Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Reflecting on Steering, Pitfalls, and History, published by Davidmanheim on November 21, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
In light of Holden's excellent discussion of Rowing, Steering, Anchoring, Equity, Mutiny, I've been thinking about steering and its problems, and think there's something missing in his analysis. I haven't figure out how to plug the hole, but I have some initial thoughts.
Epistemic status: Preliminary thoughts and tentative conclusions, with some concrete examples which I hope are illustrative of something general, but may be post-hoc justifications to support my intuitive arguments.
Introduction
Holden proposes that steering, which he says is, in the analogy, trying to "navigate to a better destination than the current one." The idea is, then, to "anticipate future states of the world (climate change, transformative AI, utopia, dystopia) and act accordingly." He then notes that the historical track record of this type of work is not particularly great. Unfortunately, I think that this tries to combine two different things, in ways that are misleading, and uses far too narrow a historical lens. I'll start by addressing the elephant which Holden correctly located as crowding the room, Communism, then try to look elsewhere for examples.
Communism as Steering
First, true communism has never been tried. That's because true communism isn't even a single platonic idea, so there are mottes all over the place that allow for ambiguity and prevarication. But it's still useful to look at where the ideas have gone wrong.
The origins trace back well before Thomas More's Utopia, written in 1516, but that's a good place to start, with a vision of a society with communal ownership, simple needs, and rejection of competition. Of course, the idea of an idea state wasn't a blueprint or charting a course - but it clearly identified some problems with European society, and then proposed fanciful and impractical solutions.
In response to a varity of related ideas and recognition of problems, there were attempt to create such communal societies which clearly predate Marx, for example, in places like New Lanark - where Robert Owen, with support of philanthropists and others, including Bentham, built a Owenist commune around the time Marx was born. The small-scale communes, both predating Marx, during his lifetime, and over the following century, seem to have been anywhere from fairly successful to unspectacular failures.
But communism wasn't really compete until Marx. Much of what Marx added was a specific concern for what happens without radical reform, an economic theory, and a theory of history. I won't address the problems with the economic theory, but the specific concern - that capitalism would run roughshod over the workers and lead to poverty for all but the richest - wasn't actually unreasonable. In fact, without the labor movement in the US, and similar movements abroad, which developed largely prompted by socialism and communism, the trajectory of the working poor was quite grim. It's plausible that without a communist movement, Marx's vision of a capitalist dystopia wouldn't have been particularly wrong - and his assumption that things would inevitably become more socialist was mostly wrong in thinking that revolutions would necessarily be violent.
The problems with communism as attempted aroudn the world are manifold, but mostly seem to go alongside the planning and active steering. The types of abuse that communist states embraced were largely driven by certainty about their vision, and the inevitable human tendency to build "ideal" systems that in practice are self-serving rather than beneficial to others.
I think this is a trend - identifying problems is far easier than solving them, and grand schemes for solutions, is a typical red flag. It describes...
