How to design better societies
To look at how we can improve things in various domains of society, we need to identify the system that we want to change. These systems are highly complex to grasp your head around(be it economics or politics). How do you understand complex systems like society and its salient aspects?
I have found it interesting to start at what society considers taboo. In many cultures, cannibalism is outlawed, but in many societies, it is deemed to be sacred. For ancient Egyptian pharaohs, it guaranteed an eternal afterlife. For Druids, it might have been connected with agriculture and fertility. Some monks and ascetics practice cannibalism in some cultures as well. The word "taboo" denotes the points where the sacred and profane converge: sexual intercourse and the taking of life. What a particular society finds as taboo is particularly telling about that society.
Another way to look at salient features of a society is to look at its emergent properties. I have written about how spontaneous orders can emerge without a concerted effort to reach that goal. The economy is an emergent property- people trying to satisfy their material needs unconsciously organize themselves into an economy through various individual acts of buying and selling; it happens without anyone in charge or with anyone consciously planning it. Morality is an emergentist phenomenon. Moral truths are like truths of the market. Is gold intrinsically more valuable than silver? Would aliens coming to Earth agree that gold is more valuable than silver? I wonder what aliens would think of cannibalism especially considering that 1500+ species on Earth show cannibalistic behavior. Morality and taboos are two sides of the same coin. One disclaimer I'd like to point out is that not all phenomena giving spontaneous order are virtuous (i.e., slavery). It is up to us to identify those sub-optimal outcomes to design better societies.
The genes in a developing embryo organize themselves to make a liver cell and, in another way, to make a muscle cell. Flying birds adapt to the actions of their neighbors, unconsciously organizing themselves into a flock. Organisms constantly adapt to each other through evolution, thereby organizing themselves into an exquisitely tuned ecosystem. Atoms search for a minimum energy state by forming chemical bonds, thereby organizing themselves into structures known as molecules. In every case, groups of agents seeking mutual accommodation and self-consistency somehow manage to transcend themselves, acquiring collective properties such as life, thought, and purpose that they might never have possessed individually. All of this happens despite entropy and increasing disorder in the universe.
The second law of thermodynamics expresses a fundamental and simple truth about the universe: that disorder, characterized as a quantity known as entropy, always increases. The only time it might decrease (still disputed) will be at the end of the universe during a big crunch. Coming back to present timescales, how does such beautiful spontaneous murmurations of starlings(see video below) arise in a world with an increasing disorder?
The world's general tendency toward decay results in rusting iron and rotting logs. Water cools to the temperature of its surroundings. Nature seems to be less interested in creating structures than tearing structures apart and mixing things up into an average. Indeed, the process of disorder and decay seems inevitable, which can be paraphrased as "You can't unscramble an egg." Left to themselves, atoms will mix and randomize themselves as much as possible. Fallen logs rot — but trees also grow. What explains this? Once you grasp the underlying forces that give rise to these structures and complexity, you will better design artificial systems.
In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken science to its foundations with the realization that elementary dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily complex behavior; witness the endlessly intricate beauty of fractals or the foaming turbulence of a river. And yet chaos by itself doesn't explain the structure, the coherence, the self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems.
Complexity deals with understanding complex adaptive systems. A complex system is composed of many components that may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructures such as power grid, transportation or communication systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living cell, and the entire universe. The study of complex systems regards collective or system-wide behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them. As someone who studied theoretical particle physics, this does not come as second nature quickly. This is despite studying Quantum mechanics at one point in time, which is as non-intuitive as it gets in Physics.
In complexity, the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos. All these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement, where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil. Furthermore, these complex, self-organizing systems are adaptive in that they don't just passively respond to events the way a rock might roll around in an earthquake. They actively try to turn whatever happens to their advantage and can be considered anti-fragile.
Now, going back to taboos, they happen to be at the edge of profanity and sacred. Interesting patterns occur at the edge of chaos and order. A simple example would be to imagine spilling a little water onto the surface of a highly polished tray; it beads up into a complex pattern of droplets. And it does so because two countervailing forces are at work. There is gravity, which tries to spread out the water to make a very thin, flat film across the whole surface. That's negative feedback. And there is surface tension, the attraction of one water molecule to another, which tries to pull the liquid together into compact globules. That's positive feedback. The mix of the two forces produces a complex pattern of beads.
The vital thing to observe about the actual living economy out there is that it is path-dependent, it's complicated, it's evolving, it's open, and it's organic. In the real world, outcomes don't just happen; they build up gradually as small chance events become magnified by positive feedbacks. And they don't magically find the best possible outcomes, with slavery being an obvious example. Less obvious examples were when an engineer named Christopher Scholes designed the QWERTY layout in 1873 specifically to slow typists down; the typewriting machines of the day tended to jam if the typist went too fast. The QWERTY layout won out despite not being the optimal keyboard layout for typing. Similarly, VHS format won out over Beta format, despite Beta being technologically superior.
If small chance events can lock you into any of several possible outcomes, then the outcome that's selected may not be the best. And that means that maximum individual freedom and the free market might not produce the best of all possible worlds.
Coming back to how can you use these theoretical constructs in your day-to-day life. If you want to understand the evolution of complex systems, keep an eye out on the edges or what could be considered fringes or be in the fringes yourself to effect change. Be it in business(that startup that is making ripples now could displace a giant in no time if you don't pay attention), or society(the #metoo movement is a classic example that started on the fringes and then became widespread globally with its impact spanning churches to media to the field of astronomy). It is hard to make predictions about complex systems, just as Darwin was only able to theorize how evolution worked but couldn't predict how the species would evolve after a million years. That said, it is up to us to identify the current outcomes that are sub-optimal and harmful in the long run for humanity. We need to look at the status quo, which is not sustainable for the environment, and go carbon-negative fast. When the automotive industry was still in its infancy, petrol(gasoline) was considered the least-promising power source. Its chief rival, steam, was well developed, familiar, and safe; petrol was expensive, noisy, dangerously explosive, hard to obtain in the right grade, and required a new kind of engine containing complicated new parts. Petrol engines were also inherently less fuel-efficient. If things had been different and if steam engines had benefited from the same ninety years of development lavished on gasoline engines, then we might now be living with considerably less air pollution and substantially less dependence on fossil fuels.
So, which are some of the systems you are impacted by and can identify them as sub-optimal and unsustainable? And what are some interesting movements in the edge that you can identify and be part of to effect changes?
