Let’s take a Darwinian perspective - entities that are better at reproducing, spreading and power-seeking will become more common and eventually dominate the world.[1] This is an almost tautological story that plausibly applies to everything ever, agnostic to the specifics. It first happened with biological life in the last few billion years and humans specifically in the last hundred thousand years. Eventually, it led to accelerating economic growth in the last few thousand years, and in the future it will presumably lead to the colonization of the universe.
My core point is this: It makes complete sense that this nihilistic optimization process at first actually benefits some class of agent - because initially, the easiest way to keep growing is to use some class of agent in the world and incentivize it by satisfying its preferences. But then, as the optimization becomes more and more advanced, it stops being beneficial - because there are almost certainly some more evolutionarily fit configurations out there than the class of agent that the process just happened to start out with. It’s a “Darwinian honeymoon”.[
Chickens had normal, happy lives for most of history because humans needed to “cooperate” with them, in a way - there was no alternative to free-range, and confining them in tight spaces would have made disease too much of a problem. Chickens had some negotiating power, so to speak, just by virtue of existing in their natural form, with their natural preferences. But then, humans invented antibiotics and vaccines to make extreme density viable. They synthesized vitamin D and added it to feed to make sunlight unnecessary. They discovered mechanized processing made farms with millions of birds possible. They figured out breeding science to grow chickens to unhealthy sizes. They found the right culture, and enough psychological distance in the industrial process, to disregard the chickens’ suffering. The world optimized itself.
Also, experts tend to think that the Agricultural Revolution (and possibly even the Industrial Revolution for a bit) reduced aggregate human welfare at first. So the outside view of “humans will keep doing better” has failed before - it’s strictly weaker than the outside view of “things will become more optimized”. My guess is that the total welfare of the world today is probably negative anyway due to factory farming, so that’s another way the optimistic outside view, globally speaking, doesn’t get off the ground.
Very quick, very speculative, lightly held thoughts on how the honeymoon may already be ending: Humans may be drifting away from our natural instincts due to the differing incentives of the modern capitalist world: Lower marriage rate, lower fertility, etc. Worsening teenage mental health may also be a sign of “underlying unhealthiness”/goodharting in some way. And increasing political polarization could be interpreted as human social instincts getting hijacked by larger entities (“egregores”) into larger-scale, more optimally power-seeking conflict. (Of course, there are other possible hypotheses for all these, and they’re completely independent from the main gist of the post). And AI replacing us is obviously another option.
on twitter everything is a tweet! (ignoring articles) when you reply or QT a tweet you are writing another tweet, which has all the affordances a full tweet has. you can attach images (including screenshots), you can QT while replying, other people can reply or RT or QT your tweet, replies and QTs show up in feeds. this makes twitter “fully recursive” in a way other platforms aren’t. someone can make a point in a top-level tweet and you can critique or build off that point in a QT which is its own top-level tweet. tweets can get replies which are so good they accumulate more RTs and QTs than the original. there’s a frictionless way discussions “grow” on twitter, budding off new discussions which bud off new discussions etc, which any platform that maintains a post / reply distinction makes harder
the argument runs through a few steps: we systematically overestimate how evil foreign leaders are (outgroup bias, halo/horn effects). a lot of what looks like evil values in dictators is really just the structural demands of staying in power, not their actual preferences. and most humans, even bad ones, share enough baseline human values (love, beauty, flourishing) that their extrapolated output would be recognizably good. the "torture your enemies forever" failure mode exists but requires a very specific fanatical mindset that's actually screened out by successfully holding power.