Amazing, thank you for the reply. I’ll definitely check out the linked essay. Would be curious to hear why people agreement downvoted you. I’m assuming they are more pessimistic than you?
Your optimism updates me pretty strongly because I don’t actually know much about the fields in question.
I would agree with you that there are a lot of insights to be gained from evolutionary biology (and also studying optimal foraging theory sounds like it would make for quite an interesting career). On the other hand it still seems daunting to imagine that we could come to real generalizations about economic history (not saying we can’t).
It seems like we can barely agree on why the industrial revolution happened or why fertility crashed. Perhaps we are closer than we think on agreement in these areas, or I am misinformed about the state of the field. Or maybe we can still get lots of useful generalizations while still not solving some of these fundamental questions. I guess I’m just left with this intuition that if we could predict ETI societies with any sort of accuracy we would also have a much clearer understanding/agreement of the macro trends of our own history.
I seem to get downvoted fair amount on EA Forum, for reasons I don’t understand, and often by people who don’t leave comments; so I have no idea what their reasons are.
Anyway, I agree that using evolutionary biology to understand the likely types and natures of ‘primitive’ ETIs (before they develop technological civilizations) might be easier than using some generalization of economic history to understand what kinds of civilizations they might develop, or how their higher-order social organizations might function.
We have many examples of convergent evolution in biology; we don’t have that many examples of ‘convergent history’ in civilizations—although I’m still optimistic that certain principles of economic and social organization might apply even to ETIs.
Amazing, thank you for the reply. I’ll definitely check out the linked essay. Would be curious to hear why people agreement downvoted you. I’m assuming they are more pessimistic than you?
Your optimism updates me pretty strongly because I don’t actually know much about the fields in question.
I would agree with you that there are a lot of insights to be gained from evolutionary biology (and also studying optimal foraging theory sounds like it would make for quite an interesting career). On the other hand it still seems daunting to imagine that we could come to real generalizations about economic history (not saying we can’t).
It seems like we can barely agree on why the industrial revolution happened or why fertility crashed. Perhaps we are closer than we think on agreement in these areas, or I am misinformed about the state of the field. Or maybe we can still get lots of useful generalizations while still not solving some of these fundamental questions. I guess I’m just left with this intuition that if we could predict ETI societies with any sort of accuracy we would also have a much clearer understanding/agreement of the macro trends of our own history.
Hi Charlie,
I seem to get downvoted fair amount on EA Forum, for reasons I don’t understand, and often by people who don’t leave comments; so I have no idea what their reasons are.
Anyway, I agree that using evolutionary biology to understand the likely types and natures of ‘primitive’ ETIs (before they develop technological civilizations) might be easier than using some generalization of economic history to understand what kinds of civilizations they might develop, or how their higher-order social organizations might function.
We have many examples of convergent evolution in biology; we don’t have that many examples of ‘convergent history’ in civilizations—although I’m still optimistic that certain principles of economic and social organization might apply even to ETIs.