My last post was on Where’s My Flying Car?, which argues that changing US attitudes created a tsunami of reluctance and regulation that killed nuclear power, planes, and ate the future that could have been. This explanation, however, has a problem: if there are many dozens of nations, how can regulation in one nation kill a tech? Why would regulatory choices be so strongly correlated across nations? If nations compete, won’t one nation forgoing a tech advantage make others all the more eager to try it?
Who are these "elites" of which you speak? Taking aircraft as an example…do you mean like “experts”? Like veteran pilots and the folks from the NTSB? The ones that dissect crashes and make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to me? I’ll take all of that “elite” I can get, thank you. The only “elites” I see in that industry are the big airlines that love to hire cheap, overwork, and scrimp on maintenance. They are the last to “pressure" anyone to regulate, and actually actively conspire against regulation.
“It seems to me that we instead have a strong world culture of regulators, driven by a stronger world culture of elites. Elites all over the world talk, and then form a consensus, and then authorities everywhere are pressured into following that consensus.” Not so much. What you have is a cycle in which something bad happens and politicians and regulators are pressured into “doing something” so that it “never happens again”. In the case of aircraft, this mostly comes from relatives of families and tort lawyers, who band together out of grief and avarice respectively. I don’t think I would call these folks “elite”.
As for “conformity” don’t you think that regs in most industries will naturally trend toward some kind of best practices - sort of convergent evolution of systems? Many industries are like small town where everyone knows everyone.
Broad examples:* Choice of leader (popular vote vs. elite choice)* Multiple vs single party
Concrete examples:* Kidney market in Iran* One-child policy in China
In general I know very little about the policy worlds in China or Iran, I'm mostly assuming that the broad differences in the dynamics and structure of government also lead to large differences on a more concrete level.
A similar thesis is put forward in https://www.hup.harvard.edu... . Apes are hierarchical - humans are not, Boehm argues that this is because we learned to build coalitions and kill tyrants with arms. Where both coalitions and arms have an equalizing effect neutralizing potential brute force advantage of the alpha male.
Wrangham explains that the usual consensus was built on observations of average, day to day interactions between foragers, which are indeed quite peaceful. But, just like Antifa, foragers are only "mostly peaceful" - from time to time, usually very quietly, deadly violence erupts for a few minutes. If in a group of fifty there is one collectively executed murder of a quarrelsome individual every 10 years, it's enough to make a big difference in the frequency of alleles predisposing to quarreling, especially if the selection operates over 300,000 years.
If the gossip-enforced conformity requires at least occasional face-to-face interactions, then being beyond the reach of commercial aviation might be enough. But yes, reasonable people might eventually have to move to other star systems to break off for good.
Robin, have you read "The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution" by Richard Wrangham?
Highly recommended and relevant to your post. Contrary to what has sometimes been said about peaceful consensus building among foragers, ruthless premeditated murder was the key social innovation that differentiated H.sapiens from our Paleolithic congeners, and paradoxically, it lead to modern humans becoming remarkably more mellow than our ape ancestors. The book fleshes out the argument in great detail and I am quite convinced it is broadly correct.
Carried over into our times, humans are adapted to gossip while at the same trying to stay out of other gossipers' crosshairs. They gossip at Davos, in the couloirs of the UN and at funerals of the formerly mighty and since the onset of the jet-setting age the separate national elites slowly coalesced into one diffuse, amorphous global blob where everybody is afraid to be the odd man out - because back in the tribal times being the odd man out meant there was always a target for other men's arrows painted on your back. The elites no longer kill each other, an occasional Saddam or Muammar excepted, but the old adaptations to conformity don't go away.
So we end up with trillions of dollars destroyed in lockdowns and billions of people muzzled with dehumanizing, humiliating and almost completely useless masks, except in Sweden and Holland, which this time seem to have missed the memo.
This is an excellent post - you give an explanation for the epidemic of cooperative stupidity that swept the world in the past 50 years.
A move to Mars and beyond, far enough to prevent too-frequent elbow-rubbing by our rulers, could let us breathe free again.
It really surprised me how the policies against Covid19 are being copied around even the incorrect ones, and how any deviation is punished by the public opinion. But we are not in the upper paleolithic. Our frustrations probably show how it is different now from what it used to be then. For example, from my understanding of hunter gatherer societies, it wasn't that you were forced to follow the main course - you were compelled by gossip - but nobody used force if you disagreed and wanted to go your way. The problem was that going completely on your own was a sure death, but the bands regularly split so if you found a few followers you could always escape the group politics. After the split the two groups could follow their courses and not interfere much. Now there is no such possibility - we are all connected. So for example if Sweden does not do lock down - then the example they establish interferes with other countries internal politics, even if physically the borders are closed. This is also why the anti-elite movements get so angry and we all get so frustrated - they feel that they should have the option to just leave and be let to follow their ideas, but there is no place in the Internet that is really away from any other place. It is as if the hunter gatherer band had a big quarrel and split - but then the two bands made camps just 20 meters from each other, even if there was a river in between it was all visible.
International copyright treaties: It's an absurdity that it should last beyond the lifetime of an author, and questionable that it should be transferable from the author. That there could be estates and organizations like Elsevier jealously guarding what should be public domain.
Intellectual property in general has been turned into a tool to oppress creators and inventors, and for rent-seeking organizations to terrorize the world. It's an absurdity that you can be fined and arrested *for understanding something*!!
Our modern internet Alexandria is already burning. We could lose all our cultural works from 1923 onwards as our libraries die and nothing is allowed to replace them.
This is definitely true. I was shocked to learn that in the 2018 Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society report, 51% of professionals work worldwide:https://www.northeastern.ed...
And growing rapidly. There really will be global coordination of nearly all regulation very soon. The report also finds that the great majority of professionals work within their field (for some company). So it basically seems like industry pros really do just go around trying to reach agreement on beneficial regulations and writing up laws.
Maybe as a consequence the future will have a lot more general disobedience than we might have thought.
re: "white couple with white baby". If you search "couple with baby" you find tons of example, mostly white.That's probably because you specify the skin color of the baby or of the couple only when it's relevant, such in case of a black couple with a white baby or vice versa.
> - sort of convergent evolution of systems
evolution only works when animals fail to reproduce, and get selected against.
the pressure against under-regulation here is obvious: political fallout from a catastrophe that should have been prevented.
but what selective pressure prevents regulatory regimes from over-regulating?
Who are these "elites" of which you speak? Taking aircraft as an example…do you mean like “experts”? Like veteran pilots and the folks from the NTSB? The ones that dissect crashes and make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to me? I’ll take all of that “elite” I can get, thank you. The only “elites” I see in that industry are the big airlines that love to hire cheap, overwork, and scrimp on maintenance. They are the last to “pressure" anyone to regulate, and actually actively conspire against regulation.
“It seems to me that we instead have a strong world culture of regulators, driven by a stronger world culture of elites. Elites all over the world talk, and then form a consensus, and then authorities everywhere are pressured into following that consensus.” Not so much. What you have is a cycle in which something bad happens and politicians and regulators are pressured into “doing something” so that it “never happens again”. In the case of aircraft, this mostly comes from relatives of families and tort lawyers, who band together out of grief and avarice respectively. I don’t think I would call these folks “elite”.
As for “conformity” don’t you think that regs in most industries will naturally trend toward some kind of best practices - sort of convergent evolution of systems? Many industries are like small town where everyone knows everyone.
Broad examples:* Choice of leader (popular vote vs. elite choice)* Multiple vs single party
Concrete examples:* Kidney market in Iran* One-child policy in China
In general I know very little about the policy worlds in China or Iran, I'm mostly assuming that the broad differences in the dynamics and structure of government also lead to large differences on a more concrete level.
https://www.overcomingbias....
A similar thesis is put forward in https://www.hup.harvard.edu... . Apes are hierarchical - humans are not, Boehm argues that this is because we learned to build coalitions and kill tyrants with arms. Where both coalitions and arms have an equalizing effect neutralizing potential brute force advantage of the alpha male.
Wrangham explains that the usual consensus was built on observations of average, day to day interactions between foragers, which are indeed quite peaceful. But, just like Antifa, foragers are only "mostly peaceful" - from time to time, usually very quietly, deadly violence erupts for a few minutes. If in a group of fifty there is one collectively executed murder of a quarrelsome individual every 10 years, it's enough to make a big difference in the frequency of alleles predisposing to quarreling, especially if the selection operates over 300,000 years.
If the gossip-enforced conformity requires at least occasional face-to-face interactions, then being beyond the reach of commercial aviation might be enough. But yes, reasonable people might eventually have to move to other star systems to break off for good.
That thesis sounds at odds with the usual anthropology consensus. Which of course doesn't make it wrong.
I'm afraid Mars isn't remotely far enough to prevent their inclusion in this same system.
Robin, have you read "The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution" by Richard Wrangham?
Highly recommended and relevant to your post. Contrary to what has sometimes been said about peaceful consensus building among foragers, ruthless premeditated murder was the key social innovation that differentiated H.sapiens from our Paleolithic congeners, and paradoxically, it lead to modern humans becoming remarkably more mellow than our ape ancestors. The book fleshes out the argument in great detail and I am quite convinced it is broadly correct.
Carried over into our times, humans are adapted to gossip while at the same trying to stay out of other gossipers' crosshairs. They gossip at Davos, in the couloirs of the UN and at funerals of the formerly mighty and since the onset of the jet-setting age the separate national elites slowly coalesced into one diffuse, amorphous global blob where everybody is afraid to be the odd man out - because back in the tribal times being the odd man out meant there was always a target for other men's arrows painted on your back. The elites no longer kill each other, an occasional Saddam or Muammar excepted, but the old adaptations to conformity don't go away.
So we end up with trillions of dollars destroyed in lockdowns and billions of people muzzled with dehumanizing, humiliating and almost completely useless masks, except in Sweden and Holland, which this time seem to have missed the memo.
This is an excellent post - you give an explanation for the epidemic of cooperative stupidity that swept the world in the past 50 years.
A move to Mars and beyond, far enough to prevent too-frequent elbow-rubbing by our rulers, could let us breathe free again.
Yeah - just compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... Anyone remembers Bhopal?
It really surprised me how the policies against Covid19 are being copied around even the incorrect ones, and how any deviation is punished by the public opinion. But we are not in the upper paleolithic. Our frustrations probably show how it is different now from what it used to be then. For example, from my understanding of hunter gatherer societies, it wasn't that you were forced to follow the main course - you were compelled by gossip - but nobody used force if you disagreed and wanted to go your way. The problem was that going completely on your own was a sure death, but the bands regularly split so if you found a few followers you could always escape the group politics. After the split the two groups could follow their courses and not interfere much. Now there is no such possibility - we are all connected. So for example if Sweden does not do lock down - then the example they establish interferes with other countries internal politics, even if physically the borders are closed. This is also why the anti-elite movements get so angry and we all get so frustrated - they feel that they should have the option to just leave and be let to follow their ideas, but there is no place in the Internet that is really away from any other place. It is as if the hunter gatherer band had a big quarrel and split - but then the two bands made camps just 20 meters from each other, even if there was a river in between it was all visible.
International copyright treaties: It's an absurdity that it should last beyond the lifetime of an author, and questionable that it should be transferable from the author. That there could be estates and organizations like Elsevier jealously guarding what should be public domain.
Intellectual property in general has been turned into a tool to oppress creators and inventors, and for rent-seeking organizations to terrorize the world. It's an absurdity that you can be fined and arrested *for understanding something*!!
Our modern internet Alexandria is already burning. We could lose all our cultural works from 1923 onwards as our libraries die and nothing is allowed to replace them.
How do you know you are elite? Your proposals are accepted. How do you know you are not? Yours aren't. More definition than explanation.
This is talking in circles. how can we decouple policymakers and making policies? should be democratize the process?
This is definitely true. I was shocked to learn that in the 2018 Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society report, 51% of professionals work worldwide:https://www.northeastern.ed...
And growing rapidly. There really will be global coordination of nearly all regulation very soon. The report also finds that the great majority of professionals work within their field (for some company). So it basically seems like industry pros really do just go around trying to reach agreement on beneficial regulations and writing up laws.
Maybe as a consequence the future will have a lot more general disobedience than we might have thought.
re: "white couple with white baby". If you search "couple with baby" you find tons of example, mostly white.That's probably because you specify the skin color of the baby or of the couple only when it's relevant, such in case of a black couple with a white baby or vice versa.
We need to start eating elites the same way the morlocks ate the elois.