Game B, Game Ant, and the Open Sourced Religion Alternative
By: Bj Campbell
Tags: Society, Culture War, Culture, War, Religion

Game B, Game Ant, and the Open Sourced Religion Alternative

This is how we end war.

This article is going to be a little bit complicated for folks who haven’t followed along, but I think once the Handwaving Freakoutery (HWFO) readers are caught up to speed, they’ll be intrigued by it. Herein, we’re going to critique a dialog between myself and Jordan Hall about something he and his think-group call “Game B,” which is curiously similar yet importantly divergent from the Culture War Analysis material of the past two years on HWFO. After some extensive dialog, I think his group have many things mostly right but some things vitally slightly wrong. Let’s see how, and discover where that leads us. And then let’s end war, because that would be awesome.

Background

Jordan Hall is an intelligent, semi famous guy in nerd circles who made his hay early in life by co-founding DivX, Inc. He’s a Medium writer going back to 2014 with an impressive list of think pieces. He hit Intellectual Dark Web Adjacent circles with his Deep Code publication here, most particularly Situational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition, which peeled apart some concepts he calls the “Blue Church” and the “Red Religion.” Very similar to our mode of thinking here on HWFO when we do Culture War Analysis.

The Dialog

The general framework of the discussion goes like this. HWFO analysis views mankind as a group of animals with extra white space in our brains, into which we can install behavioral software. Some of our behavior is genetic, but some is dictated by that software. And since the software isn’t genetic, it can evolve much faster. Our great leaps of the past several thousand years have been made by (perhaps unintentionally) fine tuning our software to look more and more like the hard-coded behavior of the ants, since the ants objectively run the planet today. Agriculture, social hierarchies, division of labor, civil infrastructure, self sacrifice, war, genocide, and slavery are all ant-things, and ants make up a fifth of all animal biomass on the planet. Follow the “ants” link below for a refresher. Be clear, we’re still not beating the ants, and we’ve only come close by behaving like them.

Game B theorists call this software “Game A,” and are generally of the view that following it to its natural conclusion will create an existential disaster, either through global thermonuclear war, environmental collapse, or something else of similar magnitude. The “us versus them” nature of Game A creates coordination problems, and our level of technology and overall population burden will be planet-destroying without better ways to coordinate. They decided to convene and work towards creating an alternate system. A “Game B.”

My dialog with Jordan, initially brokered by Peter Limberg (Intellectual Explorers Club) began on Facebook and pivoted over to Medium, in a series of responses under this HWFO article:

The dialog is long, but begins here:

And it columnated in an 80-minute dialog on Peter’s podcast:

Throughout the course of the dialog, I took notes on where Jordan and I diverged in our thinking.

The Critique

Jordan views Game A as inherently fragile. The Game B theorists use this language a lot. I don’t. I view Game A as inherently strong, outside of possible boundary conditions that create an existential threat to mankind itself. This is a huge and important disagreement between our viewpoints. It seems to me that his viewpoint is based on a hyper focus on Game A’s intermittent systemic failures, such as the ’08 financial crisis, the collapse of the Mayan Empire, or similar. My viewpoint is based on the idea that Game A is a product of memetic evolution over thousands of years of trial and error, a Darwinism of ideas. I view the process by which Game A has evolved to be a more robust system design process than any process a group of intellectuals could cook up.

I infer that Jordan doesn’t think mankind is emulating ants, or at least is not eventually going to be, because we are evolving so fast. Our rate of memetic evolution is limited not by our genetic interactions but by our “bandwidth” to process ideas. As the bandwidth expands, we evolve faster, which is how we got this far towards the ant solution in such short a time. Our evolution is happening memetically instead of genetically. This reminds me a lot of the comedy horror book “Fluke, or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings,” by Christopher Moore.

go here for the whaleyboys

Where I break from him here, I think, is that we are evolving towards a specific maximum, and that maximum is the ants. We won’t get past the ants until we get to the ants, and the thing we’re trying to avoid, I think, is becoming ants. That stage is necessarily horrific. He sees us zooming somewhere else as our rate of memetic evolution advances. I see us moving faster towards becoming ants. This is why I call it Game Ant, and why I think if anyone is going to alter our course of memetic evolution, they better do so quickly.

We disagree about exponential growth as it applies to these evolutionary systems. In my mind, and he will agree at the surface, nothing grows exponentially. Moore’s Law will eventually reach a limit, and even if it doesn’t, the number of interactions within the human species, what he calls “bandwidth,” is necessarily limited by the number of brains on the planet that can process those interactions. That limit is fixed by the population, until / unless Elon Musk succeeds at computer-brain interfaces or the AIs become self-aware. But at that point we wouldn’t be talking about human evolution at all, we’d be talking about machine evolution, and it seems almost pointless to me to speculate what that would even look like.

He seemed to think that military advances are happening along that Moore’s Law rate as well, and we disagree on that. If we are going to measure military destructiveness, the scale starts at sharpened stick and ends at the H bomb, and any developments since then have simply been to develop ways to kill smaller numbers of people more efficiently, not destroy planets. In my mind we reached that “existential threat” half a century ago, and the only thing that could make it any worse is nuclear proliferation. Although as a gun proponent, and a “good fences make good neighbors” proponent, I’m not convinced that more nuclear proliferation wouldn’t make the world less violent. “Mutually assured destruction,” while it certainly breeds a kind of angst and fear that I grew up with as a child of the 1980s, seems generally to have worked. If we were to evaporate the nukes, we’d probably get ourselves into more world wars of the style not seen since the bomb hit Nagasaki. I will admit up front that my position is arguable, and isn’t popular.

I think one of the major differences with HWFO thinking and Game B thinking, is that I view indoctrination (Jordan prefers “enculturation”) as an essential element of Game A. Wherever Game A might stumble into a Nash Equilibrium that is suboptimal, such as the killing of the whales, that can be bridged by a cooperative encultured behavior. The Golden Rule is the chief example, but there are others. To me it seems like the drive of any project to get us past these existential threats should be to run the same program we’ve always run. Better enculturation beats worse enculturation, so identify the encultured elements that will bridge these gaps and avoid these existential crises, and then identify the best, cleanest, most effective way to roll them out. I tend to think religion, or religion like analogues, work very well here.

The sense I got from Jordan is that he dislikes the word “indoctrination” entirely, and wants to, in the words of Kevin Flynn from Tron, “build a better system.” He views Game A as the mother of this new system, and Game B as the child. He seems to think that my approach, of spreading new enculturations to bridge gaps in Game A, can’t work because there will be too many gaps to bridge. He views it like the legal system, where laws are constantly growing in complexity to plug holes in behavior, but the laws create new holes in behavior, and the thing becomes unmanageable. He likens this effect to plugging holes in a dike, where each plug creates two new holes.

We disagree heavily about this. When you have an indoctrinated behavioral script telling you the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ then you don’t have to know a giant body of if/then statements like computer code, or legal code. You have certain key principles you default to that are applicable for a wide range of scenarios, which can just as easily be applied to new unforeseen scenarios. I think his analysis here is erroneous. The reason why core ethical principles work is because they’re inherently scalable to emerging environments. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have ethics at all, we’d just have law. Law is constantly expanding to plug gaps in a dike, but ethics are simple and mostly universal. Most of our body of law could be reduced to “don’t be an asshole,” provided we had a culture wide understanding of what “asshole” meant.

In my mind, our current problem as a species is that the environment has changed and is changing, but the morality doesn’t have an update mechanism, largely because religion lacks a such a mechanism. The fix in my mind is not to abandon Game A, it’s to adjust the religious circulatory system inside Game A to be able to advect new antibodies against bad equilibria, while getting the wise to spend time cracking out new antibodies. And that, in my mind, is literally all that needs to be done to fix it.

The next portion of the podcast dialog, we drilled on some semantics which are important. In Jordan’s terminology, morality is simulated thinking, following rote doctrine which was written by wise people, in order to affect behavior. Ethics is actual thinking, having the wisdom to know why you should behave a certain way. From his point of view, a more rapidly changing environment will create a situation where morality no longer works, because there will be too many new cases erupt where there’s no clear indication of which behavior is appropriate. This goes back to his analogy to law. In his view, the only way for people to deal with the coming scenario he envisions, where the social environment is changing at an ever-increasing rate, is to pivot everyone from morality to ethics. From rote behavior to wisdom. This is the nature of his project.

While I find that notion beautiful, I don’t think it’s realistic at scale. I think his think-group, who are all fabulously intelligent, considerate thinkers, have a huge blind spot here. I think “everyone should be wise” is a pipedream, and I think human history and the evolution of these societal management memes to date reinforces my opinion. The way this has always functioned, is a small number of wise people wrote down behavioral scripts for a large number of less wise people to follow. There is a “Wisdom to Morality Pipeline” that’s built into our societal frameworks, which has existed since we began labor specialization. Let the farmers farm and the wisemen be wise, because the farmer either doesn’t have the genetic capability, or the time, or the motivation, to do the wisdom stuff. Managing this pipeline is the literal function of religion within Game A, and has been for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. It’s why our brains are wired for it.

they’re also wired for rock and roll

Jordan doesn’t seem to think this will work. He points to literal war, and what he calls the “war on sensemaking,” as being different aspects of the same overall thing. Here on HWFO we’ve simply been calling that “Culture War.” In his mind, wars of bullets and wars of media are attempts by one gaggle of wisemen to lop off the heads of another gaggle of wisemen, and hijack their base of moral followers. And as I understand it, he seems to fault the Wisdom to Morality Pipeline itself. I think this pipeline is essential to maintain, as a feature of a culture, because “everyone should just be wise” isn’t realistic.

I also think that it’s often not the wisemen driving the boat. It’s the abstracted concept itself driving the boat, be that concept “third wave feminism” or “communism” or “capitalism” or “white nationalism.” Even the wisemen are acting out scripts, when it comes to culture war. They’re mostly just tools of the scripts themselves. We covered that here:

I think you can end war a different way. Instead of scrapping the Wisdom to Morality Pipeline and trusting that everyone can be wise, you build a system where the pipelines come from the ground up, and can change an adapt. A democratized, evolving, morality pipeline. An open sourced religion.

Which is exactly what Social Justice has done. They just built it on an unstable and poorly thought out seed crystal. We covered that here:

Folks in this intellectual space should not spend a tenth of a second bashing social justice, but rather should spend days figuring out how the social justice crowd completely unwittingly built an open sourced religion. They’re a (currently failing) beta test for a concept that could literally end war, instead of constantly waging it like they do now. From my point of view, they look like they built the world’s first torque wrench and are using it to bash holes in cars while I stand at the edge of the garage shouting to bystanders, “wow, folks, look! A torque wrench!”

Further, social justice has rediscovered a culture war route that most culture warriors have forgotten — memetic hijacking. The Christians spread through Europe by mapping their teachings onto Pagan teachings, and the Social Justice folks are doing the same thing now to Christianity. “Privilege” = original sin, “problematic” = heresy, “cancellation” = excommunication, and such. “Woke” = saved. By hijacking an established memetic system, they made their indoctrination set easy to adopt by the target group.

I’m not even sure that they intended it to work out this way. But because the system was being developed on tumblr and a cloister of academic journals, it’s rooted in a kind of indoctrinational Darwinism, where a giant internet soup of social justice ideas brewed, and the most alluring and spreadable bits rose to the top and dominated the conversation. This mirrors the open sourced software engine, or the free market, or the Serengeti Plain, where the most effective ideas or companies or organisms grow to dominate. They built an evolutionary idea marketplace.

Open Sourced Religion

The functional solution I envision looks like this. Steal the “evolutionary idea marketplace” functions that have given rise to Social Justice, but seed them with a different seed crystal. Rationalism instead of postmodernism. Identify the existing cultural structures that work historically, instead of wishing de-facto dystopian cultural structures worked. Identify where these existing cultural structures appear within the current world religions, as well as within Social Justice, economics, and psychology. Solidify them into a unifying principle. A meta-golden rule. Write it down in a book, with a black cover. I’m partial to writing “Don’t Panic” on the front of it.

Package the meta-golden rule and distribute it throughout the evolutionary idea marketplace. Crowdsource the project of showing how this meta-golden rule exists at the heart of all world religions, social justice, and contemporary philosophical ethics frameworks. This book becomes a meme that can hijack any existing culture. Allow the behaviors exemplified within it to spread via a new Wisdom-Morality Pipeline from the ground up instead of the top down. A guru-less religion. An adaptable religion. A form that subsumes all religions, and teaches them all that they’re all saying the same thing. A form that spreads by the internet beyond national boundaries. A form whose wisemen cannot be lopped off.

A form that ends war.