# Evolution & Freedom

In [Against Money Maximalism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k3YkteLLzciz5d6Qb/against-money-maximalism), I argued against money-maximization as a normative stance. Profit is a coherent thing you can try to maximize, but there are also other sorts of value. Profit-maximization isn't the unique rational way to engage with money.

One way you could respond to this is economic Darwinism: "Sure, you *can* optimize other things than money, but over time, the market will come to be dominated by money-maximizing agents."

I think this is misguided in several respects.

First, obviously, the values of probable future societies aren't necessarily your values. Even the values of the dominant order in current society aren't necessarily your values. Even if your cause is hopeless, that doesn't automatically mean that you should flip values.

Second, I don't really think markets evolve money-maximizers, in the same sense that [evolution doesn't really evolve fitness-maximizers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers). I see at least three senses in which this is true.

**Building fitness-maximizers is hard.**

Evolution will aggressively prune *behaviors* which harm fitness (relative to readily accessible mutations), but this doesn't exactly add up to fitness-maximizing organisms. Similarly, common practices in business aren't exactly as economists would suggest. Economists say that profit-maximizers should set prices by finding the point where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. Real companies almost always calculate price as cost plus markup, instead. This is, at least in part, because it is difficult to know the demand curves needed to compute the marginal cost = marginal revenue.

I'm essentially saying that the [inner alignment problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/inner-alignment) is hard: an outer loop selecting for X doesn't necessarily produce agents who try to maximize X. Instead, it often produces agents who care about things correlated with X.

**Evolution is more centrally about weeding out losers than selecting winners.**

A big shift in my thinking about evolution and economics has been realizing that firms/organisms don't necessarily have to be profitable; they just have to *survive*.

> The airline industry is a low margin business. We all know that. In the years from 1945 to the end of the twentieth century the global airline industry made total net profits of $36bn representing a margin of 0.8% to revenues. In the first decade of *this* century the industry generated net *losses* of $49bn — a third more than it had ever made. ([source](https://aviationstrategy.aero/newsletter/Jun-2015/1/Airline-Profit-Cycle))

I believe grocery stores and restaurants are also examples of notoriously low-margin businesses.

In a narrow profit-maximizing mindset, there's no reason for non-profitable businesses to exist. Yet, in theory, so long as a business can keep bringing in as much money as it spends, it can persist indefinitely.

Notice that although such a business has zero value from a profit-maximizing perspective, it can still produce a great deal of value as measured by serving customers and paying employees.

I think approaching economics with a profit-maximizing mindset will wrongly heuristically suggest to your mind that there's one winning strategy which everything tends towards; perhaps something like "buy under-valued things, transform them into over-valued things, sell". Instead, there's an extreme diversity of viable strategies. A growing market tends to make things more efficient, pushing out less-efficient ways of doing things via competition; however, an even more important effect seems to be that a growing market creates more diversity of strategies, as new businesses become viable. This diversifying effect seems to outpace the anti-diversity impact of the efficiency incentive.

These effects are perhaps better-documented in the case of biology. 

There's **speciation**, the process of one species becoming more.

There's the **niche**, a viable overall survival strategy. 

There's **adaptive radiation**, which means rapid evolution from one species occupying one niche to many occupying many. For example, Darwin's finches underwent adaptive radiation after landing on an isolated archipelago (the Galapagos), filling many niches by adapting their form to specialize in a way of life.

There's the concept of **ecospace filling**, a long-term trend for life to occupy more niches over time. One illustration of this is parasites with complex multi-host lifecycles. This survival strategy seems absurd from a fitness-maximization perspective. How did it get started? Yet, it *can* happen, and over long enough timescales, it eventually will, and a species will emerge adapted to the niche.

There's **niche construction**: the process by which [organisms change their environment and create new selective pressures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_construction), which can modify existing niches or create new ones. Trees are a highly-evolved light-eating organism: their hard wood flesh allows sustained growth to extreme heights, their branching structure efficiently encompasses a volume while using a minimal quantity of such flesh, and their leaves efficiently metabolize sunlight within that volume (concentrated towards its surface, since the interior gets shaded by the leaves). This creates many opportunities for other organisms, from birds nesting in trees to fungus rotting dead wood.

Niche construction brings up a final point against the fatalistic argument for money-maximization / fitness-maximization:

**Organisms determine the fitness function.**

Trees give rise to forests, which support a whole different ecology than would otherwise exist.

Evolution isn't maximizing some static notion of fitness. What "fitness" means is determined by the surrounding world, including other members of a species as well as the surrounding ecosystem.

For example, **sexual selection** is the selective pressure created by mates. This can create famously inefficient adaptations, such as a Peacock's tail. In some sense, this is a species "deciding" what its values are and modifying the fitness function to select for that.

I've talked to people who find this abhorrent: who see Peacock-tails as a failure mode, a symbol of lost purposes. I think I can see the intuition here. There's a feeling of fake-ness, forms insulated from broader reality, decadence. It's the flipside of the beauty of an efficient form, like a hawk's wings or a tree's branches. 

However, there isn't in fact a """broader reality""" here. Instead, there's just reality, which contains a huge variety of life-situations. The study of "fitness" isn't the study of any single final form, but rather, the study of how organisms adapt to specific situations.

Similarly, a market doesn't select for money-maximization. Rather, the market demands whatever it demands. When a market is working well, it supplies the various demands in an approximately Pareto-efficient manner. What the world looks like under that optimization pressure depends on what is being demanded!

In a future optimized by intelligent beings, there's no special reason why money-maximizing needs to be the convergent equilibrium. Even the market could be discarded.

Speaking for myself, Peacock-tails don't feel like a failure mode. Instead, it feels like a sort of freedom. Beings trapped in evolution by natural selection nonetheless exercise a sort of choice over their trajectory. Beings trapped in a market economy still get some choice over what future they collectively create.