I’d like to talk about the broader topic too, but for now I just want to try out some Disputes.
Governmental institutions: There seems to be some degree of institutional failure (mild-ish, so far) in a number of American and especially Californian institutions: California’s electricity is less reliable than it used to be, due basically to bad governance.
There are definitely a number of institutional failures in recent years (another is Flint’s government choice to ignore health and safety recommendations to save money resulting in contaminated water) but do we know that these sorts of events are actually getting worse than the type/frequency found in previous 20-year-chunks of American history?
San Francisco, especially, is seeing rising crime, due more or less to decriminalizing a lot of crime.
Is there a source for this? Preliminary investigation indicates otherwise. Some crimes in particular are up, but it’s not clear that they’re because things like “arson” or “car thefts” were decriminalized? Has that actually happened?
Many aspects of the covid-19 response also cast our institutions in a worse light than I’d previously anticipated, though it is plausible (given my ignorance) that my anticipations were the silly thing here and that we would not in fact have done better in previous eras. (I’m thinking here of: America being slower than I’d anticipated re: acquiring testing and PPE; putting very little money in the extensive stimulus bill to reducing covid via testing/research/etc.; America staying in semi-lockdown for an extended time instead of trying harder either to head toward actual zero (via border control, testing + tracing, etc.) so that we could relax again, or toward something more like herd immunity (while metering it out; but it seems to me that as a country we probably lost more to the costs many parts of America seeming not to lock down for extended periods of time without a plan to use that time to do anything constructive, and without (I think?) adequate accounting for what that would cost in terms of social stability and mental health.)
It feels important for me to ask why this is related to “forming stable, cooperative institutions?” The evidence I’ve seen points to it being fairly easily explained by an excessively bad administration and lack of leadership, with many well documented unforced errors in preparedness and coordination, as well as simple failures to pick low-hanging-fruit.
I’m not saying we should discount “The US government” as an institution, obviously it is a massively important one, but that importance comes from the way it effects others, and thus makes it hard to judge overall competence of institutions downstream of it. The Executive Branch in particular has massive amounts of control and effect on all sorts of areas beyond what people would generally think of as “their job.” Personally I trust the CDC about as much as I did before, I’m just more aware of how much a bad Executive can hinder them.
Non-governmental parts of our national sense-making apparatus: Most brand names, e.g. the NYT, Harvard, Science and Nature magazines, the Democrats, the Republicans, the police, the CDC, etc. seem less well-regarded than they used to be. I can’t think of many brands of any sort that are instead better-regarded (Amazon, SpaceX and bitcoin, probably).
This seems true, and largely due to the overall democratization of news/opinions/science/all manner of gatekeepers in our culture. In terms of clear-seeing, we’re more aware of the mistakes they make, and in terms of exaggerated criticism, we’re more influenced by antagonistically-produced memes.
Subcultures: David Chapman claims that subcultures are much harder to form now / more or less don’t exist anymore. I have also tried to look myself, and this matches my own experience: rationality and EA seem among the few things that are sort-of here, and even we are only sort-of here, I think. (“The rationalist diaspora,” not “the happening applied rationality scene.”) (I can think of some others, e.g. the authentic relating / circling communities; some other parts of the Thiel-o-sphere; maybe the group at the Stoa; surely some others. But… fewer than I would have expected, and I think fewer than I would have found in past decades?)
This seems genuinely surprising to me. There actually seems to be far more subcultures being formed than there ever were before? Even discounting subcultures formed around specific media, there’s certainly a lot of political subcultures that have formed in the past ~20 years. What’s the standard for what qualifies as a “culture” in this space?
There actually seems to be far more subcultures being formed than there ever were before
DaystarEld, what are your favorite current happening scenes? (Where new art/science/music/ways of making sense of the world/neat stuff is being created?) Would love leads on where to look.
Well my favorite ones you’re likely already aware of, like rationality (+rational fiction) and EA and circling, but there have been many growing communities of e.g. board game designers, 3D printing aficionados, video game music creators, cosplayers, specific fanfiction groups (think like the glowfic community, but also for things like Worm and other major online serials), online “Quests,” etc.
Also porn. Lots and lots of very niche and varied porn, such that I believe most of the top Patreon creators are some type of porn creator.
Fewer of the “science” or “try to make sense of the world” communities come to mind where the communities are actually a part of the creation and not just consumers, but the “youtube edutainment community” has a lot of great works and collaboration and feels worth distinguishing as one.
Overall it just feels like there are hundreds of communities out there, growing and dying every week. If the criterion is ones that they “last” then that does cut out most, since a lot are tied to particular types of media, and if we only focus on “serious” ones then certainly there are far fewer, since we can’t include otherwise impressive ones like the high-quality-gif community on Reddit, but I would be surprised if any previous time period won on either of those metrics just from sheer amount of people around today, exchanging ideas and collaborating.
Thanks for the SF crime link; you may be right. Multiple (but far from all) friends of mine in SF have been complaining about being more often accosted, having greater fear of mugging than previously, etc.; but that is a selection of crimes and is not conclusive evidence.
Also on crime, I’m not sure the relevance or cause, but NYC’s crime rate jumped in the 70s & 80s, then dropped again in the 90s. If anyone knew a good source for the cause of this I’d be curious.
I’d like to talk about the broader topic too, but for now I just want to try out some Disputes.
There are definitely a number of institutional failures in recent years (another is Flint’s government choice to ignore health and safety recommendations to save money resulting in contaminated water) but do we know that these sorts of events are actually getting worse than the type/frequency found in previous 20-year-chunks of American history?
Is there a source for this? Preliminary investigation indicates otherwise. Some crimes in particular are up, but it’s not clear that they’re because things like “arson” or “car thefts” were decriminalized? Has that actually happened?
It feels important for me to ask why this is related to “forming stable, cooperative institutions?” The evidence I’ve seen points to it being fairly easily explained by an excessively bad administration and lack of leadership, with many well documented unforced errors in preparedness and coordination, as well as simple failures to pick low-hanging-fruit.
I’m not saying we should discount “The US government” as an institution, obviously it is a massively important one, but that importance comes from the way it effects others, and thus makes it hard to judge overall competence of institutions downstream of it. The Executive Branch in particular has massive amounts of control and effect on all sorts of areas beyond what people would generally think of as “their job.” Personally I trust the CDC about as much as I did before, I’m just more aware of how much a bad Executive can hinder them.
This seems true, and largely due to the overall democratization of news/opinions/science/all manner of gatekeepers in our culture. In terms of clear-seeing, we’re more aware of the mistakes they make, and in terms of exaggerated criticism, we’re more influenced by antagonistically-produced memes.
This seems genuinely surprising to me. There actually seems to be far more subcultures being formed than there ever were before? Even discounting subcultures formed around specific media, there’s certainly a lot of political subcultures that have formed in the past ~20 years. What’s the standard for what qualifies as a “culture” in this space?
DaystarEld, what are your favorite current happening scenes? (Where new art/science/music/ways of making sense of the world/neat stuff is being created?) Would love leads on where to look.
Well my favorite ones you’re likely already aware of, like rationality (+rational fiction) and EA and circling, but there have been many growing communities of e.g. board game designers, 3D printing aficionados, video game music creators, cosplayers, specific fanfiction groups (think like the glowfic community, but also for things like Worm and other major online serials), online “Quests,” etc.
Also porn. Lots and lots of very niche and varied porn, such that I believe most of the top Patreon creators are some type of porn creator.
Fewer of the “science” or “try to make sense of the world” communities come to mind where the communities are actually a part of the creation and not just consumers, but the “youtube edutainment community” has a lot of great works and collaboration and feels worth distinguishing as one.
Overall it just feels like there are hundreds of communities out there, growing and dying every week. If the criterion is ones that they “last” then that does cut out most, since a lot are tied to particular types of media, and if we only focus on “serious” ones then certainly there are far fewer, since we can’t include otherwise impressive ones like the high-quality-gif community on Reddit, but I would be surprised if any previous time period won on either of those metrics just from sheer amount of people around today, exchanging ideas and collaborating.
Thanks for the SF crime link; you may be right. Multiple (but far from all) friends of mine in SF have been complaining about being more often accosted, having greater fear of mugging than previously, etc.; but that is a selection of crimes and is not conclusive evidence.
Also on crime, I’m not sure the relevance or cause, but NYC’s crime rate jumped in the 70s & 80s, then dropped again in the 90s. If anyone knew a good source for the cause of this I’d be curious.