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Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelli

Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelligent people in various symbiotic systems can act wisely and with good intent and intelligence and still things get worse. To use a recent HN headline, it's a meta-stable catastrophe. In fact, the greater the attempts to correct, the worse it gets. Intuition fails us. Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.

DenisM 5y ago
I can scarcely find any powerful entity interested in opposing social media. It clearly expands the reach of American influence in the world, so the state must be happy. It’s good for advertising, so pretty much all businesses are happy too. The public gets their high-sugar circuses. Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
- DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  I don't think this ends by something or somebody you can point a finger at and say "that did it" Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known. Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched. None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
  - DenisM 5y ago
    Very astute observation, as always, Daniel. The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace. Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many. I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success? Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy. Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging. Regulations could be another, obvious option. There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Any other ideas?
    - DanielBMarkham 5y ago
      As one wag said about a famous politician many years ago, "That guy's got a hundred ideas a day! But only one or two of them are worth a damn" So yes, I got some ideas. I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible. I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here. So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved). Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this. E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)

DenisM 5y ago

I can scarcely find any powerful entity interested in opposing social media. It clearly expands the reach of American influence in the world, so the state must be happy. It’s good for advertising, so pretty much all businesses are happy too. The public gets their high-sugar circuses. Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?

DanielBMarkham 5y ago
I don't think this ends by something or somebody you can point a finger at and say "that did it" Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known. Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched. None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
- DenisM 5y ago
  Very astute observation, as always, Daniel. The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace. Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many. I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success? Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy. Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging. Regulations could be another, obvious option. There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Any other ideas?
  - DanielBMarkham 5y ago
    As one wag said about a famous politician many years ago, "That guy's got a hundred ideas a day! But only one or two of them are worth a damn" So yes, I got some ideas. I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible. I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here. So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved). Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this. E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)