Vinay Gupta, in Cutting Through Spiritual Colonialism, and Venkatesh Rao, in The Gervais Principle, paint a picture where the routine operation and maintenance of life and organizations generates some sort of pollution (focusing mostly on the intrapersonal and interpersonal varieties), and an important function of institutions is basically doing the ‘plumbing work’ of routing the pollution away from where it does noticeable damage to where it doesn’t do noticeable damage. I don’t think I fully endorse this lens, but it seems like it resonates moderately well, and combines with trends in a few unsettling ways.
In centuries past, it was common to have communities that cared very strongly about whether or not insiders were treated fairly, but perceived the rest of the world as “fair game” to be fleeced as much as you could get away with; now the ‘expanding moral circle’ seems more common (while obviously not universal), in a way that makes the ‘plumbing work’ harder to do. [If life requires aggression, and you have fewer legal targets, this increases the friction life has to work against.]
It seems like our credit-allocation mechanisms have become weirdly unbalanced, where it’s both easier to evade responsibility / delete your identity and start over / impact many people who will never know it was you who impacted them, and simultaneously it’s easier to discover crimes, put things on permanent records, and rally the attention of thousands and millions to direct at wrongdoers. The new way that they operate seems to have empowered Social Desirability Bias; once we might have imagined the Very Serious People leading the crowd, and now it seems the crowds are leading the Very Serious People.
This is also one of the ways that I think about the ‘crisis in confidence’; see Revolt of the Public for more details, but my basic take is that experts have always been uncertain and incorrect and yet portrayed themselves as certain and correct as part of their role’s bargain with broader society. Overconfidence helps experts serve their function of reassuring and coordinating the public, and part of the ‘plumbing work’ is marginalizing dissent and keeping it constrained to private congregations of experts. But with expanded flow of information, we both have more expertise as a society, and more memory of expert mistakes, and more virulent memes spreading distrust in experts. This feels like the sort of thing where we get lots of short-term benefits in correcting the expert opinion, but also long-term costs in that we lose the ability to coordinate because of expertise.
[Feynman in an autobiography describes his father, who makes uniforms, pointing out that uniforms are manufactured / Feynman shouldn’t reflexively trust people because of their uniforms, which seems like great advice for Feynman, but not great advice for everyone in society; the social technology of respecting uniforms does actually do a lot of useful work!]
Vinay Gupta, in Cutting Through Spiritual Colonialism, and Venkatesh Rao, in The Gervais Principle, paint a picture where the routine operation and maintenance of life and organizations generates some sort of pollution (focusing mostly on the intrapersonal and interpersonal varieties), and an important function of institutions is basically doing the ‘plumbing work’ of routing the pollution away from where it does noticeable damage to where it doesn’t do noticeable damage. I don’t think I fully endorse this lens, but it seems like it resonates moderately well, and combines with trends in a few unsettling ways.
In centuries past, it was common to have communities that cared very strongly about whether or not insiders were treated fairly, but perceived the rest of the world as “fair game” to be fleeced as much as you could get away with; now the ‘expanding moral circle’ seems more common (while obviously not universal), in a way that makes the ‘plumbing work’ harder to do. [If life requires aggression, and you have fewer legal targets, this increases the friction life has to work against.]
It seems like our credit-allocation mechanisms have become weirdly unbalanced, where it’s both easier to evade responsibility / delete your identity and start over / impact many people who will never know it was you who impacted them, and simultaneously it’s easier to discover crimes, put things on permanent records, and rally the attention of thousands and millions to direct at wrongdoers. The new way that they operate seems to have empowered Social Desirability Bias; once we might have imagined the Very Serious People leading the crowd, and now it seems the crowds are leading the Very Serious People.
This is also one of the ways that I think about the ‘crisis in confidence’; see Revolt of the Public for more details, but my basic take is that experts have always been uncertain and incorrect and yet portrayed themselves as certain and correct as part of their role’s bargain with broader society. Overconfidence helps experts serve their function of reassuring and coordinating the public, and part of the ‘plumbing work’ is marginalizing dissent and keeping it constrained to private congregations of experts. But with expanded flow of information, we both have more expertise as a society, and more memory of expert mistakes, and more virulent memes spreading distrust in experts. This feels like the sort of thing where we get lots of short-term benefits in correcting the expert opinion, but also long-term costs in that we lose the ability to coordinate because of expertise.
[Feynman in an autobiography describes his father, who makes uniforms, pointing out that uniforms are manufactured / Feynman shouldn’t reflexively trust people because of their uniforms, which seems like great advice for Feynman, but not great advice for everyone in society; the social technology of respecting uniforms does actually do a lot of useful work!]