I agree with what you’re pointing at, but not with this statement. I think it’s worse than this. There are (groups of) people who (collectively) know how to make (some) things better. But The Power is held collectively by those you label The Powerless, and they lack the skills or drive to even know how to choose the right priesthood-holders to trust. As a result we spend an awful lot of time and effort tying our hands and shooting our feet, while competing would-be priests shout ineffectually at one another, regardless of who has a record of having made correct predictions before. Our ancestors may not have understood the natural world, but if someone showed up and made the right guesses about the behavior of some eldritch god vastly more often than anyone else could do, they would have been either elevated to leadership or feared/hated/condemned for black magic. We lost that skill, I think, in favor of playing social status games, the moment it sunk in that the natural-world-threats felt distant.
I think lots of people have power to do stuff but the limits are such that it’s a lot easier to break things than it is to build them.
Suppose you were magically elected POTUS with the mandate of Making Things Much Better. How do you fix the economy, or the climate, or anything else in four years, with “only” at your disposal the full might of the United States, within your ability to command it? You would be faced with a ton of options, uncertainties, compromises, a few good ideas but none fully resolutive.
Now suppose the same thing happened, but with the mandate of Making Things Much Worse. That sounds like an easy enough job!
Sure, I mostly meant the limits as in all sorts of constraints (what people will and won’t allow you to get away with, what is knowable, what is easily computed/predicted, etc). But ultimately it really boils down to, every step in the “better” direction requires moving towards an even smaller state space and thus decreasing bits of entropy in the state of the world. So in a sense it literally is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics.
I believe our ancestors elevated and condemned people for reasons mostly separate from whether they statistically made better predictions. Things like “Does this sound good?”, “Does this help give more power to the leader?”, “Is the person uttering the various statements seemingly convinced of them?”, “Can the person make it seem like the statements matched the reality post-hoc?”, etc.
It might have correlated in some cases, but what I am pointing at something much more hit-or-miss than the process you are describing.
I agree with what you’re pointing at, but not with this statement. I think it’s worse than this. There are (groups of) people who (collectively) know how to make (some) things better. But The Power is held collectively by those you label The Powerless, and they lack the skills or drive to even know how to choose the right priesthood-holders to trust. As a result we spend an awful lot of time and effort tying our hands and shooting our feet, while competing would-be priests shout ineffectually at one another, regardless of who has a record of having made correct predictions before. Our ancestors may not have understood the natural world, but if someone showed up and made the right guesses about the behavior of some eldritch god vastly more often than anyone else could do, they would have been either elevated to leadership or feared/hated/condemned for black magic. We lost that skill, I think, in favor of playing social status games, the moment it sunk in that the natural-world-threats felt distant.
Aka: In practice we are sex-obsessed murder-monkeys and all of this is way above our pay grade.
I think lots of people have power to do stuff but the limits are such that it’s a lot easier to break things than it is to build them.
Suppose you were magically elected POTUS with the mandate of Making Things Much Better. How do you fix the economy, or the climate, or anything else in four years, with “only” at your disposal the full might of the United States, within your ability to command it? You would be faced with a ton of options, uncertainties, compromises, a few good ideas but none fully resolutive.
Now suppose the same thing happened, but with the mandate of Making Things Much Worse. That sounds like an easy enough job!
Not just the legalistic limits, but the 2nd Law.
Sure, I mostly meant the limits as in all sorts of constraints (what people will and won’t allow you to get away with, what is knowable, what is easily computed/predicted, etc). But ultimately it really boils down to, every step in the “better” direction requires moving towards an even smaller state space and thus decreasing bits of entropy in the state of the world. So in a sense it literally is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics.
I believe our ancestors elevated and condemned people for reasons mostly separate from whether they statistically made better predictions. Things like “Does this sound good?”, “Does this help give more power to the leader?”, “Is the person uttering the various statements seemingly convinced of them?”, “Can the person make it seem like the statements matched the reality post-hoc?”, etc.
It might have correlated in some cases, but what I am pointing at something much more hit-or-miss than the process you are describing.