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> when a lot of the reasons for problems like poverty aren't a tech issue, they are because we haven't figured out how to build functional institutions I woul

> when a lot of the reasons for problems like poverty aren't a tech issue, they are because we haven't figured out how to build functional institutions I would argue that is still mostly a technology issue. Just social technologies, instead of physical technologies. Democracy is a social technology. Gender equality is a social technology. Market economies are a social technology. And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well. Over time, we learn the pitfalls and improve the engineering. That lowers the cost, increases the quality, and widens the distribution. Liberal democracy is a 300-year old idea, but the percentage of the world's population living under it has drastically increased in just the past 30 years. Also over time, we learn which social technologies are dead-ends. Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology.

IAmEveryone 7y ago
You're just calling all sorts of things "technology". Yes, you can make that definition fit, somewhat hazharzously: maybe ideas, concepts, ideologies are, in a certain light, "tools" to use to get some result. But how does that help? You're just throwing away whatever nuance is captured by the existing terminology. Are people more likely to rationally use and improve liberal democracy if you frame it in technological terms? If you believe so go ask emacs users what they like best about vim...
- igorkraw 7y ago
  I'd argue framing these things as technologies removes some of the mental blocks we have in them. Capitalism and socialism as ideologies can endlessly be argued about, but as technological solutions to the problem of control of the means of production that are stable and efficient you can evaluate their performance calmly. Moralistic thinking of how "people deserve their own world reward/a fair share" has it's place, but it's not a very tolerant one. A moral code that has some "higher" purpose is not something you can evaluate and discuss. A tool is evaluated only in the context it's in. This is a more flexible and pragmatic framing
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it. In fact we already do this with finance and economics. Neither are even remotely calm, unbiased, or objective. And if someone says that in fact you can evaluate moral codes on objective criteria - not least long-term species survivability and the dimensions of the collective predictive horizon and strategic IQ - how can you be sure that alternative criteria you might prefer are any better?
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it. This is exactly what makes social and political systems a technology. People choose between different technologies based upon their personal judgments and preferences about acceptable trade-offs. Different people, and even different groups of people, will make different decisions because they have different preferences.
    - igorkraw 7y ago
      Yeah, but you will have to state them at least. You need to state your goal. "Capitalism/socialism is immoral" is fuzzy and works for both. "Capitalism/socialism ensures maximum efficiency of exploitation of resources" can be checked and doesn't work for both. "But why do we want to maximally exploit resources" is then a question we need to answer separately, and here your subjective things come into it.
    - smaudet 7y ago
      As others have stated you're not really tearing down metrics. Pick any you like, metrics are just tools we use to evaluate tools. You can pick some ones which do get results or ones which don't. I think this is where the concept of the selfish gene comes to the rescued - metrics, traits, tools, which work best tend to re-inforce each other and 'win'. Say what you will about 'morals', I doubt I will find you making a moral argument for the rights of phages over your own happiness. So it doesn't really matter which criteria you pick - long-term species suitability might be good, if there are better they will arise.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Liberal democracy is just a technology that has to be adopted as a standard in order to work, like TCP/IP or AC power. Some country might have a mixed-member proportional elected parliament just as another country might have 120V mains power. And in that respect, there are technologies much more widely standardized than any political system. I think it helps as a reminder that all of these things are human inventions that are intended to solve problems.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Liberal democracy is not "just" a technology, and creating a mixed member proportional elected parliament isn't a guaranteed magic solution to political or social problems. Politics is hard. Really, really hard. Much harder than technology. Because politics is part social psychology and part evolutionary psychology. And while we understand enough about both to have some idea how to manipulate them, we don't understand them well enough to manipulate them - and ourselves, and each other - wisely.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      No technology is a guaranteed magic solution to any problem. That's what makes it technology rather than magic.
igorkraw 7y ago
Very much agree. The only difference is that physical technologies and social technologies take much longer. There is a book called "law's for a flat world" (or maybe rules for a flat world) that discusses the Social technology of law and how we could drastically increase both the adaptivity and accessibility to this technology
jkingsbery 7y ago
I would buy your first and last paragraph, but I'd quibble with your second. > And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well. I think this is where having the two categories separate is useful. There's a lot behind Hayak's quote "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to man how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." It is true that many more people live under democracy, and that's a great thing. But I think we've also seen over the past 30 years experiments in instituting democracy where they had not previously been that have not been as successful. We've also seen the trappings of democracy usurped by those looking to add legitimacy to their autocratic regime. > Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology. I agree fully, but it still seems to be sticking around, and I hear similar rhetoric without people understanding the lessons behind why it was such a failure ("We're not Leninist, we just want to remove the profit motive, limit what people earn to what we think should be enough, and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society..."). I'm skeptical we can plan for these things the same we do things in engineering, but that doesn't mean when we try to predict the future we shouldn't look at their importance.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  > and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society..." this is nonsense, consider Walmart, the US military, and nuclear power. Walmart is proof that centralized planning can have extremely successful results. The US military has no publicly known catastrophes in nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are too expensive (both upfront costs and insurance) for private enterprise and even small municipalities. Consider the Hoover Dam. Panama Canal. Both "capitalist" US and "communist" USSR planned their way through the space race. Planning is _good_. Everyone who is smart does it. It's how big things happen. What's important is to keep democracy on top of the plan. Walmart is heavily authoritarian. Marxist-Leninists believe in extending democracy to include the workplace and the economy. If you think that's "clearly destructive", I'd have you take a peek at climate change, deforestation, sweatshops, migrant toddler concentration camps, Flint Michigan, Tulsa Massacre, etc.. The USSR might not have been a utopia, or even good, but don't strut around like you're better than them and hand-wave away a rising-in-the-US ideology so frivolously.

IAmEveryone 7y ago

You're just calling all sorts of things "technology". Yes, you can make that definition fit, somewhat hazharzously: maybe ideas, concepts, ideologies are, in a certain light, "tools" to use to get some result. But how does that help? You're just throwing away whatever nuance is captured by the existing terminology. Are people more likely to rationally use and improve liberal democracy if you frame it in technological terms? If you believe so go ask emacs users what they like best about vim...

igorkraw 7y ago
I'd argue framing these things as technologies removes some of the mental blocks we have in them. Capitalism and socialism as ideologies can endlessly be argued about, but as technological solutions to the problem of control of the means of production that are stable and efficient you can evaluate their performance calmly. Moralistic thinking of how "people deserve their own world reward/a fair share" has it's place, but it's not a very tolerant one. A moral code that has some "higher" purpose is not something you can evaluate and discuss. A tool is evaluated only in the context it's in. This is a more flexible and pragmatic framing
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it. In fact we already do this with finance and economics. Neither are even remotely calm, unbiased, or objective. And if someone says that in fact you can evaluate moral codes on objective criteria - not least long-term species survivability and the dimensions of the collective predictive horizon and strategic IQ - how can you be sure that alternative criteria you might prefer are any better?
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > Your "calm" performance metrics will be chosen subjectively, almost certainly on the basis of a moral code which guides your decisions but which you're not objectively aware of - because you consider it so correct it would never occur to you to question it. This is exactly what makes social and political systems a technology. People choose between different technologies based upon their personal judgments and preferences about acceptable trade-offs. Different people, and even different groups of people, will make different decisions because they have different preferences.
  - igorkraw 7y ago
    Yeah, but you will have to state them at least. You need to state your goal. "Capitalism/socialism is immoral" is fuzzy and works for both. "Capitalism/socialism ensures maximum efficiency of exploitation of resources" can be checked and doesn't work for both. "But why do we want to maximally exploit resources" is then a question we need to answer separately, and here your subjective things come into it.
  - smaudet 7y ago
    As others have stated you're not really tearing down metrics. Pick any you like, metrics are just tools we use to evaluate tools. You can pick some ones which do get results or ones which don't. I think this is where the concept of the selfish gene comes to the rescued - metrics, traits, tools, which work best tend to re-inforce each other and 'win'. Say what you will about 'morals', I doubt I will find you making a moral argument for the rights of phages over your own happiness. So it doesn't really matter which criteria you pick - long-term species suitability might be good, if there are better they will arise.
philwelch 7y ago
Liberal democracy is just a technology that has to be adopted as a standard in order to work, like TCP/IP or AC power. Some country might have a mixed-member proportional elected parliament just as another country might have 120V mains power. And in that respect, there are technologies much more widely standardized than any political system. I think it helps as a reminder that all of these things are human inventions that are intended to solve problems.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Liberal democracy is not "just" a technology, and creating a mixed member proportional elected parliament isn't a guaranteed magic solution to political or social problems. Politics is hard. Really, really hard. Much harder than technology. Because politics is part social psychology and part evolutionary psychology. And while we understand enough about both to have some idea how to manipulate them, we don't understand them well enough to manipulate them - and ourselves, and each other - wisely.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    No technology is a guaranteed magic solution to any problem. That's what makes it technology rather than magic.

igorkraw 7y ago

Very much agree. The only difference is that physical technologies and social technologies take much longer. There is a book called "law's for a flat world" (or maybe rules for a flat world) that discusses the Social technology of law and how we could drastically increase both the adaptivity and accessibility to this technology

jkingsbery 7y ago

I would buy your first and last paragraph, but I'd quibble with your second. > And like regular technologies, social technologies are often simple in theory but deceptively difficult to implement well. I think this is where having the two categories separate is useful. There's a lot behind Hayak's quote "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to man how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." It is true that many more people live under democracy, and that's a great thing. But I think we've also seen over the past 30 years experiments in instituting democracy where they had not previously been that have not been as successful. We've also seen the trappings of democracy usurped by those looking to add legitimacy to their autocratic regime. > Marxist-Leninism is clearly a horrendously destructive social technology. I agree fully, but it still seems to be sticking around, and I hear similar rhetoric without people understanding the lessons behind why it was such a failure ("We're not Leninist, we just want to remove the profit motive, limit what people earn to what we think should be enough, and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society..."). I'm skeptical we can plan for these things the same we do things in engineering, but that doesn't mean when we try to predict the future we shouldn't look at their importance.

Can_Not 7y ago
> and have the central government plan around all the hard problems in society..." this is nonsense, consider Walmart, the US military, and nuclear power. Walmart is proof that centralized planning can have extremely successful results. The US military has no publicly known catastrophes in nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are too expensive (both upfront costs and insurance) for private enterprise and even small municipalities. Consider the Hoover Dam. Panama Canal. Both "capitalist" US and "communist" USSR planned their way through the space race. Planning is _good_. Everyone who is smart does it. It's how big things happen. What's important is to keep democracy on top of the plan. Walmart is heavily authoritarian. Marxist-Leninists believe in extending democracy to include the workplace and the economy. If you think that's "clearly destructive", I'd have you take a peek at climate change, deforestation, sweatshops, migrant toddler concentration camps, Flint Michigan, Tulsa Massacre, etc.. The USSR might not have been a utopia, or even good, but don't strut around like you're better than them and hand-wave away a rising-in-the-US ideology so frivolously.