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20241110 – Wicked Problems
MAIN IDEA:
The main idea of this book is to analyze two different types of problems: simple problems that could be fixed, such as problems with clocks, and complex problems, such as understanding cloud behavior or societal issues, that are not easily described or fixed and demonstrate the feasibility of applying tools developed by humanity for fixing simple problems such as engineering to manage the complex ones. Here is the author’s description: “This book is double stranded. One strand follows a forgotten engineer; the other examines forgotten uses for engineering. Together, they weave an engineering vision for civics and a civic vision for engineering. While nonfiction, the book’s aspiration may feel like fiction. Engineers, after all, aren’t commonly invoked as pillars of democracy. Yet as we’ll see, engineering does more than tech support. Engineering is a carrier of history, simultaneously an instrument and the infrastructure of politics. It’s among the oldest cultural processes of know-how, far more ancient than the sciences of know-what. And through engineering, civics can gain a more structured, systemic, and survivable sense of purpose. By applying engineering concepts in a civic context, engineering can usefully grow the policy lexicon and enhance its cultural relevance. The usefulness of civics and engineering is often realized only in their breakdowns, much like trust, most longed for in their absence.”
Probably the most important conclusion the author comes up with is that the engineering of “Civicware” should be conducted cautiously and incrementally because it is way too complex, vague, and wicked character to apply relatively rigid engineering solutions:” Two decades before presenting on clocks and clouds, Karl Popper wrote about “piecemeal” social engineering. He argued for open-ended reforms over utopian blueprints. A piecemeal approach is evolutionary and begins by realizing that facts are fallible and contexts change. Yet, such increments require caution. Piecemeal responses can cancel one another out when not coordinated by an overarching principle or guided by a standard set of concepts. And obviously, you cannot optimize a system by optimizing its parts separately. Because wicked systems cannot be planned from the top down, they require an evolutionary approach to selecting and replicating improvements to civic welfare. The concept set of efficiency, vagueness, vulnerability, safety, maintenance, and resilience can facilitate such conscious cultural evolution.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
Engineering is the application of science to real-life problems. As such, it applies only to situations where a set of actions applied to a defined environment always results in the same or statistically consistent outcome. Consequently, it is very difficult but still conceivable to apply it to complex problems such as global climate control despite its wide variety of variables. However, this is never the case with society because society consists of thinking and self-directing entities- human beings, which brings the complexity level to near infinity because of a multitude of feedback loops, which makes the consistent outcome of any experiment nearly impossible. Consequently, to build such an organization of society that would reliably provide opportunities for human flourishing, one should look not at engineering approaches, whether piecemeal or global, but rather at resource allocation to individual humans so they could do with these resources whatever they wish and limit external, violent intervention only to situations when individuals attempt to use their resources to harm others.
20240414 -The Square and the Tower
MAIN IDEA:
This book is about the history of parallel development of two methods of organization used by human societies and their interaction. Here is the author’s statement of the purpose:” This book is about the past more than it is about the future; or, to be precise, it is a book that seeks to learn about the future mainly by studying the past, rather than engaging in flights of fancy or the casual projection forward of recent trends. There are those (not least in Silicon Valley) who doubt that history has much to teach them at a time of such rapid technological innovation. Indeed, much of the debate I have just summarized presupposes that social networks are a new phenomenon and that there is something unprecedented about their present-day ubiquity. This is wrong. Even as we talk incessantly about them, the reality is that most of us have only a very limited understanding of how networks function, and almost no knowledge of where they came from. We largely overlook how widespread they are in the natural world, what a key role they have played in our evolution as a species, and how integral a part of the human past they have been. As a result, we tend to underestimate the importance of networks in the past, and to assume erroneously that history can have nothing to teach us on this subject.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
I think both methods, networks, and hierarchies, are necessary components of human existence, always intertwined and codeveloped. However, they always have different weights and impacts on the conditions of human societies depending on the phase of human development we are looking at. Judging by what we know about great apes that had developed from a common ancestor some 4 million years ago in parallel with humans such as chimpanzees, we started with small hierarchical bands based on individual physical power and psychological aggressiveness. Chimpanzees are still there, maintaining hierarchy as the dominant method of organization. Humans, however, moved in a different direction by developing language and more complex brain structures that allowed for a high level of cooperation in hunting, mutual help, and building conspiracies to overthrow whatever megalomaniac attempted to build a hierarchy with self at the top. Over the period of tens of thousands of years, this produced highly egalitarian hunting-gathering societies of people with genotypical and phenotypical features that made them strive to obtain the optimal ratio between being a part of a network of cooperating individuals adjusting to each other needs and free agents taking care about one’s own needs. Then we had about 20,000 years of hiatus in the equality mode when human expansion all over the world forced transfer to militaristic/agrarian societies in which fights for territories and suppression of opposition made hierarchy the most appropriate form of society for individual survival, even if it more often than meant live in misery. Now, with the new technologies of resource acquisition and networking, stabilization of population, and soon disappearance of the need to work for a living, humanity could minimize the need for hierarchies and all this violence and coercion that are inevitable features of hierarchy. This process is not simple and will probably take a few decades, but I believe we will eventually get there.
20231223 – End Times
MAIN IDEA:
This book presents a new scientific approach to history and to the prediction of future developments of society called Cliodynamics. This approach includes the development of a massive database of information about crises of many societies in the past and the outcomes of these crises. Here is the main point of the analysis of the collected data:” Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis”.
The application of this result to current events in American Society leads to the conclusion that it is on the brink of revolutionary events that would include massive, organized violence and may result in the breakdown of this society. Despite the generally pessimistic mood of the book, the conclusion is this:” The final thought with which I want to end this book is that humanity has come a long way since our species appeared some two hundred thousand years ago. The last ten thousand years have seen a particularly rapid evolution. Despotic elites who oppressed common people repeatedly arose and were repeatedly overthrown. We are now again in the disintegrative phase of this cycle, but while we live through our own age of discord, it’s worth remembering that humanity has learned from previous such debacles. Cumulative cultural evolution equipped us with remarkable technologies, including social technologies—institutions—that enable our societies to deliver an unprecedentedly high—and broadly based—quality of life. Yes, this capacity is often not fully realized—there is great variation between different states in providing well-being for their citizens. But in the longer term, such variation is necessary for continuing cultural evolution. If societies don’t experiment in trying for better social arrangements, evolution will stop. Even more importantly, when selfish ruling classes run their societies into the ground, it is good to have alternatives—success stories.”
MY TAKE ON IT:
It is not the first and not the last book that predicts cataclysmic events for American society in the near future. Unlike the previous 30+ years of my life in this country, this time it looks like quite a reasonable probability. It is not caused by just the overproduction of the elite, the immiseration of the masses, and the rise of authoritarian powers bent on world domination. I see the most important underlying cause in the global process of elimination of human beings from the process of production of goods and services. Initially, this process liberated most of the population from the necessity to work all the time just to survive, as was the case until very recently when something like 90% of the population had to work in agriculture to produce enough food to avoid famines. From this point just a few hundred years ago humanity moved to a situation where 2% of the population easily produced enough food for everybody, even for everybody with poor control over appetite to be obese. The existing forms of society, either autocracies based on massive suppression and slavery (traditional monarchies or contemporary communist dictatorships) or democratic ones based on mass ownership of private property (material, like land, or intellectual, like professional skills), would no longer work. This is because autocrats will not need slaves and businesses will not need workers of any level of skills. This situation will cause mass restructuring of societies, quite possibly violent, everywhere in the world, America included. The result could be a new structure of society based either on mass bureaucratization when everybody will have a place within the bureaucracy doing some meaningless job, suffering psychological stress from control from above while causing similar stress to individuals below. Alternatively, it could be a society based on mass possession of private property not only material or intellectual but also as a share of the common inheritance of humanity that provides sufficient returns to do whatever one wants to do with his or her life in pursuit of happiness.
I am pretty sure that eventually, a second outcome will occur, and a society of freedom based on property will eventually be established. However, it will not happen without decades of struggles, violent or otherwise, and lots of pain and suffering caused by failed attempts to make a society of mass bureaucratization work for people.
Equal Rights Libertarian 