He hides subjectivity inside the game definition, declares the payoffs objective, and invents a god called the Perfect Evolutionary Being.
Source: YouTube video (2:36, uploaded 2024-10-18, 26 views) Links: Channel Overview, Value and Profit, The Weighting Problem, Morality, Measurement, Causality, and Free Will
This is his metaphysical bedrock. His property allocation system, his anti-libertarian critiques, and his reputation system all ultimately derive from the claims in this 2:36 video. Every one of them fails.
He treats evolution as teleological — heading toward a “Perfect Evolutionary Being” as its “goal” and “convergence point.” Evolution has no goal. Natural selection is a filter: it removes what doesn’t survive and reproduce in the current environment. It doesn’t optimize toward a destination. There is no endpoint. There is no convergence.
This is the same error as saying gravity’s “goal” is to pull things down, or erosion’s “goal” is to flatten mountains. These are processes, not purposes. Selection pressure is differential survival, not directed progress. The evolutionary record shows this clearly: 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct. Evolution didn’t “correct their deviation” — it killed them. And what replaced them isn’t “closer to perfection” — it’s just what happened to survive the current conditions.
His “Perfect Evolutionary Being” isn’t a scientific prediction. It’s an eschatology — a teleological endpoint that gives meaning to the process, identical in structure to religious conceptions of divine purpose. He’s built God out of game theory notation.
His central claim: game theory payoffs are “objectively dependent on the game being played and the context of the situation,” therefore value is objective.
The first half is true. Within a defined game, payoffs are objective — if the payoff matrix says (3, -1), it says (3, -1). But someone had to define the game. Someone chose:
These choices are where all the subjectivity lives. He’s moved the subjective judgment from “what is valuable?” to “what is the game?” and then declared everything downstream objective. The subjectivity didn’t disappear — it retreated one level.
This is the Weighting Problem exactly:
He collapsed steps 2 and 3 into “Universal Darwinism decides” without showing his work on why Universal Darwinism’s game definition is the right one — or even what its payoff function actually measures.
He defines value as proximity to the Perfect Evolutionary Being, then admits this being may require “violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics” — i.e., it’s physically impossible. So:
This is not a theory. It’s a metaphysical commitment dressed in game theory language. The 2nd law admission is a tell — he knows the endpoint is impossible but keeps it as the foundation anyway, which means it’s functioning as an article of faith, not a scientific hypothesis.
Evolution has no goal, but it’s not random either. What evolution does extremely well is match outputs to inputs. The world has one set of physical constraints — gravity, thermodynamics, chemistry, energy availability — and organisms that don’t align their strategies with those constraints get eliminated. This produces convergence: eyes evolved independently dozens of times because photon detection is useful given the inputs this planet provides.
The vault’s own convergence arguments (Weighting Problem, morality framework) concede a version of this point. For the things we can’t change — physical constraints, scarcity, the structure of cooperation problems — there ARE strategies that work and strategies that don’t. Independent civilizations converging on “don’t murder” isn’t coincidence; it’s the same inputs producing the same outputs. This is real and important.
But this is NOT what he’s claiming. The vault’s convergence is:
He takes a real observation (convergence from shared inputs) and inflates it into teleology (the universe has a destination). The vault takes the same observation and keeps it grounded: convergence tells you about the inputs, not about a cosmic purpose.
Even granting everything above — even if evolution DID have a goal and value WERE objective proximity to it — that wouldn’t make it morally right. “Evolution selects for X” does not entail “X is good.” Smallpox was fantastically successful by evolutionary metrics. Parasitic wasps that lay eggs inside living caterpillars are beautifully adapted. Evolution “values” whatever reproduces, including things humans rightly find monstrous.
He’s deriving ought from is: because evolution produces selection pressure toward productivity, productivity IS the right goal. The vault’s morality framework avoids this by grounding moral claims in performative contradiction (you can’t argue against the prerequisites of arguing) — a logical structure that doesn’t require evolution to have a destination.
“This is why we intuitively value maximizing productivity” — do we?
People value leisure, beauty, relationships, humor, spiritual experience, meaning, adventure, rest, play, contemplation, and a thousand other things that aren’t “productivity” by any standard definition. A parent reading to a child at bedtime isn’t “maximizing productivity.” A monk in prayer isn’t “maximizing productivity.” A person choosing a lower-paying job they love over a higher-paying one they hate isn’t “maximizing productivity.”
Defining all human values as secret productivity — stretching the word until it covers everything — makes it meaningless. If everything is productivity, the word has no content.
More importantly: this is where his utilitarianism eliminates self-agency. If value is objective and equals “productivity toward the Perfect Evolutionary Being,” then your preferences don’t matter. Your choice to run a hobby farm instead of a factory is objectively wrong — it’s a deviation from optimal value that “will experience natural selection pressure proportional to the magnitude of the deviation.” You don’t get to decide what’s valuable to you. Evolution already decided, and you’re either aligned or defective.
This is the same move he makes in the property allocation video: individual preferences are overridden by system-level optimization. Here we see why — his metaphysics requires it. If value is objective and externally determined, then subjective preferences are errors to be corrected, not rights to be respected.
The vault’s value theory (Value and Profit):
His framework requires objective value to function. The vault shows objective value is impossible at the composite level. These are incompatible foundations — and the incompatibility explains every downstream disagreement.
He treats “evolutionary game theory” as a fundamentally different framework from standard game theory — one that reveals objective truths about value that normal game theory can’t reach. It isn’t.
Evolutionary game theory adds specific features to the standard framework: repeated play, population dynamics, mutation/variation, frequency-dependent selection, and replicator dynamics. These are real and can change results — the repeated prisoner’s dilemma famously produces cooperation where the one-shot version produces defection. But these additions are exactly what they look like: different players and different rules. It’s still a game. Someone still defined it. The payoff function is still chosen, not discovered.
The insight that repeated interaction changes outcomes is valuable and well-established (Axelrod’s tournaments, tit-for-tat, etc.). But it doesn’t transform game theory into a value-discovery engine. It transforms a one-shot game into a repeated game — which is a modeling choice, not a metaphysical revelation. Calling it “evolutionary” doesn’t make the payoffs objective; it just means the population of strategies shifts over time according to their fitness. Fitness relative to what? The game definition. Which someone chose.
He’s treating the “evolutionary” label as if it imports the authority of biological evolution into the mathematical framework. It doesn’t. Evolutionary game theory is a useful tool. It is not a theory of objective value.
This is video #1 in terms of logical priority. Everything else in his framework depends on:
If any of these fall, his property allocation system has no foundation (“total system output” is meaningless without objective value), his anti-libertarian critiques lose their alternative (“the highest comparative advantage user should get the property” requires knowing what “advantage” means objectively), and his reputation system has no metric to track.
All three fall.