Learning about society.
Samo Burja
Karma: 862
Eight Books To Read
The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer
On the Loss and Preservation of Knowledge
How To Use Bureaucracies
How to Find the Frontiers of Knowledge
Intellectual Dark Matter
Announcing my YouTube channel
What Botswana Can Teach Us About Political Stability
Honors Fuel Achievement
The risk of an American Civil War is remote
Why I’m Writing A Book
On Building Theories of History
Competition for Power
Social Technology
On August 23rd I’ll be giving a talk organized by the Foresight Institute.
Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future
Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth.
We pin the hopes of our common human project on this renewal and growth of the whole civilization. Whether this project is going well is a challenging but vital question to answer.
History shows us we are not safe from institutional collapse. Advances in technology mitigate some aspects, but produce their own risks. Agile institutions that make use of both social and technical knowledge not only mitigate such risks, but promise unprecedented human flourishing.
Join us as we investigate this landscape, evaluate our odds, and try to plot a better course.See the Facebook event for further details.
There is a limited number of spots and there has been a bunch of interest, still I’d love rationalists to attend so try to nab tickets at eventbrite. Feel free to introduce yourself and chat me up after the talk, would be happy to meet rationalists thinking about civilization and sociology :)
I’m going to follow this up in later pieces if there is interest… In particular an overview of existing theories and also laying out my own.
Excellent exercise! It seems a good way to evaluate content, initially building out or explicating one’s own models before comparing it to someone else’s, I will remember to do this.
I’m happy to hear you’ve found the model I present on useful and interesting!
The government agencies and corporations that dominate our society are many decades, if not centuries, old. It is also clear they are in need of renewal.
Why did they reach such a state of misalignment? I believe that across society we had a notable failure of succession.
These things were created by people, and then they took on a life of their own, in an almost automated fashion, rather than continuing human oversight. As a result we are in a society that is more fragile, less cooperative and less coordinated than it could be.
This is an excellent analysis of a particular aspect. Firstly I do want to emphasize that this mindset is already very rare, few people reason from the existence of traditions of sound knowledge and begin thinking how to access them. The exercise for most remains, pardon the pun, academic.
The only thing I would add is less of an emphasis of universities and more on particular institutions such as branches of government or particular companies. This represents a kind of institution that, assuming a sound career or skill-set, those in middle age are better positioned to understand and make use of. Particular social circles can fulfill this function as well. Further those in middle age can and do easily gain access to postgraduate education of high quality but seem to do so less frequently. As a very practical example I could cite Robin Hansons reorientation towards the social sciences after a successful stem career.
Agreed. Implicitly the intended audience is already familiar with many of those.
Overbuilding an outside view and under-building an inside view is one of the key generators of akrasia, and renders knowledge inert rather than allowing book knowledge to be mixed in with lived life experience.