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Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

Intentional communities, by and large, fail to recognize the many darwinian iterations of evolution modern societies have gone through over the years, where successful social organizations have overwhelmed their less-adapted brethren.

Simply put: the current way of organizing society is a pretty good plan for organizing a very, very complicated social mechanism full of smart, self-interested actors towards the common good. Is it fucked up still in many respects? Absolutely. Do you have a better idea? Highly unlikely. We've been working on this whole "getting along" thing for millennia, and we've tried pretty much every idea possible at one point or another.

There's a modern conceit that we're somehow smarter or better than previous generations, and that's very misguided. We're much better informed, certainly. The conventional wisdom, the collective mental schema regarding what's a good idea and what's not, that's improved dramatically. Not because you thought about it, but because a bunch of faulty social assumptions have gotten weeded out over the years. But people are pretty much the same as they've ever been.

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This applies to everything, not just society. We see flaws in things, but don't realize the story behind them. We think they are oversights, or mistakes we can fix, and don't realize they are often times the result of a tradeoff to fix a more severe issue.

Just a few examples:

Tech: The NoSQL movement thought SQL databases were slow, so they stripped out a lot of the parts of an ACID database to make it fast. Some of those parts turn out to be important.

Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.

Medicine: Anti-vaxers think we don't need vaccines, because they never experienced the diseases they have eliminated.

I think of Uber and AirB&B as great examples of this, too; they bypass all sorts of rules and regulations we have put in place for transportation and housing, and at first they seem to be amazing. They are cheap, efficient, and provide great service. But as they grow, we start to notice more and more negative effects to society. These are the same negative effects that we put the regulations in place to address.

> Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.

Maybe, but sometimes regulations reflect a historical context that's no longer valid.

As technology changes, and as cultural mores evolve the circumstances which prompted a regulation may no longer be valid.

That isn't to say that the regulation is now doing more harm than good, but that if we came at it today as a fresh start, we might not choose that exact set of regulation.

To give a very extreme example, let's look at health-inspections for meat.

1. Was motivated by disease tainted meat being wide-spread in cities, with no way of tracking down bad producers, and no simple way for consumers to ensure their meat wasn't tainted before eating

2. Fast forward 100 years

3. The regulation is still beneficial but (a) simple cost-effective testing can be carried out by consumers in their homes or grocers before sales (b) the industry has become incredibly cohesive, with much more sophisticated logistics methods and a smaller number of producers.

Today, if we wanted to 'solve' the issue of tainted meat---the industry could self-regulate out of fear of government action, and consumers/grocers could spot check with relatively small overhead.

We might not end up with the same level of USDA oversight as we currently have---although we probably would end up with something.

It's tempting but wrong to believe that our regulations are exactly what we would have always thought out, in every circumstance, simply because they're currently still beneficial.

RE: meat.

My experience has shown me that over time, someone will get away with as much as you let them. I.e. 50% of grocery store fish is not even the fish on the label.

So just because things are OK right now in the meat department.. take off regulations and wait 5 years, and someone will undercut by sneaking dog meat into ground beef, and then some people will die from it, and we will be sad and pass more regulations again.

I WANT freedom and less regulations. I do not trust for profit actors to deliver that for me.

On the other hand, if you want organic, grass-fed meat, you can get that at Whole Foods.

The the thing with regulations is that because they apply to everyone, every man and his dog (and his lobbyist) gets to have a say, and you end up with one size fits nobody.

Maybe it's better to avoid regulating any particular standard of quality, and allow people to buy and sell more or less anything they want so long as it's not misrepresented. Dog meat as ground beef is not cool, dog meat as dog meat, maybe that's ok?

Or the guy at Whole Foods will sell you dog meat and label it organic grass fed beef, because nobody is looking over his shoulder.

If your assumption is that nobody is going to try to cheat or cut a corner to make a buck then your system is not going to work in the long run. As your system grows the odds of having an asshole who cheats and ruins it for everybody approaches 1.

It's funny that you mention Whole Foods' meat.

"Whole Foods’ expensive, ‘humanely treated’ meat is a ‘sham,’ PETA lawsuit claims" ~https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/2...

A better argument against (some) government regulations is that some of them were bought by industry to exclude competition, and were never meant to benefit consumers at all.

Those aren't the ones that get complained about the most though. It's the health and safety ones, ones that ensure that industries don't just externalize a lot of bad costs that get attacked the most.

Your argument seems to assume that health and safety regulations aren't lobbied for as anti-competitive, which they often are.

A chicken farm might be reasonably safe if one in 500 chickens are checked for illness or disease. Of course, it would be perfectly safe if every chicken were checked for illness and disease, and checked at every step of the distribution chain. Of course, there's a huge cost disparity between reasonably safe and perfectly safe, and it behooves the largest farms to push more towards perfect, as sure, the cost of chicken goes up, but it goes up across the board, limiting the ability of smaller farms to compete, thus giving a competitive advantage to larger farms.

To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Grade A eggs in America must be vigorously washed, treated with chemical sanitizer, rinsed, and then thoroughly dried. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.

To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Class A eggs in Europe must never be washed or cleaned in any way. Because washing reduces the shelf life of an egg, and because inadequate washing greatly increases risk, they outright ban farm or factory washing of eggs. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.

The net result is that we have a pretty high set of safety standards in both Europe and America, despite diametrically opposed means of getting there. The only real difference is that the cost of regulatory compliance for egg makers in America is much higher in America, and as the equipment for washing, chemically treating, rinsing and then drying eggs is expensive, it favors larger egg farms to smaller egg farms, and increases the capital requirements to enter the egg market commensurately.

Yes, obviously I am not arguing "We should never make changes because everything we do now is for a reason and so we should keep doing it the same way"

I am just trying to point out that it takes a LOT of context to understand why things are the way they are. We often look at the superficial features of something, and immediately think we can do better.

We should change things, but we need to be extra vigilant in understanding WHY we are doing things the way they are before we change them, and have a plan for how to deal with all of the things the current method already does.

This is a great argument for rewriting software too.

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Saturnals!

Oooops mardi gras & carnivals.

the industry could self-regulate

Always a bad idea. Have you been to countries why there's very little govt regulation? To promote self-regulation is akin to saying that we don't need a "central" govt.

> We see flaws in things, but don't realize the story behind them.

Also known as Chesterton's Fence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

> Also known as Chesterton's Fence.

Also known as, "X is broken and we're fixing it."; "Building an X that doesn't suck."

cringe

While generally true this iterative process created a huge amount of cruft and cargo cult, the best example of which is the common law system: Does it work? Absolutely, and surprisingly well at that. It's however also ridiculously Byzantine and can be quite inequitable.

These convoluted structures and systems increasingly break down because they mandate a common code for everyone to live by regardless of their respective ideas and ways of living. Brexit is a nice example of this. An entire country's future jeopardised because a majority at that particular moment voted by a thin margin that this might be a good idea.

Who are they to tell others how and where to live and work? Conversely, who am I to tell them how they should live their lives?

I don't have answers to these questions but I feel the answers lie at a local level and with decentralised structures rather than nation states.

A return to independent city-states is probably the future of society. Unfortunately we're currently going in a direction of a one world wide government

While I agree with your statement that independent city states are the future of governance in general, we are always going to require a broad coalition government. This is because actions taken in one place frequently spill over to another, and there needs to be a mechanism for redress in these circumstances. For example, a factory upriver dumping waste legally according to its municipal regulations affects everyone downriver of it. Additionally, there needs to be a check in place against tyranny by the majority at the local level.

I think a best case scenario would be popular-vote based local (metropolitan area) democracies, with a "world court" system that protects rights and arbitrates disputes between governments.

We can have micro and macronations.

What would be the check against tyranny by the 'world court'?

There can be no independent abstract "world court" because there is no military to back it. The closest we have is probably the united nations security council, which is composed of US, Russia, China, France, UK + 10 others that vary over time. These actors have varying interests which keep each other in check to some degree.

A world court doesn't require a military in a highly interdependent world. Economic sanctions are sufficient. A city state is going to require food and goods from other city states. If you go against the ruling of the world court, other city states refuse to provide those goods, and you are going to fall into line fairly quickly.

Another benefit of smaller independent city states is that it is easier to check their aggression. If raising a large army requires broad cooperation among city states, that greatly reduces the likelihood that such a force will come into being. This is because of the difficulty in coordination and the fact that multiple city states are unlikely to share the exact same interests, reducing their impetus to unite.

They may not be mutually exclusive, eg. you could have a system of a world-wide government whose only job is enforcing trade & property rights and providing physical security, while delegating responsibility for social mores & resident services to the city state.

Even more significant than societies sort of work as they are is the selection effect, whereby communities set up by and for people who don't like how society works are going to end up composed of people who tend to - at least at the stage of their life they join - be more opinionated about the way things ought to be and/or less capable of assimilating into and succeeding in conventional society. Some of those people are going to be difficult to integrate no matter what social system you devise.

Except the structure of society has shown to be extremely unstable, even over relatively short timeframes. In just the past few generations we had two major wars that rocked the world, and drastic changed the societies of many countries.

Modern society is not a compelling example of a stable local maxima that has survived the eons, it's a seemingly calm period for our portion of a historically chaotic system.

"Unstable" is relative.

No way, we were field testing two alternate societal modalities, fascism and communism. Didn't work out, for different reasons.

Governments, yeah, they come and go, but the modern republic, rule of law, checks and balances, regulated capitalist, civil society state is currently the world champ, and is in the process of consolidating its place as the default structure for social organization. It takes generations for societies to iterate.

The current alternate modality is the tightly regulated non-democratic socialist/capitalist hybrid, a la China, which has done well but I think isn't going to go the distance, as they don't really have their failure mode worked out. When they hit a recession, as they inevitably will, how are they going to handle it? The real advantage of capitalism is reallocation of resources from ideas that have played out to the next set of ideas. You just can't manage that with a government-- stakeholders in old, bad ideas hold too much political influence and do not go gently into that good night.

> When they hit a recession, as they inevitably will

Ignoring your other points, it's interesting to notice that the boom/bust business cycle of a market economy is something you are taking for granted as an attribute of all systems.

In this respect, as long as China is a part of the world economy they'll be a part of its boom/bust cycles.

Neither nature, nor the market, tolerates exponential growth.

i'm wondering if the tighter control of information (i.e. the firewall) makes this alternate modality uniquely resilient to some types of failure.

it may not have the same upside potential but perhaps it can lumber along under its own momentum. maybe even create enough illusion of momentum to weather dips that might otherwise be more detrimental.

to the extent it might need to evolve to be more democratic it could do so in a way to give the illusion of choice but the freedom to choose between false options isn't much of a choice.

clearly i'm feeling a bit cynical after this election cycle. yikes.

anyway i thought your comment was interesting and it got me thinking.

I'm old enough to remember when Japan was gonna take over the whole world. They did great, by the by, but hit some real cultural problems and stalled. Still doing fine, but definitely plateaued. I'd expect China to do something like that, although I question whether their totalitarian state is going to be able to hold together if growth peters out. When a bad year is 4% growth, people are remarkably tolerant of the government doing whatever. In lean years, not so much.

And honestly, as bitchy and entitled as the American middle class is, they're the folks that demand progress and reform. Lacking a group of people with that level on initiative I think would be self-limiting in terms of what you could get out of your economy. They need to move up the value chain to keep going, and the kinds of people that do that are kind of pushy as a rule.

>is in the process of consolidating its place as the default structure for social organization. It takes generations for societies to iterate.

Yes, and perhaps this will be the perfectly stable system that will stand the test of time. Or maybe we're due a few more iterations yet.

Your previous comment suggested that modern society had demonstrated some kind of evolutionary fitness that means it's not worth trying anything else. My point is that I don't see much to support that.

Uh, you live at the absolute pinnacle of human civilization. There has never been a period more peaceful, informed, just, or prosperous than right here, right now, today. Quantifiably so. There's no close second either. The fifties and sixties were unbelievably fucked up (the current American faux-nostaligic high water mark).

We could always do better though. And there's no reason to believe we won't. People are working on making a better world all the time. It's built into the system. Let's try your idea next, and if it fails, it goes in the trash with the others.

> There's a modern conceit that we're somehow smarter or better than previous generations, and that's very misguided.

But: We do have better tools.

And better tools combined with the same level of smartness can give you better or at least different outcomes.

Furthermore, better tools can facilitate the implementation and maintenance of systems (social, governmental, entrepreneurial, what have you) that would have been unsustainable with the tooling of the past.

No, better tools simply makes the magnitude of the variations larger, it doesn't necessarily give you "better" outcomes.

When's the last time we had a famine in the developed world?

It's a bit disingenuous to suggest we are not smarter as a race. We have centuries of knowledge and information at our fingertips. If we choose to ignore that, then perhaps we are no smarter. But we shouldn't.

Surely, given a puzzle box we have the same chance of solving it. But when it comes to making grand choices for complex societal systems, we have much better information to guide us.

I think the parent comment wanted to teach us that we can make mistakes and we might not get it right even now, undoubtedly true. But we are equipped to make much better decisions, unless we completely ignore all history.

Perhaps history majors should have a more key role on policy making.

The Morris West [1] book, The Navigator, is an interesting read in this connection. A mixed group of people, headed by a charismatic and larger-than-life Prof., Gunnar Thorkild, of mixed ancestry (white + Polynesian), set out in a ship from Hawaii, using a secret map, to find a lost Polynesian island known to the ancient navigators - guided by an aged Polynesian relative (grandfather?) of Thorkild. They end up finding it, but during a storm, which wrecks their ship on the outer reef of the island. The rest of the book is about how they manage their lives there, their trials and tribulations (interestingly, the latter more due to human nature than nature :). (It's sort of an adult Robinson Crusoe type story with some differences.) Some sub-plots within the overall story. A pretty good read, IMO, and carries some lessons too, about leadership, human strengths and frailty, etc., including about facing death with dignity.

P.S. I think the stuff mentioned in the book (The Navigator), about ancient Polynesian techniques of navigating by the stars, the sun, the wind, the waves and the sea currents, might be true (though West only describes them briefly via the voice of the navigator (Thorkild's relative, Kaloni Kienga, after whom the book is named).

Why I think so, is because I remember reading an article in National Geographic, long ago, in which they wrote about this sort of stuff. They visited many places in the Pacific and South Seas, interviewed and discussed all this stuff with people (traditional Polynesian navigators) who had these skills, as did their ancestors, and wrote an article or series in NatGeo about it. I remember it being very interesting reading.

Edited for grammar and re-wording.

That's a pretty good argument, but I feel like in the last ~100 years or so something important has happened that didn't exist before: easy communication. I can talk to a huge number of people instantly and get news from all over the world. Since the printing press, new means of communication have changed societes dramatically. I'm not convinced that the structure we currently have had time to adapt to the new ways of communicating that the Internet provides.

In a way it's true, but that could be said about any innovation, any startup: 'Do you really think you have a better way of doing it than what has already been figured out?'

If people followed that principle, there would be no democracy, civil rights, rule of law, women's rights, most religions wouldn't exist, etc. Some of those innovations challenged what had been true for all of human history.

our society evolved from a tribal system based on scarcity,backward beliefs, and limited knowledge. While it still somehow works it will not survive a head-on collision with abundance, education, increased longevity and automation.

These communities that fail, do so mostly because in life most of the things we try fail. Just like with startups we will have some "unicorn" societies created, but first we have to fail. fail often and fail fast.

Unfortunately our civilization is not conductive to experimentation when it comes to society and culture. While we think we're tolerant and progressive, in reality we all are very conservative and intolerant, even if only subconsciously.

> We've been working on this whole "getting along" thing for millennia, and we've tried pretty much every idea possible at one point or another.

Fallacy. "Millenia" ago we lived in huts and had a life expectancy under 30. We had sticks and stone lances. Now we have computers and nuclear weapons. Less 150 years ago modern science started in its earnest. The literally world-changing implications of technology cannot possibly be overstated. So the idea that we've not managed to fix society in the last, say, 3000 years of trying completely ignores the fact that the last 200 have transformed life to the point of making it unrecognisable, and the next 50 will do so surely as well. The impact of things like post-scarcity, AGI, or fusion power, make that point completely moot.

>"Millenia" ago we lived in huts and had a life expectancy under 30.

I can't stand this particular misunderstanding of life expectancy. Pre-industrial societies weren't "Logan's Run", it's just that infant mortality drags the average down. If you substitute "life expectancy at birth" (the usual meaning) with "life expectancy at 5 years of age" (meaning people who survived infancy and toddler years), life expectancy looks pretty similar to the present.

And I can't stand this argument. First, it is false: even life expectancy at 5 years of age was way worse than it is today, from 47 at age 10 in ancient Greece/Rome, to 64 at age 21 in English nobility in the Late Medieval, to give a few examples. Today it's over 80 for your average citizen of the developed world. Second, why on earth should we discount infant mortality? High infant mortality has a terrible impact on societies. It's completely arbitrary to disregard.

Why do today's societies look completely different from the societies of 300 years ago, then?

A good book on this theme is Matt Ridley's "The Evolution of Everything", which argues that social institutions are generally a lot more evolved and a lot less designed than people realise, and that we forget this at our peril.

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