Post #2: Aim for Our Destination

Hello party people. Lady Whistledown here.

I introduced the concept of “existential relevance” in the last post. To recap said post: we live in this thing called existence. Understanding existence is meaningful. We don’t understand what’s going on. We’re learning, but we don’t fully get it. To make meaningful decisions about what to do as a species and as individuals, it’s helpful to have existential context. Ok, recap done.

As you may recall from the introduction, each post is generally going to fall into one of two categories: 1) “How-to” posts that explore strategies for creating a more existentially relevant society. 2) “Meta-posts” that explore what existential relevance actually means.

This one falls into the “How-to” category. The prompt we’ll explore is “how to create a society where individuals are incentivized to make existentially relevant decisions.” To clarify this question, here’s an example. Let’s say we have a person named Mooga. Mooga has brown eyes with a little bit of green in them. Mooga keeps one eye closed all the time though, so it’s tough to fully verify whether both eyes have the same color pattern. Anyways, back to the example. There are two organizations that Mooga could choose to work for, organization A or organization B. If we could measure the “existential relevance” of these two organizations, we’d find that organization A is more relevant than organization B. However, Mooga chooses to work for organization B because it pays more. It would be better for both Mooga’s personal sense of meaning and for society’s progress if Mooga worked for organization A. So the question becomes: “What societal system can we build that would result in our dear Mooga choosing organization A?”

To start our exploration, we’ll head to sea.

My Captain, O Captain

Imagine that you are the captain of a ship. This is your first time as captain. It’s also your first time on a ship. Congratulations, you’re a rising star. This ship you suddenly find yourself on is already in motion, moving in some unknown direction. As captain, your job is to make sure the ship arrives at the destination safely.

The trick is that you haven’t been given orders from your superiors because they don’t exist, so you don’t know the destination. You therefore face the exceptionally challenging task of deciding which direction to aim for. And since the ship is in motion, there’s a time pressure to set the right path. For all you know, the ship could be heading towards a giant fiery whirlpool. Woof, quite the job you’ve been given.

To risk stating the obvious: in order to aim the ship towards the right destination, you need to figure out what that destination is. You could pick a direction at random and sail the ship in that direction as far as possible. But…it’s likely that you could select a direction that would be more meaningful by using the information available to you.

Let’s say that you leverage all the information available and determine that the most meaningful destination is…Antarctica! Yay, good job. A future post will dig into what a system could look like to select our “Antarctica” for humanity.

The first question you ask is, “how do I get my ship to Antarctica?” First off, let me just say: great question.

To skip the details of your hard captain planning work, your conclusion looked like this:

• See the path: a direction to follow to get to your destination, in this case North; and a compass to tell you if you are heading North or not.

• Know the basic requirements: keep the ship in a working condition to move and to be steered.

• Know your resources: a working boat, a healthy crew of 10, working oars, intact sails, food and water rations, sleeping quarters, an intact steering mechanism.

• Allocate those resources: assign roles to use the resources and move the ship in the right direction.

You’ve done it! You have a plan to get to your existentially relevant destination of Antarctica. Wow. You are amazing. Gold star.

Now as far as societies go, an 11-person boat is a simple one. You were the sole decision maker with access to full information. That said, our 8-billion-person society faces essentially the same job: point the ship towards the right destination and move in that direction.

To Aim Somewhere New, It Helps to Know Our Current Direction

Who is the captain of our society and where are they driving us?

Our current patchwork of economies, governments, and religions is the “captain.” Collectively, this patchwork of incentive systems influences our decisions, steering the ship that is humanity. To know where we’ve been aiming for, let’s consider the motivation that led to these systems.

Earth has a 4.5-billion-year lifespan. Life on earth has been on a 3.7-billion-year journey. Human-like primates have been walking the earth for something like 5 million years, with homo sapiens doing our thing for about 315,000 years. 315,000 years is a long time to figure out some systems for relating to each other.

As we spread across earth, we found safety in clumping together in larger and larger groups. These large groups required us to form strategies that could coordinate tens of thousands, millions, and now hundreds of millions and billions of people around shared goals. For context, as of 2022, both China and India have populations of 1.4 billion people, while the U.S. has third most with a measly 330 million. Those are some big groups.

Nothing against your captain skills, but you could be the best captain in the world and have no chance of efficiently coordinating hundreds of millions or billions of people. It’s possible an artificially intelligent captain would be up to the task, but we’ll cover that in a future post. Assuming that humans are the best decision makers, to have any chance of coordinating we need hyper scalable and robust incentive systems. Our economies, governments, and religions scaled to meet our coordination needs.

Returning to our question: where are these scaled systems steering us?

To put it simply, they’ve sent us in the direction of large group coordination and being nicer to each other. Our economies give us means of nonviolent negotiation. Our governments usually protect us from other humans that would do us harm, oftentimes discouraging either side from starting a conflict. Our religions provide an ideological basis for being nice to each other, with all religions, both east and west, primarily preaching “treat your fellow humans nicely.”

This patchwork coordination system worked. Across our species, we are massively more coordinated than even a couple hundred years ago, let alone 20,000 or 200,000. This is an awesome win. It’s important to acknowledge the meaningful success we’ve had to make sure we don’t throw the eggplant out with the bath water as we create new systems. And yes, I do bathe my eggplants and on occasion forget them in my portable bathtub and throw them out.

So we’ve successfully teased out humanity’s current destination by looking at the decisions our systems incentivize. Our conclusion is that the destination is “be kind to each other and work together.” Less violence. More coordination. More support. Less lying, cheating, stealing. Love each other people.

While we haven’t quite finished docking our boat on the shores of our “be nice to each other” destination, we’re dang close. Close enough to realize that the direction set by our current incentive systems is not getting us to our final destination. It’s time to start building new systems that will tweak humanity’s course in a more existentially relevant direction.

A New Destination Calls for a New Incentive System

While our existing incentive system successfully optimized our relationships with each other, the new incentive system will need to optimize our relationship with existence.

Over just the past 500 years of scientific inquiry, we’ve learned so much about ourselves and our existential circumstance. While we don’t understand the exact nature of our reality, it’s clear that we can systematically uncover it. If we want to surf this rainbow of existential understanding to arrive at complete existential clarity, we will need to reimagine our coordination system with that destination in mind.

We will need to incentivize ourselves to relate to existence in new and better ways. We’ll need a more scalable, experimental, and long-term focused “captain.” And just in case my metaphor shuffling got the best of me, by “captain” here I’m referring to society’s coordination system.

Next Post: The Internet Will be Useful

As of April 2022, there are 5 billion humans using the internet, with 200 million being added in the prior twelve-month period. With the rate of adding new people increasing, every human on earth will have internet access within the next 10 years.

As those stats would suggest, our society is extremely early in figuring out how to best use the internet. It’s a highly scalable coordination tool that will continue to massively level up the ways that our species is able to work together. We will go far beyond selling goods and sharing personal content.

Used thoughtfully, the internet will enable us to evolve into a more existentially relevant society.

Until next time dear reader.