Missing what I’d consider the biggest problem: it seems like the vast majority of problems in real-world social systems do not stem from malign or unusually incompetent actors; they stem from failures of coordination, failures of information-passing, failures of anyone with the freedom to act noticing that nobody is performing some crucial role, and other primarily-structural issues. Insofar as that’s true, selection basically cannot solve the majority of problems in social systems.
Conversely, well-designed structures can solve selection failures, at least to a much larger extent than selection can solve structural failures. Designing systems to work fine with mostly-average people and be robust to a few negative outliers is difficult, but possible. So there’s a real asymmetry between structural vs selective approaches.
Missing what I’d consider the biggest problem: it seems like the vast majority of problems in real-world social systems do not stem from malign or unusually incompetent actors; they stem from failures of coordination, failures of information-passing, failures of anyone with the freedom to act noticing that nobody is performing some crucial role, and other primarily-structural issues. Insofar as that’s true, selection basically cannot solve the majority of problems in social systems.
Conversely, well-designed structures can solve selection failures, at least to a much larger extent than selection can solve structural failures. Designing systems to work fine with mostly-average people and be robust to a few negative outliers is difficult, but possible. So there’s a real asymmetry between structural vs selective approaches.