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Kaj_Sotala comments on Open thread, Nov. 10 - Nov. 16, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've read Yvain's Meditations on Moloch and some of the stuff from the linked On Gnon, but I'm still unclear on what exactly Gnon is supposed to signify. Does someone have a good explanation?
IANANRx, but I think the maximally charitable answer is "Nature; especially, the biological, physiological, and game-theoretical constraints within which any society and culture must operate." By extension, a culture neglecting these constraints is necessarily in a state of collapse- a faux perpetual motion machine may move for a few moments because of initial momentum in the system, but it must necessarily halt.
As an additional corollary, homeostatic societies (which were, presumably, not in a state of collapse) must have been acting within these constraints. Therefore, long-running traditional cultures most clearly illustrate the terms of compliance with Gnon.
Thanks, your answer together with jaime2000's clarified things considerably.
This is why deep ecologists and 'Soylent Greens' often advocate tribal-like structures, as found in hunters-gatherers' societies. But this clearly raises a question, how do we know which kinds of technological or social evolution are compatible with Gnon? Is greenwashed "natural capitalism" good enough, or do we need to radically simplify our lives in the name of sustainability? Or even forsake all kinds of technology and go primitivist?
A critique of the general concept: A culture may remain "in a state of collapse" for a long, long time. It's a little like saying "as soon as you're born, you start dying" — it's a statement more about the speaker's attitude toward life or society than about the life or society being described.
(Moreover, homeostasis only works until invaded. That's why there ain't no more moa in old Aotearoa.)
In terms of instrumental goals ('keep society functioning'), I think these are secondary concerns. A person might believe that we are all in a perpetual state of decay; a doctor finds it necessary to understand the kidneys of a high-functioning adult so that later problems may be diagnosed and fixed. Even if decay itself might take a long time- and even if decay is ultimately inevitable- there are reasons to want to understand and replicate the rules that provide access to 'doing okay, for now'.
Departing from my steelman for a moment, I think a more pressing concern with the model might be a poor understanding of the environmental pressures on specific societies. Homeostasis is contextual- gills are a bad organ for somebody like me to have. In the case of human societies, it's not obvious what these environmental pressures might be, or what consequences they might have. Technology is certainly one of them, as are other human societies, as are material resources and so on, but it's just not a well constrained problem. Does internet access alter the most stable implementations of copyright law? Does cheap birth control change the most economically viable praxis of women's education? Would we expect Mars colonization to result from a new cold war? So I think it is not enough to show that a society endured- you have to show that the organs of that society act as solutions to currently existing problems, otherwise they are likely to multiply our miseries.
(Rejoinder to the rejoinder: Chesterton's Fence.)
I think the "in a state of collapse" expression is a bit misleading with wrong connotations. A culture neglecting the real-world constraints is not necessarily collapsing. A better analogy would be swimming against the current -- you can do it for a while by spending a lot of energy, but sooner or later you'll run out and the current will sweep you away.
What is energy in this analogy, and where does it come from?
In the most general approach, negentropy. In the context of human societies, it's population, talent, economic production, power. Things a society needs to survive, grow, and flourish.
A lot of that doesn't look like the kind of thing societies consume, more like the substrate they run on. At least aside from a few crazy outliers like the Khmer Rouge.
I'm having a hard time thinking of policy regimes that require governments to trade off future talent, for example, for continued existence. Maybe throwing a third of your male population into a major war would qualify, but wars that major are quite rare.
Tentatively-- keeping the society poor and boring. Anyone who can leave, especially the smarter people, does leave. This is called a brain drain.
Literally borrowing ever increasing amounts of money against future generations' productivity.
Having social policies that lead to high IQ people reproducing less.
They are now, anyway.
The Ottoman Empire lost 13-15% of its total population in WWI but had by far the worst proportional losses of that war, particularly from disease and starvation.
In WWII, Poland lost 16%, the Soviet Union lost 13%, and Germany 8-10%..
In the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. as a whole lost 3% of its population, including 6% of white Northern males and 18% of white Southern males..
Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.
As I understand it, the apatheist statement of "the laws of nature as they justify traditional societal hierarchy".
Gnon is reality, with an emphasis towards the aspects of reality which have important social consequences. When you build an airplane and fuck up the wing design, Gnon is the guy who swats it down. When you adopt a pacifist philosophy and abolish your military, Gnon is the guy who invades your country. When you are a crustacean struggling to survive in the ocean floor, Gnon is the guy who turns you into a crab.
Basically, reality has mathematical, physical, biological, economical, sociological, and game-theoretical laws. We anthropomorphize those laws as Gnon.
Thanks, your answer together with Toggle's clarified things considerably.
(Also, that crab thing is fascinating.)
Oh, definitely. It's a really good analogy for the NRx view of civilization, too. That's why Gnon's symbol is a crab.
If you want to read another non-obscurantist explanation of Gnon, try Nyan Sandwich's "Natural Law and Natural Religion".
Gnon's symbol is a crab because someone had to slip subtle pro-Maryland propaganda into the memeplex.
See also: List of examples of convergent evolution
Seems like they take Feynman's "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled" and add a but of mysticism, resulting in "Nature is out to get you, constant vigilance, citizen!". Certainly makes the message easier to internalize for those who already think they live in a hostile environment.
That's just a less-pithy version of "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum", one of the formulations of Finagle's Law.
And then we get to the hard question-- how do we decide what is true about nature?
The usual way, make models (and metamodels) and refine them to explain and predict better.