4 ms·

Ways to think long-term: a cognitive toolkit for good ancestors

169 points by MindGods 6y ago

jkingsbery 6y ago
> Out of the ashes of World War Two came pioneering long-term institutions such as the World Health Organisation, the European Union and welfare states. Comparing the length of the existence of those organizations to how long many cathedrals took to build (some decades, but some centuries to complete), I don't understand how they're considered "long-term" institutions. It seems like if we want to look at institutions that have been successful long-term institutions, we would want to look at (1) secular governments such as the Roman Republic/Empire (which arguably lasted from the republic's founding in 509 BC until 1453), or Ancient Egyptian or Chinese societies (each of which also lasted through various dynasties as a continuous organization for thousands of years) and (2) various religious groups such as the Catholic/Orthodox Christian Churches which have existed as centralized institutions for a couple millenia.
- analbumcover 6y ago
  The point isn't that those institutions have existed for long periods of time, but rather that they attempt to address long-term issues.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    That's a weak point. If you say you want to think long-term, which of these do you mean? 1. I want to make plans that have long-term effects I consider desirable. 2. I want to make plans that are similar to those of other organizations which describe themselves as thinking long-term. On the assumption that we're talking about #1, a record of actual longevity always trumps the empty claim of future longevity. You can say whatever you want. Saying you're going to have a long-term impact doesn't mean you're going to have a long-term impact.
    - jchrisa 6y ago
      But surely there must be more to the story than survivorship bias? Can intentions towards long term thinking have the desired effect? If so, it's reasonable to consider what strategies and tactics are most helpful.
    - cbsmith 6y ago
      I think you're being a bit presumptuous about institutions whose lifespan have yet to be determined. It's not like practices from successful long-lived institutions were ignored. The examples you cite suffer from a reality that in many ways those institutions survived for so long in name only. They have transformed significantly enough from one generation to the next as to be largely unrecognizable as the same entity beyond comparative trivialities of language/ceremonies etc. If you pulled together snapshots of them from various points in time and put them together, they'd often be at cross purposes. Of course, the same criticism could be leveled at the post-WWII institutions, but those institutions were defined more by their purpose than their mere existence, so it was "pioneering" in terms of the effort to maintain said purpose, even if in many ways they've failed. I do think looking at the ways they've failed despite design intent and historical knowledge applied to them is potentially very interesting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  I believe the academy is the longest lasting institution, founded by Plato in 387 BC.
  - idoh 6y ago
    I googled this, found the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy Seems like it has not endured unbroken from then until now. But if you disagree I'd love to read about your take.
    - dr_dshiv 6y ago
      Sure, the academy shut down several times. But, it was a novel mode of social organization -- and as such, it continues today with great effect. Surely the role of the academy in the scientific revolution is certain, for instance.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    My Jewish minyan would disagree with that. We've been meeting and discussing the same issues for at least 2500 years.
    - dr_dshiv 6y ago
      Fair enough! One could argue that the nature of the social organization shifted significantly post-temple... But I'd be arguing on your side. Now Buddhism or Jainism, I suppose they would take the prize for longest lasting institutions?
      - fortran77 6y ago
        Buddhism or Jainism may have established social rituals that have been going on longer, I'm not sure. But I always laugh at the "long now" people. If you look at the earliest Jewish writings found, and compare them to what we read and study today, you'll see we've had a lot of continuity over the years and have found a social model that works for this--despite the best efforts of the rest of the world.
- simonh 6y ago
  I think your fundamentally missing the point of the article in your rush to post a “well actually”. The author is advocating establishing institutions intended to be long term, to tack long term problems. The European Union and WHO are examples of what were intended to be long term institutions to tackle long term problems. They are just representative of this sort of thinking, that is all. Of course there’s no way to know if they will turn out to be long term, that’s clearly impossible. Similarly there is no way to know now if institutions set up now to tackle new long term problems will last. It’s hard to believe that needs to actually be be said. The point is to employ long term thinking in our intentions and actions.
  - ksdale 6y ago
    I think you make an excellent point, but I think it is very relevant that basically every institution ever is intended to be long term. Every empire that lasted a thousand years steamrolled however many other aspiring empires that also wanted to last a thousand years, and every long-lived religion outlasted countless cults that had similar aspirations but died with their founding leader. I agree that long term institutions to tackle long term problems are important, but the intent itself feels almost irrelevant, to me anyway.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Intent may not guarantee success, but I can guarantee it’s necessary for having a chance of it.
      - wisty 6y ago
        Replication (or imitation) and mutation in a selective environment can create the illusion of intent without it needing to be present.
      - lmm 6y ago
        Can you? I would wager that many long-lived institutions had no particular intention to be long-lived; I could easily believe that it's actually a negative correlation (just as companies that grow big aren't necessarily those that were aiming to grow big).
xamuel 6y ago
One of my favorite papers highlighting the counter-intuitiveness of the world on a truly long term is Rohde et al, 2004, "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans". Wherein they show using computer simulations, with conservative assumptions, that it's almost certainly the case that the so-called "identical ancestor point" was as recent as a few thousand years ago (a blink of an eye in geological terms). What is this "identical ancestor point"? The IA point is the most recent time t such that if you choose any human alive at time t, then there are only two possibilities: (1) everyone alive in 2020 is their descendant, or (2) they have no descendant alive in 2020. Or in other words: it's the most recent time t such that for every two people in the world today (say, me and you), the set of {my ancestors alive at time t} and the set of {your ancestors alive at time t} are identical. And, with high probability, that time is within the past few thousand years. One consequence: if you were alive a few thousand years ago, it would be easier for you to literally become an ancestor of everyone alive in all of 2020, than it would be for you to write a book and have that book survive to 2020.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Or in other words: it's the most recent time t such that for every two people in the world today (say, me and you), the set of {my ancestors alive at time t} and the set of {your ancestors alive at time t} are identical. This isn't of much interest, though; the multiset of your ancestors will still look very different from most everybody else's. If I have a hundred thousand lines of direct descent from someone, and you have three, in what sense do we have identical ancestry?
  - xamuel 6y ago
    Well, it's going a little beyond Rohde et al (and could be an interesting future paper if you're into writing papers), but I would imagine the same sort of modelling would probably show that it's unlikely for anyone to have exactly one line of direct descent to an IA point ancestor. Anyway, on the fun side of things, if you think of it in terms of ancient prophecies (the ancient prophecy says the chosen hero shall be a descendant of X), such prophecies usually don't distinguish between 1 line vs. many :)
analbumcover 6y ago
This is distinctly at odds with the techno-optimist view that is so prevalent on this site, and in the tech world in general, that expects technology to address societies ills in a way that allows us to forgo systemic changes.
- clairity 6y ago
  that's not bad as one-line critiques go, but few people are narrowly techno-optimist. few would say that only technology will fix our ills, with no other structural changes. but certainly technology as solution can be misguided. UBI for instance (applying the term 'technology' broadly), as a path to labor and leisure utopia that actually further entrenches power/wealth in the hands of the few, thereby making no meaningful structural change addressing unproductivity or unfairness.
  - yarrel 6y ago
    If people wish to push for structural change, having time to do so is a good affordance of UBI.
    - clairity 6y ago
      a better affordance might be a wealth tax that supports grants to individuals and organizations pushing for structural change, perhaps encouraging civic participation and jumpstarting economic opportunity in disadvantaged regions. a fixed and constant cycle of money that distorts economic, political, and social incentives is not the only way, nor even a good way, i'd contend.
bullen 6y ago
Now is a good time to think that the code you write today might live forever and in that context stop writing bad code for employers and instead write good code for people. Good code runs on both Windows on X86 and Linux on ARM. Good code can hot-deploy. Good code is fast! For me that means Java SE on the server and C+ (C syntax with string, stream and objects for project organization only) on the client. HTML, CSS and JS is ok for GUIs only, everything else should be native with command line! Please comment if you down vote.
- weego 6y ago
  Good code doesn't project intent into the future, it is written for now. Good code doesn't paint the future into a corner.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  Programming for longevity is probably less about the specific language or tooling choices and more about things like: can you reproduce the build or does it presume a specific environment? How is the source code stored and how can it be recovered if the primary location is lost? Is the system well documented? Are the abstractions robust, and well composed? Many mainframe systems survived while desktop based systems have been killed because of the server/client architecture that has allowed for new front-ends to built separate from the backend. In this sense, if you are building for malleability, things like good test coverage become very important to support refactoring and changes. I'm sure many other considerations apply.
  - bullen 6y ago
    Sure, that's why github backed up everything in the Arctic now. But C and Java will remain longer than anything else, for good and for bad.
jenny13857 6y ago
All these six ways were very accurate and we must work on them to make long term decisions. Moreover if you like reading about the low mortgage rates florida then you must check my recent blog at https://www.lendova.com/ https://www.lendova.com/
citizenpaul 6y ago
This is all an exercise in hubris. I really dislike these types of things since they always forget one thing. In a world without infinite resources distributed to anyone that wants them. All of this is pointless. The second anything that has solid long term staying power it will be subverted by people's that wants a bigger share of the pie. In short all of these projects forget or ignore human nature.
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  People have been making your same essential claim in different variations for literally centuries, and have always proven to be wrong by the course of change and more importantly, human creative innovation. The pie may be fixed in certain specific absolute terms but in most ways it's far from that. It has room for many unique solutions that expand the scope of how we can create more from what we have to keep our well-being relatively high for the very long term. Also, because we have worries about our future sustainability now we should thus stop the "hubris" of planning for longevity? What an absurd argument right from square one.
  - PTOB 6y ago
    I dunno. Seems like most Marxist efforts thus far have pretty much made poor assumptions about human nature, causing their collapse or transformation into something less hopeful. Heck, the USA barely survived its first hundred years, and it might be the best example the world has of a long-term plan that's mostly intact. I think the hubris mentioned above is to believe that one set of ideas from a small handful of people are so correct, and their conclusions so obvious, that all of humanity will immediately shift gears in their minds and hearts to conform to them. We can look at history and see this this sort of thinking leads to the necessary killing, enslavement, or exile of human beings who - for some unknown reason - disagree with the ideas.
suyash 6y ago
This is an excellent article, we often get sucked into short term thinking - fighting fire day in and out not only adds unnecessary stress but also keeps us away from thinking long term. People like Elon Musk, Gates come to mind who think long term and take on projects that will benefit not only current but also future generations.
thecupisblue 6y ago
Honestly, this article is so Medium. 1. N ways to X 2. Cognitive toolkit, Mental model, Ruleset, Guidelines, 3. “Oh humanity is selfish and has a short term view, we need to think long term and in unity boohoo”. 4. This is just PR for a book. It feels like a highschooler read some "Think Like Elon Musk" brainporn and decided to write a pop-philosophy article without even thinking about it. After reading the article, I am sorry for those that waste money on this "interesting thinkers" book, because there seems to be nothing interesting or even thought out in this article. I assume TLDR of the whole book is "think about humanity in the long term and not just about yourself", which is exactly what isn't done here. A lot of the "six drivers" overlap, short/long aren't "the counter" of each other but can actually work in synergy. If you can even call them drivers. "Tyranny of the clock", no, we just have a social and technological standard enabling us to keep our distributed system in sync. We aren't doing field work all day, we're doing things that take minutes and hours, sometimes even second. A lot of times, it isn't even technology that captures our attention in technology, it's other people or stories, and if it was 1538, people and stories would still capture each attention, they'd gossip, hang around, go to pubs, theaters, fire dances with the shaman, it was just localised and you were limited to your tribe/area. This brought as much good things as it brought bad things. We focus on the next election because that is the way we fix the system, not by wishful thinking. Political corruption is a whole another sport that has nothing to do with this set of gloves, but we can also correlate it to age of the politicians, time when the system was established and the information scale at which average human operated at the time (let's say 100 years, my city/village scale). They are remnants of a legacy way of thinking, a way that will be seen as disgusting even by politicians in 50 years. Just like we look at guillotines in disgust. The same "speculative capitalism" (lol) is what feeds innovation and growth, it's the same thing that enabled us to connect and achieve more, it's the same thing that raised our standards worldwide and made the world a better and safer place to live. The speculation is called investment and it enables long-term scaling and thinking. Yes, we spent the last 150 years destroying the planet in the name of economic growth, but it's also what got us out of the mud, connected to each other, learning more about nature and ourselves, noticing the damage we're doing and pivoting to correct it. Of course we are "selfish", we have known for nothing but our tribe since the beginning of time, and we worked both to protect our unionized "self" (tribe) and our selfish (me, family, kids..) "self" against anything. For thousands of years we knew nothing but family pride and tribal pride, for the last 100ish years people really discovered national pride (we knew it before, but it wasn't that big of a pond or that concrete of a deal) and now we're just "discovering" global pride. We have been long-term thinking since the start of humanity, except in a "selfish" way, and we just recently realised "oh wait there is a whole world out there", with the latest generations being the only ones born into that kind of world and growing up understanding that there are other, diverse people around the world and how their actions impact others. For an article covering long-term thinking, it's a shame such short-term behavior (particulary last 50-100 years) is used to describe a whole civilisation.
dharma1 6y ago
Great post, tempted to read the book. We just don't have the inbuilt evolutionary incentives for optimising for long-term/generational success in today's landscape. We are new to the role of custodians of spaceship Earth and it doesn't look we are ready to be in the driver's seat. Our genetic reward pathways guide us in the short term. But there is no dopamine hit for recycling, consuming less, polluting less. None of these things were a problem for evolution to optimise away in the past, and the speed of technological development vs timescale of evolutionary pressure to fix these issues is at odds. I think I agree with Lovelock - best bet is to develop AI fast enough and let it take over long term optimisation for us.
shadowprofile77 6y ago
Talk about hand wavy: >A more likely trajectory is Reform, where we respond to global crises such as climate change but in an inadequate and piecemeal way that merely extends the Breakdown curve outwards, to a greater or lesser extent. Here governments put their faith in reformist ideals such as ‘green growth’, ‘reinventing capitalism’, or a belief that technological solutions are just around the corner. >A third trajectory is Transformation, where we see a radical shift in the values and institutions of society towards a more long-term sustainable civilization. For instance, we jump off the Breakdown curve onto a new pathway dominated by post-growth economic models such as Doughnut Economics or a Green New Deal. He makes these statements in these two sections, preceded by a first section in which he criticizes the 20th century business as usual "greed of avaricious capitalism and resource consumption, but then in the third point refers two two specific linked projects that are both exactly what he describes as piecemeal hybrids of capitalism and "new thinking" of the kind that's supposedly wrong in the first quoted paragraph above. Denmark is in no way escaping from the world's modern economic machinery with its so-called doughnut project and the green new deal is a gargantuan exercise in spending, ideological biases that could easily derail it for their lack of objectivity, and problematic, tenuous reasoning at best. Talk about generalization that just sweeps important substance under a rug of feel-good concepts. So far it is exactly a pragmatic mix of technology, piecemeal innovation, "selfish" market exchange, speculative investment and also of course gradually improved laws coupled with activism that have made the world better over centuries and decades. Not massive "transformative" notions. The literal attempts at applying things in which a complete transformation is claimed have if anything bathed the last 100 years in blood more than anything else. The author of this essay makes some very good points but more than anything, mashes his overall argument together in a hand wavy way that's riddled with absurdly biased cliches about the evils of modern society and capitalism which are heavily rooted in pop ideology and platitudes without substance. Not the best basis for genuinely objective attempts at long term thinking. The word "blockchain" even managed to get tossed in there. I mean, imagine the sort of reasoning, biases and specific dogmas that a 16th century version of this document would have in making arguments for how we should plan for the future, and imagine just how absurdly removed they would be from most of the real problems that the future actually confronted us with, especially compared to said hypothetical author's absorption in the shallow, highly specific political correctness of his own time.
tomrod 6y ago
Their pathways for civilization (https://miro.medium.com/max/2086/1*1dhjzhchffxWXdoNZ8V_lA.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/2086/1*1dhjzhchffxWXdoNZ8V_lA.jp...) reminds me of the outcomes for Sid Meirs "Beyond Earth." In that game you have five outcomes that I paraphrase as: - Failure: you fail the game. - World Domination: Your sectarian group becomes dominant. This does not guarantee ultimate survival, just survival in the moment. - Biological integration: you merge with the native flora/fauna, taking the "best" from both, gaia-ist style - Humanist conformity: you maintain human hegemony ranging from global purity to genetic purity - Transhumanist: you merge with technology I don't know if there are formal philosophical terms or treatise on these topics, but the view is interesting. The only recognizably "human" after millions of years had significant eugenic or otherwise authoritarian overtones. I wonder whether our imagination simply fails us, or we are doomed to a Morlocks/Eloi transformation of the species.
zazerbayev 6y ago
Where does the author get the idea that sustainable growth is no longer possible? Even setting aside how unfair it is to tell the global poor they've had enough growth when we've had 10x more, the claim isn't even true for developed countries. Rich countries are comfortably able to grow at rates higher than 1% a year (which, thinking long-term, is 2.7x in 100 years) and there is no reason to suspect that decarbonization will put a serious dent in that. The author seems to believe that growth is predicated solely on physical inputs, when in reality institutions and human capital are the real drivers.
Robotbeat 6y ago
I strongly disagree with this claim that is presented uncritically and without evidence: > Additionally, the more we set our sights on escaping to other worlds, the less likely we are to look after our existing one. The opposite seems to be true. There’s some evidence the Apollo program fostered the environmental movement. As Carl Sagan said, “Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo.” The “Overview Effect” has apparently caused a strong movement among astronauts to protect the Earth, from both war and environmental degradation. The two most prominent benefactors of human expansion into space, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, flawed as both men are, seem to also be sincerely concerned with the long-term ability of humanity to live on Earth sustainably. Musk does this through Tesla (accelerating clean energy transition), and Bezos through climate donations and, of course, funding the Long Now foundation that thoughtpieces like this are the product of. And NASA is deeply involved in environmental protection, whether monitoring the ozone layer or climate change. Few other agencies are as focused on protecting the habitability of the Earth as the only agency that is involved in sending people to other worlds, and you’d find fewer more strident proponents of protecting the environment than astronauts who have seen the entire Earth as it is. So this is just a false dilemma. A straw argument & it seems likely the exact opposite is likely to be true: lack of focus on the reality of Earth in space and the long term of humanity possibly taking root among the stars seems to make ignoring of environmental degradation easier, not harder. When you do not see Earth as “finite, alone,” it’s easy to lose the perspective that we must protect the Earth... the only home we’ve had and by far the best planet.

169 points by MindGods 6y ago

> Out of the ashes of World War Two came pioneering long-term institutions such as the World Health Organisation, the European Union and welfare states. Comparing the length of the existence of those organizations to how long many cathedrals took to build (some decades, but some centuries to complete), I don't understand how they're considered "long-term" institutions. It seems like if we want to look at institutions that have been successful long-term institutions, we would want to look at (1) secular governments such as the Roman Republic/Empire (which arguably lasted from the republic's founding in 509 BC until 1453), or Ancient Egyptian or Chinese societies (each of which also lasted through various dynasties as a continuous organization for thousands of years) and (2) various religious groups such as the Catholic/Orthodox Christian Churches which have existed as centralized institutions for a couple millenia.

analbumcover 6y ago
The point isn't that those institutions have existed for long periods of time, but rather that they attempt to address long-term issues.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  That's a weak point. If you say you want to think long-term, which of these do you mean? 1. I want to make plans that have long-term effects I consider desirable. 2. I want to make plans that are similar to those of other organizations which describe themselves as thinking long-term. On the assumption that we're talking about #1, a record of actual longevity always trumps the empty claim of future longevity. You can say whatever you want. Saying you're going to have a long-term impact doesn't mean you're going to have a long-term impact.
  - jchrisa 6y ago
    But surely there must be more to the story than survivorship bias? Can intentions towards long term thinking have the desired effect? If so, it's reasonable to consider what strategies and tactics are most helpful.
  - cbsmith 6y ago
    I think you're being a bit presumptuous about institutions whose lifespan have yet to be determined. It's not like practices from successful long-lived institutions were ignored. The examples you cite suffer from a reality that in many ways those institutions survived for so long in name only. They have transformed significantly enough from one generation to the next as to be largely unrecognizable as the same entity beyond comparative trivialities of language/ceremonies etc. If you pulled together snapshots of them from various points in time and put them together, they'd often be at cross purposes. Of course, the same criticism could be leveled at the post-WWII institutions, but those institutions were defined more by their purpose than their mere existence, so it was "pioneering" in terms of the effort to maintain said purpose, even if in many ways they've failed. I do think looking at the ways they've failed despite design intent and historical knowledge applied to them is potentially very interesting.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I believe the academy is the longest lasting institution, founded by Plato in 387 BC.
- idoh 6y ago
  I googled this, found the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy Seems like it has not endured unbroken from then until now. But if you disagree I'd love to read about your take.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Sure, the academy shut down several times. But, it was a novel mode of social organization -- and as such, it continues today with great effect. Surely the role of the academy in the scientific revolution is certain, for instance.
- fortran77 6y ago
  My Jewish minyan would disagree with that. We've been meeting and discussing the same issues for at least 2500 years.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    Fair enough! One could argue that the nature of the social organization shifted significantly post-temple... But I'd be arguing on your side. Now Buddhism or Jainism, I suppose they would take the prize for longest lasting institutions?
    - fortran77 6y ago
      Buddhism or Jainism may have established social rituals that have been going on longer, I'm not sure. But I always laugh at the "long now" people. If you look at the earliest Jewish writings found, and compare them to what we read and study today, you'll see we've had a lot of continuity over the years and have found a social model that works for this--despite the best efforts of the rest of the world.
simonh 6y ago
I think your fundamentally missing the point of the article in your rush to post a “well actually”. The author is advocating establishing institutions intended to be long term, to tack long term problems. The European Union and WHO are examples of what were intended to be long term institutions to tackle long term problems. They are just representative of this sort of thinking, that is all. Of course there’s no way to know if they will turn out to be long term, that’s clearly impossible. Similarly there is no way to know now if institutions set up now to tackle new long term problems will last. It’s hard to believe that needs to actually be be said. The point is to employ long term thinking in our intentions and actions.
- ksdale 6y ago
  I think you make an excellent point, but I think it is very relevant that basically every institution ever is intended to be long term. Every empire that lasted a thousand years steamrolled however many other aspiring empires that also wanted to last a thousand years, and every long-lived religion outlasted countless cults that had similar aspirations but died with their founding leader. I agree that long term institutions to tackle long term problems are important, but the intent itself feels almost irrelevant, to me anyway.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Intent may not guarantee success, but I can guarantee it’s necessary for having a chance of it.
    - wisty 6y ago
      Replication (or imitation) and mutation in a selective environment can create the illusion of intent without it needing to be present.
    - lmm 6y ago
      Can you? I would wager that many long-lived institutions had no particular intention to be long-lived; I could easily believe that it's actually a negative correlation (just as companies that grow big aren't necessarily those that were aiming to grow big).

xamuel 6y ago

One of my favorite papers highlighting the counter-intuitiveness of the world on a truly long term is Rohde et al, 2004, "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans". Wherein they show using computer simulations, with conservative assumptions, that it's almost certainly the case that the so-called "identical ancestor point" was as recent as a few thousand years ago (a blink of an eye in geological terms). What is this "identical ancestor point"? The IA point is the most recent time t such that if you choose any human alive at time t, then there are only two possibilities: (1) everyone alive in 2020 is their descendant, or (2) they have no descendant alive in 2020. Or in other words: it's the most recent time t such that for every two people in the world today (say, me and you), the set of {my ancestors alive at time t} and the set of {your ancestors alive at time t} are identical. And, with high probability, that time is within the past few thousand years. One consequence: if you were alive a few thousand years ago, it would be easier for you to literally become an ancestor of everyone alive in all of 2020, than it would be for you to write a book and have that book survive to 2020.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Or in other words: it's the most recent time t such that for every two people in the world today (say, me and you), the set of {my ancestors alive at time t} and the set of {your ancestors alive at time t} are identical. This isn't of much interest, though; the multiset of your ancestors will still look very different from most everybody else's. If I have a hundred thousand lines of direct descent from someone, and you have three, in what sense do we have identical ancestry?
- xamuel 6y ago
  Well, it's going a little beyond Rohde et al (and could be an interesting future paper if you're into writing papers), but I would imagine the same sort of modelling would probably show that it's unlikely for anyone to have exactly one line of direct descent to an IA point ancestor. Anyway, on the fun side of things, if you think of it in terms of ancient prophecies (the ancient prophecy says the chosen hero shall be a descendant of X), such prophecies usually don't distinguish between 1 line vs. many :)

analbumcover 6y ago

This is distinctly at odds with the techno-optimist view that is so prevalent on this site, and in the tech world in general, that expects technology to address societies ills in a way that allows us to forgo systemic changes.

clairity 6y ago
that's not bad as one-line critiques go, but few people are narrowly techno-optimist. few would say that only technology will fix our ills, with no other structural changes. but certainly technology as solution can be misguided. UBI for instance (applying the term 'technology' broadly), as a path to labor and leisure utopia that actually further entrenches power/wealth in the hands of the few, thereby making no meaningful structural change addressing unproductivity or unfairness.
- yarrel 6y ago
  If people wish to push for structural change, having time to do so is a good affordance of UBI.
  - clairity 6y ago
    a better affordance might be a wealth tax that supports grants to individuals and organizations pushing for structural change, perhaps encouraging civic participation and jumpstarting economic opportunity in disadvantaged regions. a fixed and constant cycle of money that distorts economic, political, and social incentives is not the only way, nor even a good way, i'd contend.

bullen 6y ago

Now is a good time to think that the code you write today might live forever and in that context stop writing bad code for employers and instead write good code for people. Good code runs on both Windows on X86 and Linux on ARM. Good code can hot-deploy. Good code is fast! For me that means Java SE on the server and C+ (C syntax with string, stream and objects for project organization only) on the client. HTML, CSS and JS is ok for GUIs only, everything else should be native with command line! Please comment if you down vote.

weego 6y ago
Good code doesn't project intent into the future, it is written for now. Good code doesn't paint the future into a corner.
jacobr1 6y ago
Programming for longevity is probably less about the specific language or tooling choices and more about things like: can you reproduce the build or does it presume a specific environment? How is the source code stored and how can it be recovered if the primary location is lost? Is the system well documented? Are the abstractions robust, and well composed? Many mainframe systems survived while desktop based systems have been killed because of the server/client architecture that has allowed for new front-ends to built separate from the backend. In this sense, if you are building for malleability, things like good test coverage become very important to support refactoring and changes. I'm sure many other considerations apply.
- bullen 6y ago
  Sure, that's why github backed up everything in the Arctic now. But C and Java will remain longer than anything else, for good and for bad.

jenny13857 6y ago

All these six ways were very accurate and we must work on them to make long term decisions. Moreover if you like reading about the low mortgage rates florida then you must check my recent blog at https://www.lendova.com/ https://www.lendova.com/

citizenpaul 6y ago

This is all an exercise in hubris. I really dislike these types of things since they always forget one thing. In a world without infinite resources distributed to anyone that wants them. All of this is pointless. The second anything that has solid long term staying power it will be subverted by people's that wants a bigger share of the pie. In short all of these projects forget or ignore human nature.

shadowprofile77 6y ago
People have been making your same essential claim in different variations for literally centuries, and have always proven to be wrong by the course of change and more importantly, human creative innovation. The pie may be fixed in certain specific absolute terms but in most ways it's far from that. It has room for many unique solutions that expand the scope of how we can create more from what we have to keep our well-being relatively high for the very long term. Also, because we have worries about our future sustainability now we should thus stop the "hubris" of planning for longevity? What an absurd argument right from square one.
- PTOB 6y ago
  I dunno. Seems like most Marxist efforts thus far have pretty much made poor assumptions about human nature, causing their collapse or transformation into something less hopeful. Heck, the USA barely survived its first hundred years, and it might be the best example the world has of a long-term plan that's mostly intact. I think the hubris mentioned above is to believe that one set of ideas from a small handful of people are so correct, and their conclusions so obvious, that all of humanity will immediately shift gears in their minds and hearts to conform to them. We can look at history and see this this sort of thinking leads to the necessary killing, enslavement, or exile of human beings who - for some unknown reason - disagree with the ideas.

suyash 6y ago

This is an excellent article, we often get sucked into short term thinking - fighting fire day in and out not only adds unnecessary stress but also keeps us away from thinking long term. People like Elon Musk, Gates come to mind who think long term and take on projects that will benefit not only current but also future generations.

thecupisblue 6y ago

Honestly, this article is so Medium. 1. N ways to X 2. Cognitive toolkit, Mental model, Ruleset, Guidelines, 3. “Oh humanity is selfish and has a short term view, we need to think long term and in unity boohoo”. 4. This is just PR for a book. It feels like a highschooler read some "Think Like Elon Musk" brainporn and decided to write a pop-philosophy article without even thinking about it. After reading the article, I am sorry for those that waste money on this "interesting thinkers" book, because there seems to be nothing interesting or even thought out in this article. I assume TLDR of the whole book is "think about humanity in the long term and not just about yourself", which is exactly what isn't done here. A lot of the "six drivers" overlap, short/long aren't "the counter" of each other but can actually work in synergy. If you can even call them drivers. "Tyranny of the clock", no, we just have a social and technological standard enabling us to keep our distributed system in sync. We aren't doing field work all day, we're doing things that take minutes and hours, sometimes even second. A lot of times, it isn't even technology that captures our attention in technology, it's other people or stories, and if it was 1538, people and stories would still capture each attention, they'd gossip, hang around, go to pubs, theaters, fire dances with the shaman, it was just localised and you were limited to your tribe/area. This brought as much good things as it brought bad things. We focus on the next election because that is the way we fix the system, not by wishful thinking. Political corruption is a whole another sport that has nothing to do with this set of gloves, but we can also correlate it to age of the politicians, time when the system was established and the information scale at which average human operated at the time (let's say 100 years, my city/village scale). They are remnants of a legacy way of thinking, a way that will be seen as disgusting even by politicians in 50 years. Just like we look at guillotines in disgust. The same "speculative capitalism" (lol) is what feeds innovation and growth, it's the same thing that enabled us to connect and achieve more, it's the same thing that raised our standards worldwide and made the world a better and safer place to live. The speculation is called investment and it enables long-term scaling and thinking. Yes, we spent the last 150 years destroying the planet in the name of economic growth, but it's also what got us out of the mud, connected to each other, learning more about nature and ourselves, noticing the damage we're doing and pivoting to correct it. Of course we are "selfish", we have known for nothing but our tribe since the beginning of time, and we worked both to protect our unionized "self" (tribe) and our selfish (me, family, kids..) "self" against anything. For thousands of years we knew nothing but family pride and tribal pride, for the last 100ish years people really discovered national pride (we knew it before, but it wasn't that big of a pond or that concrete of a deal) and now we're just "discovering" global pride. We have been long-term thinking since the start of humanity, except in a "selfish" way, and we just recently realised "oh wait there is a whole world out there", with the latest generations being the only ones born into that kind of world and growing up understanding that there are other, diverse people around the world and how their actions impact others. For an article covering long-term thinking, it's a shame such short-term behavior (particulary last 50-100 years) is used to describe a whole civilisation.

dharma1 6y ago

Great post, tempted to read the book. We just don't have the inbuilt evolutionary incentives for optimising for long-term/generational success in today's landscape. We are new to the role of custodians of spaceship Earth and it doesn't look we are ready to be in the driver's seat. Our genetic reward pathways guide us in the short term. But there is no dopamine hit for recycling, consuming less, polluting less. None of these things were a problem for evolution to optimise away in the past, and the speed of technological development vs timescale of evolutionary pressure to fix these issues is at odds. I think I agree with Lovelock - best bet is to develop AI fast enough and let it take over long term optimisation for us.

shadowprofile77 6y ago

Talk about hand wavy: >A more likely trajectory is Reform, where we respond to global crises such as climate change but in an inadequate and piecemeal way that merely extends the Breakdown curve outwards, to a greater or lesser extent. Here governments put their faith in reformist ideals such as ‘green growth’, ‘reinventing capitalism’, or a belief that technological solutions are just around the corner. >A third trajectory is Transformation, where we see a radical shift in the values and institutions of society towards a more long-term sustainable civilization. For instance, we jump off the Breakdown curve onto a new pathway dominated by post-growth economic models such as Doughnut Economics or a Green New Deal. He makes these statements in these two sections, preceded by a first section in which he criticizes the 20th century business as usual "greed of avaricious capitalism and resource consumption, but then in the third point refers two two specific linked projects that are both exactly what he describes as piecemeal hybrids of capitalism and "new thinking" of the kind that's supposedly wrong in the first quoted paragraph above. Denmark is in no way escaping from the world's modern economic machinery with its so-called doughnut project and the green new deal is a gargantuan exercise in spending, ideological biases that could easily derail it for their lack of objectivity, and problematic, tenuous reasoning at best. Talk about generalization that just sweeps important substance under a rug of feel-good concepts. So far it is exactly a pragmatic mix of technology, piecemeal innovation, "selfish" market exchange, speculative investment and also of course gradually improved laws coupled with activism that have made the world better over centuries and decades. Not massive "transformative" notions. The literal attempts at applying things in which a complete transformation is claimed have if anything bathed the last 100 years in blood more than anything else. The author of this essay makes some very good points but more than anything, mashes his overall argument together in a hand wavy way that's riddled with absurdly biased cliches about the evils of modern society and capitalism which are heavily rooted in pop ideology and platitudes without substance. Not the best basis for genuinely objective attempts at long term thinking. The word "blockchain" even managed to get tossed in there. I mean, imagine the sort of reasoning, biases and specific dogmas that a 16th century version of this document would have in making arguments for how we should plan for the future, and imagine just how absurdly removed they would be from most of the real problems that the future actually confronted us with, especially compared to said hypothetical author's absorption in the shallow, highly specific political correctness of his own time.

tomrod 6y ago

Their pathways for civilization (https://miro.medium.com/max/2086/1*1dhjzhchffxWXdoNZ8V_lA.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/2086/1*1dhjzhchffxWXdoNZ8V_lA.jp...) reminds me of the outcomes for Sid Meirs "Beyond Earth." In that game you have five outcomes that I paraphrase as: - Failure: you fail the game. - World Domination: Your sectarian group becomes dominant. This does not guarantee ultimate survival, just survival in the moment. - Biological integration: you merge with the native flora/fauna, taking the "best" from both, gaia-ist style - Humanist conformity: you maintain human hegemony ranging from global purity to genetic purity - Transhumanist: you merge with technology I don't know if there are formal philosophical terms or treatise on these topics, but the view is interesting. The only recognizably "human" after millions of years had significant eugenic or otherwise authoritarian overtones. I wonder whether our imagination simply fails us, or we are doomed to a Morlocks/Eloi transformation of the species.

zazerbayev 6y ago

Where does the author get the idea that sustainable growth is no longer possible? Even setting aside how unfair it is to tell the global poor they've had enough growth when we've had 10x more, the claim isn't even true for developed countries. Rich countries are comfortably able to grow at rates higher than 1% a year (which, thinking long-term, is 2.7x in 100 years) and there is no reason to suspect that decarbonization will put a serious dent in that. The author seems to believe that growth is predicated solely on physical inputs, when in reality institutions and human capital are the real drivers.

Robotbeat 6y ago

I strongly disagree with this claim that is presented uncritically and without evidence: > Additionally, the more we set our sights on escaping to other worlds, the less likely we are to look after our existing one. The opposite seems to be true. There’s some evidence the Apollo program fostered the environmental movement. As Carl Sagan said, “Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo.” The “Overview Effect” has apparently caused a strong movement among astronauts to protect the Earth, from both war and environmental degradation. The two most prominent benefactors of human expansion into space, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, flawed as both men are, seem to also be sincerely concerned with the long-term ability of humanity to live on Earth sustainably. Musk does this through Tesla (accelerating clean energy transition), and Bezos through climate donations and, of course, funding the Long Now foundation that thoughtpieces like this are the product of. And NASA is deeply involved in environmental protection, whether monitoring the ozone layer or climate change. Few other agencies are as focused on protecting the habitability of the Earth as the only agency that is involved in sending people to other worlds, and you’d find fewer more strident proponents of protecting the environment than astronauts who have seen the entire Earth as it is. So this is just a false dilemma. A straw argument & it seems likely the exact opposite is likely to be true: lack of focus on the reality of Earth in space and the long term of humanity possibly taking root among the stars seems to make ignoring of environmental degradation easier, not harder. When you do not see Earth as “finite, alone,” it’s easy to lose the perspective that we must protect the Earth... the only home we’ve had and by far the best planet.