All of Martin Sustrik's Comments + Replies

My feeling is that combining both would lead to each compromising the other. Markets are driven by greed. If you add tribalistic incentives, you distort the flow of financial information within the system and make the market work less efficiently. Same applies the other way round: If you add financial incentives to the Twitter's bridging algorithm, you are likely to end up with lower quality community notes.

2Yoav Ravid
Yeah, that's certainly a possibility, but I think it's still worth exploring in case there is a way they can complement each other.

Yes, I am seeing that as well. Technical/philosophical stuff is fine, but the psychology in adult fiction is too complex for an 11-years old to enjoy.

Exactly. You can't make the kid read something, but if he doesn't know the book exists he's not going to read it for sure.

Wow. Worm? That's pretty dark. Also a million words or so. Does your kid enjoy it?

4Foyle
Yeah, powering through it.  I've tried adult Fiction and Sci-Fi but he's not interested in it yet - not grokking adult motivations, attitudes and behaviors yet, so feeding him stuff that he enjoys to foster habit of reading.   

That brings back memories. We used to have an english Encyclopaedia as well. Similar story. I still recall how gloomy an impression it made on me. It felt like the world might be a weird, dark and dangerous place, at least compared to the rosy picture that the local communist propaganda was trying to paint.

4AnthonyC
Thinking about the encyclopedia point, what about collections of short stories? Something like Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories is great for browsing through, and over time the year-by-year format gives a kind of historiography of the future and a sense of what people in each decade were concerned and thinking about. Also since no one has mentioned Asimov's own short stories, I'd suggest The Last Question. Technically ends with a bit of blasphemy from a certain POV, but it doesn't sound like that's a problem here.

Thanks! A lot of stuff to check here.

The context is: The kid reads encyclopaedia for fun, really interested in the history of technology, likes Randall Munroe books, but I was looking for fiction to provide a more complex and nuanced view of world, going beyond the bare technicalities.

2AnthonyC
Ok, then sounds like they enjoy a mix of hard science and absurd humor. If they're anything like I was, then one way to get someone like that to pay attention to stories and people involves  choosing ones that have a good amount of worldbuilding with well-designed, comprehensible systems and technologies you can think about as you read, and that reward paying close attention with details that turn out to matter way later. Ian Stewart's fiction has a similar vibe as Randall Munroe's books, but using the math and humor to tell stories instead of teach science.  The Robert and Ellen Kaplan books are not fiction, but they're half trying to teach math through creative play with concepts (they were also the founders of The Math Circle) half history of math. If you want them to start applying what they're learning in real life, this is a good bit of nonfiction to suggest. And I'd definitely try Asimov, especially the Foundation books as others have mentioned, for a hard sci-fi story that's really about the people and civilization and the forces that move and shape them.   The stuff I put in #4 pushes more towards being story-forward, but again with a mix of hard sci-fi and playful absurdity. #10 has that too, but really appreciating those relies a lot on being at least familiar with the general tropes and plots of classic literature and famous authors. Then again, it's a great book for someone who likes to randomly stop reading and look things up when there's a reference they don't know. Lots of potential for pointing towards other interests and gaining cultural literacy. I'd recommend Terry Pratchett to anyone. You don't have to read Discworld in order, you can focus on the arcs that you like. The witch-focused books are really centered on individual responsibility and critical thinking. The wizard-focused books have a recurring theme of the limitations of academic research and high technology. The Death-focused books have a theme of unpacking myth and culture. And

Thanks! Asimov I am trying right now. I find the robot stories quite naive nowadays, but it seems that it may be just the right level of complexity not to overwhelm the kid and make him abandon the book on the one hand and yet keep him interested on the other. Foundation series I am going to try next. I recall reading it at 15, so maybe 11 is a bit early, but yes, its mechanistic view of society can make you interested in social sciences even if you are naturally a STEM type. Ender's game - great! I forgot about that one. As for The Martian not sure, it feels a bit too complex, but maybe it's worth a try.

5Mo Putera
You mention in another comment that your kid reads the encyclopaedia for fun, in which case I don't think The Martian would be too complex, no?  I'm also reminded of how I started perusing the encyclopaedia for fun at age 7. At first I understood basically nothing (English isn't my native language), but I really liked certain pictures and diagrams and keep going back to them wanting to learn more, realising that I'd comprehend say 20% more each time, which taught me to chase exponential growth in comprehension. Might be worth teaching that habit. 
4lsusr
If the kid is enjoying the robot stories then that's definitely the place to start. Foundation goes well after robots.

HPMOR has quite a complex story, not sure I would have been able to follow/enjoy it at 11.

4Carl Feynman
Doesn’t matter, because HPMOR is engaging enough on a chapter-by-chapter basis.  I read lots of books when I was a kid when I didn’t understand the overarching plot.  As long as I had a reasonable expectation that cool stuff would happen in the next chapter, I’d keep reading.  I read “Stand On Zanzibar” repeatedly as a child, and didn’t understand the plot until I reread it as an adult last year.  Same with the detective novel “A Deadly Shade of Gold”.  I read it for the fistfights, snappy dialogue, and insights into adult life.  The plot was lost on me.

b> Many cities and some countries are doing great things, but the EU likes to slow everything down

If it was that simple, its a whole mess with both EU and member states implicated:

In 2008, the EU established a European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) with the aim of replicating the success of institutions like MIT. If you have not heard of it, it is not your fault. The effort went badly from the start, as EU countries couldn't agree on where to put it. So, in true EU fashion, governments compromised by breaking it into pieces and spreadin

... (read more)
4AnthonyC
Of course, I was definitely oversimplifying for my comment! One good example is the collapse of the steel industry in the US, hastened by Europe and Japan using newer and better equipment. I haven't looked into direct comparisons between cities in Europe, that would be interesting.

Agreed. But the popular narrative is that all the EU bureaucrats want is to regulate and then regulate some more. The sentence in question is supposed to say that it is not necessarily so, in accord with what you are saying.

1Sherrinford
It is an interesting question how justified this stereotype is, given that many regulations aim at creating a single market and reducing trade barriers. Comparing EU growth to the US is hard for different reasons, for instance demography but also the decarbonization efforts of the EU.

Sorry, this is an internal European discourse about the European economy slowing down compared to the US. The "eurocrat" wording is a bit tongue-in-cheek thing. The reality is more about the coordination problems associated with scaling down the regulation. Compare the news like this: "Macron Warns EU ‘Could Die’ Within 3 Years Due to Overregulation, Welfare Burden, Underinvestment" https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/macron-warns-eu-could-die-within-3-years-due-to-overregulation-social-welfare-burden-underinvestment-5734718?rs=SHRNCMMW

1Sherrinford
I know the internal European discourse, which is why I think depicting politicians in Europe as being mostly impervious to "pro-growth ideas" seems like a strawman. It is mainstream in the EU to try to find ways for higher economic growth rates. Everybody is talking about deregulation, but there are very different ideas what kind of policies would lead to higher growth rates.

Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let's say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.

Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:

  1. For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
  2. Significant portion of refe
... (read more)

Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that's how it's going to be.

It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can't really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.

Coincidentally, here's Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:

Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.

https://www.betonit.ai/p/age_and_commonhtml

There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period -- which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.

Let me try a different example:

Let's say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.

The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55%... (read more)

Unfortunately no, they didn't. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian "exit").

LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don't know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls' "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!

If those people wer... (read more)

5gwern
Did they mention any welfare/transfer mechanisms to ensure balance? Like if you drew 'peasant' 4 summers in a row (which is not that improbable, having that happen to someone), no one would blame you for just leaving then and there and maybe also quitting the whole thing, but that seems like a bad outcome.
2dr_s
Honestly if the proportions of those roles were true to real life I would simply never take the lottery, that's an almost certainty of being a peasant. I guess they still must have made things a bit more friendly.

Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?

Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.

Isn't it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?

Isn't it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who's willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.

One man's singularity is another man's Tuesday:

The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What's easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there's no generic "human intelligence", just the intelli... (read more)

Reply1111
2Viliam
Is your point that the world is already too complicated for all of us to understand, and singularity will only make it more so? Like, quantitatively it can all get a lot weirder, but the qualitative point of "no one really understands what's going on anymore" has passed long ago? (Or perhaps there never was such moment that people understood how their world works.)

Thanks for the link. I've noticed the trend of avoiding the salient issues among those who get things actually done, but I haven't had a name for it. Pulling the rope sideways - nice.

I don't think this works very well. If you wait until a major party sides with your meta, you could be waiting a long time.

Correct. This could be countered by having multiple plans and waiting for several possible situations/alliances in parallel.

if you get what you were waiting for, you're definitely not pulling sideways

Why? It's known that people care a lot about obj... (read more)

2abramdemski
Your example was waiting until states rights aligned with one side or other of gay rights. So I understood that you were recommending a strategy where you wait until your pet meta issue is polarized. If you don't do that, what is left of the strategy you were suggesting? Either the partisan politics sees a connection between state rights and gay rights, in which case you get your allies but you also inherit a bunch of enemies; or partisan politics fails to see the connection, in which case you don't get a bunch of allies and you also don't get enemies. (Not directly relevant, but: my model is that partisan politics filters for issues which are polarizing, but of the available parties voters tend to choose the most centrist. To appeal to a party, an issue should strike at the other side, but to appeal to voters, you're aiming for broad appeal.)

Fair enough. The information was taken from some book, it's a long time, I don't remember exactly, possibly Dawkins. Anyway, I've fixed the article. Thanks for pointing that out!

Admittedly, I haven't read about the problem of sex since '90s but back then the argument against the naive "sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism" was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual -- while the natural selection works on the individual level.

In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined ou... (read more)

This is aimed at those who can't make an informed opinion themselves. (And most of us can't. Even a scientist can't often make an informed opinion about a result from a different discipline.) What it means is: "Trust the official scientific institutions. However broken they may be you are still better off trusting them than trusting the alternative sources of information."

0Shankar Sivarajan
That smacks of religion.

This is related to an idea I keep stressing here, which is that people rarely have consistent meta-level principles. Instead, they’ll endorse the meta-level principle that supports their object-level beliefs at any given moment. The example I keep giving is how when the federal government was anti-gay, conservatives talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and liberals insisted on states’ rights; when the federal government became pro-gay, liberals talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and conservatives insisted on states’

... (read more)
4Dagon
If you reframe this as instrumental vs terminal goals, it's obviously true.  If you don't care about the constitution per se, but only as a means to power and to enabling your policies, and your timeframe is much longer than your opposition, then it's trivially useful to seek power now and use it over the long term. But it's not at all clear that these conditions hold for any humans in the real world.  We don't really have values or goals that are all that well-defined, and we like to think we're more long-term-oriented than our opposition, but we're mostly fooling ourselves.
4abramdemski
I don't think this works very well. If you wait until a major party sides with your meta, you could be waiting a long time. (EG, when will 321 voting become a talking point on either side of a presidential election?) And, if you get what you were waiting for, you're definitely not pulling sideways. That is: you'll have a tough battle to fight, because there will be a big opposition.

Hard to say, but one problem I see is that strong regional identity that powers the political processes in federations cannot be created by fiat. If you turn a centralized country to federation by passing such law it would continue to work as a centralized country. Maybe in 100-200 years regional identity, regional elites, specific regional interests would emerge, but it won't be tomorrow. Same, although maybe in a lesser extent, I think, applies to already federated countries and "making them even more federated".

Interesting. I've never heard about that. Any tips about where to read some more about that?

Let's go even further. Assuming the above model, the system can be improved by treating each successful referendum as a system failure. A postmortem should be written a submitted for public discussion:

  • If majority was in favour, why wasn't the law changed before in the first place?
  • Why haven't the counterproposal succeeded?
  • Why haven't the initiants retracted the initiative?
  • What should be done so that a similar failure doesn't happen again?

There's yet one more dynamic: Initiative proposes X. Government is, like, this is just crazy. The initiators: Do change the law to include Y (a watered down version of X) and we'll retract the initiative.

Looking at it from that point of view, the referendum can be thought of not as a way for "the people" to decide, but rather a lever, a credible threat, to change the law without having to go via the standard representative system (joining a party, becoming an MP, etc.)

1Raoul Audouin
The latter “credible threat” seems to work similarly in Denmark, where 30% of the parliament can initiate a referendum. I think this only happened once in 174 years, because the 30% parliament minority uses this institution to force a compromise or even a “deal” (I assume that it’s most of the time a secret deal) with the parties in majority, not for “the people” to decide.
2Martin Sustrik
Let's go even further. Assuming the above model, the system can be improved by treating each successful referendum as a system failure. A postmortem should be written a submitted for public discussion: * If majority was in favour, why wasn't the law changed before in the first place? * Why haven't the counterproposal succeeded? * Why haven't the initiants retracted the initiative? * What should be done so that a similar failure doesn't happen again?

In Switzerland there's a lot of discussion about changing this or that part of the political system, but I've never seen someone advocating for getting rid of referenda. There's something about the concept that people tend to like, irrespective of whether it works well or not.

I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we’d have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.)

I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are - based on their experience - less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and th... (read more)

Picture fixed. Thanks for spotting that.

It would take a large amount of research...

That's the nature of illusion: If you research it there's no illusion. If you just glance at it without much thinking, the illusion is there.

Is this true?

As far as I am aware, yes. At some point it was all about Africa. I recall complaints about that in the media back at the time.

Whether it's a calque or a descriptive expression, I think the main problem is still that it addresses only one term. You encounter a term that has no good translation, invent your own translation, start using it and maybe it'll eventually catch on. But then you have to do the entire dance again for the next term.

What I was thinking of was using the English terms. There are, obviously, problems with the declinations, transliteration to cyrilic or what not, but the main blocker, I think, is that using English terms is seen as ugly, un-literary and generally... (read more)

4Viliam
Not sure how transparent is this for native English speakers, but imagine something like this: A: "To avoid dehydration, you should drink a lot of aqua." B: "Just say 'water', moron!" The connotation is that the first speaker is either pretentious, trying to gain some status cheaply by using a Latin word (connotating "I am educated", without actually saying anything impressive), which gets a fair slapdown ("we are just as educated as you")... or maybe actually repeats the teacher's password without fully understanding it, which would be quite shameful in case of an idea this simple. The principle is that the person who fully understands the idea (that you should drink water), and isn't trying to play blatant status moves, would almost certainly have said "water" instead. Which is a good heuristic (communication should be as clear as possible)... that fails if you are using the foreign word because there literally is no good translation (that would convey the intended connotations).
1Alaric
Yes, I agree. I think it depends on education in the community. Yes, for example, Leo Tolstoy in "War and peace" wrote even vast fragments in French. But most of his readers knew French well. (Almost exclusively well-educated person had time for fiction reading.) Now despite mandatory learning in school at least one foreign language many Russians know very badly even Latin alphabet (not to mention rules about reading English words). If you are writing/translating something for specialists, you may ignore that. But if you are writing fiction or something for beginners, you need to think about that. And yes, we have problems with declinations. It is hard to read sentences in Russian with words which cannot be declined by language rules. And I often think about the problem: If a reader knows English and sees words, for example, "taboo tradeoff", I think they can understand that "tradeoff" is about changing something to something. And due to that they can understand the whole term easier. If a reader doesn't know English, they see only some strange letter set. I think it may be important in writing text for beginners.

I think you are on the wrong track. Of course, in the end you can find the equivalent term that someone used somewhere.

But look at it from a different perspective.

Take a term that is used and understood in the rationalist community. Say "Moloch".

Now try to write an opinion piece to The Washington Post. If you want to refer to the concept of "Moloch" you can either explain it, wasting your allotted 3000 characters quickly, or just say "Moloch" and hope someone would get it. In the latter case one or two people may get it and the rest would think you are a c... (read more)

2gjm
Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I wasn't making any sort of objection to your general point, just wondering about the specific examples you used. I completely agree that, whether or not there are Slovak terms that are good translations of "economies of scale" and "single point of failure", there are definitely some languages, or dialects, or systems of technical terminology, in which there are some things that can't be said so easily in some others, and that limits on what can easily be talked about are important, and that what communities' ideas end up with a barrier to entry into public discourse will depend on the size of the community and the size and quirks of whatever larger community they're embedded in. I'm not wholly convinced, though, that the size of the larger community is really the point. (To be clear, this is no part of what I was saying before, it's just something I notice while affirming that I agree with all those things I agree with.) If I try to get my head around the mechanisms whereby there aren't (assuming that indeed there aren't) Slovak terms for various standard economics concepts, the size of the Slovak-speaking world seems to enter in only quite indirectly: it's something like "Slovakia isn't a large market, so there aren't a lot of translations of English-language economics texts into Slovak, so the main channel by which those terms would have got into the Slovak language is rather narrow, so those terms haven't had much chance to take hold". All of which might be true, and does have to do with the size of the community -- but (1) only quite indirectly, and (2) it seems like there are other equally plausible mechanisms that have nothing to do with the size of the community. Maybe there are more economists in richer countries, and Slovakia is relatively poor, and so doesn't have a lot of people who have been exposed to technical terms of economics. Maybe it's relevant that Slovakia used to be part of the Soviet bloc wher

"Economies of scale" seems to be "úspory z rozsahu" ("saving from the extent") - but that sounds really weird and I've never heard it being used. My guess is that the economics professors just use the English term.

As for "single point of failure" I am an engineer myself and I've never encountered any Slovak equivalent.

2gjm
What about in translations of English texts? (I'm guessing that's pretty common, but have no actual idea.)

I am reading Hirshmann's Exit, Voice and Loyalty right now and it's great. But it's not about governance per se. Which book did you have in mind?

2jmh
I agree that Hirshmann is going to lay out any plan towards some ideal government but I do think he gets to some of the problems confronting good governance and so shed light on areas that need consideration. (As and aside I am far from hold the view that "ideal" governance is possible -- it's always going to be contextual in both time and place due to the dynamic nature of social life). If you've not already put his "The Passions and the Interests" you might also find it interesting. In the case of ideal governance it may have some pointers to Constitutional structures that are better at aligning interests (if they can be well enough defined) of the government agents with the societal principles while working to mitigate the passions of the agents. I've not read it but looking at the title "Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Action" may also be relevant to thinking things though.

Some other stuff to look into:

  • Governance of Church. This may not seem like a big deal today, but in early medieval Europe, church probably had more capacity than states, so it mattered a lot. Also, catholic governance structures are quite different from protestant, from the structures in Judaism etc.
  • IETF has a pretty weird governance. The assumption is that anyone can join (or leave) at any moment, so the boundaries of the body politic are quite fuzzy. Thus, no voting, the stress on decision making by consensus, running code etc. Also, limited lifetime
... (read more)
4John Schulman
Lee Kuan Yew wrote about how he went looking for a governance system for his party, the PAP (which now rules Singapore) after the party nearly was captured by the communists in the 50s. He looked at the Catholic Church as an inspiring example of a system that had survived for a long time, and he eventually settled on a system based on the Church's system for electing cardinals and the Pope.
3jaspax
Fictional example: In The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto, the Emperor is elected by the entire body of nobles descended from a semi-legendary ancestor, but the number of votes is determined by a calculated blood quantum representing the percent of your total ancestry from that person. (In the book, the exceptionally pure-blooded dowager empress casts something like a quarter million votes by herself, but she is nonetheless outvoted by a coalition of most of the rest of the nobles.) One could imagine something similar for the US where voting rights are apportioned according to your ancestry from the Mayflower or the like. Or: all citizens are granted a single vote upon reaching the age of majority, but they are free to permanently sell that vote. Current vote holders are recorded in a public registry. There is a large and thriving vote-trading market. Savvy players will buy up large numbers of votes before an election that they care about, then sell them off before elections of lesser importance.

I've tried to double check. Global production of wheat and exports by Russia and Ukraine, according to FAO:

2019, in 1000 tonnes, amounts to 6.9%, very much the same numbers as you've got.

Where does the 5%/90% statistic come from?

Russian troops refuse to go to Ukraine on grounds they do not have passports, so Russia fires them.

These were riot police. From the interview:

  • What motivates the National Guard for their refusal to participate in the "special operation"?

  • It's very simple. People don't want to kill and get killed. When they got a job, the contract said different things. In addition, OMON has a different mission. They don’t know how to use ground-to-air systems, they don’t drive tanks. How should they fight against a regular army? And with what - with a baton and a sh

... (read more)

As for Galeev's threads: As a person from the former Ostblok, where countries share similar dynamics, there was nothing there that made me call bullshit on the spot. I am not a Russian though so I can't vouch for the particular details.

2Viliam
Same here. I am not an expert, but everything I have read so far fits my model of the world.

As a Russian I confirm that everything that Galeev says seems legit. I haven't been following our politics that much, but Gallev's model of Putin's fits my observations.

The only thing that looked a little suspicious to me was the thread on Russian parliamentarism -- there was an opportunity to say something about Navalny's team there (e.g. as a central example of party that can't be registered or something about them organizing protests), and I expected that he would mention it, but he didn't. In fact, I don't think he ever mentioned Navalny in any of his threads. Why?

I am an EU citizen and I've realized that I have little understanding of what EU is, how it works and how it came about. While researching the topic I've stumbled over Jean Monnet.

I guess the general approach is: Look for a surprising development (e.g. Europe suddenly overcoming old enmities) and research it. If change happened, there were people involved. Some of them had more impact, some of them less and some of them have even wrote down their thoughts and experiences.

Here are some interesting people and developments that may or may not prove fruitful t... (read more)

3Ben Pace
Thank you very much! This is very helpful to me right now!

Thanks for sharing the story. I've done some research myself and stumbled over the fact that Vavilov's favourite phrase was: "The life is short. One needs to hurry."

It expresses the same sentiment as Nick Bostrom's "Why did we start so late? " but I personally like it much better.

If the above is true, an interesting consequence would be that social progress may slow down as the average length of life increases.

The thing you are missing, I think, is the nature of common knowedge which underpins the society. Thanks to how it works, people can't achieve moral/societal progress individually. If you live in a violent society you can't get less violent by yourself. If you do, you'd get killed. If you live in a corrupt society you can't get less corrupt all by yourself. If you do, you'd be in disadvantage to all the corrupt people. The society can progress only as a whole, thus the limit on the speed of progress is determined by the speed in which the majority is able ... (read more)

3ChristianKl
Yes, but you can change systems to make it harder for people to be corrupt. You can fund investigative journalism. You can push for organizations to adopt structures that increase transparency.
5alkexr
Yes, I'm aware of all that, and I agree with your premises, but your argument doesn't prove what you think it does. Let's try to reductio it ad absurdum, and turn the same argument against the possibility of fast technological or scientific feedback cycles.  If you live in a technologically backwards society (think bronze age), you can't become more advanced technologically yourself, because you'll starve spending your time trying to do science. The technology of society (including agriculture, communication, tools, etc.) needs to progress as a whole. If you live in a scientifically backwards society, you can't have more accurate beliefs, because you'll be burned at the stake by all the people believing in nonsense. Therefore, science and technology can only progress as fast as the majority can adopt it. And all of the above is true, actually, up to a certain point in history. But once the scientific understanding of society advances to the point where it understands that science is a thing and has a basic understanding of how science works, it can basically create a mesa-feedback-loop. Similarly, once you have technologies like writing and free market capitalism, suddenly it's possible to set up a tech company, sell something worthwhile and in exchange not starve. And that's the frame for my original comment. I didn't mean to imply that a fast moral feedback loop would involve a single person going on some meditation retreat that is somehow a clever feedback loop in disguise and then come back more moral or whatnot. I think it is possible that there is some innovation, moral or social or otherwise (e.g. a common understanding of common knowledge), that would enable the creation of fast moral and social feedback loops. So the question, again: what are the necessary conditions for such a feedback loop? Are they present? What would it look like? How would you recognize it if it was happening right in front of you? (EDIT: spelling)
4Martin Sustrik
If the above is true, an interesting consequence would be that social progress may slow down as the average length of life increases.

I would say there were two distinct "progressive" worldwiews in the 19th century. The symbol of the bourgeois progressivism may be Exposition Universelle of 1889, the symbol of the proletarian progressivism the Paris Commune. Two events, same place, 18 years apart. The former with all the wonderful machines etc., the latter with the barricades and soldiers shooting the survivors. The two worldviews, being that distinct and held by different people, it's not clear to me whether the failures of the social progress school led to the souring towards the technical progress.

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