Woah, this was hard! Took me longer than an hour, for the first time. The prompt felt very broad and less like it pushed the babble in a particular direction… it felt like it would probably have been best to be guided by curiosity, but I didn’t feel much curiosity for the original post. I guess this is an interesting test cases in using babble challenge to help build more curiosity...
1 What does Anna means when she says that some subcultures are only “sort-of here”?
What are examples I’ve come across of institutions being cooperative or non-cooperative?
2 Whenever I interface with the US government I have to do an exorbitant amount of paperwork. This seems to be way more than necessary.
4 I notice that when making fun of institutions like that there’s some sense of guilt and sadness… as if though behind all that mess there are hard-working people just doing their best, and who do not deserve ridicule?
5 When I subscribe to a newspaper recently to get access to an article, the “confirm your email” email didn’t have any link in it. So I had to inspect the code underlying and manage to find a url that didn’t render. God knows how many potential subscribers were not able to do that, and how long this error persisted for?
6 I wonder how many of these problems are solvable with better mechanism design
7 I’m confused why there would be a trend toward institutional decay… maybe because of the internet?
8 It is said that the health of an organisation can be measured by how easy it is to unsubscribe from their services. And my impression is many newspapers make this super hard—one I recently subscribed to one you had to call them, during limited work hours, to unsubscribe.
9 I recently saw the Mathematicians’ Association of America (or something similar, probably by a different name) post a long, confused Official Announcement about critical studies and social justice, taking a stance in favor of it. This felt to me like a strong sense of institutional decline, like maybe they were sacrificing some of the Kolmogorov Option.
10 I’m reminded of a recent podcast of preference falsification with Eric Weinstein. One of the key points was that “majority beliefs” can be upheld even if only believed by a minority of people, due to lack of common knowledge; but when the tide actually turns, it can cascade very rapidly. This makes me wonder if there can be some sort of “institutional decay overhang”, and that things are actually worse than they seem, but this just hasn’t been realised yet
11 I wonder how covid ties into all this. Some say it might be good that it shakes up the current equilibrium, clearing away institutional cruft (but at a terrible cost).
12 How could we measure whether institutions have decayed over the past few years? I’m reminded of that study who sent postcards to invalid addresses in random countries, to find out how many of them were returned. (In order to measure the functioning of their postal service). Maybe one could use that to see how things have change over time? Maybe some natural experiement occurred in the past?
Some other ideas:
13 books stolen from libraries
14 the cost of bribing officials—has it gone down?
15 or, similarly, the effectiveness of lobbying in terms of policy change per dollar spent
16 Cost disease, in its various form, seems like one of the strongest puzzle pieces to the general puzzle about institutions
17 Why would institutions be decaying now and not earlier in history?
18 Maybe they have decayed earlier, and civilisations fallen with them.
19 What are effective ways of turning the tide? Of building more stable, cooperative institutions? RadicalXChange appear to be doing interesting work in this space.
20 I’m confused about whether I should expect the internet to make it easier or harder to form subcultures. You ought to be able to access more people with niche interests… but at the same time there are economies-of-scale and razor-sharp competition for attention, so maybe clickbait superstimuli dominates everything.
21 Hm… for some reason I feel that Pinterest is less clickbaity than other social media? Though really not sure about this. But it just generally presents me with beautiful and extremely well-curated content. And sure, I keep scrolling. But not in the binge-scrolling ways that I end up deeply regretting afterwards.
22 Could Twitter change to really improve discourse if they wanted to? How much leverage do they have with the software? Relatedly: how deep is the current bad attractor they are in, and how hard is it to move to a different one?
23 How was it at all possible to have institutions hundreds of years ago, when sending messages to take days, weeks, or months. How did the Brittish empire even work? Communication is hard, even these days with email, but the equivalent time of sending an email and receive a reply in those days would literally be months...!
24 I often feel interactions are less cooperative and more hostile when happening through text than when in person… people appear way more humane and reasonable in person… I’ve been wondering why...
25 A friend recently told me that maybe it was fortunate we were facing institutional decay in this period… this time when so many crucial questions about the future must be answered. We wished for a Long Reflection, and we got a Great Stagnation.
26 When I did some work in policy-advising academia, it occurred to me that although there was some real incompetence, there was also some genuinely extraordinary people around. I update away from the “civilisation inadequacy” view where everything is broken, to a more nuanced view, where there are true heroes and geniuses scattered through the brokenness.
27 Another major puzzle piece was the remarkably degree of cooperativeness from non-institutions during covid. Tons of companies volunteered employee time to help (e.g. software engineers, management consultant), others launched in-house projects like building dashboard or shipping PPE. How much of this was for PR, versus some kind of general, societal immune system against institutional collapse? Not sure—but the current second wave might be an interesting test case. PR effects are less, but impact possibilities persist.
28 I noticed I’m confused about how institutions arise and evolve in the first place… you can’t really iterate on them in the same fast way as, say, companies
29 In my experience, do obtain trust as a leader requires getting buy-in from people. This often requires high-bandwidth, 1-1 conversations. But how do you do that if you’re a nation, or a government? Maybe by having local representatives who can have high-bandwidth communication with people? And maybe there’s something important in that that’s being lost when things happen more and more over the internet?
(I notice that for whatever reason I feel less in the mode of “it’s okay to say something stupid, like ‘bird in space suit’”, and more like each thought has to be interesting! I feel stuck on hypotheses for what actually makes cooperative institutions successful, so let’s try to attack that, starting with some stupid things...)
Cooperative institutions become successful if...
30 …they give their employees enough pizza.
31 …they follow the 2-pizza rule and never have meetings larger than the number of people you can feed with 2 pizzas.
32 …they’re filled with “champions”—people who really care about a thing, enough as to spearhead it, deal with all annoying details and special cases
33 …culture is filled with portrayals of high-integrity, conscientious, courages public servants. (What would such portrayals be? I think of maybe movies about Churchill, the character Rossiu from the Gurren Lagann anime, the title character from “Charlie Wilson’s War”… but can’t think of many others)
34 … employees of key department work in the same buildings, so they can have high-bandwidth communication
36 …when bureaucrats and civil servants are users of their own products in important ways
37 …they have rules that can manipulated in the working memory of the average person being ruled by them… and not too complex (not at all sure about this one)
38 …when they’re governed by a bird in a space suit
39 …there is a basic story they can tell about their existence that the employees actually believe and buy into (like SpaceX has “Make life multiplanetary”)
40 …when there exists live examples within the institution of people “working their way up”, providing a very alive-feeling example that progress and reward is possible if you work hard (this is completely made up, no idea if true)
41 I wonder what measures would could look at across history to track the rise and fall and rise and fall of cooperativeness...
42 Are tech companies institutions just because they’re monopolies with massive economies-of-scale and social externalities?
43 Maybe culture and communication is not actually as bad as it seems on social media, since only the most extreme cases penetrate the war-for-clicks. But then again, that might lead to preference falsification and a surprisingly sticky equilibrium of more aggression and hostility than most people actually endorse
44 “Inadequate Equilibria” talks a lot about systems and civilisations getting stuck. And this is something I’ve thought about, along with how they make progress. But I notice a gap in my thought in that I’ve rarely thought about how and why things decay… it is indeed confusing why so many systems seem to instead get stuck in slow-rolling, bad equilibria… some combination of inertia, and people willing to stick around as long as they see signs of their being status and other valuable resource to grab, even if much less of them than in other places?
45 When institutions stop working, do they go out with a bang or with a whimper?
46 What norms and practices have allowed science as a field to maintain such high-bandwidth (or, at least, rigorous) communication? Maybe there’s a Chesterton’s fence here in terms of other bad equilibria in science (not sure I believe that though)...
47 If it is the case that most great things are driven by “champions”, individuals who can deal with the annoying special cases, push through hard times, and rally people around them, has it become the case that society fosters fewer champions? If so, why? What is the mechanism whereby champions are raised?
48 What are standard cooperative rituals people do to make it common knowledge that they actually intend to cooperate with each other? (if there even are such things) Maybe having casual chit chats on the street? [...]
49 I recall listening to a podcast where the speaker described that when was young his mom would put a sign around his neck with her address and telephone number, in case he’d get loose when playing outside. In particular, back in those days, other adults were seen as a resource, as a safety net they could rely on. Whereas, today, many parents are very protective of their children, and other adults are seen as a potential threat.
50 A contested election is a very interesting test case of our current institutions, because it sort of samples from outside the training distribution.
51 What company is most like an institution, and what institution is most like a company?
52 Newspapers are weird… because they are for-profit companies with an inherently social mission and strong sense of integrity and pride in fulfilling that mission...
53 I’m also interested in utilities companies, and all the regulation and stuff surrounding them. As an example of a company dealing with a resource that would be a natural monopoly.
Woah, this was hard! Took me longer than an hour, for the first time. The prompt felt very broad and less like it pushed the babble in a particular direction… it felt like it would probably have been best to be guided by curiosity, but I didn’t feel much curiosity for the original post. I guess this is an interesting test cases in using babble challenge to help build more curiosity...
1 What does Anna means when she says that some subcultures are only “sort-of here”?
What are examples I’ve come across of institutions being cooperative or non-cooperative?
2 Whenever I interface with the US government I have to do an exorbitant amount of paperwork. This seems to be way more than necessary.
3 A few months ago when I interfaced with the US Postal service. It was horrifying. Broken software (where I had to guess what the bug was and do weird iterations to get through to the next page); awful bureaucracy (to ship that kind of item you need to order a particular kind of plastic folder to contain a particular kind of customs form and it will take them 7 days to arrive); the general vibe being heavily… branding-y? Like, “we’re pitching you this new, slightly outmoded service, that doesn’t seem super amazing, but has a title that might sound-great-to-someone-in-charge-somewhere, like Click-n-Ship©” (note the copyright symbol! As if though the value in their service would lie in that name...!)
4 I notice that when making fun of institutions like that there’s some sense of guilt and sadness… as if though behind all that mess there are hard-working people just doing their best, and who do not deserve ridicule?
5 When I subscribe to a newspaper recently to get access to an article, the “confirm your email” email didn’t have any link in it. So I had to inspect the code underlying and manage to find a url that didn’t render. God knows how many potential subscribers were not able to do that, and how long this error persisted for?
6 I wonder how many of these problems are solvable with better mechanism design
7 I’m confused why there would be a trend toward institutional decay… maybe because of the internet?
8 It is said that the health of an organisation can be measured by how easy it is to unsubscribe from their services. And my impression is many newspapers make this super hard—one I recently subscribed to one you had to call them, during limited work hours, to unsubscribe.
9 I recently saw the Mathematicians’ Association of America (or something similar, probably by a different name) post a long, confused Official Announcement about critical studies and social justice, taking a stance in favor of it. This felt to me like a strong sense of institutional decline, like maybe they were sacrificing some of the Kolmogorov Option.
10 I’m reminded of a recent podcast of preference falsification with Eric Weinstein. One of the key points was that “majority beliefs” can be upheld even if only believed by a minority of people, due to lack of common knowledge; but when the tide actually turns, it can cascade very rapidly. This makes me wonder if there can be some sort of “institutional decay overhang”, and that things are actually worse than they seem, but this just hasn’t been realised yet
11 I wonder how covid ties into all this. Some say it might be good that it shakes up the current equilibrium, clearing away institutional cruft (but at a terrible cost).
12 How could we measure whether institutions have decayed over the past few years? I’m reminded of that study who sent postcards to invalid addresses in random countries, to find out how many of them were returned. (In order to measure the functioning of their postal service). Maybe one could use that to see how things have change over time? Maybe some natural experiement occurred in the past?
Some other ideas:
13 books stolen from libraries
14 the cost of bribing officials—has it gone down?
15 or, similarly, the effectiveness of lobbying in terms of policy change per dollar spent
16 Cost disease, in its various form, seems like one of the strongest puzzle pieces to the general puzzle about institutions
17 Why would institutions be decaying now and not earlier in history?
18 Maybe they have decayed earlier, and civilisations fallen with them.
19 What are effective ways of turning the tide? Of building more stable, cooperative institutions? RadicalXChange appear to be doing interesting work in this space.
20 I’m confused about whether I should expect the internet to make it easier or harder to form subcultures. You ought to be able to access more people with niche interests… but at the same time there are economies-of-scale and razor-sharp competition for attention, so maybe clickbait superstimuli dominates everything.
21 Hm… for some reason I feel that Pinterest is less clickbaity than other social media? Though really not sure about this. But it just generally presents me with beautiful and extremely well-curated content. And sure, I keep scrolling. But not in the binge-scrolling ways that I end up deeply regretting afterwards.
22 Could Twitter change to really improve discourse if they wanted to? How much leverage do they have with the software? Relatedly: how deep is the current bad attractor they are in, and how hard is it to move to a different one?
23 How was it at all possible to have institutions hundreds of years ago, when sending messages to take days, weeks, or months. How did the Brittish empire even work? Communication is hard, even these days with email, but the equivalent time of sending an email and receive a reply in those days would literally be months...!
24 I often feel interactions are less cooperative and more hostile when happening through text than when in person… people appear way more humane and reasonable in person… I’ve been wondering why...
25 A friend recently told me that maybe it was fortunate we were facing institutional decay in this period… this time when so many crucial questions about the future must be answered. We wished for a Long Reflection, and we got a Great Stagnation.
26 When I did some work in policy-advising academia, it occurred to me that although there was some real incompetence, there was also some genuinely extraordinary people around. I update away from the “civilisation inadequacy” view where everything is broken, to a more nuanced view, where there are true heroes and geniuses scattered through the brokenness.
27 Another major puzzle piece was the remarkably degree of cooperativeness from non-institutions during covid. Tons of companies volunteered employee time to help (e.g. software engineers, management consultant), others launched in-house projects like building dashboard or shipping PPE. How much of this was for PR, versus some kind of general, societal immune system against institutional collapse? Not sure—but the current second wave might be an interesting test case. PR effects are less, but impact possibilities persist.
28 I noticed I’m confused about how institutions arise and evolve in the first place… you can’t really iterate on them in the same fast way as, say, companies
29 In my experience, do obtain trust as a leader requires getting buy-in from people. This often requires high-bandwidth, 1-1 conversations. But how do you do that if you’re a nation, or a government? Maybe by having local representatives who can have high-bandwidth communication with people? And maybe there’s something important in that that’s being lost when things happen more and more over the internet?
(I notice that for whatever reason I feel less in the mode of “it’s okay to say something stupid, like ‘bird in space suit’”, and more like each thought has to be interesting! I feel stuck on hypotheses for what actually makes cooperative institutions successful, so let’s try to attack that, starting with some stupid things...)
Cooperative institutions become successful if...
30 …they give their employees enough pizza.
31 …they follow the 2-pizza rule and never have meetings larger than the number of people you can feed with 2 pizzas.
32 …they’re filled with “champions”—people who really care about a thing, enough as to spearhead it, deal with all annoying details and special cases
33 …culture is filled with portrayals of high-integrity, conscientious, courages public servants. (What would such portrayals be? I think of maybe movies about Churchill, the character Rossiu from the Gurren Lagann anime, the title character from “Charlie Wilson’s War”… but can’t think of many others)
34 … employees of key department work in the same buildings, so they can have high-bandwidth communication
35 …employees of different departments work in the same buildings—interfaces are a scarce resource https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hyShz2ABiKX56j5tJ/interfaces-as-a-scarce-resource
36 …when bureaucrats and civil servants are users of their own products in important ways
37 …they have rules that can manipulated in the working memory of the average person being ruled by them… and not too complex (not at all sure about this one)
38 …when they’re governed by a bird in a space suit
39 …there is a basic story they can tell about their existence that the employees actually believe and buy into (like SpaceX has “Make life multiplanetary”)
40 …when there exists live examples within the institution of people “working their way up”, providing a very alive-feeling example that progress and reward is possible if you work hard (this is completely made up, no idea if true)
41 I wonder what measures would could look at across history to track the rise and fall and rise and fall of cooperativeness...
42 Are tech companies institutions just because they’re monopolies with massive economies-of-scale and social externalities?
43 Maybe culture and communication is not actually as bad as it seems on social media, since only the most extreme cases penetrate the war-for-clicks. But then again, that might lead to preference falsification and a surprisingly sticky equilibrium of more aggression and hostility than most people actually endorse
44 “Inadequate Equilibria” talks a lot about systems and civilisations getting stuck. And this is something I’ve thought about, along with how they make progress. But I notice a gap in my thought in that I’ve rarely thought about how and why things decay… it is indeed confusing why so many systems seem to instead get stuck in slow-rolling, bad equilibria… some combination of inertia, and people willing to stick around as long as they see signs of their being status and other valuable resource to grab, even if much less of them than in other places?
45 When institutions stop working, do they go out with a bang or with a whimper?
46 What norms and practices have allowed science as a field to maintain such high-bandwidth (or, at least, rigorous) communication? Maybe there’s a Chesterton’s fence here in terms of other bad equilibria in science (not sure I believe that though)...
47 If it is the case that most great things are driven by “champions”, individuals who can deal with the annoying special cases, push through hard times, and rally people around them, has it become the case that society fosters fewer champions? If so, why? What is the mechanism whereby champions are raised?
48 What are standard cooperative rituals people do to make it common knowledge that they actually intend to cooperate with each other? (if there even are such things) Maybe having casual chit chats on the street? [...]
49 I recall listening to a podcast where the speaker described that when was young his mom would put a sign around his neck with her address and telephone number, in case he’d get loose when playing outside. In particular, back in those days, other adults were seen as a resource, as a safety net they could rely on. Whereas, today, many parents are very protective of their children, and other adults are seen as a potential threat.
50 A contested election is a very interesting test case of our current institutions, because it sort of samples from outside the training distribution.
51 What company is most like an institution, and what institution is most like a company?
52 Newspapers are weird… because they are for-profit companies with an inherently social mission and strong sense of integrity and pride in fulfilling that mission...
53 I’m also interested in utilities companies, and all the regulation and stuff surrounding them. As an example of a company dealing with a resource that would be a natural monopoly.