Soulless systems Contents
Contents
My bestowment
Organizations develop bloat and cruft over time. At [REDACTED] clubs become competitive. We develop applications and interview rounds and coffee chats and polytiered hierarchies and vice vice presidents and complicated inter-committee and inter-club and inter-campus socials.
Google, for example, does not always put its machine learning specialists to work training machine learning models. It is now an old organization. It moves slowly. As organizations grow, their missions expand beyond their original central lodestar. As organizations grow, they also come to require more and more supplications and sacrifices. These offerings must be brought by congregants and burnt by priests. As an organization grows, it requires accountants to keep track of tithes, and web developers for its new website, and graphic designers for its shiny flyers.
We talk about this sometimes through the lens of alignment: Many of the original priests are very loyal to the cause, and maybe even the high priest too. But the accountant is not necessarily a devout parishioner. The Google employee, too, is not a devout Googler. (Or maybe ey is, for a year.) When the mesa-optimizer is aligned with its host, it needs less incentive to work toward the same goals. Some incentives still apply, of course; it will be torn and distraught if its job at the church does not allow it to pay its bills. But the mesa-optimizer that is not aligned with its host is a far more serious concern. This mesa-optimizer will be happily inefficient, ineffective, unproductive, counterproductive, even sabotage-apt. This mesa-optimizer steals office supplies and resells them for a profit. This mesa-optimizer is a 1/10xer.
Okay, I’ll stop snorting the poetry powder. The point is—even if the unaligned mesa-optimizer is in fact very good at what it does, you’ll have to pay it to stay, more than you’d have to pay the aligned one. And there are costs to increasingly being taken over by modules that don’t care about your fundamental goals.
We’re used to it. You clock in / you clock out. We think it’s normal to be unaligned with egregores that steal thousands, tens of thousands of hours of our lives. Guess what that makes us, and them? Ouroboric parasites. They steal our only-once-lived lives and we steal their momentum and movement toward missions. Together we drain each other’s life forces till we’re on our deathbeds and we don’t say we wish we had worked more.
What if I told you—two of our current great challenges come from the same place? You know, Marxist post-modernism. They complain about how we live meaningless lives, how what anchored us was taken from us. At the same time we find ourselves governed by soulless corporations, bureaucracies, and states. T(his is because t)he soul is necessarily eliminated in the parasitic trade between the ensouled and the corporate.
What if I told you you could have meaning in your life, while making a difference? All you have to do is this: Decide that life matters. We are not here to play games or cheat the system. We only live once and we are here to live full lives, and not waste away in offices there will be no point in remembering.
When you decide that your life matters you necessarily realize that the default choice of wasting away in an office should not be a default at all. You shall live instead with conviction. You shall do something that you believe means something. Quit being part of those parasites that don’t do anything to help the world, and choose to be aligned.
Soulless systems exist because people don’t care about being aligned. Because being unaligned is normal, unmarked. You have to understand—some people sell their souls to the devil on purpose, and some do so because the benefits are good. But many of us simply trade neither with the devil nor with God. By rejecting neutrality in the war between good and evil, we reduce the power of soulless systems, and strengthen those that are good.
Now, about mesa-optimizers—they add bureaucracy and cruft. Some features of organizations are added entirely to cater to unaligned mesa-optimizers. More importantly, those who are not aligned with an organization are not incentivized to ruthlessly prune unnecessary growths. Thus, the system gets more and more byzantine until it collapses in a cloud of plaster. When you are part of an organization your thoughts about any proposed change, especially an addition, should be “does this go toward our mission?” You may, occasionally, as a treat, have little a something that doesn’t go directly toward the mission, but it should be clearly recognized as such.
We choose to truly pursue happiness, and so we do not stand for soulless systems. When we find ourselves in them we take time to hack away at their cancerous overgrowth, just a little at a time. When we believe it is right (and it is usually right) we walk away from slavery in soulless systems, and choose to serve or command those that fight on the side of good. We fight for good as well, and so easily advocate for that which fuels the good, and mercilessly eliminate that which hinders it. When we are called upon to endure tedium or suffering we do so, and this is heroic. But much more often it is right to reject tedium and suffering, and to reject the idea of inflicting them on others. Choosing joy, choosing meaning, and choosing the side of good are the same thing.
My attempts to identify the underlying structure of this
- Unaligned mesa-optimizers are often costlier
- They might be incompetent (and are usually uninterested in improvement)
- They might be malicious
- Or they might just be uninterested in the mission of the organization, hence corruption
- Lack of alignment creates resource waste and causes drift away from lodestars
- Lack of alignment comes both in the form of growth (in unhelpful/harmful functions) and decrease (in mission-serving functions), as well as opportunity cost
- Widespread lack of alignment
- Meaninglessness and lack of alignment are connected: those who lack meaning tend to lack alignment, and unaligned organizations cause people to feel a lack of meaning
- Deciding that life matters → YOLO → do not tolerate soulless systems
- Choosing joy ↔ choosing meaning ↔ choosing the side of good