The Seldon Paradox, our faulty memories... the death of vaccinations and the unintentional resurrection of Karl Marx

For your weekend pleasure - or else your daily drive to work - here's another interview that probes issues that are far more important today than they were, even then.

Also... before diving into this weekend's topic, may I first offer one remark on current events? A fact not noted by any media I've seen - that maybe a quarter of the sagacious grownups who were yanked from their jobs all over the world to get yammered at, in Quantico, were not generals or admirals, but sergeants! 

Sergeants-major or command chief petty officers or guardians who are treated with respect, as comrades, by the flag officers... and whose faces at the 'meeting' bore the same, icy-grim flatness as the generals, while being harangued by two jibbering... And yet, they were unable to quite hide their revulsion and a taste of acid in their mouths. Anyway, the presence of those NCOs and their reactions were as significant as anything else in that week of news.

But on to something more big picture than our present day crises.

== A couple of basic patterns of psychohistory ==

In his book The Disruption of Thought, Pat Scannell describes the Collingridge Dilemma.

 

“In the early stages of an emerging and complex technology, no one – certainly not institutions – can accurately predict or control the potential negative consequences. We don't know the problems they may cause, so we can't regulate or shape them optimally. Later in the technology's maturation, as it becomes more established and widely adopted, the problems become more apparent. But by this time, it has become embedded in societal structures and practices. By that point, we can see the problem, but there is a 'lock-in' – technological, economic, social, and institutional—where various interests, incentives, and norms prevent any change, however well-intended.” 

Philosopher David Collingridge articulated it succinctly: "When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming."

As Scannell re-stated: even very good ideas must pass through the Overton Window – from unthinkable to accepted policy. 

“And with technology, the Collingridge Dilemma creates a double bind: early on, harms are hard to foresee; later, the system locks in and becomes costly to change. We tend to work where problems are both legible and tractable – leaving the largest, entangled ones to fester.”

This very much correlates with the phenomenon that I cite in Chapter One of my nearly completed book on Artificial Intelligence, that crisis always accompanies every new technology that expands human vision, memory and attention. And it usually takes a generation or more for positive effects to start overcoming quicker, more-immediate negative ones.  

This Collingridge Dilemma takes on a twist when it comes to crises engendered by AI. The widespread temptation – expressed by many inside and outside of the field – is to go: “Well, AI will handle it.” 

Okay. The very same cybernetic entities that we worry about, that will shake every institution and assumption, will also be the ones (newly born and utterly inexperienced) to analyze, correlate, propose and enact solutions. 

Or shall we say that they should do that? Ah, that word. "Should."

== Hari & Karl ==

There is another, related concept – the Seldon Paradox, named after Hari Seldon, the lead character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe, who develops mathematical models of human behavior that are sagaciously predictive across future centuries. In that science fictional series, Seldon’s methods are kept secret from the galaxy’s vast human population – on twenty-five million inhabited worlds – because the models will fail, if everyone knows about them and uses them.

This effect is well-known by militaries, of course. It is also why so many supposed tricks to predict or game the Stock Market – even if they work at first – collapse as soon as they are widely known. 

But the Seldon Paradox goes further. A good model that stops working, because of widespread awareness, might later-on start to work again, once that failure becomes assumed by everyone.

One example would be what happened in my parents’ generation, that of the Depression and the Second World War. At the time, everyone read Karl Marx. And I do mean almost everyone. Even the most vociferous anti-Marxists could quote whole passages, putting effort into understanding their enemy. 

You can see this embedded in many works of the time, from nonfiction to novels to movies. All the way to Ayn Rand, whose entire scenario can be decrypted as deeply Marxist! Though heretically-so, because she cut his sequence off at the penultimate stage, and called the truncated version good.

Indeed, Asimov’s Hari Seldon was clearly (if partially) based upon Marx.

Particularly transfixing to my parents' generation were Marx’s depictions of class war, as power and wealth grew ever more concentrated in a few families, leading – his followers assumed – to inevitable revolt by the working classes. So persuasive was the script that, in much of the wealthy American caste, there arose a determination to cancel their own demise with social innovations!

One, innovation, in particular, the Marxists never expected was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose game plan to save his own class was to fork over much of the wealth and power by investing heavily to uplift the workers into a prosperous, educated and confident Middle Class. One that would then be unmotivated to enact Karl's scanario.

Or, as Joe Kennedy was said to have said: "I'd rather have half my fortune taken to make the workers happy than lose it all, and my head, in revolution." (Or something to that effect.)

== It worked, SO well that eventually... ==

Whether or not you agree with my appraisal here, the results were beyond dispute. The GI Bill generation built vast infrastructure, supported science, chipped away at prejudice, and flocked to new universities, where the egalitarian trend doubled and redoubled, as their children stepped forth to confidently compete with the scions of aristocracy. And thusly brought a flawed but genuinely vibrant version of Adam Smith's flat-fair-open-competitive miracle to life! That is, until…

…until all recollection of Karl Marx and his persuasive scenarios seemed dusty, irrelevant, and mostly forgotten. Until the driving force behind Rooseveltism – to cancel out communism through concentrated egalitarian opportunity – became a distant memory. 

At which point, lo and behold, conditions of wealth and power began shifting back into patterns that fit into Old Karl’s models with perfect snugness! With competition-destroying cartels and cabals. With aristocracies greedily and insatiably vampiring the system that had given them everything. (Ayn Rand's elite 'looters.") With the working classes fleeced, like sheep. And then (so far figuratively) eaten.

At which point the writings of Marx – consigned for 80 years into the dustbin – have regained interest from disgusted, formerly upward-mobile classes. Books that are now flying off the shelves, all over the world, pored-over eagerly… 

...but not by those who need awareness the most. Surrounded by sycophants and flatterers, they will deem themselves to be demigods, until the tumbrels come for them. Or until another FDR rescues them, in the nick of time. (Don't count on it.)

Because of the Seldon Paradox. 

-- And yes, the anti-vax movement is another example ==

There are reasons why the Greatest Generation adored FDR above all other living humans. And the next American so-beloved? His name was Jonas Salk. The Man Who Gave Kids Back Their Summer....

...because until the miracle of his vaccine, parents terrified of polio kept their children away from public parks and swimming pools... and I barely remember parent-talk of their joy and relief, letting me stroll the neighborhood and nearby streets in safety.

How does this relate? Childhood vaccinations worked so well that most citizens forgot how much people suffered from two dozen lethal and "non lethal" diseases such as measles, mumps, etc. And they forgot the horrors of polio and diptheria and tetanus (reputed to be the very worst way to die.)  And yeah. The Anti-Vax movement well resembles phase one of the Seldon Paradox. 

And woefully we are already seeing signs of phase two. 

== Okay, it is kind of a 'cycle' ==

And what the heck does any of that have to do with Artificial Intelligence, Brin?

Just everything. Because the new, helium-cooled AI seers might have longer memories and perspectives on time than we do… or else much, much shorter. 

Either way, perhaps they will be immune to the primitive reproductive strategies that drive class conflict… 

...or else they might redefine self-interest to awesome degrees that I elaborate in my forthcoming book. 

Ideally they will understand the Collingridge Dilemma… and the Seldon Paradox, and other crudely human traps... and help us with our faulty memories. 

 

That is one reason that I am writing all of this. For their consideration.

 

======================================

 

PS... I finished Isaac’s Foundation series for him, after his passing, tying together all of his loose ends, in Foundation’s Triumph. So... yeah. Hari Seldon was my character, too.

 

This class war has no memory – and that could kill us

Nathan Gardels – editor of Noema magazine – offers in an issue a glimpse of the latest philosopher with a theory of history, or historiography. One that I'll briefly critique soon, as it relates much to today's topic. But first...

In a previous issue, Gardels offered valuable and wise insights about America’s rising cultural divide, leading to what seems to be a rancorous illiberal democracy.  

Any glance at the recent electoral stats shows that while race & gender remain important issues, they did not affect outcomes as much as a deepening polar divide between America’s social castes, especially the less-educated vs. more-educated. 

Although he does not refer directly to Marx, he is talking about a schism that my parents understood... between advanced proletariate and ignorant lumpen-proletariate.

Hey, this is not another of my finger-wagging lectures, urging you all to at least understand some basic patterns that the WWII generation knew very well, when they designed the modern world. 

Still, you could start with Nathan's essay...

...though alas, in focusing on that divide, I'm afraid Nathan accepts an insidious premise. Recall that there is a third party to this neo-Marxian class struggle, that so many describe as simply polar. 

 

== Start by stepping way back == 

There’s a big context, rooted in basic biology. Nearly all species have their social patterns warped by male reproductive strategies, mostly by males applying power against competing males.  

(Regretable? Sure. Then let's over-rule Nature by becoming better. But that starts by looking at and understanding the hand that evolution dealt us.)

Among humans, this manifested for much more than 6000 years as feudal dominance by local gangs, then aristocracies, and then kings intent upon one central goal -- to ensure that their sons would inherit power.

Looking across all that time, till the near-present, I invite you to find any exceptions among societies with agriculture. That is, other than Periclean Athens and (maybe) da Vinci's Florence. This pattern - dominating nearly all continents and 99% of cultures across those 60 centuries is a dismal litany of malgovernance called 'history'. (And now it dominates the myths conveyed by Hollywood.)

Alas, large-scale history is never (and I mean never) discussed these days, even though variants of feudalism make up the entire backdrop -- the default human condition -- against which our recent Enlightenment has been a miraculous - but always threatened - experimental alternative. 

The secret sauce of the Enlightenment, described by Adam Smith and established (at first crudely) by the U.S. Founders, consists of flattening the caste-order. Breaking up power into rival elites -- siccing them against each other in fair competition, and basing success far less on inheritance than other traits. 

That, plus the empowerment of new players... an educated meritocracy in science, commerce, civil service and even the military. And gradually helping the children of the poor and former slaves to participate.

This achievement did augment with each generation – way too slowly, but incrementally – till the World War II Greatest Generation’s GI Bill and massive universities and then desegregation took it skyward, making America truly the titan of all ages and eras.

Karl Marx - whose past-oriented appraisals of class conflict were brilliant - proved to be a bitter, unimaginative dope when it came to projecting forward the rise of an educated middle class... 

…which was the great innovation of the Roosevelteans, inviting the working classes into a growing and thriving middle class..

... an unexpected move that consigned Marx to the dustbin for 80 years... 

... till his recent resurrection all around the globe, for reasons given below.

== There are three classes tussling here, not two ==

Which brings us to where Nathan Gardels’s missive is just plain wrong, alas. Accepting a line of propaganda that is now universally pervasive – he asserts that two – and only two – social classes are involved in a vast – socially antagonistic and polar struggle.

Are the lower middle classes (lumpenproletariat) currently at war against 'snooty fact elites'?  Sure, they are!  But so many post-mortems of the recent U.S. election blame the fact-professionals themselves, for behaving in patronizing ways toward working stiffs. 

Meanwhile, such commentaries leave out entirely any mention of a 3rd set of players...

... the oligarchs, hedge lords, inheritance brats, sheiks and “ex”-commissars who have united in common cause. Those who stand most to benefit from dissonance within the bourgeoisie! 

Elites who have been the chief beneficiaries of the last 40 years of 'supply side' and other tax grifts. Whose wealth disparities long ago surpassed those preceding the French Revolution. Many of whom are building lavish ‘prepper bunkers.' And who now see just one power center blocking their path to complete restoration of the default human system – feudal rule by inherited privilege. 

(I portrayed this - in detail - in Existence.)

That obstacle to feudal restoration? The fact professionals, whose use of science, plus rule-of-law and universities – plus uplift of poor children - keeps the social flatness prescription of Adam Smith alive. 

And hence, those elites lavishly subsidize a world campaign to rile up lumpenprol resentment against science, law, medicine, civil servants... and yes, now the FBI and Intel and military officer corps. 

A campaign that's been so successful that the core fact of this recent election – the way all of the adults in the first Trump Administration denounced him – is portrayed as a feature by today’s Republicans, rather than a fault. And yes, that is why none of the new Trump Appointees will ever, ever be adults-in-the-room.

== The ultimate, ironic revival of Marx, by those who should fear him most ==

Seriously. You can't see this incitement campaign in every evening's tirades, on Fox? Or spuming across social media, where ‘drinking the tears of know-it-alls’ is the common MAGA victory howl? 

A hate campaign against snobby professionals that is vastly more intensive than any snide references to race or gender? 

I beg you to control your gorge and actually watch Fox etc. Try actually counting the minutes spent exploiting the natural American SoA reflex (Suspicion of Authority) that I discuss in Vivid Tomorrows.  A reflex which could become dangerous to oligarchs, if ever it turned on them! 

And hence it must be diverted into rage and all-out war vs. all fact-using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

To be clear, there are some professionals who have behaved stupidly, looking down their noses at the lower middle class.

Just as there are poor folks who appreciate their own university-educated kids, instead of resenting them. 

And yes, there are scions of inherited wealth or billionaires (we know more than a few!) who are smart and decent enough to side with an Enlightenment that's been very good to them.

Alas, the agitprop campaign that I described here has been brilliantly successful, including massively popular cultural works extolling feudalism as the natural human forms of governance. (e.g. Tolkien, Dune, Star Wars, Game of Thrones... and do you seriously need more examples in order to realize that it's deliberate?)

They aren’t wrong! Feudalism is the ‘natural’ form of human governance. 

In fact, its near universality may be a top theory to explain the Fermi Paradox! 

… A trap/filter that prevents any race from rising to the stars.

== Would I rather not have been right? ==

One of you pointed out "Paul Krugman's post today echoes Dr B's warnings about  MAGA vs Science.":

"But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. ....
And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either."

Krugman is the smartest current acolyte of Hari Seldon. Except maybe for Robert Reich. And still, they don't see the big picture.

== Stop giving the first-estate a free pass ==

And so, I conclude. 

Whenever you find yourself discussing class war between the lower proletariats and snooty bourgeoisie, remember that the nomenclature – so strange and archaic-sounding, today – was quite familiar to our parents and grandparents.  

Moreover, it included a third caste! The almost perpetual winners, across 600 decades. The bane on fair competition that was diagnosed by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. And one that's deeply suicidal, as today's moguls - masturbating to the chants of flatterers - seem determined to repeat every mistake that led their predecessors to tumbrels and guillotines.

With some exceptions – those few who are truly noble of mind and heart – they are right now busily resurrecting every Marxian scenario from the grave… 

 … or from torpor where they had been cast by the Roosevelteans. 

And the rich fools are doing so by fomenting longstanding cultural grudges for – or against – modernity. 

      The same modernity that gave them everything they have and that laid all of their golden eggs.

If anything proves the inherent stupidity of that caste – (most of them) - it is their ill-education about Marx! And what he will mean to new generations, if the Enlightenment cannot be recharged and restored enough to put old Karl back to sleep.

Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx & the Hari Seldon Paradox

Let's try looking back at the Foundation universe... which some of you have read... considering Isaac Asimov's sci fi classic in light of his acknowledged influences - Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and Karl Marx... which I would venture almost none of you have read.  Indeed, I am less well-read in those three than I ought to be, though I am very well-read in Asimov!  And hence, let me attempt to do my main job... 

...to be interesting. To offer perspectives you may find nowhere else.

== Isaac Asimov knew them all! ==

Fans of Asimov’s Foundation series often cite Isaac being inspired by Gibbon’s classic, The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, and of course that is apt…

... though in Foundation’s Triumph I point out that Asimov’s future Galactic Empire based on Planet Trantor has many traits that are more Chinese than Roman. Especially the way it is run by an all-powerful caste of eunuchs. (The robots obedient to Daneel Olivaw, who are sterile and loyal, but relentlessly manipulative, behind the scenes.)

But another inspiration deeply affected Asimov. Anyone doing historical musings in the first half of the 20th Century – and well into the second half – was deeply affected by the historiographic  incantations and predictions of Karl Marx. Indeed, he was so widely read and so influential that notions of inevitable effects of technology on class struggle profoundly influenced Ayn Rand, for example!

Indeed, Rand's fervid hatred of communism (from her upbringing in Soviet Russia) was that of an acolyte-heretic, spitefully rejecting but staying very close to the teacher. Her entire eschatology was Marxist to its core, only omitting the master's final phases! Cribbing liberally till near the end, Rand chose to freeze her own scenario at the moment of utter domination by capitalist lords, wrote-off any proletarian revolutionary response, and called that outcome good. (See my decryption of Ayn Rand.) 

In Asimov’s case, the reflex was not to create a quasi-religious scripture, but rather to envision the crude Marxian methods being developed into a vastly intricate and fact-grounded science. A science called psychohistory. 

Of course, Isaac had a scientist's habit of questioning all models, even his own! And this led, decade after decade, to Isaac arguing with his former self! Discovering flaws and innovating possible solutions, a process that I describe in greater detail here… in a grand, galactic thought experiment that I completed (I think), bringing everything full circle in Foundation’s Triumph.

== Applying this to today ==

So what does any of this have to do with the politics of here and now? Both the confident prediction-incantations of Marx and the whole notion of psychohistory appear… well… kinda quaint to modern minds. Allowing us to shrug-off and even forget how compelling both were to both the masses and all wings of intelligentsia, a couple of generations back.

Well, there’s no room here for detail. Though there's plenty to discuss! (See "Class War and the Lessons of History.") ... Like how old Karl and his followers mapped out as ‘inevitable’ a series of events in oppression of an increasingly skilled working class whose resentment of owner-oppression could only follow one, ordained path.

Alas, having transformed himself over time (as Freud did) from brilliant researcher into a tendentious guru surrounded by acolytes, Marx came to believe incantations could overcome inconvenient human nature. It never seemed to occur to him that hundreds of thousands would actually read his books!  And find them convincing. Convincing enough to decide to alter the apparently ordained path! Changing course through incremental, rather than sudden, reform.

Above all, Karl Marx never imagined that scions of wealth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his circle - would be persuaded to buy off the workers, by leveling the field and inviting them to share in a strong Middle Class, whose children would then (as recommended by Adam Smith) be able to compete fairly with scions of the rich. 

It was a stunning (if way-incomplete) act of intelligence and resilience that changed America's path and thus the world's.

Among many mistakes, neglecting to consider that possibility was Old Karl's (and Lenin's etc.) biggest. Assuming that humanity is stupid and predictable is almost as dumb a glaring error as assuming that we’re smart! 

Anyway, the Rooseveltean Experiment worked, far better than even its believers and enactors expected. For decades the US labor movement was hugely effective at counterbalancing the lords of wealth. Disparities hit levels lower than any great nation across history. And marginalized groups - races and genders - overcame resistance to enter the bargain. For a while, Marx seemed consigned to the dustbin...

Only now his tomes are again flying off the shelves, at almost every university on the planet. Why?

== He's baaaaack! ==

Why? Because our insipid world aristocracy is largely made up of buffoons and doomsday 'preppers' and inheritance brats whose addiction to flatterers has left them unable to read, let alone argue over the historical lessons of class taught by 6000 years of history. Or especially by the innovations of the Greatest Generation.

Show me one of today's oligarchs with the brains of that smart crook, Joseph Kennedy, who supported FDR for one reason:

"I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution."

Any aristocrat who actually, actually thinks the R word is not on the table, amid his caste's all out war against not just labor but increasingly fed-up nerd professions, is truly too smug, too dumb and incurious ever to know or care what the word 'tumbrel' means, until he is riding in one. But it's a cart that can find its way even into deep, Patagonian prepper fortresses.

== So, is it a cycle? ==

A some of you know, I have a deep and abiding dislike toward yammers about so-called "cycles of history" like the insipid, recent Fourth Turning fetish that's so beloved on the lobotomized U.S. right. (That's okay, the mad left, while much smaller, has its own insipidities.)

What ... all cycles, Brin? Even one that is… predictable? Well, I will quickly grant that there are strong attractor states, the worst and strongest being feudal or monarchal pyramids of privilege, ownership and power that dominated 99% of human societies for at least 6000 years. A natural - if toxic - outgrowth from mammalian male reproductive strategies that have only ever been stymied in a few Enlightenment Experiments. Like ours.

And yes, as the younger (smarter) Karl Marx pointed out, capitalism can either follow the recommendations of Adam Smith and remain flat-fair-transparent-competitive-creative, or else... it will follow the far more familiar path of parasitism by cheaters... and decay back into a form of feudalism, yet again.

One of you (Paradoctor) put this ironic contradiction cogently, in light of the Rooseveltean Miracle that kept capitalism flat-fair, for a while... 

“When the capitalist class takes seriously Marx's predictions of mass immiseration and political unrest, then they enact mixed-economy reforms to ensure the stability of the middle class, as insurance. The reforms work; while inconvenient to their exercise of lordly whim, they protect the owner families from revolution and Marx's predictions are falsified."

Paradoctor brought it back around to Isaac Asimov's grand thought experiment. 

“This is an instance of Seldon's Paradox: that accurate psychohistorical predictions, once made known, set into effect psychohistorical forces that falsify the prediction. 

"But the Paradox has more work to do. When Marx's predictions fail, then the capitalist class stops taking those predictions seriously. Therefore they stop supporting opportunity-uplifting semi-socialism and a flattened-fair social order, turning back to cheating to benefit their own inheritance brats. The reforms unravel, resulting in mass immiseration and political unrest, as Marx predicted."

In other words, what we are seeing now... a massive, worldwide oligarchic putsch to discredit the very same Rooseveltean social compact that saved their caste and allowed them to become rich... but that led to them surrounding themselves with sycophants who murmur flatteringnotions of inherent superiority and dreams of harems. Would-be lords, never allowing themselves to realize that yacht has sailed. 

“So to the capitalist class, Marx is as true a prophet as he is a false prophet. Likewise for the Seldonian psychohistorian: when first stated, the prediction sets into motion forces that deny it; yet when the prediction is denied, the forces against it abate, and it comes true. Therefore to the society, the psychohistorical prediction is as confirmed as it is denied.”

What we're seeing, alas, is final proof that Adam Smith was right, as were the U.S. Founders who rebelled against dullard inheritance feudalism... as were subsequent reformers who had to ratchet forward those incomplete reforms, one grindingly too-slow step at a time.

We can and should(!) argue over the details! And the Seldon/Marx paradox will likely be with us for a long time... and even longer under AI-eunuch lords? 

But the central conundrum remains: that rule by narrow aristocracies was always deeply stoopid across all of human history, a litany of bad governance, delusions and horrors that was only finally broken by the Enlightenment Attractor Alternative. An alternative that perhaps - across the galaxy - only humanity ever stumbled into... which may rank as a top explanation for the Fermi Paradox

The conundrum has a basic answer.  Our path out of the age-old macho, feudal trap was (primitively) shown by the social contract generated by the Greatest Generation and the equalizing/elevating power of the GI Bill and civil rights and the drive to argue new reforms openly and fairly.

And hence, when you see would-be lords dissing that process, you must recognize the old, reflexively unsapient enemy of all our ancestors, all descendants, all sagacity... and all hope.