Good article. Good way of thinking about this pattern.
I think we see the importance of hard endpoints in science here. The further away we get from a outcome that is testable by an outsider, the more likely that we are looking at a bee orchid rather than a bee. Similarly, we can tell a bee and a bee orchid apart by asking them both to make honey.
Soviet mathematics and engineering were still basically valid. The Sputnik program put a man in space, the Soviet nuclear program was a success with a few hiccups. When we move into subjects like biology where theories are harder to validate empirically we see Soviet science degenerating. By the time we get to Anthropology or Economics where all the data is a mess and effects happen on a generational timescale there's nothing of value left.
We see this in western medical science. We have gotten very good at managing acute injury. Patching people up after gunshot wounds, for instance, we are excellent at. Go for a walk anywhere in the country and you can see that for chronic conditions out medical knowledge is at best useless. Western nutrition is an failure. Psychological medical practice etc.
Actually, I thought of something else. This pattern that you're describing looks very similar to Carlyle's criticisms of Democracy.
"These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;–and what were the people withal that took them for real?"
And we also see in democracy the same sort of lack of testability. Like, when we compare voting to management, we see that when we make a management decision we have a sort of action response feedback cycle. A manager (or, an engineer) has the ability to test hypotheses and update priors based on whether those actions made the situation worse or better.
The management feedback loop looks like: decision -> action -> investigation -> update priors -> new decision ->... A good manager will try hard to investigate and understand the consequences of their actions.
When we look into the management cycle for a democratic state the action response feedback loop is much more diffuse and latent. The voter feedback cycle looks like: Vote -> votes are aggregated -> government morphology changes -> government makes decisions -> things happen -> the news reports on those things -> 4 years later we vote again. We see information loss at every step in the democratic feedback cycle. A democratic voter must rely on the news to construct a narrative relating their voting decisions to the real world consequences. I think that we all intuitively feel how much play there is in this narrative construction process. This makes it hard for us to differentiate good rulers from bad rulers / creates space for grifters to outcompete serious management, etc.
I'm familiar with Carlyle but I often insist that these problems are not exclusive to democracy (i.e. with Yarvin https://cactus.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-summoning-the-best). I think blaming democracy makes the problem seem much easier than it actually is. This type of self deception is not exclusive to Democratic government, but also to bureaucracies small and large (in the case of small ones, most of them fail so quickly that they go bankrupt before we notice)
You force the system to perform tasks that demonstrate competency. A factory is a system like this. Security systems also require this type of validation. Luckily, we don't have to fight a war to check our theories of security, humans naturally provide enough chaos. Simply having competing independent systems of authority is enough. Systems that function will prosper, systems that don't will bleed talent and capital.
Yeah. It's a 40000 ft overview of a system that manages reputation, information and responsibility, delegates authority, facilitates lossy channels of human communication. But basically any functional design has to abide by certain principles, for instance disinformation can't have a long term advantage over information, etc.
When we look at functional pre-modern systems through this lens they start to make a lot more sense. I.e. a system of baronies and landlords can be thought of as a hierarchical system of federated competing authorities (aka private government).
I saw Ikuru tonight at the Metrograph, what an incredible movie.
Yeah, I totally agree. It's more like a fundamental epistemological problem in the modern world. Science / math is this very useful way of structuring logic, but just using scientific methods doesn't make your logic valid or relevant. Science needs to be tempered by engineering, which is an adaptive process.
Yarvin, "reason doesn't work because it's scientific, science works because it's reasonable."
And I guess the other main take away is that Democracy isn't a necessary component of the security information feedback loop. I think that it's probably inevitable that information systems wind up as organs of the state in democratic systems, but we have plenty of examples of autocratic states that control their own information systems.
There's a conspiracy of elites that understand "bee orchid kindergarten soccer" is the natural tendency of people, and exploit that to their own ends of collapsing society and instituting a dystopia of pod-living bug-eaters?
Because from where I sit, that seems the most logical explanation (this and that, instead of this or that).
Your discussion of Lynskoism reminded me of Deutsch's classification of memes: anti-rational (ie static) memes vs rational (ie dynamic) memes in The Beginning of Infinity.
The labels describe their mode of replication (not their content).
Rational (ie dynamic) memes outcompete others by being useful and surviving criticism better than false ideas.
Anti-rational (ie static) memes rely on being shielded from criticism to survive. Religion and cults are quintessential examples: They disable people's creativity to stop criticism of the meme (via things like blasphemy and apostasy). People are unable to reject the idea. Thus the meme survives. Lysenkoism and Wokeism are other examples of a successful static meme.
the problem with the "Bee Orchid" theory is that it is bullshit. I don't know if this, in itself, helps to make the point of your article, but well done either way.
I'm trying to figure out where you're going with this line of thought. It sounds like that you believe that rationalists have been and will be neutered by the "mediocres". At least that was what was suggested by the cartoons I liked those!). If that's true, then what? Is there no solution? Is Christianity defunct? Personally, and by inclination, I'm a Cowenite short term pessimist and long-term optimist. I believe, without evidence but with the ability of man throughout history to overcome adversity and continue on, we shall overcome tyranny with average Americans.
In art there is a tendency which arose in the 1960s and still persists, for painters or sculptors to deliberately defeat themselves, to mar or scuff their work. This may be too grand but I wonder if achievement of man appeared too utopian after the world wars. So there is a feeling that human achievement has to be slowed down or the belief in supermen will come back. I certainly feel that making art without Christianity is kind of a dead end, there just aren’t other stories in Western culture that engage so many dimensions of meaning, symbol, formal ideas, or characters. Without it you have misty man-erasing nature worship, or an isolated individual view, woman against the world. Both of which AI produces lots if you ask.
Good article. Good way of thinking about this pattern.
I think we see the importance of hard endpoints in science here. The further away we get from a outcome that is testable by an outsider, the more likely that we are looking at a bee orchid rather than a bee. Similarly, we can tell a bee and a bee orchid apart by asking them both to make honey.
Soviet mathematics and engineering were still basically valid. The Sputnik program put a man in space, the Soviet nuclear program was a success with a few hiccups. When we move into subjects like biology where theories are harder to validate empirically we see Soviet science degenerating. By the time we get to Anthropology or Economics where all the data is a mess and effects happen on a generational timescale there's nothing of value left.
We see this in western medical science. We have gotten very good at managing acute injury. Patching people up after gunshot wounds, for instance, we are excellent at. Go for a walk anywhere in the country and you can see that for chronic conditions out medical knowledge is at best useless. Western nutrition is an failure. Psychological medical practice etc.
Actually, I thought of something else. This pattern that you're describing looks very similar to Carlyle's criticisms of Democracy.
"These guides, then, were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;–and what were the people withal that took them for real?"
And we also see in democracy the same sort of lack of testability. Like, when we compare voting to management, we see that when we make a management decision we have a sort of action response feedback cycle. A manager (or, an engineer) has the ability to test hypotheses and update priors based on whether those actions made the situation worse or better.
The management feedback loop looks like: decision -> action -> investigation -> update priors -> new decision ->... A good manager will try hard to investigate and understand the consequences of their actions.
When we look into the management cycle for a democratic state the action response feedback loop is much more diffuse and latent. The voter feedback cycle looks like: Vote -> votes are aggregated -> government morphology changes -> government makes decisions -> things happen -> the news reports on those things -> 4 years later we vote again. We see information loss at every step in the democratic feedback cycle. A democratic voter must rely on the news to construct a narrative relating their voting decisions to the real world consequences. I think that we all intuitively feel how much play there is in this narrative construction process. This makes it hard for us to differentiate good rulers from bad rulers / creates space for grifters to outcompete serious management, etc.
I'm familiar with Carlyle but I often insist that these problems are not exclusive to democracy (i.e. with Yarvin https://cactus.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-summoning-the-best). I think blaming democracy makes the problem seem much easier than it actually is. This type of self deception is not exclusive to Democratic government, but also to bureaucracies small and large (in the case of small ones, most of them fail so quickly that they go bankrupt before we notice)
So... How to create a system that accounts for these dysfunctional biases, and engineers them out of existence?
You force the system to perform tasks that demonstrate competency. A factory is a system like this. Security systems also require this type of validation. Luckily, we don't have to fight a war to check our theories of security, humans naturally provide enough chaos. Simply having competing independent systems of authority is enough. Systems that function will prosper, systems that don't will bleed talent and capital.
I think this is only part of the solution, but it's a start. Going to ruminate on this...
Yeah. It's a 40000 ft overview of a system that manages reputation, information and responsibility, delegates authority, facilitates lossy channels of human communication. But basically any functional design has to abide by certain principles, for instance disinformation can't have a long term advantage over information, etc.
When we look at functional pre-modern systems through this lens they start to make a lot more sense. I.e. a system of baronies and landlords can be thought of as a hierarchical system of federated competing authorities (aka private government).
Oh sick. I'm definitely going to listen to this.
I saw Ikuru tonight at the Metrograph, what an incredible movie.
Yeah, I totally agree. It's more like a fundamental epistemological problem in the modern world. Science / math is this very useful way of structuring logic, but just using scientific methods doesn't make your logic valid or relevant. Science needs to be tempered by engineering, which is an adaptive process.
Yarvin, "reason doesn't work because it's scientific, science works because it's reasonable."
And I guess the other main take away is that Democracy isn't a necessary component of the security information feedback loop. I think that it's probably inevitable that information systems wind up as organs of the state in democratic systems, but we have plenty of examples of autocratic states that control their own information systems.
So, WHAT IF...
There's a conspiracy of elites that understand "bee orchid kindergarten soccer" is the natural tendency of people, and exploit that to their own ends of collapsing society and instituting a dystopia of pod-living bug-eaters?
Because from where I sit, that seems the most logical explanation (this and that, instead of this or that).
Your discussion of Lynskoism reminded me of Deutsch's classification of memes: anti-rational (ie static) memes vs rational (ie dynamic) memes in The Beginning of Infinity.
The labels describe their mode of replication (not their content).
Rational (ie dynamic) memes outcompete others by being useful and surviving criticism better than false ideas.
Anti-rational (ie static) memes rely on being shielded from criticism to survive. Religion and cults are quintessential examples: They disable people's creativity to stop criticism of the meme (via things like blasphemy and apostasy). People are unable to reject the idea. Thus the meme survives. Lysenkoism and Wokeism are other examples of a successful static meme.
Re Deutsch more generally, he seemingly contradicts many ideas in Rationalism which need to be reconciled as I discuss here: https://falliblepieces.substack.com/p/david-deutsch-eats-rationalism.
People pretend not to like grapes when the vines are too high for them to reach.
Marguerite de Navarre
Mediocrity is easier to reach for most.
the problem with the "Bee Orchid" theory is that it is bullshit. I don't know if this, in itself, helps to make the point of your article, but well done either way.
I'm trying to figure out where you're going with this line of thought. It sounds like that you believe that rationalists have been and will be neutered by the "mediocres". At least that was what was suggested by the cartoons I liked those!). If that's true, then what? Is there no solution? Is Christianity defunct? Personally, and by inclination, I'm a Cowenite short term pessimist and long-term optimist. I believe, without evidence but with the ability of man throughout history to overcome adversity and continue on, we shall overcome tyranny with average Americans.
Perhaps you might like: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham
In art there is a tendency which arose in the 1960s and still persists, for painters or sculptors to deliberately defeat themselves, to mar or scuff their work. This may be too grand but I wonder if achievement of man appeared too utopian after the world wars. So there is a feeling that human achievement has to be slowed down or the belief in supermen will come back. I certainly feel that making art without Christianity is kind of a dead end, there just aren’t other stories in Western culture that engage so many dimensions of meaning, symbol, formal ideas, or characters. Without it you have misty man-erasing nature worship, or an isolated individual view, woman against the world. Both of which AI produces lots if you ask.