David Duvenaud

And they might feel like they're forced to because if their only source of income is something like UBI, then the entire game going forward for economic advancement is do some sort of activism to convince the government to give your group more UBI.

So this is going to make politics just much more high stakes and unstable.

And so governments that don't

sort of disempower their citizens one way or another, are going to be facing these constant pressures and being sort of blown around by who's winning the activism war this week.

And so eventually that's an unstable situation that's going to end up with, I think, people basically being unable to control the levers of power.

Yeah.

And I want to give it a shout out to my co-author, Jan Kovalt, who is really the person who pushed for this and developed this thesis in the paper.

Yeah.

So the basic idea is that, you know, culture is this other sort of replicator, sort of like Richard Dawkins talks about memetics and stuff.

And they can serve humans sort of better or worse.

And in the past, especially this is in the past, like things like tradition changed.

cultural norms were actually very important for society to work at all.

And there was like important sort of selection effects that meant that when groups had like bad enough culture, they would somehow be less competitive and one way or another adopt it or be taken over by a group that had like a more effective culture.

Like maybe the most extreme example of this is the Cathars, which was like a Christian sect that believed in no violence and no sex.

And they eventually... I haven't met a Cathar recently.

Yeah, exactly.

And so these selection pressures that meant that like having bad culture meant that you might not like reproduce or your civilization might die are much weaker than they used to be, partly because we're richer than we used to be and probably because we have this one global culture.

And actually Robin Hanson is always saying, guys, this is really scary.

We've lost this sort of like group selection effects and our culture is sort of randomly drifting in a way that no one is controlling.

This is likely to lead it to be worse just in expectation.