Far from the Madding Crowd

I recently finished reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. I had to look up that name just now to spell it - I've been a fan of James' writing for two decades, mostly his excellent column "The Financial Page" in The New Yorker, and have been curious about this book for a while, but just finally got around to reading it. My immediate impetus for checking it out was noticing it on this list of best financial books as compiled by Larry Swedroe. A lot of those are books I've already read and loved, a few I know I'm not interested in, but a few ones like this jumped out at me and gave me a nudge to finally read them.

 

 

TWoC is a great read, the kind of book that's entertaining and makes you feel smart, like you've learned something both personally useful and true about the universe. It feels a bit Malcolm Gladwell-y, in the best positive sense. Like a lot of books in this genre, it's focused around a simple thesis: in this case, that groups of people tend to make better decisions than individuals. Groups are more than the sum of their parts, smarter than the smartest people in them, and can collectively arrive at solutions beyond any individual.

The first example he opens with is the classic example of a contest to guess the number of items in a large jar - how many gumballs or jelly beans or ping-pong balls or whatever. At a state fair people will write down their guess and submit it. At the end, if you add up everyone's guesses and divide by the number of entries, you'll end up with a really great approximation of the answer. In fact, that average answer will often be closer than any individual guesser. He gives a lot of other examples of groups collectively arriving at good solutions, both to complex problems (finding where a submarine landed deep on the ocean floor) and seemingly mundane ones (how to walk down a crowded sidewalk).

One thing that surprised me, though, is that after introducing the thesis, he spends more time exploring examples that seem to contradict the thesis: cases where crowds acted dumbly, where adding more people led to a worse solution, where something that worked well at a small level failed to scale up to a larger one. I think this really helps clarify the main point: by seeing what doesn't work, we can identify what does. The real world is, of course, complicated. We can't say "A always causes B!" We can say "A usually leads to B!" And then we can think about why that's the case, and what makes it more likely for A to lead to B, and what obstacles might prevent A from reaching B.

James classifies the types of problems crowds face into three main types, what he calls "cognition problems," "coordination problems" and "cooperation problems." (Again, this feels pretty Gladwell-y.) Cognition problems are the simplest type, and are cases where there is a specific right answer to find. You don't know at the outset what that answer is, but at some point in the future you will know whether you chose correctly or not. The gumballs-in-a-jar problem is one example, and so are "Where did the submarine crash to the ocean floor?" and even "How much money will this company earn over the next 20 years?" or "Who will be the next President of the United States"? There are multiple ways that groups can organize to tackle these problems, and he is a big fan of a "market" organization, where people bid on their best guesses: putting some skin in the game seems to drastically help the accuracy of predictions. (As a loyal Patreon subscriber to Election Profit Makers, I was intrigued by the description of the Iowa Electronic Market, a forerunner to PredictIt, Polymarket and other modern prediction markets.)

In a "coordination problem," there isn't some fact (past, present, or future) that you're trying to uncover. Instead, a group needs to decide how to accomplish some task, with everyone acting as individuals. Most of his examples here involve traffic, like busy New York City sidewalks or congested freeways. What's interesting about coordination problems is that, as a species, we are actually really good at coordinating, and we tend to do it without much thinking of direction. When scientists studied pedestrians, they discovered that pedestrians don't walk directly behind one another: each one walks slightly to the side of the person in front of them, so they can peer over their shoulder and see what's ahead. We do that for our own benefit, so we can be prepared if foot traffic is snarling ahead, but it also benefits everyone else in the group, since it keeps traffic moving smoothly.

Another example he looks at that I really liked is seating on a subway car. During rush hour, there are more riders than there are seats available. So we have a coordination problem to solve: who should get seats? The unspoken system we've landed with is simple: if you'd like to sit, and there's an open seat, you take it. (With of course caveats for handicapped seats.) Now, you can definitely argue that this isn't an optimal system, and it certainly isn't the only system you can imagine. Maybe we should prioritize giving seats to the people who have the longest to ride - that does seem fair. But if we were to implement that system, then you would need to have some Seating Czar on each subway car, who would quiz each rider as they boarded, compare their travel plans to others already on the car, and reassign seats as needed. Or each boarding rider would need to quiz every other rider to determine their seating order. The system we ended up with is good enough, much simpler and has way less overhead, and it actually does end up having an effect like that ideal system: people who are riding for longer will have more chances to claim seats, so while it won't necessarily be "fair" 100% of the time, it will be pretty fair most of the time. That's decent coordination.

Pretty much everything in the book is based on published scientific studies, not anecdotes, which I appreciated. In the coordination section, he notes that a lot of our behavior is strongly influenced by culture. People feel strongly about queues, for example, and will react strongly if someone asks to cut into a queue; on the other hand, people are much more willing to give up a subway seat if politely requested. The line is a more powerful force in our psyche than a subway car. Behavioral economists and sociologists have played "coordination games" in different countries around the world, and found differences in how players behave. Which is fine - again, for coordination there isn't necessarily a "right" or a "wrong" answer. We can all agree to drive on the left, or we can all agree to drive on the right, and as long as we're all doing it the same way we've successfully coordinated.

The last, and most challenging, class of problem he considers is the "cooperation problem." In this case, you are trying to solve a problem and make something happen: work as a construction crew to build a building, or as a party committee to put on a prom, or as NASA to bring a shuttle of astronauts safely back to Earth. One of the inherently hard things about this type of problem is that there isn't a clear black-or-white "right answer", but there definitely are good outcomes (everyone had a good time at Prom!) and bad outcomes (nobody had a good time at Prom!). With a cooperation problem, you need to decide what needs to be done, how to do it, and execute on it.

There are lots of different ways to organize things. You could have a pure committee, where each person gets one vote, and everyone does what the majority says. You could have a dictatorship, where one person (the boss) decides what to do, and makes everyone do it. And everything in between: pyramidal management structures, affinity groups, multiple classes of participants, etc.

In general, James likes broad-based groups, to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Adding more voices can bring in more ideas, help identify blind spots, and lead to better outcomes. He goes into a lot of detail on where this is and isn't effective. Diversity is very important - not sociological diversity, but people with different perspectives and background who bring unique thoughts to the table. Adding a bunch more Harvard MBAs likely won't improve decision-making, but adding a mix of MBAs, long-time employees, outsiders from other organizations, and customers will.

He writes about "private knowledge," which just means something unique that one person has which isn't shared by everyone. This could be some expertise, but also just having had a previous experience in the past, or knowing a random fact. The sum of all the private knowledge in a group will be greater than the private knowledge of even the most knowledgeable person. So an interesting quality of many group dynamics is that, if you add "dumber" people to a group, the decisions that group makes can actually become "smarter". The total knowledge of the group increases additively, it isn't reduced to the mean.

But, how the group is organized has a huge impact on realizing this potential. There's a long and kind of heart-breaking example of the Columbia explosion, and the days of internal NASA meetings that completely failed to handle the problem. (The underlying issue: there was a botched takeoff, which damaged the foam and protective heat tiles. When it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of the mission, the intense heat destroyed the shuttle.) One big aspect of this was management: the mission manager chair Linda Ham quickly settled on an interpretation of the facts that she liked, and downplayed and cut off other voices who suggested alternative (and, it turns out, better) explanations. This is a really wrenching section to read, I think especially because the dynamics shown here are often seen in workplaces throughout the country, but with the severest consequences.

James doesn't just blame the one person at top (even if the fact one person was driving everything contributed to the problem). He rhetorically asks, what was the difference between the Apollo 13 mission and the Columbia mission? One answer is that the Apollo 13 ground control was much more diverse. As he points out, that is a kind of shocking thing to say: when you see photos of the Apollo-era ground control, everyone has identical haircuts, identical classes and identical short-sleeved shirts. But because NASA was so new, everyone had worked somewhere else before joining. Some were ex-military, some were in manufacturing, some had worked in research labs, some managed retail stores. By contrast, by the time of the Columbia disaster, NASA was a much more insular and bureaucratic operation. Most people there had joined right out of college and spent their entire careers inside NASA. Because of that they all shared the same culture, similar mindsets and attitudes towards hierarchies. That made it far less likely for someone to speak up to challenge the decision of a leader, and even less likely to press on an issue once they had been shut down.

The book is filled with nifty examples like that. It is very much a relic of its time, having been written in 2004, and I felt a little sad reading James's praises of Google. I was reminded of just how magical Google was back then - you could type something into a search box and it did a really good job at finding you the information you needed. He explains how the PageRank algorithm works, which is essentially a voting mechanism, tapping into the "wisdom of crowds" to find the most useful information instead of relying on a single authoritative source (a la Yahoo at the time). Google's fall from grace has been well-documented, and I'm a bit more sympathetic to their decline: even before the disastrous decision to remove the wall between Search and Ads, Google had been dealing for over a decade with an entire SEO industry that had sprung up specifically to manipulate its algorithm into unduly weighting preferred sites. Voting worked well when the data was clean, but when you vote with dirty data you'll get dirty results.

It was also interesting to read about business in the window after the tech bubble crash of the late 90s-early 2000s and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. I don't think the GFC invalidated anything he wrote here, but he certainly would have referenced it if it had already happened. In the context of this book, an asset bubble like tech stocks is probably a more applicable example than a systemic financial problem like the GFC.

I think of James primarily as a business writer, but TWoC as a whole is much less about business than I had expected. He draws mostly from science and sociology, with smatterings of history, pop culture and other fields. There are more business examples as the book continues, but he mostly pays attention to how things work inside individual businesses, especially at the level of small teams. This is much more micro than most of my business and econ reading these days, which are far more focused on macro. But the micro level is much more applicable to our lives, the level where we can recognize problems and systems and personally act to fix them.

I found myself thinking periodically of Nexus while reading this, and parts of this book seemed to be in conversation with that one, but that may be because I read them back-to-back. Both books are interested in information, and have examples where adding more information leads to a worse outcome. Returning to that gumball example, late in the book James recounts a study where a professor ran the classic experiment, and as usual got a pretty accurate result. He didn't share this result with his class, but instead asked them to submit new guesses, this time prompting them to note that the container was made out of plastic, and that the area under the cap could contain additional gumballs. All of this is information students could have, and maybe did, observe in the first round, and all of the information he shared was true. And yet in the second round of voting, guesses came in significantly over the actual answer. Having an authority figure inject additional information skewed the natural accuracy of the crowd and drew it astray. That's interesting!

Overall I think the Wisdom of Crowds is a more optimistic book than Nexus. It's hopeful that crowds can identify the truth that points to an underlying reality, collectively making discoveries. That isn't a guarantee, and there are definitely ways that crowds can be drawn astray or hijacked by bad actors, but in general we as a society do our best work when we're cooperating in groups. He has some thoughtful pages on the implications for democracy as well. It's pretty shocking how poorly informed voters are: most people (at least as of 2004, though I doubt it's much better now) believe that the US spends 20-40% of its tax dollars on foreign aid, when it's actually less than 1%. Collectively, we're shockingly ignorant about economics, foreign policy, and most big-picture topics. And yet, we (historically) have done a decent job at electing leaders who do a decent job at handling those things. Some of us daydream of a technocratic elite that knows stuff and can do things, but the dumb masses end up with a system that works just as well, and is (theoretically) more resistant to capture or authoritarianism.

So, yeah! I liked this book, it's one of those general topics that I think will be interesting and relevant to most people.

Veilguard

Woo! I've finished Dragon Age: Veilguard. I was debating writing one more post before starting the final mission, and opted to save it for after finishing the game, but now I kind of wish I'd gone ahead: there is a lot that happens in the endgame, both gameplay-wise and story-wise, and I feel now like I'm writing about the last half of the game instead of the last third. That's a good thing, of course: the game gets even more compelling as it rockets to the finish.

 

 

Some random notes before dropping onto spoilers:

 

 

I love all the companion conversations. There's the traditional ambient banters you hear while wandering around zones, but also a lot more back at the base, both ambient chats you overhear while walking near characters and a surprising number of full cinematic cutscenes between companions. I think that makes sense because of the smaller party size - when you had 3 companions you had 3 possible banter partners while out questing, but with 2 companions there is only 1 possible banter partner. And you're unlikely to have, say, your two warriors in the party at the same time since they don't synergize, so it's much more important to have more character development and bonding back at the base. Anyways, I love this change: you used to have great companion moments as a side-effect of their personal quests, but in Veilguard it's very common to have great companion moments for their own sake.

 

 

The economy is really good throughout the entire game, and I think this is probably my favorite economic system of any Dragon Age Game, or really any BioWare game. Money is a bit tight throughout the game, and you want to be strategic about what you spend on. I never bought a single cosmetic (armor or decoration), and just spent on the gear I would personally use (bows, light armor, light vitaars) and gear my companions would actively use. You don't need to spend to be viable since you get a lot of gear through chests and quest rewards, but spending on gear you actually use does make a meaningful difference, unlocking additional abilities and increasing stats. Even at the very end of the game I was turning down nice-to-haves to support my must-haves.

 

I should note that I had a very completionist playthrough. I think I skipped a few treasure chests and maybe one or two Fen'harel Altars, but as far as I know I took and finished every optional quest in the game. So someone who didn't do all those quests would have found money even tighter. You could probably squeeze out more gold than me since some merchants will buy raw materials, so after upgrading all the shops and my gear I could have liquidated my remaining stash of heartwood, lyrium-infused ore and the like; I'm pretty confident that would have only a relatively limited increase in overall gold, though, I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy everything no matter what.

 

 

Along the same lines of being completionist, the game has a hard level cap of 50, and I hit that relatively late in the game but prior to reaching the point of no return. That did make a few quests feel a bit useless since they only rewarded XP, but most quests will also give some gear and gold or faction strength, so they're all still worth doing. I was able to get all of the skills that I wanted; there were a few random upgrades buried deep in other trees that I didn't bother going for.

 

 

The game keeps track of your "faction strength" with the various groups in northern Thedas. You increase it by completing quests for that faction (like pushing out the Antaam in Treviso for the Antivan Crows or strengthening defenses in the Anderfels for the Grey Wardens) and by selling them "valuables" (aka junk). As I noted in an earlier post, some but not all valuables have a premium in reputation gain for a specific faction. You can find some spreadsheets online that break it down, but I found it easier to wait until I had a big stock, then visit all the factions in turn, selling off the 15+ reputation items at each shop, then the 8+ rep items, and finally selling all my 3 rep items to my lowest-ranked faction. I was able to get every faction up to its maximum strength by the end of the game; oddly, the last faction to reach it was the Shadow Dragons, which was my PC's background and the group I had most dramatically aided in the game.

 

 

I played the game on "Adventurer" difficulty, which is the default; I usually like to play one step above normal, but since Veilguard is more action-y and less tactical I didn't want to push it. It took a while for me to get the swing of combat, but it ended up being pretty fun. Time pauses when you bring up the party menu (R1 on a controller), and I found myself using this like I'd use the spacebar on the old real-time-with-pause BioWare games, looking around the battlefield to locate enemies and see if I was being targeted. This did get slightly annoying late in the game: there are some combat encounters where, in addition to attacking or defending against enemies you also need to destroy Blight Boils or Venatori Crystals or other elements; but you can't lock onto these, so I would often end up accidentally targeting some dumb enemy instead of the Blight boil I actually wanted to destroy.

 

 

I was a Veil Ranger rogue, wearing light armor. Once my build came online it felt very powerful. I had significantly increased Momentum generation, especially when targeting weakpoints; I could slow down time while aiming, which cost a little Momentum, but I'd immediately get it back when a shot connected; and I dealt bonus damage based on my current (nearly always full) Momentum. So while in the early game I tended to spend Momentum as it came up with elemental attacks that I could combo with my companions, by the end of the game my companions would just combo with each other while I did an endless series of rapid headshots. It's super effective!

 

 

 

I really like how different each enemy faction feels. They aren't just different skins on the same weak/strong/elite stat blocks. When you're fighting against darkspawn, it feels like hyou're desperately trying to beat back an endless wave of zombbies. Individual darkspawn enemies have very low health and can be taken down in a single headshot, and with AOE you can clear out a whole bunch of Darkspawn at once; but if you let them swam you it gets extremely hard to break free and fight them off. Antaam are kind of the opposite, with a few huge, beefy enemies that all have barriers or armor, as well as Centurions with unbreakable shields. Antaam can stagger you and knock you around the battlefield. They generally move slowly so you have to maintain a careful distance from them, looking for openings to get in a few hits, and repeat the dance until you gradually wear them down. And shades and demons blink and teleport around the battlefield, as they've done since Dragon Age: Origins, which is really disorienting: they're kind of weak like darkspawn, but you need to chase them around or they'll mess you up. Overall darkspawn were probably my most satisfying enemy to fight and Ventari my least favorite, due to how hard it is to hit their assassins; I suspect that different builds and playstyles will fare differently against each faction.

 

There's some big variance in difficulty throughout the game. A few big boss fights, especially the optional "hidden" bosses and ones in the Crossroads, required optimized loadouts (like swapping out Electric attacks for Necrotic) and multiple retries after long battles. Many other boss fights felt surprisingly trivial, with me easily steamrolling them on the first try. It's possible this is a side-effect of my build, and again, a warrior or rogue might have found these difficulties reversed. The variance in difficulty didn't bother me at all, it was just a little surprising how widely the apparent difficulty varied.

 

 

There is a fair amount of map re-use throughout the game, but it feels much better than in Dragon Age 2. In DA2, you had literally the same map, but the game would pretend it was something different: "We're in the Deep Roads!" "We're in the catacombs!" "We're in the bandit lair!" In DAV, you'll have marquee quests that take place in existing zone maps, but fast travel beacons are disabled and some passages are barricaded off. But it narratively makes sense, like there's an army attacking this location or something. And it raises rather than lowers the stakes, because you already are familiar with this place, both narratively and in the gameplay. 

 

It took a while for me to realize it, but companions actually have two separate meters, "approval" and "bond". It seems to be much easier to get approval than disapproval, although that might be the effect of my make-everyone-like-me instincts. You get "bond" by certain story decisions, having someone in your party when you finish a side-quest, and defeating enemies that companion particularly dislikes. "Bond" is the most important from a gameplay perspective, as your companions gain Ability points when they increase their Bond to the next rank.

 

 

I spread around my Bond as much as possible, generally bringing along lower-bonded companions when taking random side-quests. Before heading in to the endgame I had a single companion at the maximum Bond of 10 and everyone else was at Bond 9; by the end of the game I had brought two more people up to Bond 10. At Bond 10 you can fully fill out three of their five skill trees, which is effectively the maximum since you can only have three skills equipped at a time. I did frequently re-set their skill points so they would synergize with whoever else was in the party at the moment.

MINI SPOILERS

Completing a companion's personal quest will make them a Hero of the Veilguard, a special status that also unlocks a new passive ability and a Legendary suit of armor. There is a slightly repetitive system to this: near the end of each person's quest you help them choose between one of two paths, and I think the specific ability you get will depend on the choice they make, as well as this ultimately affecting their fate at the end of the game. Davin chooses whether to return the griffons to the service of the Wardens or to release them to the wilds of Arlathan Forest; Bellara chooses whether to continue plumbing the depths of the past with the help of the Archives or to destroy them and release her people from the bonds of history, and so on. I didn't find any of these choices especially hard to make, either one path felt clearly better or the stakes seemed too light to really concern me.

 

 

The first person I got to Hero status was Harding, which is appropriate since she was the one I was romancing. It does feel like I may have missed a few story beats. Harding's story seemed like the climax was about her denying her anger... but I don't remember her anger being discussed before then. It makes me wonder if I skipped a conversation along the way, or maybe some content was cut, or maybe it would have made more sense if I'd been following a "friendship" dialogue path instead of my "romance" dialogue path.

 

 

Likewise, there's a whole storyline about The Butcher in Antiva. Right before dying he gives a big speech about his motivation which doesn't seem to line up with what we've learned about him up until then: all of a sudden he's talking about how much he loves Antiva and he's willing to become blighted and killed to prove that we love the city as much as he does (!?!?). I kind of feel like each of these kind of quests could have been the basis for their own game, and we ended up getting sort of the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the story.

MEGA SPOILERS

There are repeated, or at least rhyming, story beats. Family loss, for example, is a big part of both Bellara and Taash's storylines. But it's interesting to see the differences between them. Bellara mourns her brother Cyrian as part of a community with its rituals; Taash's mourning of her mother is more lonely but feels at least as powerful. There's also a strong emphasis on cities, especially Treviso and Dock Down, and we hear multiple, but slightly varied, monologues on the value of cities, how despite their faults they are sources of vibrancy and connection.

 

 

I really enjoyed the long and complex regional plots, which play out over all three acts and feed into the finale. In Minrathous, there's a street-level story, primarily associated with Neve but not exclusively linked to her, about the corruption of law enforcement and the role of the Threads crime syndicate, which ultimately rolls up into a bigger story about Venatori infiltrating the Magisterium, which leads to a huge choice about whether to make Dorian or Maevaris the new Archon. I opted for Dorian; Maevaris is very cool, I haven't read any of the comics she's in but I do know a bit about her role in Thedas outside of this game, but ultimately Dorian is my bro from Inquisition so I had to go with him. (As my previous post on this blog noted, these days I'm also more in tune with "bring a gun to a gun fight" thinking than "when they go low we go high", which also tilts me more towards Dorian's program for bold action to dismantle corrupt influences than Maevaris's more idealistic campaign of radical transparency.)

 

 

As an aside, I don't think any of the subsequent Dragon Age games have yet topped the agonizing moral choices in Origins, like whether to save or destroy Caridin's Forge and whether to support Prince Bhelan or Lord Harrowmont as ruler of Orzammar. I think part of it is that those were all very deeply flawed choices with huge downsides and moral qualms. I like both Dorian and Maevaris, either one would be a huge improvement over the status quo, and I can theorize about how is most likely to succeed or do the most good. That's different from choosing which group of people to damn or embracing murderous authoritarianism in the hopes of securing social rights.

 

 

Treviso also had a great story. You think that it's going to be about the occupation of the Antaam, but you eventually learn that The Butcher who leads the Antaam was in cahoots with Governor Ivanici. The criminal Crows are the ones who actually save the city, which both Ivanici and the Antaam would see looted. A lot of the dialogue here referenced my "sacrifice" of Treviso, sneering at my new-found concern for the city's fate after abandoning it to the dragon. I'm pretty sure the same events would have occurred if I'd chosen to save this city instead of Minrathous, just with different dialogue.

 

 

While the leadership in Minrathous and Treviso are compromised, the leader of the Grey Wardens is just obstinate and dumb. The First Warden ignroes the significance of the elven gods and refuses to consider that this Blight might be different from the ones that came before. I punched him out, which felt very much like socking the Quarian admiral in Mass Effect, a rare Renegade action in my generally Paragon Rook. Eventually the mid-ranking Wardens rise to lead and rebuild the Order, while we also inspect its past to learn more about the history of the Griffins and of previous Blights. It's kind of amusing to me how way back in Dragon Age Origins we learned the deepest secrets of the Wardens, and our player characters in every game since then have largely been unaware of those secrets.

 

 

Other factions are a bit thinner - there aren't the same level of depths to plumb with the Lords of Fortune as there are with Minrathous, for example - and they end up revolving more around companion quests than broader regional quests. That's cool though, there's definitely enough meaty story to go around, and the more bite-sized and stand-alone quests in other areas make for a good change of pace.

 

While Act 2 is mostly focused on helping your companions resolve their issues, Act 3 is equally concerned with finding allies and making them stronger. As noted above, you can do this by completing their faction quests and selling them stuff. Unlike a lot of games in this series (or RPGs generally), DAV explicitly says that you have "several weeks" to accomplish these things: the big deadline is an eclipse that is arriving in a month or so.

 

 

Once you do decide to progress pass the point of no return, though, things abruptly snap into high gear. Elgar'nan uses his immense power to drag the moon into position, firing off an early eclipse and forcing everyone to scramble. The big threat is that Elgar'nan and Ghilanain want to unleash the Blight from within the Fade and use it to infect the world, thus giving them total control. Solas has been opposing them, but his goals are only marginally better: he wants to bring down the Veil that separates our world from the Fade, which will mean unleashing demons throughout the world and killing off most of the living creatures on Thedas. Thanks to your previous regional quests, you have learned that the elven gods have forged a new ritual dagger of red lyrium and will carry out their plan on a particular remote island.

 

 

There are a whole bunch of decisions to make during the long final series of missions. The very first one turns out to be the equivalent of the Virmire decision from the original Mass Effect: you pick one person to lead the second squad. The only two choices I had were Harding or Davrin. I was immediately annoyed: Harding was my love interest, and Davrin was my favorite companion; Davrin was also the only person I had gotten to 10 Bond yet. I had been planning on taking the two of them in particular in the final missions, and right off the bat my plan had fallen through. I reluctantly selected Davrin to lead the second squad, preferring to keep Harding close by for any banters. 

 

 

It isn't immediately obvious what the consequence of this choice will be, and you similarly need to task the remaining members to handle other missions as you approach the Archon's palace: someone to disable the Venatori crystal generating a force field around the gates, someone to assassinate the Venatori commander, someone to take down the gigantic construct guarding the gates. The game gives a few nudges towards which type of person would be effective for each job: someone skilled with magical seals for taking on the crystal, which suggests Neve or Bellara; a close-combat fighter for the assassination, which screams Lucanis. These missions are also backed by particular factions, like the Crows aiding with the assassination and the Veil Jumpers with the crystal. I'm not sure exactly how everything interacts, but I presume that if you choose the wrong companion and/or the associated faction is weak, either the companion or a related NPC will perish. This all feels very Mass Effect 2 suicide-squad-y, which I adore: it's such a smart, good blending together of all the choices made up to this point, the investments you've made in people, and hitting big story beats with a strong system behind it.

 

 

This is also the most cinematically thrilling segment of the whole game, long set-pieces filled with hand-to-hand combat, explosions, incredible emotion and heart-pounding tension. The music is suitably epic, driving you forward in the action. 

 

 

As it turns out, the person you selected to lead the second squad is ultimately killed by Ghilanain; in the case of Davrin, Assan flies in after him, which is extra heartbreaking. I shouldn't be surprised: this is Dragon Age, after all, and it's BioWare, it wouldn't be a BioWare game if they didn't kill someone we loved. It definitely stings, though, both narratively and because I had lost a source of Overwhelmed and Taunt.

 

 

Narratively the two main villains of the game are Ghilanain and Elgar'nan, but I always found Ghilanain way more interesting then Elgar'nan: she looks way creepier, with tons of tentacles and a ghastly mask and stuff, while Elgar'nan mostly just looks like a slightly chubby elf. Her backstory is a lot more interesting too: she created the Blight, and has shaped many creatures over the years, endlessly tinkering with living beings like some kind of mad scientist. Elgar'nan's main deal seems to be power: he apparently has stronger raw magical abilities than Ghilanain, and a particularly strong mental force of will; later in the game he starts imposing himself into your thoughts, and more broadly commands the large factions of Venatori, Antaam and others under his thumb. He's more associated with tyranny while Ghilanain is more associated with madness, rot and decay. So it was mildly disappointing that the more interesting villain was killed first; but they do mostly make up for it with Elgar'nan's later visual transformation, growing significantly more creepy-looking as he becomes infused with the Blight.

 

 

Like I keep saying, this is a very long finale, which was great: there's time for interior twists and pauses and more and more stakes-raising. One very big twist comes relatively late, when you discover that Varric, who was injured in the opening mission in the game, actually died during that first confrontation with Solas and has been dead this whole time: all the time you've spent having conversations with him have been figments of your imagination. It sounds like this is somewhat due to Solas's influence, but also party due to Rook's own rejection of reality. Nobody else on the team was aware that you were seeing or talking to him. This is one of those things that kind of makes me want to re-play the game and watch prior cut-scenes with Varric with that in mind. It isn't a central twist in the way that Fight Club is, but could add something to those prior events.

 

 

The game telegraphs for a while that deciding what to do with Solas will be the final choice, and I was right. We've had chances all along to express our opinions of him, either being sympathetic for his trials and motivations or angry at his actions and lies. My Rook has been consistently anti-Solas; I'd be very curious to see telemetry for how players break down in their opinions, and in particular if there's a split between returning Inquisition players or new Veilguard converts. In my game Bellara was abducted by Elgar'nan and infected with the Blight; during this time she learned that Solas had bound the strength of the Veil into the two gods, so if you kill them, you will accomplish Solas's goal of bringing down the Veil. This especially stings since he had just made of a point of dramatically swearing to protect the Veil in exchange for your cooperation against the gods and vowed "The Veil will never fall by my own hand." Even then I'd doubted him; Solas has become the Benjamin Linus of Thedas, always able to convince you that he's changed and this time is different, but always with a fresh betrayal in the chamber ready to deploy. Anyways, as your team muses over what to do, you come to the conclusion that Solas is the only remaining Elven god, so the only solution is to bind him to the Veil so it can continue to stand after Elgar'nan dies.

 

 

You do eventually kill Elgar'nan, and have the final choice about what to do with Solas: fight him to force him to bind with the veil, or trick him into binding with the veil, or, in my case, using the power of Mythal to convince him to sacrifice himself to strengthen the veil. This builds on an optional previous set of quests in the Crossroads that led to finding Mythal's essence and convincing her to aid your cause. (This also culminates one of the oldest plot lines of Dragon Age: Flemeth was the embodied spirit of Mythal, and Morrigan inherited her memories when Flemeth died, but Mythal's power was kept by another spirit in the Fade. In recovering Solas's repressed memories you previously learned how he and Mythal were lovers and allies against the Evunaris, and Mythal ultimately died for his cause, which is his single biggest source of regret.) 

 

 

I'd been planning to continue my anti-Solas streak, but faced with the final choice, I mused that they all kind of fit that bill. Attacking him or tricking him seemed pretty equivalent, saying more about my methods than my goals. Convincing him was the most diplomatic path, but would presumably have the same final result. At the end of the day I'm a sucker for any secret/unlocked/ultimate ending, so I opted for that path. There is a pretty long and emotional denouement: Morrigan and the Inquisitor get involved, as does the memory of Varric and Mythal. (Earlier, Harding had chewed out Solas for his many many sins in enslaving the Titans and creating the Blight. We get some deep lore reveals in this game: elves are the descendents of spirits from the Fade who chose to become embodied in the world; the Titans were the original inhabitants of the physical plane, lyrium is their blood, and the Blight was created when Solas severed the titans' spirits from their physical forms and trapped them in the Black City.)

 

 

I played the conclusion over a couple of weekend days and it was the most compelling part of the game, very cinematic and epic and thrilling. It leveled up my entire appreciation for the game; I started Act 1 pretty unenthused, by the midpoint I was fully digging the game, and by the end I loved and admired it. I should sit with it a bit longer before ranking, and ideally replay at some point, but my gut is that Veilguard is a bit behind Inquisition and Origins and solidly in front of 2.

 

 

Oh, other random note: I was pleasantly surprised by just how much the Inquisitor ended up playing a role in this game, it seemed more substantial than Hawke's quest in Inquisition. Like I said before I kind of wish I'd spent more time on the Inquisitor's sliders, as mine vaguely resembled a written description of the Inquisitor but didn't look a whole lot like her; I wonder if anyone will ever write a tool to export sliders from a save game file so you can get a close-to-exact match in Veilguard. One small bummer is that my Inquisitor romanced Sera, and it doesn't seem like that was ever acknowledged in this game; I'm pretty sure that a Solas romance would have a big impact, and I assume that romancing a returner like Dorian would also get a shout-out. It's probably too much to expect a cameo from each of the eight possible romance options, so I do get it.

 

The actual end of the game is a series of Varric-style narrative vignettes, a la the typical slide show, which is the de-facto way to end an RPG now and fully satisfying. I'd be curious to see what variations are possible here; there are some obvious ones, like Dorian's reign as the new Archon. Rook himself doesn't seem to make much of an impact here, but it's cool to see where others' stories end up.

 

 

END SPOILERS

This was a deeply satisfying game to play. It benefits from continuing a story and lore I've been invested in for 15 years, but I think it stands well on its own. The actual combat was less enjoyable to me than Origins or Inquisition, but it did grow on me as the game continued, and I came to really like it and feel decent at it by the end. The signature BioWare storytelling is still alive and well even after some high-profile staff departures, and this game can bring tears and cheers as it hits its story beats.

 

 

It sounds like the game didn't sell very well, which is definitely disappointing. While the plot does tie up in a satisfying way at the end, and brings a conclusion to many long-running stories in this universe, it's a world that I want more than ever to explore further. I'll continue to hope against hope that the team can come back together one day and tell another story in this world.

 

Nexus

I recently read "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari. My friend Dan recommended it, and I can see why: it's an intriguing book, bursting with knowledge, analysis, theories and predictions. The author is a professional historian, and the book liberally cites historical examples, but the book is more interested in describing how society works as a system: the parameters, the choices and limits available to us, how technological developments have opened or closed doors in the past and how they might change in the future.

 

 

Looking back, this kind of feels like two books to me. The first third looks at the history of "information networks" from the dawn of our species through the present day. This is a very broad but very vital topic: how ideas are generated, debated, accepted, spread, and how they affect us as individuals, groups and nations. The second two thirds focus on the impact of computers in general and AI in particular, sounding an alarm for the potentially existential threats they pose to our way of life. I found the first section extremely compelling and convincing, the latter part less so.

It's hard to summarize the whole book in a blog post, but my primary take-away of his argument is that, while we tend to think of "information" as reflecting reality, it doesn't necessarily have any connection to reality. "Information" is just data or thoughts, which could be true or misleading or false or fictional. Nonetheless, despite not necessarily being true information does have a profound impact on our entire lives. Concepts like "money" are purely human inventions that don't reflect natural law, yet the shared ideas we have about "money" control so many aspects of our lives. In fact, the most powerful forces in our history have essentially been myths and stories we tell ourselves: about religion, race, nations on the macro level; love, friendship, rivalry, heroism on the micro level.

I'll note early on my biggest criticism of the book, that some of the language feels a bit shifty. Harari calls this out in particular: he writes a lot about "information" but acknowledges that this word means something different to a biologist, a historian, a journalist, a computer scientist, and so on. I think his personal definition is carefully crafted and fit to purpose, but I get the nagging feeling that there's some semantic sleight-of-hand in how he uses it throughout the book.

Somewhat similarly, he writes a lot about "dictatorship" in contrast with "democracy," but he seems to basically define "democracy" as "a good government." He explicitly says that a democracy is not about majority rule, which I think is insane. In my opinion, you can have dictatorships that protect minority rights, or democracies that do not protect minority rights, but he seems to think that any system that protects minority rights is automatically democratic. He really should use different terms for what he's talking about instead of slapping significantly different meanings on well-established words. (It's wild that he defined "populist" and traces back the etymology but never does this for "democracy.")

Later on he somewhat snippily writes that he doesn't want to create neologisms so he insists on using common words. Which, fine, that's his choice. But I don't think you get to do that and then complain about how people are misunderstanding or misinterpreting your argument, when you're using common words to mean something different from how most people understand them. I vastly prefer Piketty's approach, using a neutral word like "proprietarian" that he carefully defines and then can usefully examine in his work, sidestepping the confusing baggage that comes with words like "liberal" or "capitalist" (or "democrat").

But those complaints about words aside, I think Harari's big argument is very correct and is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately, paralleling some significant changes in my own thinking over my life. When I was a baby libertarian in my late teens and early twenties, I whole-heartedly agreed with statements like "The solution to hate speech is more speech." As I've grown older and observed how things actually work in the real world, and how things have worked in the past, I've come to see that this isn't true at all: adding more voices does not automatically, consistently or reliably neutralize the harm generated by hate speech.

Prior to reading this book, I've tended to think that this is a symptom of the modern world, where the sheer volume of information is far too much for us to properly inspect and interrogate. We have enough time to read 100 opinions when rapidly scrolling a social media feed, and won't click on any of the articles they link to, let alone follow up on those articles' primary sources (if any). So we early believe the lies, spins, misrepresentations and exaggerations we encounter in our informational ecosystem. Why? We're biologically conditioned with a tendency to latch on to the first thing we hear as "true" and become skeptical of subsequent arguments or evidence against our previously received beliefs.

As Harari shows, though, the spread and persistence of misinformation isn't at all a modern phenomenon. One especially compelling example he gives is the history of witch hunts in Europe. In the medieval era, belief in witches was very local and varied a great deal from one community to the next: each village had their own folklore about witches, maybe viewing them as a mixture of good and bad: sometimes bringing rain, sometimes killing goats, sometimes mixing love potions. Late in the medieval era, the official Catholic church doctrine was that belief in witches was a superstition, and good Christians should trust in God rather than worry about magical neighbors. That changed when Heinrich Kramer, a man with bizarre sexual and misogynistic hang-ups, rolled into the Alps denouncing particular women for having sex with Satan and stealing men's genitalia. He was shut down by local secular and church authorities. He left town, got access to a printing press, and printed up thousands of copies of the Malleus Maleficarum, which gave lurid and shocking details about a supposed global conspiracy of secret witches who had infiltrated every village and carried out horrific crimes against children. This took off like wildfire and led to centuries of torture and execution of innocent people This is all very similar to QAnon, Pizzagate, and trans panics today. An individual can write a compelling and completely false narrative and set off a global campaign of hate and violence, completely deaf to the litany of evidence against these lies. Whether in the 1600s or the 2000s, having more information didn't bring the world closer to truth or solve problems, it led to immense misery and evil.

The conventional view of the printing press is that it broke the Catholic church's religious stranglehold on information and enabled the development of the Scientific Method, allowing people to freely publish and share their ideas. There is some truth in this, but it's overstated. Copernicus's groundbreaking book on the heliocentric system failed to sell its initial run of 1000 copies, and has been called "The worst seller of all time." Meanwhile, the Malleus Maleficarum instantly sold through multiple runs and continued to be a best-seller for centuries. The fact that Copernicus's book was more true than Kramer's did nothing to increase its popularity or reception or impact on the world.

Instead of unfettered access to information, Harari credits the Scientific Method to the creation of institutions with a capacity for self-correction. This was very different from the Catholic Church, which was (and is!) forced by its own doctrine to deny any error. Interestingly, Harari points out that most of the founders of the scientific revolution did not hail from universities, either. Instead, they were an information network of royal societies, independent researchers, journals and so on. The key difference here was that information was peer-reviewed: people wouldn't just say "Trust me," but would share their theories, experiments and data as well as their conclusions to their colleagues, who would look for errors, omissions or alternative explanations. And if an error later was discovered, journals would publicize the error, making corrections to the past record rather than cover it up or ignore it. While this seems like it would weaken the reliability of a source, it ends up building trust in the long run: the reality is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are fallible, and by embracing this self-correcting system we can move in the direction of greater truth, not merely the most compelling story.

Fundamentally, Nexus is arguing against what it calls the "naive" view of information, which is basically "More information will reveal the truth, and the truth will produce order and power." This idea is that more information is always good, because true and useful information will drown out the bad and lead to a better understanding of how the world works. Again, this view is easily disproven by history. One alternate view is what Harari calls the "populist" view, which essentially denies that an eternal "truth" exists at all, and equates information with power. Controlling the production and flow of information will produce power, which in the "populist" view is implicitly good in its own right.

Taken from another angle, Harari thinks that there is a "truth" which reflects "reality", but "information" doesn't have any intrinsic relationship to truth. Some information truly reflects reality, other information distorts reality. The consistent effect of information is that it connects - when we tell stories to each other, we grow more connected, and I can persuade you of my ideas and convince you to act in a certain way, or you can make me feel a kinship with you and act for your benefit. There is an even larger class of information that contributes to what he calls an "intersubjective reality". This is information that exists on its own independent of an underlying physical reality. Think of story-telling: you might make up an impressive work of fiction, someone else might write fan-fiction based on your world, a critic might write a review of your fiction summarizing what happens in it, a fan would argue that a character should have made a different choice than they actually did. You end up with this entire ecosphere of carefully-constructed and internally-consistent thoughts about an idea that doesn't have an underlying reality. You, the critic, and the fan are all choosing to participate in a shared intersubjective reality.

There is actually some evolutionary advantage to our ability to create and share stories. We talk about how our fight-or-flight instincts are biologically inherited from our ancestors who needed to quickly react to the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. Harari brings up the interesting point that our neanderthal and sapiens forefathers had a similar evolutionary advantage around their ability to cooperate in teams. You can have a small band of, say, chimpanzees or bonobos that may cooperate against another band, but you never see chimpanzee communities of hundreds or thousands. You can get bands of that many humans, though, thanks to their ability to share stories and ideas. These ideas may be built around myths, concepts of extended kinship, oral traditions of prior hardships and victories.

To this day we have a very strong reaction to all sorts of "primitive" stories: boy-meets-girl, good-man-beats-bad-man, sibling-rivalry, etc. These stories gave evolutionarily beneficial advantages in winning mates, having children, taking territory and defeating enemies. Today, we still strongly respond to those stories; however, in the same way that our daily lives have many more encounters with rude bicyclists than with saber-toothed tigers, we're far more likely to need to navigate an opaque bureaucracy than to kill a rival chieftain. But we don't have a gut-level appreciation for stories about bureaucracies in the same way we appreciate action or romance stories. And our brains don't retain information about bureaucracies very well: we can remember bible stories about rivalries and murder and who fathered who, but we are terrible at remembering lists of sewage inspection reports or NGO organization charts or certification requirements.

As an aside, this observation reminds me of William Bernstein, who writes about how man is a story-telling animal. We respond much more strongly to stories than we do to data, which was evolutionarily adaptive in the past (we won't eat the red berries because someone told us that they're poisonous) but gets us into all sorts of trouble today (we listen to our friend who says investing in bitcoin is safer than US Treasuries). Interestingly I think this observation is from his finance book The Four Pillars of Investing and not one of his history books, although the observation seems even more relevant to history. But Bernstein is a trained neurologist, has a keen understanding of how our biological makeup and mental hardware impacts our daily lives and how we organize as a society.

Harari is a big fan of the Scientific Method, as is Bernstein (in The Birth of Plenty), but neither writer is too rose-tinted. One thing I've heard in the past that Nexus backs up is that individual scientists almost never change their mind, even when faced with persuasive empirical evidence challenging their prior beliefs. Scientists are humans, with egos and prejudices and concerned about maintaining their prestige and positions. When science advances, it isn't like everyone reads a journal and changes their mind; it's that the old guard continues believing the old thing but eventually dies off, and is replaced by a new generation that grew up being persuaded by the better, new belief. Change is measured in decades, not months or years.

Which is fine, if that's how it works, but feels discouraging when considering the problems we face today. We may not have decades to react to crises like climate change or the subversion of democracy. And "decades" is specifically for the class of professional scientists who pay attention to evidence for a career; it's even less likely that the populace as a whole will change their mind to a truer, more correct belief. I mean, Newtonian physics was disproven something like 120 years ago, yet we still learn it in school and most of us follow it in daily life; those of us who have finished high school are vaguely aware of relativity, and have probably heard of string theory but don't really understand it.

All to say that, I don't think science can save us from urgent wide-spread problems. It's slow, and while it can influence the elites it can't change the mind of the masses. Harari seems to suggest that the real key is trust. If we're a society that trusts scientists, because we know they peer-review their work and admit mistakes and are continually improving, we may accept their pronouncements even if we personally don't have the time or inclination to check all their work. But if we don't trust scientists, we lose the benefits of science: longevity, productivity and affluence.

Science is ultimately about truth, but as Harari keeps noting, truth isn't the end-all and be-all: a society with access to truth does have some advantages (it can keep its citizens healthier and produce more reliable military equipment), but it is not guaranteed to triumph over a society with less devotion to the truth. Harari sees Order and Truth as two separate pillars upon which societies are built. You need both of these. Without truth you can't survive: you'll have feces in the water supply, desolate cropland with the wrong grains planted in the wrong season, walking on foot because you don't have motors. Think of something like the Great Leap Forward in China, which upended scientific truths and led to internal misery and the stunting of external power. (In a surprising coincidence, Nexus devotes a few paragraphs to Trofim Lysenko, who I just wrote about in my last post: he was a charlatan who convinced Stalin that genetics was bogus and led the USSR down a path that led to the evisceration of its sciences and widespread man-made famines.)

But you also need order in a society. If you don't have order, then you have anarchy, the collapse of the bureaucracy and the inability to function. Again, you can have bad sewage, because nobody is preventing others from poisoning the water supply; crops are desolate, because farmers know bandits will take any crops they grow, walking on foot because nobody is organizing the factory which makes motors. Between truth and order, you can make a convincing argument that order is the more important factor. Stalin was a moral nightmare, his internal terror was horrific to truth, which caused huge real problems like massive losses in the Red Army; and yet, the system was incredibly stable. Nobody dared challenge Stalin despite his many failures, the USSR endured for multiple generations and had a real shot at total world domination. Or consider the Catholic Church: it has consistently prioritized order over truth, defending bad ideas like the geocentric nature of the universe, disastrous crusades and self-destructive inquisitions; and yet it has lasted for two thousand years, far longer than the School of Athens, the League of Nations or the Royal Academy of Sciences.

In an ideal world, of course, you would balance these two. Those of us in the West will generally push for the primacy of Truth, but still recognize Order as an essential ingredient. There may be times when this requires tough choices, as in the 1960s with widespread dissent and protest against the Vietnam War and racial injustice. One thing I really like about Harari is that, like Piketty and unlike Marx, he foregrounds the importance of choice. Order doesn't inevitably triumph over Truth, nor Truth over Order; multiple stable configurations exist, we can help shape the kind of society we live in, and we should also recognize that other societies may follow other paths, with results that are different from ours and may be stronger or weaker than us.

Going back to the various views of information, Harari has rejected the naive view that information leads to truth, and truth leads to wisdom and power. He also rejects the simplistic populist view that there is no truth or wisdom, that information directly leads to power. His view is that information produces both truth and order. Truth and order, in tandem, generate power. Separately, truth also leads to wisdom. Wisdom relies on truth, but power does not require wisdom. It's an interesting view; I think I'll need to sit with it a while longer to digest and decide if I actually agree with it, but it does feel useful to me.

Phew! All of the above thoughts and reactions are for the first third of the book, which is mostly teeing up the second two-thirds. (There's a lot more I didn't get into in this post, like how advances in information technology enabled large-scale democracies for the first time, the historical development of the bureaucracy, or the 20th-century conflicts between democracy and totalitarianism.) I'm less enthused by the last 2/3 of the book which is mostly about the threat posed by AI.

Examining my own reaction, I think I have a knee-jerk skepticism. Overall I find his arguments persuasive but annoying. I am not at all an apologist for or proponent of AI, but I've been in the camp that views AI as the latest graduated step in advancing technology, whereas Harari sees it as fundamentally different from prior technologies. His point is that algorithms in general and AI in particular are agenic: they can actually take action. Up until now technology has merely augmented human decision-making. A human needs to consult a book, then execute the action described by the book; a human is in the loop, so there's an opportunity to stop and question the book's instructions before carrying them out. But a computer program can, say, deny credit card applications or impose a prison sentence or alter the outflow rate at a sewage treatment facility without requiring any human intervention. Two programs can directly communicate with one another in a way that two books or two TV shows could not.

In another interesting little coincidence, I just recently (re?-)watched The Net, the 1995 thriller starring Sandra Bullock. Many parts of that movie felt like they were in strong conversation with Nexus. For example, in one scene her character Angela Bennett is trying to get back into her hotel room, but the clerk tells her, "The computer says that Angela Bennett checked out two days ago." She insists, "No, I'm Angela Bennett, and I didn't check out, I'm standing right here!" but the clerk refuses to engage with her and moves on to the next person. Even thirty years ago we had offloaded our decision-making to the computer, so what's different now? The fact that there won't even be a clerk in the future: just touchless entry at the door, with nobody to hear your complaint or the ability to override the system. And the ubiquity of the system: in The Net, human hackers had singled out Angela Bennett in particular (much like Will Smith's character in Enemy of the State); but in the future, AI might target entire classes of people: the sick, or anyone with a criminal record, or humanity as a whole.

The triumph of AI isn't inevitable: it requires us choosing to give it control. But if we do make that choice, we may find it impossible to reverse. We can't appeal to AI's mercy or wait for it to fall asleep. Harari repeatedly refers to AI as not just "Artificial Intelligence" but "Alien Intelligence": it isn't that it thinks like a human but more rapidly, it "thinks" in a completely different way from us. For well over a decade now AI has been a black box: we can't understand how it makes its decisions, only watch the final choice it makes. All this adds up to a very urgent and potentially deadly situation.

Harari does offer some suggestions for how to address the threat posed by AI, which I do appreciate. It's very annoying when books or articles lay out doom-and-gloom scenarios without any suggested solutions. The proposals in Nexus tend to be pretty narrow and technical. They include things like keeping humans in the loop, requiring us to sign off on decisions made by AI; along with this, AI needs to explain its reasoning. Harari also muses about banning or at least prominently labeling all bots and generated content online: we waste far too much mental energy arguing against bots, and the more we engage with them the better they get to know us and the more likely they are to persuade us.

As modest as these proposals seem, he acknowledges that they still seem unlikely to be implemented. In the US they would require legislative action, which is incredibly difficult these days, and even more so when the majority party is (perhaps temporarily) benefiting from AI support.

One of my annoyances with this book is how Harari stumbles into what I think of as terminal pundit brain, the impulse to treat political factions as equivalent. He writes things like "Both parties are losing the ability to communicate or even agree on basic facts like who won the 2020 elections." It's insane to act like the Democratic party is equally to blame for January 6 and election denialism! Elsewhere, though, he does acknowledge the reality of the situation, making a cogent abservation about the abrupt transformation of right-leaning parties. Historically the conservative party has, following Edmund Burke, argued for cautious, slow and gradual change, while the progressive party has argued for faster and more ambitious change. But in the last decade or so, Trump's Republican party along with parties abroad like Bolsonaro in Brazil or Duterte in the Philipines have transformed into radical parties that seek to overthrow the status quo: getting rid of bureaucracies, axing the separation of powers, imposing new economic systems, and broadly and rapidly changing social relations.

This is a surprising change on its own, but Harari notes that this has also thrust the traditional left-leaning progressive party like the US's Democratic party into the unlikely role of the defender of the status quo. They aren't necessarily adopting more conservative positions, but they do want to retain the overall democratic system. While Harari doesn't dig into this aspect much further, it does really resonate to me. I often feel like the Democratic party insists on bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's very frustrating to hear, say, Chuck Schumer repeat the tired paeans to bipartisan cooperation and consensus, when the house is burning down behind him. I do feel a bit more sympathy for him when I think of how he wants to keep a robust pluralistic democracy running, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that his actions will help bring that about. My overall pessimistic feeling has been that that era is just over now, and while a populist left may be less stable than a broad-based democratic left or broad-based democratic right, it's the best option available to us now.

I think that Piketty is much more useful in this area than Harari. If we're going to marshal the resources to actually address climate change and similar existential issues, we need to retake democratic control of our wealth, which in practical terms means taxing the rich and limiting the influence of money in our politics. It's no coincidence that the ascendant conservative faction tearing down institutional systems is the faction aligned with the wealthy.

Harari points to the breakdown in political and social cohesion in the US. During the 60s the country was wracked by big divisions over civil rights, women's rights, war in Vietnam, and other points of friction. The entire Western world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. And yet the system still functioned pretty well. The Civil Rights Act was supported by majorities in both parties, the Nixon administration broke every norm of the justice system yet ultimately abided by court order. The fragile and messy democratic West eventually came through this period and triumphed over the more order-orientated USSR. Today, there's no bipartisanship, not a shared set of beliefs in facts let alone ideology, a lack of trust not just in specific bureaucracies like the CDC or the FBI but overall institutions like science and government as a whole, as well as a rejection of core structural decisions like the separation of powers.

Harari admits that he doesn't know what the reason is for this breakdown in consensus that has occurred over the last decade or so, but he implies that there's at least a chance it's the impact of alien intelligence: shrill political bots driving outrage on social media, algorithms steering individuals into more siloed media environments, and so on. Personally, though, I think you can draw a straight line from Newt Gingrich giving speeches to an empty House of Representatives in 1984 through to Donald Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters in 2025. There's a pundit-brain temptation for symmetry and a refusal to acknowledge that one faction just wants power and doesn't have qualms about how to get it or keep it.

Again, there's a lot of stuff in this book that I found valuable which I haven't unpacked in this post. I should mention that Harari does a terrific job at examining Facebook's culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar and YouTube's role in bringing right-wing nationalist parties to power in 2016. That's all stuff I'd heard before (and lived through!), but it's really helpful to view as a unified trend and not isolated phenomena. But once more, I think Harari's instinct towards bipartisanship blunts the potential insights he could have. He views the algorithmic pull towards outrage in purely capitalist terms, as angrier people will interact more with content, not only generating direct ad revenue but also providing Facebook and Google with additional data they can store to make their products more powerful. But he skips over the fateful Peter Thiel-led decision to axe the human team running the Facebook News team in favor of the algorithm in the first place. Likewise, he doesn't mention how the GOP House accused YouTube of left-leaning bias and pushed for a more "neutral" algorithm, which in practice meant less truthful content and more outrageous content. Harari argues that we have collectively given too much power to the machine; in my view, a specific faction has led that charge, and is benefiting the most from the consequences.

I should also mention that Nexus is an extremely readable book. It looks a bit long, but I flew through the whole thing in just a few days. The language is very readable, each section is just a few pages long and makes a clear and cogent point. For all my complaints, I think Harari does an excellent job at noting what parts of the book are well-established facts, which are well-supported inferences, which are controversial statements, and what are merely speculative scenarios.

Overall I think I'd recommend this book to others. I think the first section is fantastic, the latter two are arguably even more important but less fun. I am curious to check out Harari's earlier books, it sounds like he's been working in adjacent areas for a while. I like his mix of concrete history and abstract systemic theorizing, and am curious what other tools he has come up with.