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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      So... I’ve been trying to find supporting arguments for my intuition that even though death rate is far lower than Spanish Flu (2%) and European Black Death (25-30%), the civilizational damage is comparable. I’ve found a pretty good one...

      16 replies 40 retweets 259 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      I call it memetic whole-life r/K theory. Civilizations pursue one of 2 strategies: r-civilizations treat life as cheap and are robust to a lot of death at all life stages and sustain it with high birth rate K-civilizations great life as expensive and fight hard for every life

      5 replies 7 retweets 79 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      The reference is to r/K selection theory. It’s an old but still roughly right portrait of reproduction strategies. You have r species that make lots of offspring and lose a lot (rats) and K species that invest a lot in each of fewer offspring (elephants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory …

      2 replies 0 retweets 39 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Note r/K theory in its original form has lots of empirical issues. Treat it as a qualitative sketch precursor to the real theory. Read the Wikipedia link above for details. But basic point is, the value of life is not just a moral issue but a strategic one for civilizations.

      11:12 PM - 11 Jul 2020
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      2 replies 1 retweet 42 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Our civilization is a K-civilization. Though it may not seem like it, we actually value life at its highest in history from a strategy perspective. We do not generally follow robust, high redundancy designs for our institutions. They cannot tolerate a high death rate.

          3 replies 1 retweet 54 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          For eg. during the Black Death, children were basically treated as not even really alive till they made it past 7 or 8. Their mortality rate was too high. Feudalism was quite a flat political structure at the nobility level. Individual nobles dying was rarely a crisis.

          1 reply 1 retweet 36 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          In WW1, humans were cheap enough to waste in attrition trench warfare. Industrial production was mostly based on interchangeable humans. Very few humans were single-point failure modes.

          1 reply 1 retweet 37 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Now, in our late industrial mode, with hyperspecialization, the world is not super resistant to high death rates. Which means even small death rates can do a lot of damage. Especially in clustered breakouts which might take out key civilizational widgets.

          4 replies 2 retweets 66 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          If everybody is either a farmer or warrior in a 9:1 ratio say, the world can tolerate a lot higher death rate than when there are a few dozen artisan trades. And when you get 10s of 1000s of literate roles doing highly specialized things... even small uptick in death is very bad.

          2 replies 4 retweets 52 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          I think this could be computed to allow normalized comparisons across history. Like maybe 1 random extra death today is as damaging as 10 random extra deaths in 1918 and 100 random extra deaths in 1348?

          1 reply 1 retweet 29 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Though sheer larger population could have confounding effects

          1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Note, it’s not death rate itself that causes a problem. It’s death rate and backfill delay. The higher the skill level, the longer it takes to backfill. Another confounding variable is the residual high-r jobs under the api. And whaddya know, they are the ones risked the most.

          4 replies 2 retweets 41 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          But there’s also high K roles under high risk, like specialized doctors. Sol this hypothesis has a lot of details to be worked out. It’s not a simple, elegant theory. It’s a messy heuristic for mapping system survivability in terms of soecuslization/redundancy/r/backfill

          2 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Note that severe labor shortage was one of the effects of the Black Death. Already by them society was specialized enough it couldn’t tolerate the death rate. Society collapsed quite deeply.

          4 replies 0 retweets 36 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted roon

          Humans can make such distinctions but the system may not have the ability to discriminate like that. So it reacts sharply to any death rate spike.https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1282202538868125698?s=21 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          roon @tszzl
          Replying to @vgr
          seems like mostly retirees dying?
          2 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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          Plus system has evolved to work with the constraints that people tend to care about family elders and their own old age. A society that treated life past 60 as worth sharply less for eg would not have a stable incentive structure. Makes for fun sci-fi like Pebble in the Sky tho

          4 replies 1 retweet 25 likes
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        14. End of conversation

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