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Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years
- intrasight 7y agoOf course I immediately thought of "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson ;)
- joycian 7y agoAnathem was inspired by the 10K clock project in the first place right?
- hprotagonist 7y agoIt's probably fairer to say that Neal was involved with The Long Now anyway, and wrote a novel about it and also some Liebniz he wanted to tell you all about.
- rmbryan 7y agohprotagonist on a Stephenson thread, glorious.
- adamsea 7y agoMovies, microcode, and pizza delivery.
- hprotagonist 7y agoand ancient sumerian, let’s not forget.
- maxxxxx 7y agoIt’s an interesting idea but I don’t think it makes much sense. Society changes a lot during that time so what could such an institution be based on? Closest is probably religion but considering that most religions are based on the understanding of the world at time of their creation they would either be obsolete after 10000 years or they would have to preserve the status quo and limit scientific progress. The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few hundred years.
- toasterlovin 7y agoI've wondered if a religion that specifically carved out space for areas of knowledge that are expected to mutate would be viable.
- maxxxxx 7y agothis will be difficult. Usually discoveries in one area will also have impact in other areas.
- tathougies 7y ago> The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few hundred years. The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of millennia. Your point on scientific progress is especially obtuse, given that the entire reason for the study of science in the West was at the behest of Christianity. I can't think of any time the church sought limiting scientific progress as an end unto itself.
- maxxxxx 7y agoIt's true that the Church supported science but there are plenty of examples where it didn't like the results and tried to bury them.
- gen220 7y agoFrom my understanding, it's more that the personalities of certain powerful individuals in the Church didn't rub well with the personalities of certain influential citizen-scientists (@Galileo, principally), and the former individuals abused their power to torment the latter. The actual results were much less important to the people involved than the prestige of "being right". For context, these inquisitions happened at a time when the printing press was democratizing ownership of authoritative information (i.e. the Church) – not too dissimilar to today, where the web's information is upending traditional news sources. The inquisitions were a reaction to a perceived loss of power. From that POV, it was less an ideological, Church vs Science thing (although this conflict is real today, though it seemed to be less real in the past), and more a butting of egos. Many people today experience zero dissonance between their religion and their scientific beliefs, and this observation is an old one (see the writings of any number of religious scientists throughout history). Anyways, just my 2¢! :)
- amirouche 7y agoThat is very inspiring thoughts. I love The Long Now project. I think more people should get interested in those topics and in general on the long standing impact of humans.
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoI'm part of an institution that's lasted about 3000 years so far. It's my Synagogue. (Getting lots of downvotes--as expected because Hacker News doesn't like Jews--but it's probably one of the best examples of an institution that's built to last. Even with the Temple gone, and prayer taking the place of sacrifices, we continue. The Hebrew Language has been kept alive over the centuries, too, and the alphabet was preserved in the daily Yiddish my grandparents and parents spoke.)
- urbandrillah 7y agoCool story brah
- maxxxxx 7y agoDo you think it can last another 7000? I can't even imagine how the world will look then.
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoMoshiach will arrive long before then!
- brianpgordon 7y agoI'm sure that's what they thought about 3000 years, 3000 years ago.
- Animats 7y agoNetanyahu sometimes hints that he is the Moshiach.[1] "We live in historic times. The ancient prophecies are being realized. The people of Israel have ingathered their exiles, come back to the Promised Land, built Zion, reunited our eternal capital, Jerusalem. ... And in fact, the American Embassy was just recently moved there in a historic move by President Trump. This is all important. What we're witnessing is the dream of centuries, the dreams of millennium being realized." It's getting weird. See "dispensationalism". This is a somewhat nutty Bible interpretation which is getting political support. It doesn't end well. Maybe you don't want to have institutions that last 10K years. They're likely to be doing the wrong thing from a sense of tradition. Or sheer inertia. [1] https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/2018/december/ancient-prophesies-are-being-realized-netanyahus-holiday-message-to-christians-worldwide https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/2018/december/ancient-prophesie...
- hellllllllooo 7y agoAm I the only one who finds The Long Now obnoxious? Mostly rich people who spend their money and time thinking about 10000 years from now as some kind of grandiose, pretentious, self-important hobby. Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone: http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/
- colanderman 7y agoOne could say it's helping advance research into how to deliberately create lasting institutions, which benefits the future of the human race.
- blahblahthrow 7y agoGiven the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make 10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions we have now.
- LargeWu 7y agoBecause of short term thinking. Nobody cares about what will happen beyond the next election cycle, the next quarter, the next iPhone release. A bit more long-term thinking would not hurt anybody.
- hellllllllooo 7y agoNo one is objecting to 20-100 year thinking and even then planning is hard if you look back 100 years and see what has changed. I would be very happy if these people were putting their time and money into solving problems on this scale like the Gates foundation etc. This is just a sci-fi hobby.
- LargeWu 7y agoMy point stands. Uber has been a public company for all of 5 hours now, and their stock is a few dollars less per share than it opened, and everybody is freaking out and wondering what it all means. It's not about planning out 10,000 years, or even 100; it's something more abstract than that. What will your legacy be? Your family's legacy? Your country's? Humanity's? I don't have any personal connection to somebody who will be alive 1000 years from now, or even 200, but I still don't want to leave them a dead, depleted planet. Is the clock a bit frivolous? Sure. But it's not about the clock. The clock is merely a symbol, that we have considered our place in history, that we recognize we are part of something larger, and we want to be good stewards of our future.
- qzw 7y ago>It’s unclear if civilization started because we could ferment things, or we started fermenting things and therefore civilization started... Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing? I would think the alternative would be "or civilization started and therefore we could ferment things."
- valarauko 7y ago>Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing? Yup. Both posit causality from fermentation -> civilization.
- RobertoG 7y agoIt's a strange sentence anyway. I suppose he calls civilization to the Neolithic, so civilization started with agriculture, and with agriculture you have something to ferment (and more people trying different things). Doesn't look so mysterious to me.
- SilasX 7y agoYou can have something to ferment before you're growing it yourself: take the fruits (or whatever) growing in nature.
- brookhaven_dude 7y agoHinduism
- earthboundkid 7y agoTraditionally, many Indian classics were transmitted orally. This supposedly led to a lower error rate over time because if I mistranscribe a letter in a written text, all descendants of my text will have the same error, but a single misspeaking in oral transmission is unlikely to persist. On the flipside, the classics tend to be shorter and gnomic and rely on commentary to make them intelligible. They also needed to create a system to preserve old Sanskrit pronunciation even after the spoken language changed.
- neural_thing 7y agoThe way progress has been accelerating... "Vanilla" humans are not going to be important 10,000 years from now, and might not even exist. You can debate whether we will see radical improvement through genetic engineering or brain-computer interfaces, or whether AI makes humans obsolete, or global warming wipes us out. But all of those reach "tipping points" way before 10,000 years from now. We just don't know which will strike first (I am betting my time and money on brain-computer interfaces).
- devoply 7y agoWhat isn't political and should be political is the nature of change on this planet using technology. It's taken for granted that change is a constant and constantly necessary. That stability is impossible, though this is not factually true -- stability in short time frames like 10,000 years is historically definitely possible at many levels. That infinite competition is necessary and that the people are simply cogs in that system... where that system should serve people. Instead people serve the system. In such a system open to constant change and destruction it is rather difficult to create other systems that survive the destruction of the meta system that contains them.
- neural_thing 7y agoYou would like Meditations on Moloch, if you haven't read it already. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- Mirioron 7y agoI think it is necessary. If you stop improving then it means that anybody that could've benefitted from the improvements that would've happened don't get those benefits. Furthermore, if some part of society ignores your drive for stability and still keeps trying to improve, then over time they'll simply take over, because they'll be more advanced in many ways.
- devoply 7y ago
- docker_up 7y agoThis is entirely masturbatory. To think they can re-engineer how some multi-century organizations like religions are able to stay alive is ridiculous. There are 99.99999% of organizations have failed during that time and there is massive survivorship bias. It's basically luck at this scale. Not even countries last for thousands of years let alone 10 thousand years. So many attempts would fail in the first 2 years, you would need millions of attempts to get something started that lasts even 4-5 decades. Plus who cares? How would you even judge or know you're going on the right path even at 100 years when it's 1% of your goal?
- mordae 7y agoLibraries appear to be pretty durable - as an idea.
- cobbzilla 7y agoGreat discussion. Institutions have to deal with continuous changes over long time spans. Most are “made for their time” and thus cannot survive when the deviations are big enough. Memes can survive way longer than institutions. Here’s some memes that have been with us since the paleolithic: gathering around a fire at night to tell stories; fear of spiders; smiles, hugs and kisses. Any others that are as old or older?
- sova 7y agoThat's quite a loose characterization of the word meme. Campfires predate the Internet by about a million years. but on this note you do bring up an interesting point about archetypal action and behavioral psychology. an old girlfriend of mine explained to me once that kissing is suspected to come from bird moms feeding bird babies. Other things that are very significant are simply sharing a meal. (Break bread together) did you know that a blind person will put their hands up into the sky victoriously when they win the race even without ever having seen another human being do it? some of the nature of your interested in is more innate than can be known by the eye alone.
- cobbzilla 7y agoA meme is a unit of cultural transmission. At some point long ago, humans did not have these behaviors, they were not innate, they were learned and continuously passed on to the present day. I hope you don’t think memes are limited to pictures with some witty text on them.
- knolax 7y agoIt used to be that you could mention the word meme in the Dawkinsian sense without it being conflated with funny internet pictures. Ironically, the concept of a meme is itself a very weak meme.
- sova 7y agoYeah, and the Earth is actually Terra. Swimming against popular parlance and convention is not gonna win any points. Well, maybe on here. But not many other places! shakes fist in Dawkins' general direction
- zachguo 7y agoAren't institutions evolving on their own like super-organisms? The origin of modern universities is kinda funny. Basically, a flock of students, a few erudite scholars, and local landlords fought with each other until they reached an agreement about a set of rules that everyone was happy with, then institutionalized it. The process is roughly 1) a few scholars stayed together in one small town in Italy, which attracted a flock of knowledge-hungry students 2) local landlords charged high rents for the students 3) students unionized to fight against landlords 4) student union became powerful enough to put pressure on teachers too 5) teachers also unionized to counter student union 6) fights among student union, teacher union and local landlords continued 7) they reached agreements about the syllabus, grading, tuition, dedicated real estate for classrooms, and admin department to handle all these. http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100643670&fa=author&person_id=445 http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010064367...
- zwkrt 7y agoIf one takes a meta viewpoint about evolution not as how single organisms evolve over time but instead the complex processes that happen to be occuring on the surface of the Earth, then you don't actually need to separate your thoughts about biological, cultural, or technical evolution. It's all part of one big ball of mud rolling down the same hill! The only reason that humans seem to think that microchips and sailboats and GIFs are fundamentally different than oxygen and proteins and honey is that humans think other humans are Very Important.
- natmaka 7y ago
- b_tterc_p 7y agoMy university was fond of saying it expected to serve students for thousands of years to come. Always thought that was laughably naive. It was maybe 70 years old at the time.