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This is quite dense to unpack but it does remind me of a main theme from those Adam Curtis documentaries: That overarching master plans, especially social ones,

This is quite dense to unpack but it does remind me of a main theme from those Adam Curtis documentaries: That overarching master plans, especially social ones, are overconfident by nature and generally lead to large unexpected consequences — many of which are catastrophically bad (ahem Nazism). My napkin explanation is that governments and organizations (and so on) 'bite off more than they can chew' by implementing theories into policies before really understanding them. They see "this will optimize X (prosperity, civil rights, public health)" without fully understanding the larger system. However, that's just about the implementation details. In the end, it all comes down to what a society wants and its values. The hard part isn't the intellectualism and engineering of how to 'fix' a society, it's deciding what a 'fixed' society looks like, short term and long term. I think we as technical people need to be reminded often that the social world isn't a machine with an easily identifiable telos.

scarmig 12y ago
Nazi-ism is a bit of a bad example, because it's a master plan that, once adopted, went mostly as planned. It was evil, very obviously, but if anything it speaks against the idea that High Modernism is always doomed to fail in implementing its abstract designs. To your main point: I would go a step further, and say that governments and organizations "bite off more than they can chew" because it's fundamentally impossible for individual leadership to fully comprehend a larger system to enforce a policy on. Abstractions always obliterate local knowledge; worse off, it's usually impossible to even know the unknowns that are being blown away. Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns. Hayek had it on the mark, but if anything he (and, to a larger extent, his loudest followers) didn't apply his observations thoroughly enough, and instead think you can blindly apply governmental regimentation through universalistic property rights that are somehow immune to the weaknesses of global rules. Smart, technical-minded people are especially prone to this fallacy: see the everlasting temptation to shove waterfall processes into Agile rhetoric. I'm taking some time to digest this article, but I like it a lot, and I think it might fit in with some thoughts I've been trying to solidify for awhile. Going back to Rumsfeld, he had a trio of the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. I want to argue there's a forth category, however: the unknown knowns. In other words, institutions and networks of individuals may be isomorphic to real data and the algorithms that work on it, even though no individual needs to know about the data or algorithms actually being implemented, any more than a register would need to know what bits lies inside it. We thus embed knowledge into society: we've created an emergent social computation through unplanned collective activity. The parallels to Elinor Ostrom and James Scott should be easy to build to from there.
- cgio 12y ago
  The unknown knowns -> qualia. I am doing some work on the application of these concepts in organisational design and control.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    Anything you've written or read on this topic you'd recommend?
- evunveot 12y ago
  There's an Errol Morris documentary from last year about/featuring Rumsfeld called The Unknown Known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known
oxalo 12y ago
In regards to your comment about 'this will optimize X,' it reminded me of article [0] I read recently. The main point of it is to 'beware the local maxima.' Governments seem to focus on one goal at a time, the X, and seem to disregard effect to other variables: they care only about the local maxima. [0]: http://www.iafrikan.com/2014/07/07/beware-the-local-maxima-power-of-patience/ http://www.iafrikan.com/2014/07/07/beware-the-local-maxima-p...
trhway 12y ago
>overarching master plans, especially social ones, are overconfident by nature and generally lead to large unexpected consequences in application to reality, a formal system and expressions built in it are always approximations. The more complex an expression the farther it usually is from reality. It is true for linearized equations describing physical processes and even more true for formal systems describing society/economy/etc...

scarmig 12y ago

Nazi-ism is a bit of a bad example, because it's a master plan that, once adopted, went mostly as planned. It was evil, very obviously, but if anything it speaks against the idea that High Modernism is always doomed to fail in implementing its abstract designs. To your main point: I would go a step further, and say that governments and organizations "bite off more than they can chew" because it's fundamentally impossible for individual leadership to fully comprehend a larger system to enforce a policy on. Abstractions always obliterate local knowledge; worse off, it's usually impossible to even know the unknowns that are being blown away. Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns. Hayek had it on the mark, but if anything he (and, to a larger extent, his loudest followers) didn't apply his observations thoroughly enough, and instead think you can blindly apply governmental regimentation through universalistic property rights that are somehow immune to the weaknesses of global rules. Smart, technical-minded people are especially prone to this fallacy: see the everlasting temptation to shove waterfall processes into Agile rhetoric. I'm taking some time to digest this article, but I like it a lot, and I think it might fit in with some thoughts I've been trying to solidify for awhile. Going back to Rumsfeld, he had a trio of the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. I want to argue there's a forth category, however: the unknown knowns. In other words, institutions and networks of individuals may be isomorphic to real data and the algorithms that work on it, even though no individual needs to know about the data or algorithms actually being implemented, any more than a register would need to know what bits lies inside it. We thus embed knowledge into society: we've created an emergent social computation through unplanned collective activity. The parallels to Elinor Ostrom and James Scott should be easy to build to from there.

cgio 12y ago
The unknown knowns -> qualia. I am doing some work on the application of these concepts in organisational design and control.
- scarmig 12y ago
  Anything you've written or read on this topic you'd recommend?
evunveot 12y ago
There's an Errol Morris documentary from last year about/featuring Rumsfeld called The Unknown Known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known

oxalo 12y ago

In regards to your comment about 'this will optimize X,' it reminded me of article [0] I read recently. The main point of it is to 'beware the local maxima.' Governments seem to focus on one goal at a time, the X, and seem to disregard effect to other variables: they care only about the local maxima. [0]: http://www.iafrikan.com/2014/07/07/beware-the-local-maxima-power-of-patience/ http://www.iafrikan.com/2014/07/07/beware-the-local-maxima-p...

trhway 12y ago

>overarching master plans, especially social ones, are overconfident by nature and generally lead to large unexpected consequences in application to reality, a formal system and expressions built in it are always approximations. The more complex an expression the farther it usually is from reality. It is true for linearized equations describing physical processes and even more true for formal systems describing society/economy/etc...