Comment by microarchitect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microarchitect | Hacker News Reader

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So who are the designers, and how are they going to do any of this in isolation? Previous attempts have resulted in bloodbaths because the only way anyone can design a society is with large amounts of force. And then the state of the society is better characterized by the bloodbath than by whatever design the bloodbath was intended to create or enforce.

I don't buy the argument that this has to be done by force, or that this necessarily results in a bloodbath. What are governments trying to do when they tweak laws, interests rates and the like but trying to "design" societies?

I'm just suggesting that we take more quantitative and model-based approach to this issue. We can start by simply involving more scientists and engineers in policy decisions, and ask them to use the tools we've developed to analyze complex systems to analyze the socio-economic system that we live in.

To a certain extent, we're already doing this. A hundred years ago, most political decisions were ad hoc based on what "seemed right" to the party in charge. Decisions today are much more data-based and rely on expert input.

Unintended consequences aren't the only reason you can't design society. The main reason is that society insists on designing itself. ...

These are dogmatic statements unsupported by citations. I'm not sure how to respond to them.

Societies are full of people who don't agree with other people's "designs" and won't voluntarily cooperate.

It would have inconceivable five hundred years that "most" people would agree on the following:

(1) large parts of the world would elect their own rulers. (2) women would have the same rights and privileges as men. (3) violence as a means of solving problems would be perceived as "wrong".

This perception changed because we see now that these were decisions that benefited society as a whole.

Fundamentally, design is the wrong analogy. In design, there is a designer, and then there is something being designed. In society, the "designer" is already part of society, and he doesn't have the same degree of control an actual designer has.

Let's suppose you assemble everyone together to agree on and implement a design. The design process literally turns into a political process: a competitive effort to benefit fundamentally unreconcilable private interests and opinions rather than a collaborative effort to come up with an objectively good system. Stable, democratic governments aren't designers: they're a manifestation of the powers that be in the society already.

What form of government is a designer? The closest match seems to be some sort of brute-force colonialism--when foreigners try to redesign a society that they, themselves, are not a part of. The next-closest analogy to design is absolute dictatorship. Once you get into stable systems of government, even one-party states like China, or mature colonial states, but especially democracies, the political and economic system governing society is the result of a competitive game between different players, not the result of anyone implementing a design. Framing social problems in design terms is fundamentally wrong--well-functioning societies do not work that way and societies that are designed turn into bloodbaths until reverting to a form of society that's not designed.

I'm not unsympathetic to your viewpoint. I like to design things, too. Unfortunately, some things just can't be designed. There's a process fundamentally dissimilar to design--natural selection--that ultimately produced the human brain out of competing, uncoordinated forces following shallow goals. And when you put humans together in a social context, there are processes fundamentally dissimilar to design, made out of competing, uncoordinated forces, that ultimately produced liberal democracies. The biggest joke on the designer ever is that these undesigned processes eventually end up doing a better job than any designer would, as the blood-soaked social designers of the 20th century discovered.

"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being. Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.

I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother."

-The Architect from "The Matrix Reloaded"

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