5 ms·

Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it)

Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point appears to persist. As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the system. It’s been in vogue to hype up technical solutions (“more compute,” “yeah but when it gets better…” “we just need a few more years on this”) to all of these problems that deserve to be solved in the socio-political sphere. It’s often more effective to restructure a given systems’ relationships than to hope for magical boosts here and there.

ip26 2y ago
That feels like a tilted assessment. The technical solutions can break down enormous walls, and very quickly. There are just some walls they can't - political, social, etc - and once the other walls have been leveled, we tend to get focused on those & lament.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Technology has been used to change the political landscape quite effectively. So far, I’ve seen it used to favor short term interests of small groups, but a sufficiently motivated organisation can do a lot toward a favourable outcome for the whole planet.
hansonkd 2y ago
Could be a bottleneck some ways. In other ways its an accelerant (think space race). Like most things in nature you probably get the most out of "progress" (kind of a slippery word in itself) through some type of equilibrium rather than an absolute everyone must work together.
agumonkey 2y ago
It can be even worse. When people are too deep into a particular technique they lose track of what the system needs. I've seen 500M intranet applications who were slower that handwriting on preprinted paper templates (which means network failures would increase productivity overall).
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization I think this is backwards thinking. Progress is meant to serve humans, humans are not meant to serve progress People should not be expected to give up their identities, nations, freedom, or really anything else in service of progress
danny_codes 2y ago
IMO this is structurally a part of capitalism. Capitalism provides limited avenues for cooperation. If your problem doesn't meet those limits, capitalism can't solve it. This seems to arises because capitalism seeks to maximize a personal reward function, rather than a societal one. A good example is car-dependency. Designing land use around car-dependency has a lot of rather painful externalities. Capitalism doesn't account for those externalities, and so decisions are made that are a net-negative (suburban sprawl, urban freeways, etc). These degrade everyone's quality of life & degrade the environment, but are optimal from a capitalist perspective (they enrich the individual decision maker).
- naming_the_user 2y ago
  The issue with your assessment is that everyone includes the individuals. The externalities associated with driving are probably -1 utility points for me whereas driving is +20 or even more. I think that basically what you are saying only makes sense if society includes a bunch of people who do not benefit, when in reality that’s usually a fairly small group (e.g. in the US or UK the small number of homeless).
  - NumberWangMan 2y ago
    I think the whole problem with externalities is that even if everyone gains a private benefit from their choice, you can all be worse off due to the externalities. To take your example, if you have a society of 30 people, each of whom drives, and gains +20 utility for driving, but -1 for each other car on the road, you get a net utility of -9 per person. But if any individual decides not to drive, their utility drops to -29, even as they provide a total benefit of +29 utility to everyone else by choosing not to drive. It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. You have local externalities (noise, particulate pollution, health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle, deaths and injuries due to accidents) and global ones (GHG emissions). Using public transport also subjects people to some negative externalities, if crime isn't controlled enough, or if people are noise. And you don't want a place that makes driving hard, but also has crappy public transit -- though usually, crappy public transit is a symptom of car-centric design, in my opinion. But I think on balance, places where driving is discouraged in favor of other modes of transport are better off, and especially, a world where private automobiles are rarely used is better than a world where most everyone drives everywhere.

ip26 2y ago

That feels like a tilted assessment. The technical solutions can break down enormous walls, and very quickly. There are just some walls they can't - political, social, etc - and once the other walls have been leveled, we tend to get focused on those & lament.

rbanffy 2y ago
Technology has been used to change the political landscape quite effectively. So far, I’ve seen it used to favor short term interests of small groups, but a sufficiently motivated organisation can do a lot toward a favourable outcome for the whole planet.

hansonkd 2y ago

Could be a bottleneck some ways. In other ways its an accelerant (think space race). Like most things in nature you probably get the most out of "progress" (kind of a slippery word in itself) through some type of equilibrium rather than an absolute everyone must work together.

agumonkey 2y ago

It can be even worse. When people are too deep into a particular technique they lose track of what the system needs. I've seen 500M intranet applications who were slower that handwriting on preprinted paper templates (which means network failures would increase productivity overall).

bluefirebrand 2y ago

> Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization I think this is backwards thinking. Progress is meant to serve humans, humans are not meant to serve progress People should not be expected to give up their identities, nations, freedom, or really anything else in service of progress

danny_codes 2y ago

IMO this is structurally a part of capitalism. Capitalism provides limited avenues for cooperation. If your problem doesn't meet those limits, capitalism can't solve it. This seems to arises because capitalism seeks to maximize a personal reward function, rather than a societal one. A good example is car-dependency. Designing land use around car-dependency has a lot of rather painful externalities. Capitalism doesn't account for those externalities, and so decisions are made that are a net-negative (suburban sprawl, urban freeways, etc). These degrade everyone's quality of life & degrade the environment, but are optimal from a capitalist perspective (they enrich the individual decision maker).

naming_the_user 2y ago
The issue with your assessment is that everyone includes the individuals. The externalities associated with driving are probably -1 utility points for me whereas driving is +20 or even more. I think that basically what you are saying only makes sense if society includes a bunch of people who do not benefit, when in reality that’s usually a fairly small group (e.g. in the US or UK the small number of homeless).
- NumberWangMan 2y ago
  I think the whole problem with externalities is that even if everyone gains a private benefit from their choice, you can all be worse off due to the externalities. To take your example, if you have a society of 30 people, each of whom drives, and gains +20 utility for driving, but -1 for each other car on the road, you get a net utility of -9 per person. But if any individual decides not to drive, their utility drops to -29, even as they provide a total benefit of +29 utility to everyone else by choosing not to drive. It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. You have local externalities (noise, particulate pollution, health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle, deaths and injuries due to accidents) and global ones (GHG emissions). Using public transport also subjects people to some negative externalities, if crime isn't controlled enough, or if people are noise. And you don't want a place that makes driving hard, but also has crappy public transit -- though usually, crappy public transit is a symptom of car-centric design, in my opinion. But I think on balance, places where driving is discouraged in favor of other modes of transport are better off, and especially, a world where private automobiles are rarely used is better than a world where most everyone drives everywhere.