Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.
Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.