Patri Friedman makes a rare contribution to Overcoming Bias:
Like many (?most?) irrationalities, it is likely a relic of our tribal past. In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive. In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our "tribe", and it turns out that this is an inefficiently large group for most types of collective action. We evaluate the prospect of unity with ancient mental modules optimized for Dunbarian tribes, and that sphexishness leads us into disastrous collective ventures.
I just listened to Russ Roberts interview Eric Raymond on hacking last night and a similar point came up. These supposed solutions do not scale; that is, they might work for a small group (or in a software case, for a single server) but when you introduce more people, it breaks down. It's not just that I disagree with a policy or two- I know for a fact this stuff doesn't work.
No comments:
Post a Comment