The Stripminer's Bargain is what has hollowed out society.

· Bits and Bobs 10/12/26
  • The Stripminer's Bargain is what has hollowed out society.
    • The bargain: a real, immediate gain on what you measure, in exchange for a cost you can't see.
    • It sounds reasonable.
      • Every individual step is an improvement.
    • It's a deal with the devil, except there's no devil.
      • Just an optimizer that doesn't care what it gives away.
    • Three ingredients make it ruinous:
      • 1) Optimizers will take an epsilon gain on the dimension they're graded on, even at catastrophic cost to the dimensions they aren't. The unmeasured is free to spend.
        • Russell's Catastrophe.
      • 2) Direct effects are fundamentally easier to see and measure than indirect ones. So the gains are always counted, and the costs never are.
      • This creates an asymmetry.
      • The hotter you run it, the more it hollows things out.
      • 3) We optimize hotter and hotter, across every dimension of society.
    • It runs until everything that held it up has been strip-mined away, and all that's left is a hollow shell.