[SEQ RERUN] Helpless Individuals
Today’s post, Helpless Individuals was originally published on 30 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer bands where everyone knows everyone else, it begins to seem miraculous that modern-day large institutions survive at all. And in fact, the vast majority of large modern-day institutions simply fail to exist in the first place. This is why funding of Science is largely through money thrown at Science rather than donations from individuals—research isn’t a good emotional fit for the rare problems that individuals can manage to coordinate on. In fact very few things are, which is why e.g. 200 million adult Americans have such tremendous trouble supervising the 535 members of Congress. Modern humanity manages to put forth very little in the way of coordinated individual effort to serve our collective individual interests.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I find myself wondering if Kickstarter or something similar may help with the problem this post describes. The post suggests that it shouldn’t, but I’m wondering if it may be less of an emotional issue than a coordination one. Until recently there were few convenient ways for people to point dollars in the direction of specific, large projects with the expectation that enough other people would do the same for it to make a difference. Those few cases that I remember seeing were all managed by an existing (political) organization with an established donor base.