On humanity's failures to steer itself properly

Abstract : This text comes to explain what I meant at the end of my essay on maths and physics for the fqxi contest, when I mentioned my project to change the world, that "I could not find anyone else to care understanding it and working on it", while I did not join the Spring 2014 essay contest "How Should Humanity Steer the Future?". I give here a critical review of a number of ideas found among the essays of that contest, inserted in the more general context of humanity's failures to develop proper ideas in this field, and explanations of the precise causes of these failures. Finally I will mention my unsuccessful tries to make that revolution with other partners meanwhile.

Prologue : on the failure of utopias

The science of changing the world : needed skills - Stop Mistaking Denialism as Wisdom

The popular rejection of intellectual abstractions

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Religious "morality principles"

Flaws of economical science

Some say, economics with its mathematical models is too abstract, too mathematical, and thus too disconnected from life.

In The Cartography of the Future: Recovering Utopia for the 21st Century

"Yet, it would be incorrect to think that the distortions of determinism applied to human society have been limited to the totalitarian movements of the last century. The physicist Lee Smolin has pointed out that the problem with contemporary free market economics isn’t that it relies too much on quantitative models, but that its quantitative models built around concepts such as “market equilibrium” are based on a simplified version of science where the future was considered determined rather than open. By thinking the future is determined Smolin thinks we have surrendered our freedom in regards to it. (...)
Unlike most other forms of determinism that flowered in the 19th century and 20th centuries, progressive technological determinism continues to have legs. "

Unpredictability of new technologies

"Predicting the content of new scientific knowledge is logically impossible because it makes no sense to claim to know already the facts you will learn in the future. Predicting the details of future technology, on the other hand, is merely difficult."

"Crucial Phenomena" and Artificial Intelligence

Stupid Delegations of Intelligence

On the limits of political experimentation

On education

Stop Killing Geniuses who Don't Fit into the System

Changing oneself or changing the world ?

One example of concrete reality

• It is not the same people : people with problems are shamed and shut up, while the official voices to describe problems have no clue because they do not feel the problems themselves in their life
• It can be the same people that make a division in their mind, between their personal problems and the problems they professionally study as global problems, as if they were split between 2 lives in 2 different universes with no communication between them (similarly to the division between research and teaching)

The matchmaking problem

Another example of concrete reality

More examples ? The use of an online voting solution

Well, that's very easy to find. So many geopolitical conflicts are based on propaganda, i.e. false information. So we need better information systems. For example, the Ukraine-Russia conflict was mainly based on the inability to provide well-proven information, first about what is going on in Ukraine and how many Russian soldiers were sent to the front line by force, second about what the people from a given region really want : the cause of the problem of "illegal referendums" whose validity is contested, is the lack of any practical means to make a truly verifiable and anonymous referendum that would ridicule the fake ones that were done by force (and the same voting technology could also serve to let families report and count the true number of Russian soldiers forcefully sent to Ukraine). But a solution would be easy to implement as part of my project - if only there were a few people who really preferred to solve the world's problems over their currently most cherished value of dying stupid.

On the limited value of transhumanism

On the value and tools to preserve the climate and environment

Acting for the climate : Do people have a clue what they really mean ?

Causes of economic inequality

Overpopulation

Complexity, common good, political issues, justice and foundation of money

The biggest problem to make the world better is to make it more politically coherent, that is, where human action is more precisely and efficiently oriented towards the common good. But this is precisely what my project is all about - much more efficiently than all previous democratic systems considered.

Ray Luechtefeld wrote in Steering Humanity's Future with the Dialogic Web

 Being guided by universal ethical principles. Particular laws or social agreements are usually valid because they rest on such principle
As individuals grow through the stages their ethical foundation becomes less dependent on outside definition and more internally grounded. Habermas describes this as a "de-centering" of a maturing person's understanding of the world. At the final stage there is no need for laws, in the sense that a person at that stage of moral development would act in the best interests of a civil society with or without a set of civil and criminal statutes in place.

Sorry, I see no use for pointing out any morality principles. Of course it may be better if people had better intention. However:

• Of course, but then what ? There is no magic stick to change selfish, corrupt or criminal people into angels
• It is not even clear, as good intentions may also result in evil, such as when caring for the good of someone without understanding the real needs, it may result in actually harming the person we wanted to help, or harming the rest of the world we do not think about.
  

There is a widespread temptation to trace bad actions to bad intentions, such as assumed by

Open Peer Review to Save the World

"... developed technical gadgets that provide access to much of the world’s knowledge from a device we carry in a pocket. Yet at the same instant we spend trillions fighting wars that serve only to destroy the lives of millions based on no more than our tribal instinct for feuds"

but I think it is badly mistaken : most of the wars are caused by people who go to war on the wrong side not because of "our tribal instinct for feuds" but because they are well-intended people ready to give their life for causes which they think are good and selfless but are not, because they are badly misinformed on the real truth about the common good (which side of the war is the right one). So ultimately it is because we did not develop good enough "technical gadgets that provide access to much of the world’s knowledge from a device we carry in a pocket".
Also, trying to save people from death, illness and starvation may result in overpopulation which will be a bigger problem, harming the planet.

So in my sense, principles are nothing, the real problem is to find out how to apply them properly and relevantly.
As I explained there, it depends mainly on 2 things:

1. In answer to the last problem (that good intentions are worthless in the absence of available information on what is actually good) : making an information system to provide a more direct, efficient, complete and reliable information to the people on the measure of comparison of how each option they may choose would be helpful or harmful, may it be for themselves, their friends and relatives, and for the rest of the world
2. To cope with cases of lack of good intentions, and to not reward any bad-intended people for their bad intentions : we need to rebuild money so as to more systematically and reliably provide justice, i.e. give back to people the value of how they affect the rest of the world.
   

The need for such solutions is more or less expressed in some essays:

Many powerful people and institutions in particular have a strong interest in keeping their investments from being stranded by social change. As Jason Matheny has said, “extinction risks are market failures”.
Nevertheless, our human diversity is a strength as well as weakness. It is easy for any of us to fantasize about what good we might be able to do if we were given complete decision-making authority for the human race. But as Edmund Burke observed after the French Revolution, idealist schemes are never as well thought out as we imagine. No one knows all the facts or is completely aware of their own biases. Decision-makers almost inevitably end up serving their own interests. Only by working together and building consensus can we harness the wisdom of the crowds. In the end, survival will require the cooperation and insight of a broad cross-section of the human race.
First, we need to conduct more research into the risks we face so we can improve our decision-making . The science of human survival is still in its infancy. Some of the existential risks we face — like the danger of catastrophic climate change — are now being studied extensively. But others — like the danger posed by new technologies — receive much less attention. And much more work needs to be done to determine the most effective ways to survive and prevent a catastrophe.
Second, we need to improve governance of the common resources we depend on. That means building inclusive global institutions that can set and enforce rules about who can draw from those resources. And it means developing fair conflict resolution mechanisms that allow countries and groups to participate in the political process without resorting to destructive force.

My second priority would be the creation of some form of political super structure, representative, purely democratic, or some other mechanism, including all of the institutions required to support such an endeavor (e.g. language translation, public education about issues up for debate, etc) such that our species could effectively and efficiently tackle the problems we face on a planetary scale.
while it can coerce smaller member state behavior through various means, it does not have the legal force required to compel the largest and most powerful members to comply with any course of action that might be deemed important to our species' survival.
The proposed institution would ultimately have to be completely transparent if it is to be trusted with collating and implementing overall steerage for our species. It could withhold no secrets and have an open and honest agenda.

For the individual, evaluating possible courses of action to address interrelated problems in highly connected social, economic and ecological networks is presently too costly. The necessary information may exist, even be accessible, but it is too expensive in terms of time and energy. To steer the future, information about our dynamical and multi-layered networks has to become cheap and almost effortless to use. Only then, when we can make informed decisions by feeling rather than thinking, will we be able to act and respond to the challenges we face.
The necessary information for individuals to learn and react to systemic trends may be available, even accessible, but it is too expensive. Information is presently costly, not necessarily financially, but in the amount of effort required to obtain and understand it. Relevant information is too difficult to find or comprehend and doing so requires too much time and energy. Blaming people for being politically disinterested, scientifically illiterate, or plainly unintellectual doesn’t do anything to address the costliness of information and thus doesn’t do justice to the origin of the problem. The individual investment necessary to process information about trends and relations in our systems is currently too high and personal benefits do not outweigh the disadvantages.
humans don’t care what somebody or some thing thinks they should be doing. They’ll do whatever they please. The only way to change their ways is to please them.
We reached this gridlock because the human brain did not evolve to understand the consequences of individual actions in networks of billions of people. We are bad in making good long-term decisions and do not care much what happens in other parts of the planet to people we have not and will most likely never meet.
... frequently decisions which are beneficial on long time- or distance scales conflict with those on short time- or distance scales..this conflict is often resolved in favor of short times and distances. But we know how to solve these problems. We solve them by bringing close that what is far away.(...)
All it takes is a simple and intuitive visualization that lets users immediately grasp how well an action matches with their stated goals. The keywords here are:
Simple, intuitive, and immediate. This is cheap information. The solution to our problems is a generalization of this feedback loop: To give people access to
cheap information about the consequences of collective human actions,(...)
The point here is not to manipulate people into changing their ways because I or you or some supercomputer thinks it would be better if we’d do more of this or more of that. The point is to help people make decisions. The way we presently make decisions, part of our priorities remain neglected because we cannot assess how well we would be working towards them. It’s too complicated, too costly. But it’s not like we are happy with this. Most people notice the tension, the neglect of some of their priorities, and are left with bad consciousness, the nagging voice that says you should make better decisions. If only you had the time and it wasn’t so difficult.
We do not get anywhere with bemoaning that most people do not understand climate models or do not read information brochures about genetically modified crops. It is time to wake up. We’ve tried long enough to educate them. It doesn’t work. The idea of the educated and well-informed citizen is an utopia. It doesn’t work because education doesn’t please people. They don’t like to think. It is too costly and it’s not the information they want. What they want is to know how much an estimated risk conflict with their priorities, how much an estimated benefit agrees with their values. They tolerate risk and uncertainty, but they don’t tolerate science lectures.
The economic system to some extent does what we want. After all, it’s not like we’ve been total losers at steering the future of humanity. But the standard theory of the economic system assumes that consumers have full access to relevant information, that they take it into account, and that their decisions reveal their true preferences. However, monetary value is a one-dimensional measure that inevitably disregards the multi-valued reasons people have to invest money, and this projection on a one-dimensional scale means that information is lost.
Concretely, imagine how much more useful book reviews would be if you knew the reviewers’priorities compared to yours, if you knew what they consider a “good book”. Imagine how much more useful sales numbers would be if companies knew how important economic and social engagement are for their customers. The economic system alone doesn’t give us this information.
I assume humans are intrinsically good and mean well, they just don’t always get it right.
I may be naïve and I may be wrong. If in fact most people do not regard it relevant to get the plastic out of the oceans and to prevent children in the developing world from dehydration, then lowering the cost of information will not make a difference.

• Problems of personal interests that depends on complex tastes (her example of book reviews), and how to make an efficient search for options that best match one's tastes. The advantage here is that such systems are almost directly verifiable by users : in case a user tries different systems in parallel (which unfortunately few people would bother doing), he can compare the results he gets from them.
  
• Problems of processing moral values, discerning right from wrong in actions that may affect other people who we do not personally know.
  

And what is wrong with mixing these 2 kinds of problems, is its way of treating moral values as if they were a matter of taste. That sort of materialistic explanation of morality as brain function, as if the problem of how to make the world better was reducible to this kind of subjectivist construction of morality (personal tastes about what someone feels right to do to others and assumes that it will be good to others), as if it was the right reliable source of information about what is really helpful to others.

Sorry, this is nonsense. Because if we want morality to make real sense, then it is up to moral "values" to adapt themselves to the reality of which actions really have the best consequences on the real world. It is not up to anything and someone's actions to adapt to what might fit to his or someone else's individual pictures of imagination about what kinds of events in the world may positively or negatively contribute to the common good. Because most of the contents of ordinary people's "moral values" (pictures of what they imagine good or bad in the rest of the world) is just totally junk information, that is either trivial (to just "wish everyone to be happy") and thus not worth sharing and processing; or most probably plain wrong (because it is oversimplified pictures of a very complex world which the person cannot properly figure out in his personal feelings and opinions without gross mistakes). See the above sections on Religious "morality principles" to see what I mean. Another example is the problem she mentioned of "how important economic and social engagement are for their customers". The problem with such values is that, taken on word, they are irrelevant : of course it would be good if things were produced in good working conditions, but just mentioning bad working conditions is partial information that cannot be relied on just like this: we have to explain why is it that people came to work in such bad conditions, so that if we boycott this production, then what will these workers become ? Will they remain jobless and become beggars or worse ? And if their condition is not going to become worse by closing these bad factories as they will have better options how to make a living, then why are they not already going for these better options ? We first need to answer these questions before considering a system tracing "social engagement" of companies to be of any help.

To know which moral values people feel, is the small problem, and it is junk information irrelevant to the problem of how to make the world really more civilized. But to find out which actions correctly fit those moral values which are worth following, i.e. those moral values, which, to not be most probably plain wrong, most often have to be only the most trivial ones (to just wish everyone to be happy), is THE problem. Here unfortunately, there is no natural experimental feedback loop possible in case a system would be defective (failing to detect some causalities, correctly attributing effects to their cause), so that a careful expert analysis which will escape most people's feelings, either directly of some specific consequences, or of what kind of new information systems can better approach such an information and why, is all we have to develop the right computation of the moral consequences of a given action.

And this problem needs to be handled by processing the information, not about the moral values which are so trivial that they are not any information at all, but about the complex causality relations relating actions to their consequences.
And one of the main information systems able to do this (part of the solution, among other needed systems to solve other kinds of complex problems), is money (yet to be improved to better serve this purpose): it puts a price on actions to express their effects on the rest of the world, and this price is naturally constructed out of the information which other people give about their respective personal interests which can be affected by this action. And the advantage of the monetary nature of how this moral information is expressed, is that it no more depends on people's moral values (intrinsic goodness) to make the right choice !
So it would work based on the expression of individual tastes and preferences, which is THE relevant information to determine which events are really good as they really serve the interests of real people, unlike "moral information" by which some people may try to picture other people's interests but usually do so incorrectly and irresponsibly.
Of course not all problems can be solved in this way : there can also be a place for cases where selfish reactions to money would not be sufficient to give all the correct picture of what is right, and that more tasty moral values would be needed in complement. But this is precisely what the system of charity donations and public expenses is here for : people having tasty ideas on the world's interests may influence the world according to their tastes by paying for actions which they value.

Still there is another configuration, where the problem is how to prevent harm from being done, such as environmental destructions : to prevent other people from destroying the planet because they take profit from it, cannot be solved by paying anything that would formally prevent the harm from being done, if the basic system did not recognize it as harm. But the answer to this problem is by integrating a justice system in the money system, as I explained in my money theory. It works by redefining money as an information, so that if someone makes profit by harming the planet then we can cancel this profit as soon as this profit is monetarily expressed, by creating and properly formalizing in information networks, a consensus that cancels this monetary information. So, such a solution does integrate moral information from people. But it does it in the logical efficient ways,  which dispersed systems of everyone following his own moral values independently of those of others (such as boycotting some products) could not achieve : someone boycotting a bad company is harming himself and cannot prevent other people from buying from this company ; but dispersed subjective values are anyway worthless. Instead, a work of consensus building out of these subjective values is essential, both to approach objective moral truth and to accomplish effective results, a process which is what my new money system would make, by its remarkable way of naturally and powerfully combining consensus building and effectivity as one and the same quality (with "coherent boycott" against someone's money, to be metaphorically described as traced as "money that stinks" so that the rest of the world won't "buy" it even after it changes hands), that does not let any possibility of effectivity to any wrong (non-consensual) "values".

The cult of cryptography and the disadvantage of anarchy

• The standard commercial one : copyright, forbidding the use without payment, despite the fact that such a use harms nobody
• Copyleft: having work done by passion rather than for money, so the product will be given away for free
• Being paid by donations of users ; if a work would target a category of users that is too selfish for paying, it won't be profitable, so that it won't be done, and let down with these selfish users !
• Being paid from the outside of the community of users would, such as by state or NGOs, that now support e.g. fundamental research or arts. It can be considered unfair because, taken as a whole, the producer and the users are not bringing any benefit to the outside.
• A new solution I imagined here.
  

• Either not to make anything right (what would it mean anyway ?) but the only valuable thing is spending billions in advertising to trick all people into using one shit rather than another (uh, awesome stuff of course, except that users wouldn't see the difference anyway because the awesome difference is all about hidden security stuff that no user would care of, as they are not aware how important it is to keep secret all their stuff in case anybody would have time to waste spying all their "I'm late", "That's funny", "when can we meet", "where are you" and all that fuss)
  
• Or keep developing millions of projects made of any possible combinations at random, in hope that experience will reveal which one is right
  

The problem with Bitcoin

The Future Driving Force of Human Evolution

Interstellar future and the Earth's temperature

While it is far beyond the scope of this essay to address this political issue, it is within the scope of this piece to consider: does the practice of neoliberalism run risks in the very longue durée ?
The risks, as I will argue, are as follows: first, that unplanned exploitation of finite resources will prevent long-term development dependent on commodities that will become very scarce inappropriate exploitation of the planets and other bodies in the Solar System, for example failed terraforming, geoengineering or deployment of rogue von Neumann constructors, presents a second failure point in the chain of development, whereby we will achieve spaceflight and limited colonization but further expansion is then prevented
Yet another such process is a space- colonisation race in which replicators might burn up cosmic resources in a wasteful effort to beat out the competition

• Nuclear reactions
  
• Loss of element into outer space, especially water vapor (dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen) and other light gases from atmospheres.
• Loss of DNA information on biodiversity
  

Develop technology to regulate sun radiation reaching the surface of our planet.
We would need to develop technology for regulating solar radiation. How can we accomplish this? One approach would be to install giant adjustable reflectors covering large geographical areas both on the ground and the ocean surface around the equator. One disadvantage would be that due to variable meteorological conditions, it would be difficult to assess how much solar radiation was actually reflected into space. Another approach would be to place giant remotely adjustable reflectors into space at an optimum orbit around Earth. However, the potential problem would be “ solar wind” including direct pressure from the stream of photons .

• Go fast, using nuclear fuels
• Be patient on the way. Systems can be made to remain in hibernation for thousands of years, and then automatically brought back to life, such as from frozen embryos.
• Wait until stars get closer

Worthless

What was I doing in Spring 2014 ?