I promised I'd revisit this, though I wonder sometimes if I write about it too often? Feels like I do, in some shape or form... but the last time I covered this may have been years ago.
Imagine, if you will, a world where humans need 23 hours of sleep in a day. One tribe decides to stagger their sleep cycle, so that one person is always awake. The other... doesn't.
If something were to happen. An attack, or natural disaster, or somesuch, I think it's fairly obvious which tribe would be better off.
Cooperation makes us stronger. (Which is well known, of course, which is also why certain types of people find dissent so threatening. It's hard to accomplish much of anything if the group is unable to make a decision on what, or how. But that's a separate topic.)
A pack of wolves is more dangerous than the sum of each individual wolf's abilities. They can work together to attack blind spots, tire out their target, and so on and so forth.
But there are challenges to cooperating, especially for us. That's part of my fascination with social dilemmas and the like. How do we get people to agree to cooperate when there are so many incentives to be selfish? (This is also where trust comes into play... because maybe you do want the benefits of cooperating, but you don't trust everyone else to do their part. And if nobody is going to work together, then you might as well see about getting yours while you can.)
One of the best classes I ever took was called Analyzing Social Trust and Cooperation, and it covered quite a bit of this - social dilemmas, Bowling Alone, microlending, and more. It also discussed Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons, well before she won her Nobel prize.
And we discussed the Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan, and the problems and challenges with such a system.
Hobbes argued for a strong centralized government. As I mentioned earlier, he wrote during the English Civil War, and saw the horrors of disunity. I suppose you could also watch Game of Thrones to see a fictionalized account of that sort of thing. Can you think of a single character that didn't lose something they cared deeply about?
And, again, is it such a shock that some Iraqis now look fondly on Saddam Hussein, and prefer a 'strongman' to the chaos we unleashed?
But there are problems with Leviathan, and more than just the harm caused by being at the mercy of a tyrant. (I used to think the evil villains in fantasy were caricatures... a real world ruler would never be that awful, would they? I heard some stories about Saddam and his sons that made me rethink that.)
The thing is, centralized (and, more importantly, outside) forces generally make one of two mistakes - they either punish the innocent or fail to capture the guilty. It's sort of like the challenges the computer science industry has with intrusion detection systems, or biometric authentication... you get some false positives (thinking someone is hacking your system when they aren't, or in biometrics thinking someone isn't who they claim to be when they are) and some false negatives (thinking you're good when someone really is trying to hack your system, or with facial recognition recognizing someone when they really aren't the person they're supposed to be.)
Leviathan may try to, say, make marijuana illegal... but the cops may not catch everyone using it, and may falsely arrest someone who wasn't.
The thing is, these are the mistakes an outsider would make. I don't mean that they're a foreigner, per se, so much as that they just don't really know the local situation. You might know if your neighbor is doing something illegal, but the cops don't.
So one solution is to empower the people who actually know the situation, up close and personal. Elinor Ostrom's work looked at various ways local communities solved social dilemmas. Like water usage... if cities are drawing their water from underground lakes, and the lakes start filling up with salt water if the water level gets too low... destroying the resource for everyone... then the people who want to use that water benefit by working together.
Same thing with the fishing industry, and the problems with overfishing.
She wrote a whole book discussing this, and iirc it was rather dense and academic, though interesting. There's stuff like whether the boundaries of the resource are clearly defined (i.e. consider the difference between water rights to a lake, vs. the right to breathable air), whether there's an effective way of monitoring usage, and more. A lot of good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but probably a bit much for a layperson.
The part I wanted to focus on, though, was her notion of allowing local communities to resolve it their own way (i.e. no attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution. One fishing community may agree to rotate access to prime fishing locations, and another fishing community may come up with an entirely different solution. That's okay.), and the notion that organizations should form multiple layers of nested enterprises (to go back to water usage... figuring out a solution depends, in part, on knowing exactly how much water it's safe to use before you destroy the resource entirely. That sort of research requires resources to collect the data and analyze it. You may also need the resources to create and enforce an agreement... perhaps through the judgment of a state or federal court, and the use of state or federal power.)
In other words, we have yet again discovered the joys of trying to keep decision-making at the lowest level possible, and empowering those lower levels to make decisions.
Nesting those governments in a larger organization gives you some of the benefits of that, without making the whole system cumbersome, slow, and prone to error.
Really, it doesn't seem all that different from the republic system of government we stumbled on... nor the ideal military structure. What's that term the military started using lately? Mission command?
Empower those closest to the issue to come up with their own solutions, and use any larger resources to help smooth away the problems in doing so.
As with all systems, there are strengths and weaknesses here, and things that have to be done in order to make it work. I also think there's a certain tension in... I dunno... humanity? I think of it like centrifugal and centripetal force - social pressure to consolidate and make everything (or everyone) the same, and a countervailing pressure to be individuals each doing their own thing.
Like, there's advantages to having everyone all speak the same language. Makes it a heckuva lot easier to order food, or go shopping. But there's also advantages to having different languages, where we're only just beginning to understand how language can shape the way we think, and different languages give us different ways of thinking... some of which may be useful at times. (It's like... how we frame issues can affect how we solve them, so having different frames of reference can be like having different tools in our toolbag. We can pull out the one that's most appropriate to the situation. Different cultures, different languages, different stories... they all can give us different ways of being human, and being aware of them give us more choices about that. Umm, not in a 'cultural appropriation' kind of way... It's more like, I dunno. I heard about high-context and low-context cultures, and realized the impact that has... and in some ways, I've reduced how explicitly I write in my blogs because of it. Err, not directly. I'm not trying to change up my cultural context or anything. It's just... if someone's interested enough in reading my babble they can probably, they can probably figure out some of this stuff without my explaining it in detail, and maybe it's even better if they do. Maybe I can let the reader figure it out for themselves, and even if it's not exactly what I was thinking, it probably sticks better that way, anyway.)
Anyways. There's advantages to having consistency... consistent rules, consistent standards. Like having screws, nuts, and bolts all standardized, so you don't have to custom make replacements.
And maybe it's better to use the USB-C, so you don't have to have twenty different cables for as many devices.
But there are downsides to that, too... from a business perspective, of course the makers of said devices prefer being able to sell you their own unique cable, even if we all benefit by being able to use just a few. But aside from that, one company might come up with something new or different (like allowing the cable to work regardless of which way you plug it in) that eventually becomes standard.
Though in that case I think it was specified by the IEC, so you don't exactly have to have private businesses competing in order to get improvements.
Anyways, this post has gone on long enough. I hope, dear reader, that my babble hasn't been too boring, or too much of a data dump.
Imagine, if you will, a world where humans need 23 hours of sleep in a day. One tribe decides to stagger their sleep cycle, so that one person is always awake. The other... doesn't.
If something were to happen. An attack, or natural disaster, or somesuch, I think it's fairly obvious which tribe would be better off.
Cooperation makes us stronger. (Which is well known, of course, which is also why certain types of people find dissent so threatening. It's hard to accomplish much of anything if the group is unable to make a decision on what, or how. But that's a separate topic.)
A pack of wolves is more dangerous than the sum of each individual wolf's abilities. They can work together to attack blind spots, tire out their target, and so on and so forth.
But there are challenges to cooperating, especially for us. That's part of my fascination with social dilemmas and the like. How do we get people to agree to cooperate when there are so many incentives to be selfish? (This is also where trust comes into play... because maybe you do want the benefits of cooperating, but you don't trust everyone else to do their part. And if nobody is going to work together, then you might as well see about getting yours while you can.)
One of the best classes I ever took was called Analyzing Social Trust and Cooperation, and it covered quite a bit of this - social dilemmas, Bowling Alone, microlending, and more. It also discussed Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons, well before she won her Nobel prize.
And we discussed the Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan, and the problems and challenges with such a system.
Hobbes argued for a strong centralized government. As I mentioned earlier, he wrote during the English Civil War, and saw the horrors of disunity. I suppose you could also watch Game of Thrones to see a fictionalized account of that sort of thing. Can you think of a single character that didn't lose something they cared deeply about?
And, again, is it such a shock that some Iraqis now look fondly on Saddam Hussein, and prefer a 'strongman' to the chaos we unleashed?
But there are problems with Leviathan, and more than just the harm caused by being at the mercy of a tyrant. (I used to think the evil villains in fantasy were caricatures... a real world ruler would never be that awful, would they? I heard some stories about Saddam and his sons that made me rethink that.)
The thing is, centralized (and, more importantly, outside) forces generally make one of two mistakes - they either punish the innocent or fail to capture the guilty. It's sort of like the challenges the computer science industry has with intrusion detection systems, or biometric authentication... you get some false positives (thinking someone is hacking your system when they aren't, or in biometrics thinking someone isn't who they claim to be when they are) and some false negatives (thinking you're good when someone really is trying to hack your system, or with facial recognition recognizing someone when they really aren't the person they're supposed to be.)
Leviathan may try to, say, make marijuana illegal... but the cops may not catch everyone using it, and may falsely arrest someone who wasn't.
The thing is, these are the mistakes an outsider would make. I don't mean that they're a foreigner, per se, so much as that they just don't really know the local situation. You might know if your neighbor is doing something illegal, but the cops don't.
So one solution is to empower the people who actually know the situation, up close and personal. Elinor Ostrom's work looked at various ways local communities solved social dilemmas. Like water usage... if cities are drawing their water from underground lakes, and the lakes start filling up with salt water if the water level gets too low... destroying the resource for everyone... then the people who want to use that water benefit by working together.
Same thing with the fishing industry, and the problems with overfishing.
She wrote a whole book discussing this, and iirc it was rather dense and academic, though interesting. There's stuff like whether the boundaries of the resource are clearly defined (i.e. consider the difference between water rights to a lake, vs. the right to breathable air), whether there's an effective way of monitoring usage, and more. A lot of good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but probably a bit much for a layperson.
The part I wanted to focus on, though, was her notion of allowing local communities to resolve it their own way (i.e. no attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution. One fishing community may agree to rotate access to prime fishing locations, and another fishing community may come up with an entirely different solution. That's okay.), and the notion that organizations should form multiple layers of nested enterprises (to go back to water usage... figuring out a solution depends, in part, on knowing exactly how much water it's safe to use before you destroy the resource entirely. That sort of research requires resources to collect the data and analyze it. You may also need the resources to create and enforce an agreement... perhaps through the judgment of a state or federal court, and the use of state or federal power.)
In other words, we have yet again discovered the joys of trying to keep decision-making at the lowest level possible, and empowering those lower levels to make decisions.
Nesting those governments in a larger organization gives you some of the benefits of that, without making the whole system cumbersome, slow, and prone to error.
Really, it doesn't seem all that different from the republic system of government we stumbled on... nor the ideal military structure. What's that term the military started using lately? Mission command?
Empower those closest to the issue to come up with their own solutions, and use any larger resources to help smooth away the problems in doing so.
As with all systems, there are strengths and weaknesses here, and things that have to be done in order to make it work. I also think there's a certain tension in... I dunno... humanity? I think of it like centrifugal and centripetal force - social pressure to consolidate and make everything (or everyone) the same, and a countervailing pressure to be individuals each doing their own thing.
Like, there's advantages to having everyone all speak the same language. Makes it a heckuva lot easier to order food, or go shopping. But there's also advantages to having different languages, where we're only just beginning to understand how language can shape the way we think, and different languages give us different ways of thinking... some of which may be useful at times. (It's like... how we frame issues can affect how we solve them, so having different frames of reference can be like having different tools in our toolbag. We can pull out the one that's most appropriate to the situation. Different cultures, different languages, different stories... they all can give us different ways of being human, and being aware of them give us more choices about that. Umm, not in a 'cultural appropriation' kind of way... It's more like, I dunno. I heard about high-context and low-context cultures, and realized the impact that has... and in some ways, I've reduced how explicitly I write in my blogs because of it. Err, not directly. I'm not trying to change up my cultural context or anything. It's just... if someone's interested enough in reading my babble they can probably, they can probably figure out some of this stuff without my explaining it in detail, and maybe it's even better if they do. Maybe I can let the reader figure it out for themselves, and even if it's not exactly what I was thinking, it probably sticks better that way, anyway.)
Anyways. There's advantages to having consistency... consistent rules, consistent standards. Like having screws, nuts, and bolts all standardized, so you don't have to custom make replacements.
And maybe it's better to use the USB-C, so you don't have to have twenty different cables for as many devices.
But there are downsides to that, too... from a business perspective, of course the makers of said devices prefer being able to sell you their own unique cable, even if we all benefit by being able to use just a few. But aside from that, one company might come up with something new or different (like allowing the cable to work regardless of which way you plug it in) that eventually becomes standard.
Though in that case I think it was specified by the IEC, so you don't exactly have to have private businesses competing in order to get improvements.
Anyways, this post has gone on long enough. I hope, dear reader, that my babble hasn't been too boring, or too much of a data dump.
No comments:
Post a Comment