I had never heard of that before but it is interesting on a bunch of levels (mechanical, sociological, memetic, etc). My presumption is that you’re interested primarily in the idea captured by the this quote by Buckminster Fuller at the bottom of the wikipedia page:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.
I’m curious how deep the analogy you’re suggesting is. Can you extend it into something more explicit? My naive thought, would be that Eliezer_2007-ish was the trim tab and all of what’s happening from ~2009 to ~2013 (Leverage Research included) is more like “the rudder” starting to move, and the ship won’t even have visibly changed course until 2020-ish and then only slightly. The place the analogy really seems to fail to me is that it presumes there is this single tiny thing that matters (which is quite complimentary and thus a nice PR angle), when really there are probably thousands of things that will retrospectively be seen to have mattered and the english speaking singularitarian political movement is just one of them.
EDA: I don’t understand LW’s voting here. Tim was the one with the idea, I just spelled out the implications for the sake of discussion, and his comment’s at 1 and mine is 9 now?!? He’s the one with the awesome signal/noise ratio and relevant links, not me, but I can’t vote myself down to rectify this.
The place the analogy really seems to fail to me is that it presumes there is this single tiny thing that matters (which is quite complimentary and thus a nice PR angle), when really there are probably thousands of things that will retrospectively be seen to have mattered and the english speaking singularitarian political movement is just one of them.
Well there may be some cases where a little effort can make a big difference—and it may pay for individuals to seek them out. However, there’s obviously a big influence from technological determinism—which would tend to damp out small fluctuations due to the efforts of individuals.
Do you know of any solid methodologies for predicting outcomes from technology? To cash out political determinism I’d go with something like Bruce Bruno De Mesquita’s work, but I don’t know any methods to analyze technological determination of history other than using case-by-case reasoning, and nearly all of the “cases” I’ve seen are post hoc.
EDA: I don’t understand LW’s voting here. Tim was the one with the idea, I just spelled out the implications for the sake of discussion, and his comment’s at 1 and mine is 9 now?!? He’s the one with the awesome signal/noise ratio and relevant links, not me, but I can’t vote myself down to rectify this.
I had never heard of that before but it is interesting on a bunch of levels (mechanical, sociological, memetic, etc). My presumption is that you’re interested primarily in the idea captured by the this quote by Buckminster Fuller at the bottom of the wikipedia page:
I’m curious how deep the analogy you’re suggesting is. Can you extend it into something more explicit? My naive thought, would be that Eliezer_2007-ish was the trim tab and all of what’s happening from ~2009 to ~2013 (Leverage Research included) is more like “the rudder” starting to move, and the ship won’t even have visibly changed course until 2020-ish and then only slightly. The place the analogy really seems to fail to me is that it presumes there is this single tiny thing that matters (which is quite complimentary and thus a nice PR angle), when really there are probably thousands of things that will retrospectively be seen to have mattered and the english speaking singularitarian political movement is just one of them.
EDA: I don’t understand LW’s voting here. Tim was the one with the idea, I just spelled out the implications for the sake of discussion, and his comment’s at 1 and mine is 9 now?!? He’s the one with the awesome signal/noise ratio and relevant links, not me, but I can’t vote myself down to rectify this.
Well there may be some cases where a little effort can make a big difference—and it may pay for individuals to seek them out. However, there’s obviously a big influence from technological determinism—which would tend to damp out small fluctuations due to the efforts of individuals.
Do you know of any solid methodologies for predicting outcomes from technology? To cash out political determinism I’d go with something like Bruce Bruno De Mesquita’s work, but I don’t know any methods to analyze technological determination of history other than using case-by-case reasoning, and nearly all of the “cases” I’ve seen are post hoc.
Nobody has a practical methodology for predicting the future in very much detail.
Technological determinism still seems like a big and important idea to me, though.
EDA: I don’t understand LW’s voting here. Tim was the one with the idea, I just spelled out the implications for the sake of discussion, and his comment’s at 1 and mine is 9 now?!? He’s the one with the awesome signal/noise ratio and relevant links, not me, but I can’t vote myself down to rectify this.