The Thousand Small Fixes: On Iteration, Selection, and the Perils of Grand Solutions

 My Experience in Architecture School

Every semester of architecture school you have these group projects, and because college professors are ignorant communists, they never bother to appoint a leader for each team. The result is that team members often spend as much time trying to escape doing work as actually doing the work. The biggest bully winds up dominating the team, and hot and mid women alike escape their duties because the men of the team don't want to compromise their chance to fuck her.

When I was completing my degree at university, I was on a team with a bully. This was for an urban planning semester, and we were compiling information on a particular neighborhood about all the flaws and problems. I wanted to take a "dozens of solutions approach," where we documented each and every problem in the neighborhood and then proposed small solutions to fix each of them. The bully who dominated our team, a man who happened to be right wing on the only team of right-leaning males, demanded that we all agree to his grand vision to remake the downtown area with big public infrastructure and sculptures. Not wanting to do more battle with him or get ejected from the team, I went along with his proposal. These are student projects, and it's not like any of this is actually going to be built in the real world, though design juries are composed of actual professionals from the real world who occasionally appropriate a student's idea.

During the final presentation, it was a disaster. And to make matters worse, there was an all-female team that independently did the exact "dozen solutions" approach that I wanted to take and received wide praise for all their little innovative solutions. By addressing all the little flaws in the neighborhood, they created a cumulative uplifting of the whole area. They had used my approach and beaten me with it while I gave in to some bully and got trounced. I had to defend a presentation by a man I didn't even like while critiquing a presentation by a team that had taken my own approach. And all for a grade I didn't really care about in a tedious semester I didn't really care about. Thus is my real-life experience with the "great man / fearless leader" archetype.

There's always a "great man."

The Best Solutions Are Many Small Solutions

There's a fundamental recursive nature to reality going on here, and that is that every big, great solution sets off a chain of many small recursive side effects. Big solutions generally cause more problems than they solve—think Communist revolution. You would think that a conservative would understand that, but give a man power and watch him change. I have described before the problems-solution cycle. This is a cycle where every problem demands a solution, and every solution creates one or more problems of varying magnitude. The libertarian response is to throw up their hands and say that the government shouldn't bother doing anything. This is a mistake and fundamentally misunderstands the situation. The correct approach is to create new solutions whose side effects diminish in magnitude. If every solution creates a new problem, then the new problem needs to be much smaller than the old one. If enough cumulative solutions like this are put in place, then the total uncontrolled entropy in the system can be reduced to an absolute minimum. This is probably a principle of physics itself, a principle of systems in general, and you could probably plot it on a graph: that the first solution has a high-level magnitude of negative side effects, while each successive one (when done correctly) has smaller and smaller severity.

You can see this principle in action with history. The invention of agriculture was supposed to solve starvation and the human calorie deficit problem. It created the problems of feudalism, slavery, and pandemics. Slavery has never been completely abolished in the world, and the problems of democracy are legendary. Everyone thought pandemics were abolished until recently.

It goes on and on. Air conditioning solves a problem, creates social isolation as another problem. Smartphones solve a problem, create social isolation even more. Cars solve a problem, create auto-dependent cities as another problem. Birth control solves a problem, crashes birth rates and creates nasty women as another problem. Wherever there is a solution, I guarantee there is another problem created by that solution. This is especially true with technology but is also true with law. Most of what governments do is try to fix problems created by their predecessors. The problem-solutions cycle is recursive, with each new solution producing the next set of problems like turbulence in the flow of a liquid. This is why good solutions inevitably reform existing systems; they straighten out that turbulence into a laminar flow. When it's done wrong, the magnitude of chaos in society increases. This is why I consider modern internet technology to be more trouble than it's worth; it has obviously increased the magnitude of total chaos in the system.

This is also why revolution is disastrous. When you have a revolution, you are just starting the whole process over from the beginning. First, you start with a big solution, and then you iterate continuously through its problems-solutions cycle, trying to solve each little problem created by the previous solution. Far easier to just take a known political form or policy and improve upon it. Civilization does this instinctively anyway; the modern Chinese system is an improvement on the old imperial exam system. The modern Constitutional order is an improvement on ancient Greek democracy. Even religions get upgrades to make them better at being whatever they are supposed to be doing. The only mystery here is why it takes so long to iterate through new organizational forms and why politicians are so uninterested in running beta tests.

The Location of Natural Selection May Move But Its Existence Is Not Abolished

People do this thing where they scoff at selection effects. They do everything in their power to argue that selection effects don't exist or that discussing natural selection is social Darwinism, as if one could object to a fact using a moral injunction. If you know anything about reality, you know that moral injunctions don't change it. But since humans never really grow out of the childhood activity of make-believe, there is a gigantic subset of the population for which saying that something shouldn't be true is adequate justification for establishing it as false. These people engage in "ought therefore is," a form of logic that says things ought to be a certain way and therefore they are. I heard this excellently described as "wishcasting" and may explain why so many people on the left used to love Harry Potter. When you think language is a spell, then reciting the correct language changes reality, and therefore good people have good opinions, and evil people have evil opinions. Since talking about reality contradicts the wishcast, it is an evil activity. This is the old "facts don't care about your feelings" and "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed," both of which are true statements and both of which go in one ear and out the other. (The first of these two statements comes from Ben Shapiro, and the second from Ayn Rand).

Anyway, there is a greater point at play here, a more sophisticated and high-resolution picture, which is that the location of natural selection may change but not its existence. Let's go through some examples:

If one creates artificial womb technology, then reproduction is handled by the corporations or governments that breed humans. This means that the location of natural selection is moved to the government or corporation, or perhaps the future fathers that pay for the gestation of their children. Right now, the location of natural selection is the traditional heteronormative patriarchal family unit (or whatever you want to call it).

If androids replace humanity, then the location position of natural selection is moved to the factories that make them.

If consciousness lives on a machine, then the position of natural selection is moved to the software update.

If the controller of natural selection is a religion, then the location at which natural selection occurs is the ideological corporation (the church), and the church is partially or fully in control of the direction of natural selection.

Selection is never abolished; it is simply relocated. If the selection is not genetic, then it is ideological. Everything undergoes natural selection: language, culture, nations, businesses, business models, political forms, laws, the practices of individual families. If it takes a thousand years for the welfare state to cause the genetic decay of humanity, it might only take three generations to cause cultural decay within the family, as drug addicts and wife beaters out-reproduce everyone else. Decay does not have to be genetic to happen, it does not have to occur within the family to happen; natural selection is everywhere and operating at all times. Social Darwinism is the only view consistent with actually existing reality. Social Darwinism just is, and no transcendent leverage exists that could defeat it, since it is something we are within. Social Darwinism, and Darwinism of every form, is the actually existing nature of the universe that encompasses us. There is no moral that can rise above it because morals themselves are within it. Even moral codes undergo natural selection, as those with morals that contradict survival fail to survive and reproduce and to transmit their morals to future generations. Survival doesn't mean you're right, but death definitely means you're wrong. Survival is the beginning of morality but not its totality. For something to be moral, it must at minimum facilitate its own survival and reproduction, but that only establishes a minimum criterion of not-wrongness. An ideology that leads to your death is automatically wrong, but an ideology that leads to your survival is not automatically right.

Different locations of natural selection create different incentive structures. A corporation has incentive structures radically contradictory to things like individual liberty and human ability. The incentives of corporations that use artificial wombs are much more like those of ant colonies and other eusocial animals. Take the naked mole rat, for example; it has lost the ability to experience pain because it has been selected as a eusocial creature to take care of the offspring of the queen. Say what you want about the nuclear family, but parents have a strong incentive to educate their children and make them capable, since capable children are better equipped to navigate the world and reproduce the genes of their parents. The competitive nature of sex and reproduction between families, combined with the altruistic nature of a healthy parent relationship, pushes humans toward greater capability and intelligence. Oh sure, there are abusive parents, but those represent failures of the model, which would normally be eliminated by selection forces in the absence of the welfare state. The "compassionate" welfare state creates more dysfunctional families and more abuse by breeding more abusive families into existence, and this happens independently of any genetic component, since selection affects the culture of the family and not just its genes. The incentive structures of a selection system are tremendously important because we want to live in a world where human rights exist, and if the selection structure goes against that, then human rights must constantly swim upstream against the material force of incentives. A crashing birth rate creates a profound incentive for government to care about the conditions of the population. An infinitely expanding population creates a disincentive to care about human rights and an incentive to treat humans as disposable. Creating a moral paradigm that respects the rights of individuals is not achieved through wishcasting but through incentive engineering. When the right incentives are engineered, the selection system then favors the preservation and expansion of human rights. While moral systems may have no transcendent leverage to abolish natural selection, they may access leverage to manipulate natural selection by closing off the worst and most degrading potential futures it could evolve into. Natural selection may be forced in a particular direction with incentives. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" is exactly the technique you use to preserve and expand freedom, and you do that by choosing the location of your selection. You don't allow corporations to use artificial wombs, for example, but you do allow single men to use them. You don't allow the factory to mass-update android code, but you do allow the androids to trade code amongst themselves. Since selection is never abolished but its location can be changed, controlling the location is controlling your destiny. This is an understanding with parallels in The Art of War, since one must be subjected to selection forces, one can choose the location at which the battle for survival occurs, and thus give oneself an advantage over adversaries and adversarial conditions.

The patriarchal family unit is a known commodity, a big solution with countless small recursive compensatory mechanisms to limit its abuses. It has gone through the problems-solution cycle and come out with laws, cultural limitations, and even reproductive technologies that limit its power. It may be oppressive, but so is every location at which survival and reproduction take place. The question is not whether it oppresses but whether or not it oppresses in the manner in which you get a tactical advantage for your flourishing and human rights. Since there is nothing outside of nature, and since wishcasting does not make things real, all we can do is choose the location of our battle for survival. The goal is not exactly to maximize chances of survival—survival is only the beginning of ethics—we can do even better than merely survive. The goal is to control all iterative branch points going forward so that every battle works in favor of our rights and flourishing.

Changing the point at which natural selection occurs creates a new big problem, which then requires countless secondary recursive solutions. Changing the point at which natural selection occurs is more than likely going to be a disaster that creates horrors beyond comprehension, but humans cannot help themselves where technology is concerned.

The patriarchal family unit is a known commodity, a big solution with countless small recursive compensatory mechanisms to limit its abuses. It has gone through the problems-solution cycle and come out with laws, cultural limitations, and even reproductive technologies that limit its power. A corporation with a warehouse full of artificial wombs has none of those compensatory mechanisms limiting its power and abuse.

—Fin—