I think you highly underestimate how incredibly asymmetric *power dynamics* are. In the bubbling up example, why would a principal or a mayor care about a question asked by a high school student? Or to give a more tangible example which people love to memory hole, why would privileged people care about what working class people lost during the covid lockdowns? Software engineers get to work from home in a post-covid world, why would they care about the jobs lost, and the local businesses owned by people they've never heard which got wiped away?
I'm not just talking about selfishness here, but *systemic* selfishness. If large businesses didn't optimize for profits, they would lose out to others which do. If politicians weren't corrupt and promised far more than they delivered, they wouldn't get re-elected. See also: Meditations on Moloch, the Rule for Rulers, and in general, game theoretical dynamics which shape our world (arms races, technological progress which cannot be stopped, tragedy of the commons, etc.)
If the idea isn't so much to replace or change the people in power, but to instead get enough people to coordinate so that power dynamics do not dictate our interactions, then this doesn't solve another fundamental issue of our world, which is its *atomization*.
People who think in atomized ways ask questions like: "how do we make school better? how to make it so that work isn't so soulless? how do we make technological progress more sustainable?" But a broader perspective would ask why those structures exist in the first place: "Why do we even send children in school, a place isolated from everything else (work, family, nature, etc.) where they are inculcated in a purely internal institution (i.e. your performance is evaluated by the teacher, not by what you do in the real world)?" Or "why has technological progress driven our world to begin with? What are the drivers and to what extent is it a conscious process?"
The importance of understanding atomizing collectives and atomizing questions lies in the following dynamic: problem-solving always takes an atomized form, because divide and conquer has been the most effective way to coordinate people. The problem with that approach is that the problem solvers are *never* incentivized to care for the whole.
People in medicine tell us how to be healthy in a world which constantly makes us disconnected from our body, and more and more unhealthy (sitting in front of a desk all day, driving to places, eating food grown on poor soil). People in businesses care about providing services and maximizing their profits, without any incentive to care about the environment. People in law institutions think about how to bring about a "fair" world without ever interacting with the outrageous economic reality of our times and its downstream consequences.
On and on, hyper-specialists working in their tiny field of expertise, with no broader context for a more harmonious whole.
But the thing to understand isn't just that "compartmentalization bad", it's that 1) it results from many dynamics which bring about our world in the first place (it's easiest to coordinate people through divide and conquer as mentioned, amongst other dynamics) and 2) there is once again an incentive to not care about the whole, similar to the game theoretical dynamic described above with regards to power.
A charity that tries to get to the root of the problems it tries to tackle, whether environmental or social (and the two are of course intertwined) won't get anywhere. It will run into a wall, people will be frustrated, be demotivated and burnout, and the charity will probably disappear. But one that starts with more actionable, *definable* goals, such as helping the pandas in China, or install water pumps for remote areas in Ethiopia, builds momentum because it's satisfying to see those definable metrics go up.
This sounds good in the short term, but in the long term what does this lead to? As everyone who thinks about metrics knows, Goodhart's Law is an ugly friend which keeps showing its head up. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". The charities which optimize for their definable goals end up becoming more popular in the eyes of the public, because their impact is clear and they can attract shareholders who know what to expect from their investments.
But what this leads to in practice is that the initial intention of doing good in the world becomes captured by the need to maintain the structure. The charity provides money and hope to its workers and many other people. Why would it try to shake up the foundations of the very system which causes the problems it tries to address?
In practice that never happens. Charities which become successful never want to remove the roots of the problems which they are working at addressing. They *need* the problems in order to get value for themselves.
You can call this selfishness, and in a sense it is, but the dynamic that I'm talking about is far more subtle to grasp. It's the way in which intentions in an atomized and complex world become self-serving and deviate from their initial good intentions. Charities dare not win, because they can't afford to. They need to keep struggling against the very same system which gives them their money and attention.
I claim that this is true for all large-scale movements aiming at changing the world. There is never an incentive to take care of the whole, and more generally, never a *locally optimum series of moves* that leads to that. Just like you can't explain in rational, utilitarian terms the value of consciously loving someone, you can't explain in market-driven locally optimum terms the value of taking responsibility for the whole. So no one ever will.
I don't expect you to ever change your opinions based on what I've written, but this is what I predict will go wrong with your project. It won't account for the inherent power dynamics that drive our world, it won't account for its atomization either, and it won't account for the way that good intentions get captured and morph over time.
What do you think about local-only responses to local issues of concern? For example: forget global charities building wells in far flung countries. Can local charities help ensure local people have clean water, and leave it at that?
There’s two local charities near me that I appreciate. One gives free healthcare to uninsured people. The other re-distributes prepared commercial food that would otherwise enter the waste stream. Small scale local organizations that deliver tangible results without intention to grow.
Now: maybe the success of these ideas translates to a town in the next county establishing a similar effort. Copycat the good idea.
Local assessment and influence is the only thing I can see working sustainably and without the corruption of incentives that large-scale effort produces.
The problem is that in the short-term, it’s very difficult to not feel like you’re being overrun by the steamrollers of the modern world, i.e. local economies are being constantly eroded by companies like Amazon which are so unbelievably more convenient than anything a local business might provide.
But economy aside, yeah when it comes to doing good in the world, I only trust in small-scale actions, because that’s the only way that the feedback of intention + action + result completes, and that the process of atomization can start healing. Otherwise you have to replace ‘intention’ with ideology/chasing metrics, and ‘results’ with ‘metric we are optimizing for’, and it becomes a number game once again.
I'll "yes, and" this and say, this project is about expanding that scope of "local". My "local" includes my immediate family & friends, my trust network, my coworkers. Take that tight trust network, and expand it as far as you can + create a public entry point to it (anyone can come to you, but you don't let anyone in your trust network, unless you trust them)
the fastest growing internally coherent/aligned trust network wins (as we do this process we will run against networks that are coordinating but in secret. And they won't admit they are coordinating, but it will become very clear if we are coordinated)
I think you highly underestimate how incredibly asymmetric *power dynamics* are. In the bubbling up example, why would a principal or a mayor care about a question asked by a high school student? Or to give a more tangible example which people love to memory hole, why would privileged people care about what working class people lost during the covid lockdowns? Software engineers get to work from home in a post-covid world, why would they care about the jobs lost, and the local businesses owned by people they've never heard which got wiped away?
I'm not just talking about selfishness here, but *systemic* selfishness. If large businesses didn't optimize for profits, they would lose out to others which do. If politicians weren't corrupt and promised far more than they delivered, they wouldn't get re-elected. See also: Meditations on Moloch, the Rule for Rulers, and in general, game theoretical dynamics which shape our world (arms races, technological progress which cannot be stopped, tragedy of the commons, etc.)
If the idea isn't so much to replace or change the people in power, but to instead get enough people to coordinate so that power dynamics do not dictate our interactions, then this doesn't solve another fundamental issue of our world, which is its *atomization*.
People who think in atomized ways ask questions like: "how do we make school better? how to make it so that work isn't so soulless? how do we make technological progress more sustainable?" But a broader perspective would ask why those structures exist in the first place: "Why do we even send children in school, a place isolated from everything else (work, family, nature, etc.) where they are inculcated in a purely internal institution (i.e. your performance is evaluated by the teacher, not by what you do in the real world)?" Or "why has technological progress driven our world to begin with? What are the drivers and to what extent is it a conscious process?"
The importance of understanding atomizing collectives and atomizing questions lies in the following dynamic: problem-solving always takes an atomized form, because divide and conquer has been the most effective way to coordinate people. The problem with that approach is that the problem solvers are *never* incentivized to care for the whole.
People in medicine tell us how to be healthy in a world which constantly makes us disconnected from our body, and more and more unhealthy (sitting in front of a desk all day, driving to places, eating food grown on poor soil). People in businesses care about providing services and maximizing their profits, without any incentive to care about the environment. People in law institutions think about how to bring about a "fair" world without ever interacting with the outrageous economic reality of our times and its downstream consequences.
On and on, hyper-specialists working in their tiny field of expertise, with no broader context for a more harmonious whole.
But the thing to understand isn't just that "compartmentalization bad", it's that 1) it results from many dynamics which bring about our world in the first place (it's easiest to coordinate people through divide and conquer as mentioned, amongst other dynamics) and 2) there is once again an incentive to not care about the whole, similar to the game theoretical dynamic described above with regards to power.
A charity that tries to get to the root of the problems it tries to tackle, whether environmental or social (and the two are of course intertwined) won't get anywhere. It will run into a wall, people will be frustrated, be demotivated and burnout, and the charity will probably disappear. But one that starts with more actionable, *definable* goals, such as helping the pandas in China, or install water pumps for remote areas in Ethiopia, builds momentum because it's satisfying to see those definable metrics go up.
This sounds good in the short term, but in the long term what does this lead to? As everyone who thinks about metrics knows, Goodhart's Law is an ugly friend which keeps showing its head up. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". The charities which optimize for their definable goals end up becoming more popular in the eyes of the public, because their impact is clear and they can attract shareholders who know what to expect from their investments.
But what this leads to in practice is that the initial intention of doing good in the world becomes captured by the need to maintain the structure. The charity provides money and hope to its workers and many other people. Why would it try to shake up the foundations of the very system which causes the problems it tries to address?
In practice that never happens. Charities which become successful never want to remove the roots of the problems which they are working at addressing. They *need* the problems in order to get value for themselves.
You can call this selfishness, and in a sense it is, but the dynamic that I'm talking about is far more subtle to grasp. It's the way in which intentions in an atomized and complex world become self-serving and deviate from their initial good intentions. Charities dare not win, because they can't afford to. They need to keep struggling against the very same system which gives them their money and attention.
I claim that this is true for all large-scale movements aiming at changing the world. There is never an incentive to take care of the whole, and more generally, never a *locally optimum series of moves* that leads to that. Just like you can't explain in rational, utilitarian terms the value of consciously loving someone, you can't explain in market-driven locally optimum terms the value of taking responsibility for the whole. So no one ever will.
I don't expect you to ever change your opinions based on what I've written, but this is what I predict will go wrong with your project. It won't account for the inherent power dynamics that drive our world, it won't account for its atomization either, and it won't account for the way that good intentions get captured and morph over time.
What do you think about local-only responses to local issues of concern? For example: forget global charities building wells in far flung countries. Can local charities help ensure local people have clean water, and leave it at that?
There’s two local charities near me that I appreciate. One gives free healthcare to uninsured people. The other re-distributes prepared commercial food that would otherwise enter the waste stream. Small scale local organizations that deliver tangible results without intention to grow.
Now: maybe the success of these ideas translates to a town in the next county establishing a similar effort. Copycat the good idea.
Local assessment and influence is the only thing I can see working sustainably and without the corruption of incentives that large-scale effort produces.
The problem is that in the short-term, it’s very difficult to not feel like you’re being overrun by the steamrollers of the modern world, i.e. local economies are being constantly eroded by companies like Amazon which are so unbelievably more convenient than anything a local business might provide.
But economy aside, yeah when it comes to doing good in the world, I only trust in small-scale actions, because that’s the only way that the feedback of intention + action + result completes, and that the process of atomization can start healing. Otherwise you have to replace ‘intention’ with ideology/chasing metrics, and ‘results’ with ‘metric we are optimizing for’, and it becomes a number game once again.
I'll "yes, and" this and say, this project is about expanding that scope of "local". My "local" includes my immediate family & friends, my trust network, my coworkers. Take that tight trust network, and expand it as far as you can + create a public entry point to it (anyone can come to you, but you don't let anyone in your trust network, unless you trust them)
the fastest growing internally coherent/aligned trust network wins (as we do this process we will run against networks that are coordinating but in secret. And they won't admit they are coordinating, but it will become very clear if we are coordinated)