Adam Carlton's writing notes in 2022

Humans and capitalism are a poor match

Humans are poorly adapted to a high-performance capitalist society. That's why as consumers (and as the owners of capital) we devoutly await the arrival of competent, ubiquitous robots. Ironic, really.

On being dominated by your primary psychological functions

All my life I have been seduced by ideas: libertarianism, marxism, the sacredness of scientific endeavour. Finally I am learning to be a whole person, with collegial relationships with others.

And you ask why I joined the Catholic church? That was my first confession! 

The one thing I took from T'ai Chi was the Taoist idea that we should be conscious of those drives which impel us to action or gratification  - which include of course intellectual curiosity, as well as staples such as fear or jealousy - and never be mastered by any one of them.

It has to be said, though, that the Taoist persona - calm and in control - does not lend itself to emotional colour or drama!  There's no market for a Taoist soap!

The illusion of intrinsic equality

Imagine teaching children at school that all (cognitive, psychometric) abilities are distributed normally and variantly - and that this explains many outcomes. And that we maintain a legal/social principle that all citizens are nevertheless to be considered equal.

Too sophisticated for the left side of the bell curve? Or too divisive? Is that why we lie?

Marx or Darwin?

In fact, to be absolutely precise about my view, I would say you can either have Marx's - rather vague and certainly utopian - concept of communism as a historical destination for humanity, or you can have a realistic evolutionary Darwinian theory of human nature.

You can't have both.

Marx is best understood, IMHO, as a sociologist who analysed the specificity of the capitalist mode  of production as contrasted with feudalism or slave societies. This completely undermines its utility to the revolutionary left, which is why they will defend to the death their dogma of the social-mutability and perfectibility of humanity. Wokeism is just one more, albeit theoretically-shallow, spin-off of this delusion.

Marx himself seemed rather ambivalent about the extent to which human nature was mutable. He was a fan of Darwin. But not enough, it turned out 😏... a triumph of wishful thinking on his part.

Liberalism is - in essence - decoupled from reality

Liberalism is a low-stakes politics. Liberalism believes in the autonomous power of ideas, detached from material contexts and more importantly vital interests.

The defining characteristic of liberal thought is the setting of ungrounded normative models. Fukuyama is more sophisticated than most in that he has read widely and situates his thinking historically. Yet his attachment to the ungrounded concept of "democracy" abstracts from the actual dynamics of history. Marx called Hegel out on this (and Fukuyama has regressed to Hegel). We need to move in the other direction, that of sociobiology. 

Example: Fukuyama was stranded by the military coup in Egypt which overthrew the Morsi Islamist government. That marks the outer limit of his insight. 

AI Cars

Current architecture AI cars attempt to prove the zombie hypothesis: the hypothesis that all driving can in principle be achieved unconsciously. 

Why can't we tell the cars things? Would that be the road to automotive consciousness?

Biology first, then sociology, then political economy

You have to think of the animal. The animal, if smart enough, can support various social protocols. Co-evolution obviously, at the margins. But it's the animal supporting the protocols, not the protocols creating the animal. 

AI systems today are task models, not agents per se (in a naturalistic sense). We'll make scientific progress when we know how to engineer artificial animals or humans. And that's when AI Risk becomes real.

Hitting your cognitive limits

Subjectively how it feels: self-deception. No-one really believes in their own cognitive limits - people prefer to believe that the IQ tests 'suddenly become arbitrary'.