Really appreciate the commentary and thoughts! Few comments:
1. > Those who want to establish a new government always say “This time it will be better” but are almost never right. -- I disagree with this. Our institutions today, considered in any long aec of history, are better, at least eventually.
2. A microcosm of this might be corporate reorgs, which provide both positive and negative insights, though at least proves reorgs and shaking up need not be fatal or detrimental to legitimacy. Accenture is one that's done this to grart effect.
3. Most long standing institutions do evolve. They change their mandate, their charter, their methods and more. I'm just suggesting they also add their own setups to that mix. I admit there are practical problems aplenty, but I'm not convinced it's a legitimacy crisis.
1: Governments eventually get better (usually), but revolutions are like resetting the clock. My comment was in context of "Let's tear this down and build it anew" and not "We're going to keep chipping at the granite slab until we have a David" Our institutions today have (mostly) had continuity for decades to centuries, and the ones that are the worst are often the newest and youngest (Looking at you homeland security).
2. Reorgs might be a mechanism that is least likely to bring about a catastrophic failure (although I think this varies by industry, since there are certainly some industries with large amounts of tribal knowledge which simply can't be replicated once disrupted)
3. Is evolution the same as shaking things up? Perhaps this is a referential gap, but when I think "evolution" I think "slow response to environmental factors." When I think "shaking things up" I think "rapid radical changes." Evolving police to go from "We catch burglars" to "We investigate organized crime" is an evolutionary change. Changing police from "we catch burglars" to "We hunt political dissidents" is pretty radical (or at least in America it is, can't speak for the world)
I think perhaps there was an inferential gap. I didn't mean it to be one revolution after another, I meant we should focus on trying experiments with the ecology, this can indeed be evolutionary though that still includes mutations aplenty. My contention is that stasis has significant downsides, and its worth taking the unknown downside risk of experimentation to help us evolve towards better solutions. Sure we can do it gradually, but we can't do it if we're only willing to move once we've exhausted the ways in which something might go wrong.
If I came across as suggesting "Don't try anything until we have determined nothing can go wrong" then I apologize. I was seeking for those who would be shakers to pause and game out how things might, or just even how things are likely, to go wrong. Often times when I ask someone how "their ideal changes might go wrong" they give me a look as if I just grew a third eye. "Failure to plan is planning for failure" is an idiom I try to keep in mind when discussing changes. Your plan can never cover everything, and there are unknown unknowns you can't possibly find, but at least trying to make some contingencies and options is a pretty good idea.
Agreed! That's actually congruent. Right now I feel we're stuck in the too scared to do things phase, whereas I'd like us to be in ready to try stuff out and we'll sort out if sthing bad happens phase, definitely on the margins and maybe on average.
You both may find this interesting. https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129 There are discernible stages that systems go through under stress up to a breaking point. If things don't go too far, we have growth and hormesis - anti-fragility. My sense is that we don't have to do anything special to engineer disruption. Transaction costs tend to increase over time in systems, and that leads to exploration of alternatives provided the costs of pursuing them are not prohibitive and they are able to gain ground. Disruption, in that sense, is a solved problem, I think.
So I did my best to read that article, or at least skim it. I'll be honest, it's far outside of my wheelhouse. I understood most of the math, but would be taking interpretations of that math and validity of the math presented on faith. For what it's worth, I gathered that they've figured out how to describe this process, and perhaps it might be legible to some, but I don't see how it would be legible to those with an agenda, nor how it would impress upon them that they're actively working to hit a fatal breaking point.
So I guess my take on it is "It might be 'solved' in an academic sense, but I don't see how this is going to turn into it being solved in a state/lobby/activist actor sense." Since that is what I'm concerned about: in the attempt to make an effort to change things (for what is imagined to be better), they will push too far, ignoring the warning signs, and things will fall apart around them. The theory seems to rely of identification of contributing factors, or at least accounting for them, which does not seem to be a function of those who are intent on change.
Really appreciate the commentary and thoughts! Few comments:
1. > Those who want to establish a new government always say “This time it will be better” but are almost never right. -- I disagree with this. Our institutions today, considered in any long aec of history, are better, at least eventually.
2. A microcosm of this might be corporate reorgs, which provide both positive and negative insights, though at least proves reorgs and shaking up need not be fatal or detrimental to legitimacy. Accenture is one that's done this to grart effect.
3. Most long standing institutions do evolve. They change their mandate, their charter, their methods and more. I'm just suggesting they also add their own setups to that mix. I admit there are practical problems aplenty, but I'm not convinced it's a legitimacy crisis.
1: Governments eventually get better (usually), but revolutions are like resetting the clock. My comment was in context of "Let's tear this down and build it anew" and not "We're going to keep chipping at the granite slab until we have a David" Our institutions today have (mostly) had continuity for decades to centuries, and the ones that are the worst are often the newest and youngest (Looking at you homeland security).
2. Reorgs might be a mechanism that is least likely to bring about a catastrophic failure (although I think this varies by industry, since there are certainly some industries with large amounts of tribal knowledge which simply can't be replicated once disrupted)
3. Is evolution the same as shaking things up? Perhaps this is a referential gap, but when I think "evolution" I think "slow response to environmental factors." When I think "shaking things up" I think "rapid radical changes." Evolving police to go from "We catch burglars" to "We investigate organized crime" is an evolutionary change. Changing police from "we catch burglars" to "We hunt political dissidents" is pretty radical (or at least in America it is, can't speak for the world)
I think perhaps there was an inferential gap. I didn't mean it to be one revolution after another, I meant we should focus on trying experiments with the ecology, this can indeed be evolutionary though that still includes mutations aplenty. My contention is that stasis has significant downsides, and its worth taking the unknown downside risk of experimentation to help us evolve towards better solutions. Sure we can do it gradually, but we can't do it if we're only willing to move once we've exhausted the ways in which something might go wrong.
If I came across as suggesting "Don't try anything until we have determined nothing can go wrong" then I apologize. I was seeking for those who would be shakers to pause and game out how things might, or just even how things are likely, to go wrong. Often times when I ask someone how "their ideal changes might go wrong" they give me a look as if I just grew a third eye. "Failure to plan is planning for failure" is an idiom I try to keep in mind when discussing changes. Your plan can never cover everything, and there are unknown unknowns you can't possibly find, but at least trying to make some contingencies and options is a pretty good idea.
Agreed! That's actually congruent. Right now I feel we're stuck in the too scared to do things phase, whereas I'd like us to be in ready to try stuff out and we'll sort out if sthing bad happens phase, definitely on the margins and maybe on average.
You both may find this interesting. https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0129 There are discernible stages that systems go through under stress up to a breaking point. If things don't go too far, we have growth and hormesis - anti-fragility. My sense is that we don't have to do anything special to engineer disruption. Transaction costs tend to increase over time in systems, and that leads to exploration of alternatives provided the costs of pursuing them are not prohibitive and they are able to gain ground. Disruption, in that sense, is a solved problem, I think.
So I did my best to read that article, or at least skim it. I'll be honest, it's far outside of my wheelhouse. I understood most of the math, but would be taking interpretations of that math and validity of the math presented on faith. For what it's worth, I gathered that they've figured out how to describe this process, and perhaps it might be legible to some, but I don't see how it would be legible to those with an agenda, nor how it would impress upon them that they're actively working to hit a fatal breaking point.
So I guess my take on it is "It might be 'solved' in an academic sense, but I don't see how this is going to turn into it being solved in a state/lobby/activist actor sense." Since that is what I'm concerned about: in the attempt to make an effort to change things (for what is imagined to be better), they will push too far, ignoring the warning signs, and things will fall apart around them. The theory seems to rely of identification of contributing factors, or at least accounting for them, which does not seem to be a function of those who are intent on change.