The Root Cause

EuanMcLean

The Root Cause

EuanMcLean

20 min read · Jun 17, 2025

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ThomNorman

I was interested in this because I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea that we might not give enough attention to bigger systems. But for me, this post only really strengthened my EA tendencies.

So the core argument in favour of the metacrisis being ‘a thing’ (upon which the later arguments that we should take it seriously hang) seems to be:

a. Technology makes us more powerfu and the world is more interconnected

b. As a result, our capacity for self destruction has massively increased

c. Our ‘culture, the implicit assumptions, symobls, sense-making tools and values of society’ are not ‘mature’ enough to ensure this capacity is managed in a low risk manner

d. Therefore, some kind of existential risk is more likely

Propositions A and B seem basically correct to me. But I think proposition C is very weak. I have two main problems with it:

1) there is just so many different things inside of that grouping, the article only makes an argument as to why a set of implicit assumptions are a cause of the problem, then sneaks in all this other stuff in this one central paragraph. It seems highly likely to me that some things (like society's values) are more important to how well the world goes than others (like symbols)

2) I think C stands to be proved. While there are many problems with society and global coordination, it seems like often at the crunch global coordination pulls through (nuclear proliferation, chemical weapons and CFCs are examples). I think you can make an argument we don’t have the right tools, but I think equally you can make at least as strong an argument to say that we know exactly what the right tools are and we should be putting our efforts into strengthening global institutions of coordination.

I think the Diego character makes a number of other mistakes which I’m not sure are necessarily core to the argument, but certainly weaken my sense of its credibility for me:

The idea that system change is intractable is just an intuition - this clearly isn’t true. If we look at successful social movements, they consistently work through breaking problems down and taking them one at a time. This ends up looking like systems change eventually because it can lead to paradigm shifts, but these shifts only come later on as an accumulation of smaller wins (some examples would be the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, universal suffrage in the UK). We can also point to plenty of folk talking about how everything is connected and getting no where at all. So the claim 'system change is not tractable' may not be correct, but it is clearly based on more than mere intuiton.
The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave. It only takes a small number of people to act in a rivalrous or antisocial manner for things to become bad, given we can't rule out that someone will behave in this way, we have to respond accordingly.
The argument that we ‘diefy’ technology and assume wealth is always good: this is almost straying into ‘degrowther’ territory. Technology is the primary driver of increased productivity and therefore a key part of driving growth. Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing. While I’m in favour of redistribution, I think we have to be realistic that simply stopping growth and improving people’s lives soley through redistribution would be politically impossible. It also places a celling on possible human wellbeing and so is plausibly much much worse than a world of high, sustainable growth.
The idea that the notion of the perfect/wellfunctioning market is rarely questioned: obviously not true, this is a hugely contested idea
(This is a small one): Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empyrically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent (among other things)
The argument that we know eventually civilisation will collapse because all previous civilisations have collapsed: this feels like a very ‘cakeism’ style argument, you can’t have it both ways. Either it is the case that the history of all these very different societies shows the inevitability of our eventual destruction (in which case it seems that changing our culture isn’t going to help) or culture is the key to our doom (in which case all these other cultures being destroyed can't be evidence about our own culture because the key variable is different)
Tractability is surprisingly high: how can you possibly assess the tractability of this problem when - in your own words - you have no idea what the problem is? Compare this to wild animal suffering (as Diego does): in wild animal suffering we have a clearly defined problem: lots of animals suffer a lot and this is bad. We have some solutions that actually seem very good, like getting rid of screw worms. There are some empirical frameworks we can use to assess the problems and make decisions, and we can at least in some cases run experiments to gain a better understanding. This all seems like much more progress towards tractable solutions than this metacrisis thing
Cultural change is actually happening very fast: Diego is using culture in two almost entirely different ways. First that its about our underlying paradigm for seeing the world to argue that culture is this deep seated root problem (for most of the article) then in this thin way about changing cultural artefacts or taste to argue that it changes very quickly. These are obviously two different propositions and one can’t be used to argue the other.

I like the idea of doing more thinking through Socratic dialogues and there were a couple of jokes here which actually made me laugh out loud. But it has left me closer to thinking this integral/metacrisis thing is lacking in substance. Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.

EuanMcLean

1y*

Thanks for your comment Thom.

In my response to this, I really want to avoid this vibe of “you just don’t understand” or “you need to wake up” and all that kind of thing. I know how annoying and unproductive that kind of response can be. In what I write below I’m not trying to just assert that my position is obviously more right, if only you could see through the matrix. I’m interested in clarifying the metacrisis position/how metacrisis folk think, as maybe if it becomes clear enough it will no longer seem obviously stupid to you!

That being said, the standard metacrisis-y response to most of what you’ve said here would be to try and pick apart the (modernist-y) assumptions that might lie underneath it. Being contextualizing isn’t just about awareness of the context of the system you’re studying, but also the context of your own mind/rationality/beliefs – all the quite deep assumptions driving those beliefs that work well in a number of contexts (like building bridges, training LLMs, or saving kids from malaria) but might not generalize as well as you think to statements about a rapidly evolving and highly interconnected world.

I’ll pick out a couple of examples to pick on from your comment:

> Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empirically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent

I want to pick on this because I think it’s a good example of what the vibey crowd like to call “scientism”, which in my head means something like the view that “the only possible way to know something to be true is if it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal”. That is obviously one of the most reliable ways to know something is true, but it limits your toolkit for making sense of the world.

In the case of modernity leading to a mental health crisis: yes, you’re right that it’s a very hard thing to measure, and therefore no signal has been found by any study. But when you include lived experience… I don’t know man, it just feels so true, at least in some sense, from my own life and the lives of so many around me. For example, there’s no signal that shows that social media can mess up teenagers’ mental health, but this exchange we’re having in the comments of the EA forum is making my muscles tense and my mind race, and when I extrapolate this to being a teenager and dealing with high stakes things like how I look or who fancies me, this is some good evidence for that causation in my book.

Sometimes I think of EA as the “analytical philosophy of changemaking” while metacrisis is the “continental philosophy of changemaking”, since in analytical philosophy something is true because you can prove it to be true, while in continental philosophy something is true because it feels true. We need both.

> Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing.

So… how are you defining human wellbeing here? In terms of stuff you can measure (life expectancy, economic prosperity, etc), yea there’s no argument, you’re right. But all the other things that contribute to a broader definition of wellbeing? Community, meaning, connection to nature, etc? Wellbeing is a complex beast. I don’t have the arguments or the data to say you’re wrong, but you’re saying it here without any argument as if this is obviously right.

You may well be right even in the broader sense of the word wellbeing, but a metacrisis person might also say that once you’ve optimised hard enough for economic growth, goodhart’s law bites you in the arse and growth starts to decorrelate from wellbeing. Some might argue that that is starting already (see, for example, Scandinavia scoring best on various happiness metrics while having a smaller economy than, say, the US).

To reiterate something I said in the post, I’m aware that if you’re constantly questioning everything and constantly having to keep all the mystery of the definitions of all your terms you’re using in your attention, you’ll never get anything done. Getting things done is good. But if you commit to some metric and then never revisit the assumptions behind it, you might find yourself getting the wrong things done when your optimisation pushes the world out of the regime in which your metric makes sense.

> The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave.

This feels like a statement about the strength & generality of game theory when applied to humans on various scales. The metacrisis nerds would probably try to poke at how much confidence you have in game theory to support the claim that rivalry will always arise. This kind of background acceptance in game theory has a modernist vibe.

Anyway, I don’t expect I’ve changed your mind on any of this, which is fine! Even if we don’t agree it’s good to more deeply understand each other’s position. Ok bye

ThomNorman

Thanks for responding to my points! You didn't have to go through line by line, but its appreciated.

Obviously a line by line response to your line by line response to my line by line response to your article would be somewhat over the top. So I'll refrain!

The general point I'd make though is that this almost feels like an argument for something before you've decided what you want to argue for. There feels like a conceptual hole in the middle of this piece (as you say, people are still trying to work out what the problem is). But then you also respond to most of (not all) my points without actually giving a counter-argument, just claiming that I'm clearly mistaken. This makes it quite hard to actually engage with what you've written.

Maybe, as Alexander seems to think, I'm just a poor blinkered fool who can't understand other people's perspectives - but I am actually tryign to engage with what you've written here, not sh*t posting.

EuanMcLean

1y*

Obviously a line by line response to your line by line response to my line by line response to your article would be somewhat over the top. So I'll refrain!

Yes we could waste our lives falling down a hole here.

But then you also respond to most of (not all) my points without actually giving a counter-argument, just claiming that I'm clearly mistaken.

Huh. I must have messed up the tone of my last message because that wasn't the intention at all. For some of my responses I thought I was basically agreeing with you, and others I was clarifying what I (or rather Diego) was trying to say rather than saying you are wrong.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]

hbesceli

I liked this comment and thought it raised a bunch of interesting points, thanks for writing it.

> Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.

I had a bit of a negative reaction to this comment - it seems a bit uncharitable to me

ThomNorman

Thanks!

I had a bit of a negative reaction to this comment - it seems a bit uncharitable to me

That's fair, I might have been a bit mean there!

Alexander Herwix 🔸

-6

I don't want to engage in a point by point rebuttal but just want to encourage you to engage more critically with the assumptions that you bottom out your argument with. All of these can and have been reasonably questioned. In particular, how to think about progress and its relationship to technology and the innocuousness of defining "problems" as decoupled from their particular contexts.

> But it has left me closer to thinking this integral/metacrisis thing is lacking in substance. Putting this author aside, it seems like many of the folk who talk about this stuff are merely engaging in self-absorbed obscurantism.

I wonder if this statement might simply reflect your ability to understand and steelman other people's perspectives. Food for thought?!

ThomNorman

I wonder if this statement might simply reflect your ability to understand and steelman other people's perspectives. Food for thought?!

Now this is uncharitable

Alexander Herwix 🔸

10mo

-4

So, you do it on purpose, not out of inability? Thanks for clarifying.

Neel Nanda

Thanks for writing this! I'm broadly sympathetic to Thom's critique, but thought this was impressively well written and good at engagingly/non-annoyingly conveying a different perspective, so kudos. I would love to see more posts in that genre.

Chris Leong

1y*

Interesting post.

I think it did a good job of explaining why the metacrisis might be relevant from an EA standpoint (the dialogue format was a great choice!). I made a similar (but different) argument - that Less Wrong should be paying attention to the sensemaking space - back in 2021^[1] and it may still be helpful for readers who want to get better sense of the scene^[2].

Unfortunately, I'm with Amina. Short AI timelines are looking increasingly likely and culture change tends to take a long time, so the argument for prioritising this isn't looking as promising as it previously did^[3]. It's a shame that some of these conversations didn't start happening a decade or two earlier than they did. Some of these conversations could have been great for preparing the (intellectual) soil and it could have provided motiviation for working on generally useful infrastructure at the point in time when it made sense to be doing that.

Another worry I have about the metacrisis framing is that it, by default, it seems to imply that we should think of all these threats as being on par, when that increasingly doesn't seem to actually be the case.

Amina: This all feels impenetrable to me. They use a bunch of jargon and a lot of it sounds floaty, vague or mental.
Diego: Yea I get that too. It reminds me of how I felt the first time I encountered EA.

I felt this response leaned a bit popularist. I think it's pretty clear that conversation in sensemaking space is much less precise than EA/rationality on average. The flip side of the coin is that the sensemaking space is open to ideas that would be less likely to resonate in EA/rationality. Whether this trade-off is worth it comes down to factors like how valuable these ideas tend to be, how valuable it is to avoid incorrectly adopting confused beliefs vs. incorrectly rejecting fruitful ideas and the purpose of the movement.

FWIW, I was a lot more positive on the sensemaking space back in the day, now I'm a lot more uncertain. I think there's a lot of fruitful ideas there, but I'm not convinced that the scene has the tools that it needs to identify which ideas are or aren't fruitful.

^{^}
Though certainly not as well as you are doing here!
^{^}
Or at least how it was back in 2021, I haven't really followed it in a while.
^{^}
Your counter-arguments make reasonable points, but they aren't strong enough (in my opinion) to outweigh the arguments you've put them up against.

Camille

This helped clarify things a bit, thanks -not the least because I've interacted with some of you lately.

I'm still mostly skeptical because of the amount of implicit conjunctions (a solution that solves A & B & C & D & E seems less plausible to exist than several specialised solutions), how common it is for extremely effective ideas to be specialised (rather than the knock-on result of a general idea) and the vague similarity with "Great Idea" death spiral traits. All of this said, I'm in favor of keeping the discussion open. Fox mindset rules.

For those who need clarification, I think I understand four non-exclusive example avenues of what "solving the metacrisis" looks like (all the names are 100% made-up but useful for me to think about it):

1-"Systemism" postulates the solution has to do with complex system stuff. You really want to solve AI X-risk ? Don’t try to build OpenAI, says the systemist, instead, do :

1.1-One gigabrained single intervention that truly addresses all the problems at the same time (maybe « Citizen Assemblies but better »)

1.2-A conjunction of interventions that mutually reinforces each other in a feedback loop (maybe « Citizen Assemblies » + « UBI » + « Empowerment in social help »)

Will this intervention solve one or all problems ? Again, opinions diverge :

1.3-Each intervention should solve one problem -a bigger one, and to a better extent, than conventional solutions.

1.4-This intervention should solve all the problems

1.5-The intervention should solve one problem, but you can « copy-paste » it, it has high transferrability.

2-"Introspectivism" postulates the solution has to do with changing the way we relate to ourselves and the rest of the world. You really want to solve AI X-risk ? Again, don’t build OpenAI, but go meditate, learn NVC, use Holacracy.

3-"Integralism" postulates the solution is to incorporate criticism of all different paradigms. You really want to solve AI X-risk ? Make your plans consistent with Marxism, Heidegerian Phenomenology and Buddhism, and you’ll get there.

4-"Culturalism" postulates that cultural artifacts (workshops, books, a social movement, and/or memes in general) will suceed to change how people act and coordinate, such that reducing X-risks becomes feasible. Don't try to build OpenAI, think about cultural artifacts -but not books about AI Risk, more like books about coordination and communication.

Separately, I think discussing disagreements around the meta-crisis is going to be hard.

Why? I think that there is a disparity in relevance heuristics among EA and... well, the rest of the world. EA has analytical and pragmatic relevance heuristics. "Meta-crisis people" have a social relevance heuristic, and some other streams of thoughts have a phenomenological relevance heuristic.

Think Cluster Headache. I think many people attempted to say that Cluster Headaches could matter a big deal. But they said stuff we (or at least, I) didn't necessarily understand, like "it's very intense. You become pain. You can't understand". Then decades later, someone says "maybe suffering is exponential, not linear, and CH is an intensity where this insight is very clear". And then (along with other numerate considerations) we progressively started caring (or at least, I started caring).

All these systems can communicate with EA if and only if they succeed to formalize / pragmaticize themselves to some degree, and I personally think this is what people like Jan Kulveit, Andres G. Emilsson, or Richard Ngo are (inadvertently ?) doing. I'd suggest doing this for meta-crisis (math > dialogues) otherwise people may backfire.

MildAbandon

This is well written and engaging, thank you.

I'm coming in with a cleaner-adjacent perspective.

I have many friends who espouse many of these ideas. They talk about systems level change. They talk about the challenge of imagining anything outside of the current paradigm. They talk about non-zero sum approaches, they talk about moving beyond competition. They talk about economic growth being a poor measure of utility.

They don't call themselves "metacrisis" people, though, and they don't see their enemy as "modernity".

They call themselves anarchists and they see capitalism as the enemy.

That sounds like I'm putting your argument down - I'm not. Anarchism is poorly defined and so often misunderstood and I don't think it actually has the answers.

But I don't think the concept of the metacrisis is preparadigmatic - I think so many of concepts are there within the anarchists, anticapitalists, post modernists or critical theorists. And at the same time many of the concepts and the challenges are also there in the underpinnings of populism and authoritarianism.

As far as I can see, the metacrisis an issue of systems of power which do not deliver optimal outcomes. This is by no means a preparadigmatic problem. It's not a problem we've solved, but let's not pretend it's a new concept.

Alexander Herwix 🔸

Thanks for sharing this! It's an entertaining read and a valuable reminder of the limits of our perspectives. I love how the cleaner shows up at the end. True koan vibes!

SummaryBot

Executive summary: Through a fictional yet philosophically rich dialogue, the post explores the idea that existential risks like AI doom are not just technical challenges but symptoms of a deeper “metacrisis”—a mismatch between the accelerating power of our technologies and the immaturity of our cultural and societal systems—arguing that the Effective Altruism movement should include this systems-level lens in its epistemic toolkit, even if the path forward is speculative and the tractability uncertain.

Key points:

Hopelessness in AI safety stems from systemic issues, not just technical difficulty: The conversation between Amina and Diego illustrates that AI alignment efforts, while vital, may be insufficient due to external forces like corporate races, shareholder pressure, and political gridlock.
Effective Altruism’s “decoupled” problem-solving mindset may limit its scope: Diego critiques EA’s tendency to abstract and isolate problems from their broader social and cultural context, suggesting that this framing can miss key drivers of existential risk.
The “metacrisis” is proposed as a root cause of x-risk: Diego introduces the idea that existential risks arise from a deeper cultural mismatch—our technological powers have outpaced our society’s collective wisdom and coordination capacity.
A parallel movement focused on systems thinking is emerging: Diego highlights a loosely affiliated cluster (called the “metacrisis movement”) that values interconnectedness, culture, and paradigm-level change, distinguishing it from EA’s marginal and analytical focus.
The metacrisis may be a high-impact but low-tractability cause area: Using EA’s scale-neglectedness-tractability framework, the post argues the metacrisis is massive in scale and underexplored, though challenging to address—potentially justifying early investment in clarifying the problem.
Recommendation: broaden the EA epistemic toolkit: Rather than replacing existing EA priorities, the post suggests integrating metacrisis-informed perspectives as a complementary lens to diversify worldview assumptions and enhance decision-making across cause areas.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

KevinCorneliusFlynn

I’ve developed what I call a “course” which in my humble opinion answers the questions posed in this article. It examines the root cause of the metacrisis and the race to the bottom, which is also referred to as the tragedy of the commons or “moloch”. My course offers up the best way in which we as a species should try to change our mindset in order to give ourselves the best chance at immediate, intermediate and long term survival.
As alluded to in this article or story, from a philosophical standpoint, the same “teachings” and “understandings” which will be required for us to wrestle with, come to grips with and use to overcome the old school problems, or metacrisis, are the same as those which will be required to try to train AI so that it is aligned with that which is in the most beneficial long term interests of the human race as a species.

Shubhorup Biswas

7mo*

Because so far, all civilisations destroy themselves eventually. Human history is basically a story of civilisations forming, being stable for a short time, and collapsing. The Babylonians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottomans. They all fell.

The entities that collapsed would be more accurately described as states/dynasties, not civilisations. These were not human settlements that just vanished. Some fell to external pressures, or at least had their stresses exacerbated by them.

They all fell. But when they fell it wasn’t the end of humanity, because they were just local collapses.

It wasn't the end of humanity because they were replaced by their human local competitors/internal revolts. The collapse of Rome may have been followed by a sustained economic regression in the region but I don't think the same can be said of the others.

For any civilisation/state there are only two possible outcomes

Collapse before being integrated into the current modernist/globalist system
Survive long enough to be integrated into the globalist system

(Excluding the few states/civilisations that went about creating the current system)

There were states/civilisations that collapsed on contact with the globalist system which could be classified under 1 or 2(you could also classify integration as collapse).

tl;dr The assertion that 'all civilisations eventually destroy themselves' is very loadbearing and I think needs quite a bit more support, because

The examples you cite involve human states/dynasties being replaced by other human states/dynasties and not civilisational collapse
There are examples of states/dynasties that have survived to become a part of the modern interconnected civilisation, which is the only other possibility apart from collapse

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ThomNorman

I was interested in this because I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea that we might not give enough attention to bigger systems. But for me, this post only really strengthened my EA tendencies.

So the core argument in favour of the metacrisis being ‘a thing’ (upon which the later arguments that we should take it seriously hang) seems to be:

a. Technology makes us more powerfu and the world is more interconnected

b. As a result, our capacity for self destruction has massively increased

c. Our ‘culture, the implicit assumptions, symobls, sense-making tools and values of society’ are not ‘mature’ enough to ensure this capacity is managed in a low risk manner

d. Therefore, some kind of existential risk is more likely

Propositions A and B seem basically correct to me. But I think proposition C is very weak. I have two main problems with it:

I think the Diego character makes a number of other mistakes which I’m not sure are necessarily core to the argument, but certainly weaken my sense of its credibility for me:

The idea that system change is intractable is just an intuition - this clearly isn’t true. If we look at successful social movements, they consistently work through breaking problems down and taking them one at a time. This ends up looking like systems change eventually because it can lead to paradigm shifts, but these shifts only come later on as an accumulation of smaller wins (some examples would be the abolition of slavery, LGBT rights, universal suffrage in the UK). We can also point to plenty of folk talking about how everything is connected and getting no where at all. So the claim 'system change is not tractable' may not be correct, but it is clearly based on more than mere intuiton.
The idea that rivalry (caused by human nature) is a background assumption and not necessarily the case: the point here surely is that, yes of course humans can be more or less cooperative at times and given different cultural assumptions, but this kind of game theory describes dynamics that are independent of how most people behave. It only takes a small number of people to act in a rivalrous or antisocial manner for things to become bad, given we can't rule out that someone will behave in this way, we have to respond accordingly.
The argument that we ‘diefy’ technology and assume wealth is always good: this is almost straying into ‘degrowther’ territory. Technology is the primary driver of increased productivity and therefore a key part of driving growth. Growth has historically been the single biggest driver of human welbeing. While I’m in favour of redistribution, I think we have to be realistic that simply stopping growth and improving people’s lives soley through redistribution would be politically impossible. It also places a celling on possible human wellbeing and so is plausibly much much worse than a world of high, sustainable growth.
The idea that the notion of the perfect/wellfunctioning market is rarely questioned: obviously not true, this is a hugely contested idea
(This is a small one): Modernity has led to the mental health crisis: I’m just not sure this empyrically stacks up. It is really hard to measure mental health over time, given that its measurement is so culturally contingent (among other things)
The argument that we know eventually civilisation will collapse because all previous civilisations have collapsed: this feels like a very ‘cakeism’ style argument, you can’t have it both ways. Either it is the case that the history of all these very different societies shows the inevitability of our eventual destruction (in which case it seems that changing our culture isn’t going to help) or culture is the key to our doom (in which case all these other cultures being destroyed can't be evidence about our own culture because the key variable is different)
Tractability is surprisingly high: how can you possibly assess the tractability of this problem when - in your own words - you have no idea what the problem is? Compare this to wild animal suffering (as Diego does): in wild animal suffering we have a clearly defined problem: lots of animals suffer a lot and this is bad. We have some solutions that actually seem very good, like getting rid of screw worms. There are some empirical frameworks we can use to assess the problems and make decisions, and we can at least in some cases run experiments to gain a better understanding. This all seems like much more progress towards tractable solutions than this metacrisis thing
Cultural change is actually happening very fast: Diego is using culture in two almost entirely different ways. First that its about our underlying paradigm for seeing the world to argue that culture is this deep seated root problem (for most of the article) then in this thin way about changing cultural artefacts or taste to argue that it changes very quickly. These are obviously two different propositions and one can’t be used to argue the other.