Hsu befriended Cummings way back in 2014 at one of the Google Summits, and I suspect Hsu is the fellow who put Cummings in touch with other theoretical physicists, whom Cummings famously used to win Brexit instead of political consultants. An endorsement from Hsu carries some weight for me; the guy’s done a lot of cool stuff behind the scenes, so to speak.

I also found Cummings’ writeup of that weekend (linked below) illuminating of his mindset, especially when you consider the timeline of what he did since. The guy’s desperately trying his ass off to fix the world, and I admire his methods.

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/08/19/standin-by-the-window-where-the-light-is-strong-de-extinction-machine-intelligence-the-search-for-extra-solar-life-neural-networks-autonomous-drone-swarms-bombing-parliament-genetics-amp/

Cummings has clearly been closely linked to objectives I’ve favoured and attitudes I share, and also to attitudes I might not share. He also sounds like a huge, arrogant DB. But an accomplished one.

So I’ll reserve some judgment until I might remember what it was that bothered me before. For now, I can only say that I wouldn’t really want my own country transformed into a “meritocratic technopolis” any more than a socialist commune or a progressive egalitarian [probably also] technopolis. If those are my only alternatives then I would gladly watch it all fall into the sea.

I think all of you above have completely missed the point–in such great detail that I am not even going to attempt a “refutation.”

The Guardian reported that “Anna Karenina, maths and Bismarck are his three obsessions.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Cummings

More conservative types have offered up almost as utopian such schemes in the past to my loose approval, for all that most people would not benefit.

On the other hand, this one is packaged in the usual flowery, utopian radical way that leaves a foul taste. For me it combines all the downside of the technocrat progressive mind, the ideal of an elite of super progressive tech-enabled strivers saving the world, and the inevitable idealizing of perfect, perfectly formed youth as the people of tomorrow.

Unless the institution in question is the Battle School of Ender Wiggin, and Earth is actually under threat from alien arachnids, I don’t want any part of such notions.

Plus Cummings is associated with it. I can’t remember what it was, but I recognized his name from some other nauseating scheme of a few years ago. His name ought to be poison.

The flip side: never try to interact on an equal basis with those who are not on your level. It just doesn’t work.

What we need to do is get past this to the next stage, where actual adults with full agency run their own damn lives, and let others the hell alone to run theirs.

Unfortunately, that’s a long ways off. I’m tired of the infantile children around me wanting daddy to come tell them what to do, what to think, how to think, and I’m equally tired of the asshole wannabe “daddies” who actually can’t manage their own lives to any degree, yet who think they should tell me how to run mine.

One of these days, there’s going to be some self-appointed “great leader” arise, and instead of everyone falling over themselves to do what he wills, the vast majority are just going to point at him and laugh, going about their own business without paying him the slightest heed.

At that point, you’ll know we’ve finally matured as a species.

The root of the problem lies in this general idea that greater social mass and greater size in social structures are either true to human nature, or at all feasible with modern humans. We keep trying to build these massively unwieldy structures, and remain constantly shocked, dismayed, and surprised when they don’t work out over short, medium, or long terms.

The key thing is right there in the opening paragraphs of this piece, where the author describes the social structures and organizational features of “primitive” societies as being beneath contempt.

But, see, here’s the thing: Those chaotic and tiny little hunter-gatherer bands of yore are the way we evolved to live, and the exact social structures that took us out of Africa (or, wherever else we might have evolved…) and on to essentially cover the world are what works for humans. These massive, impersonal bureaucracies and inhuman hives are not. Contrast the whole path we took as human beings colonizing the Americas and Australia. Were the forebears of the Amerindian and Aborigine representatives of some vast antedeluvian bureaucracy, working to the orders of some authoritarian priest-king? Or, were they a bunch of small, self-supporting bands of humans who came together as necessary to do big things, like hunt for buffalo and other megafauna?

The reality is that the big edificial civilization-thingies we’ve become so fond of don’t really work out all that well, over the long haul. Rome and the Ottomans fell; the city-states of the Maya are no longer around, but the Mayan families who built them are still out there on the Yucatan, doing their thing.

Mass and size are things we don’t do well, when it comes to social structures. It inevitably decays into ossified bureaucracy that can’t adapt, can’t change, and the jobsworthies take over everything. More than likely, the guys who built Angkor Wat could have coped with changing conditions around the city, but the problem was that they were all dead, and the bureaucrats had taken over, who promptly “managed” their civilization to death.

The human mindset and mental capacity for working within these brobdignagian institutions is simply not there; we build them, but we can’t make them work.

That being the case, we need to take a look at what does work, on a human scale, and then try to adapt that to how we organize and run our lives. If you go back and look at the various really major things humans have done over the years, the accomplishments that stand out to me are things like taking over the entire Eurasian environment, conquering the Americas, and turning Australia into a human-dominated environment. We did all that without the benefit of a freakin’ “Big Government”, or anything more complex than a hunter-gatherer band for social structure. By comparison, in terms of scale of the project, just about everything else we’ve done pales. Humans were living at the very tip of Tierra Del Fuego, when the “advanced” Europeans arrived, and they were quite happy. How many Europeans would have survived, near-naked, in that environment?

Hell, Peary had to adapt and adopt most of the technology of the Inuit in order to even be able to do his polar explorations. Think about that for a moment: The most advanced civilization on the planet couldn’t cope with the environment in the Arctic, and then had to copy and co-opt the technologies and life-patterns of one of the most “primitive” in order to simply survive and do some basic exploration of their environment, that they’d been living in for thousands of years without even the rudiments of “big government”. Socially, the Inuit were primitive as hell, but… They adapted and lived in one of the harshest environments on Earth, completely without benefit of “big government”.

What does that tell you about the essentials of human nature? We don’t do “big” at all well; the Inuit predecessors were in the Arctic and thriving before Rome rose, and weren’t fully replaced until after the Vikings left Greenland to the glaciers. That’s nearly a 2,000-year run of success, followed by Inuit dominance of the region until the early 20th Century.

In that period, how many “big government” civilizations rose, fell, and left big messes behind, while the Arctic populations just kept on keeping on, tiny little bands thriving in the chaos of the harshest environment on Earth? Did they need “big government” to do that?

Small, polyvalent and survivable is what we need to be. We’re happiest in that social environment, and I think we’d be better off building out our bigger efforts from these blocks. Instead of corporations, we ought to be focusing on work teams that mimic the ancient situation of the human hunter-gatherer band. The individual anomie and dissatisfaction with life in modern social structures is down, I think, to the isolation and lack of social support. If you were to focus on building effective small structures like work teams, and then built up from those on an ad-hoc basis, you’d avoid many of the perils of the modern mass society. People would be happier, and work more effectively–You’d also do away with the need for much of the HR bureaucracy we seem to be doomed to recapitulate every time things get out of hand, size-wise.

Instead of building out Empire, I think we’d do better to focus on doing what our ancestors did, and build small effective teams that can come together as needed and then dissolve to repurpose for other projects. Building some huge thing like NASA for one project does not make sense, because concentrating all that power and authority in one place just attracts the wreckers, the careerists, and the mind-numb apparatchik parasites. Better to determine a mission, swarm it, and then dissolve the whole thing once the mission is done to everyone’s satisfaction. The Amerindians did not have some prehistoric NASA-like thing over them all, as they spread out and made the land their playground, exploiting every niche that they could.

You look at it with the right point of view, and that achievement is truly amazing. And, they did it all as tiny little hunter-gatherer bands spreading out chaotically across the continents…

“Our” civilization is really only the civilization of the WEIRD, some 10% or less of humanity. It is likely that it will collapse at some time, and pretty soon if mass migrations from low IQ, illiterate, unskilled civilizations continues.