Tamay Besiroglu

It's always been the case.

But I think when it is sufficiently functional for that to be suppressed, they are capable of suppressing it.

No, I'm not under-emphasizing that.

I think, like, there are... What I would say is there are certain things that are, like, path-dependent in history, such that if someone had done something different, like something had gone differently a thousand years ago, then today, in some respects, would look different.

I think, for example, which languages are spoken across which boundaries or, like, which religions people have or, like, which...

Like those kinds of – or fashion maybe to some extent, though not entirely.

Like those things are more path-dependent.

But then there are things that are not as path-dependent.

So, for example, if some empire – like if the Mongols had been more successful and like they somehow –

I don't know how realistic it is, but they became very authoritarian and had slavery everywhere.

Would that have actually led to slavery being a much more enduring institution a thousand years later?

That seems not true to me.

The forces that led to the end of slavery seemed like they were not...

they were not contingent forces.

They seem like deeper forces than that.

And if you're saying, well, if we like if we aligned us today to some bad set of values, then that could affect the future in some ways which are more fragile.

That seems plausible.

But I'm not sure how much of the things you care about the future and how much – the ways in which you expect the future to get worse, you actually have a lot of leverage on at the present moment.

No, I don't think you should give up.

It's more like it's hard to anticipate the consequences of your actions in the very distant future.