I think the point about people Goodhart-ing the things seen as greatness makes sense. These incentives would have been around for a long time and don’t predict recent changes, though.
One thing that is different now is more of the words/sentences/pictures/ideas of interactions I have are with some form of manipulable media (websites, podcasts, radio, television, etc) rather than flesh-and-blood humans. Here I’m trying to capture something like the amount of beliefs, knowledge, and ideas moved, rather than amount of time or attention.
So this predicts things like ‘its easier to form institutional cultures when there is more human-human interaction’, which would point to a decline in recent decades, but also probably have significant events at past points in history.
Radio, television, internet, etc would probably be interesting points to study.
The recent pandemic is then interesting, because this would predict that in places that shut down for the pandemic, it became acutely more difficult to build/maintain cultures of great institutions, because we acutely curtailed human-human interaction.
I think the point about people Goodhart-ing the things seen as greatness makes sense. These incentives would have been around for a long time and don’t predict recent changes, though.
One thing that is different now is more of the words/sentences/pictures/ideas of interactions I have are with some form of manipulable media (websites, podcasts, radio, television, etc) rather than flesh-and-blood humans. Here I’m trying to capture something like the amount of beliefs, knowledge, and ideas moved, rather than amount of time or attention.
So this predicts things like ‘its easier to form institutional cultures when there is more human-human interaction’, which would point to a decline in recent decades, but also probably have significant events at past points in history.
Radio, television, internet, etc would probably be interesting points to study.
The recent pandemic is then interesting, because this would predict that in places that shut down for the pandemic, it became acutely more difficult to build/maintain cultures of great institutions, because we acutely curtailed human-human interaction.