Fatal Flaws 2 - This time it's societal
Link to part 1 here.
I didn’t go into enough detail about what I mean by fatal flaws in that post.
Let’s start with some Bayesian math and sophistry. Everything has a beginning and everything has an end. Using Bayesian math, if you know how long something has been around you can give rough estimates as to how long it might last. In that way, we can say, nearly everything we know and love today will likely be gone by the end of our lives.
If we enhance that Bayesian math with a little bit of a reality check, we will probably conclude that everything we know and love will likely end far sooner than that. We live in an ever-reinventing order, a continuum of society, a ship that is constantly changing all of its parts that we break into distinct segments in order to understand the rise and fall.
Fatal flaws are core contradictions of a system. Aspirational goals that the system very much did not embody at its inception. Phrased optimistically, these are the very problems the project set out to solve. Any project that stays alive too long though risks keeping the very problem it tried to solve around. Because after all…if all of the problems you set to solve are solved, what use are you any more?
I remember a presentation at Google from the Trust and Safety team - the measures they put in place would cut down on one particular type of fraud. Those measures might cost $10k/month and now only address 1% of active fraud cases. They would often get the question: why spend so much on these small cases? The answer is simple: if you remove the measure you will see a rapid rise in those types of cases.
Recurring problems of societal organization are a bit like bacteria in your body infecting you. You need antibiotics to fight them and you need to finish the whole course to completely eliminate the bacteria and build up a natural immunity to that thing again. However, the natural immunity might not come if the structure of your society is what led to the social ill in the first place, it might be that a strong enough dose of antibiotics will indeed take down the whole system.
This is what I mean by fatal flaws. It is a flaw that is obvious, needs to be fixed and in attempting to fix it will certainly destabilize and destroy the society as we know it. Race in America. Caste in India. Han-ness in China.
My only faith is that the order will always re-invent itself. We will quickly and efficiently come together as a country again and build up networks of good faith. I hope. The old system will die, let’s hope the new one gets here soon.