Investigating musical genius by listening to the Beach Boys a lot

*I posted some later content on this piece - responding to reader takes - [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/misc-thematic-links/#innovation-stagnation).*

My [Where’s Today’s Beethoven](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) analysis involved finding a lot of “most critically acclaimed music/TV/film/books” lists, and charting patterns in them. While doing this, something I was very surprised to learn was that some of the Beach Boys’s music is incredibly acclaimed, respected, and thought of as genius.

In particular, their 1966 album [Pet Sounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds) is the [#1 most acclaimed album of all time](http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/year/alltime_albums.htm), and their followup single [Good Vibrations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Vibrations) is the the [4th-most acclaimed song of all time](http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/year/alltime_songs.htm). As the Wikipedia pages show, this isn’t some fluke of the rankings, e.g.:

> Promoted there as "the most progressive pop album ever", Pet Sounds garnered recognition for its ambitious production, sophisticated music, and emotional lyric content. It is considered to be among the most influential albums in music history …
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> *Pet Sounds* revolutionized the field of [music production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_production) and the role of producers within the music industry, introduced novel approaches to orchestration, [chord voicings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicing_(music)), and [structural harmonies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony), and furthered the [cultural legitimization of popular music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_music#Popular_music), a greater [public appreciation for albums](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_era), the use of [recording studios as an instrument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_studio_as_an_instrument), and the development of [psychedelic music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_music) and [progressive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_rock)/[art rock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_rock) ...
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> It has topped several critics' and musicians' polls for the best album of all time, including those published by *[NME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NME)*, *[Mojo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(magazine))*, *[Uncut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncut_(magazine))*, and *[The Times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times)*. In 2004, it was inducted into the [National Recording Registry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recording_Registry) by the [Library of Congress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress) …
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> Pet Sounds is evaluated as "one of the most innovative recordings in rock" and as the work that "elevated Brian Wilson from talented bandleader to studio genius".[118] Music historian Luis Sanchez viewed the album as "the score to a film about what rock music doesn't have to be …"
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After learning this, I tried listening to Pet Sounds several times, and was not able to figure out what the hoopla is about. It sounds like a cheesy pop album.

I was unable to connect the experience of listening to [Wouldn't It Be Nice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZBKFoeDKJo&ab_channel=pieandjoe1) to this statement: “it was out to eclipse ... previous sonic soap operas, to transform the subject's sappy sentiments with a God-like grace so that the song would become a veritable pocket symphony." (The term “pocket symphony” seems to come up a surprising amount for Beach Boys songs that have, as far as I can tell, 3 or so themes like most pop songs.)

[God Only Knows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u90beUXTKwo&ab_channel=TheBeachBoys-Topic) is by far my favorite track on the album, but “often praised as one of the greatest songs ever written”? Hmm.

After struggling with this for a while, I had a stroke of inspiration. I decided to listen to *all* of the Beach Boys albums in order.[1](#fn1) (The things I do to understand the world better! [Here’s my playlist if you want to try it](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3BtTwlHiFCcHBsMMdzooJj?si=0cb26970817c4f52).)

And indeed, **after ~4 hours of the simplest, sappiest music imaginable, I could sort of hear Pet Sounds as something comparatively deeper and richer** - more challenging, more complex, more contemplative, more cohesive.[2](#fn2) In particular, a lot of the cheesy-seeming instrumental arrangements now sounded like some badly needed variety; maybe the at-the-time version of this reaction would’ve been “What creative instrumentation, it’s like a symphony!”

So maybe Pet Sounds was a remarkable new sound at the time?

But, I think, only if you had a really fanatical commitment to only listening to the poppiest of pop music. **Pet Sounds came out more than a year after legendary jazz album [A Love Supreme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Love_Supreme)!** I don't want to get carried away about what my subjective taste says, but … even if A Love Supreme isn’t your cup of tea, I’d guess you’ll think it’s a great deal more complex, cohesive, impressive, and interesting in just about every way (other than the lack of prominent "studio effects") than Pet Sounds. And it's not even clearly less accessible - looks like they sold a similar number of copies?[3](#fn3)

A Love Supreme is ranked well below Pet Sounds on the [Acclaimed Music](http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/year/alltime_albums.htm) aggregated list, as well as on the [Rolling Stone list](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/). Reading what the critics say about Pet Sounds, after listening to both works, is quite a trip - it reminds me of reading a parent's description of their child's art, with the most generous possible interpretation of the "genius" of every humdrum thing in there.

This feels roughly as close as I’m going to get to a smoking gun that rock music critics are living in a strange, strange world. If that's right, I think we also have to question whether classical music critics - and our own minds - are playing similar strange tricks on us when they assert with such conviction that Beethoven's music is unparalleled.

Or maybe I’m the one hearing (or failing to hear) things? I would love to hear from any readers who could give me any idea of what kind of headspace I’d have to inhabit to find Pet Sounds more impressive, enjoyable, or [any positive adjective][4](#fn4) than A Love Supreme!

*I posted some later content on this piece - responding to reader takes - [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/misc-thematic-links/#innovation-stagnation).*

For email filter: florpschmop

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Footnotes
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1. While working on other things. I did not “just sit and listen” to all five hours of this. [↩](#fnref1)- I definitely could’ve been imagining it. [↩](#fnref2)- [Pet Sounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds#Capitol_promotion_and_US_sales): “total sales were estimated at around 500,000 units.” [A Love Supreme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Love_Supreme): “By 1970, it had sold about 500,000 copies.” These aren’t necessarily the same time frame, but I’m taking it as evidence that they’re in the ballpark.  [↩](#fnref3)- To be clear, I think some Beach Boys music is at least more “easy to enjoy” or “accessible” than A Love Supreme, even if it’s not as complex or interesting. But Pet Sounds doesn’t seem to accomplish either - it’s weird and slow by Beach Boys standards, and as noted above, didn’t sell better (at least probably not by much) than A Love Supreme, despite coming from a much more popular band.

 FWIW my favorite Beach Boys album is Beach Boys Party!, a really weird album that is mostly covers (of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and others) with a chattering crowd dubbed over it, kind of like a live performance at a party, but just … super weird. I think it revolutionized music. [↩](#fnref4)


Future-proof ethics

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

Ethics based on "common sense" seems to have a horrible track record.

That is: simply going with our intuitions and societal norms has, in the past, meant endorsing all kinds of insanity. To quote an article by [Kwame Anthony Appiah](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092404113.html):

> Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.
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>  Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?
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>  Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.
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>  Is there a way to guess which ones?
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This post kicks off a **series on the approach to ethics that I think gives us our best chance to be "ahead of the curve:" consistently making ethical decisions that look better, with hindsight after a great deal of moral progress, than what our peer-trained intuitions tell us to do.**

"Moral progress" here refers to both societal progress and personal progress. I expect some readers will be very motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that I will later approve of, after I've done more thinking and learning," while others will be more motivated by something like "Making ethical decisions that future generations won't find abhorrent." (More on "moral progress" in [this follow-up piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/moral-progress-vs-the-simple-passage-of-time/).)

Being "future-proof" isn't necessarily the end-all be-all of an ethical system. I tend to "compromise" between the ethics I'll be describing here - which is ambitious, theoretical, and radical - and more "common-sense"/intuitive approaches to ethics that are more anchored to conventional wisdom and the "water I swim in."

But **if I simply didn't engage in philosophy at all, and didn't try to understand and incorporate "future-proof ethics" into my thinking, I think that would be a big mistake** - one that would lead to a lot of other moral mistakes, at least from the perspective of a possible future world (or a possible Holden) that has seen a lot of moral progress.

Indeed, I think some of the best opportunities to do good in the world come from working on issues that aren't yet widely recognized as huge moral issues of our time.

For this reason, I think the state of "future-proof ethics" is among the most important topics out there, especially for people interested in [making a positive difference to the world on very long timescales](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-talk-about-10-000-years-from-now/). Understanding this topic can also make it easier to see where some of the unusual views about ethics in the [effective altruism](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) community come from: that we should more highly prioritize the welfare of animals, potentially even [insects](https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering/), and most of all, future generations.

With that said, some of my thinking on this topic can get somewhat deep into the weeds of philosophy. So I am putting up a lot of the underlying content for this series on the [EA Forum](http://effective-altruism.com/) alone, and the pieces that appear on Cold Takes will try to stick to the high-level points and big picture.

Outline of the rest of this piece:

* Most people's default approach to ethics seems to rely on "common sense"/intuitions influenced by peers. If we want to be "ahead of the curve," we probably need a different approach. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#common-sense-ethics)* The most credible candidate for a future-proof ethical system, to my knowledge, rests on three basic pillars:
	+ **Systemization:** seeking an ethical system based on consistently applying fundamental principles, rather than handling each decision with case-specific intuitions. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#systemization)+ **Thin utilitarianism:** prioritizing the "greatest good for the greatest number," while not necessarily buying into all the views traditionally associated with utilitarianism. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#thin-utilitarianism)+ **Sentientism:** counting anyone or anything with the capacity for pleasure and suffering - whether an animal, a reinforcement learner (a type of AI), etc. - as a "person" for ethical purposes. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#sentientism)* Combining these three pillars yields a number of unusual, even uncomfortable views about ethics. I feel this discomfort and don't unreservedly endorse this approach to ethics. But I do find it powerful and intriguing. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#putting-the-pieces-together)* An [appendix](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#appendix-other-candidates-for-future-proof-ethics) explains why I think other well-known ethical theories don't provide the same "future-proof" hopes; another [appendix](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#appendix-aspects-of-the-utilitarianism-debate-i'm-skipping) notes some debates about utilitarianism that I am not engaging in here.

Later in this series, I will:

* Use a series of dialogues to illustrate how specific, unusual ethical views fit into the "future-proof" aspiration.

* Summarize what I see as the biggest weaknesses of "future-proof ethics."

* Discuss how to compromise between "future-proof ethics" and "common-sense" ethics, drawing on the nascent literature about "moral uncertainty."

"Common-sense" ethics
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For a sense of what I mean by a "common-sense" or "intuitive" approach to ethics, see this passage from a recent [article on conservatism](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/brooks-true-conservatism-dead-fox-news-voter-suppression/620853/):

> Rationalists put a lot of faith in “I think therefore I am”—the autonomous individual deconstructing problems step by logical step. Conservatives put a lot of faith in the latent wisdom that is passed down by generations, cultures, families, and institutions, and that shows up as a set of quick and ready intuitions about what to do in any situation. Brits don’t have to think about what to do at a crowded bus stop. They form a queue, guided by the cultural practices they have inherited ...
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>  In the right circumstances, people are motivated by the positive moral emotions—especially sympathy and benevolence, but also admiration, patriotism, charity, and loyalty. These moral sentiments move you to be outraged by cruelty, to care for your neighbor, to feel proper affection for your imperfect country. They motivate you to do the right thing.
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>  Your emotions can be trusted, the conservative believes, when they are cultivated rightly. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” David Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature. “The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments they employ,” the late neoconservative scholar James Q. Wilson wrote in The Moral Sense.
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>  The key phrase, of course, is cultivated rightly. A person who lived in a state of nature would be an unrecognizable creature ... If a person has not been trained by a community to tame [their] passions from within, then the state would have to continuously control [them] from without.
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I'm not sure "conservative" is the best descriptor for this general attitude toward ethics. My sense is that most people's default approach to ethics - including many people for whom "conservative" is the last label they'd want - has a lot in common with the above vision. Specifically: rather than picking some particular framework from academic philosophy such as "consequentialism," "deontology" or "virtue ethics," most people have an instinctive sense of right and wrong, which is "cultivated" by those around them. Their ethical intuitions can be swayed by specific arguments, but they're usually not aiming to have a complete or consistent ethical system.

As remarked above, this "common sense" (or perhaps more precisely, "peer-cultivated intuitions") approach has gone badly wrong many times in the past. Today's peer-cultivated intuitions are different from the past's, but **as long as that's the basic method for deciding what's right, it seems one has the same basic risk of over-anchoring to "what's normal and broadly accepted now,"** and not much hope of being "ahead of the curve" relative to one's peers.

Most writings on philosophy are about comparing different "systems" or "frameworks" for ethics (e.g., consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics). By contrast, this series focuses on the comparison between non-systematic, "common-sense" ethics and an alternative approach that aims to be more "future-proof," at the cost of departing more from common sense.

Three pillars of future-proof ethics
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### Systemization

We're looking for a way of deciding what's right and wrong that *doesn't* just come down to "X feels intuitively right" and "Y feels intuitively wrong." Systemization means: **instead of judging each case individually, look for a small set of principles that we deeply believe in, and derive everything else from those.**

Why would this help with "future-proofing"?

One way of putting it might be that:

**(A) Our ethical intuitions are sometimes "good" but sometimes "distorted"** by e.g. biases toward helping people like us, or inability to process everything going on in a complex situation.

**(B) If we derive our views from a small number of intuitions, we can give these intuitions a lot of serious examination, and pick ones that seem unusually unlikely to be "distorted."**

**(C) Analogies to science and law also provide some case for systemization.** Science seeks "truth" via systemization and law seeks "fairness" via systemization; these are both arguably analogous to what we are trying to do with future-proof ethics.

A bit more detail on (A)-(C) follows.

**(A) Our ethical intuitions are sometimes "good" but sometimes "distorted."** Distortions might include:

* When our ethics are pulled toward what’s convenient for us to believe. For example, that one’s own nation/race/sex is superior to others, and that others’ interests can therefore be ignored or dismissed.

* When our ethics are pulled toward what’s fashionable and conventional in our community (which could be driven by others’ self-serving thinking).

* When we're instinctively repulsed by someone for any number of reasons, including that they’re just different from us, and we confuse this for intuitions that what they’re doing is wrong. For example, consider the large amount of historical and present intolerance for unconventional sexuality, gender identity, etc.

* When our intuitions become "confused" because they're fundamentally not good at dealing with complex situations. For example, we might have very poor intuitions about the impact of some policy change on the economy, and end up making judgments about such a policy in pretty random ways - like imagining a single person who would be harmed or helped by a policy.

It's very debatable what it means for an ethical view to be "not distorted." Some people (“moral realists”) believe that there are literal ethical “truths,” while others (what I might call “moral quasi-realists,” including myself) believe that we are simply trying to find patterns in what ethical principles we would embrace if we were [more thoughtful, informed, etc](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/2017-report-consciousness-and-moral-patienthood#ExtremeEffort). But either way, the basic thinking is that some of our ethical intuitions are more reliable than others - more "really about what is right" and less tied to the prejudices of our time.

**(B) If we derive our views from a small number of intuitions, we can give these intuitions a lot of serious examination, and pick ones that seem unusually unlikely to be "distorted."**

The below sections will present two ideas - thin utilitarianism and sentientism - that:

* Have been subject to a lot of reflection and debate.

* Can be argued for based on very *general* principles about what it means for an action to be ethical. Different people will see different levels of appeal in these principles, but they do seem unusually unlikely to be contingent on conventions of our time.

* Can be used (together) to derive a large number of views about specific ethical decisions.

**(C) Analogies to science and law also provide some case for systemization.**

*Analogy to science.* In science, it seems to be historically the case that aiming for a **small, simple set of principles that generates lots of specific predictions** has been a good rule,[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn1) and an especially good way to be "ahead of the curve" in being able to understand things about the world.

For example, if you’re trying to predict when and how fast objects will fall, you can probably make pretty good gut-based guesses about relatively familiar situations (a rock thrown in the water, a vase knocked off a desk). But knowing the [law of gravitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation) - a relatively simple equation that explains a lot of different phenomena - allows much more reliable predictions, especially about unfamiliar situations.

*Analogy to law.* Legal systems tend to aim for **explicitness and consistency**. Rather than asking judges to simply listen to both sides and "do what feels right," legal systems tend to encourage being guided by a single set of rules, written down such that anyone can read it, applied as consistently as possible. This practice may increase the role of principles that have gotten lots of attention and debate, and decrease the role of judges' biases, moods, personal interests, etc.

**Systemization can be weird.** It’s important to understand from the get-go that **seeking an ethics based on “deep truth” rather than conventions of the time means we might end up with some very strange, initially uncomfortable-feeling ethical views.** The rest of this series will present such uncomfortable-feeling views, and I think it’s important to process them with a spirit of **“This sounds wild, but if I don’t want to be stuck with my raw intuitions and the standards of my time, I should seriously consider that this is where a more deeply true ethical system will end up taking me.”**

Next I'll go through two principles that, together, can be the basis of a lot of systemization: thin utilitarianism and sentientism.

### Thin Utilitarianism

I think one of the more remarkable, and unintuitive, findings in philosophy of ethics comes not from any philosopher but from the economist John Harsanyi. In a nutshell:

* Let’s start with a basic, appealing-seeming principle for ethics: that it should be **other-centered.** That is, my ethical system should be **based as much as possible on the needs and wants of others, rather than on my personal preferences and personal goals.*** What I think Harsanyi’s work essentially shows is that **if you’re determined to have an other-centered ethics, it pretty strongly looks like you should follow some form of *utilitarianism,*** an ethical system based on the idea that we should (roughly speaking) always prioritize the *greatest good for the greatest number of (ethically relevant) beings.** There are many forms of utilitarianism, which can lead to a variety of different approaches to ethics in practice. However, an inescapable property of all of them (by Harsanyi’s logic) is the need for **consistent “ethical weights” by which any two benefits or harms can be compared.**
	+ For example, let’s say we are comparing two possible ways in which one might do good: (a) saving a child from drowning in a pond, or (b) helping a different child to get an education.

	+ Many people would be tempted to say you “can’t compare” these, or can’t choose between them. But according to utilitarianism, either (a) is exactly as valuable as (b), or it’s half as valuable (meaning that saving two children from drowning is as good as helping one child get an education), or it’s twice as valuable … or 100x as valuable, or 1/100 as valuable, but there has to be *some* consistent multiplier.

	+ And that, in turn, implies that for any two ways you can do good - even if one is very large (e.g. saving a life) and one very small (e.g. helping someone avoid a dust speck in their eye) - there is *some number N* such that *N of the smaller benefit is more valuable than the larger benefit. **In theory, any harm can be outweighed by something that benefits a large enough number of persons, even if it benefits them in a minor way.***

The connections between these points - the steps by which one moves from “I want my ethics to focus on the needs and wants of others” to “I must use consistent moral weights, with all of the strange implications that involves” - is fairly complex, and I haven’t found a compact way of laying it out. I discuss it in detail in an Effective Altruism Forum post: [Other-centered ethics and Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem) I will also try to give a bit more of an intuition for it in the next piece.

I'm using the term **thin utilitarianism** to point at a minimal version of utilitarianism that *only* accepts what I've outlined above: a commitment to consistent ethical weights, and a belief that any harm can be outweighed by a large enough number of minor benefits. **There are a lot of other ideas commonly associated with utilitarianism that I don't mean to take on board here,** particularly:

* The "[hedonist](https://www.utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism#theories-of-well-being-hedonism)" theory of well-being: that "helping someone" is reducible to "increasing someone's positive conscious experiences relative to negative conscious experiences." (Sentientism, discussed [below](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#sentientism), is a related but not identical idea.[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn2))

* An "ends justify the means" attitude.
	+ There are a variety of ways one can argue against "ends-justify-the-means" style reasoning, even while committing to utilitarianism ([here's one](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans)).

	+ In general, I'm committed to some non-utilitarian personal codes of ethics, such as (to simplify) "deceiving people is bad" and "keeping my word is good." I'm only interested in applying utilitarianism within particular domains (such as "where should I donate?") where it doesn't challenge these codes.

	+ (This applies to "future-proof ethics" generally, but I am noting it here in particular because I want to flag that my arguments for "utilitarianism" are not arguments for "the ends justify the means.")* More on "thin utilitarianism" at my [EA Forum piece](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iupkbiubpzDDGRpka/other-centered-ethics-and-harsanyi-s-aggregation-theorem#The_scope_of_utilitarianism).

### Sentientism

To the extent moral progress has occurred, a lot of it seems to have been about **“expanding the moral circle”: coming to recognize the rights of people who had previously been treated as though their interests didn’t matter.**

In [The Expanding Circle](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691150697/the-expanding-circle), Peter Singer gives a striking discussion (see footnote)[3](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn3) of how ancient Greeks seemed to dismiss/ignore the rights of people from neighboring city-states. More recently, people in power have often seemed to dismiss/ignore the rights of people from other nations, people with other ethnicities, and women and children (see quote [above](#)). These now look like among the biggest moral mistakes in history.

Is there a way, today, to **expand the circle all the way out as far as it should go**?To articulate simple, fundamental principles that give us a complete guide to “who counts” as a person, such that we need to weigh their interests appropriately?

**Sentientism** is the main candidate I’m aware of for this goal. The idea is to focus on the **capacity for pleasure and suffering (“sentience”):** if you can experience pleasure and suffering, you count as a “person” for ethical purposes, even if you’re a farm animal or a [digital person](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) or a [reinforcement learner](http://petrl.org/).

Key [quote](https://speakingofresearch.com/extremism-undone/ar-beliefs/) from 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?"

A variation on sentientism would be to say that you count as a "person" if you experience "conscious" mental states at all.[4](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn4) I don't know of a simple name for this idea, and for now I'm lumping it in with sentientism, as it is pretty similar for my purposes throughout this series.

Sentientism potentially represents a simple, fundamental principle (“the capacity for pleasure and suffering is what matters”) that can be used to generate a detailed guide to who counts ethically, and *how much* (in other words, what [ethical weight](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#sentientism) should be given to their interests). Sentientism implies caring about all humans, regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, etc., as well as potentially about animals, extraterrestrials, and others.

Putting the pieces together
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Combining systemization, thin utilitarianism and sentientism results in an ethical attitude something like this:

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> * **A good principle is that ethics should be about the needs and wants of others, rather than my personal preferences and personal goals.** This ends up meaning that I need to judge every action by who benefits and who is harmed, and I need consistent “ethical weights” for weighing different benefits/harms against each other.
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> * When deciding how to weigh someone’s interests, the **key question is the extent to which they’re sentient:** capable of experiencing pleasure and suffering.
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> * Combining these principles can generate a lot of familiar ethical conclusions, such as “Don’t accept a major harm to someone for a minor benefit to someone else,” “Seek to redistribute wealth from people with more to people with less, since the latter benefit more,” and “Work toward a world with less suffering in it.”
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> * It also generates some stranger-seeming conclusions, such as: “Animals may have significant capacity for pleasure and suffering, so I should assign a reasonably high ‘ethical weight’ to them. And since billions of animals are being horribly treated on factory farms, the value of reducing harm from factory farming could be enormous - to the point where it could be more important than many other issues that feel intuitively more compelling.”
>
> * The strange conclusions feel uncomfortable, but **when I try to examine why they feel uncomfortable, I worry that a lot of my reasons just come down to “avoiding weirdness” or “hesitating to care a great deal about creatures very different from me and my social peers.”** These are exactly the sorts of thoughts I’m trying to get away from, if I want to be ahead of the curve on ethics.
>
>
>
>
>
>

An interesting additional point is that this sort of ethics arguably has a **track record of being "ahead of the curve."** For example, here's Wikipedia on Jeremy Bentham, the “father of utilitarianism” (and a major sentientism proponent as well):

> He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. [My note: he lived from 1747-1832, well before most of these views were common.] He called for the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights.[5](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn5)
>
>

More on this at [utilitarianism.net](https://www.utilitarianism.net/introduction-to-utilitarianism#track-record), and some criticism (which I don't find very compelling,[6](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fn6) though I have my own reservations about the "track record" point that I'll share in future pieces) [here](https://metaphilosophyblog.com/2020/09/11/the-worst-argument-for-utilitarianism/).

To reiterate, I don’t unreservedly endorse the ethical system discussed in this piece. Future pieces will discuss weaknesses in the case, and how I handle uncertainty and reservations about ethical systems.

But it’s a way of thinking that I find powerful and intriguing. When I act dramatically out of line with what the ethical system I've outlined suggests, I do worry that I’m falling prey to acting by the ethics of my time, rather than doing the right thing in a deeper sense.

Appendix: other candidates for future-proof ethics?
---------------------------------------------------

In this piece, I’ve mostly contrasted two approaches to ethics:

* "Common sense" or intuition-based ethics.

* The specific ethical framework that combines systemization, thin utilitarianism and sentientism.

Of course, these aren't the only two options. There are a number of other approaches to ethics that have been extensively explored and discussed within academic philosophy. These include [deontology](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/), [virtue ethics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/) and [contractualism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/).

These approaches and others have significant merits and uses. They can help one see ethical dilemmas in a new light, they can help illustrate some of the unappealing aspects of utilitarianism, they can be *combined* with utilitarianism so that one avoids particular bad behaviors, and they can provide potential explanations for some particular ethical intuitions.

But I don’t think any of them are as close to being *comprehensive systems* - able to give guidance on practically any ethics-related decision - as the approach I've outlined above. As such, I think they don’t offer the same hopes as the approach I've laid out in this post.

One key point is that other ethical frameworks are often concerned with duties, obligations and/or “rules,” and they have little to say about questions such as “If I’m choosing between a huge number of different worthy places to donate, or a huge number of different ways to spend my time to help others, how do I determine which option will do as much good as possible?”

The approach I've outlined above seems like the main reasonably-well-developed candidate system for answering questions like the latter, which I think helps explain why it seems to be the most-attended-to ethical framework in the effective altruism community.

Appendix: aspects of the utilitarianism debate I'm skipping
-----------------------------------------------------------

Most existing writing on utilitarianism and/or sentientism is academic philosophy work. In academic philosophy, it's generally taken as a default that people are searching for some coherent ethical system; the "common-sense or non-principle-derived approach" generally doesn't take center stage (though there is some discussion of it under the heading of [moral particularism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/)).

With this in mind, a number of common arguments for utilitarianism don't seem germane for my purposes, in particular:

* A broad suite of arguments of the form, "Utilitarianism seems superior to particular alternatives such as deontology or virtue ethics." In academic philosophy, people often seem to assume that a conclusion like "Utilitarianism isn't perfect, but it's the best candidate for a consistent, principled system we have" is a strong argument for utilitarianism; here, **I am partly examining what we gain (and lose) by aiming for a consistent, principled system at all.*** Arguments of the form, "Utilitarianism is intuitively and/or obviously correct; it seems clear that pleasure is good and pain is bad, and much follows from this." While these arguments might be compelling to some, it seems clear that many people don't share the implied view of what's "intuitive/obvious." Personally, I would feel quite uncomfortable making big decisions based on an ethical system whose greatest strength is something like "It just seems right to me [and not to many others]," and I'm more interested in arguments that utilitarianism (and sentientism) should be followed even where they are causing significant conflict with one's intuitions.

In examining the case for utilitarianism and sentientism, I've left arguments in the above categories to the side. But if there are arguments I've neglected in favor of utilitarianism and sentientism that fit the frame of this series, please share them in the comments!

**Next in series: [Defending One-Dimensional Ethics](https://www.cold-takes.com/defending-one-dimensional-ethics/)**

---

Footnotes
---------

1. I don't have a cite for these being the key properties of a good scientific theory, but I think these properties tend to be consistently sought out across a wide variety of scientific domains. The simplicity criterion is often called "[Occam's razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)," and the other criterion is hopefully somewhat self-explanatory. You could also see these properties as essentially a plain-language description of [Solomonoff induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference). [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref1)- It's possible to combine sentientism with a non-hedonist theory of well-being. For example, one might believe that *only beings with the capacity for pleasure and suffering matter*, but also that *once we've determined that someone matters, we should care about what they want, not just about their pleasure and suffering.* [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref2)- > At first [the] insider/ outsider distinction applied even between the citizens of neighboring Greek city-states; thus there is a tombstone of the mid-fifth century B.C. which reads:
>
>
> *This memorial is set over the body of a very good man. Pythion, from Megara, slew seven men and broke off seven spear points in their bodies … This man, who saved three Athenian regiments … having brought sorrow to no one among all men who dwell on earth, went down to the underworld felicitated in the eyes of all.*
>
>
> This is quite consistent with the comic way in which Aristophanes treats the starvation of the Greek enemies of the Athenians, starvation which resulted from the devastation the Athenians had themselves inflicted. Plato, however, suggested an advance on this morality: he argued that Greeks should not, in war, enslave other Greeks, lay waste their lands or raze their houses; they should do these things only to non-Greeks. These examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. The ancient Assyrian kings boastfully recorded in stone how they had tortured their non-Assyrian enemies and covered the valleys and mountains with their corpses. Romans looked on barbarians as beings who could be captured like animals for use as slaves or made to entertain the crowds by killing each other in the Colosseum. In modern times Europeans have stopped treating each other in this way, but less than two hundred years ago some still regarded Africans as outside the bounds of ethics, and therefore a resource which should be harvested and put to useful work. Similarly Australian aborigines were, to many early settlers from England, a kind of pest, to be hunted and killed whenever they proved troublesome.
>
>

 [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref3)- E.g., <https://www.openphilanthropy.org/2017-report-consciousness-and-moral-patienthood#ProposedCriteria>  [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref4)- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham) [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref5)- I mean, I agree with the critic that the "track record" point is far from a slam dunk, and that "utilitarians were ahead of the curve" doesn't necessarily mean "utilitarianism was ahead of the curve." But I don't think the "track record" argument is intended to be a philosophically tight point; I think it's intended to be interesting and suggestive, and I think it succeeds at that. At a minimum, it may imply something like "The kind of person who is drawn to utilitarianism+sentientism is also the kind of person who makes ahead-of-the-curve moral judgments," and I'd consider that an argument for putting serious weight on the moral judgments of people who drawn to utilitarianism+sentientism today. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/2cd688fa-1284-4183-9e42-d79398d0f4a8/#fnref6)


Cost disease and civilizational decline

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. Note that this recording combines a [previous post](https://www.cold-takes.com/empowerment-and-stakeholder-management/) with this one.*

"Cost disease" is a term sometimes used to refer to the **rising costs (over the past several decades) of particular goods and services - particularly education (both K-12 and higher education), health care, real estate, and infrastructure (e.g., subway stations) - without commensurately rising benefits.** It's been discussed at length on Slate Star Codex, [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/) and [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/).

I've often heard people citing "cost disease" as an indicator of general "civilizational decline." I've even seen it lumped in with the ["Where's Today's Beethoven?" question](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/), along these rough lines:

> **Collapsing civilizational competence hypothesis (CCCH):**we have so much wealth and technology, we have such a huge population, and yet - we collectively can't match the [music or literature](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) of the past, or its [scientific innovation](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/), or its ability to provide an [affordable education and health care](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/), or even its subway station construction. Something is badly broken in our culture.

The CCCH is an intriguing claim - especially so, I think, because we are naturally [biased toward imagining the past as a golden age](https://ourworldindata.org/optimism-pessimism#declinism).

I haven't seen a major formal defense of CCCH (see [previous comments on how people discuss innovation stagnation](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#the-golden-age-hypothesis)), but I've heard it come up in many casual conversations.

Over the last several weeks, I've been examining different topics relevant to the CCCH. Here I'm going to summarize my take on the CCCH as a whole.

At a high level, I basically see it as cherry-picking. It would be one thing if we saw things getting worse everywhere we looked - declining quality of life, declining wealth, declining technological capabilities, declining athletic abilities. But in fact, [the world has been getting better in a large number of ways](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/).

With this in mind, I think it's worth looking at the *specific* claims made in the CCCH, one by one, and remaining open to the idea that there are lots of different things going on here - that we won't see the same theory explaining everything.

Once we take that attitude, what I think we see is:

**Innovation stagnation and cost disease really seem like different phenomena.**

* Innovation stagnation is about the output of the tiny upper tail of innovators in society. Cost disease is about trends in the average cost to provide goods and services, across the board.

* They *could* be explained by the same underlying story - for example, perhaps everyone is just getting worse at everything - but I don't find that sort of story very likely, especially when we have [good reason to think that innovation stagnation is about ideas getting harder to find rather than about worsening culture or intelligence](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#interpretation).

**Cost disease is itself multiple, arguably somewhat cherry-picked phenomena.**

It's not the case that *everything* is getting more expensive[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b6fb3f22-a581-44f8-9119-6820cd82b704/#fn1) - in fact, in some sense the *average* thing is getting more affordable. E.g., as shown [here](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N), real median household income is rising or at worst flat, which means that median income is rising faster than average prices; a similar chart for mean income, or a global version, would be more encouraging still.

If food and energy were getting more expensive while education and health care were getting cheaper, I imagine the complaints about "cost disease" would be roughly the same. So we should think of cost disease as "A list of several things that are getting more expensive" rather than as "A phenomenon in which everything gets more expensive." And we should look at each of these several things individually.

**I'd guess that a decent amount of cost disease is explained by the "stakeholder management"-related challenges I laid out [previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/empowerment-and-stakeholder-management/).**

* Slate Star Codex's excellent [compilation of comments on cost disease](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/) includes several pretty compelling (to me) anecdotes about some of the possible causes that seem to largely reflect [stakeholder management challenges](https://www.cold-takes.com/empowerment-and-stakeholder-management/). See the comments from John Schilling, bkearns123, fc123, and CatCube.

* Detailed examinations of what's going on with construction costs (for subway stations and other infrastructure) seem to imply a major role for stakeholder management;[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b6fb3f22-a581-44f8-9119-6820cd82b704/#fn2) I'd guess that similar dynamics affect education and health care.

* The facially most obvious explanation for rising real estate costs would seem to be [NIMBYism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY), which I [previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/empowerment-and-stakeholder-management/) discussed as an instance of "stakeholder management" challenges. (Another salient explanation would be along the lines of: "As wealth rises and land doesn't get more plentiful, land should get more expensive.")

**I'd guess another significant fraction is explained by things I don't consider to be "civilizational decline" at all.**

* [Baumol's cost disease](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/17/followup-on-the-baumol-effect-thanks-o-baumol/) may be an important part of the "cost disease" picture, and wouldn't indicate civilizational decline. Baumol's cost disease is difficult to explain compactly, but the basic idea is something like: "Due to productivity going *up*, many jobs get more lucrative; and so schools and medical systems and such need to pay more in order to stay competitive in hiring, even if schools and medical systems aren't getting more productive themselves."
	+ I've also wondered whether the basic dynamic of Baumol's cost disease applies to things other than employees. For example, you could maybe imagine that a similar dynamic applies to conveniently located real estate. That is: real estate is a key input into many things, and it has not been getting cheaper as fast as other things have been getting cheaper; so when a high percentage of the costs of X comes from real estate, X will get more expensive.* I'm pretty compelled by some of the "cost disease" [explanations](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/) that emphasize the combination of:
	+ (a) Rising demand and willingness-to-pay for good education and health care.

	+ (b) Difficulty *assessing the quality* of education and health care. When you can't tell what you're getting for your money, but are willing to spend a lot for "the best," this could be a formula for costs spiraling upwards and paying for a lot of illusory indicators of value.

	+ (c) "Disintermediation," in which people are not entirely making their own purchasing decisions - health care is paid for by insurance, public education by government, higher education by scholarships and donations as well as direct payments. This makes it harder for there to be a subset of the market that has lower willingness to spend, providing demand for cheaper services.

	+ You could certainly call the combination of (a)-(c) *dysfunctional*, but it's not clear that there is anything here that is *unique to today's world* or *getting worse as time goes on.* If (a) is rising while (b) and (c) are steady, that's sufficient for costs to rise over time.

**Bottom line.** When I look separately at the various pieces of the CCCH, I ultimately don't see a good case that our society is getting less competent across the board, or "forgetting how to do basic things," or anything like that. I think our society is getting bigger, wealthier, and more capable, and it's sometimes "getting in its own way" in ways that we might [naturally expect](https://www.cold-takes.com/empowerment-and-stakeholder-management/).

---

Footnotes
---------

1. [Relevant chart](https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/10/12933426/27-charts-changing-economy):

![alt_text](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2022/01/image1.png "image_tooltip")

 [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b6fb3f22-a581-44f8-9119-6820cd82b704/#fnref1)
2. * From a [Brookings report](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/WP54_Brooks-Liscow_updated.pdf) on this topic: ""We do find empirical evidence consistent with two hypotheses. The first is that the demand for more expensive Interstate highways increases with income, as either richer people are willing to pay for more expensive highways or in any case they can have their interests heard in the political process ... The second hypothesis ... is the rise of 'citizen voice' in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We use the term 'citizen voice' to describe the set of movements that arose in the late 1960s—such as the environmental movement and the rise of homeowners as organized lobbyists (Fischel 2001)—that empowered citizens with institutional tools to translate preferences into government outcomes (Altshuler and Luberoff 2003) ... Other new tools, such as mandated public input, could yield construction of additional highway accoutrement (such as noise barriers), create delays, or increase planning costs ... we find that income’s relationship to costs is five times stronger in the post-1970 era. This is consistent with the timing of the rise of citizen voice, which took flight in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Second, we find that the discussion in the Congressional Record around the Interstates was substantially more likely to involve environmental issues after 1970 and that these issues remained in heightened discussion after the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969."

	* Alon Levy's analysis of subway costs ([1](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/), [2](https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/costspresentation2.pdf)) has named station construction as a major culprit in countries with unusually high costs - in particular, the choice to tunnel underground to avoid street disruption, rather than using cheaper and quicker "cut-and-cover" methods that cause major street disruption. My guess is that there was less concern over street disruption in the past, partly because there was less "citizen voice" to oppose it. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b6fb3f22-a581-44f8-9119-6820cd82b704/#fnref2)


Reader reactions and update on "Where's Today's Beethoven"

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

There were a lot of great comments on [Where's Today's Beethoven?](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) and followup pieces, from the [comments](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=fBjMNvTARBZBYNztf), Twitter, and other places. There were too many to share them all, but here are some of the broad themes that came up, with quotes and thoughts below:

* I think I undersold the ["bad taste" hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#the-bad-taste-hypothesis) - that "innovation stagnation" has a lot to do with critics' biases toward the past, rather than the actual quality of ideas being produced today. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#i-think-i-undersold-the-bad-taste-hypothesis)* Some readers hypothesized that we just don't know who today's Beethoven is *yet* - that's the kind of thing that comes with distance and perspective. I think this is possible, but doesn't explain most of the "innovation stagnation" [observations](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#data-on-innovation-stagnation). For fun, I outline what I think we'll be saying about today's innovations 50 years from now. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#maybe-we-just-dont-know-yet)* Some readers hypothesized that it's hard for someone to *stand out* as much as Beethoven today, since there is more total art to consume and critics aren't able to process it all. I think this is an important part of the picture, though not all of it. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#fields-are-getting-more-crowded)* I'll also quote and respond to a few other interesting takes. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#some-other-interesting-takes)* Finally, I'll revisit my [previous comments](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/) about the implications of innovation stagnation and talk about updates based on these points. [More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#implications)

I think I undersold the "bad taste" hypothesis
----------------------------------------------

A number of reactions emphasized that the ["critical acclaim"](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#data-on-innovation-stagnation) data I'm analyzing - likely for both science and art, but especially the latter - is from critics that are "out to lunch" in various ways.

At a high level, I agree with this. A significant part of my answer to "Where's today's Beethoven?" is "Ehh, there's lots of music today that's as impressive/enjoyable/both as Beethoven's - it just doesn't have the same august reputation for a variety of ultimately silly reasons." (I feel this way more about Mozart and Shakespeare than about Beethoven, but it ultimately seems pretty plausible across the board.)

I think I underplayed this point partly because I felt awkward about saying that, and because I expected a lot of people to violently disagree, with no data to settle the dispute. But I think we do have some hints that critics think about the quality of art (particularly music) in pretty warped ways.

One such hint comes via Matt Clancy of [New Things Under the Sun](https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/), a great "living literature review about academic research on the economics of innovation, science of science, creativity, and discovery." He writes:

> I thought [this tweet](https://twitter.com/dfreelon/status/1438568279820341253?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) (part of a longer thread) was interesting:
>
>
>
>
> > Next up, top decades. The numbers at the top represent each decade's percentage change from '04 to '21. [pic.twitter.com/urM5HNEWxA](https://t.co/urM5HNEWxA)
> >
> > — Deen Freelon (@dfreelon) [September 16, 2021](https://twitter.com/dfreelon/status/1438568279820341253?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  I've always suspected people have a hard time separating how original art actually is from how original it felt to them when they first encountered it, and that means people have a perpetual bias towards thinking the best work was from when they were younger. The tweet is about comparing the Rolling Stones list of top 500 songs when they did it in 2004 and 2021. You can see in the linked tweet (1) that both groups think the quality of music peaked a few decades ago and mostly declined thereafter; (2) that the distribution of best songs shifts forward in time for the 2021 group.
>
>

Caveats: the shift forward isn't a full 17 years ([closer to 7](https://twitter.com/dfreelon/status/1438576248545062918?s=20)), and Matt has also been looking at another data set (the [Sight and Sound lists released each decade for film](https://www.bfi.org.uk/articles/category/the-greatest-films-of-all-time)) and finding that the average release year for the top 10 films stays around 1945 (if he posts more analysis on this, I'll link it in the future).

Nostalgia is just one kind of cognitive bias that could pump up the reputation of older music. [Jeff Sackmann](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=kzZNbfw28pzdaG3dL) is among the readers who pointed to another:

> It's impossible to imagine western classical music without Beethoven, in part because such a significant amount of it is Beethovian. Had some very talented and charismatic musician come along at the right time from the Balkans, maybe that foundational slot would be taken by someone/something else. If this is correct, there's bound to be some historical figures that are considered head-and-shoulders above the rest, and they must be quite old. A contemporary person cannot fill this role, though it's conceivable that a contemporary person would fill this role for people 200 years down the road.

My own guess is that critics are affected by both of these things and simply by peer pressure, so that an initial critical consensus (possibly affected by both of the above dynamics) has a lot of staying power.

With those mechanisms in mind, here's an interesting, plausible quote from [Luke Muehlhauser](https://lukemuehlhauser.com/):

> I think I’d also place significant weight on “people with fancy music tastes overrate Beethoven relative to Beefheart or Mingus for reasons that I think are worth calling mistakes / bias.” Like, praise for Beethoven is ubiquitous, but if people with fancy music tastes knew a lot of music theory and also the composition date for every piece of music and had listened to damn near everything, they would realize that Beefheart and Mingus are in the same league as Beethoven, but because they are ALSO exposed to lots of cultural and peer signals, they’ve been tricked into thinking that Beethoven towers above them, and they might not have even heard of Beefheart ...
>
>
>
> Once rock music was a format, people started innovating like crazy within that format, or at least they did starting around 1965. Some of that innovative sophisticated stuff is unlistenable Beefheart, but some of it is highly listenable, e.g. Robert Wyatt’s ‘Rock Bottom’ or Miles Davis’ ‘Bitches Brew’ (a mega bestseller, and which I’m counting as equal parts rock and jazz). Is Beethoven’s 5th really so much more innovative, sophisticated, or listenable than Bitches Brew? Maybe a bit on each dimension, but not a ton, I claim. And the fancy music listeners are just biased and mistaken when they fail to rank Rock Bottom or Bitches Brew in the same league as Beethoven’s 5th.
>
>

Another thing that has moved me toward the ["bad taste" hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#the-bad-taste-hypothesis) is an extensive project I undertook to listen repeatedly to, and try to understand the genius of, the #1-rated modern music album of all time from the [Acclaimed Music data set](http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/year/alltime_albums.htm): Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys. More on this in a future short piece!

Maybe we just don't know yet who today's Beethoven is?
------------------------------------------------------

I saw a few sentiments along the lines of [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/rwog7t/wheres_todays_beethoven/hrd8h4i/):

> We can't tell who the Beethoven's are because we don't understand them, and cannot judge. Maybe in 200 years, in hindsight, it will be obvious who they were, but right now, us plebs can't recognize their genius, because we are not geniuses.

I think this is a good potential answer to the literal question, "Where's *today's* Beethoven?", but less satisfying for explaining the very long-running "innovation stagnation" patterns in the [many charts here](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) (e.g., innovation stagnation occurring over the period of 1800-1950).

Still, maybe this is a good time to comment on what I think we'll **actually** think about the "where's today's Beethoven?" question, **50-100 years from now:**

* I think sometime in that range, civilization will probably (though not definitely) be taken over by [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/), [misaligned AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century/#worst-misaligned-ai) or something even stranger.

* If beings from that time talk about the time we live in, in terms that roughly resemble this topic, they'll say things along the lines of: "The field of AI really took off in the 2010s. This was of course the far-and-away most important innovation in the whole history of human civilization, similarly to how the most important 'innovation' of apes was evolving into humans. It was the most important innovation for music (we now have a near-infinite amount of music more brilliant than Beethoven's by nearly any definition you can come up with), literature, [advanced sandwich art](https://www.cold-takes.com/visualizing-utopia/#an-in-between-point-erring-conservative), etc."

* If they bother to read about old debates bemoaning the "golden age" of innovation sometime between the 15th and 20th century, they'll just find it kind of funny, if humor is still something they do.

See also: [The Great Depression, Recession and Stagnation in Full Historical Context](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-great-stagnation-in-full-historical-context/).

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Fields are getting more crowded
-------------------------------

From reader Vadim A.:

> even though the number of people producing innovation in every field has increased drastically, the audience evaluating each field has always been a single, highly correlated group with limited bandwidth. So let's say there were 100 serious books produced in some year a few hundred years ago. Maybe 50 of them would be read and discussed by a fair number of the intellectual class, and five would be deemed worthy of extended discussion. Maybe one would maintain its reputation and become influential enough to make a greatest book list.
>
>
>
>
>
>  Then, let's say today there are 10,000 serious books produced in a year, maybe 500 of them get enough initial marketing or momentum to be read by a fair number of people. Once some people read a book and talk about it, other people will use their advice to read it, and base their opinions on the early reviewers. So **even if there are now 5,000 books of equal quality to 50 books of a few hundred years ago, there is only enough bandwidth for 500 of them to take off.** Then, there might only be room enough for extended discussion of 20 (because again, there are network and correlation effects). And maybe only a few survive to become influential.
>
>

(Emphasis mine)

I saw similar themes well put in comments from:

* [Anton Howes](https://twitter.com/antonhowes/status/1478999684228259844): "Given the focus on acclaim, what we are most likely seeing in the data presented is just that there are \*too many\* Beethovens today, spread across far more and ever growing fields, and we have only limited attention spans in which even critics can appreciate them."

* [Stuart Carter](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=prmzEcrgHQuDJLug6): "If someone solved the riemann hypothesis tomorrow, I doubt the average person would hear much about it"

* [Calion](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=PKAgyaeCACwFGMJzJ): "I am not sure we'd *notice* a new Shakespeare. We'd simply lump him in with all of the other really good playwrights we have. Nothing would make him stand out as the best."

* [Josh Achiam](https://twitter.com/jachiam0/status/1478779751133331457): "If there are a million geniuses producing Beethoven-level work right now, who could even learn all of their names?"

I think this is probably a big part of what's going on. It seems like an especially nice fit with [patterns like](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#science-and-art-literature-music-1400-1950) "output of acclaimed ideas is constant or increasing, but is decreasing when adjusted for 'effective population increases.'" And in some sense it is a further component of the ["bad taste"](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#the-bad-taste-hypothesis) hypothesis, being about limitations of critics rather than of artists.

However, if this were *all* that were going on, I'd expect to see something we don't seem to see. I'd expect that **the very most-acclaimed works from today would be more acclaimed than the very most-acclaimed works from longer ago.** The basic idea:

* Say that the number of musicians goes up by 100x.

* It might be the case that critics aren't able to keep up with all the music, so the number of "acclaimed works" doesn't rise at all.

* But in theory, the compositions that rise *all the way to the top* in the world of critical opinion - which almost certainly would penetrate public consciousness as well - should be better by whatever metrics critics are using, since they're coming from a 100x larger population.

This is in fact not what we're seeing: the acclaim level of the "top" works also seems to follow an "innovation stagnation" pattern.[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#fn1)

Some other interesting takes
----------------------------

Note: I am leaving out most takes along the lines of "Here's a specific reason that the Golden Age died (people today aren't as intellectual, don't think as big, etc.)" I [don't think we have a good evidential case](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#interpretation) that there's a ["golden age"](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#the-golden-age-hypothesis) in need of explaining, and don't find most of those theories compelling.

[Fernando Pereira](https://mobile.twitter.com/earnmyturns/status/1478834368235720704): "[Holden] fails to take into account scale change in culture: as culture grows, domains split, fame becomes localized, effective domain pop much smaller than his estimates."

I definitely think there is something to this - there are a lot more musical genres than there used to be, so the "number of artists" in a given genre may be lower than in the past. But critics still tackle questions like "What's the best music/literature/film, full stop?", and I think the total "effective populations" of people trying to be musicians or authors have risen, not fallen.

[Ben Todd](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/87AugxNfxAgAqR3mv/comments-for-shorter-cold-takes-pieces?commentId=9wKf9Nhf6nQZA4m4q) hypothesizes that maybe we just have a dynamic something like: "1 in 10 million people is a top innovator, and more widespread education/urbanization/etc. doesn't change this."

This is tough for me to believe intuitively: things like adequate nutrition and exposure to cultures of innovation seem like they really ought to be important, and the latter seems especially clear when you look at how concentrated innovation was in particular geographic areas for a lot of our history.

[hippydipster](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/rwog7t/wheres_todays_beethoven/hrd8h4i/) hypothesizes that we are less impressed with people when they don't "tower over their peers" as much (because their peers are better, as they are in today's world): "rather than there being A Beethoven, there's 3 dozen. Yawn. We fail to recognize, partially because Beethoven's uniqueness is literally one of the primary aspects of him, without which we don't have this conversation. The actual skill level still exists today, but the uniqueness doesn't."

Is it in fact the case that the difference between the 1st- and 2nd-best performer should shrink as the number of competitors goes up? This isn't obvious to me either way.

[Michael Nielsen](https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1478755979168661505): "I think this classification is incomplete. Golden ages can be opened up, by new fields. Turing was working in what must have seemed an esoteric, obscure branch of logic; he discovered an important new field, with tonnes of low-hanging fruit."

I think Turing is a bit of an outlier here - he's arguably the founder of modern computer science, one of the only major new scientific fields of the last 200+ years. If you ask the question "Are we seeing 'innovation stagnation' when it comes to creating new fields of comparable stature to computer science?" I think the answer is yes, and the "innovation as mining" thesis seems a good explanation for why (see footnote for a rough illustration).[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/f73eca8c-cf0e-4684-ac46-9e4f330a74ca/#fn2)

Implications
------------

A lot of what I've covered above comes down to different reasons to think that **critics being underinformed, overwhelmed, confused, nostalgic or otherwise wrong** is a major factor in the "innovation stagnation" we observe when we look at critically acclaimed works.

I don't think this is the whole story (it can't explain all of the [technological innovation story](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#technological-innovation-1930-present), for example), but I do think it's a fair amount.

I think the [conclusions](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/) I laid out previously (as well as the [high-level description of how artistic ideas get harder to find](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/)) hold up reasonably well if we increase our emphasis on "bad taste"/"confused critics":

* At a high level, it's still the case that **earlier innovators have an advantage in achieving critical acclaim** (a lot of the above hypotheses are giving different reasons for this). And it's still the case that there isn't much case for a ["golden age"](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/#interpretation) worth trying to explain or get back to.

* We should [probably expect further "stagnation" by default](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/), though this stagnation may (continue to) be illusory.

* To the extent we see special value in works that have broad cultural and critical resonance, my [earlier comments](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/#innovation-as-mining) (about how we should think about artists and their intellectual property) still seem applicable.

But here's a point that seems stronger to me than it did before, and that I didn't make in previous pieces: **if we can put aside the trappings of acclaim and reputation and enjoy art on its own terms** ([not necessarily possible](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-artistic-ideas-could-get-harder-to-find/)), we might find there's no stagnation to explain at all, and no need to [hope for a growing number of artists](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-it-matters-if-ideas-get-harder-to-find/#stagnation-by-default). That is, **we might find that we're swimming in impressive art and aren't necessarily in need of more.**

(Science/technology is different, though - I think the [case that](https://www.cold-takes.com/past-and-future-of-economic-growth-paper/) "we need more innovators, or growth is going to fall" is unaffected.)

**Next in series:** [To Match the Greats, Don’t Follow In Their Footsteps](https://www.cold-takes.com/to-match-the-greats-dont-follow-in-their-footsteps/)

---

Footnotes
---------

1. The charts in my [main piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) mostly do not address this, but I also looked at a lot of measures of innovation weighted by the level of acclaim, and they also show "innovation stagnation." It's also just generally the case that the very top performers on most of my lists tend to be from early in a field, not late. [↩](#fnref1)- Rough demonstration of this: if we just look at [Wikipedia's list of academic fields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_fields) and focus on natural sciences and formal sciences, we see six fields (biology, chemistry, earth sciences/geology, physics, astronomy, mathematics) that have been around ~forever and reached their "modern form" in the 1500s or 1600s (arguably earlier in the case of mathematics), and only 3 or 4 - computer science, "modern logic," space sciences and maybe "systems sciences" - dating to the 1800s or 1900s. This seems like the kind of "innovation stagnation" pattern I discussed [previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) - more recent "output" isn't as high as you'd expect given the rises in "effective population." Intuitively, the "innovation as stagnation" hypothesis seems pretty strong here: you can only "discover modern physics/chemistry/biology" once, and there don't seem to be a huge number of fields out there as fundamentally important as those.  [↩](#fnref2)


Book non-review: The Dawn of Everything

When I was putting out lots of posts about very-long-run history - e.g. [Summary of History](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/), [Has Life Gotten Better?](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/) and [Was life better in hunter-gatherer times?](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/) - a number of people encouraged me to read and review a recently published book called [The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity](https://smile.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity-ebook/dp/B08R2KL3VY/).

It’s billed as “A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.” Sounds relevant!

A normal thing for me to do would’ve been to diligently read the book and make a post pointing out some of my favorite quotes and anecdotes, as well as parts where I thought the book was weak.

But I think [reading books is overrated](https://www.cold-takes.com/reading-books-vs-engaging-with-them/). Instead of moving my eyes over each page, highlighting here and there, I generally prefer to strategically extract what’s valuable and skip the rest. And in this case - based on reading the first chapter and a bunch of online criticism/commentary - I’ve decided that I don’t want to read or engage with this book: I’d just rather spend my precious moments another way. So **instead of a book review, this post will explain my process for deciding not to read the book, despite its relevance for my interests.**

What I did read: chapter 1 of the book, plus reviews of the book in [the New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/early-civilizations-had-it-all-figured-out-the-dawn-of-everything) (by Gideon Lewis-Krauss), [The New York Review](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/) (by Kwame Anthony Appiah), and [The Nation](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/) (by Daniel Immerwahr).

I looked for claims attributed to the book that (a) would, if true, change my mind about something important; (b) seem reasonably likely to be well-cited/supported/argued. I didn’t find any, and I think authors [need to make their important-if-true claims easier to find than this](https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/).

**A bit more detail**

The first chapter of the book (which I think an author should really make sure is communicating what the rest of the book has to offer) felt rambly and hard to pin down to a concrete hypothesis beyond something like “The past is complicated, and simple narratives are oversimplified” (something I already agree with ¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯ ). The only sign of an important-if-true factual claim was this one (I’m quoting from the *The Nation* review):

> In arguing that people hate hierarchies, Graeber and Wengrow twice assert that settlers in the colonial Americas who’d been “captured or adopted” by Indigenous societies “almost invariably” chose to stay with them. By contrast, Indigenous people taken into European societies “almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.”
>
>
>
>
> Big if true, as they say, but the claim is ballistically false, and the sole scholarly authority that Graeber and Wengrow cite—a 1977 dissertation—actually argues the opposite. “Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way” is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t. Many captured settlers returned, including the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the Puritan minister John Williams, and the author Mary Rowlandson. And there’s a long history of Native people attending settler schools, befriending or marrying whites, and adopting European religious practices. Such choices were surely shaped by colonialism, but to deny they were ever made is absurd.
>
>

All of the reviews - plus [this Twitter thread by Brad DeLong](https://twitter.com/delong/status/1455173184127324161) - echoed the theme that the book is thinly cited and that many of its claims seem overstated or unsupported. That makes it a tough sell for me, as I’m not excited to read 500 pages of claims that aren’t particularly likely to hold up once I dig in and check them out.

And based on my [investigation into whether life has gotten better](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/), I generally expect *most* claims about our distant past to - at best - get resolved into a big “maybe, who knows.” (That’s why I’ve been selective in what I’ve tried to examine, highlighting things I think can be known while making the case that most of our distant past is a [mystery](https://www.cold-takes.com/did-life-get-better-during-the-pre-industrial-era-ehhhh/#mystery-period).) If we’re looking for insight into what the world might look like without states (apparently a major theme of the book), I’d rather just hope for modern experiments than try to read archeological tea leaves.

At a high level, I think I might agree with the main conceptual claims of the book: that we shouldn’t be too confident about what our past looks like, that there are exceptions to most generalizations about it that we could come up with, and that we shouldn’t assume that any particular form of social organization is impossible in our future. These seem like reasonable default views to have; to the extent they “revolutionize” someone’s understanding of history by “tearing down” some tidy story, that someone isn’t me and that tidy story isn’t mine. (I do think there are [directional trends](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/#history-is-a-story) running throughout history, and I think it’s worth deliberately simplifying things down to notice the “[highlights](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/)”; this is different from claiming that history in all its detail is simple or consistent.)

Bottom line … it’s over 500 pages, it sounds inconsistently (at best) cited, and I couldn’t quickly identify particular claims that seem like a good use of time to investigate. It would’ve been nice to be able to say I read this prominent book on a topic of interest. But life’s too short.

But I am definitely interested in hearing from any readers who can point to specific parts of this book that seem particularly worth engaging with, with explanations of why!

For email filter: florpschmop


Empowerment and Stakeholder Management

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

I've been writing recently about sweeping, very-long-run trends in whether things are going well or poorly in the world.[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b38f340e-4b80-4823-adc5-0176ba638a4c/#fn1) One candidate trend I haven't talked about yet: what some see as a trend toward [vetocracy](https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus), [kludgeocracy](https://www.newamerica.org/economic-growth/policy-papers/kludgeocracy-the-american-way-of-policy/), bureaucracy and/or red tape - [things getting harder to build](https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/), more [costly](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/), etc.

I basically buy the idea that we are seeing - and should broadly expect to continue seeing - trends in this direction. I think some of this is specific to particular parts of the world (e.g., the USA), but I broadly expect there to be overall trends in this direction over time, pretty much across the board.

That's because I think there is a deep connection between:

* **Empowerment -** increased options and capabilities for people (including e.g. technology), which I consider one of the most [robust historical trends](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/).

* **Stakeholder management**, or the challenge of carrying out activities that lots of people want input into. I think stakeholder management can explain a lot of what we see in terms of rising bureaucracy, red tape, etc.
* To be clear, I think stakeholder management can be a good thing too, and that empowerment is broadly "worth it" despite the stakeholder management challenges.

Here, I'm going to lay out the conceptual basics of what I mean. Future posts will likely refer back to this one, when trying to make sense of ways in which the world may be getting better or worse.

What is stakeholder management?
-------------------------------

The term "stakeholder" comes up a fair amount in corporate and nonprofit settings. I'd define it as someone who cares about a decision, wants to weigh in on it, and might react badly if they aren't satisfied by it.

For example, if a company changes its compensation policy, affected employees are stakeholders for the decision; if it changes its product, both employees and customers are.

It's common to do "stakeholder management" in advance of making some change: contacting some key stakeholders, hearing from them how they'd feel about the change, and looking for compromises on the aspects they feel strongest about in order to keep as many people as possible happy and avoid blowback. The more stakeholders there are, the more challenging this can be, and the more it can slow projects down and make it hard to make changes.

(I think the best public examples of what "stakeholder management" looks like tend to come from stories about how legislation gets passed, such as in the movie [Lincoln](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/) and the book [Showdown at Gucci Gulch](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004FGLXJC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). I also liked [this article](https://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5723878/how-a-bill-becomes-a-law-in-2014); sections 2, 5, 8 and 9 are particularly germane.)

When we make personal decisions like where to work, whom to date, etc., we don't tend to have to satisfy a lot of stakeholders - if anything, modern individualism means we're more "on our own" here than we used to be. But when it comes to companies setting policies, legislators making laws, diplomats reaching agreements, schools designing syllabi, governments trying to build subway stations, and more, stakeholder management can be a huge part of where the effort goes. **The more active, opinionated stakeholders there are, the more conflicting desires there are to satisfy, and the harder it is to move things forward quickly, decisively or cheaply.**

This is often a good thing! (And in nonprofit circles, it's often assumed to be.[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b38f340e-4b80-4823-adc5-0176ba638a4c/#fn2)) I'd guess most decisions are much better when they have input from interested and affected parties, vs. when they're just made unilaterally. I think the right amount of stakeholder participation is more than zero - but I think there's also an amount that just makes it very hard to accomplish anything. For a vivid example, see this article on [two San Francisco residents who have been solely responsible for blocking large numbers of city projects](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/San-Francisco-lets-just-one-person-stop-15561164.php):

> Two San Franciscans seem to have made it their pandemic hobby to file appeals for just about every emergency action taken by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in the past six months ... [E]ach of the five appeals will cost about 100 hours of work by ... staff ... each hearing at the Board of Supervisors, which serves as the judge and jury in these cases, costs a combined $10,000 in city officials’ and attorneys’ time. In fact, Tumlin said each appeal is taking more time and money than it took to create the emergency programs in the first place."

I think the modern world sees a lot of instances of **stakeholder strength growing to the point where making any kind of change to the status quo becomes prohibitively difficult.** Some central examples in my mind:

* [NIMBY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY)ism: any attempt to build a subway station, power plant, or just more housing is met with complaints and blocking maneuvers (as above) by the people directly affected.

* A dynamic sometimes referred to as "why we can't have nice things": there are increasing numbers of people who might get injured or hurt (or just upset) by some product or service, possibly suing over it, and so providing the product or service requires more and more measures to pre-empt possible ways in which it could harm someone. Some nice examples are in [this post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/) (see comments from John Schilling, bkearns123, CatCube).

I see this phenomenon - a growing "stakeholder management" burden - as **having a likely deep connection to historical trends toward greater [empowerment](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/).** As people become wealthier, more educated, and more informed, they become louder and more opinionated, active stakeholders.

To reiterate: I think this is a good thing overall. But it means there are increasing numbers of hurdles to building new things and changing the status quo in domains that invite a lot of stakeholder participation.

**I like the "stakeholder" lens better than lenses based around "over-regulation" or "bureaucracy" or "red tape,"** because it points at the underlying cause rather than blaming some particular government or institution.

* It seems to me that across the world's rich countries, we're seeing consistent trends toward more difficult and costly stakeholder management. For example, I believe it's getting harder in ~all rich, urban areas to build new subway stations.

* I think this dynamic affects private companies, governments and more. While "red tape" appears in institutions, I think the *underlying cause* of the "red tape" often comes from the behavior of private individuals. And I don't think the world becoming more "libertarian" (at least in the narrow sense of seeking to shrink government) would necessarily solve much (at least, I wouldn't expect it to lead to more subway stations!)

### Legacy systems and kludgeocracy

Even holding the amount of stakeholders constant, the *burden* of stakeholder management - and the difficulty of changing the status quo - could grow over time, via a couple of common dynamics.

The first is **legacy systems:** things that aren't how we would do them today, but that lots of people have built their lifestyles/routines/businesses around, such that change is painful. Simple examples:

* A lot of government and other bureaucratic processes still give prominent roles to written paperwork and fax machines; switching over to electronic records tends to be a huge project, even though it would've been easy to start out that way if the technology had been available earlier.

* When the World Wide Web was new, there was an opportunity to define the basic protocols and languages that power it - such as HTML - with a lot of freedom. Today, if there were some obvious improvement to how HTML should work, implementing the improvement could cause a lot of websites built under the old system to break, and there's a [tremendous amount of effort needed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium) even for relatively modest upgrades. I think most people would agree that the current way HTML, CSS and JavaScript work together to power most websites is a mess, and not the way we'd set things up if we were starting over - but also that fundamental change is unlikely.

The second is **kludgeocracy:** when any new initiative or change (to policies, neighborhoods, etc.) has to navigate legacy systems and compromises with opponents, a system can get more and more complex over time. This can make it more and more difficult to understand what's going on, more and more difficult to understand the full effects of a change, and thus even harder to make changes.

The term "kludgeocracy" comes from [this essay by Steven Teles](https://www.newamerica.org/economic-growth/policy-papers/kludgeocracy-the-american-way-of-policy/), which is focused on the US but which I'd expect to be somewhat applicable across the board. The abstract states:

> The dictionary tells us that a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem" ... “Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.

Upshot
------

In modern, politically stable societies with high levels of [empowerment](https://www.cold-takes.com/summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens/), there's reason to expect that lots of things could get gradually "harder to do" - and in particular, systems could get harder to change - over time. I think this explains many observations about [vetocracy](https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus), [kludgeocracy](https://www.newamerica.org/economic-growth/policy-papers/kludgeocracy-the-american-way-of-policy/), bureaucracy and red tape, etc.

I think the *degree* of these problems varies from place to place and domain to domain, and depends on lots of details of how systems are set up and how stakeholder input works (e.g., what can people sue for or formally block, as opposed to just complaining?) I think there's probably plenty of room to significantly mitigate these challenges via well-designed processes for considering - but not being totally beholden to - stakeholder input.

But overall, we should expect this sort of thing to be a challenge that grows with modernity. I think it's "worth it" and consider empowerment overall to be a good thing, but recognize there's room for debate there.

It's also possible that these sorts of problems are pretty temporary in the scheme of things. As these problems become more and more noticeable, there may be increasing pressure to change governance practices and norms to make changes to the status quo easier. Or perhaps [some other change](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/) will come along that makes it all look like small potatoes.

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Footnotes
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1. [Has Life Gotten Better?](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/) discusses whether quality of life has improved for the average person over the course of human history. [Where's Today's Beethoven?](https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/) discusses whether our society has become worse at scientific and artistic innovation over the past few centuries. [↩](#fnref1)- Here's an [example](https://nonprofitquarterly.org/who-are-stakeholders-and-why-do-they-matter/) I grabbed by taking the first Google result for "nonprofit stakeholders."  [↩](#fnref2)