First of all, I really appreciate your positivity. I believe in the possibility of a better world, and am also hopeful for one. However, finding stable peace a

First of all, I really appreciate your positivity. I believe in the possibility of a better world, and am also hopeful for one. However, finding stable peace and improving the world in the ways that you describe is not so simple. Based on the way our current civilization is set up, we are subject to a so-far-insurmountable problem that continuously pulls us away from this ideal. I would roughly summarize this problem as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is a unique category of coordination failure that undergirds many aspects of the world we might criticize right now, such as climate, disinformation, nuclear risk, and more. Scott Alexander[0] and Daniel Schmachtenberger[1] have written and spoken about this meta-level issue at length. I particularly like this quote from the Alexander piece: > all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s- eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid. To answer your question directly, I think it’s possible that this meta-problem might now be solvable because we have technologies that empower us to create net new incentives and coordination games[2]. I have a hypothesis that this is particularly relevant today because same coordination failure patterns are very likely to play out with AI alignment - and the tools are showing promise to be able to help with this. I feel very lucky that this is what I get to spend all my time working on. Making the world a better place in this way is almost all I can think about. There’s a contingent of good people working on this problem in the context of the idea “DAOs.” If you feel called to try to address what might be the highest leverage problem of our time, definitely recommend you check it out. [0]: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBoLVvoqVY [2]: https://medium.com/@virgilgr/ethereum-is-game-changing-technology-literally-d67e01a01cf8 https://medium.com/@virgilgr/ethereum-is-game-changing-techn...