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Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that's how it's going to be.
It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can't really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.
Coincidentally, here's Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:
Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.
There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period -- which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.
Let me try a different example:
Let's say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.
The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55% voters vote for them, yet they get 80% of MPs. They don't care about meta level and are not willing to sacrifice object-level interests for it.
The situation is stable for the time being. There's no "political will" to enact proportional voting. So you wait.
At some point the voting patterns change and the ruling party suddenly faces defeat in the upcoming elections. Now they would do better with the proportional voting system.
They care only about the object level, that is, winning the election, and proportional voting is as good means to win as is majority voting.
You, on the other hand, care only about the meta level. You may lose the upcoming election if proportional system is adopted, but you think it's still worth it.
Suddenly the two parties are aligned, each side prefers the proportional system, albeit for different reasons. The proportional voting gets adopted.
Unfortunately no, they didn't. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian "exit").
LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don't know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls' "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!
If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system - would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.
Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?
Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.
Isn't it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?
Isn't it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who's willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.
One man's singularity is another man's Tuesday:
The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
What's easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there's no generic "human intelligence", just the intelligence of individual human beings.
Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.
Technological singularity, in other words, isn't an objective phenomenon. It's a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole's event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.
Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can't fathom what's going on?
If so, we don't have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.
And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...
And there seems to be a dilemma here:
Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable - and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...
Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.
Thanks for the link. I've noticed the trend of avoiding the salient issues among those who get things actually done, but I haven't had a name for it. Pulling the rope sideways - nice.
I don't think this works very well. If you wait until a major party sides with your meta, you could be waiting a long time.
Correct. This could be countered by having multiple plans and waiting for several possible situations/alliances in parallel.
if you get what you were waiting for, you're definitely not pulling sideways
Why? It's known that people care a lot about object-level issues and little about meta-level ones (procedural stuff, e.g. constitution). If you get what you want at the meta level, the voters won't care and politicians thus have little incentive to make it a partisan/salient issue.
Fair enough. The information was taken from some book, it's a long time, I don't remember exactly, possibly Dawkins. Anyway, I've fixed the article. Thanks for pointing that out!
Admittedly, I haven't read about the problem of sex since '90s but back then the argument against the naive "sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism" was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual -- while the natural selection works on the individual level.
In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined out). Thus, the advantages of the sexual reproduction must outweight this huge drop in fitness. Even worse, it must outweight it quickly. "Your progeny is going to be better off after 100 generations" is not going to work, because when your fitness drops by 50% you'll die out in few generations.
Anyway, if the newer research found a solution to this problem, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Yes, it does. Any better ideas?
This is aimed at those who can't make an informed opinion themselves. (And most of us can't. Even a scientist can't often make an informed opinion about a result from a different discipline.) What it means is: "Trust the official scientific institutions. However broken they may be you are still better off trusting them than trusting the alternative sources of information."
This is related to an idea I keep stressing here, which is that people rarely have consistent meta-level principles. Instead, they’ll endorse the meta-level principle that supports their object-level beliefs at any given moment. The example I keep giving is how when the federal government was anti-gay, conservatives talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and liberals insisted on states’ rights; when the federal government became pro-gay, liberals talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and conservatives insisted on states’ rights.
--- https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
One encounters that kind of thing all the time, e.g. people trying to change the constitution to cause particular object-level changes.
But on the other hand, it feels like a useful political tool: Whoever is willing to sacrifice their object-level goals can achieve their meta-level goals instead. And given that meta-level changes are likely to have more profound long-term impact, it may be worth it.
Elaborating the above example, if you are anti-gay, but pro-state all you have to do is to wait until pro-gay people support strengthening the states at the expense of the federal government. At that point you can join forces with them and give more power to the states. I'll hurt your object anti-gay agenda, but you achieve your meta-level agenda which will keep paying off in 20 or 50 years when the gay issue is probably no longer salient enough to care.
Hard to say, but one problem I see is that strong regional identity that powers the political processes in federations cannot be created by fiat. If you turn a centralized country to federation by passing such law it would continue to work as a centralized country. Maybe in 100-200 years regional identity, regional elites, specific regional interests would emerge, but it won't be tomorrow. Same, although maybe in a lesser extent, I think, applies to already federated countries and "making them even more federated".
Interesting. I've never heard about that. Any tips about where to read some more about that?
Let's go even further. Assuming the above model, the system can be improved by treating each successful referendum as a system failure. A postmortem should be written a submitted for public discussion:
- If majority was in favour, why wasn't the law changed before in the first place?
- Why haven't the counterproposal succeeded?
- Why haven't the initiants retracted the initiative?
- What should be done so that a similar failure doesn't happen again?
There's yet one more dynamic: Initiative proposes X. Government is, like, this is just crazy. The initiators: Do change the law to include Y (a watered down version of X) and we'll retract the initiative.
Looking at it from that point of view, the referendum can be thought of not as a way for "the people" to decide, but rather a lever, a credible threat, to change the law without having to go via the standard representative system (joining a party, becoming an MP, etc.)
In Switzerland there's a lot of discussion about changing this or that part of the political system, but I've never seen someone advocating for getting rid of referenda. There's something about the concept that people tend to like, irrespective of whether it works well or not.
I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we’d have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.)
I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are - based on their experience - less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and therefore societal progress) are not great. One is likely to see clique formation, tribal thinking, corruption.
Now, new generation doesn't have the civil war experience (or a street gang experience, or whatever). It is generally more trusting. They are able to cooperate on a higher level, but the old generation is distrustful, considers the youngsters to be dangerously naive and throws a wrench into the machine. And the longer the average length of life is, the slower the process of moving away from zero-sum games to positive-sum games becomes.
The interesting observations are:
- Solutions like "retire at 350" are not going to work - you can't retire a person from the society.
- The "old guard" problem could be, in theory, solved if the old generation would learn to change their mind, to adjust to the changed conditions on the ground. However, I am not sure how realistic is the unlearning the civil war experience, unlearning of not trusting the people around you.
Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.
It would take a large amount of research...
That's the nature of illusion: If you research it there's no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.
Is this true?
As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.
Whether it's a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it'll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.
What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally low status.
But that doesn't have to be so: Consider the use of Latin phrases in Europe in XIX. century. It was, back then, seen as beautiful, literary and high-status. If the same could be achieved today with English, it would allow small language communities to break out of the language cage.
I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.
But look at it from a different perspective.
Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say "Moloch".
Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of "Moloch" you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say "Moloch" and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a crackpot referring to the ancient Phoenician deity in a completely unrelated context.
The problem is that the rationalist community is too small for its terminology "to be in the Overton window". Not so with economic terminology. That community is large enough and the terms like "economies of scale" are admissible in public discourse.
Now scale that down to a small language community. Suddenly, the rationalist community is so small that it, for all practical purposes, does not exist. The economists are now in the position that the rationalists were in in the anglosphere. There are few of them and their terminology is not widely understood and accepted.
In other words: In the US you can't make an argument in public discussion involving rationalist concepts. But you can use economic terminology and get away with it. In Slovakia, you often can't.
"Economies of scale" seems to be "úspory z rozsahu" ("saving from the extent") - but that sounds really weird and I've never heard it being used. My guess is that the economics professors just use the English term.
As for "single point of failure" I am an engineer myself and I've never encountered any Slovak equivalent.
Fixed. Thanks!
I am reading Hirshmann's Exit, Voice and Loyalty right now and it's great. But it's not about governance per se. Which book did you have in mind?
Some other stuff to look into:
- Governance of Church. This may not seem like a big deal today, but in early medieval Europe, church probably had more capacity than states, so it mattered a lot. Also, catholic governance structures are quite different from protestant, from the structures in Judaism etc.
- IETF has a pretty weird governance. The assumption is that anyone can join (or leave) at any moment, so the boundaries of the body politic are quite fuzzy. Thus, no voting, the stress on decision making by consensus, running code etc. Also, limited lifetime of the working groups seems to be designed to prevent concentration of power and bureacratizaton.
- Open source governance models overall, from BDFL to Debian. Nadya Eghbal wrote a nice paper not 100% focused on the governance, but close.
- Governance of common pool resources. Elinor Ostrom's work is interesting here. Book review.
- Governance structures in the organized crime.
- Vast anthropological literature on the governance in traditional societies. (Clans, age groups etc.)
- Swiss political system breaks the typical state governance patterns. Known mostly for direct democracy - but the real meat is: Any randomly assembled group of actors can get immediate political power by threatening to launch a binding, all-overriding referendum. Such groups are trpically consulted with and appeased.
- Governance of international bodies.
I've tried to double check. Global production of wheat and exports by Russia and Ukraine, according to FAO:
2019, in 1000 tonnes, amounts to 6.9%, very much the same numbers as you've got.
Where does the 5%/90% statistic come from?
Russian troops refuse to go to Ukraine on grounds they do not have passports, so Russia fires them.
These were riot police. From the interview:
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What motivates the National Guard for their refusal to participate in the "special operation"?
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It's very simple. People don't want to kill and get killed. When they got a job, the contract said different things. In addition, OMON has a different mission. They don’t know how to use ground-to-air systems, they don’t drive tanks. How should they fight against a regular army? And with what - with a baton and a shield? Their job is to disperse the Navalny supporters and they did an excellent job at that. But this is something else.
The part I do understand: The European Union works by unanimous consent.
Depends on the area of interest. For some things it's unanimous consent, for others it's qualified majority (55% of the countries, 65% of the population).
The part I do not understand: Why everyone else can’t agree to do it anyway.
EU has a single internal market. Allowing imports to one country means allowing imports to all of them.
As for Galeev's threads: As a person from the former Ostblok, where countries share similar dynamics, there was nothing there that made me call bullshit on the spot. I am not a Russian though so I can't vouch for the particular details.
I am an EU citizen and I've realized that I have little understanding of what EU is, how it works and how it came about. While researching the topic I've stumbled over Jean Monnet.
I guess the general approach is: Look for a surprising development (e.g. Europe suddenly overcoming old enmities) and research it. If change happened, there were people involved. Some of them had more impact, some of them less and some of them have even wrote down their thoughts and experiences.
Here are some interesting people and developments that may or may not prove fruitful to research: Unification movements (German unification, Bismarck, Zollverein etc., Italian unification, US federation); Peace of Westphalia (liberal outcome from an extreme polarization - each side literally thought that the other side sides with the devil); Second International and its failure to prevent WWI; enlightened monarchs (Peter the Great, Friedrich the Great, Joseph II., Deng Xiaoping, Park Chung-Hee etc.); decolonization, why it led to chaos and why Botswana is an exception (Seretse Khama, maybe); Vergangenheitsbewältigung - why it succeeded in Germany, but not, say, in Turkey; creation of modern international organizations, e.g. International Criminal Court.
Thanks for sharing the story. I've done some research myself and stumbled over the fact that Vavilov's favourite phrase was: "The life is short. One needs to hurry."
It expresses the same sentiment as Nick Bostrom's "Why did we start so late? " but I personally like it much better.
If the above is true, an interesting consequence would be that social progress may slow down as the average length of life increases.
The thing you are missing, I think, is the nature of common knowedge which underpins the society. Thanks to how it works, people can't achieve moral/societal progress individually. If you live in a violent society you can't get less violent by yourself. If you do, you'd get killed. If you live in a corrupt society you can't get less corrupt all by yourself. If you do, you'd be in disadvantage to all the corrupt people. The society can progress only as a whole, thus the limit on the speed of progress is determined by the speed in which the majority is able to change their attitude (get less violent, corrupt etc.) And given how unlikely an average person is to change their attitude the social progress may move one funeral at a time.
I would say there were two distinct "progressive" worldwiews in the 19th century. The symbol of the bourgeois progressivism may be Exposition Universelle of 1889, the symbol of the proletarian progressivism the Paris Commune. Two events, same place, 18 years apart. The former with all the wonderful machines etc., the latter with the barricades and soldiers shooting the survivors. The two worldviews, being that distinct and held by different people, it's not clear to me whether the failures of the social progress school led to the souring towards the technical progress.
I haven't seen the latest book, but the older ones I've seen were written in the traditional anthropological way, mostly as collections of anecdata. That's not an objection specifically against Graeber. Anthropology was always done that way. But rigor-wise it doesn't compare to more modern stuff, like, say, Joe Henrich.
IIRC, the study was done on people living in a nearby big city, but originally coming from the respective region.
No idea. I was just speculating.
I don't know, frankly. But what I find fascinating is that one finds the tall poppy syndrome in any society. It almost feels like something inherent to human nature. Does it mean that there's something adaptive about it? And if so, are the societies like Tiv just those that that managed to take the full advantage of that potential?
A different one. Tiv live in Nigeria, the study was conducted in DRC.
I think that's not the way how people instinctively think. Consider following statement: "Wall Street bankers should be stripped of their wealth/heavily taxed/prosecuted." Ignore whether it would be a good policy or not. Still, it's a human way to think and many do adopt that kind of stance. Now consider the opposite: "Wall Street bankers should be forced to share their methods so that everyone can prosper." That's quite an alien approach and one would be hard pressed to find many people who actually think that.
For the psychology behind it consider this article which describes how !Kung people of Kalahari were insulting an ox they were given, calling it a bag of bones and similar. When asked why, they've explained:
Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle
I believe the book is rather fresh, haven't read it yet. But reading Graeber was always fun and thought-provoking, I've even exchanged few emails with him back when it was still possible. On the rigor side though I am not that convinced :)
Fixed. Thanks!
- "Alright, but the Swiss could do that because they didn't need to worry about any outside threat. They didn't have to deal with the same difficulties other countries had to deal with."
That's not historically true. Switzerland, being a country positioned in the middle of big European powers (France, Austria, HRE/Germany, Italy) has gone through all the shit that the rest of Europe did.
That being said, the things often played out differently than elsewhere. It's not clear how much of that is pure luck and how much is attributable to other factors, such as peculiarities of the local political system.
Consider, for example the very beginnings. The core of the weird political entity that will one day become Switzerland was formed around the access route to the Gotthard pass. There are different mountain passes in Alps, but only one did escape the rule by aristocrats and got to be rules be local communities instead. The reason may have to do with that fact that Gotthard pass did not exist until 1220's when the first bridge was built in Schollenen Gorge. (Devil was involved in the feat, they say.) That meant that until then, canton Uri was an economic backwater - and literally so, being only reachable by ship - and tightly controlling it wasn't really worth the effort. The communities were to a large extent left to self-govern themselves. At the same time, aristocracy was particularly weak in XIII. century which allowed the new entity based on treaties between communities to form and gather strength instead of being immediately crushed by a superior power.
Or take the 30 year war. In some parts of HRE as much as 70% of the population died. The future Switzerland seemed very much on the same trajectory. There was a deep split between Protestants and Catholics and the forces were balanced out so that fighting could go on for a long time. But it did not. It may be partly attributable to the fact that great powers haven't invaded the region, treating it as a source of mercenaries instead. But even then, it's strange that the Swiss haven't started cutting each other throats all by themselves. One may point to the fact that catholic and protestant cantons were jointly ruling over subjugated territories which required some minimal amount of cooperation. Or simply that centuries of being bound by many mutual treaties and undergoing small-scale internal clashes has resulted in enough political skill to escape the temptation to wage a full-scale war. Or maybe that cantons, not being ruled by a single person, managed to escape the worst excesses of personal ambitions. Hard to say.
The current political system formed in 1948. It was so radical for its time that great powers would gladly crush it. But in 1848 all of them were busy keeping fighting the revolutions at home. Swiss went through their civil war and the establishment of the new system so quickly that once the great powers took notice, it was already done. The speed of the process was result of the victorious radical forces turning out to be rather moderate after they've won, they did almost no cleansing of the conservatives etc. The defeated conservatives, in their turn, being willing to continue the fight within the framework of the new institutions. In 1891 they've even permanently joined the government. Again, it's not easy to say why it happened that way.
In 1918, the political situation was tumultous. Bavarian Soviet Republic was established etc. In Switzerland, there was a general strike and it didn't look good. Army was mobilized. Paramilitary units started forming. But then the leaders of the strike backed down. The government made moderate concessions. The fight continued by political means until 40 years later, social democrats have become integral part of the government.
During WWII, Germany was definitely planning to invade Switzerland. But Switzerland was cooperative, allowing transport to pass between Germany and Italy. In case of attack, on the other hand, the Swiss army planned to retreat to the area around the Gotthard pass and hold on there as long as possible, which would stop that traffic and tie valuable resources in a difficult war in the mountains. All in all, there was little to gain from attacking Switzerland as long as Axis powers were fighting wars elsewhere.
It's hard to find a common pattern in all of that, but in any case, it's not like there have been less difficulties in Switzerland than elsewhere.
- "Alright, that's all well and good, but this system hasn't led Switzerland to help in the holocaust, lots of residents aren't given citizenship... maybe the system isn't so great after all?"
That's the price of rule by consensus. Your preferences may be to give citizenship to all the residents. But there's also a lot of people who would like not to let any foreigners in in the first place. What you get in the end is a compromise solution: A lot of immigrants are allowed in, but gaining citizenship is made deliberately difficult.
As for the holocaust note that Switzerland managed to keep their Jewish population safe. There are very few countries in Europe that can make a similar claim. And all that while being surrounded by Axis powers on all sides.
All in all, to me it sound like a question of sacrificing ideological purity in favor of achieving practical results.
Self-review: Looking at the essay year and a half later I am still reasonably happy about it.
In the meantime I've seen Swiss people recommending it as an introductory text for people asking about Swiss political system, so I am, of course, honored, but it also gives me some confidence in not being totally off.
If I had to write the essay again, I would probably give less prominence to direct democracy and more to the concordance and decentralization, which are less eye-catchy but in a way more interesting/important.
Also, I would probably pay some attention to the question of how the system - given how unique it is - even managed to evolve. Maybe also do some investigation into whether the uniqueness of the political system has something to do with the surprising long-term ability of Swiss economy to reinvent itself and become a leader in areas as varied as mercenary troops, cheese, silk, machinery, banking and pharmaceuticals.
In red button game the players should be enemies (or at least unaligned) which doesn't play well with the in-community ritual. Adding EA forum this year was, IMO, a step in the right direction. What about getting some further off community involved? Maybe anti-nuclear activists like https://www.icanw.org ? One wouldn't, of course, expect anti-nuclear activists to press the button, but the community may be different enough (UN politics, anyone?) to make it interesting.
With age pyramid shifting is there really a dearth of available experts? If only a fraction of retired experts was involved in apprenticeship programmes, wouldn't that be enough to server the dwindling pool of young apprentices?
Those are some good points. I wonder whether similar happened (or could at all happen) in other nuclear countries, where we don't know about similar incidents - because the system haven't collapsed there, the archives were not made public etc.
Also, it makes actually celebrating Petrov's day as widely as possible important, because then the option for the lowest-ranked person would be: "Get demoted, but also get famous all around the world."