systems | complexity | second-order effects
“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Or, in German and with a similar rhyme, “Wenn die Münze im Kästlein klingt, die Seele in den Himmel springt.”
A friar named Johann Tetzel may or may not have said those words in the early 1500s, but the money he raised by selling indulgences helped rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica.
But what is an indulgence?
Continue reading “Secular Indulgences”
In the early 2000s while in Mexico City I ended up on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is an enormous university, by any of the standards I know. The university had 370,000 students (as of 2023, but I believe a similar number 20 years ago).
Walking around I met some students and followed them to a meeting of the Spartacist Youth League.
I had no idea what that was, other than the name seemed interesting and the people were nice.
Then the meeting started. After a long speech by the organizer (my Spanish was only good enough to understand half), students took turns standing and giving their own speeches. A few of the speeches were in English, which surprised me. The content was surprising too. One of the speeches was to persuade mainland China to abandon capitalist reforms. Another was in support of North Korea.
As the meeting ended, my new friends asked me what I thought.
“I’m not sure if I understood, but was there a speech in support of North Korea? In support of the government of North Korea? And the continuation of the revolution there?” Continue reading “The Youth”
Even if we’re not good at dealing with them, we tend to see a lot of systems surprises that arise from expansionism – the situations where something grows faster than expected, dangerous positive feedback loops, or good intentions with bad outcomes that negate the original good intentions.
So I was surprised when I recently learned about the way some forager hunter societies found to create stability in environments with both limited food (meaning successful hunters could accumulate status) but with few ways to store that food (limiting the ways others could accumulate status).
My main source here is a paper titled “Leveling the Hunter,” by Polly Wiessner.
Between the Current Thing and the Great American Safety Valve is another pathway to guiding desired social change. That of designing a grand new outcome, in its entirety, top-down, in one attempt. To decree a deity. Has it ever worked?
Or, to quote from Christopher Alexander, on “unselfconscious” and “selfconscious” cultures, why does it fail? From Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form:
“In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs…. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction…. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind – a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships – and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context – the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer.”
If you were plonked down in an unknown society, how would you identify their most remembered historical figures?
One guess would be to look at the notable physical memorials. Statues, plaques, and names on buildings.
These are the most noticeable, prominent names, and figures. But as someone who reads the plaques, I usually find they’re full of unrecognizable names and forgotten actions. If those pieces of history aren’t also present in the minds of passersby, a statue won’t educate them.
No, physical memorials are what yesterday’s committees and special interest groups decided was worthy to remember, or even, what should be remembered, even if it was worthy only of being forgotten. Continue reading “Dead Poet Societies”
A phrase in the recent Economist obituary about Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, immediately struck me.
According to the obituary, in the moments before his helicopter crashed, Raisi “stared sombrely” out of the window. And at the end of the obituary, “the president stared out of the window, unsmiling, as the fog closed in.”
I put it outside the ability of even US intelligence agencies to know that Raisi was staring at that moment and the way in which he stared.
Quotes like this are a symptom of the way publications like the Economist and others project beliefs onto historical occurrences.
But this symptom is not new. When I read the Economist piece, I was also reminded of a section from the book What Do You Care What Other People Think? by physicist Richard Feynman. Continue reading “What People Think”
Well, is it?
In his book The Mansions of Philosophy, historian Will Durant has a chapter titled “Is Socialism Dead?” He wrote the book in 1929 but I think we could still seriously ask the question in 2024.
And for that matter, Durant had another chapter titled “The Breakdown of Marriage.” How long has it been reportedly breaking down?
But it was another chapter in his book, one titled “Is Progress a Delusion?,” that I thought most odd. 1929 was well into the 70 years of fast technological and social change (1870 to 1940) noted by Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon claims that those 70 years of fast change might never be seen again in the history of the world.
So the question of whether progress was a delusion struck me as odd. Let’s look at some of the Durant’s supporting examples:
Durant notes that the ancient Greeks thought of history as a “vicious circle” that repeated again and again. There was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle. Continue reading “Is Progress a Delusion?”
Six month ago I wrote a post called Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI, which started with the infamous “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter. In my post I looked at how groups historically tried to block or reverse change that the general public experienced as inevitable. But there are always options. I wrote about options for the situations where you don’t want that inevitable change:
“You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.
“You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.
“Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.”
Authors of the letter requested a pause of at least six-months in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. It’s now six months after their letter, so I thought it was time for another look at the topic. Continue reading “The Strong Do What They Can (Addendum to Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI)”
Are some things inevitable?
And if something is inevitable, what do you do if you don’t like it?
You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.
You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.
Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.
The “Pause Giant AI Experiments” letter came as a shock to me. Not that someone wrote it, but that they wrote it yesterday.
Noteworthy signatories of that letter include Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a number of business leaders and academics. The list also included Andrew Yang, whose 2020 presidential campaign platform included AI-fomented Universal Basic Income.
But I disagree with the pause argument because the bubble of history seems already to have popped.
The spark for this post was an article published in The Century Magazine in 1892. In it the author explains to a foreign visitor the odd way that Americans keep the peace. I couldn’t improve upon the article’s title, “The Great American Safety Valve,” so I stole it for my title.
It’s a short, informal article from 130 years ago, but there’s a lot going on. In it the author explains to a bewildered foreign friend how the US balances a large population that has been taught that the class they were born into doesn’t prevent them from rising to the peak of power, with the obvious lack of political offices. In 1892 language, “it is the birthright of every American boy to have the chance to be president…”
It might seem odd to turn to an obscure article from over a century ago, but the topic relates to today. Here are some of the main points: