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Welcome, Wayfinder.

Yesterday, we explored how multipolar traps manifest through the Prisoner’s Dilemma and capitalism due to their incentive structures.

Today we’ll explore a few more outcomes of these incentive traps that influence our lives.

Synchronize.

Multipolar traps are situations where there are multiple agents that each have their own self-interest, and due to the context are incentivized to act in their own self-interest in a way that creates a collectively destructive or suboptimal outcome for everybody involved, including themselves (trap) relative to if they (1) cooperated or (2) didn’t act in their immediate self-interest.

What are some other multipolar traps we contend with today?

Agriculture

From available evidence, hunter gatherer humans had higher life expectancy and bigger bodies and brains (average weight down from 176-188 to 154-176, and brain size down 10%) than agricultural humans.

This follows from both the physical and mental demands of being a hunter gatherer—generalist skills are required to survive and thrive to nomadic, changing conditions.

Plant identification, hunting, shelter finding, physically demanding life, exposure to predators, more varied diets, etc.

Versus… sitting on a plot of land for your whole life eating mainly barley or whatever crop was growing with nothing much happening other than tilling the soil and waiting.

So why then, did the agricultural humans win out if it was less enjoyable, drove physical and mental reversion, and killed people faster (collectively suboptimal impact)?

Because it was simply more competitive.

“Yeah, y’all go out nomading, we’ll sit here breed like crazy and go pop up a new settlement once we exhaust the local resources which oh by the way means y’all don’t have anything to hunt or gather here.”

So, become agriculturalists, or go nomad until there’s not enough viable territory or resources to be hunter gatherers anymore.

Just like the capitalist that cuts prices, worker conditions and salaries to keep the business operating.

It’s not because it’s better for those involved, it is simply how sufficiently intense competition and incentive structure sculpts the players.

Similar to how the ocean carves cliffs, or rivers carve valleys.

Incentives sculpt outcomes.

Arms Races

Ok nuclear proliferation, we see you.

Coordinated ideal outcome → world peace, no armies, no wasted time, energy or funds on military expenditure at the cost of infrastructure, education, and quality of life.

Multipolar problem → no single player can unilaterally enforce other players to be peaceful, and all it takes is one player to invest in military to then crush all the peaceful nations.

So, we get virtually every nation with their own military and investing as much as they can in it as they race to hold the next “biggest bomb” over their neighbors to enforce some demented form of partial peace through mutually assured destruction (i.e. the biggest players still do whatever they can get away with).

Education

Incentives, incentive, incentive.

Students are incentivized to go to the most prestigious college they can so they brand name gets them job opportunities.

Employers are incentivized to get the best and brightest, and similar to how time is falsely equated to productivity for knowledge work, the best approximation employers have to hire and defend those hiring decisions is “well A went to Harvard and B went to a state school, so we went with A, obviously”.

Colleges are incentivized to be as prestigious as possible to pull in the most students (customers).

Ideally, employers would hire applicants solely based on competence instead of prestige, applicants would only go to college if it would provide legitimate value on their path, and colleges would focus all efforts and resources on providing the most valuable education experience possible instead of optimizing for brand association and prestige.

But alas, incentives.

Science

Coordinated Ideal outcome → all science is performed free of financial or survival incentives with clean procedural design, excellent statistical methods, and free of bias and funding that’s coupled with private interest, and there replicating studies is incentivized.

Multipolar problem → journals that publish studies are incentivized to publish the most interesting, groundbreaking findings, scientists. Replicating studies is expensive and time consuming, and there’s no external reward incentivizing their performance.

Government

Coordinated ideal outcome → all elected officials are free from external influence and are elected based on their merit and ability to think forward and act in the best interest of the country, its citizens, and its future.

Multipolar problem → getting elected is expensive, and corporations have the most to gain (from cooperative government officials) and the most money to spend (through contributing to the campaigns of those officials). Those who aren’t willing to play ball may have a hard time getting elected over those who will. Also, each official is incentivized to optimize for their specific group of voters, regardless of the impact on anyone else.

Ho hum.

It’s all incentive gradients down here.

Just like the incentive to numb with alcohol, food, vacations, sex, entertainment… any material armor against the insanity of it all.

Because you really do feel less pain.

For a moment.

At the cost of more pain, but later.

But what’s pain later to the part of our psyche experiencing pain now?

A myth.

A myth that says “it’s worth the cost, because the cost doesn’t exist (now)”, but that (now) part gets sneakily omitted.

“Pleasure now is worth it”.

“Getting elected now is worth it.”

“Getting published now is worth it.”

“Sacrificing future for now is worth it.”

Godspeed, Wayfinder.

~ Michael