Back in 1977, I started out college in engineering, then switched to physics, where I got a BS and MS. After that I spent nine years in computer research, at Lockheed and NASA. In physics, engineering, and software I saw that people are quite eager to find better designs, and that the world often pays a lot for them. As a result, it is usually quite hard to find even modesty better designs, at least for devices and mechanisms with modest switching costs.
Most costumers know little about the value of most things they buy. I don't see them having much more ignorance about social than tech innovation value.
You are correct in your suspicion, though my expertise in technology is driven by my interest in the embedded social changes.
It is the others to which I refer, not the experts. Even if we stipulate equivalent expertise in technical and social fields among experts, I claim that the consumers of innovations (non-experts in either area) have a harder time seeing the value of a social innovation. That there are people who can identify the value of social innovations does not imply that the people who benefit from it will be able to. Indeed we see similar factors at work with technical innovations all the time, despite the higher interest in tech.
A consumer of tech knows what their current tech cost, and can evaluate the cost of new tech because it is clear. A consumer of a social process probably does not know the current cost, and the cost of a new social process is probably unclear. I therefore expect lower interest in social innovation. I would also expect that where non-experts have a better grasp of the cost of their present social process, interest in social innovation in that area would be higher relative to other areas.
I suspect that you personally know a lot more about tech than about social science. Yes in your world people are more ignorant about social stuff, but there really are other places where people know a lot more about social things, and can identify the value of innovations. The problem is that others show little interest in their achievements.Both social and tech systems vary a lot in size. There really are small social innovations, and less interest is shown in these than similar size innovations in tech.
I suspect questions of honesty in motivation are subordinate to questions of ignorance. People do not habitually examine the value of social processes the same way they value technological artifacts.
Even if they did, I expect it would be much more difficult to clearly identify the value added by a social innovation vis-a-vis a technical one. I think this would be sufficient to explain why social innovations embedded in technical innovations garner more interest - the technical value is concrete, and therefore the social value is surplus (or harm - not all social impacts of technology are good, and few were predicted correctly beforehand).
These two things would compound together badly, since social innovation would be mediated through existing social processes. With a lossy understanding of the innovation, which we understand through the lossy current process, in general I would expect very little value to be communicated. By contrast, technology like a computer is essentially Markovian.
What about time? I can try a technical innovation and determine whether it will be good for me very quickly - say a 10 minute VR demonstration in the mall. By contrast, even trying a different version of an existing social process to the one I am currently in is much more demanding. Going to a new church or a new club takes hours. A whole new way value would probably be a pretty high minimum commitment.
This! _Voluntary_ social innovation often garners huge interest: just look at social networking, or the fact that 30% of marriages now start online. Robin's complaint should be reframed in terms of "political innovation" -- i.e. innovation directly involving coercive social institutions. Libertarians should be careful when wishing for political innovation. Beware any political innovation not firmly grounded on principles of choice/competition/exit. The road to serfdom is paved with political innovations.
Most real innovation in physical and software devices requires the voluntary cooperation and coordination of many parties.
From where I sit (North America), centralized democracy over large territories is the biggest mountain standing between social innovation and stagnation. The illusion that "we are the government" leads historically ignorant voters to conclusions which favor the status quo.
That said, most humans are programmed by nature to avoid upsetting the existing order, for fear of what may come.
In fact one could frame this whole post as why doesn't EA work for social innovation:
There are lots of people who (in an EAish style) try and innovate to make the world better. This doesn't happen in the social context. Why is the standard EA sort of style of notice a problem find a solution based on what has worked in the past and publicize it not effective?
Actually I'd reach just the opposite conclusion. This analysis tells us
* Social innovations are hard to implement/make happen.
* We don't really have a good grip on the factors that make apparently desirable social innovations so hard to effect.
* It's easy to misidentify the value society derives from a given social innovation, e.g., if the utility people derive from college is largely social and psychological not educational than attempts to reform college to be more educationally effective may be quite harmful.
* There are systematic factors that prevent EA's from both having a firm grip on the true social good/values a social structure serves and effectively working to reform that organization.
For instance, if you wanted to reform college to better serve the social (making friends), psychological (gentle launch into independent living) and value modification (college causes people to support things like research and education in cases where it is the true benefit as well) you won't be effective if you go around explaining that we need to focus less on good teaching and academic rigor and more on socialization and the pretense of learning.
The Gates foundation can probably handle this kind of dissonance since Bill and Melinda can chat privately about their real goals and sculpt their public rhetoric and purchases/donations to achieve their real ends. But once you start trying to get the EA community working on something like this you end up with a constant flux of people noticing your actions aren't very good at effecting your stated goals so either donations dry up and people work at cross purposes or you need a widespread whisper campaign saying 'Shh...we really don't believe in all our rhetoric we're really trying to ...' Such hypocrisy will surely be noticed and you'll be even less effective than if you had simply honestly admitted your unpopular motives.
But what is social innovation? Society changes only as a consequence of culture, politics and ideology. We cannot work directly on the object, innovations happen in culture and some of them find a place on the political agendas
The coordination hypothesis: adoption of most physical/software innovation can be done unilaterally. I can buy the latest gadget/app, and benefit from it myself, without anyone else needing to adopt it. This is rarely the case with social innovations - as the word "social" suggests, adoption by many parties is usually necessary. Most social innovations begin with a coordination problem.
Where social innovations do not face a steep coordination problem, or where some mechanism handles the coordination problem, people do adopt the innovations (e.g. options/futures contracts or online markets).
We still have the question of why there isn't more interest in social innovations that address people's real motivations. Do you think the constraint that the innovation must address real motives while being colorable as addressing stated motives, reduces the space of possible social innovations enough to explain the observed lack of interest?
Most costumers know little about the value of most things they buy. I don't see them having much more ignorance about social than tech innovation value.
You are correct in your suspicion, though my expertise in technology is driven by my interest in the embedded social changes.
It is the others to which I refer, not the experts. Even if we stipulate equivalent expertise in technical and social fields among experts, I claim that the consumers of innovations (non-experts in either area) have a harder time seeing the value of a social innovation. That there are people who can identify the value of social innovations does not imply that the people who benefit from it will be able to. Indeed we see similar factors at work with technical innovations all the time, despite the higher interest in tech.
A consumer of tech knows what their current tech cost, and can evaluate the cost of new tech because it is clear. A consumer of a social process probably does not know the current cost, and the cost of a new social process is probably unclear. I therefore expect lower interest in social innovation. I would also expect that where non-experts have a better grasp of the cost of their present social process, interest in social innovation in that area would be higher relative to other areas.
I suspect that you personally know a lot more about tech than about social science. Yes in your world people are more ignorant about social stuff, but there really are other places where people know a lot more about social things, and can identify the value of innovations. The problem is that others show little interest in their achievements.Both social and tech systems vary a lot in size. There really are small social innovations, and less interest is shown in these than similar size innovations in tech.
I suspect questions of honesty in motivation are subordinate to questions of ignorance. People do not habitually examine the value of social processes the same way they value technological artifacts.
Even if they did, I expect it would be much more difficult to clearly identify the value added by a social innovation vis-a-vis a technical one. I think this would be sufficient to explain why social innovations embedded in technical innovations garner more interest - the technical value is concrete, and therefore the social value is surplus (or harm - not all social impacts of technology are good, and few were predicted correctly beforehand).
These two things would compound together badly, since social innovation would be mediated through existing social processes. With a lossy understanding of the innovation, which we understand through the lossy current process, in general I would expect very little value to be communicated. By contrast, technology like a computer is essentially Markovian.
What about time? I can try a technical innovation and determine whether it will be good for me very quickly - say a 10 minute VR demonstration in the mall. By contrast, even trying a different version of an existing social process to the one I am currently in is much more demanding. Going to a new church or a new club takes hours. A whole new way value would probably be a pretty high minimum commitment.
This! _Voluntary_ social innovation often garners huge interest: just look at social networking, or the fact that 30% of marriages now start online. Robin's complaint should be reframed in terms of "political innovation" -- i.e. innovation directly involving coercive social institutions. Libertarians should be careful when wishing for political innovation. Beware any political innovation not firmly grounded on principles of choice/competition/exit. The road to serfdom is paved with political innovations.
What would you cite as examples of *private* social innovations that don't seem to attract as much interest as they should?
A lot of social innovation can proceed needing only voluntary cooperation. But I claim there is less interest in such things.
Most real innovation in physical and software devices requires the voluntary cooperation and coordination of many parties.
From where I sit (North America), centralized democracy over large territories is the biggest mountain standing between social innovation and stagnation. The illusion that "we are the government" leads historically ignorant voters to conclusions which favor the status quo.
That said, most humans are programmed by nature to avoid upsetting the existing order, for fear of what may come.
In fact one could frame this whole post as why doesn't EA work for social innovation:
There are lots of people who (in an EAish style) try and innovate to make the world better. This doesn't happen in the social context. Why is the standard EA sort of style of notice a problem find a solution based on what has worked in the past and publicize it not effective?
Actually I'd reach just the opposite conclusion. This analysis tells us
* Social innovations are hard to implement/make happen.
* We don't really have a good grip on the factors that make apparently desirable social innovations so hard to effect.
* It's easy to misidentify the value society derives from a given social innovation, e.g., if the utility people derive from college is largely social and psychological not educational than attempts to reform college to be more educationally effective may be quite harmful.
* There are systematic factors that prevent EA's from both having a firm grip on the true social good/values a social structure serves and effectively working to reform that organization.
For instance, if you wanted to reform college to better serve the social (making friends), psychological (gentle launch into independent living) and value modification (college causes people to support things like research and education in cases where it is the true benefit as well) you won't be effective if you go around explaining that we need to focus less on good teaching and academic rigor and more on socialization and the pretense of learning.
The Gates foundation can probably handle this kind of dissonance since Bill and Melinda can chat privately about their real goals and sculpt their public rhetoric and purchases/donations to achieve their real ends. But once you start trying to get the EA community working on something like this you end up with a constant flux of people noticing your actions aren't very good at effecting your stated goals so either donations dry up and people work at cross purposes or you need a widespread whisper campaign saying 'Shh...we really don't believe in all our rhetoric we're really trying to ...' Such hypocrisy will surely be noticed and you'll be even less effective than if you had simply honestly admitted your unpopular motives.
Most real innovation in physical and software devices requires the coordination of many parties.
Yes, it is harder to design to more constraints, and harder to market such designs.
But what is social innovation? Society changes only as a consequence of culture, politics and ideology. We cannot work directly on the object, innovations happen in culture and some of them find a place on the political agendas
The coordination hypothesis: adoption of most physical/software innovation can be done unilaterally. I can buy the latest gadget/app, and benefit from it myself, without anyone else needing to adopt it. This is rarely the case with social innovations - as the word "social" suggests, adoption by many parties is usually necessary. Most social innovations begin with a coordination problem.
Where social innovations do not face a steep coordination problem, or where some mechanism handles the coordination problem, people do adopt the innovations (e.g. options/futures contracts or online markets).
Also worth noting that subcultures have sometimes emerged with a great interest in social innovations (e.g. hippies, rationalists)
We still have the question of why there isn't more interest in social innovations that address people's real motivations. Do you think the constraint that the innovation must address real motives while being colorable as addressing stated motives, reduces the space of possible social innovations enough to explain the observed lack of interest?