At the town hall, you remarked that you had made a list of many explanations, each of which looked apparently likely to be true when viewed in isolation, but none of which seemed obviously more compelling than the others. I attempted the same exercise, and got a similar result. Looking at my list and thinking about it, I’m not convinced there is necessarily a center; some of the hypotheses look like they plausibly could be, but the alternative is that there are a bunch of mechanisms which push to higher and lower levels of corruption, which mostly wind up cancelling out, but that some of the mechanisms are positive-feedback loops.
Here’s my list of hypotheses, clustered in a few groupings. This is somewhere half-way between “developed theories that I fully believe” and this babble challenge.
Institutions Which Corrode Others in Proportion to their Own Corrosion
News media. The judiciary. Higher education. Unions. Grantmakers. Each of these institutions (or categories of institutions) has a surface area through which it influences other institutions, and is influenced by them in return; that influence might be positive or negative, depending on how well functioning it is. News media and the judiciary influence the behavior or other institutions through scandal and liability, respectively; that distortion can be positive or negative.
Loss of Slack
The parts of an institutional culture that trade off short- and long-term incentives rely on the institution and the people within it having slack. For a number of reasons, both people and organizations seem to have less slack than they used to. There are a few big well-known ones affecting individuals: student loans, housing prices, and health care prices, in particular. But the ones affecting institutions and person-instutition relationships are more interesting:
Financialization: It is fairly common for an investor to take an organization with a secure income stream and a lot of slack, and use financial instruments to transform it into a precarious organization plus money elsewhere. The prototypical instance of this is the leveraged buyout, which seems to have first started being a thing in the 1980s.
No More Company Men (/Women): Decades ago, and still in some countries, the relationship between an employee and a corporation was a long term and loyal one; people would spend most of their career inside a single organization. This implies a low risk of being fired, a long time horizon in their relationship with the company, and a lot of time in which to absorb a company’s culture.
Loss of Ability to Filter
In order to function, an institution needs to recruit people filtered for both competence and alignment, which can be done either by recruiters assessing people directly, or by delegating and judging based on work history or formal credentials. Most large institutions have shifted heavily towards the latter, while the formal-credential-giving institutions have shifted away from selecting on intelligence and towards selecting on time-expenditure and conscientiousness. As a result, many institutions seem to have filled up with people who have papers that say they’re qualified, who nevertheless aren’t.
Scalability Problems
Some norms are enforced in a distributed way, where the enforcement only works if the violation is known widely enough, eg boycotts in response to corporate misbehavior. If the population doubles, the number of corporations doubles, and the per-capita number of boycott targets stays constant, then the total influence of boycotts halves. Similar effects exist internally when scaling up institutions, when increasing the number of participants in a market, and when increasing the complexity of regulation.
A noteworthy part of the experience of hanging out in any sort of niche forum is that US’s major institutions have a recurring cast of scandals which never seem to be resolved, and which the relevant people don’t show much awareness of. In 2015, the Congressional reaction to police brutality and discrimination didn’t look like disagreement, it looked like not having enough bandwidth to investigate or think clearly about it. This is what we should expect to happen more and more to fixed-size institutions as the world gets more complex.
A related problem is that as the influence of an institution grows, the rewards for capturing or corrupting it also grow, and the growth between offense and defense is not symmetric. An example of this is the relationship between the PR and newspaper industries; the ratio of PR resources to investigative-reporting resources has grown drastically, and this fact seems like a natural consequence of economic growth.
Adversarial Action
Foreign intelligence agencies are actively working to reduce unity within the US.
A history of corruption in powerful institutions created a cultural backlash against institutional power in general, which isn’t selective enough.
Institutions are easier to sabotage than they are to create, so scaling up the world disfavors them.
Decreased Attention Spans
When I was growing up, it was a standard aphorism that “television rots your brain”—ie, that consuming too much media messes people up in some way. I recall a more specific claim, which was that television decreases attention span—ie, people who watch a lot of television have more scattered attention. People now say similar things about social media, and I think the effect is the same: people tend to spend less consecutive seconds on each thought, and have a harder time dealing with long inferential distances.
Many of the major problems look like leaders are being too miserly with cognition; there’s a correct model of the problem which has some inferential distance, and a competing model of the problem which is simpler but wrong, and we find leaders acting as though they believe the latter. Eg the “landlords are greedy” model (simple, wrong) vs the “prices are high when housing construction is inhibited by regulation” model (correct, but more complex).
Assorted Other Hypotheses
Exposure advertising induces resistance to a class of messaging which includes both advertising and organizational ideology.
Business schools are teaching MBAs a strategy that doesn’t rely on understanding the culture of an institution, and so they go on to destroy the local culture wherever they go.
The same thing that’s causing an obesity crisis, also changes people’s psychology in a way that makes them hard to build institutions out of.
Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.
Many organizations relied on an implicit hierarchy in which older people were higher ranked and less numerous; the decrease in birth rate broke this.
Con artists are more skilled than they used to be, because TV/social media/something else made it easier for them to practice, and most organizations are being captured by them.
“Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.”
I think this is a key observation. Western academia has grown continually more cynical since the advent of Marxism, which assumes an almost absolute cynicism as a point of dogma: all actions are political actions motivated by class, except those of bourgeois Marxists who for mysterious reasons advocate the interests of the proletariat.
This cynicism became even worse with Foucault, who taught people to see everything as nothing but power relations. Western academics today are such knee-jerk cynics that they can’t conceive of loyalty to any organization other than Marxism or the Social Justice movement as being anything but exploitation of the one being loyal.
Pride is the opposite of cynicism, and is one of the key feelings that makes people take brave, altruistic actions. Yet today we’ve made pride a luxury of the oppressed. Only groups perceived as oppressed are allowed to have pride in group memberships. If you said you were proud of being American, or of being manly, you’d get deplatformed, and possibly fired.
The defamation of pride in mainstream groups is thus destroying our society’s ability to create or maintain mainstream institutions. In my own cynicism, I think someone deliberately intended this. This defamation began with Marxism, and is now supported by the social justice movement, both of which are Hegelian revolutionary movements which believe that the first step toward making civilization better is to destroy it, or at least destabilize it enough to stage a coup or revolution. This is the “clean sweep” spoken of so often by revolutionaries since the French Revolution.
Since their primary goal is to destroy civilization, it makes perfect sense that they begin by convincing people that taking pride in any mainstream identity or group membership is evil, as this will be sufficient to destroy all cooperative social institutions, and hence civilization.
At the town hall, you remarked that you had made a list of many explanations, each of which looked apparently likely to be true when viewed in isolation, but none of which seemed obviously more compelling than the others. I attempted the same exercise, and got a similar result. Looking at my list and thinking about it, I’m not convinced there is necessarily a center; some of the hypotheses look like they plausibly could be, but the alternative is that there are a bunch of mechanisms which push to higher and lower levels of corruption, which mostly wind up cancelling out, but that some of the mechanisms are positive-feedback loops.
Here’s my list of hypotheses, clustered in a few groupings. This is somewhere half-way between “developed theories that I fully believe” and this babble challenge.
Institutions Which Corrode Others in Proportion to their Own Corrosion
News media. The judiciary. Higher education. Unions. Grantmakers. Each of these institutions (or categories of institutions) has a surface area through which it influences other institutions, and is influenced by them in return; that influence might be positive or negative, depending on how well functioning it is. News media and the judiciary influence the behavior or other institutions through scandal and liability, respectively; that distortion can be positive or negative.
Loss of Slack
The parts of an institutional culture that trade off short- and long-term incentives rely on the institution and the people within it having slack. For a number of reasons, both people and organizations seem to have less slack than they used to. There are a few big well-known ones affecting individuals: student loans, housing prices, and health care prices, in particular. But the ones affecting institutions and person-instutition relationships are more interesting:
Financialization: It is fairly common for an investor to take an organization with a secure income stream and a lot of slack, and use financial instruments to transform it into a precarious organization plus money elsewhere. The prototypical instance of this is the leveraged buyout, which seems to have first started being a thing in the 1980s.
No More Company Men (/Women): Decades ago, and still in some countries, the relationship between an employee and a corporation was a long term and loyal one; people would spend most of their career inside a single organization. This implies a low risk of being fired, a long time horizon in their relationship with the company, and a lot of time in which to absorb a company’s culture.
Loss of Ability to Filter
In order to function, an institution needs to recruit people filtered for both competence and alignment, which can be done either by recruiters assessing people directly, or by delegating and judging based on work history or formal credentials. Most large institutions have shifted heavily towards the latter, while the formal-credential-giving institutions have shifted away from selecting on intelligence and towards selecting on time-expenditure and conscientiousness. As a result, many institutions seem to have filled up with people who have papers that say they’re qualified, who nevertheless aren’t.
Scalability Problems
Some norms are enforced in a distributed way, where the enforcement only works if the violation is known widely enough, eg boycotts in response to corporate misbehavior. If the population doubles, the number of corporations doubles, and the per-capita number of boycott targets stays constant, then the total influence of boycotts halves. Similar effects exist internally when scaling up institutions, when increasing the number of participants in a market, and when increasing the complexity of regulation.
A noteworthy part of the experience of hanging out in any sort of niche forum is that US’s major institutions have a recurring cast of scandals which never seem to be resolved, and which the relevant people don’t show much awareness of. In 2015, the Congressional reaction to police brutality and discrimination didn’t look like disagreement, it looked like not having enough bandwidth to investigate or think clearly about it. This is what we should expect to happen more and more to fixed-size institutions as the world gets more complex.
A related problem is that as the influence of an institution grows, the rewards for capturing or corrupting it also grow, and the growth between offense and defense is not symmetric. An example of this is the relationship between the PR and newspaper industries; the ratio of PR resources to investigative-reporting resources has grown drastically, and this fact seems like a natural consequence of economic growth.
Adversarial Action
Foreign intelligence agencies are actively working to reduce unity within the US.
A history of corruption in powerful institutions created a cultural backlash against institutional power in general, which isn’t selective enough.
Institutions are easier to sabotage than they are to create, so scaling up the world disfavors them.
Decreased Attention Spans
When I was growing up, it was a standard aphorism that “television rots your brain”—ie, that consuming too much media messes people up in some way. I recall a more specific claim, which was that television decreases attention span—ie, people who watch a lot of television have more scattered attention. People now say similar things about social media, and I think the effect is the same: people tend to spend less consecutive seconds on each thought, and have a harder time dealing with long inferential distances.
Many of the major problems look like leaders are being too miserly with cognition; there’s a correct model of the problem which has some inferential distance, and a competing model of the problem which is simpler but wrong, and we find leaders acting as though they believe the latter. Eg the “landlords are greedy” model (simple, wrong) vs the “prices are high when housing construction is inhibited by regulation” model (correct, but more complex).
Assorted Other Hypotheses
Exposure advertising induces resistance to a class of messaging which includes both advertising and organizational ideology.
Business schools are teaching MBAs a strategy that doesn’t rely on understanding the culture of an institution, and so they go on to destroy the local culture wherever they go.
The same thing that’s causing an obesity crisis, also changes people’s psychology in a way that makes them hard to build institutions out of.
Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.
Many organizations relied on an implicit hierarchy in which older people were higher ranked and less numerous; the decrease in birth rate broke this.
Con artists are more skilled than they used to be, because TV/social media/something else made it easier for them to practice, and most organizations are being captured by them.
“Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing that an institution is bad makes the people within it stop trying, and the good people stop going there.”
I think this is a key observation. Western academia has grown continually more cynical since the advent of Marxism, which assumes an almost absolute cynicism as a point of dogma: all actions are political actions motivated by class, except those of bourgeois Marxists who for mysterious reasons advocate the interests of the proletariat.
This cynicism became even worse with Foucault, who taught people to see everything as nothing but power relations. Western academics today are such knee-jerk cynics that they can’t conceive of loyalty to any organization other than Marxism or the Social Justice movement as being anything but exploitation of the one being loyal.
Pride is the opposite of cynicism, and is one of the key feelings that makes people take brave, altruistic actions. Yet today we’ve made pride a luxury of the oppressed. Only groups perceived as oppressed are allowed to have pride in group memberships. If you said you were proud of being American, or of being manly, you’d get deplatformed, and possibly fired.
The defamation of pride in mainstream groups is thus destroying our society’s ability to create or maintain mainstream institutions. In my own cynicism, I think someone deliberately intended this. This defamation began with Marxism, and is now supported by the social justice movement, both of which are Hegelian revolutionary movements which believe that the first step toward making civilization better is to destroy it, or at least destabilize it enough to stage a coup or revolution. This is the “clean sweep” spoken of so often by revolutionaries since the French Revolution.
Since their primary goal is to destroy civilization, it makes perfect sense that they begin by convincing people that taking pride in any mainstream identity or group membership is evil, as this will be sufficient to destroy all cooperative social institutions, and hence civilization.
This rings pure and clear, epistemically, in a way that most of the page has not.
I see gears. They look hard to move, but they’re there.