The Nonlinear Library LW - Review: Conor Moreton's "Civilization & Cooperation" by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien
May 26, 2024
57:05
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: Review: Conor Moreton's "Civilization & Cooperation", published by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien on May 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
Author's note: in honor of the upcoming LessOnline event, I'm sharing this one here on LessWrong rather than solely on my substack. If you like it, you should subscribe to my substack, which you can do for free (paid subscribers see stuff a week early). I welcome discussion down below but am not currently committing to any particular level of participation myself.
Dang it, I knew I should have gone with my first instinct, and photocopied the whole book first. But then again, given that it vanished as soon as I got to the end of it, maybe my second instinct was right, and trying to do that would've been seen as cheating by whatever magical librarians left it for me in the first place.
It was just sitting there, on my desk, when I woke up six weeks ago. At first I thought it was an incredibly in-depth prank, or maybe like a fun puzzle that Logan had made for me as an early birthday present. But when I touched it, it glowed, and it unfolded in a way that I'm pretty sure we don't currently have the tech for.
Took me a while to decode the text, which mostly looked like:
…but eventually I got the hang of it, thanks to the runes turning out to be English, somehow, just a weird phonetic transcription of it.
Hilariously mundanely, it turned out to be a textbook (!), for what seemed like the equivalent of seventh graders (!!), for what seemed like the equivalent of social studies (!!!), written by an educator whose name (if I managed the translation correctly) is something like "Conor Moreton"…
…in a place called (if I managed the translation correctly) something like "Agor."
At first, I thought it was a civics textbook for the government and culture of Agor in particular, but nope - the more I read, the more it seemed like a "how stuff works" for societies in general, with a lot of claims that seemed to apply pretty straightforwardly to what I understand about cultures here on Earth.
(I'll be honest. By the time I got to the end of it, I was stoked about the idea of living in a country where everybody was taught this stuff in seventh grade.)
I took notes, but not very rigorous ones. I wasn't counting on the book just disappearing as soon as I finished reading the last page
(I know, I know, not very savvy of me, I should have seen that coming. 20/20 hindsight.)
so what follows is a somewhat patchwork review, with a lot of detail in random places and very little detail in others. Sorry. It's as complete as I can make it. If anybody else happens to get their hands on a copy, please let me know, or at least be sure to take better notes yourself.
I. Civilization as self-restraint
The first chapter of Moreton's book asks readers to consider the question Where does civilization come from? Why do we have it?
After all, at some point, civilization didn't exist. Then gradually, over time, it came into being, and gradually, over time, it became more and more complex.
(Moreton goes out of his way to make clear that he's not just talking about, like, static agrarian society, but civilizations of all kinds, including nomadic and foraging ones.)
At every step of the way, he argues, each new extra layer of civilization had to be better than what came before. Cultures aren't quite the same as organisms, but they're still subject to evolutionary pressure. Behaviors that don't pay off, in some important sense, eventually die out, outcompeted by other, better-calibrated behaviors.
The book points out that what civilization even is is a question that's up for debate, with many people using many different definitions. Moreton proposes a single, unifying principle:
Civilization is the voluntary relinquishment of technically available options. It's a binding of the self, a del...
Author's note: in honor of the upcoming LessOnline event, I'm sharing this one here on LessWrong rather than solely on my substack. If you like it, you should subscribe to my substack, which you can do for free (paid subscribers see stuff a week early). I welcome discussion down below but am not currently committing to any particular level of participation myself.
Dang it, I knew I should have gone with my first instinct, and photocopied the whole book first. But then again, given that it vanished as soon as I got to the end of it, maybe my second instinct was right, and trying to do that would've been seen as cheating by whatever magical librarians left it for me in the first place.
It was just sitting there, on my desk, when I woke up six weeks ago. At first I thought it was an incredibly in-depth prank, or maybe like a fun puzzle that Logan had made for me as an early birthday present. But when I touched it, it glowed, and it unfolded in a way that I'm pretty sure we don't currently have the tech for.
Took me a while to decode the text, which mostly looked like:
…but eventually I got the hang of it, thanks to the runes turning out to be English, somehow, just a weird phonetic transcription of it.
Hilariously mundanely, it turned out to be a textbook (!), for what seemed like the equivalent of seventh graders (!!), for what seemed like the equivalent of social studies (!!!), written by an educator whose name (if I managed the translation correctly) is something like "Conor Moreton"…
…in a place called (if I managed the translation correctly) something like "Agor."
At first, I thought it was a civics textbook for the government and culture of Agor in particular, but nope - the more I read, the more it seemed like a "how stuff works" for societies in general, with a lot of claims that seemed to apply pretty straightforwardly to what I understand about cultures here on Earth.
(I'll be honest. By the time I got to the end of it, I was stoked about the idea of living in a country where everybody was taught this stuff in seventh grade.)
I took notes, but not very rigorous ones. I wasn't counting on the book just disappearing as soon as I finished reading the last page
(I know, I know, not very savvy of me, I should have seen that coming. 20/20 hindsight.)
so what follows is a somewhat patchwork review, with a lot of detail in random places and very little detail in others. Sorry. It's as complete as I can make it. If anybody else happens to get their hands on a copy, please let me know, or at least be sure to take better notes yourself.
I. Civilization as self-restraint
The first chapter of Moreton's book asks readers to consider the question Where does civilization come from? Why do we have it?
After all, at some point, civilization didn't exist. Then gradually, over time, it came into being, and gradually, over time, it became more and more complex.
(Moreton goes out of his way to make clear that he's not just talking about, like, static agrarian society, but civilizations of all kinds, including nomadic and foraging ones.)
At every step of the way, he argues, each new extra layer of civilization had to be better than what came before. Cultures aren't quite the same as organisms, but they're still subject to evolutionary pressure. Behaviors that don't pay off, in some important sense, eventually die out, outcompeted by other, better-calibrated behaviors.
The book points out that what civilization even is is a question that's up for debate, with many people using many different definitions. Moreton proposes a single, unifying principle:
Civilization is the voluntary relinquishment of technically available options. It's a binding of the self, a del...