How Social Engineering Drives History

Notes from Samo Burja

Society itself is an engineered system. Without socialisation most of us wouldn't be able to interface with material technology. Technology only reproduces through instruction or imitation — and only embedded in a larger social organism that puts it to use. Devices have both social and material contexts.

The succession problem (a social problem!) is the bottleneck on the propagation of many material technologies. An invention is not adopted due to its mere existence, but only when it can find a stable socioeconomic niche.

The industrial revolution required a revolution in the capacity to educate masses of people on how to use new machinery. This was achieved by new techniques of discipline.

Milities loses the ability to evaluate good designs from bad due to institutional decay during long periods of peace, without active demand, productive capacity decays from lack of use.

Social patterns and institutions were designed not discovered.

Useful industrial capacity is sustained and improved.

Even organisations dedicated to the creation of new technologies seem to become hostile to innovation over time. This simple observation rules out the proposition of reforming an organisation as a way to generate innovation.

Committees are a device for generating the illusion of avoiding risk and avoiding responsibilities by increasing perceived accountability even whilst it lessens it.

A functional institution is much easier to build given a metric to measure it and against which one can maintain alignment.

Movement from a focus on external goals towards self-preservation and the defense of resources, this is not correlated with effective organisations.

Demo-2 Mission — brought two astronauts into orbit — the result of the functional institution SpaceX.

Any pursuit that requires developing implicit expertise and repeated practice will benefit from individual instruction. The esoteric and well-grounded knowledge needed for creation can’t be achieved at industrial scales.

Hume’s is-ought problem — moral conclusions cannot be inferred from nonmoral premises.

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