There’s a small and decreasing number of people who are still capable of synthesizing information and creating new hypotheses and interpretations.
Then there’s those who are mostly no longer capable of doing that, things got too complicated and weird, and they can’t keep up, but they can read the first group and meaningfully distinguish between people claiming to be in it, and between their individual claims, ask questions and help provide feedback. To them, the first group is legible. This forms a larger second group that can synthesize the points from the first group, and turn it into something that can be read as an emerging new consensus, which in turn can be legible to a third much larger group.
This third group can then be legible to the general public slash general elites, who learn that this is where good new ideas come from. Then the Responsible Authority Figures can feel under public pressure, or see what the emerging new ideas are, and run with the ball from there, and the loop continues.
Somewhat tangential, this is four levels from “people who figure things out” to “general public”. I wonder how recently it would have been three. But also, I’m not sure how to tell how many levels there are; if you’d said there were three levels, or five, I don’t think that would have seemed particularly off to me.
Free association: this is in some sense “one level of middle management” (the second group). I don’t remember back to moral mazes very well, but I feel like that might have been where things start to go really wrong. (It might have been two levels of MM instead.) I’m not sure if this is a meaningful connection to make—if mapping “people who figure things out” to CEOs and “general public” to employees gives us any insights—but if it is… honestly I’m not sure what to do with that.
Somewhat tangential, this is four levels from “people who figure things out” to “general public”. I wonder how recently it would have been three. But also, I’m not sure how to tell how many levels there are; if you’d said there were three levels, or five, I don’t think that would have seemed particularly off to me.
Free association: this is in some sense “one level of middle management” (the second group). I don’t remember back to moral mazes very well, but I feel like that might have been where things start to go really wrong. (It might have been two levels of MM instead.) I’m not sure if this is a meaningful connection to make—if mapping “people who figure things out” to CEOs and “general public” to employees gives us any insights—but if it is… honestly I’m not sure what to do with that.