In the world around us, innovation seems to increase with the size of an integrated region of activity. For example, human and computer languages with more users acquire more words and tools at a faster rate. Tech ecosystems, such as those collected around Microsoft, Apple, or Google operating systems, innovate faster when they have more participating suppliers and users. And there is more innovation per capita in larger cities, firms, and economies. (All else equal, of course.)
Phase transitions can lock groups into a shared state, eg a magnet where pointing up dominates and it’s hard to get such a system to flip to down even if down is better for some reason. Phase transitions can only exist in large systems. The macro field is not strong enough to control all atoms in a smaller system.
A complementary point about human organizations: when faced with an ambiguous challenge, each individual may have a different understanding of the goal. If they don’t align, their efforts might not add up to much, or they may even work against each other. One might imagine it’s easier to align in small groups via rational argument.
So… a small group is needed both to explore options and rationally debate / align, while a large group will confer the benefit of alignment but it will be along some locked in direction - one that might be suboptimal and also one that is inflexible and hard to change.
I think you are getting to an important understanding here. The focus on technology in and of itself as a means to a future state are misplaced. The ecosystem in which tech, knowledge, innovation either thrives or stagnates is downstream of other cultural factors - psychological and metaphysical factors, values, or what I would call the spiritual state of affairs of mankind. If this is out of sync with reality and with pro-social norms, then large-scale societal innovation will not thrive. I tend toward pessimism but hopefully my pessimism is misplaced.
If the innovations can't leave their regions, then it is any difference is enough. When innovations can leave regions, then it needs to be super-linear. But these conditions seem to usually be met for larger regions.
In the world around us, innovation seems to increase with the size of an integrated region of activity.
Does it increase sublinearly, linearly or superlinearly with the size of the area? I.e. If you broke such a region into two regions of half the size, would total innovation increase, stay the same, or decrease?
If it's sub-linear then maybe we should break up all such regions (while trying to keep the same 'density of connectedness') into as many small dense regions as possible
I have in mind scenarios where the drag is enough to induce negative growth rates. And the problems I'm talking about don't need a world government. A world mob will do.
A powerful world government could indeed lead to some relatively stagnant situations if it was not competent, or had bad intentions. I think this issue is fairly widely recognized. If we succeed in coordinating on such a large scale, it is something to watch out for. It would more likely lead to slow down than complete collapse, though. Calling a source of drag or delay a "filter" seems as though it would be a bit misleading.
Only for a tiny fraction of human existence have we lived without a frontier - a place we could escape to and do our own thing in our own way. We're now basically trapped in a single pressure cooker, all sharing the same social media, community of elites, and increasingly globalized norms of conduct. In the 18th century some nerds read a bunch of philosophy books and drafted plans for a country that ended up contributing a lot to human progress. Maybe today's nerds could do far better and advance humanity even more, but since there is no unclaimed place to settle, they will never get a chance. I think our most fertile fantasy genres all involve frontiers of some kind, and nerds dream about settling space because it promises the possibility of trying something new. I don't think humans are at our best when we're bottled up like this.
Definition of biological species has criteria that are not dependent on the number of individuals eg. can they successfully mate? Does that mating produce offspring that can successfully mate?
I'm not sure how relevant the results are about species evolution since they seem naturally confounded by the way we draw species distinctions. After all, if evolution is happening fast then we tend to divide up the group into more species so we should expect that smaller numbers of individuals in a species size would correlate with faster evolutionary rate merely as a consequence of how we divide up species.
If, instead, we consider number of existing individuals descended from some reproductively closed initial population then I'm betting that the rate of evolutionary adaptation will be positively correlated with that size *conditional* on the amount of culling (animals failing to transmit their genes) that happens. In other words, in a lab Evo study I'd expect the study which creates 10,000 colonies at each stage before culling them down to 100 based on some fitness measure to evolve faster than in a study where each step branches into 100 colonies before culling down to 1.
That's not to disagree with your worry. It's just that I'd characterize it more as the concern about decreasing the number of divergent offshoots from a community/population so we don't have the question of how we lump/split communities obscuring the real effect.
Have you read Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies"? I didn't find it persuasive, but its attempt to scientifically study the issue might be of interest to you.
When species get to migrate across continents after a long period of separation, the ones from the larger continent (or continent with a larger population) tend to outcompete the ones from the smaller. Hence Australia's are at a disadvantage compared to the Old World and they have lots of invasive species, but indigenous Australian species are less apt to invade the Old World.
Phase transitions can lock groups into a shared state, eg a magnet where pointing up dominates and it’s hard to get such a system to flip to down even if down is better for some reason. Phase transitions can only exist in large systems. The macro field is not strong enough to control all atoms in a smaller system.
A complementary point about human organizations: when faced with an ambiguous challenge, each individual may have a different understanding of the goal. If they don’t align, their efforts might not add up to much, or they may even work against each other. One might imagine it’s easier to align in small groups via rational argument.
So… a small group is needed both to explore options and rationally debate / align, while a large group will confer the benefit of alignment but it will be along some locked in direction - one that might be suboptimal and also one that is inflexible and hard to change.
I think you are getting to an important understanding here. The focus on technology in and of itself as a means to a future state are misplaced. The ecosystem in which tech, knowledge, innovation either thrives or stagnates is downstream of other cultural factors - psychological and metaphysical factors, values, or what I would call the spiritual state of affairs of mankind. If this is out of sync with reality and with pro-social norms, then large-scale societal innovation will not thrive. I tend toward pessimism but hopefully my pessimism is misplaced.
If the innovations can't leave their regions, then it is any difference is enough. When innovations can leave regions, then it needs to be super-linear. But these conditions seem to usually be met for larger regions.
In the world around us, innovation seems to increase with the size of an integrated region of activity.
Does it increase sublinearly, linearly or superlinearly with the size of the area? I.e. If you broke such a region into two regions of half the size, would total innovation increase, stay the same, or decrease?
If it's sub-linear then maybe we should break up all such regions (while trying to keep the same 'density of connectedness') into as many small dense regions as possible
I have in mind scenarios where the drag is enough to induce negative growth rates. And the problems I'm talking about don't need a world government. A world mob will do.
A powerful world government could indeed lead to some relatively stagnant situations if it was not competent, or had bad intentions. I think this issue is fairly widely recognized. If we succeed in coordinating on such a large scale, it is something to watch out for. It would more likely lead to slow down than complete collapse, though. Calling a source of drag or delay a "filter" seems as though it would be a bit misleading.
Only for a tiny fraction of human existence have we lived without a frontier - a place we could escape to and do our own thing in our own way. We're now basically trapped in a single pressure cooker, all sharing the same social media, community of elites, and increasingly globalized norms of conduct. In the 18th century some nerds read a bunch of philosophy books and drafted plans for a country that ended up contributing a lot to human progress. Maybe today's nerds could do far better and advance humanity even more, but since there is no unclaimed place to settle, they will never get a chance. I think our most fertile fantasy genres all involve frontiers of some kind, and nerds dream about settling space because it promises the possibility of trying something new. I don't think humans are at our best when we're bottled up like this.
Definition of biological species has criteria that are not dependent on the number of individuals eg. can they successfully mate? Does that mating produce offspring that can successfully mate?
I'm not sure how relevant the results are about species evolution since they seem naturally confounded by the way we draw species distinctions. After all, if evolution is happening fast then we tend to divide up the group into more species so we should expect that smaller numbers of individuals in a species size would correlate with faster evolutionary rate merely as a consequence of how we divide up species.
If, instead, we consider number of existing individuals descended from some reproductively closed initial population then I'm betting that the rate of evolutionary adaptation will be positively correlated with that size *conditional* on the amount of culling (animals failing to transmit their genes) that happens. In other words, in a lab Evo study I'd expect the study which creates 10,000 colonies at each stage before culling them down to 100 based on some fitness measure to evolve faster than in a study where each step branches into 100 colonies before culling down to 1.
That's not to disagree with your worry. It's just that I'd characterize it more as the concern about decreasing the number of divergent offshoots from a community/population so we don't have the question of how we lump/split communities obscuring the real effect.
Yes I've read Tainter. And yes even in bio larger continents have more total innovation.
Have you read Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies"? I didn't find it persuasive, but its attempt to scientifically study the issue might be of interest to you.
When species get to migrate across continents after a long period of separation, the ones from the larger continent (or continent with a larger population) tend to outcompete the ones from the smaller. Hence Australia's are at a disadvantage compared to the Old World and they have lots of invasive species, but indigenous Australian species are less apt to invade the Old World.