16 Comments
User's avatar
Defender's avatar

I saw this first thing in the morning in my email and I was SO excited, I was like "omg what are the odds guy wrote about this too!!! look at us collaboratively mapping the foundational principles of the field!!! converging!!"

(then I saw the tweet, but it doesn't matter, the feeling is still there, we ARE collaboratively mapping out this field and making it legible!!! 😄)

I never thought about this concretely, I loved thinking through this hierarchy of kings and what do you do at the limit!

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Guy's avatar

yes - i was very stoked to read your writing on basically the same thing i already had in my drafts !!

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latentjuice's avatar

hahaha this post reminded me of this frank ocean lyric. it’s kings all the way up until the coordination problem hits a halting condition: a lack of faith

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Shadow Rebbe's avatar

This is great.

But if "kings are for coordination" and this is a genius idea, odds are the guy who figured out how to coordinate was pretty smart right? So this guy wouldn't /just/ coordinate for things like driving left vs right, if he could figure other things that would be good and could get co-ordinated for. Things like don't take advantage of widows and orphans (the powerless), and give money to the priests (sustaining the co-ordination, and creating a class who's job is to perpetuate and evolve the co-ordination and the like.

On another note- you might like Jan Assman, who explains some of monotheism's insane mechanisms to make it super-coordinate. (He's got some good youtube lectures)

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Guy's avatar

I think there's more things going on (ie opposite pressures) and that this wasn't "figured out" as much as it was discovered (ie societies that lucked into this survived/conquered the ones taht didn't). But yes the logic then still applies to your following examples (and in fact societies that did those things outcompeted the ones that didn't).

Will check him out, thanks!

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Shadow Rebbe's avatar

I see why both explanations are possible- (darwinian survival + reproduction) and (intentional design).

why do you think it's more likely to be the first?

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Guy's avatar

Trash answer but... priors. I think everyone defaults to intentional design and I've repeatedly found things to be discovered instead of invented. So... priors.

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Shadow Rebbe's avatar

I think it’s reasonable that the first coordinations are emergences from randomness, but I imagine many of the advances forward are intentional. I mean, plato’s laws and republic are kindof like doing this thing? and he wrote about the… noble lie (as a coordination mechanism). So at least since then the ideas been in the air.

I think of it more like “when was this discovered” than when was this ‘invented’. once you’ve seen an example, maybe you say “hey, we can do this on purpose!”

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Rajeev Ram's avatar

haha his last name is Assman, which makes second example in this post hilarious

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Shadow Rebbe's avatar

pun pun pun pun pun :)

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The Veil's avatar

wake up babe, new rival banger just dropped

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Guy's avatar

Baeeeeeeee who is rival lemme sleeeeep

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The Veil's avatar

ahahah soweyy GUY

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Herald of the Octopus's avatar

But what happens if different monotheisms clash?

At some point, we'll run out of superlatives. Islam and Christianity won't agree on a God of Gods of Gods because they've already maxxed out on superlatives in the previous step.

For global/planetary coordination (the missing final step), I think we need to go the perennial route of asserting that the different Gods of Gods are, in fact, the same true God of God (and any differences are on a level below, concerning only the lower gods of local cultures.

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Kuda's avatar

So this is why the "AI priestly class" is losing its authority. They are actually anti-kings, as they are introducing uncertainty instead of coordination. Not even sure how they even got this far...they must be being held up propaganda (AGI (God, basically) is right around the corner guys...2-3 years. We promise. So give us your support or else China will beat us to the punch and kill us all).

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John Hanacek's avatar

What if the king became a new kind of nature birthed from garbage and necessity for a new fractal scale? earthstar111.substack.com

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