Dynamics of Embodied Perception
No ideology will be perfect. All understandings all have flaws. And yet groups need an ideology to coordinate effectively in real time.
Tight coordination requires communication, communication requires language, and each language is an ideology — a set of beliefs about how the world works. Speak too much English and you’ll think of the world as consisting of “things” that have “properties” and perform “actions”. These concepts, like all concepts, work until they don’t. Gödel grins beyond the limit of it all.
If you point out the flaws in the ideology your group is using, you prevent the group from functioning as effectively as if those flaws were just ignored. Everyone working on a stupid plan often goes better than people disagreeing over which plan to use. When you criticize a group’s ideology, you lose all standing in that group — even if you love the group and want to see it improved. The group identifies with its ideology.
You can’t plan out all of your interactions; a smile must be unforced in the moment to be trusted. The only way to gain power is to internalize a model; not two truths and a lie, but 900 truths and 30 faulty assumptions.
When you sit in a meeting, make eye contact with everyone else in the meeting. See who’s evaluating the content, who’s evaluating the people, and who’s skimming the news on their phone.
Your capacity to respond appropriately depends upon you having internalized the model by which the group communicates. Your capacity to reflect reality depends upon you refusing to internalize any model that has any flaws, which they all do.
Hence we see a natural pattern:
There is a problem with the world; the current models just don’t work. We know that! but we can’t say it. We lose face, lose status needed to access power inside the current model.
Some people talking about this problem come up with a new idea. It’s worse. Not totally wrong, but just not as good. It goes nowhere.
Other talking about this problem come up with a new idea. It’s slightly better. No, it’s not perfect. But it is slightly better than the previous ideas.
Rather than work within the structure of an old idea, they work under the impression of the new one. Like most systems, it grows so slowly that nobody notices, until BAM it takes off.
All the hard, risky work is done before anybody notices. By the time anyone does notice it, it’s got massive momentum behind it. We see the system grow from small to big, but we miss the long, lonely exponential tail of work needed to even make it small.
From the outside, it seemed almost inevitable, because we only start watching after the inflection point. From the inside, it seemed impossible but necessary.
The new system becomes big. It becomes powerful. And it must respond in real time, effectively, to the challenges it faces. Its model crystallizes, and becomes brittle.
It too will eventually run up against the limits of its capacity to accurately reflect reality, and then its’ sunset will begin. Slowly at first, and then all at once.
For each predictive domain, you can either rise upon an existing model, or you can try to build a new one. You can’t do both, but the models do stack.
A company is a model of reality: people need a better way to shave! Most razors suck. Can’t say this in the boardroom of the OLD CORP, because you’d be sticking your neck out for no good reason.
You could try, within the halls of OLD CORP, to launch a new razor via their incubator program. It probably won’t work. “People like the current razors just fine” says the woman who could give you the budget. “Don’t try to differentiate too hard from the existing product” say the people in charge of communicating.
Better to just go on your own, to make some razors that don’t suck. Now you watch as OLD CORP stumbles along, with only momentum sustaining it because its capacity to innovate has long died. Eventually it falls, and you are now the razor king!
But you are too busy reacting to reality to continue striving to improve your modeling of it. Nobody has time to look at the stars when they are running at full speed.
Yet though you did rewrite the current stack frame, you haven’t modified the one beneath it. You are executing on top of an old model, that says human activity is oriented around commerce. People have tried rewriting that one, but most of those rewrites have failed. Who’s to say they all will?
Perhaps you try to produce a new razor that works on a different model; with teams of trained experts providing shaves for free only in exchange for a positive review, and the peer network of reputations sustains itself, because we find that it’s now much easier to manufacture razor blades than it is to manufacture trust, and if someone’s gonna shave you, well, boy, you’d better trust them.
Even commerce itself has an older, much older model behind it — the nation state. Could you build a commercial enterprise that didn’t rely on the law and courts, and instead resolved disputes through blockchains and reputation networks?
Or would you abandon commerce on top of this new stack, and build a different model of reality instead?
The environment changes, and organisms that are adapted to the new environment prosper. They have learned; they have better modeled the environment. What they don’t tell you in evolution school is that we change the environment ourselves. The first large scale environmental catastrophe was when those damn respirators emitted so much oxygen, that the atmosphere shifted from being filled with ammonia to being full of oxygen. Oxygen was poison. And yet now we all breathe oxygen. We breathe fire! But we don’t even realize it, cause we’re all doing it.
The stock market enables evolution with virtual organisms; mergers and acquisitions are the new multi-cellular entities.
Big things eat small things. Better to be bigger! Yet it took a few minutes for the signal to travel from the tail of a sauropod to its head. If that signal was “we are being eaten”, then the sauropod might have had a chance. If it grows too much bigger, the gains from increased size get outweighed by the slower reaction time. However, if that signal was “hey look at that rock from the sky”, all the time in the world wouldn’t help.
Everything dies eventually. What would it look like if portions of the modern world — the massive enterprise, the state, academia — what would it look like if they were dying? How would we know if they were already dead?
Would they put out a press release?
Or would they just seem increasingly disconnected from reality, and then, finally, irrelevant?
