There is social pressure to hide X. So, X turns out to be much more common and much less extreme than one naively imagined. The net effect is already out there, so maybe just chill.
But, the above story exists in equilibrium with the reverse reaction:
There is social pressure to hide X. It turns out that X is much more common than one naively imagined, and although the average instance of X is not so extreme, the system is actually about to collapse under the cumulative weight of X, and almost nobody is aware until it happens.
A story like this is revealed at the end of every business cycle, where X is some form of corruption we previously thought was held in check by the social pressure against X (which turned out to be insufficiently harsh). Like, for example, approving loans to people we know are unlikely to pay them back.
For those of us who didn’t catch it, this is what happened with the 2008-09 recession. In a nutshell, giving people mortgages became so profitable and facilitated so much economic growth (including by increasing property values) that the people approving and rejecting mortgages became corrupted and pursued short-term incentives to an insane degree in order to be competitive, approving mortgages that were unlikely to be paid back e.g. letting people buy multiple houses.
This was a major feature of US history, and I’m interested if people have thoughts on the extent to which dark matter might have prevented the government from responding until it was too late (it’s a hard domain to penetrate because of how many people were correctly anticipating that they would be passing the blame).
Good point. Another example of the latter is dangerous ideologies. Could be Nazism in Germany before it was popular, could be Marxism in the US right now.
There is social pressure to hide X. So, X turns out to be much more common and much less extreme than one naively imagined. The net effect is already out there, so maybe just chill.
But, the above story exists in equilibrium with the reverse reaction:
There is social pressure to hide X. It turns out that X is much more common than one naively imagined, and although the average instance of X is not so extreme, the system is actually about to collapse under the cumulative weight of X, and almost nobody is aware until it happens.
A story like this is revealed at the end of every business cycle, where X is some form of corruption we previously thought was held in check by the social pressure against X (which turned out to be insufficiently harsh). Like, for example, approving loans to people we know are unlikely to pay them back.
For those of us who didn’t catch it, this is what happened with the 2008-09 recession. In a nutshell, giving people mortgages became so profitable and facilitated so much economic growth (including by increasing property values) that the people approving and rejecting mortgages became corrupted and pursued short-term incentives to an insane degree in order to be competitive, approving mortgages that were unlikely to be paid back e.g. letting people buy multiple houses.
This was a major feature of US history, and I’m interested if people have thoughts on the extent to which dark matter might have prevented the government from responding until it was too late (it’s a hard domain to penetrate because of how many people were correctly anticipating that they would be passing the blame).
Good point. Another example of the latter is dangerous ideologies. Could be Nazism in Germany before it was popular, could be Marxism in the US right now.