San Francisco is the capital of the online networks where today’s new ideas are born. It’s an excellent place for a sensitive young man with something to say. Ben and Wolf describe how the scene works and how to break in.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: One of the things I hear from young men all around the country, all around the whole Western world actually, is that the system seems to be against you. And I think that’s because the system is against you. Broadly speaking, if you look at the statistics, you look at the anecdotes, a lot of young, competent, intelligent men have been locked out of the public institutions by various schemes. We’ve all seen this discussed over the last few years, especially. And I wanted to discuss today what your actual options are and what we can do about that.
What are the ways that people have actually gotten out of the ghetto, so to speak, that the system has been trying to put us in? And so I brought on my colleague, Ben Landau-Taylor, here. We’re going to discuss the one way out that I’ve seen, which is the San Francisco intellectual scene. Now, this isn’t necessarily the only way out, the only way sort of to find esteem and a merit-based place in the world. But it is certainly one, and it is one that we’ve seen a lot up close.
So we’re here in San Francisco. People often sort of ask, “Why would you be in San Francisco, famously one of the most progressive cities in America?” Well, San Francisco is actually not just a monoculture. It’s actually quite diverse intellectually, and that’s why it’s interesting. And furthermore, it’s very meritocratic, and that’s why it’s actually a really good place to be.
So Ben, let’s start with having you introduce yourself, and then let’s get into this topic.
The virtues of San Francisco (01:49)
Ben: Yeah. So I’ve been here in the Bay Area for, I guess, 13 years now, and I came here initially, I visited for a week and was just immediately struck by like, “These are my people.” The scene here is just filled with people who are thinking about the sorts of things that I think are important, who are actually trying to find answers in ways that I really resonated with. So I just immediately came over here and was kind of like, “All right, we’ll figure out what that actually means.” But I could tell that the culture here was what I wanted to be part of.
I’ve been part of a bunch of interesting, in my eyes, very fruitful intellectual projects in my time here, doing types of sort of basic research. Just every now and then, I’ll get some young man who’s asking me for career advice. He’s like, “It seems like you’ve been... I’m here in the academy writing about a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about to give to people who will never read it, and I see you are writing about the fundamental questions which you seem to really care about and just doing the research about the things that matters to you, and how do I get there?” A lot of that has been through, when I first came here as part of Leverage Research was where we first got to know each other.
It was primarily a psychology research group. I was doing mostly sociology research, sort of studying the structure of society there. After that was part of Bismarck Analysis, doing a lot of case study work, a lot of institutional analysis. That was the consulting firm which our friend Samo put together to—just be doing a lot of the, taking a lot of the sort of social theory, applying it to particular cases. Now I’m here doing The Students, and yeah, it’s just a bunch of sort of oddball intellectual projects that I don’t think could have started anywhere but here.
Wolf: Yeah. And I think from the outside, this all looks very weird and it all looks very, I don’t know, questionable in a variety of ways. And I’m sure the audience can fill in their own ways that we all seem like a bunch of wackos, which we probably are.
Ben: We certainly are in many ways.
Wolf: This is very much a city of wackos, but that’s why it works. And so I remember, a few years ago, I went and drove my Volkswagen van all around the continent with my family, and we visited a whole lot of people. And I remember having one conversation with a relation, let’s say. He’s a philosopher academically, works in academia, does philosophy research, that sort of thing. And he had recently been inspired to kind of do some more work philosophically on his PhD topics and so on.
But he seemed very intrigued by the fact that a bunch of us unregulated philosophers, let’s say, out here in San Francisco are able to not only kind of do much more, maybe less rigorous sometimes, but much more wide-ranging, and in many ways more lucrative philosophy than you can do anywhere near the academia. And so I thought that was an interesting data point. It’s like, okay, there is this thing that people don’t necessarily understand, but they see it, or maybe they haven’t seen it yet. But it’s this very important thing to understand, which is that there is a meritocratic intellectual scene in San Francisco that gets people hooked up to, now they’re friends with billionaires, now they have a job at the AI research company, now they have whatever tech connections. People find all kinds of opportunity through this.
And I’ve seen a lot of people find that kind of opportunity, and I think there’s a lot of discourse online about how meritocracy has broadly collapsed, which it has. You look back, I watched “The Right Stuff,” that movie about the test pilots, Chuck Yeager and John Glenn and the Mercury program that shows kind of—in a somewhat caricatured way, a somewhat stylized way, what America was like in the ‘50s and ‘60s with respect to merit and institutions. It was just like they were finding anybody who could do the job. And they were getting a lot of young guys, guys with a lot of edge to them and so on, and they were putting them in important jobs and getting them to do these things like the astronauts or test pilots. And we saw this culminate obviously in the Apollo program.
You see a bunch of 26-year-old engineers kind of putting a man on the moon. The sort of height of meritocracy, right? And that was a wonderful way that things were set up. I think a few years later, America decided that that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted more questionable things like feeding the masses and tearing down civilization for various historical reasons.
So these days, I think one of the big casualties of that has been meritocracy. Right? And there’s a lot of discussion about this. People think, okay, why is it that a young guy with maybe perfect SAT scores, maybe high IQ, but doesn’t play well in school, but actually is really capable. There’s people who are objectively capable of a lot intellectually or in terms of work.
But they’re finding they feel isolated, they feel shut out from the system in various ways, and I think this is dismissed a lot by the people who are in the system. They think, “Oh, well, I got in here through whatever means,” and so it must not be happening, but I think it is happening. There are a lot of people who are shut out. We’ve reported on this with Palladium, the competency crisis article that went around a few years ago. More recently, there was that one in Compact about in publishing in particular, a very intellectual pursuit, how basically there was no white men, or straight white men specifically, in publishing in the last 20 years.
Like new authors.
There’s all these ways that the meritocracy has been dismantled. So if we are aligned with meritocracy, this is something that would be good for us. Where do we find that in the world? Where can we get ahead on the basis of intellectual merit, on the basis of hard work? And San Francisco seems to be one of the remaining places that are like that, and I think a lot of people end up here because of that.
Intellectual merit (08:55)
Ben: Right. And because it’s not systematized, because it’s not bureaucratized, because it’s not—
Wolf: Yeah. There’s no bureaucracy to capture. It’s just relationships.
Ben: Yeah. There’s no one being like, “Oh man, we’ve gone through the seven bloggers, and we don’t like the demographics of them.” It’s just there’s a bunch of blogs, and people read the ones that they like.
Wolf: Yeah. What it is, is there’s a concentration of intelligent people who appreciate intelligent people and appreciate insights, and they appreciate the cutting-edge things in the world, and they’re all concentrated in this city. And so if you come here, or even if you don’t come here, if you write well on the internet, if you have a lot of insight, if you’re able to shed light on things, people will respect you for that. And so I think it’s only in San Francisco, at least it was for a long time, where a thinker like Curtis Yarvin could be well-respected, right? He brings a lot of insight to the table.
He was politically very off limits for a long time. Nonetheless, he’s moving around in San Francisco circles and doing quite well simply on the basis of this guy is actually intelligent and offering useful insight.
Ben: Yeah. And like—
Wolf: And so if you can do that, you can make it.
Ben: Yeah. He was correct about things that other people were not correct about, and—
Wolf: That’s what wins you cred here.
Ben: Yes. This is, as far as I can tell, uniquely within the US, a sort of leading city where prestige goes just for being right about things with no further qualifiers. In Boston, if you are right about things and also have an academic pedigree behind them, then you’re in. And here, if you have the academic pedigree, if you don’t, that’s not really what people are checking for.
Wolf: Yeah. Which isn’t to say people from top schools, you will find a lot of people from top schools, they are objectively very capable sometimes.
Ben: For sure.
Wolf: But yeah. I really don’t get the sense that a lot of people care deeply about it, and certainly not a lot of gatekeeping in the broader intellectual scene.
Ben: Right. When I first showed up here, for example, there were a bunch of people who I would meet. At the time, I was quite deep in the LessWrong social space, and I would meet a bunch of people.
Wolf: I think that’s how both of us got here, actually.
Ben: Right. And they’d be like, “Oh, yes, I liked the comments you were leaving on the blog posts.” And so I would get invited to the parties on that basis. That was what it took.
Wolf: Right. And those are the parties where many of the other attendees of the parties, many of the people in those scenes, have gone on to make enormous amounts of money and enormous amounts of power in artificial intelligence or tech or whatever it is. It’s not like, oh, there’s other people to talk to. Yeah, that’s great. We like other people to talk to, especially if we’re very intellectually focused.
We want to talk to other people who have insights and are capable of appreciating insights. But it’s not just that. It’s insight, and then there’s conversion into wealth and power—to a large degree. Which is like, you should never dangle that too much because people should not expect that to come easy. It never does come easy.
It’s not easy at all. It’s very difficult. But there is a concentration of opportunity and appreciation for insight that’s in a very meritocratic way. And I think that’s an amazing thing that I think more people should know about. And I hope that it retains this character.
Many different cliques (12:25)
Wolf: I think because it’s very much not systematized, like we were saying, that’s one of the reasons it has maintained that character. It’s this Wild West, many different cults, many different scenes, many different industries, all competing on the basis of who’s going to actually achieve the big effect in the world, basically.
Ben: Right. And each of the individual communities that are a part of it, each has their own flaws, each has their own—
Wolf: Their own gatekeeping—
Ben: particular focuses
Wolf: their gatekeeping nonsense. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. And they have their own little critiques of each other. I think these guys are missing that stuff. I think these people tend to focus too much on this.
Wolf: Yeah, those guys are evil. I remember someone called me evil one time as a profoundly evil person. I don’t know. But so I’m probably not welcome in all of these scenes. That’s okay.
I have my circle of friends. I have my opportunities, right?
Ben: Yeah. There are some people who are very big over there who I’m like, “I don’t want to invite you to my house.”
Wolf: Yeah, you’re not coming.
Ben: So I won’t, and you can have fun with your friends. That’s fine.
Wolf: That’s okay. There’s a lot of people who are not welcome in my party.
Ben: It ends up being made up out of... So the way I think about it, I kind of think of it, there’s one scene made out of many communities and many cliques.
Wolf: Yeah, which is what a city is at its best, right? A city is supposed to be this place where you have all the dynamic people, all the dynamic economic and intellectual and cultural activity that’s happening in some country, let’s say. Country has other connotations, but just some area of influence of that city, right? It all comes to the city, and gets stirred up and there’s all these connections made, all this opportunity. And San Francisco is really working as a city, I think is the punchline here.
And, yeah, I think among the circles that we have online who maybe aren’t as aware of this, there’s this big counterintuitive thing, which is what I was describing earlier about San Francisco’s known to be this terribly governed, communist place where they tax billionaires and like—
Ben: Yes. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Wolf: Exactly. And everyone’s on this monoculture of diversity and inclusion and progressive politics, which was the case in the mid-2010s. But even then, I came down here... Let’s see. I’ll tell my story a little bit.
How Wolf entered the scene (15:01)
Wolf: So in 2011, I discovered lesswrong.com.
Ben: That’s how they get you.
Wolf: A common gateway drug is this intellectual stuff produced by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which has a lot of flaws and has a lot of merits. And I got really into that. It was very interesting to kind of engage in philosophy in this very technical way, this very aggressive way, very ambitious way that they had. I really liked it. And so I chewed through all that.
I made a name for myself posting online in those circles. And then, I got wrapped up in other circles, basically the work of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. And then I came down to San Francisco for... I was really into computer science at the time. I was searching around for things involving the Y Combinator.
You may have heard of it. It’s an obscure computer science concept involving functions. But I found this guy named Paul Graham, and I was like, “Hey, this guy’s kind of cool.” And so I ended up coming down to San Francisco for some Y Combinator event. Y Combinator is also the startup accelerator in San Francisco.
So I came down for that, and then on that meeting, someone who knew me from my online writings was like, “Hey, you can stay at my place, and I’ll introduce you to Curtis Yarvin.” Right. And it’s just like, boom, just right off the bat, I’m in. And I think it might have been the same meeting, someone had introduced me also to Geoff Anders, the founder of Leverage Research that we later ended up working at. And again, he was just looking for people who were intelligent, ambitious, and had let’s say independent views on the world.
And so, I got introduced to him. And so very quickly I’m getting hooked up into all these scenes of I think quite interesting things. Some other people might disagree. I found this all to be incredibly interesting.
I’m not from San Francisco. Who am I? I’m just some guy, right? But I wrote on the internet in the right scenes, I was interested in the right things, and I was able to bring some insight to the table, and so boom, I’m in. Right?
And so that was 2014 or so. And even then, I remember Balaji Srinivasan up on stage at the YC event talking about Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit was the name of the talk. You can probably find it on YouTube or somewhere. And basically, Silicon Valley needs aircraft carriers or something equivalent to kind of secede from the East Coast monoculture. And this was just sort of what was kind of going on in San Francisco.
People were just thinking, “We don’t like those fuddy-duddy progressives over on the East Coast.” And then I think I went back the next year, though, and every single talk was about diversity. And so clearly there’d been a bit of a changing of the guard. Most notably, I think the year before, Paul Graham had been in charge of Y Combinator. The year after, it was Sam Altman.
That’s probably most proximally explaining that particular thing. But I think broadly speaking, there was a big push to kind of—narrative containment on what was happening in San Francisco. And so San Francisco kind of regained its reputation as a very monocultural, leftist, kind of progressive place.
Ben: A lot of the outward-facing stuff definitely was. But also there was just these little scenes doing their own inquiry in their own particular direction.
Wolf: Yeah. But they’re quiet, right?
Ben: They were, yes.
Wolf: They got quiet.
Ben: They’re quiet.
Wolf: They don’t have the... Yeah, we especially got quiet around those days because people were getting nailed by journalists and so on. But—
Ben: The work didn’t stop
Wolf: the work didn’t stop, and the scenes didn’t stop, and people were still finding each other. And so it’s just that San Francisco has been, despite the kind of, let’s say, entrenched mainstream politics, has been this very politically diverse and interesting place intellectually, and a place where people can come on the basis of these cutting-edge, taboo, insightful lines of inquiry, can get wrapped up into money and power, simply on the basis of doing well at that, simply on the basis of insight. And so this is, I think, a great thing. This is obviously me giving my pitch for why I’m in San Francisco. It’s very much a city on the cutting edge of history.
The leading city (19:55)
Wolf: Not the only one, I think.
Ben: It’s the one that we know best.
Wolf: It’s the one that we know best, and I think it’s possibly the most like that in America. I think it’s overtaken New York City in that sense.
Ben: Yeah. For where is the intellectual work happening, there are other important things in the world, there are other big sources of upstream power, but when it comes to the intellectual production, I think this is the first city.
Wolf: Especially in America.
Ben: Which is kind of a horrifying thought, but I think it’s true.
Wolf: Yeah, I know. It is horrifying. It’s like, okay, you were saying earlier the intellectual production in the West no longer happens in academia, it happens in San Francisco, in these weird intellectual scenes. And God help us if that’s actually our situation.
Ben: But I think it is.
Wolf: Because we’re a bunch of wackos from the internet, right? This is not... We clearly have a lot of work to do in terms of building up our intellectual machine. But yeah, I think it’s a very important topic, so I’m glad you brought it up. And yeah, that’s my story.
I ended up founding Palladium, obviously, coming out of those scenes in 2018 and had been at Leverage Research in the meantime and have generally gotten hooked up to a lot of very interesting people and a lot of interesting opportunity, and I think there’s going to be a lot more of that as we go forward. And so, yeah, the main big takeaway for the sensitive young man in God knows where America with great intelligence and great ambition but doesn’t know quite how to get up in through the institutions, or they’re just not going to allow that anymore, come to San Francisco, write online. I’m curious how you would put it. What’s the recipe for these young guys?
How do you get in? (22:03)
Ben: Yeah. So I think that there’s two big things. As you were saying, write online is a really big one. That’s the way that people can know that your stuff is actually good. That’s the way that you can know your stuff is actually good.
Wolf: Yeah. To display honesty and insight, right?
Ben: Yes. Which is not an easy thing to do.
Wolf: No. It’s hard.
Ben: When I started doing that, I got a lot of my stuff torn apart and I was like, “Oh, yes, you’re right and I’m wrong.” And -
Wolf: Yeah, I remember getting totally trashed on LessWrong. My first few essays, it was bloodbath. And I look back and I’m like, “Wow, that guy, he’s not me. That’s an idiot.” But nonetheless, I managed to make a name for myself to some degree.
Ben: Yeah. You have to actually get into the sort of discourse that is going to tear you apart where you’re wrong, and you have to—there’s a process. No one springs fully formed from the head of Zeus with a bunch of brilliant insights that all the San Franciscans are going to be like, “That’s the genius.” But it takes a lot of work to get actually good. But one, you want to start so that you start getting good, and then once you have your stuff that’s good, you put it online where people can read it.
And there’s all this stuff of, how do I market it? Where do I put it so people can read it? And yeah, you’ve got to think about that.
Wolf: They’ll find it.
Ben: Yeah. It’s a solvable problem. It’s not trivial, but if your stuff is actually good, then it’ll work out.
Wolf: Yeah. Yeah. Look, you can always publish in Palladium, right?
Ben: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of good people have, that was the first place that they published, and then from there, they—started getting published more places because they could go and be like, that’s not the only way in, but it’s a really good one.
Wolf: Yeah. LessWrong, obviously—
Ben: Just put it on your Substack, put it on the comments on other people’s blog posts. Talk to the people who are doing the stuff you care about. Do good work, do it where they can see it, start getting in dialogue with them. And there’s all of these online scenes, but a lot of the online scenes are sort of the mirror image reflections of in-person scenes. And I’ve gotten to the point where I can see—
Wolf: Yeah. It’s largely in person, right?
Ben: Yeah. Even I can see when I’m looking at some Twitter discourse, I can be like, “Oh, these guys probably all know each other.” I click through, and all of them have location Washington, DC. I’m like, “Okay, yes, I see what’s going on here.”
Wolf: Yeah. And in some cases, they actually are just scattered all around the Western world. And I see certain online subcultures, especially ones that think a lot about the problems of the lack of meritocracy and so on. I see—some of those online subcultures are disproportionately quite scattered, and this is our sort of—
Ben: This is the mecca of it.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, this is what we can offer to them, right? Is put the image of San Francisco aside and try to get in on the intellectual scene here.
Ben: Yes. And once you have a little bit gotten into the intellectual scene, you don’t need to be some grand master, but once you’ve got a few friends and someone like the guy you ran into who was like, “Oh, yeah. You can crash with me.” Once you’ve got a few people who respect you and are doing good work and are there, then that is a good time to visit the city for a week or two and just try to meet a bunch of people. Maybe you’re friends with a few people in one clique, and they can take you around to some parties.
Wolf: Yeah. For the record, I’m happy to host people who make a good impression on me online, which I’m not going to reveal how that happens. But it happens. I like insight. I like honesty.
I like cutting-edge thought. But—
Ben: And a lot of people hear the sort of, “Oh, this guy is visiting San Francisco for the first time and meeting everyone.” This is sort of a known type.
Wolf: Yeah. No, it’s like, “Okay, yeah. You can stay in my guest room. We’ll show you around,” right?
Ben: Yeah. And then that’s a great way to just break into the scene a bit. It’s quite hard to go from one clique to another clique just through the online, but it’s—often quite smooth in person when you meet a guy, you talk to him for 45 minutes, and then you go and read his stuff, and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute. That actually holds up better than I was thinking when we were talking.”
Wolf: Yeah. Actually, we did this a couple of times this year already. In January, we held a little conference.
Ben: Yes. That was fun.
Wolf: I don’t think we need to give too much of the details on that, but it was a great conference. But it was actually prompted because someone that I respect from online had the opportunity to come through town. And so he came to town, and I was like, “All right. If he’s going to be in town, we got to do something. We got to throw a party because I like this guy. I like his work.”
And so I just gathered up as many of the intelligent people as I could from around our network, even people outside the city, brought them in. We had our little one-day conference. A lot of energy came out of that. It was a lot of fun. I hope he sort of got some good connections out of it.
I think a lot of people did out of that little event. And then, what was it, a month or two later, Nick Land texted me that he was going to be in town. And of course, I’m a big fan for many years. But he texted me he was going to be in town, and so we started hanging out. And I was like, “All right. Well, we’ve got to throw a party, right? And we’ve got to get...”
Nick Land had many connections, obviously, to get hooked up in the city. He had a great time, from what I heard. From what I heard at—
Ben: No, I had fun.
Wolf: Yeah. But yeah, we threw this Nick Land acknowledgment, which was our way of introducing Nick to the city. And 150 people just beating down the doors, coming out of the woodwork with two days’ notice—to see this guy who’s an online... Look, he’s very famous. He’s very famous.
But a lot of what he’s famous for, especially in this city, is very unregulated work, right? It’s not operating through any kind of institutions. He did operate through the institutions back in the day, and he’s known somewhat for that work. But really the work that I think he’s really well known for is Xenosystems, right? Which is just, okay, he’s a really smart guy, and he wrote a blog.
That understates it entirely, but he wrote a blog. And I think there will be less spectacular results with your average kind of 22-year-old insightful blogger. But nonetheless, what have we got? We’ve got various people in our networks here who get hooked up on internships and jobs and places to stay and so on, simply on the basis of their Substack.
Ben: Right. And I think the thing that, at least for me, was much more compelling than that was a community of people who cared about the real work. And certainly on my own path here, I’ve made a lot less money than I could have made if I were going into finance or aiming at money. But I could have gotten a job in the university that would probably have been much more stable, but then I would have had to be publishing a bunch of things that I didn’t really care about. And here, there’s a bunch of people who just want the real stuff, and they’re doing the real stuff.
And people have their own different takes on like, “Oh, this is what I care about. This is the field that I’m into.” But people who are just doing the work because it’s what they think is the important work.
Wolf: Yeah. And I’ll note about the money, yeah, it would be nice if some of us could afford houses one of these days. But I will also say that that sacrifice of kind of just putting the intellect first and getting in with the right scenes, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of wealthy people in these scenes who want to see people who do that have some kind of success. And the doors will be opened. There will be things.
There will be opportunities. It’s very stochastic. It’s very unreliable. It’s not something that you can count on. But it’s not like you’re totally on your own.
Ben: Yeah. There’s a lot of software money, and a substantial minority of the software people have actually good intellectual taste and want to support this work and—there’s a million and one different ways that that happens, and it takes legwork, but it can be done.
Wolf: Yeah. And now maybe, again, we shouldn’t dangle the rewards because I think anyone looking for those rewards is going to be sorely disappointed, and they’re going to wreck the scene. So—
Ben: And also like it’s just—
Wolf: Think about it that way.
Ben: Yeah. And also it’s just not actually... If that’s the main thing you’re after, there are better places.
Wolf: If what you want is money, there are much better places to be. Yeah, exactly.
Ben: This is like, oh yeah, you can manage to—
Wolf: You might survive, though.
Ben: Yeah. You can support yourself while you do the real work. You are not going to get rich doing it.
Wolf: Yeah, you might survive. Hey, some people do get rich doing it, but it’s unreliable. But yeah, that’s been a great overview on the nature of the scene and the fact that it exists, and that someone who’s actually intellectual and ambitious should just try themselves on coming and hanging out, writing interesting stuff online. We’ll hook you up. If you come to town, we’ll hook you up, right?
And—
Ben: If your stuff is good.
Scaling the meritocracy (31:52)
Wolf: If your stuff is good, exactly. But, I want also maybe to broaden our scope a little bit here to, okay, this is all happening on a backdrop of the collapse of meritocracy in the Western world. And, that’s a very bad situation. And, to some extent, I feel a little bit guilty about shining a spotlight on the last remaining bit of meritocracy in the world because you—
Ben: I don’t think—
Wolf: You start to wonder whether it will be targeted for destruction, right, by the same forces that went after the other ones. And so what I want to also kind of bring our minds to here and have a little discussion about is, okay, we know what at least somewhat of a good meritocratic scene looks like. How do we make it bigger? How do we export the model, right? How do we make more of the Western world more like this?
Because what we want, obviously, is the golden age of academia, which may not have ever happened, but where intelligent guys from anywhere can offer insight on topics and get hooked up into institutions of merit through that basis. Nietzsche became, what, Chair of Philology at 24 or something.
Ben: Einstein very famously was just—well, a patent clerk was just sending out his theories to the leading physicists, and they were like, “Wait a minute, this is good.”
Wolf: Yeah. Or Newton, just a little longer ago, but just the smart young guy, someone notices him, he gets into the intellectual scenes and boom, gravity, right? Calculus. So how do we bring that back as... I hate the term bring it back.
But how do we cultivate more meritocracy, more intellectual meritocracy in our civilization? Because I think we’re very thin on it right now. I think God help us that this is the last place that I’m aware of where you can just go and succeed on the basis of intellectual merit. But surely we can do better than this.
Ben: Yeah. From our position, I don’t really know what we would do other than what the scene is—
Wolf: Well, let’s put on our Napoleon hats and just imagine, how could we or someone who’s more powerful maybe help this?
Ben: So we’ve seen a little bit of this happening of one of the really cool things about being right about stuff is that people can tell, and people want that. And it may not be the only thing that people want, but there has been no shortage of people who have came here and showed that they are in fact right about important things, then using that as a jumping-off point to go into East Coast finance or Washington, D.C. or things like that. So if you have a meritocratic source of merit, then you can turn up the degree to which the other institutions and the other power centers are leaning on that rather than the, oh, you have—
Wolf: But that requires, at some level, a systematization or scaling of the thing, which is, of course, what killed it last time, right? It was the systematization of academia, it was the scaling of academia that turned it into this institution of spoils distribution and—
Ben: I think more the scaling than the systematization, actually. It was pretty systematized in 1930, but and then it was the scale in the middle of the century that—
Wolf: Yeah. I agree with the scale. Okay, just to reiterate the scale argument. The scale argument is if the intellectual networks around physics or around science or around academia, history, whatever it is, those are largely kind of very skill-based. They take promising young guys and they mentor them over the course of many years to sort of become at the top of their field.
And there’s a lot of these traditions of knowledge in there, some of which are hidden. We don’t really know the nature of them. But not hidden as much like secret, just kind of like it’s not all written down. It’s esoteric knowledge. And that transmission, you can see this in mathematics.
One of the best ways to win big prizes in mathematics is to be the student of someone who won big prizes in mathematics.
Ben: Right. And it’s not—
Wolf: Likewise
Ben: nepotism, it’s that you just learn the research methods—that they can’t write down.
Wolf: Exactly. You learn these traditions of knowledge. And scale disrupts that because now you have one professor with five or 10 or 20 they have to train 20 people, and now you have this is what happened in the middle of the 20th century. And suddenly they’re no longer able to maintain those traditions, or if you can maintain the traditions with one of those guys or two of those guys, while the other 18 now—
Ben: They all have the same degree.
Wolf: They all have the same degree.
Ben: So how can you tell?
Wolf: And no one can tell the difference. They can’t tell the difference among themselves even—necessarily.
Ben: And so from 1900 to 2000—the per capita proportion of PhDs in the United States of America went up by a factor of 30.
Wolf: Wow. That’s ridiculous.
Ben: So, in absolute terms, up by a factor of 100 because the population tripled, but in relative terms—
Wolf: It is not because we had 30 times more people of the same caliber. It’s because in order to—
Ben: No, we just scale up
Wolf: they just hyperinflated the—the credential.
Ben: Yes, and so it just means, a PhD today means probably less than just a bachelor’s in the year 1900.
Wolf: Yeah, I’ll go further. A PhD today means less than a good blog.
Ben: Yeah, probably. But then the thing with the good blog is, you can’t just check do you have the good blog piece of paper.
Wolf: Yeah, there’s no one—
Ben: You have to read the blog
Wolf: there’s no one stamping that, right? And so, okay, is this one of the ways... So the thing I wanted to say, though, about institutionalization is that once you have a formal institution that’s stamping out, “This guy’s got the PhD,” and that actually became a very centralized system, a very bureaucratized system. It’s that part that I’m referring to where it becomes very centralized and bureaucratized. And, with the peer review kind of like gate kept on basis other than citations and just horizontal esteem within the community.
There’s now an institution there, a centralized institution, that can be captured by ideologues or just idiots or whatever. And it can decay and become something, a mere social club, right? Or, these various ways that these things decay over time. It can be overtaken by the wrong political current or something, which is, I think, all of these things are kind of what happened to academia in the 20th century. And so, I fear that any kind of systematization now still faces that problem that the kind of political currents that are dominant now, or the institutional cultures that are dominant now are now very much in this extractive kind of credential printing—centralized propaganda mode rather than—
Ben: And so the version of this, which I would hope to see because of that, is not that there would be some centralized sort of good blog certification thing. But what we’ve seen so far is much more ad hoc, much more human judgment. Much more the individual person is not like, “Oh, I need some sharp San Francisco blogger,” but they’re like, “Oh, wait, John has been writing about this and seems to really get it, so I’m going to bring in him.”
Individual endorsements (40:15)
Wolf: You know what it might be, actually? If we were to scale this thing up in its current institutional forms. Let’s look at Tyler Cowen’s—
Ben: The Emergent Ventures. He’s done a great job with it
Wolf: as an example. So what’s he doing there? He’s basically grabbing these guys, these smart young folks who, they have a certain quality to them and they’re Tyler Cowen coded, so that has its connotations. But, as we’ve said, there’s many scenes in a healthy—or there’s many sub-scenes in a healthy scene. And so he’s putting his stamp of approval, and he gives them $5,000 to $50,000 or whatever it is.
Ben: Right. And he gives them the Tyler Cowen stamp of approval.
Wolf: The Tyler Cowen stamp of approval. And now there’s this credential, right? Which is like if you go to someone, and you say, “Well, I’m an Emergent Ventures scholar,” or whatever they’re called, that means something to people who care about that. And it means probably a lot more than if you said, “I’m a Rhodes scholar,” to certain people. I think some people still care about the prestige of the Rhodes Scholarship, but I don’t think anyone pretends that it’s like—it’s not making good use of its human capital, let’s put it that way.
Or Rhodes’ original intentions attached to his capital.
Ben: Right. And one of the interesting things is because it’s so personalized, because it is, he doesn’t have a bureaucracy filtering these. It’s just literally Tyler personally—as the old gray beard reading them and deciding whether he thinks that he wants to throw his name behind them.
Wolf: Yeah, and this is the importance of the individual, right? And the will of the individual is arbitrary, but it’s capable of taste. And so the other essential thing you would want is you want more such things, so there can be competition between them. Because if someone comes to me and they say, “Oh, I’ve got Emergent Ventures,” I’m like, “Yeah, okay, whatever. That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
It might mean something to someone else, or it means a little bit to me, right? But there’s other people, if someone had the, I don’t know, who do I respect? The J’accuse magazine stamp of approval. Right? I take that a lot more seriously.
Ben: And other people would much prefer the GMU stamp, and that’s—totally fine.
Wolf: Yeah. And if Robin Hanson really respects someone, Robin’s at GMU, okay, I take that more seriously than Tyler Cowen or his colleague—
Ben: Right, but because these are all—
Wolf: Caplan
Ben: personal endorsements, they end up being much more legible about what—specifically it means, rather than just turning the prestige knob up or down. There’s more content there.
Wolf: Exactly. It’s very content rich. And so if you have competition between many tastemakers—you can scale it a lot. Because let’s say you have just a blog ecosystem. You have room for 20 different bloggers in your homogenous blog ecosystem.
People can kind of know each other and know who’s good. And they can respect each other just on the basis of merit. It’s like there’s room in that kind of ecosystem for maybe 20.
Ben: This was—
Wolf: I’m just throwing out a number.
Ben: Yes. But this was the function back in the golden age of blogging that was served by the blogroll. Where you would link all of your favorite blogs and would sort of, one, help people discover, and two, display a bunch of information about the social graph implicitly.
Wolf: Yeah. And, so if someone comes to you and they say, “Oh, I’m this blogger,” then you’re like, “Oh, okay. I know who you are. I know your thing.” But that’s not scalable.
That’s like 20 people. And so what this kind of awards or certifications model does is it allows it to scale quite a lot. You can get someone like Tyler Cowen or whatever other institution very specialized in finding people who fit their taste and certifying those. And then from the outside, I only have to know that a progress studies guy is different from a LessWrong guy, is different from a Palladium guy. And these taste-making institutions become, I only have to know 20 of them.
Ben: Right. And then when the guy shows up and he’s got, “I’ve got these two badges,” then you can decide, “Am I going to get to know-”
Wolf: I don’t have to know his stuff in particular, but I know he’s respected by this thing that I respect, right? And so you can get a lot more scale that way. So I wonder if just part of the answer is we need to build up a lot more of these kind of award-making, grant-making—
Ben: Well, maybe we should start ours. Cowen seems to have—
Wolf: Yeah. This was one of the ideas behind our conference in January. I was sitting with a friend on the lead-up to it. I was thinking, well, we have a lot of guys in our extended online network who have no patronage right now, and we need to find a way to get them prestige and get them money.
But we also weren’t very thickly networked either. And so part of the first job is, let’s get them hooked up personally. Get them in the scene, so that we can then go to funders or whatever, make the pitch. Like, “Look, we’ve got all these guys. They’re really high quality. If you respect me, let me stamp an award on these guys.”
And we should just do that maybe without the money as well. I considered doing that with just my own money. Like, oh yeah, I’ll put in $10,000 a year and disperse it in small amounts. And this connects to Curtis Yarvin complains a lot about the miserly billionaire class, which is a definite subset of the billionaires who—talk a lot about the need for this or that, but don’t actually fund anything. And one of the ways this should be done is maybe just to shame them.
It’s like, “Oh, look, here we are, these wagies. We’re awarding more prestige than you are. Why aren’t you getting in on this?”
Ben: Maybe another thing, though, is they are very busy people, and maybe we should be giving them clearer signs of who to throw the wads of cash at.
Wolf: Yeah. We just have to prove the concept first. There’s this flywheel effect that has to be done with actually just building out these scenes. But that strikes me as, okay, that’s one sort of institutional development track that we could go down that would get us, I think, a much stronger intellectual meritocracy in the Western world. And we could probably make it, I hate to think in terms of scale, but let’s—
Ben: I’m not persuaded we should, but taking it for the sake of argument
Wolf: Let’s just say 10 times better along the metric that we care about. Whether that be scale or quality or whatever, I bet there’s an order of magnitude in the tank there.
So I wonder what other sorts of, I don’t know, dimensions of improvement we can go on. A lot of this obviously has to come from the political culture and political change. I think some of the people in the Trump admin tried to do some things along these lines. I don’t think that much was done in terms of improving the meritocracy situation.
Ben: It got a few people. It didn’t seem like it did anything structural.
Wolf: Yeah. And then the Supreme Court has sort of gestured at things here and there. But we should have a proper conversation with someone who’s a real expert about this someday, but there’s a lot that could be done from that angle. A lot of this stuff was established or wrecked or changed by the political culture, by the government, to put it more directly. And I think a big dimension of it’s going to have to come from that dimension, or from that direction as well.
But I don’t know. That one’s less practical immediately for us. Maybe we should put more thought into it sometime. But I wonder, besides just kind of we should distribute awards to the guys of merit, I don’t know. What else?
What does it look like to kind of improve the intellectual meritocracy situation?
Improving the intellectual meritocracy (48:55)
Ben: Yeah. So there’s the how do you recognize and sort of how do you make legible to the rest of society that within these cluster, these judgments have been made, which I think is an important problem, but there’s also just how do you make the thing actually just better at what it’s doing? I think that—
Wolf: Yeah. How do we improve it?
Ben: we have a lot of good stuff going on, but certainly it’s got a bunch of pathologies. Certainly it’s got—
Wolf: Yeah, we’re a bunch of clowns
Ben: a bunch. Yeah.
When it comes to how do I judge this over the intellectual scene in Boston, I’m like, “Yes, I prefer this one. That’s why I’m here.” And then when I’m like, “How does it compare to the size of the challenge?” I’m like, “Oh, wow. We have got our work cut out for us.”
So then there’s the question of how do we take the existing thing and make it just better at producing good people and good work?
Wolf: Yeah. And how to do this is difficult, but let’s name a few of the elements that have improved people intellectually. I’ll say, like we were saying, getting torn apart when you—post your stuff and have real debates—people who actually care about the stuff, and they respond to you in good faith, but without pulling punches.
Ben: Yes. I had a lot of very formative experiences when I was an adolescent kid, and the big culture war at the time was atheism versus Christianity.
Wolf: Oh, yes.
Ben: And so I’d just be getting into these arguments online about is God real, and no one knew I was 12 years old, so they just ripped me apart. And that was incredibly good for my ability to make good arguments.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. One learns quite a lot about good arguments by spending endless hours on autistic forums where you debate the finer points of whatever video game or operating system or bodybuilding—routine or whatever.
Ben: So yeah, we should try to do a better job. I think you’ve actually done quite well with sofiechan of building a ground where people are going—to tear into each other on the basis of actual argument.
Wolf: Well, to clue people into sofiechan a little bit, it’s my experiment in anonymous forum building. And basically, you have a reputation with the platform, which is to say spammers are not welcome, but you’re anonymous, or you have disposable anonymity, anonymous identities, which means no one knows who you are. They can guess maybe on your writing style or something, but no one knows who you are. And so I’ve been able to totally roast my friends on there, where people will post something and it’s some dumb shit, and it’s like, this guy’s a friend of mine and he’s probably going to get a little bit sensitive if I was criticizing him directly to his face. But we’re able to just go at it and call each other retards on the internet when it’s warranted to do so.
Because we don’t know who each other are for sure, right? And so I hesitate to even mention it because it’s so minimalistic, and so it’s not what it should be yet, I think. But I think you’re right. There’s a version of it that could be really cool. Imagine Twitter, but the name fags aren’t in charge, and you can’t be doxxed.
Ben: Right. And there’s a bunch of other places that have, I think for many people, LessWrong still ends up being a good place to argue and get torn apart in a way that—
Wolf: Yeah. LessWrong also has a great healthy intellectual culture. In some ways, I remember I eventually got very frustrated with them, their obtuseness on certain matters of utilitarianism and so on. But, we’ll put that aside for now.
Ben: And there are many others, but it would be good for us to... Because I think there’s many things I like about Twitter, but just the nature of the character limit is that it really isn’t one of those places.
Wolf: Yeah. I actually appreciate the character limit, but—
Ben: It’s good for what it’s trying to do, but what it’s trying to do is not make an argument Thunderdome.
Wolf: There have been times on Twitter when it was a good argument Thunderdome. The trouble is, I think the platform has never been committed to good intellectual quality. And, under the old regime, it was, I don’t know what you would call it, it was sort of benign neglect mixed with sort of mainstream intellectual prestige and mores. Under the new regime of Elon and Nikita Bier, it’s populist slop, making money from views and clicks and eyeballs. And a lot of interesting people still just get banned.
So I—
Ben: Yeah. We’ll have to do a better job of figuring out how we can incubate—the real Thunderdomes.
Wolf: I think a lot of it is the platform has to actually care. I’ve looked into this because I built one, with sofiechan. I put a lot of thought into it, about what went wrong with Reddit, what went wrong with 4chan, what went wrong with Twitter, what went wrong even on LessWrong. And if the platform cares, that overcomes a lot. There’s certain things you can do, I think, well, certain things the platform can do if it cares to do so, to protect certain kinds of intellectual diversity from the parochial tastes of the administrators.
But you have to be sort of capable of that kind of meta level reflection that I actually do want to encourage free speech from people I disagree with and stuff like this.
Ben: Very few people actually want that, but the ones who do, you can go quite far.
Wolf: Yeah. But yeah, I think the platform has to care is the important thing there, and I think—we have built very few platforms that are natively attempting to be a high-powered intellectual Thunderdome.
Ben: Yeah, and my suspicion is that it will never be one of the big mainstream ones that—
Wolf: No, of course not
Ben: my cousin is on. I think they’re all going to be fairly small niches with at most 20,000 people at the very biggest.
Wolf: Yeah. And well, maybe even bigger. Germany academia at its height, which is really the height of the intellectual culture of the West, it’s like what? One in 1,000 people are even involved in this thing. It’s a lot.
But it’s not like...
What is it? Half of Americans go to college today, which is a ridiculous overexpansion of the program. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t go to college. I think the credential is unfortunately very important still. But—
Ben: Yeah. The system that—
Wolf: I think the colleges should be shut down and pared down to what they used to be, or what they should be in the future by some logic.
Ben: Yeah.
The question of how should you navigate given the system is a very different question from does the system actually serve the needs of society.
Wolf: Yeah, exactly. You should get your degree, but also the college system should be destroyed.
Yeah. But I think, okay, we could build better online infrastructure for intellectual Thunderdome style debate. I think another one, underrated, is the in-person book club.
Book clubs and vanguard parties (56:50)
Ben: Yes. I’ve gotten a ton out of these.
Wolf: Extremely powerful. If you get together half a dozen people of like mind on some dimensions, you read books together, you have your discussions together, it just absolutely forms people’s worldviews. It makes people much stronger in their understanding of the world. And also has all these auxiliary benefits in terms of these people are going to be your intellectual comrades for life.
Ben: Yeah. And if you look at the various vanguard parties within our current system, basically all of them are cliques of people who did a lot of intense reading together.
Wolf: You say within our current system. This is historically true as well, obviously. I think the early Communist Party famously doing a lot of reading.
Ben: Oh yeah. Lenin systematized the book club more than I think anybody else as a political tool.
Wolf: Yeah. The fascists, for example, I think Mussolini was some kind of dissident socialist from some book club that went wrong.
Ben: Really? That makes sense.
Wolf: There’s all kinds of... Went wrong, according to the other socialists. But yeah, there’s all kinds of power historically. Or even our modern economics and so on, it comes out of these effectively little intellectual networks that are reading books together. Yeah, so very powerful book clubs.
Book clubs are very powerful. We should do a lot more of that in this city. I think we do a little bit of it. But part of the issue there is everyone’s so busy, right? To get everyone coordinated around reading a particular book at a particular time and coming out, you have to relax something.
People don’t necessarily have the—
Ben: Well, this is because you’re trying to get a bunch of 35-year-olds who are in the middle of their careers and—in your book clubs.
Wolf: We need more NEETs. We need more NEETs. The NEETs are the future ruling class, for sure.
Ben: Yeah. And for those of you who are 22 years old and still have the time to be exploring and checking out things, I think that putting together a book club with some of your sharpest friends is a very good investment.
Wolf: Yeah, speaking of which, we should polish up our reading list and publish it.
Ben: Oh, yes. That’ll be fun.
Wolf: We did a good one back with Palladium. We launched a network of book clubs under Palladium. This was near the end. It was in 2023, near the end of my tenure. Some of them are still going very successfully.
But yeah, we put a lot of thought into, okay, suppose we want to yank some young Palladium reader out of their preconceptions and give them an actual grounding in the things we think are important. Here’s the 20 books that they should read, and they had a lot of fun with that. It was good. But we should do that again.
Yeah, the problem of how to create and maintain meritocratic intellectual culture is, in many ways, it’s very close to what we’re just trying to do with this project—with The Students. It’s called The Students for a reason, right? We are trying to create a culture among ourselves of actually doing the reading, actually doing the thinking, actually doing the argument, having the arguments frankly and unapologetically.
Ben: Yeah. There’s no way around it.
Wolf: There’s no way around it. And yeah. This is a very fruitful line of inquiry. I think we’ve been going for a while now. We could roll it up.
But it’s a good topic, and we should hit it again at some point.
Ben: For sure. Well, it’s a pleasure as always.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Ben, for coming on and discussing this with me, and I guess we’ll see you next time.