5 ms·
Political rot is inevitable. Small political units (e.g. committees, HOAs) rot into pettiness. Large political units rot into despotism. I would take pettiness
by hliyan 5y ago
Political rot is inevitable. Small political units (e.g. committees, HOAs) rot into pettiness. Large political units rot into despotism. I would take pettiness as the lesser evil. Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100. Perhaps in politics we have traded effectiveness in favor of efficiency. Can one human being truly represent a thousand (or even a million) people?
- tines 5y agoIf a person can represent two people then he can represent a theoretically unlimited number (just arrange everyone into a binary tree).
- rahimnathwani 5y agoThat's like saying someone who can manage a team of 7 can manage an organization of unlimited size, because each of those 7 can manage 7 others etc.
- daveguy 5y agoGood point. N**2 is probably the maximum, unless you're also adept at managing the management.
- PeterisP 5y agoIsn't that pretty much how we actually manage huge organizations ? A top general in ww2 (modern armies are much smaller despite the world having tripled in population) could manage literally millions of people in a direct chain of command for a single purpose, mostly through the use of hierarchically nested units which each had similar substructures.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoIn large organizations, culture and instructions don't flow down with only through the chain of command. Think about a large company like Google. Lots of energy is spent on ensuring alignment, common culture etc., and this isn't achieved primarily through manager->subordinate communication. Maybe armies are a special case due to the limited instruction set.
- wahern 5y ago> Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100. The human brain has only approximately 7 registers, therefore all of humanity's accumulated knowledge and culture can't have come into existence because 7 registers per computational node is insufficient? These cognitive limitations are better understood as challenges, not fundamental barriers. Culture is an immensely powerful tool. Indeed, one might argue that culture is so powerful that as our capacity to construct and leverage culture grew the selective pressures and evolutionary need for further increasing other, primitive cognitive limits diminished.
- javert 5y ago> The human brain has only approximately 7 registers Where did you get this idea? Or did you come up with it? Ayn Rand had the same idea. She called it the "crow epistemology," rather than using an analogy to registers.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoMaybe the GP is talking about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
- ethbr0 5y ago> pettiness / despotism Pettiness just feels like despotism without sufficient imagination and/or power to enforce desired change.
- jessaustin 5y agoSo... much better for humans than despotism then.
- hanniabu 5y ago> Perhaps in politics we have traded effectiveness in favor of efficiency Governments are efficient?
- hliyan 5y agoDespotism tends to be more efficient than representative democracy at decision making. Representative democracy tends to be more efficient than direct democracy at the same. Effectiveness is another matter.