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For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's a

• Aunche 3y ago
  He doesn't even give an example of "ancient human tribes," but modern day nomads whose traditions have also developed over thousands of years. If ancient human tribes were so great at avoiding tragedy of the commons, I would be eating a mammoth steak right now.
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    Maybe losing mammoths wasn't actually a tragedy.
    • rocketbop 3y ago
      It was for the mammoths.
      • bawolff 3y ago
        And for the people who liked to eat mammoths More to the point, the word "tragedy" in context isn't saying that the end result is neccesarily a tragedy for the people involved. The "tragedy" is our (alleged) inability to have nice shared stable resources, not any specific outcome of any specific resource being exhausted.
        • oh_sigh 3y ago
          Sure - my point was that maybe mammoths weren't viewed as nice shared stable resources, but rather like cruel giants that might destroy your settlement, crops, and family randomly for fun. Sort of like how how elephants are viewed by rural farmer folk in many parts of Africa.
  • coldtea 3y ago
    The author explained very well what they meant (optimizing for lower risk vs profit) and this has little to do with preserving mammoths. That would be a very peripheral concern (if it was one at all).
    • Aunche 3y ago
      Mammoths were an easy protein source for ancient people that were hunted into extinction. This is optimizing for short term profit.
      • me_me_me 3y ago
        It was any kind of fauna that was hunted into extinction when humans moved in. And its still happening to this day. I was staying in a tribe village in Thailand, a full day trek into jungle. They had a dirt road connecting them to the rest of thailand but were surrounded by jungle. I was sharing few drinks with people i traveled and locals, and there was small commotion. When asking about it, locals explained that someone saw monkey out in the jungle and people were discussing who should shoot it. They explained that there is no animals in over 5km around the village as its hunted for the meat the moment its spotted. Basically a deadzone for anything that has enough meat to be worth a shotgun shell. Its clear as day that everyone in the village would benefit from cooperation but they dont. Humans on average are not rational. And we are barely more advanced than the ancient people. We have better tech, and a bit more empathy. But the wiring is still the same.
      • Fluorescence 3y ago
        I believe it was mainly climate change and loss of habitat during glacial retreat that caused Mammoth and other mega-fauna to die out. Human hunting was likely a minor contributor and nothing like the industrial slaughter of bison.
        • more_corn 3y ago
          Not true. Megafauna died out across the world in hundreds of different habitats when humans arrived and hunted them to extinction.
  • pvdoom 3y ago
    The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.
    • concordDance 3y ago
      > Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. Ones that scale to more than a million people?
      • pvdoom 3y ago
        Yup.
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      Historically, quite a few people ruined themselves.
    • inglor_cz 3y ago
      Historically, people also cut down most of the forests in the Mediterranean for firewood and shipbuilding without even attempting to balance the process, causing major problems for their descendants. Most of this activity predated modern capitalism by millennia. Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke. Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas. Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash. I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.
      • pvdoom 3y ago
        And a lot of those things you list are not tragedy of the commons as stated, but a consequences of the very thing that Hardin was defending - the enclosure of the commons and privatisation. Because privatisation and capitalism both encourage competition, and unsustainable behaviour towards common resources. This is why we see agricultural and industrial runoffs, oceanic stock depletion etc. Historical communities tend to have tools and practices that prevent all of that stuff from happening, practices that have been put aside with colonialism, enclosure and markets ...
• xwolfi 3y ago
  I agree, it sounds like people saying "our generation can't live as well as our grandparents", typing it from their mind blowing portable computer on the toilets of an airplane, going to vacations abroad. Problems are only solved when they're solved, if we didn't fix a problem, either it wasn't a problem or we couldn't fix it just yet: it's not that some people are so mean they prefer the problem to persist because they gain something rather than fixing it to maximize problem solving numbers. If you can't incentivize society to cure cancer, then THAT is the problem that is impossible to fix just yet, and that person should maybe focus on this ? Look at cancer. I'm a regular smoker, I'll probably die a lonely death, of cancer, in pain, abandoned by everyone in my life who told me for years I should stop. Why don't I stop ? I can cure my own cancer but I don't, why ? The problem is way deeper, way more complex, than just some rich people abusing me for their profit I feel: I give way more money smoking to the government than I do any cigarette industrial, yet nobody seems to have found a way to cure my cancer, myself included, when we all know it will happen most likely. Maybe we just can't yet find a way to rewire my brain to never need cigarettes anymore, and the problem is deeper than capitalist profit-seeking ? And if it wasn't a cigarette addiction I had, it would be another one, because what I need somehow is a dangerous vice and that is not an easy thing to make me not want ?
  • imtringued 3y ago
    If you care about nicotine and your health, you can just vape. A pure nicotine addiction is way more benign than burnt tobacco, because you aren't breathing in the byproducts of burnt tobacco and additives. Those additives aren't there for nothing, they make the product more addictive than the nicotine alone.
• coldtea 3y ago
  >For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. And yet other societies in the present do the right things in a lot of areas even with comparable groups of people. Not to mention today we have tools like the fast text, voice, and even video communications, the internet, roads, distributed power structures, an educational system, etc. to combat scale issues. >Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different. Is it really a wash? Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies? >"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot Which doesn't really matter, as it's a figure of speach. It means "most things" or even "a hell of alot of things".
  • SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
    I’m not gonna argue that it’s precisely a wash, but I’m not aware of any country without political factions who strongly oppose each other and think the country would be much better if everyone else would just get on board. What can sometimes be true is that multiparty systems make the hardness of problems more legible; if you have 5 different parties with 5 different perspectives on how the education system ought to work, it’s a lot less tempting to think that one perspective is unambiguously correct and it’s only The System that’s stopping us from following it. The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      >The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track. We can change this however to "we know that massively cheeper or free college to anyone in the appropriate high school track is better" and it becomes true.
• marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I've lived in a few places around the world. By far the best-run one was the Isle of Man, which (when I lived there) had a population of around 30K. It has an independent parliament (Tynwald, the oldest continuous parliament in the world), and it makes its own laws. The government has very little graft. Politicians seemed to genuinely work for the benefit of their constituents [0]. I always attributed this to the fact that they lived in the communities they served, and the people they socialised with were affected by the decisions they made. The UK has the problem that the politicians are insulated from the people they ostensibly serve. Especially the Tories. They have displayed contempt and arrogance beyond belief. This is all, as you say, a problem of scale. [0] One illustration of this is the Manx implementation of social security vs the UK. When the Manx government set up national insurance contributions, they paid them into a separate fund (https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-treasury/social-security-division/manx-national-insurance-fund/ https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-trea...) which is under control of the treasury. The UK just poured the national insurance contributions into the general taxation pool. The Manx fund (and by extension their health service) is rolling in money. The UK NHS is broke. The Manx system is proof that there were more than enough contributions to the NHS to keep it adequately funded. But the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things, because they could.
  • prox 3y ago
    Thomas Paine in Common Sense also describes that is preferable to have constituents from the places and with work in the community they live in. Congress only has 2 years for this reason as well, to be a reflection of the community they live in.
  • timeon 3y ago
    > that they lived in the communities they served It is not just this. There are many small municipalities around the world where mayor/local council does not act like this. Most of things come down to voters. Their culture and breadth of views.
  • consp 3y ago
    > the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things I'm pretty sure this is by design and the end result is as well.
• jmnicolas 3y ago
  The ancient tribes did better because when they didn't, people died of starvation. Pretty big incentive here. Nobody died from the UEFI custom image vulnerability.
• pvdoom 3y ago
  A better way to put it is, we could fix everything, we just don't, because it is not profitable and not in the interest of the people that have the money to invest in stuff. I do think there is definitely an element of things being harder than they seem, but it's just an element. The vast majority is the for profit nature of our system, that does not reward making things better.
• roenxi 3y ago
  AI is also likely to make a huge difference to coordination problems. We can imagine a future in a short while ... maybe a decade or few? ... where we as random citizens can ask an AI we trust to go through the last 30 years of parliamentary records, profile an individual politician's voting record and interpret it according to my personal worldview. That seems like it'd be a significant change to the game. At the moment, figuring out what someone's record is is still too hard even with sites that are trying to help. I can go to http://politicsthatwork.com/ http://politicsthatwork.com/ and see a politician scored 12.8% on "Humane Immigration Policy" which tells me nothing [0]. My views are complex enough that no mass-produced title is going to break things down in a way I'm satisfied with. But AI will allow that sort of summary where I can describe what sort of features a record should have, with examples of particular bills. I can think of other similar uses too; this'll be a wild era. One person can get through a lot of text all of a sudden. Maybe even fast enough to use it while arguing politics in real time. [0] Does the dude hate migrants? Love migrants but prefers a welfare-heavy society and wants to try and make it sustainable? Loves migrants but the opposition is playing silly games with bill names? Loves high-skilled migrants? Are the bills being voted only tangentially related to migrants, or strategically entangled with migrant issues? Politics is best understood in context.
• RandomLensman 3y ago
  Ancient tribes failed all the time - not sure they did much better on a lot of measures.
• lloeki 3y ago
  > Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems There are also plenty of countries with very close to somewhat different systems. Let's take France, where there are > 2 party - more like a dozen, of various sizes and shapes -, and where the president is a direct elect from the crowd. Sounds far removed from the Lib vs Dem indirect US presidential election? Well, every single time when there's a new contender that does not alight with the typical left vs right mentality they're going to be derided as weasely opinion cherry-pickers with an agenda of selecting voters; "that one can't make up their mind, therefore they're shady: pick a side already!" unanimously shouts the crowd. Some think it gets further emphasised by the two-round election system: vote for any candidate (who may or may not be tied to a specific party, but hey, guess show you get any reasonable amount of campaign funding), then vote for one of the top two of the previous round (the latter is basically intentional post-WWII design that assumes >50% of the population is sensible enough to kick out an extremist should they get enough of a share on the first round so that the neighbour's history doesn't repeat itself). I'd argue that it would be essentially the same without it: there's only one winner, and for the winner to carry any weight through their term they need to have some backing in Senate and Parliament, which also gets us into "pass" vs "no pass" law- and decision-making, and so, deep down, a "us vs them"[0][1] situation. It's not a two party system, yet ultimately it seems like "yes" vs "no" voting always crystallises things into one as an artifact. [0]: https://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/___97 https://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/___97 [1]: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    That's not to do with the voting system. It's because political disagreement is almost always ideological disagreement, which is one dimensional. See Sowell's analysis in his book "Conflict of visions" for an explanation of why.
• fifticon 3y ago
  I don't think he was blaming it on the two-party system. He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives. The general category of issues he highlights, should be well known to people who have lived in and observed our real world and society for a while. It is possible to produce USB-C cables that are robust and last - I know as I own some. But I also own and buy some that LOOK 'robust' but are fragile and stop working within a few months. The vendors make most money by optimizing for LOOKING robust (which is what I am 'demanding'), but in reality making a fragile product, so I anyway have to buy more. For medicine, he is also obviously right - tons of resources are poured into developing 'money-making' medicines for 'money-making' diseases, by commercial companies. And comparatively little money is expended solving diseases which are harmful but not candidates for making money. As an example, investors prefer chronic diseases where you need periodic medicine, and aren't attracted to 'single-use cure' medicines. He is really just pointing to, that a lot of the worlds problems aren't needing an inventor to solve them technically, they are needing politicians and a political movement to drive the will to solve and change them. I recommend reading Machievelli's 'The Prince', for people who suffer from naivety.
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    The US two party system isn't that obviously broken. Americans like to say it's broken, but they often aren't that familiar with the alternatives. You could have FPTP but with more than two parties, like the UK does. The downside of this is that the reason there are more than two major parties in the UK is that the parties are much more closed off to outside influence, and due to the presence of a major independence movement (something banned by the Constitution). In the USA it's considered entirely normal and possible for complete outsiders to run in party primaries, take over that party and then become President. This cannot happen in the UK because none of the parties have open primaries. Small movements towards more internal party democracy by Labour have been rolled back in recent years, because they allowed in non-centrist types like Corbyn who were popular with the base but not with the electorate. Still, it could be implemented in the USA. "All" you need to do is end the system of party primaries and voting for President, to allow party insiders to select their own leadership. And if you want a big independence party then change the Constitution to allow cessation. You could have PR, like most of Europe does. Then you'd have lots of parties. The downside of this is that it guarantees that politicians can never actually do any of the things they campaigned on doing, with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously. Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods, knowing that there's no point in having specific ideas as they'll all be mashed up in coalition negotiations anyway. Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses, and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality. Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum, and all the left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything. Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily, and it means Americans are able to go in an "fix" the parties if they drift too far from what is actually wanted. A big part of the meltdown over Trump is that the party insiders were reminded of this against their will. A big part of the meltdown over Sanders vs Clinton was that Americans actually like this aspect of the system and the left felt it was being denied to them.
• Ragnarork 3y ago
  I get the frustration of the author, but to me this article reeks of the "Cocktail Party Ideas"[0] syndrom. [0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
  • imtringued 3y ago
    It doesn't reek of that for me. The other extreme is to insist on genetic engineering to increase IQ so that we have more "geniuses" with "novel" ideas, when in reality those ideas have been known for a long time and just needed to be put into practice.
• Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  That's basically it. The biggest problem in human society in all era's (including the 21st century) is scaling up. Once you get past Dunbar's number, whatever your system is, it'll start to run into challenges. Be it a company, an organization, or an entire country. Objectives become diluted, misbehavior becomes possible, and steerability goes out the window. Keeping a large group of people focused, well behaved, and capable of change is a huge challenge in any century, and is as ever highly underrated. When doing research it seems like there's a lot of magical thinking in the field. Finding focussed sources tends to be tricky. Getting people to adopt even the most straightforward of practices even trickier. :-P
• hackerlight 3y ago
  Problem is that incentives, especially financial incentives, have so much control over our democracy. Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value. Same answer for why we don't fix global warming, farming subsidies, carried interest loophole. For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo, versus a much larger majority who actually do want to fix things but this majority has a political will that is diluted and disorganized and can't be concentrated into political leverage. So in practice the smaller group has the power.
  • vasco 3y ago
    Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics. Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy to change, then anyone can take power and mess it up for everyone else equally as fast. A slow changing system is preferable if you want to self protect against it, even if some avoidable misery is sometimes around due to this lag it's way better than someone blasting through everything because they know better. This seems like classic immature "but why don't we change everything and do a revolution" which does not take into account the negatives of that or that the revolution will go like someone else wants to, not you - and these things only work if "you can control everything" which is basically why communism has not worked. A battle of competing incentives seems way better than some guy deciding he knows better about everything and if he can only "coordinate everyone" he can "solve everything". That's called a dictatorship, which comunist states tend to.
    • pmontra 3y ago
      I wonder if that's because of communism or because in any country with one party in power for too many years there is a drift to authoritarianism first and eventually to dictatorship. There are examples even in Europe and around it right now. Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties. That would be heresy and the first years after the revolution in Russia 100 years ago show how it goes. Not communist parties are unthinkable by definition so yes, an ideological communist country sets the stage for dictatorship. A communist party in charge for only a few years in a democratic country, not much more than anything else.
• abroadwin 3y ago
  100-200, you say? Sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  • throwup238 3y ago
    Well yeah, Dunbar was an anthropologist studying social structures of tribes and primates…
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  In my opinion, we always overlook what the natural environment has done for us, almost everything else under our control is a disaster in one way or another or requires very significant effort to keep operating. Anti-biotics overuse, holes in the ozone layer, top soil degredation, climate change, nuclear accidents, microplastics, broken arrows etc. We're lucky we live in an environment that mostly provides us with the basics to survive. We hope that powerful tech like AI will give us the power to put us in control of our destiny.I think we need to be careful what we wish for because I don't think we actually know what we want. We can't go backwards now anyway, so best of luck to us. Cool article though, we seem too like to waddle around in our own shit.