(Posted as a Twitter thread, and on GETTR, Parler, and Gab, and probably worth adding to my archive here. If Twitter changes for the better, maybe I’ll let go of the need to maintain and cross-post to so many accounts…!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tremendous value of salutary feedback systems: how vitally important they are to human flourishing and to getting us out of bad situations where we’d otherwise become stuck.
A feedback mechanism is anything that course-corrects when inputs indicate something’s not right. Much of the sad state we’re in seems to be the result of inadequate or severed feedback loops. Unaccountable systems end in persistent failure.
Our neurobiology is built on feedback loops. Motor control circuits work like servo controllers – targeting a desired outcome, checking results, and adjusting motor control impulses, iteratively, in real time. The immune systems that keep us healthy are similarly feedback-based.
The scientific method, when its feedback systems are allowed to operate as they should, is able to converge on truth more reliably than most other claims to knowledge precisely because it is accountable to open scrutiny and the necessity of solid methods and reproducible results.
When the scientific practice’s essential feedback mechanisms are suppressed, science becomes becomes crippled and devolves to a garden-variety appeal to authority.
Businesses have to be accountable to their customers. The only sustainable way for them to succeed is to make those customers happy. Businesses that take insufficient interest in satisfying customers’ wants and needs, or that cheat or deceive, must either course-correct or fold.
Laws and enforcement thereof deter harmful criminal activity in people whose internal moral compasses didn’t head off or avoid such impulses at an earlier stage. Feedback systems can operate in layers, or in concert, to apply beneficial course corrections.
Democracy is a feedback mechanism that seeks to apply public accountability to the state and to those who hold office within it. To avoid pure democracy’s failure mode of mob rule, we declare certain foundational rights inalienable and codify immutable constraints on state power in a constitution.
For career politicians and immortal government programs, the name of the game is avoiding accountability at all costs. For too often, and by design, new programs and departments are created without sufficient accountability to the results they promise. Slow-to-boil public outrage rarely provides a sufficient restoring force to stop the insanity.
Major social media sites, like the legacy journalistic and media outlets that preceded them, have sought to stem political accountability and suppress the course-corrections that could result, by seeking to shape what we are allowed to know and discuss. The deception we long suspected is now being laid bare. Will this produce sufficient public outcry to force a return to less filtered and manipulated public square?
The existence of alternatives – from places we can spend our time in cyberspace to physical places we can go to live and be governed more reasonably – provides some course-correcting pressure on legacy institutions.
The “Network Effect” makes the hold of large social media incumbents hard to break, so we’re lucky to have a rogue outsider like @elonmusk come clean house at Twitter. There was otherwise no sufficiently strong feedback loop in place that would disrupt the manipulation going on behind the scenes.
The opening of new frontiers that I’ve been focused on for years offers hope of alternatives to legacy governance, both for those who go and for those whose governments may feel pressured into more competitive practices. Whether the mechanics are spacefaring, seasteading, taming untapped wilderness, building “network states”, or other, we will find and develop new places that open up new possibilities, and – I hope – build better, more robust salutary feedback systems along the way.
Just a loose collection of thoughts so far, on ideas I expect I’ll ponder further. I’m under no illusion that our very substantial political divide is fixable by anything other than people w/different values going separate ways, but this does seem to get at something deeper that may help us understand things better and navigate to where we each need to be w/greater clarity.
Building robust salutary feedback systems into everything seems like a worthy endeavor.
