or: Why Everything Is Terrible, An Overview.1
It sounds like a theory which explains too much. But it's not a theory, hardly even an explanation, more a pattern that manifests itself once you start trying to seriously answer rhetorical questions about the state of the world. From many perspectives, it's obvious to the point of being mundane, practically tautological, but sometimes such obvious facts are worth pointing out regardless.
The idea is this: The subset of participants which rises to prominence in any area does so because its members have traits helpful to becoming prominent, not necessarily because they have traits which are desirable. Thus, without ongoing and concerted effort, a great many arenas end up dominated by players employing strategies which are bad for everyone.
This comes up again and again:
- Why does science (or rather, the publisher-based model thereof) so frequently produce results which are laughably wrong? Because those journals which don't publish retractions or reproductions will more frequently be the first to publish revolutionary results, and so become more widely read and widely cited. Journals don't attract authors by being as accurate as possible; they win by looking important.
- Why do cigarette companies target kids and teens whenever they think they can get away with it, and breed tobacco for maximized nicotine? Because those companies which do will turn more profit and thus last longer and grow faster than those that don't, and so have more resources to devote to proliferating. Companies don't expand by playing fair; they win by making and keeping customers.
- Why is the Make-A-Wish Foundation sitting on more donations than it knows what to do with when the Against Malaria Foundation could have used that money to save literally tens or hundreds of thousands of lives per year? Because knowing how to elicit donations is a skill almost completely unrelated to knowing how to spend donations, and because American children with cancer make for better advertising than African children with malaria. Charities don't get donations by making the best possible use of their money; they win by advertising effectively towards potential donors. (cf. Efficient Charity)
- Why do governments inevitably end up run by career lawyers and politicians instead of scientists and economists2? Because polarizing rhetoric and political connections look better than a nuanced, accurate understanding of the issues. There is only finite time for training and practice, and eventually a choice must be made between training in looking good and training in being good. People don't get elected or appointed by being good Bayesians; they win by being popular.
- Why do the big media channels seem to be more concerned with celebrities than science, and spend more time talking about individual murders than they do entire genocides? Because those channels talking about Laci Peterson seem more personal and are thus more watched than those talking about some religious sect in China. Television programming isn't determined by what's important; what wins is what's watched.
- Why is the sex ratio in animals almost always nearly 1:1, when a population with one male for every five females could grow faster and adapt to problems more readily? Because in such a population, or in any population with a sufficiently large gender imbalance, a gene causing a woman to only have male children will be vastly overrepresented in the grandchild generation relative to the rest of the population, and so shift the balance closer to 50/50. Genes don't proliferate by being good for the species; they win by being good for themselves. (cf. Evolutionarily stable strategy, evolutionary game theory.)
- Why do most big businesses make use of sweatshop conditions and shady tax dodges? Because the businesses which do so will outperform the businesses which don't. Corporations don't grow by being nice; they win by being profitable.
- Why do so many apparently intelligent people spend hours per day idly browsing the likes of Reddit, Hacker News, or TVTropes (or indeed LW), when a similar dedication to active self-improvement could have made them a master of a field inside of a decade? (Using for back-of-the-envelope's sake the supposition that 10,000 hours of practice are required for mastery of some specific art, we find that three hours per day for ten years is approximately 1.1 masteries.) Because which activities become habitual is determined by their immediate dopamine release, and for intelligent people the act of (say) reading about strategies for becoming an effective entrepreneur makes for more instant dopamine than does the painful daily grind involved in actually becoming an entrepreneur. Activities don't become part of daily life by being useful; they win by tricking your brain into making them feel good.
I find this article to be riddled with questionable statements, judgements, and explanations. The argument schema is that "X is prominent where Y would be better" - but in most cases, it's not at all clear that Y would be better, or that the explanation for X's prominence is correct. In some cases, the triumph of Y would be in the author's self-interest, in other cases I think it's just that he's not aware of alternative considerations or perspectives.
Let's start with the claim that rule by scientists and economists would be better than rule by politicians and lawyers. I see this as self-interest, or even as the vanity of believing that one's own group - here, rationalists and quantitative thinkers - is generally superior. Politicians have people skills and lawyers know how the system works, both attributes which are actually needed to run a government well. At its worst, a government by number-crunching intellectuals would be an ineffectual technocracy, first trying to reshape the world according to the wacky theories of academics, and then helpless when a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers show up, wanting to kill the monster.
It's funny that in one paragraph, we hear that science is frequently dysfunctional, and then a few paragraphs later, that scientists should be in charge. So maybe it's only the right sort of scientists who should be in charge. Someone else remarked that parapsychology is hardly a good example of what is prominent in science; parapsychologists are shunned like creationist biologists, as pseudoscientists. So, just as the item about politics can be read as a statement that "people in my cultural group should be running everything", perhaps the item about science can be read as a statement that "stuff like parapsychology shouldn't exist at all!" Certainly, the remarks about journals which achieve prominence because they have low quality control and so get to publish the breakthroughs, seems like pure mythmaking, a "just-so story"; I can't think of a single journal which matches that description - and there ought to be a dozen such journals, if this really is the basic explanation for the existence of bad science in print. In the real world, breakthroughs tend to be achieved by quality people and published in quality journals which everyone reads because they are known to have high standards. Bad journals may provide a space in which bad science gets to see print, but they aren't "widely read and widely cited".
The argument that having five girls for every boy would be better for the species is new to me. Obviously this is sexually appealing for males, so we can count this as another case in which the supposedly all-around-better situation conveniently happens to be better for the author's specific group. Despite the evo-psych opinion that women want quality rather than quantity in a mate and that they are more bisexual than men, the odds are that women would be personally worse off in such a world. However, what is asserted here is that this 1:5 sex ratio is evolutionarily superior to the 1:1 ratio, because the population grows and adapts faster. That is a very dubious assertion. It's often said that the 1:1 regime works through a functional division in which males are a reservoir of genetic variance and female choice of mates provides a selective filter. Maybe in reality the mate selection by both sexes is equally important, but for different traits. In any case, I don't see the knockdown argument in favor of 1:5, once you take sexual selection into account.
I could question some of the other items too.
I've seen it in a lot of places; it works better for species where male parental investment is minimal (which isn't as true for humans). Even then, the "good of the species" math and the "good for my line" math point in different directions.