suspicion that happiness and “ceaseless devotion” to truth are often mutually exclusive. But while World 5 focused on binaries –the difficulty of decision between two life paths, disagreement between two people– World 6 ups the ante, throwing Tim into a state of conflict and alienation with society at large.

…the ring makes its presence known. It shines out to others like a beacon of warning. It makes people slow to approach. Suspicion, distrust. Interactions are torpedoed before Tim can open his mouth.

In time he learns to deal with the others carefully. He matches their hesitant pace, tracing a soft path through their defenses. But this exhausts him, and it only works to a limited degree. It doesn’t get him what he needs.

Just as the Princess represents far more than a generic woman, Tim’s token is far more than a wedding ring. It represents his deepest values, his devotion to higher truth. And, tragically, it is what drives a wedge of animosity between him and everyone he meets.

Tim begins to hide the ring in his pocket. But he can hardly bear it - too long tucked away, that part of him might suffocate.

There and Back Again

As we have become accustomed, the first stage is again titled “The Pit”. And yet… there’s no puzzle. No key, lock, goomba, or puzzle piece. Just a hole in the floor. There’s really nothing at all to do in this stage; in a game with such economical, consciously-built levels, such a completely nonfunctional world is immediately unsettling.

The time mechanic introduced in this stage (which, of course can be deployed to zero practical use) is also a serious rule-break. Despite visiting four different worlds before now, Tim has always had the same control scheme that was introduced in the first five minutes of the game: movement the left and right, plus two buttons for jump and rewind. But now, and only in World 6, Tim can deploy a golden ring that creates a bubble of super-slowed time.

The ring allows for some brilliant new puzzles, but it seriously changes the feel of World 6’s gameplay. Not only is there a lot more fine timing necessary to solve puzzles designed for slow-motion, but players must now thing about where to place the ring in the level, not just where to move Tim.

The unfamiliar tone of the game feel, harsher and less forgiving than previous worlds, is reinforced by the creepy familiarity of the puzzle designs. After “The Pit”, stages 6-2 and 6-3 are direct transcriptions of stages 3-2 and 3-3, each puzzle tweaked only minutely to demonstrate a new solution. (Stage 6-5 is also a direct rip of puzzles in 3-6 and 4-5.)

The art style of World 6 is dark, hostile, and self-mocking. The soft wooden platforms and lush plant life of earlier levels are now rigid images carved from solid marble, lit by an eerie green glow. In “Hesitance”, by completing the trend from natural to abstract, Braid is highlighting the coldly efficient, contrived forms of its own gameplay-driven level design.

In the later stages, “Hesitance” retains the intimidating, hyperformal style but ditches the plant-life decoration. Keeping with the themes of society and alienation (as well as the more realistic, self-aware nature of World 6), the background is a city filled with buildings that look identical to the ones outside Tim’s actual house. Meanwhile, the foreground’s artistic focus appears to shift towards… hats.

Choice and Consequences

The hats and uniforms that decorate the marble platforms of World 6 are symbols of easily-identifiable professions: astronaut, cowboy, policeman, soldier, mailman, etc. These represent not just jobs but societal roles, personalities, and worldviews. This emphasizes the thematic difference between Worlds 4, 5, and 6: “Time and Place” focused on optimistic forward growth on a promising linear path, and “Time and Decision” dwelt on the agony of decision between two equal yet mutually exclusive paths… but in World 6 there are an infinity of possible paths.

Just like the escalation from World 5’s personal disagreement to World 6’s societal alienation, this seemingly quantitative escalation feels qualitatively different: with an entire world of different values to live by, it is no longer possible to give fair consideration to each option. How is it possible to justify the arbitrary choice of one life path above others? World 6’s title, “Hesitance”, surely refers to the crippling paralysis that can result from such a terrifying amount of freedom.

The monstrous ending castle of World 6 is a grotesque, hyperformal distortion of World 2’s charming citadel, augmented with the addition of with dozens of marble statues of uniforms. In the center, the largest statue depicts a scared little boy, alone in the world. The castle messenger’s words deliver a tragic final blow, the long-feared consequence of a lifetime’s effort wasted in vain:

It took you so long to get here! But at long last, I can tell you that… The princess must be in another castle.

When you chose how to live your life, he tells Tim, you chose wrong. Maybe you could have found her by now. It wasn’t impossible to do. You just didn’t do it, and now it’s too late.

A Light in Darkness

Read one way, the story of World 6 is incredibly dark: Tim abandons his ideals to fit in with a world that doesn’t understand him, and feels lost in arbitrary choices and the meaninglessness of life. And yet, the painting created by assembling the puzzles could just as easily be taken to show Tim discovering, not abandoning the golden ring that represents his values and direction. After we have collected all the puzzle pieces from every available World, we proceed to World 1. There, we’ll realize the full extent to which there are always multiple levels of meaning at work in Braid. In particular, we will see that it is possible to read the events of the previous Worlds in a complementary, yet very different way.

(Continue to read the second half of this analysis, about The Princess and the ending of the game.)

The Meanings of Braid: Four Meditations on The Princess

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second of two essays about Braid – here is the other, wherein I discuss each of the time-bending toy universes that Braid explores. You might also be interested in my fan-sequel mod-anthology, Braid: More Now Than Ever.

World 1: Tide and Riptide

The way to the attic of Tim’s house is only opened when all 60 puzzle pieces have been collected from the previous five worlds. After much time spent puzzling out the remaining, most difficult puzzles of the previous rooms, we ascend a ladder above Tim’s house. We discover a tiny, dusty attic, with barely enough room for a door. Outside the house, the city slumbers in the soothing deep blue of night. Confident in our mastery of time, driven by a now-insatiable curiosity to see the beginning of Tim’s story, we enter World One.

Starting in World 1 and continuing through the Epilogue, Braid starts doing about a million things at once, so it might seem confusing as I jump around and try to cover everything. But let’s start with the text, since that offers the most immediate connection to the previous worlds.

Codex Andromedae

At a cafe on a bright plaza, most customers sit back, feeling the warmth of the sun, enjoying their cold drinks. But not Tim- he barely notices the sun, doesn’t really taste his coffee. For him this corner affords a good view of the city, and in the teeterings of the passers-by, in the arc of the shop-girl’s hand as she displays tea to an interested gentleman, Tim hopes to see clues.

That night at the cinema, fictitious adventurers lunge implausibly across the screen. The audience here is mixed. Some are patrons of the cafe, now sitting excitedly in the plush chairs, eager for another new flavor, for distraction from the boredom of their easy lives. Other seats hold fisherman and farm workers, hoping to forget their toils and rest their hands.

Tim is here too, but he is scrutinizing the gloss on the lips on the screen, measuring the angle of the plume of a distant helicopter crash. He thinks he discerns a message, when the cinema closes and most of the audience strolls down the plaza to the south, Tim goes north.

On one level, this is the continued story of how Tim’s intense, obsessive devotion to truth alienates him from the ordinary, apathetic residents of the city. Others are driven away by his inhuman intensity, while Tim is surely confused and frustrated that everyone around him is lost in the pursuit of such a frivolous, hedonistic life. How are they not captivated, as he is, by the search for answers to the mysteries of our existence in the universe?

Tim wants, like nothing else, to find the Princess, to know her at last. For Tim this would be momentous, sparking an intense light that embraces the world, a light that reveals the secrets long kept from us, that illuminates - or materializes! - a final palace where we can exist in peace.

By this point in the game, the player is perfectly in-sync with Tim’s mindset: they too have eschewed the paths of comfort and happiness, have grown addicted to employing ruthless cunning and cold intellectual efficiency in pursuit of the glimpses of transcendent insight that each puzzle piece represents. Just one rather cryptic piece of text to go…

But how would this be perceived by the other residents of the city, in the world that flows contrariwise? The light would be intense and warm at the beginning, but then flicker down to nothing, taking the castle with it; it would be like burning down the place we’ve always called home, where we played so innocently as children. Destroying all hope of safety, forever.

…and we’re off with Tim to the first puzzle of World 1, intoxicated by mystery and salivating with deep anticipation.

The strangeness of this new world is immediately apparent, but unlike in previous Worlds, an intellectual understanding of the change takes longer to solidify. The music is strange and haunting. Tim’s movement seems off, or maybe it’s his animations? Then, dead goombas falling up into a cannon?

Then it hits: in this world, causality is reversed. Time is flowing backwards. Every jump is actually a landing, spikes vivify rather than killing goombas, and the first stage of World 1 is labeled not 1-1 but 1-4. The haunting, crashing music in the background is a reverse-recording… an appropriate soundtrack to the brooding thunderclouds that lumber in the background behind jumbled debris.

As we traverse levels 1-4, 1-3, and 1-2, the text fragments of moments ago suddenly click together in an entirely different way. Lines like this one–

People like Tim seem to live oppositely from the other residents of the city. Tide and riptide, flowing against each other.

–have a literal meaning to complement their metaphorical message. Taken literally, Tim’s “Merlin sickness” (living backwards in time) also explains his desperate obsession with “discerning a message” in ordinary cinema. For someone who remembers the future and can only imagine the past, cause-and-effect relationships would be inverted. The world would be, by definition, overflowing with confusing non-sequiturs, events of unpredictable un-logic that would not surrender easily to rational understanding.

The “Plot” of Braid

Attempting to tie Braid’s six thematic worlds together into a coherent storyline is a questionable proposition. The game was explicitly inspired in part by the short-story collections of Italo Calvino; some would probably argue that any commonalities between Braid’s worlds are just reflections of a unifying idea, not steps on a narrative path. Nevertheless, I believe that there is also a sequential, literal interpretation of Tim’s quest for The Princess.

The key to Braid’s “plot” is that Tim’s life of reverse-causality does not just apply to the mechanics of World 1, but metaphorically permeates the story-fragments of all the other worlds. The Princess and any other characters experience the chapters of Braid in numerical order, starting with World 1, then 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Tim, however, begins his tale in World 6, then journeys through 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1.

This hypothesis is supported by temporal clues in the art style and level design of the game: we revisit similar puzzles over and over, suggesting that we are revisiting the same physical areas at different times. World 5 is full of Autumn imagery, while World 4 is clearly in the throes of Winter. World 3’s lush rains can only be Spring, and the sunny blue skies of World 2 are unmistakable Summer, indicating that time flows contrary to Tim’s progression. Meanwhile, the empty wineglasses of the puzzle-mural that accompany the joyful frolicking of Tim and the Princess as they “lounge in the castle garden, laughing together, giving names to the colorful birds” is a clear causal consequence of the filled glasses from World 3’s painting. Finally, note that the Goomba King appears in both World 5 and World 3. To me, his lair looks worse for wear in World 3’s springtime , having suffered the harshness of winter and an unkind intrusion by our protagonist.

Again, it’s extremely important to avoid thinking of Braid as only a linear or literal story; that kind of overzealous adherence to a single interpretation cripples the richness of the game. The plot I outline below is only one layer:

6: Tim’s journey begins: he is alone in the world, uncertain of what path to take in life. He struggles to reconcile his obsessive, truth-seeking urge with the differing values of society. Read in proper order, the first story-fragment of Braid is this:

Tim begins to hide the ring in his pocket. But he can hardly bear it - too long tucked away, that part of him might suffocate.

Read this way, World 6 is not about Tim abandoning his devotion to the Princess, but rather his discovery of her.

5: Despite finding his direction in life in World 6, years pass while Tim works to restrain himself to the “hesitant pace” of ordinary society. Finally the day comes when Tim decides to throw off the yoke of convention; he leaves his wife and all his other ordinary ways to search for the Princess:

Giving a final kiss, hoisting a travel bag to his shoulder, he walked out the door.

4: Free and fully devoted now, Tim walks the earth, pursuing knowledge and reflecting on the things that he considers important. World 4 is essentially Tim’s finest hour: a time of learning and happy dedication to self-improvement. He wonders as he wanders, asking himself each day,

Couldn’t he find the Princess now, tonight, just by wandering from place to place and noticing how he feels? A trail of feelings, of awe and inspiration, should lead him to that castle in the future.

3: Alas, steady conventional growth is not enough for him. By World 3, Tim seeks a kind of mystical transcendence that is invisible to his obsessive, rational mind. Too late, he realizes that the Princess had already been with him, but he had failed to recognize her:

All those years ago, Tim had left the Princess behind. He had kissed her on the neck, picked up his travel bag, and walked out the door. He regrets this, to a degree. Now he’s journeying to find her again, to show he knows how sad it was, but also to tell her how it was good.

2: But Tim presses forward in his journey, becoming more excited as the prospect of reunion grows nearer, even as his relationship with what the Princess represents becomes more antagonistic, regretful, and controlling:

He made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one remains clear: the princess turning sharply away, her braid lashing at him with contempt.

Finally, of course, Tim does approach reunion with the Princess in the final level of World 1…

World 1: Final Palace

You are standing beneath her, underground, when she leaps from the clutches of a burly, monstrous knight. As the beast roars in anger, a shockwave of flame crackles on the left side of the screen. It sweeps towards you, forcing a desperate race to the right. As you dodge and leap over obstacles, the Princess runs parallel above ground, pulling levers that open your way forward and shut down perilous death-traps.

Rewinding constantly to tweak jumps and shave milliseconds off your time, you manipulate Tim through a final conglomeration of goombas, then dash up the steps of the Princess’s modernist palace as the raging conflagration nearly overtakes you. You pass underneath the castle, but the fire does not stop. With seconds to spare, you climb a terrace outside of her bedroom, climbing onto a green time-immunity-panel that will give you respite from the flames.

The instant you touch it, everything freezes. The fire is gone, the frantic music replaced by perfect silence, the Princess lies asleep in her bed. As the epilogue will later say: “On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split.”

For some time we are perplexed. We observe her home, noticing it is not so different from Tim’s. The stuffed goomba and dinosaur by her bed that imply she, too, is a full person with a life full of dreams and ideas, while the painting of the Mona Lisa in another room alludes once again to Tim’s transcendent, idealized image of her. But these aesthetic touches offer no answers. Where is our triumphant reunion? Perhaps we have done something wrong. Uncertain, we revert to the most fundamental action in Braid. We rewind, past our moments of confusion, past contact with the green panel, back into the raging fire. The Princess wakes and begins to flee. We follow her. But as we follow events from the Princess’s temporal perspective, a cruel understanding dawns. From her perspective our cooperation was competition: she was not opening paths and protecting us from traps, but trying in vain to block our leftward chase. She unleashes goombas, fireballs, and deadly falls, but we leap over them with perfect timing and efficiency, expressing a sociopathic dedication and focus on our pursuit.

The Princess sees her salvation in the waiting knight, and leaps into his arms. Her terror is instantly replaced by an expression of deep calm and love, an the pair leave the screen. The rewinding stops. Player control resumes. But there’s nothing left. We can never be with the Princess. We never were. We don’t even have a way forward. In shock, we retreat through the same door we entered: no enlightenment, nor transformation, nor even hope, in this bitter resolution.

Epilogue: Missing Pieces

Still reeling from the revealed truth of World One, the player free-falls into a confused, abstract landscape of chaos and surreal devastation.

We are back in the clouds, the level-select land of Tim’s drifting thoughts. Set-piece structures from previous levels lie scattered, leaning, eerily devoid of context. Red books throw up more walls of strange text while Tim wanders through empty, apparently meaningless areas. (Actually, there are subtle puzzles here. If Tim can manage to hide himself entirely behind one of the game’s art assets, but not close the original book in the process, the text will change. With Tim off-screen for the first time in the game, the player can experience what Tim’s obsessive rationality could never access: glimpses from the Princess’s point of view. Below, I’ll put hidden text in italics.

Since the epilogue is full of so much text, it’s no surprise that it contains key insights to the meanings of Braid. But here I must reiterate my caution against oversimplified, too-literal assessments of the game’s “story”. In one interview, Braid’s designer made a helpful analogy about the different levels of metaphor at work here:

The story of rescuing the Princess has a literal interpretation, as well as a metaphorical one; and then there are other small-scale levels of change to the interpretation, too. I don’t intend for any of them to be the sole truth; the story I am trying to tell is something like the quantum superposition of all these things.

In other words, there is no strict hierarchy of interpretation: one level of story is not some kind of inferior version of, or secret code for, another. Rather, they are distinct but complementary. That said, I usually think of Braid in terms of four “superpositioned” messages of increasing abstraction, all of which are represented in the epilogue.

Princess Peach

For people familiar with the history of videogames, the clearest interpretation of Braid is as a deconstruction of many familiar videogame cliches. By “deconstruction”, I mean that Braid toes to the same conventions of Mario and friends, but portrays the results in a deeper, thoughtful, more true-to-life way. Stomped goombas wince when hit and begin to cry as they fall to their deaths; the idea of linear forward progress is taken as a literal law of physics; rewinding draws attention to the similarly surreal reincarnation system of videogames’ 1-ups and respawns; the player revisits retro-inspired levels and learns to think about them in a new way; the nonchalant, on-to-the-next-one attitude of Mario’s “another castle” message grows into a deep melancholy.

The story of the Princess, as told through gameplay and the most literal aspects of the text entries, continues this deconstruction: just like many classic games, the Princess is a mysterious ending prize, a myth and a promise to strive towards. Braid asks, what would a person in the real world be like, who actually expresses such obsessive dedication towards such an abstract, ephemeral goal?

Princess Yorda

This layer is intermingled with the last, because it is also a deconstruction of a videogame trope. In the long history of Princess-saving games, the Princess in question is never really represented as a human being. Braid considers its Princess an actual character, not just another puzzle piece, and has presented mature thoughts on love and (unhealthy, but realistic) relationships in Worlds 2, 3, and 5. This layer of the story is also told through the completed puzzle-murals of the different worlds: each one portrays the real-world relationship of Tim and a literal Princess, from the happy peak of their relationship in Worlds 2 and 3, through memories as shy high-school lovers (look closely at the open window of Tim’s bedroom in World 4), to the decision whether to follow her to a new life, ending with Tim alone and longing in the city.

Meanwhile, the Epilogue points out that Braid’s videogamey princess-saving might seem a little less heroic in the real world. In particular, the first text of the epilogue refers fairly clearly to “Ico”:

The boy called for the girl to follow him, and he took her hand. He would protect her; they would make their way through this oppressive castle, fighting off the creatures made of smoke and doubt, escaping to a life of freedom. The boy wanted to protect the girl.

As always, Braid applies narrative tropes and game mechanics to our own reality:

He held her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders in a walking embrace, to help her feel supported and close to him amid the impersonal throngs of Manhattan. They turned and made their way toward the Canal St. subway station, and he picked a path through the jostling crowd.

…Unsurprisingly, things don’t turn out perfectly alright. Anyone who has played Ico is familiar with the unsettling air of sexism communicated by the mechanics. For one, Yorda is a helpless object of your affections whose most helpful function is as a magical skeleton key to open castle doors. She seems content to live in the castle, with no strong desire for escape; she is perhaps merely humoring Ico’s boyish excitement when he drags her to new areas. And it always does seem more like dragging than leading. The hidden text certainly reveals as much:

His arm weighed upon her shoulders, felt constrictive around her neck. “You’re burdening me with your ridiculous need,” she said. Or, she said: “You’re going the wrong way and you’re pulling me with you.” In another time, another place, she said: “Stop yanking on my arm; you’re hurting me!

Trinity

Despite being arguably the least substantial interpretation, this is the one that everyone thinks they’re sooo clever for catching on to, to the point that proponents of the “atomic bomb theory” ignore the other 90% of interesting stuff in the game. Indie-game hipsterism aside, the bomb analogy is still important. The main basis for this interpretation is a piece of text in the epilogue:

He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. Through these clues he would find the Princess, see her face. After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder’s glass up to his eyes and waited.

On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World…

Someone near him said: “It worked.”

Someone else said: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Anyone with a passing interest in physical science or modern history will recognize this as a scene from the Manhattan Project. The excited scientists, eagerly conducting experiments and checking computations. Los Alamos, a paradise of empiricism and the intellectual playground of unparalleled geniuses like Richard Feynman, John Von Newman, and Enrico Fermi. The line about “the Birth of the World” refers to the director of the project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita upon detonation of the Trinity bomb: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.”

Under this interpretation, Tim is another key member of the project. He is the stereotypical physicist: an amoral, tinkering genius, blindly pursuing a dangerous goal. Feynman described this state of mind well, saying, “We started for a good reason. Then you’re working very hard to accomplish something, and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking –you just stop.”

The Princess, according to adherents of this analogy, represents the bomb itself:

She stood tall and majestic. She radiated fury. She shouted: “Who has disturbed me?” But then, anger expelled, she felt the sadness beneath; she let her breath fall softly, like a sigh, like ashes floating gently on the wind.

She couldn’t understand why he chose to flirt so closely with the death of the world.

And yet… if the Princess is just a direct code for the Bomb, then her wording seems peculiar. “Who has disturbed me?“ makes no sense –bombs are designed to explode. (A better question might be, “Why have you created me?”) More dammingly, if Braid really is, as some overeager forum-posters suggest, a story that focuses on “the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, and the irreversible impact it had on all human conflicts thereafter”… then what the hell explains the 100% non-fissile exposition of all the other worlds? Is it all some kind of red herring? Obviously not.

The Trinity references are certainly valid, and they definitely fit the emotional tone of the ending, but they’re part of a bigger philosophical message.

Unity

Here’s the text the player encounters directly before the Trinity story:

He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.

In light of this passage, it seems clear that the story about the bomb was just one instance of Tim’s insatiable quest for scientific knowledge. Just like the grasping experimentation and theorizing that players have gone through to understand the nature of each World and solve each puzzle, Tim seeks an understanding of the real world; in particular the fundamental nature of the universe and the physical basis of consciousness. “The fall of an apple” alludes to Newton’s famous insight that the orbit of the moon is produced by the same phenomena that pulls an apple to the ground, while “the twisting of metal orbs on a thread” is a reference to the Cavendish experiment, which precisely measured the force of gravity. As far as I know, the phrases about rats and monkeys aren’t references to specific experiments, but refer to the original ways of studying brain anatomy and active brain function, respectively.

This scientific talk also recalls the images of the “Epitaph of Stevinus”, a proof of balanced forces on an inclined plane, and the Aleph, a mathematical symbol for infinity, which we encountered in World 4.

Tim’s strange mix of science and spirituality is no oddity to anyone who is familiar with the great scientific geniuses and natural philosophers of history. Plato’s assertion that our world is founded in the perfection of universal reason, Descartes’ attempts to derive the universe from the cogito, Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God”, and Einstein’s “unbounded appreciation for the structure of the world” are only a few expressions of the same deep, spiritual admiration for the order and harmony of reality.

To achieve this ultimate philosophical triumph would surely result in the transformation that Tim seeks; the materialization of “a final palace where we can exist in peace.”

Alas, Braid’s dark message is forever that “The Princess is in another castle”. The Princess, who in this final interpretation represents objective, illuminating, liberating knowledge about the universe, is neither accessible through rational inquiry nor empirical observation:

Ghostly, she stood in front of him and looked into his eyes. “I am here,” she said. “I am here. I want to touch you.” She pleaded: “Look at me!” But he would not see her; he only knew how to look at the outside of things.

Unlike the little insights of Braid’s temporal conundrums, transcendent understanding is of a fundamentally different, non-intellectual quality, and therefore transcendence –if she even exists!– lies eternally inaccessible to Tim’s analytical thought. Inevitably blind to this truth, Tim grasps ever more desperately at the deep, satisfying truths that will be forever just out of his reach.

The candy store. Everything he wanted was on the opposite side of that pane of glass. The store was decorated in bright colors, and the scents wafting out drove him crazy. He tried to rush for the door, or just get closer to the glass, but he couldn’t. She held him back with great strength. Why would she hold him back? How might he break free of her grasp? He considered violence.

They had been here before on their daily walks. She didn’t mind his screams and his shrieks, or the way he yanked painfully on her braid to make her stop. He was too little to know better.

She picked him up and hugged him: “No, baby,” she said. He was shaking. She followed his gaze toward treats sitting on pillows behind the glass: the chocolate bar and the magnetic monopole, the It-From-Bit and the Ethical Calculus; and so many other things, deeper inside. “Maybe when you’re older, baby,” she whispered, setting him back on his feet and leading him home, “Maybe when you’re older.”

Every day thereafter, as before, she always walked him on a route that passed in front of the candy store.

The magnetic monopole, a fundamental particle of magnetic charge whose discovery would confirm the grand unified theories of physics that predict its existence. Ethical Calculus, a long sought-after utilitarian ethical system that would ground moral values in objective logic and unambiguously outline the path of a meaningful, good life. The It-From-Bit, a mathematical Realm of the Forms, which would place the foundation of all thought, phenomena, and existence in the perfection of abstract axiomatic truth.

Braid confronts us with the probability that we will never have answers like these. We might writhe and fight, straining forward to extend our trembling hands. A few fingernails might claw screeching across the glass. Our eyes, blurred with tears of indescribable longing, will dart desperately across thick, swirling depths, yearning for the diamond-like glitter of transcendent insight.

“Maybe,” Braid tells us, “maybe when you’re older.”

Nuclear Strategy in a Semi-Vulnerable World

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To comment or view community discussion of this article, see the cross-posted version on the EA Forum.

Summary: it seemed interesting to reframe a variation of eca’s original EA Forum question – What would have happened every country got nukes in 1950? – as a way of interpolating between the real world and Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World” paper. Bostrom notes that an extreme worldwide police/surveillance state might be our only option to contain a sufficiently dangerous technology. In this post I explore the spectrum of potential real-world responses to a toned-down version of the extreme threat posed by “easy nukes” in Bostrom’s original thought experiment. In particular, I try to interpolate between our existing multi-polar world of many nation-states, and an imagined maximum-control world of unified government, imagining what a return to cold-war-esque or neo-imperial dynamics would look like.

Bostrom’s Vulnerable World Hypothesis

In his paper The Vulnerable World Hypothesis, Nick Bostrom invokes a thought experiment about “easy nukes” – what if it were possible to create incredibly destructive weapons with extreme ease? Considering a “counterfactual history in which Leo Szilard invents nuclear fission and realizes that a nuclear bomb could be made with a piece of glass, a metal object, and a battery arranged in a particular configuration,” the situation seems hopeless – although the information could perhaps be kept secret by classifying and policing the relevant academic fields, eventually the knowledge would get out. In a world where anyone with the right instructions can create a nuclear weapon, the imminent collapse of civilization seems almost inevitable. Even the best-case scenarios involve zealously purging the world of glass and electrical equipment, totalitarian surveillance, and a quickly-growing count of irradiated craters.

Bostrom uses this thought experiment to illustrate the general principle that, since the capabilities of future technologies are unknown, at any point we could be about to stumble upon a discovery that “makes the devastation of civilization extremely likely, unless civilization sufficiently exits the semianarchic default condition” of limited preventative policing, limited global governance, and diverse motivations.

In this post, I want to use a modification of Bostrom’s thought experiment to explore the specific dynamics of nuclear proliferation. What if nuclear weapons were intermediate in difficulty between metal/glass/battery “easy nukes”, and real nukes with their highly-enriched uranium encased in shaped charges of exotic, perfectly-timed high-explosives? What if all you needed for a nuclear bomb was to pack some ordinary, unenriched uranium-238 into a box of TNT?

Semi-Vulnerable: U-238 Is All You Need

Following the EA Forum question by eca that originally prompted my thoughts, we’ll imagine that the secret of semi-easy nukes was revealed to the world in 1950. Disclaimer: I don’t have any kind of special insight into nuclear strategy, policy, or technology – I’m just a typical internet layperson trying to think things through based on what I know. Corrections and comments are welcome!

In the real world, the primary focus of non-proliferation efforts has been to strictly control access to the highly-enriched uranium-235 and plutonium necessary to construct a bomb. If nuclear weapons could get by with only uranium-238, there would be no need for the large, high tech enrichment facilities and centrifuges that arduously concentrate natural uranium (99% U-238 and 1% U-235 by volume) to a level of over 80% U-235. Besides the question of obtaining enough fissile material, any would-be nuclear power must also solve the engineering challenges involved in creating a bomb. These engineering challenges are significant and expensive, but are considered within the reach of normal industrialized nations. But, if a nuclear explosion could be set off using ordinary construction explosives piled casually around the uranium, the engineering challenge of creating a nuclear bomb would disappear. In a world with semi-easy nukes, our civilization would be deprived of its most important anti-proliferation strategies. The power to create a nuclear weapon would be extended, not just beyond the club of rich industrialized nations, but to literally any person or group who came into possession of a few kilograms of uranium.

Unlike in Bostrom’s original thought experiment, however, this seems like a potentially survivable event for civilization. The world in 1950 was not already full of easily-accessible uranium the way it was full of glass and batteries, and uranium is naturally rare. So the most obvious focus for nonproliferation efforts would be a complete and zealously enforced ban on uranium in any form, combined with government seizure of all uranium ore mines, and a permanent ban on atomic power.

Unfortunately, uranium is widely distributed – there are large deposits in North America, in the USSR, in China and India, and in several sites within Africa. Smaller deposits are also present around the mediterranean and in south america. Even if the world gave its best effort, it would be much easier for determined countries to acquire unenriched uranium for semi-easy nukes than it is for them to acquire highly-enriched fissile material in the real world. Unlike the metal/glass/batteries scenario, the world’s uranium supply chains would likely remain pretty secure most of the time, so nuclear weapons would usually remain the purview of nations rather than lone individuals. But we would be living in a world where any nation that wanted it could have the A-bomb.

Uranium deposits are spread widely across the globe.

Tactical Details

What would happen in this world? Fortunately, in order to deliver a bomb to the target, nations want a variety of missiles, airplanes, etc, which must be bought or built. If every nation in our scenario had been magically gifted an arsenal to match the USA’s current nuclear triad of bombers, subs, and ICBMs to accompany their new warheads, the world would probably end in fire pretty quickly. But in 1950, not a single nation had invented ICBMs, and few countries even have long-range bombers.

When everyone who wants already has nukes, these other parts of a nation’s nuclear capabilities become much more important. If you are a poor African country in 1950, you don’t have intercontinental missiles ready to rain death anywhere on earth at a moment’s notice. More likely, you just have some loose warheads that you can hope to sneak into another nation’s port in a disguised container ship. Just giving everyone nukes would not put countries on an even, mutually-assured-destruction playing field. On the plus side, this disadvantage in delivery systems would quickly become a second pillar of nonproliferation efforts. Unfortunately, the resulting strategic instability as different countries jockeyed to gain advantages over their neighbors – more accurate missiles, stealthier submarines, hair-trigger alert systems, second-strike capability, etc – would probably become one of the main drivers of conflict.

Lack of second-strike capability, in particular, could prove very harmful, since nuclear strategy was much apparently more combustible before the introduction of stealthy submarine fleets. As Bostrom notes in his paper,

It is widely believed among nuclear strategists that the development of a reasonably secure second-strike capability by both superpowers by the mid-1960s created the conditions for ‘strategic stability’ (Colby and Gerson, 2013). Prior to this period, American war plans reflected a much greater inclination, in any crisis situation, to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The introduction of nuclear submarine-based ICBMs was thought to be particularly helpful for ensuring second-strike capabilities (and thus ‘mutually assured destruction’) since it was widely believed to be practically impossible for an aggressor to eliminate the adversary’s boomer fleet in the initial attack.

The stabilizing technology of nuclear submarines would not be an option for many poor (or landlocked!) nations, thus lengthening the perilous early era of first-strike-friendly nuclear strategies.

With easy-to-make nukes but tightly-controlled missile technology, we would probably also see greater tactical emphasis on very small bomb designs for local, tactical battlefield use – this would further erode the “nuclear taboo” boundary between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.

In the hopes of avoiding retaliation, anonymous attacks might become common – sneak weapons into the enemy’s cities and blow them up without warning. To counter this, powerful nations would become much more paranoid about their ports/borders, and accept commercial trade only from within their empire and a few trusted allies. (It’s almost surprising that anonymous nuclear attacks haven’t ever occurred in real life, since they’d be so easy to pull off. But in real life, the list of suspects is very short – with semi-easy-nukes, it would be much easier to hide.) International trade was only 8% of world GDP in 1950 anyways, versus 14% in 1913 and 24% today, so it wouldn’t have hurt too badly to pull up the drawbridges.

A New Geopolitical Equilibrium?

Thanks to the lack of ICBMs and rarity of long-range bombers in 1950, society would have a bit of time to settle into the new geopolitical equilibrium.

I expect that some dynamics would be similar to nuclear strategy in the real world: nuclear weapons would make wars less common, but the few wars that did happen would have a risk of being much more devastating. If you’re Saddam Hussein and you’re pondering whether to start the Iran-Iraq war, maybe you hold back for fear of a nuclear exchange, and start your own local cold war instead. I’d expect that maybe we have only a small fraction as many wars, but some of the remaining wars would involve nuclear weapons.

While interstate wars might decrease dramatically, I’m not sure if the frequency of civil wars would change as much. I could easily imagine a dark alternate history where maybe half of civil wars involve some small group (either rebels or an embattled remnant of government) getting their hands on a stray nuke and setting it off in the middle of a city.

Of course, culture would change worldwide to value stability and safety more, which you’d think would reduce civil wars, but this might have complicated effects – like, if people have higher tolerance for totalitarianism because they fear civil war and crave stability, maybe the totalitarianism just keeps getting worse until they rebel anyways, so the rate of civil wars only goes down a little?

It could be tempting for many countries to aim for a North Korea strategy – acting crazy and threatening everyone around them in exchange for concessions. Perhaps, after a bunch of initial chaos, the world would eventually enforce a much stronger norm against these rogue nations – imagine a kind of worldwide NATO who wouldn’t have any qualms preemptively nuking dictators who seemed to be going down the North Korea path.

Overall, the idea of a mostly peaceful world where “mutually assured destruction” logic extends without incident to a multipolar mexican standoff seems incredibly unlikely to me. But I am also optimistic that semi-easy-nukes is not so terrible as to be an automatic game-over for civilization. Instead, I think this world will fall somewhere between the following two extremes, either finding a way to live with low-level nuclear conflict or transitioning towards stricter global control to suppress it:

In 1950, the world starts out looking mostly similar to our own history, except wars are less common, but those wars often involve nuclear weapons, so everyone is just nuking each other occasionally, especially during civil wars, in poorer countries with less nuclear capability, and among dictatorships rather than democracies. (Cold-war-like dynamics mostly prevail among rich and powerful nations, just like IRL) This is a pretty terrible state of affairs because many more people die, and over time a larger part of the earth’s territory, atmosphere, etc, is being irradiated. Also, if nothing big is done, I’d expect the average rate of nuclear detonations per year to increase as technology continues to advance.

In order to prevent continual low-level nuclear war as described above, powerful nations might try to coordinate much more to eliminate the threat posed by unstable and rogue nations. This transition towards world government, if it happens at all, might be peaceful but might alternately involve a very severe, full-scale thermonuclear war – either as the crisis that prompts the decision to centralize, or as a result of the decision, when the winning coalition must now seize power by potentially obliterating all the objecting countries.

It would be really depressing if we repeatedly had giant full-scale worldwide nuclear wars, getting worse and worse as technology advanced, and ALSO failing to change world governance to put a stop to it. But I guess humanity has disappointed me before, so it could definitely happen – this would be especially likely if each nuclear war has an equalizing effect, making the most powerful countries disproportionately more fractured and broken and chaotic, so after the first big war there’s no alliance powerful/functional/responsible enough to impose order and stop the next round.

The Spectrum of Global Coordination

In The Vulnerable World Hypothesis, Bostrom mentions three techniques for dealing with destructive technology: preventative policing, coordinated global governance, and reducing the diversity of motivations among mankind. In our scenario, I’m taking for granted that policing works decently well, if imperfectly. Unenriched uranium is more difficult to police than enriched uranium, but vastly easier than batteries and glass – more important than questions of “how well can uranium production be policed” will be questions of “which states will allow uranium mining and export to what other countries”, which is a governance question. On the other hand, 1950s society is in no position to start mind-controlling or genetically-engineering its citizens, so “diversity of motivations” isn’t a lever we have access to. (Also, to be effective, a mind-control strategy would have to be adopted by many countries – another governance question). This leaves us with global governance as the primary axis of variation. Society will naturally attempt to coordinate and centralize more in response to the threat, but at the same time it’s possible that nuclear proliferation naturally creates divisions between nations, on net giving us a more fractured society. To sketch out the space of possibilities, here is a sliding scale of global-governance intensity:

100% literal single world government with totalitarian surveillance (likely established after a devastating WW3)
Closely cooperative alliance of all major governments (perhaps but not necessarily established after a devastating WW3)
Colonial/imperial system where there’s plenty of competition between empires, but no great power is deliberately supplying nukes to rebel groups, and rouge nations are reliably punished.
Proxy-war system where the two superpower teams are simultaneously suppressing and encouraging proliferation as they fight over declining european empires (like the coups and revolutions of the real Cold War but with lots of actual detonations)
Multi-polar world where the superpowers play defense and the developing world is defined by regional tensions (like the India-Pakistan standoff but everywhere, between eg Turkey & Greece or South Africa & Angola) and the most damage is done by medium-scale nuclear exchanges (like a war between Iran and Iraq / Saudi Arabia)
Anarchic, hyper-fragmented world where independence movements succeed everywhere and random nukes are going off all over whenever local mexican standoffs break down (eg Maoist China collapses into multiple warring states, Northern Ireland experiences nuclear terrorism, etc)

Note that one can be optimistic vs pessimistic about amount of deaths and conflict that happen in each scenario, so this spectrum of governance coordination is skew from the axis of good vs bad outcomes. You can be optimistic-imperialist (world government would probably happen, and it would be great), pessimistic-imperialist (world government would happen, but it would be a catastrophe and would only succeed at shutting down small wars in exchange for making the biggest wars more likely), optimistic-anarchist (everyone will be in a tense-but-peaceful standoff), or pessimistic-anarchist (semi-easy-nukes would for sure give us a chaotic slow-rolling nuclear war until there’s no civilization left, like in Bostrom’s original story).

I think this spectrum is also interesting for illustrating what “increased global coordination” might look like in practice. In philosophy papers about the far future, we can imagine 100% unified planetary governance, but what does it mean to be halfway between where we are now and that hypothetical unified state? I think people imagine it means weak agreement among the various nations of the earth (like the rough international consensus around climate change), or weak supranational governments (like the United Nations). But it could also mean a world of stronger alliances and larger empires, where there are effectively fewer sovereign powers on earth. This might not look very coordinated if those rival empires are at each other’s throats, but it is indeed a form of more unified global governance.

A Median-Case Story of Increased Coordination

I think the most likely (and perhaps best-case) scenario is that the world eventually makes a serious attempt at the neo-imperial system of 2.0, although this scenario only really works if the USSR and China decide to play along. It would obviously be a more totalitarian world than the real world, and it still wouldn’t stop a lot of nukes from going off. But I think in a neo-imperial system, although it world would be much more fragile than the real world, could still have a basically-normal future that is not guaranteed-doomed. Versus anything below 1.5 feels like it might work well for a few decades, but would slowly drift farther and farther off the rails as each nation’s capabilities advance.

This sudden increase in the importance of strictly-controlled empires might mean that decolonization of africa happens much later, if at all. Britain and France thus remain important world powers, as USA-supported policemen of the third world. Likely the USA could extend a similar nonproliferation umbrella over South America – not overtly colonial, but a more intensive presence than the meddling of the real-world cold war. (Would this be a workable plan? To what extent did European colonialism end thanks to egalitarian, anti-colonial sentiment and draining willpower to defend the empires – versus because they actually lost the military ability to exert control over their dominions?)

This map from 1945 depicts India and Indonesia as colonized, which gained independence by 1950. Still, there were far fewer independent nations in 1950 than today.

(Between the Soviet Union and the European empires, it’s amazing to me how few independent countries are on that map, and the power is even more concentrated when you think about how poor the rest of the world was. A much darker world, but being so centralized could have its perks against x-risk. Africa was still mostly colonized – maybe in our alternate world, Britain and France just keep it that way, the USA covers latin america, and the USSR & China exert similar nonproliferation pressure in their spheres of influence.)

I’d guess that the very first nukes to go off would probably be in Asia – either as part of ongoing Korean war, or something else involving Mao/China. They have the right combination of motive, lack of imperial oversight, and enough wealth to source lots of uranium quickly.

The danger would ramp up dramatically into the 60s, by which time many more groups have had time to acquire uranium. Practically any wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia can now entail devastating medium-scale nuclear exchanges. In Africa and Latin America, perhaps we see a steady beat of occasional detonations (one every few years on average) by attempted revolutionaries / independence movements / coup attempts.

Earlier, I’ve talked in the abstract about how much the major powers would be willing to coordinate. In practice, I think those big questions would usually come down to how USSR and China decide to behave. Maybe they join the US and Europe as global-policing empires, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of allies/possessions, like North Korea and Warsaw Pact countries. Or for a darker scenario, in a world of easy proliferation, perhaps they actually decide to supply nuclear weapons to rebel communist groups – just as the USA and USSR supported coups and revolutions with conventional weapons during the real cold war.

If the USSR and China both behaved nicely, there could be a smooth path to a colonial/imperial system – this would be very repressive, meaning that there were really only a small handful of sovereign powers controlling humanity. But given the desperate circumstances, it might be the best way to keep the peace. If they don’t play along, however, western powers would face a stark choice – first-strike the communist powers in a full-scale thermonuclear war that would kill millions, and seek to establish a hegemonic system of global control in the aftermath? Or retreat into a defensive mode, which would start off looking like the IRL cold war (proxy battles in the third world, except with occasional nuclear detonations) and would slowly transition to a multi-polar world featuring occasional medium-scale nuclear wars and increasingly many threats (from rogue North-Korea-type nations) that the west would be unable to defend themselves from?

Most scenarios of increased global coordination would require bucking the real-world trend towards a much higher number of independent countries.

A final key question, of course, is the simple feasibility of establishing strict global governance. In the short term, the goal is to control proliferation bottlenecks like ICBM technology and uranium mines. But in the long-term, would it really be possible for a handful of nations to maintain colonial-era control over such broad empires? Semi-easy nukes would increase the desire of powerful countries to control the rest, but it would also make that task harder by somewhat levelling the military playing field. If the leading nations don’t have the state capacity to pull off global governance, then we’ll be stuck in a multipolar anything-goes world no matter what we think is preferable.

Nuclear “Contagion” Impacts the Desirability of Global Governance

A graph of 20th century atrocities shows the cluster around 1940 – not just WW2 but other only-tangientially-related catastrophes like the Holodomor & Great Leap Forward. Why is war and violence so contagious? Is nuclear war special

One potential crux here is the importance of the “nuclear taboo” (which in the real world is intact, and in alt-1950 would have be broken almost immediately) and the idea of something like nuclear conflict contagiousness. In the real world, we have a vision that once even small nukes start flying, possibly things escalate extremely quickly, meanwhile drawing in more third parties until every country is sending missiles skyward as part of an omnicidal conflagration. I’m not sure how realistic this vision of nuclear contagion fits either our scenario or the real world – wouldn’t all third parties want to make very clear that they are staying totally out of any ongoing nuclear conflict? Obviously everyone is rightly terrified of ever finding out by testing the limits of the nuclear taboo, and I’m no nuclear strategist, so I’m uncertain about the strength nuclear contagion.

The “contagiousness” of nuclear conflict helps determine the value of strict global governance: if conflicts are extremely contagious (such that something like the real-world Syrian Civil War ends up with the superpowers at DEFCON 1), then small-scale wars are still extremely dangerous, and global policing is very desirable. If nuclear conflict isn’t contagious at all and it’s easy to stay out of a dispute, then it would be a lot more acceptable for the leading nations to just let nuclear wars happen, in the same way that the modern world often lets civil wars happen without intervening too much. Just play defense by being really paranoid about your ports/borders, and threatening to first-strike anyone who develops suspicious new long-range capabilities.

I really don’t know much about the question of contagiousness. Is there something special about fission weapons and the “nuclear taboo” that affects contagiousness? (Maybe nations feel like they have to “use or lose” their ICBMs before they are destroyed by opponents.) Or does all war seem contagious because it naturally erupts at the center of complex knots of geopolitical tensions and alliances? (Like the rapid domino-like declarations of war that set off WW1, or the agglomeration of seemingly disparate atrocities and conflicts centered around WW2.)

If nuclear attacks are specifically and specially contagious, we should be most worried about something like a nuclear Israel-Iran or India-Pakistan conflict. Aside from the horrific direct cost of an India-Pakistan exchange, how likely would it be to eventually draw in the gigantic arsenals of the USA and Russia?
If it’s more about the underlying geopolitical conditions and the universal logic of escalation, we should be most worried about small direct conflicts between the biggest nuclear powers getting rapidly out of hand. Maybe the USA feels pressured to confront China early over Taiwan since China’s power is only rising over time, and the vision of having a limited-casualties, mostly-naval battle in the South China Sea ends up being wrong, with geopolitical energy fueling rapid massive escalation between the two.

What does this tell us about the real world?

To keep things simple, I’ve been treating this question as purely an alternate history exercise – what would have happened by 2020 if things were different in 1950. Maybe from a long-term perspective of thousands of years, that much proliferation means you’re totally doomed. But on a timescale like that, it’s still early days for the real world’s nuclear proliferation dynamics, too.

But that brings up a key question: are we ourselves totally doomed? The spread of knowledge and the advance of technology makes real nuclear weapons accessible to more and more nations despite the difficulty. It’s possible that proliferation in the semi-easy-nukes scenario vs the real world will end up in essentially the same place, with one history just being a fast-forward version of the other.

As far as I can tell , the real world is indeed just doing universal proliferation in slow-motion. But, the slowness matters: it provides time enough to work out strategic implications, develop defensive technology, establish norms of behavior, and create international agreements, all of which help the cause of peace. In a best-case scenario, perhaps proliferation advances so slowly that it is essentially an irrelevant force compared to the many other changes the future holds.

Differential technology development is another key difference – in our world, submarines are easier for nations to build than nukes, so more nations in our world will be able to wield the stabilizing second-strike capability from the moment they get the bomb.

A final contrast the semi-easy-nukes scenario: in the real world, it seems impossible that a lone-wolf madman or small group could ever build a bomb entirely on their own without attracting attention, almost regardless of how advanced technology gets. Nuclear terrorism might be rife in the semi-easy-nukes scenario, but it seems easy to control in the real world, and limited to the fear that someone could steal and activate a fully-constructed bomb. If nation-states are the only nuclear threat, this has many simplifying effects on strategy and diplomacy: the list of possible nuclear-attack motivations is shorter, anonymous attacks become less attractive, second-strikes are an effective form of deterrence, etc.

If we are headed for a world of universal proliferation (perhaps with both nuclear and other futuristic weapons), the imperial/neocolonial governance scenario might also have lessons for us. Truly unified global governance has never existed historically, and seems difficult to achieve with no clear path for getting from here to there (especially if we want to imagine imposing the new world order without using devastating force). Furthermore, as many including Nick Bostrom and Bryan Caplan have noted, global government seems dangerous and undesirable even if it’s stable. It would be a single point of failure for human civilization, posing threats like permanent cultural/economic stagnation, worldwide totalitarian lock-in, and other dystopian scenarios.

By contrast, imperialism has been the norm throughout history, with the past 100 years being a dramatic exception to the general rule. Historical imperialism and colonialism certainly deserve their dark reputation for exploitation and human rights abuses, but there are also more positive examples in the modern day – the European Union is a good example of nations giving up some sovereignty to a supranational organization in a controlled way in exchange for the benefits of solidarity and standardization. The NATO alliance offers a blueprint for a relatively light-touch form of global governance that restricts itself to military affairs only. In reality, a world of increased global coordination would probably look like a mixture of these types of voluntary supranational associations and the territory grabs / “spheres of influence” of the bad old days. (Personally, I thought that Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel “Rainbow’s End” had a good depiction of this scenario – kind of China + US + EU in cooperation versus the assorted forces of chaos and unexpected technological disruption.) If it’s true that our future is headed in a neo-imperial direction of increasingly coordinated governance, this suggests that it might be beneficial to help groups of smaller countries build EU-like alliances. If countries find themselves needing to join a team of some kind to stay safe and succeed, much better that they voluntarily join a multinational organization than fall into the bullying sphere of influence of a distant superpower.

What works for nukes might not work for A.I.

Bostrom’s original thought experiment forces us to realize that, given a sufficiently dangerous technology, human civilization might have no choice but to implement extreme draconian measures (unified global government, extreme surveillance with harsh penalties, and attempts at mind control) to avoid extinction. Over the course of this post, considering a toned-down version of his thought experiment has caused me to come off as almost wistful about the concentration of power during what were otherwise very dark times for humanity – colonialism and the Cold War. But the threat posed by AI is very different.

With nukes, you can create a peaceful world if you just suppress things well enough. That’s something that even evil, incompetent empires are pretty good at. With AI, a suppression strategy might buy time, but it seems doomed to fail eventually – instead, you need to actually engage with the technical challenge of building a solution in the form of a safe, aligned AI. Personally, I worry that the challenge is so great, so subtle and so easy to get wrong accidentally, that no existing government has the wisdom and capacity to navigate the issue with a good probability of success. As Gwern said, “If the worst-case AI x-risk happened, it would be hard for every reason that corona was easy… Don’t count on our institutions to save anyone: they can’t even save themselves.”

In short, for difficult but simple threats that our current civilization has the skills to handle, centralization and increased global governance is good, but for complex problems beyond our current civilizational ability to solve, I think we’re dead by default, so our best option may be to decentralize, increase governance experimentation (via things like charter cities), increase the variance of outcomes, and hope that either the fruits of governance experimentation percolate everywhere and helps society become wiser, or that the increased variance alone improves our odds of a good outcome.

Naturally, this inspires questions about the details, rather than just where the world should fall on an overall coordination spectrum – how can we acquire the benefits of experimentation, competition, and improvement in some dimensions –like creating more pressure and energy for reforms that increase institutional decision-making capability– while retaining the benefits of cooperation in other areas, like avoiding technology arms-races or being able to implement bans on dangerous research?

I hope you found this post useful. I’d be happy to read your comments or corrections by email at jacksonw.xyz@gmail.com. You can participate in the discussion of the cross-posted article on the EA forum, or find additional comments about related issues over at the original EA Forum question by eca. If on the other hand you are coming to this question less from an effective-altruist perspective and more out of a dark fascination with the Manhattan Project, Trinity test, etc, you might enjoy my commentary on the game Braid.

'Chrono Trigger' Short Story

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 21:38:45 -0200

What follows is a story I wrote in 2014 about the classic Japanese fantasy videogame Chrono Trigger. People who enjoy this story may also be interested in Braid: More Now Than Ever, my fan-sequel to Jonathan Blow’s 2008 game containing original writing and new puzzles, or in my commentary on other games as hosted on this site, like The Witness, Braid.

Thoughts in the mind of Crono upon his arrival at the Town of Enhasa in The Empire of Zeal, Having Been Asked The Question, “Do You Believe In Fate?”

Crono remembers having had a thought or two about this kind of thing, back when he was little, long before this whole adventure began. He remembers the ideas which, back then, might have shaped his answer. In those days, Crono had always felt a strong sense of progress. There might be small hiccups now and again, but over the long term things were bound to move forward; it was this steady march which had so clearly brought his kingdom so far in the thousand years since its founding. There was a sense of momentum, of direction to events: the present was unambiguously better than the barbarous past, and the future in turn was sure to be even more prosperous than the present. In a way, Crono supposes, that’s a powerful sense of fate.

But on the other hand… fate? As in, everything is part of some secret plan, whole nations and histories just pawns on some cosmic chessboard, events like carefully arranged dominoes, all conspiring towards a predetermined end? It’s just too absurd, it’s cartoonish. It’s so obviously contrary to the ordinary, everyday world of infinite tiny choices and considered, freely-made decisions. Maybe he could talk himself into some subtler definition of fate, but the normal one, the idea that It All Happens For A Reason, that such-and-such was Always Meant To Be… it’s myth, it’s make-believe. It’s just too silly to be true.

But that was the Crono of long ago. It’s been barely a few weeks, but it feels like it’s been forever. So much has changed: he’s seen things he’d never have even imagined, learned things that had been forgotten for millennia. And his companions, five of them now, brought together from every distant corner of the world. Each has their own long and strange story, each their own peculiar perspective. What are they thinking? What would be their answers to the question of fate?

Marle started all this, at least in the sense that it was her royal pendant that caused Lucca’s machine to generate a time-gate. When it happened, it seemed totally random: Chrono bumped into a girl at the fair, then her strange necklace somehow set off the gate. That first part, at least, wasn’t what it seemed: Marle is no ordinary girl, but royalty, in line to become the twenty-eighth Queen of all Guardia! She had disguised herself and left the castle to see the fair without drawing attention, but in a sense her plan backfired: by now she and Chrono and the others have had more dealings with the Guardia royal line than he would ever have guessed possible. Before their adventure began, Marle felt estranged from her parents, her kingdom, and her role as princess. But as they’ve hopped the centuries between Guardia’s past and present, Marle has been a witness to the myriad subtle strands of cause and effect that connect her to her ancestors even thirteen generations distant. She’s seen kindness in the 6th century repaid in the 10th, a testament to how values and ideas can persist through the ages. She’s also watched how legacy can twist over time and create unexpected consequences: a criminal justice system established to prevent barbarism becomes a tool of oppression, and a newly-discovered treasure in one age becomes a white elephant that nearly bankrupts the kingdom in another.

But that all happened later. When Marle was thrown for the first time through the portal her pendant created, she was dumped into the Dark Ages. The young princess was mistaken for her distant grandmother, the fourteenth Queen Guardia – the real queen had gone missing several days ago under mysterious circumstances. Marle’s appearance was celebrated by the people: the Queen had been found, so the search was called off. But this meant that the real queen would never be found, preventing Marle from ever being born. Chrono remembers watching it happen: while he and Lucca were talking to her, she slowly began to change, flicker somehow, as erratic motions seemed to tug at different parts of her body. It wasn’t her muscles that were jittering, but somehow the world. She could feel it, each twitching tug growing more forceful, like the motion of a spinning top, unstable, about to spin out and tumble over. She screamed, and the scream too was a twitching, flickering, stretched and distorted sound, as she was finally torn out of the universe by the tidal forces of space and time.

What must this have been like? The rest of their party have seen a few changes like this, but to actually experience them – to know that you are changing, that your existence is racing around a vicious loop of causality, to know that the childhood you remember, the childhood that in this instant you really had, is somehow different from the one you had a moment ago. To feel yourself shaped by the past in an infinity of ways, to know with helpless certainty that you are only the inevitable, fated product of that succession of events. But in another sense not inevitable at all – that you are so fragile, so unstable, that surely nothing could ever be predestined, when the slightest change can throw such chaotic torques into the path of future history!

The places they’ve been to and the things they’ve seen have been new for everyone – but especially for Ayla. In her world, nothing was ever new. She lived in a tribal society, millions of years ago. Every day was the same there: the same dangers, the same opportunities, the whole world just a tiny outpost of ignorant humanity in a vast and homogenous jungle landscape. Whole centuries come and go there without much event; any history is first blurred into mumbled myth, then forgotten. Hell, if anybody had asked her about fate before all this started, she probably wouldn’t even know what they were talking about. “Fate – you mean, what do I think about all the stuff that hasn’t happened yet? Well of course it’s figured out ahead of time, dummy, ‘cuz I’ve already done the figuring: it’s gonna be just like all the stuff that’s already happened before!“

Indeed, Crono doesn’t think her opinion has even changed much in all the time since they met her. Medieval kingdoms, dystopic futures, lost atlantean empires – to Crono, each era seems dramatically different, their cultures and levels of technology diverging wildly from what he experienced in his own time. But to Ayla, everywhere they’ve gone has been so unbelievably far from anything she’s used to, the different eras might feel equally incomprehensible. Connecting past to future across that vast gulf – Crono’s not even sure if Ayla realizes that these different worlds really are all different parts of her future, rather than just different places somewhere else on the planet. She is happy to help Crono in the fight against Lavos – but more out of friendship, or in repayment for taking down Azala and the Reptites, than out of concern for her distant descendants. And why should she need to feel such concern? No matter what happens to Guardia Kingdom or the Empire of Zeal, it’s all millions of years in the future for her. When this adventure is over, and Ayla returns to Iota villiage, none of these places will have any relevance anymore. She’ll go back to living her life –and when it ends, other people will be living other lives little different from hers. And it’ll go on and on like that, for thousands and thousands and thousands of generations: the future no different from the past, each day just the same as the one that came before.

Lucca is probably the expert opinion here. She opened the first time-gate, after all, even if it was an accident while she was trying to make a teleportation device. Since then, she’s spent all her spare time working out equations, trying to figure out as much as possible about how the gates work and what all their time-travel is doing to the world. She has concluded – well, honestly, most of it is way over Crono’s head; Lucca has mostly been talking to Robo lately since he’s the only one who can keep up with all the technical stuff. But Crono remembers right before they were about to make the jump into the deep, prehistoric past. He was afraid –they had all been afraid, even if nobody said it– that whatever they did so many millions of years back, it would probably have huge effects on all future ages. Their families and friends might be totally erased, replaced by an entire alternate history. But then, when they actually did return to the present, that’s not at all what they saw. For all they had done –defeating the Reptites, finding enough Dreamstone to repair the Masamune, recruiting Ayla, and saving the whole Iota tribe– the change in the present was completely undetectable.

All of these time-hopping adventures: to Crono it feels like they occur totally outside the normal bounds of causality, a mischievous meddling in the proper order of events. But Lucca points out that if that was the case, the present should be vastly altered whenever they return from visiting a past age. Instead the differences, if they appear at all, are minor and isolated. She says that the only way this makes sense is if the seemingly original, untouched world we grew up in was actually somehow already altered by our current time-traveling actions. Those actions aren’t changing the world but rather in a sense completing it, because somehow the world has always already been changed by them. So does this mean some other version of myself has already done the things I’m doing right now? Are there an infinite number of Cronos, each fulfilling the same destiny over and over? This is where Lucca starts to roll her eyes. “I mean kind of, I guess,” she starts, “But really that’s totally not the right way to think about it. See, you’re still trying to frame things as the result of a normal process of cause-and-effect –made cyclical because of our time-travel, of course, but still decidedly temporal in the ordinary sense. Really it only makes sense to think of the universe stabilizing itself through causal resonance on some unknown extra-temporal level. All of us time-travelers necessarily exist in such a way that our actions are not only self-causing, but also self-stabilizing in the case of variance, and as for how things got this way in the first place? Well, not through any normal process of revision, but instead via some kind of instantaneous extra-temporal harmonic resonance effect. So yeah, no infinite Cronos.”

And no fate? On the one hand, unlike most people in Crono’s time, Lucca doesn’t believe that a god designed the world to follow a special plan. And despite the drama of their adventure, she definitely doesn’t believe in fated heroes, days of judgement, or destined battles between good and evil. But on the other hand, she does believe that the universe is “deterministic”: if you knew what every particle in the whole world was up to during one particular instant, you’d be able to predict their future movement and interactions perfectly, so you’d know exactly what the whole future would be like. How did the particles happen to get like that, rather than being in some other configuration? Well, Lucca says that the world went through some kind of “extra-temporal settling process” of “self-stabilizing resonance,” which means our particular history is “cradled in some low-energy configuration: at least a local, or possibly global minimum within possibility-space.” Deterministic history – that means the future’s inevitable – settled into a stabilizing minimum – that means things couldn’t have happened any other way. Lucca might not call that fate, but to Crono it at least sounds pretty similar.

Frog… Frog is a strange one. For Crono and everyone else, their quest through history has not just been an incredible, unexpected adventure – it has also given them a big change in perspective. Crono mostly doesn’t think about this, distracted as he usually is by the drama and romance of his mission, the thrill of battle and the intrepid courage of exploration: knowing a heroic epic when he sees one, Crono is all too eager to play his part. But on those rare occasions when he does step back and consider it all… it’s like suddenly he’s way out in space, looking down at his faraway home while watching whole oceans spin by. Seeing so many lives come and go, seeing the river of history bend and meander across changing eons – it forces a certain detachment.

But Frog isn’t like that. After all this change, all this adventure, he’s still just the honorable knight, seeking only to fulfill his duty to his liege. To Crono it seems a little ridiculous – like how could you still care about all that little stuff, after how far we’ve come? You might start to suspect that Frog was clinging onto his knightly duties for dear life, the one thing grounding him to the backwards era from which he hails. Or hey, maybe he’s just stupid.

Except it’s obvious he’s not. Frog might’ve been born in the Dark Ages, but still it’s clear he’s more thoughtful than Crono and all the other humans in their party put together. Crono’s seen him: how he always volunteers to keep watch over the rest of the camp, how he takes lots of time alone just polishing his armor, sharpening the Masamune. Frog is quiet, soft-spoken, but he’s thinking in every moment. Crono can tell: when Frog has that faraway look, he’s not just reminiscing about his days back in Guardia Kingdom. No, he’s going over everything they’ve seen so far, figuring things out, putting the pieces together better than anyone.

So, from Frog’s point of view, what picture do those pieces make?

For a long time, Frog thought Magus and his shadowy forces were the ultimate evil. But in a twist, he discovered that Magus had only been doing what he felt he had to –he had raised up his army, enslaved half of Guardia, tried to dominate the globe– in a desperate bid to build his strength to summon and defeat a far greater destructive force, the monster Lavos. Stopping Magus might’ve bought Guardia some time, but it’s doomed as long as Lavos still exists. So joining Crono is really just another part of his duty to the kingdom, another chapter in a knight’s story. And it really is a story: to Crono all the fairy-tale stuff seems absurd, dark wizards raising goblin armies and lost princesses rescued by valiant knights cursed into animal form. Even though it’s real it still seems made-up, and there’s the question, really. So Frog is playing a part in an old fantasy tale, he even realizes this – surely he notices that to everyone else all the chivalry stuff looks like theatre. But is he acting by nature, or by choice? Back before Crono had pieced together the Masamune… Frog was living alone in the forest, he had lost faith in himself, he felt he was an imposter, living in Cyrus’s shadow. Cyrus was the destined hero, but he was killed, and Frog was failing in his attempts to fill that void and save the kingdom himself.

Now he’s succeeded: eventually he did take the legendary Masamune, and used it to defeat Magus in the dark tower. So now Frog feels a lot better about himself, but what does he think of fate? “Cyrus had fate, but I did not. He was fated to defeat Magus, but failed. Instead, with thine aid, I succeeded. Impossible, thou might say: if thy were the one who saved the kingdom, then thy must have been the fated hero. Yet somehow I know that is not the correct interpretation. Perhaps mine was rather to inherit a destiny that by rights belonged to him? I cannot say.“ Fated to defy fate, destined to give off the mere appearance of destiny? Or maybe there is no real destiny, yet if Frog believed in destiny it was inevitable that he would find a way to defeat Magus? Is an imposter-hero still an imposter if he has perfectly filled the role? Is it only his own attitude towards his actions that holds him back from becoming the true knight that others see in him – and if so, one must ask, can a sufficiently skilled actor hope to transform himself into the character he imitates? Crono wonders if these are some of the questions Frog has already been asking of himself, in all those quiet moments.

Robo’s journey has been longer and stranger than any of the others’. Created as R66-Y by the Mother Brain of Geno Dome’s automated factory, Robo was originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing Mother Brain’s electric dream into reality: the last fragments of humanity overpowered, the world remade as a robot utopia of logic and steel. Then as now, Robo’s decisions were made freely by his own mind, acted out by his own will. But what does it mean to be free, if your very mind was moulded by another’s hand?

To live with a pre-programmed mind sounds horrid to Crono – until he considers his own circumstances. His parents, his friends, the culture and country and class and era of his birth, beyond that the impact of heredity and evolution, a chain of cause and effect stretching back millions of years, all the way back to Ayla, and beyond! At least Robo could hope to list the forces that had a hand in his genesis; Crono would never have a chance to fully comprehend the myriad influences on his identity.

But Robo’s premeditated destiny was not to be fulfilled – he broke down in Proto Dome, and lay there inert for decades until Lucca repaired and reprogrammed him. Since then he’s been living and adventuring with Crono, Lucca, and the rest. He’s made friends with everyone, and – though he joined their party merely out of gratitude for Lucca’s repair work – Robo is now as dedicated as anyone to stopping Lavos and saving humanity. Crono assumed that he was watching a change of heart – but was it really just a change of circuitry? Think back to when they visited Geno Dome: the other automatons called him defective, they said that his mind had been subverted, that he had forgotten his true purpose. Robo opposed them: he said he had not been subverted, but had merely traveled and seen farther than they – that it was new data, not new programming, which was responsible for his new behavior.

Why is the one respected, the other despised? It’s wonderful to “change one’s mind” after some new experience or re-consideration… but to be changed? To alter the very method of one’s thinking and not merely the content of one’s beliefs? That’s a different matter – indeed, it might even be a different person. In Robo, Crono can’t help thinking that a change caused by new data is somehow more real, more genuine, more earned, than a change caused by new programming. But in fellow humans, it’s different: to have a “transformative experience,” to be a “changed man,” for humans the deepest and most meaningful changes are closer to changes in programming. To alter opinion and behavior based only on new data is weak, shallow – mere flip-flopping.

And were Robo’s words even true that day? Crono knows that he had been reprogrammed, modified at least slightly. During her repairs, Lucca removed Mother Brain’s instructions, she said: that way, Robo would not harm us. When she did that, was she restoring Robo’s true self, reversing the pathology that Mother Brain had injected into the robots coming off her assembly lines? But the robots at Geno Dome weren’t mindless or insane – they were perfectly rational beings, albeit with some built-in predisposition towards a radical ideology. By what metric do we judge Robo’s mind superior to those of Mother’s minions? Perhaps it is impossible to speak of a “true self”; could it be that the thought of “repairing” a personality is, fundamentally, an absurdity?

When they confronted Mother Brain – her menacing, holographic image flickered and sheared across the monitors like reflections in a shattered mirror – she claimed to reveal Robo’s secret, his special mission. She said he was a custom design, programmed to live like a spy among the humans and attempt to befriend them, the better to record and analyze their strengths and weaknesses, to understand the way they think.

Was she telling the truth? There’s every chance that Mother’s programming ran far deeper and more subtle than what Lucca thought she saw. But if Mother Brain’s programming survives inside Robo, then what Robo had seen of the outside world really was able to change him, because he opposed her boldly and without hesitation.

Or was it really just a desperate lie, an attempt to sow suspicion among their party and win Robo back to her side? If so, the ploy failed to save her – but it did not fail to demonstrate that she had developed a keen understanding of human psychology. For a long time after Geno Dome, Crono had watched Robo very closely. He had wanted to trust Robo, he knew that he had changed – but somewhere in the back of his mind, Crono couldn’t shake off the suspicion. For days after her death, thanks to those comments, Mother Brain had ruled a part of Chrono’s thoughts, making him fear that she might also be ruling a part of Robo’s. Maybe that’s the secret: for her, reprogramming wasn’t even necessary to gain control. Understand the program well enough, feed it the right data, and you can control the outputs without ever influencing its internal operations. Maybe that’s what fate really looks like, when you see it up close.

And to defy fate? Control the inputs, perhaps, to achieve the outputs you desire. But of course, those desires are merely the outputs of past cycles. In that case, iterate: take the old outputs and use them as inputs for the next cycle. You’ll certainly go somewhere, but how do you know if you started in the right place, and how do you tell when you’re headed in the right direction?

Ask Robo – he’s put in more cycles than anyone. Growing up, Crono had often heard the legend about Fiona, the woman who died in the middle ages trying to protect the forest near her home from Magus’s armies. After we had traveled to that time, stopped Magus, and actually met Fiona, Robo volunteered to stay behind and help her cultivate the fledgling woods. Crono left him there, and zipped forward to 1000 AD – in total, only a few hours for Crono and the other humans, but four hundred years for their mechanical friend. Working day after day, living alone like a hermit, in those many lifetimes he had turned the entire southern desert into a lush expanse of woodlands. They found his broken-down body preserved in a cathedral, venerated as a holy relic by those who came to celebrate the forest. When Lucca had finished rebuilding him for the second time, he told them his story – the things he had learned, the paths he had walked in his wandering thoughts, as the eons slipped by. He told of how, in his million hours of lonesome thought, many seemingly complicated things revealing themselves as simple and clear; other, seemingly simple things unfold into complex uncertainties. And he spoke of a puzzle which he had turned over in his mind for all those years.

It is possible to generate time-gates artificially, but apart from the one first spawned by Lucca’s experiment at the fair, all the gates they have encountered appear to have generated spontaneously and randomly, as if by some natural process. And yet, many of these gates link to moments of extreme significance in the history of civilization, of Lavos, and of the planet as a whole. Robo says that over the eons, he has sensed the presence of what he called “an Entity,” a conscious influence that may be using the gates, perhaps using even this very adventure, as a way of coming into being, of experiencing or re-experiencing the critical moments of its own existence – like how a dying man might see a vision of his life just before his death. The nature of this Entity, if it even exists, is a total mystery. But if a conscious force is alive and at work in the world in this way – if there is some invisible world-spirit guiding them, leading them on this tour through time, preparing them for their inevitable confrontation with Lavos – then Fate is surely the only word we could use to describe it.

But on the other hand, here’s Robo: an electronic automaton from the far future, designed originally by man, modified and manufactured to be a soldier for Mother Brain’s utopia, broken down for decades far from home, repaired and reprogrammed by Lucca to join an incredible adventure across thousands of years, finally a lonesome forest guardian, lost in thought for centuries, revered as a saint from a long-ago age… who would deny that such a being has transcended anything that fate might’ve had in mind?

Crono ponders all these things as he considers his answer. It’s strange how important it feels to get this one right: this single conversation, not even a conversation – barely even a sentence! A yes or a no, lost in the whirlwind of history, the epic sweep of their grand adventure. A single uncertain note, set adrift in the dream-land empire of Zeal.

But Crono knows how small movements can have lasting, meaningful effects later on. Time can be a lever, magnifying the force of your actions with a fulcrum of centuries. Consequences percolate down the ages, building momentum across great valleys of time, shaping the world in powerful but often unexpected ways. Are these avalanches an artifact of intention, or an expression of destiny?

His own story has certainly snowballed. It didn’t start with a grand initiation or kingly assignment, only a trip to the fair. Then he was helping Lucca, then they were rescuing Marle, then they were stopping Magus, then tracking down and trying to put an end to Lavos.

Crono didn’t inherit the role of hero, but like Frog, he has taken it on himself. Doe this mean defeating Lavos is his destiny? Just because he has lead the charge on a heroic quest doesn’t mean his actions were meant-to-be. After all, how can something be fate if you’re doing it of your own volition? Chrono chose this path freely, every step of the way.

But did he really? Robo made a choice to turn against his creator, Mother Brain, and help to redeem humanity rather than destroy it. But Robo’s thoughts are pure clockwork, bound by a program forged by Mother Brain and modified by Lucca. And if Lucca’s right about the whole universe being deterministic, that means his own mind is really no different from Robo’s.

Throughout these eons, Crono has been taunted by the sight of the same tragic scenes repeating over and over: people just keep making the same predictable choices, basic human tendencies keep asserting themselves. Empires rising and falling, a parade of blind tyrants making the same mistakes over and over, trying to take advantage of a dark power they could never comprehend. Like Crono, these despots might see themselves choosing freely every step of the way. But from the outside it all seems so inevitable, so mindless.

Amid these cycles of destruction, Chrono finds it hard to conceive of any intervention that could meaningfully disrupt –or escape!– these devastating rhythms, rather than merely warping the timbre of individual details.

Why do we fall into this trap? How did Lavos become the resonant frequency of civilization? If these people could see the whole sweep of things, Chrono imagines, could see how many had gone before and how many would go after, then maybe they’d change, maybe they’d be able to stop. So maybe one kind of fate is just lack of knowledge – these tyrants, they’re fated to their foolish actions only because they can’t see far enough to understand the consequences. And maybe if you can see the consequences, then you can choose more wisely, and defy your fate.

Is that what Magus was trying to do? Crono will never forget the image of that great wizard, standing alone in the darkness at the top of the world.

Crono knows he sees farther than the tyrants. But can he ever see far enough to change his own destiny? Lucca would remind him that his adventures through time provide no special advantage here: he can peek forward only to the dystopic, devastated future that will occur if he doesn’t try to prevent the apocalypse – it gives no indication of whether he will be successful if he does. (Or maybe, if Lucca’s always-already-altered theory is correct, then it does give indication – that they’ve already failed. Lucca says it’s complicated: some things, even big things like the new forest, can change, while others –like Marle’s identity as Princess of Guardia– cannot.)

He remembers Robo’s ideas about the Entity. Compared to that Entity, he surely knows nothing. He might be travelling through time, but he’ll never have the whole picture, and he doesn’t have any special insight into the ultimate outcomes of his own actions. He can try to make things better for the people of Guardia, and maybe too for the people of Arris Dome, but who can guess what happens a million years from now? It’s as unknowable to him as his time is to a member of Ayla’s village.

As thoughts rush through his mind, he feels like Marle must have felt, in that moment back in Guardia castle. He’s not just torn between a yes or a no. Rather, somehow it seems his whole identity is in flux, that he as a person has become undefined, unbounded. Like that same seed of hope over and over, a tiny seedling growing into an endless forest, so this simple binary question has somehow spawned innumerable forces pulling him in every direction. These forces are not pointing only towards all the different actions he might take: they are pointing to all the different people he might be. He’s so conflicted, utterly confused…

Until he suddenly notices that he actually isn’t. In fact, the answer is startlingly clear, perfectly so. And what’s more, Crono realizes that for as long as he could remember, he had always felt this way: somehow, he just hadn’t noticed it until this very moment.

Crono opens his eyes, and looks up. His friends, standing nearby, are all watching him. After so much thought, Crono feels fresh and confident. He turns toward the small, strange creature who had asked him if he believed in fate. He opens his mouth to speak.

Braid Mod 'More Now Than Ever'

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 21:38:45 -0200

Braid: More Now Than Ever, a greatest-hits mod-anthology!

Braid and The Witness are both incredibly rich games, (link to page explaining more what i think about games in general) (etc etc… see my video series Examining The Witness, and braid book commentary)

Braid: More Now Than Ever is a mod-anthology that attempts to echo and extend the spirit of the original game. All-new writing continues Tim’s story and reflects on the themes of each world in a carefully-composed style reminiscent of the original game’s tone. The mod’s gameplay is a collection of some original puzzles mixed with a greatest-hits-style anthology of brilliant puzzles from other mods –After the Epilogue, Silverbraid, Stone, and Tim’s Modysee. The goal is to curate a rich variety of fresh new time-bending puzzle ideas, while creating a more consistent difficulty curve, avoiding excessive demands on platforming skill, and imitating some of the original game’s design philosophy. The gameplay focus is always on exploring the consequences of time manipulation and causality – no weird glitches or lever-filled rube-goldberg devices!

(Important note! Later this year, an official HD remake called Braid: Anniversary Edition will be released – I’m very excited about this new edition, but unfortunately my mod will probably only work with the original game.)

I started working on More Now Than Ever in 2014, during a six-month trip to Rajasthan in India, where I was struck by the sense that the seasons were running in reverse. Some parts of India are close to the equator, but rajasthan’s desert is firmly in the northern hemisphere, so it’s still hot in summer and chilly in winter. But all the rain comes in early fall, with the monsoon. In September, October, November, the trees are green, the grass is lush and the flowers are blooming, then in March and April everything’s dry and dying, with fallen leaves blowing in the wind. This got me thinking about Braid – the art style of Worlds 2, 3, 4, and 5 are clearly linked to the seasons, with summer proceeding backwards through spring, winter, and fall. I thought it would be interesting to make a mod replacing the text in the game’s books to add additional commentary. I didn’t want to tell an entirely new story, but rather emphasize hidden details and minor themes, like the progression of seasons and some of the game’s physics-related undercurrents, in a way that would hopefully enrich people’s understanding of Braid’s original writing.

For instance, many Braid players interpreted the story to fit the order that they encountered the worlds – Tim starts off straightforwardly questing after The Princess in World 2, then things slowly get more confusing and vague until at first glance World 6 barely makes any sense at all, and then the famous twist ending of World 1 comes as a bit of a non-sequitur. Others think that trying to fit the different worlds into a linear plot is missing the point – since each world is a different reflection on the same core themes, the worlds are more simultaneous than sequential. That’s mostly true, but if you pay attention it’s pretty clear that there is also a preferred plot order (which I explore more in {{/TODO: this analysis/}}) beginning in World 6, where Tim starts out lost and intimidated in a wide world overflowing with mutually exclusive possibilities. Counting down the next chapters (5… 4… 3… 2… 1…), he discovers and becomes more focused in his obsession with the Princess, and her significance for him grows until she looms as a divine, fissile embodiment of the philosophical answers he is searching for. In Braid: More Now Than Ever, I don’t change any core aspects of this story, but I try to embellish it and make certain aspects more visible.

What I didn’t expect was that the gameplay, too, had so much more depth than what I knew. Braid is such a cohesive, thoughtfully constructed work that it seemed almost perfectly complete, each world an ideal showcase of the consequences of its own time mechanic. So, I was shocked when I played a few fan mods and discovered a variety of amazing, delightful puzzles that totally stumped me, when I thought I already knew everything Braid had to show me. There were so many brilliant puzzle ideas in these other mods that pretty soon I wanted More Now Than Ever to be more than just new writing. Here are a couple of gameplay highlights for the Braid connoisseurs out there:

Three levels in Braid feature a special platform that grants the player the same immunity to rewind (and the same green sparkles) that many other objects and items in the world occasionally posses. This unique mechanic has an incredible amount of puzzle potential, but only appeared briefly in Braid, giving it a mysterious feeling. Braid: More Now Than Ever really digs into this mechanic, using it in 13 different puzzles mostly in World 3.

World 4, where time and space are correlated so that left and right map onto past and future, is totally amazing to me and is probably most players’ favorite world. In particular, the way that time-space correlation interacts with the treadmill-esque clouds is delightful and mind-boggling. More Now Than Ever takes plenty of time to explore all the details, pushing the game’s physics simulation to the limits in the process.

Starting in World 5, some levels feature the interaction of multiple time powers at once, and there are lots of interesting puzzles showcasing how the laws of time in one world collide with those of another. Maximum difficulty wasn’t a goal, but since original Braid already contains many of the simplest, most elegant puzzles, some of the challenges in More Now Than Ever can get quite complex! If you love putting your logic and reasoning skills to the test, this is where things really start to get serious.

In World 6 of Braid, Tim can place a gold ring that creates a bubble of slowed time where objects move at 1/5 of their normal speed. In More Now Than Ever, this slowdown value is changed in each world, so the ring alternately speeds up time, stops it entirely, or throws it completely into reverse!

You can download the mod from its homepage here, unzip it and put the “universes” file into your Braid folder. So in the same folder where braid.exe lives, you should now have a folder called “universes”. Inside that there should be a subfolder, “morenowthanever”. Next, in your steam library, right-click on Braid and click “properties” then “launch options”. In the launch options window, enter the command " -universe morenowthanever “. Then just run the game!

People who enjoy Braid: More Now Than Ever might also be interested in a short story I wrote based on another acclaimed time-travel-themed videogame. Thoughts in The Mind of Crono Upon His Arrival at The Town of Enhasa in The Empire of Zeal, Having Been Asked The Question, “Do You Believe In Fate?” is as much a Braid story as a Chrono Trigger one – it was also written during those six months in India, and in both cases I aspired to an Italo-Calvino-esque structure¹, with a series of vignettes each exploring a philosophical theme from complementary perspectives.

Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid and The Witness, once gave a presentation about his interpretation of Italo Calvino’s fiction and the ways he had been influenced by Invisible Cities and If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller. You can watch the hour-long talk here. ↩︎

Posts on Jackson Wagner

The Book That Indexes Itself: Testing the Codex Seraphinianus for Meaning

The book

What was already known

The tests, at a glance

Part 1: The text as a corpus

Does the same word appear twice in a row?

Does the vocabulary know what chapter it’s in?

A footnote for the literature: the entropy numbers are measuring strokes, not letters

Part 2: Matching pictures of words

The trick: never read the script

The discovery: the index pages work

How repetitive is the prose, really?

Part 3: Do the pictures get names?

Adding it up

A souvenir: the Seraphinian font

Code and data

How bad would it be if GPS satellites were shot down?

“Whoa, GPS comes from space?? I thought it was just a thing in my car…”

To be clear, there are multiple satellite-navigation constellations

What could kill GPS?

Great-power war

Hacking by superhuman AI???

An unprecedented solar storm, maybe

Other stuff

What would break in the aftermath of losing GPS?

Impact on the cell network & smartphones

Impact on the power grid

Impact on maritime industries

Impact on travel and logistics

Impacts on other industries

Reckoning an overall cost per day

Hard to say, but this feels approximately Covid-19-scale-ish

How long would an outage last?

Remember: you’re still at war with China, or Russia, or AI, or possibly the Sun!

Giving up on EA after 13 years

Leaning into EA disillusionment: Why I no longer believe in EA

EA is was three radical ideas I want to protect

The soul of EA is in trouble

EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous

My Model of EA Burnout

Don’t be bycatch

EA and the current funding situation

It’s okay to leave EA (in favor of doing the most good)

Anime's unrealistic energy-ball explosions are actually depicting condensation shockwaves

Human Empowerment versus the Longtermist Imperium?

Intro

The Long Arm of “Cultural Longtermism”

Longtermism as the latest incarnation of inexorably rising societal risk-aversion

Longtermism and its discontents

Are we already living in a world of oppressively burdensome longtermism?

The Strict Culturally-Longtermist State

Invisible Graveyards Rule Everything Around Me

The Elusive Counterfactual

The Streelight Effect Warps Modern Longtermism Towards an Exclusive Focus On X-risk Mitigation

EAs are all too familiar with how streetlight effects can distort global priorities

Nevertheless, the streetlight effects are calling from inside the house

Total Hedonic Utilitarianism and the Denial of Death

Yes, yes, of course maximizing utilitarianism gives off totalitarian vibes

The “total hedonic” part of total hedonic utilitarianism creates its own, separate problems.

Hedonic utilitarianism dissolves the value of the unique human individual into atomized, interchangeable qualia-moments

Hedonic utilitarianism subsumes the value of the human individual into the glory of the immortal leviathan

Towards A More Human Longtermism?

Surely not everything can be totalitarian…

Some Confused Hopes for a Flourishing Human Future

New Cause Area: Low-Hanging Fruit

Low-hanging fruit is essential for continued human thriving

What would it mean if humanity exhausted the low-hanging fruit?

New ways of making fruit hang lower are getting harder to find

Shorter trees –> lower fruit

Low-hanging fruit has broad benefits

The Fruit is Too Damn High

A fruitful direction for future research

Why the East Rules -- For Now

The Industrial Revolution

The Power of the Atom

Cool new San Jose gun law with implications for weird libertarian utopias

Overthinking It: Matrix 4 is about choosing the blue pill.

Matrix 1 was about “true reality” versus false simulation. Matrix 4 asks if we prefer nonfiction-style realism versus fiction-style emotional narrative.

A three-act descent into feelings-world.