The Fault in our Models
A Strategist, an Atheist, and a Philosopher walk into a bar...
Popup City
I’ll be headed to Healdsburg, California to help run an event at Edge Esmeralda. From June 23rd to 29th, past and present Summer of Protocols people will get together to work on two things.
First, their individual projects, ranging from a study of the cultural backlash against therapy to a proposal to improve prescribed burn protocols in California. Second, everyone will be giving some serious thought as to what role protocols have to play in the future. This could be in areas like the economy, war, waste management, olympics, etc.
Edge Esmeralda is a popup city which will be active for about a month. It’s a weird blend of people with both spiritual and entrepreneurial tendencies. Laurie described them as “hippies who want to be rich” which I imagine is apt, although I haven’t met most of the attendees. But I’d bet that the majority would have been happy to meet Steve Jobs, one of the world’s most successful barefoot capitalists.
One of the refreshing things about this group is that they’re interested in fixing things, not just critiquing the world. Discussions revolve around need-solution pairs (link) rather than getting stuck on defining what the problem is. There’s always a risk of analysis paralysis, but the probability of it will be lower at this event than it would elsewhere.
Meetings are overrated, but getting people in a room together is underrated. Xerox PARC, which was a famous research arm of the Xerox printer company, bet their house on this idea. The director of the research program didn’t have many requirements for the team, but did mandate that everyone show up in the beanbag room all day, once a week. That was it. From PARC came inventions like ethernet, mouse-operated graphical user interfaces, and laser printers.
Boyd, Popper, Dawkins
The line “Inside every man there are two wolves.” is one of my favorite memes. It had honest beginnings as a folktale, meant to communicate a moral: you are what you do. Today, people misuse it in every way imaginable, saying things like “Inside you are two wolves. One wants poutine. The other one wants poutine too.” Anyway…
That kind of dualism is present in many people’s thinking, including mine. For whatever reason, we tend to split the world into tidy halves. Left and right, dead and live, liberal and conservative, good and evil, yada yada.
One of the better examples of dualistic thinking is John Boyd’s essay, Creation and Destruction (link). Boyd was a military strategist, arguably the greatest since Sun Tzu. In this essay, he argues that we do, and must, continually destroy and remake our mental models of the world.
“...we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms.”
- John Boyd
Richard Dawkins is a biologist and an evangelical atheist. He popularized Selfish Gene Theory and has written a ton of books. One of his lines goes something like, “To survive, an organism must contain an accurate model of its external environment.” Since the world is frequently changing, any successful organism’s internal model must be frequently updated (and, by Boyd’s logic, frequently destroyed).
Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies makes the case that this dynamic is present not only in individuals, but in two-party political systems (link). Progressive and conservative parties create a tension that resembles the continual reinvention of an environmental model. Policies around pollution or forest conservation, for example, benefit from evolving ideas of how to manage them. Progressive proponents invent new ideas for management, conservatives defend existing best practices.
Model Drift
If you look at a society as an organism, its survival depends on it containing an accurate model of its environment. This isn’t a sufficient condition for success, but a necessary one.
As individuals, we do a pretty good job of modeling our social environments. We have a ton of feedback loops, from praise to bullying, that ensure that happens. Plus social media kinda put these loops on overdrive.
However, our models of the physical environment are becoming inaccurate. For example, if you grow up in a city, with the agricultural processes that sustain you out of sight, it’s highly likely that you won’t have an accurate model of the complexities and fragilities of that reality.
Which is a problem, because I’d hazard to guess that an increasing proportion of policymakers have grown up insulated from their physical environment. Maybe a two-party system makes up for this, but I think the deteriorating quality of our individual models is bad news.
Intellectually and politically, it’s the equivalent of growing a monocrop. If everyone running the show has the same, inaccurate environmental model, there are going to be some serious structural weaknesses in how we make large-scale decisions.
Interested to hear how edge Esmeralda goes