Social Systems, Evolution, Change, and the Status Quo

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As some of you know I am a genetic engineering research scientist. My job has been to try and take biological systems in bacteria and adapt them for beneficial purposes to human society. There are two main grand challenges to my work and other work like it. The first is biological systems are incredibly complex, and it is difficult to predict how changes we introduce will actually function. Sometimes what we change doesn't do what we expect. Sometimes it has an unexpected side effect. This is because our models of biological systems are not well-developed enough to give us accurate predictions. This isn't because we're bad at our work, but rather because the natural system is incredibly complex and building up from first principles nigh impossible (at least with current data collection and computational techniques). The second grand challenge is that biological systems are really well adapted to do what they already do. Billions of years of evolution have optimized a lot of biological functions. Thus, when we change the genetic programming of a bacteria we almost invariably make it worse at being a bacteria (although it may be better at what we want it to do). In general a genetic engineer strives to make as few changes as possible, because most changes are unpredictable and bad. In natural evolution, changes randomly occur. Most are bad changes that never accumulate in a wild population. A few are good changes that lead to the process known as evolution. Hopefully this past paragraph made sense to the Layman, because I'm going to make an analogy to social systems.

1) Social Systems of humans have evolved over time for the better
Humans started off in a state of anarchy. The base form of human civilization in the 100,000 BCE was a form of familial tribalism, but even this familial tribalism evolved from an earlier form of individualism. At one point in our evolutionary background was a creature that had no social systems at all. But starting from early hominids we have a familial tribalism. Over time more complex social systems evolved. These social systems inevitably came into conflict. The societies that had material advantages from better construction triumphed in those conflicts. Some patterns in socio-economical conflicts over time have emerged. All over the world agricultural supported cities displaced hunter-gatherer tribes. De-centralized Zhou China gave way to centralized Qing/Han China. Similarly de-centralized Greek city-states gave way to centralized Roman Empire. Later on merchant states overcame feudal states. Elected leaders overcame monarchies, and market economy USA overcame command economy USSR and China.

2) Social systems of humans are complex and evolved
Consider the modern society. It has a bunch of complex interconnected functions. Most of society is supported by a small segment that produces food. In turn the rest of society performs other functions like building infrastructure for transportation of food and goods, making technology that improves production of goods, adjudicating disputes so that people can make technology that improves production of goods, repairing people who have been hurt, protecting society from outsiders, and training the next generation of the society to perform all these functions. Some of these functions are performed by private businesses. Some by the government, and some by a mix of the two.

3) Change is costly, and sometimes exceeds the benefit of the change
There's a quote from the office where the intern Ryan is showing off his MBA knowledge asks the manager Michael "Is it more costly to keep a customer worth $1000, or sign a new customer worth $1000." Michael replies "they're the same." Ryan replies "It is 10 times more costly to sign a new customer." While I'm not certain the numbers from the office are correct, the principle is the same. When moving in a new direction there is a certain cost to implementing the change. For example say you are adding up a bunch of grades for a class you are teaching. Say adding it by hand will cost you a total of 1 hour of time. Or you could write a program in 10 hours that will add it all up for you and take 5 minutes to use. Obviously using the program is superior to adding it by hand. However, if you are only going to add it up by hand 8 times in your career it is less costly to add it up by hand. This is because the cost of change which is 10 hours exceeds the benefit of the change 7 hours and 20 minutes. This cost-benefit analysis becomes more complicated when you consider time scales. Taking the same example say it takes you 10 hours to program it now, but you're actively learning to program more quickly. In a year after you've learned correct programming it will only take you 1 hour to program it. Now the correct solution becomes to do the grades by hand the first year, and then write the program at the end of your first year. Assuming you do this once per year, after 8 years you would have spent 2 hours and 35 minutes on this task instead of 8 hours (always grading by hand), or 10 hours 40 minutes (writing a program immediately).

Understanding of biological systems, and analogy to social systems can provide some heuristics for change.

1) Test at small scale
Biological evolution works with random changes, but tests at incredibly small scale. Each individual mutation is first tested in a single organism and only propagates if it is beneficial.

2) Use competition to sort out beneficial changes
Random change only works in biology because of small scale testing and competition. Individual mutations are competing against each other and the best ones survive.

3) Incremental change is more predictable and less likely to be damaging
This is used by genetic engineers. The technique of directed evolution was pioneered by Frances Arnold 30 years ago and recently won the Nobel Prize. The technique is brilliant in its simplicity. You take a protein that is say 400 amino acids long. You make 1 amino acid changes either completely randomly or with rational input. You test each of the changes, keep the ones that are beneficial and move onto another round. You stop once none of your changes result in improvement of the function you're trying to optimize. Small changes are much more predictable than large changes and less likely to break everything.

4) It will be hard to rationally improve on the status quo
Most changes are not helpful as a lot of real-world testing and evolution occurred for society to reach the point it is at. Rational changes can have a higher success rate, but in complex systems effects are often unpredictable. Hence why it is best to make small changes and test things at small scale in competitive environments.

5) It is important to understand the benefits of the status quo before rationally designing changes
In biology a lot of stuff seems "poorly designed," until you try to change it. Why because even though something may seem sub-optimal it is entangled with a lot of functions that have been strictly optimized. Things that are truly "poorly designed" don't survive in the long term.

Any thoughts on this subject. How society should change moving forward is important.

Even if we seek not to maintain the status-quo, we must learn about the nature of the status-quo in order for us to progress.

We have to do things on the grass-roots level---not just on a theoretical level.

That's my problem. I come up with all these theories----yet I really just lie on my bed and watch YouTube videos most of my free time. I don't want to get off my butt and do things for other people.

Too much text.

You should consider this if you want people to respond.

I think you are right, but there's some issues in praxis.
That is: defining what you want your bacteria/society to do.
How to discard of bacteria/societies that don't do that but where some members have an advantage that results in a vested interest to keep things exactly this way.
And: how to keep the incrents a managable magnitude, when there are parties who have an interest in either bigger, smaller or totally different steps.

Regarding the first point: the Unabomber actually wrote about how the driving force behind social evolution is technology - and how that leads to societies' only option (in a game theoretical twist) being to subjugate themselves for the sake of technological advantage.
Example: China. Throughout most of knoen history, Europe was a rural backwater. And then, suddenly, in the 19th century the British were undefeatable and humiliated the emperor of the "central kingdom". - this resulted in chinese Nationalist scholars writing about how the Chinese people need to catch up and develop, and until they are number one, there can be no freedom. - take a look at China's data collection and AI efforts and it appears early 20th century theorists layed the groundwork for that.

On the second point:
Again, China: the country is so huge, thrle government is actually running representative experiments in different regions to see what works as a model for development. They are going about it like scientists, and they do have the power to discard models that don't work, regardless of vested interests. (The government purges politicians and businessmen roughly every ten years.)
In the West, the experiment of globalized financial markets failed and should have collapsed in 2008, but the governments decided against this purging and is infusing incredible amounts of liquidity into the system, leading to housing bubbles everywhere. They picked where societies are going, and it was based on what the one's profitting already wanted/needed to keep going.

So, it seems the decision making process is both corrupt and in a game theoretical way bound to technological progress, at the expense of human wellbeing.

On the last point, the step size: I'm thinking of Yuval Harari's remark that feminism is the biggest revolution in human history: 50% of people demanding equality (whatever that means) all at once, while the order before survived for thousands of years.
That change is so huge, it's completely incalculable where it's taking us.
And it is being done to societies that are partially pre-industrial. (Not that I'm against it being done to them, but I don't think one can argue that feminism developed organically out of, say, India).

So. ...uhm. ... I have the feeling even though it's very complex doing things with petri dishes, thinking about an analogous approach in regards to societies ends up in frustration.

This has happened before, though not quite to the same degree.

An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded. Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.

...

When I first read these contemporary descriptions of tenth-century Baghdad, I could scarcely believe my eyes. I told myself that this must be a joke! The descriptions might have been taken out of The Times today. The resemblance of all the details was especially breathtaking—the break-up of the empire, the abandonment of sexual morality, the ‘pop’ singers with their guitars, the entry of women into the professions, the five-day week. I would not venture to attempt an explanation! There are so many mysteries about human life which are far beyond our comprehension.

---Glubb, The Fate of Empires 1978

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

That's really interesting and I've never come across a description of medieval Baghdad like that. Thanks.

Rome, I had came across. But not as 'women's rights being associated with national decline' -
I wonder what the causal connection is supposed to be

I wonder that myself. I have always known Christopher Hitchens' great blunder when he declared that "the emancipation of women is the root of prosperity" to be nonsense. It obviously follows prosperity, not the other way around.

Glubb's whole essay can be read here: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

He talks about the death of duty and self-sacrifice during the phases of empire, which is overtaken by the pursuit of wealth and status, then intellectualism etc. Feminism may be just the death of female duty. As for why this cycle echoes throughout history... who knows. Maybe there's something to the mutation accumulation theory of the "Mouse Utopia" experiment. Antrax no doubt knows more about that than me.

Haha. "Obviously". I watched a Yale course on demographics on YouTube, which consistently kept astounding me. There I learned that women's education is considered the single most important factor for a nation's development. And they have the numbers for it to prove: women's education and decline in birth rate (down from however many children a woman can pop out before dying giving birth) precede prosperity. Fewer children who are educated is a better strategy than having a lot of uneducated kids...
Which is why the West is so adamantly trying to get girls into schools and educate them on condom use. - much to the dismay of patriarchal religious rulers.



Hmm. While the Glubb essay was interesting to read, I tend to gravitate towards material explanations for sentiments, not the other way round.
It's not that I have lost a sense of duty etc. Towards my nation. It's that I think my nation is there to protect not me but the assets of the super-rich.
Looking at the UK - yeah, it's a shame tgat the parties' differences are carried onto the streets, and there is no respect etc.
But Borus is an utter buffoon, willing to lie straight into the camera for the interests of whoever has the money and knows how to short-sell the country.

Oh dear. I googled Glubb to see if I can find some academic views on his text.
What I did find was a Google hangout, in which some British guys discussed this all. And somewhere within the first few minutes, one of them mentioned that Britain went bankrupt in ww2, after Churchill dragged Britain into "what was essentially a border-conflict between Germany and Poland".
At that point I knew I was in for a treat, in the form of far-right historical revisionists telling each other nonsense.

It was quite entertaining, in the way it's entertaining to listen to flat-earthers.
They also took Glubb and conflated a few things to fit their agenda even better, putting reverence for intellectuals together with reverence for athletes and actors. For Glubb, it's a progression from generals to intellectuals to athletes and actors.

Anyway.
I'm sure there's some interesting thoughts to be gleaned from Glubb, but he also was a colonial general who thought it right to occupy other people's countries by force. After all, the decline of his colonial empire is what he means by 'decline of a great nation'.

I wasn't thinking about education in particular. I was thinking of work. Poor women have no choice in the matter. They have no choice but to work alongside any childcare duties their culture demands. You must have seen the images of women working fields with kids strapped to their backs. This is fairly normal anywhere you see high poverty for most of history, even in European peasant societies the women had to be economically active in some fashion, it's a matter of eating or not.

When territories get a bit richer e.g. by becoming the nexus of an empire, the more and more housewifery you'll observe. As wealth spreads into the middle, housewifery ceases being the sole privilege of the extremely rich. Interestingly the beginnings of that same transition can be see in modern day India right now, which has a famously high proportion of STEM educated women.

Feminism in the sense we are talking about is a post-housewifery phenomenom. they certainly aren't demanding to go work in the fields again.



I wish there were better answers, if we truly understood this cycle we might be able to avoid it.



Yep that sounds like us nationalists. Though my historical understanding is a bit more nuanced.



Hehe. I smirked when I first heard of that historical pattern too. Glubb certainly isn't the first to notice it.



I find that kind of Imperial and Nation-centric thinking aligns much closer with reality than anything else offered.

Hmm... So... What's your view on what's undermining Western nations?
I don't believe in the sheer power of national narratives, - they have to correspond to some extent with reality.
So, if the west is "in decline", I'm wondering, what came first? Globalisation, that led to both the rise of china out of poverty - but even more so, the rise of the gini coefficient, and the rise of the power of capital, and the decline of the power of labour?
Might the cost of housing have something to do with the gloomy mood of my generation?

Well, in any other thread my go to response would be "a certain, broadly utopian, set of ideas that have been with us in one form or another since the French Revolution". In this thread, I must chew on other ideas that suggest that perhaps these people and their ideas are unknowingly playing a role in a larger civilisational cycle we don't really understand.



I'm not quite sure what you are asking here, sounds like "what came first the money problems or the problems of money?" Some of the economic problems I can lay at the feet of mistaken dogma (see my great ignored thread on international trade theory). Some I fear is just symptomatic of civilisational decline. I do think economics is tertiary in many senses, it all rests on top of deeper social foundations. When you dig out the foundations of a building as our utopian overlords have all but succeeded in doing ... they may find that the building falls down in the next strong wind. To the surprise of no builders anywhere, ever.

Funny that you would pick the French Revolution (I think it ended too soon).
Yes, the Romantics were a too starry eyed about human nature, but there was good reason to bring out the guillotines.
But I think their Utopia was hijacked, and every utopia ever since, by people who just could - in the spirit of Thucydides: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

I mean, democracy sounds great, until you realize that everyone needs to enlighten him/herself for it to function, and that there's people with a vested interest in making you think you have participated in democracy and are enlightened and rational etc.
Alas, some people are good at maths, and some aren't.
Or, to slightly turn Harari on his head: for centuries, human feeling was considered the best algorithm - but advertising and the media were methods of hacking human feelings.

In other words: I think the economic is primary, and the Utopias are secondary and always get hijacked by the powerful (or create new classes of powerful people who pervert the utopian ideas to maintain their power).

What interests me now is: what do you think are those foundations that have been dug up?
(Because the story I've pieced together about the world is that, actually, the foundations of our current civilization are self-destructive, in the same way that Jesus's teachings are bound to destroy any civilization built on them. - give away all your money? That only works if judgement day really is around the corner. Otherwise, your children will just grow up in poverty. Turn the other cheek? What if your opponent is in a genocidal mood...? ... Or in case of enlightenment: anyone has a right to be free, without a definite definition of what that means? And be critical towards everything, including language etc ... It should have been obvious that at one point there'll be a president questioning the definition of the word "is")

Failure and a mountain of corpses is the inevitable outcome of an attempt to bring about any sort of idealistic utopia. Utopia always requires humans to radically redesign themselves in order to live within it and of course (Christian mode activated) man cannot easily change, if at all. Eventually the plucky revolutionaries are left with a choice between giving up and going home or massacring those who cannot or will not change to fit Utopia. Often they choose the latter. They haven't been hijacked I'm afraid... they are always doomed to play out that way, the surviving revolutionaries become the monsters they believed they were fighting or worse.



^ One of the reasons I suspect this democratic experiment is going to end in ... failure and a mountain of corpses.



This may not be the thread for it, considering we were talking about more abstract patterns but:

The foundations of the house are the ethno-religious components of our, scratch that, all civilisations.

As relates to the economic side of things:
- The undermining of Christianity and its most important job: maintaining the married family. The great safety net and social support structure has been destroyed and replaced by the government through social programs, in a substandard fashion, to the point where it now plays a significant role in our looming national bankruptcy. The death of the protestant work ethic is also a factor in the Anglo world.
- Automatic trust between strangers is disappearing, undermined primarily by ethnic and religious diversity (link to the infamous Putnam) and that kind of trust is absolutely key for an advanced economy and functional contract law.
- A general unwillingness to control or shut out foreign (beholden to other national sentiments) elements from our economies, because that would be racism oh noes.

It's only in recent decades that capitalism has come to actually resemble the ridiculous caricature put forward by Marx and company



I don't believe the call to turn the other cheek means embracing pacifism, nor do many schools of Christian thought.

Was thinking about this thread last night when I couldn't sleep. Last time I read it there were no responses and I haven't read all the ones there have been so apologies if I go over old ground.

I share Anthrax's evolutionary biology background, although I have pivoted towards policy since graduating.

I don't think anything Anthrax has said would be controversial with policy professionals.

What might be a bit more controversial is why this means that the US Federal Government is inherently conservative. In this context that doesn't mean "Republican-leaning", it means "anti-radical". I'm going to explain that in probably quite a rambly fashion.

There are three things necessary for evolution to occur:

- There must be variation
- There must be successes and failures
- There must be ways for information about success to be passed between "generations"

Hopefully you can see that all three of these things apply to governments. Not all governments have exactly the same politics. Some governments fail and either stop existing, or more commonly simply change control. And it's relatively easy for information about the success of policies to pass from person to person and government to government.

So evolution requires failure. Maybe it's only relative failure, but it is failure nonetheless.

One important concept in determining the ability of a system to emerge stronger from failure is antifragility. If you are fragile, you break. If you are too robust, then you ride through the failure without improving. But if you are anti-fragile, then parts break, but the system gets stronger.

There are lots of ways that antifragility applies to politics. I think it is one of the main functions of minor parties in FPTP systems (throw out a load of ideas, and those which are actually good get picked up by the major parties while hopefully nobody suffers through the bad ones). But I'm less interested in parties, and more in governments.

Properly designed, the world governance system can be thought of as antifragile. Let a small country try out a new policy. If they fail, they fail. Their residents suffer a bit, and there's a small spillover, but in a year or so everything is better again. If they succeed, maybe a bigger country can take it. Eventually, America and China could look at adopting it. But if America starts off with the radical policy and it goes wrong, the whole world suffers.

America has a particular advantage because it has many subdivisions. You don't just have fifty states (plus change), but those states are often divided up into autonomous counties and even cities. So San Francisco's disastrous rent control policy can be adopted just in San Francisco, and when it fails, other cities don't adopt it. Or Dallas can try removing planning laws, and when that succeeds, other cities can look at adopting it, and maybe even states can, and eventually the government can.

Rather than trying to pioneer things, the most powerful governments should be adopting the policies of the most successful pioneers. The US should be relying on countries like Estonia, Singapore, Botswana, and Finland, as well as enterprising states like California, Texas, Wisconsin, and Delaware, and adopting the policies that work best for them.

As Anthrax said, the concept of trialling policies before adopting them is not new, but there needs to be less fear of learning from the best practice of other countries.