I'm wondering if there is an approach people have that best helps to organize, prune, and work through large, fundamental ideas such as these that they'd be willing to share.
I'm wondering if there is an approach people have that best helps to organize, prune, and work through large, fundamental ideas such as these that they'd be willing to share.
61 comments
> What is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?
Ask yourself this: Can you reformulate the question into questions that make more sense?
Who can/should organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens? What are relevant criteria to assert that a liberal democracy has been organized in "the best way"? Is it possible to agree on a fixed set of criteria? Is it possible to draw a model that matches reality? What game rules are you going to feed your model? Can you discern first principles that you're going to agree on and keep to build on top of?
The more questions and follow up questions you ask, the more concrete/tangible your answers will become.
Also, ask questions about yourself too. For instance, which biases can you identify with yourself? Are you able to avoid them?
In this case: how do you want to answer "best way"? If you are seeking an answer in absolute terms, then you may risk ending up in a logical tarpit discussing the existence of objective truth. Here you have a red flag: Is this question even a complete or answerable question?
So, it helps to question the question itself too. Maybe you need to bend the question before it can yield a worthwhile answer?
Ok. More specifically- some other poster suggested recording assumptions around these questions, and I will go further. Behind every complex large scale optimization question- what is the best way to X...- when X is fundamentally about humans- are a set of assumptions- here, around the definition of "best."
Rather than chew on the question as framed, perhaps work to understand the assumptions your own brain is baking into the question in whatever value is being optimized. Understand further those assumptions as choices in a landscape and identify other choices that did not originally arise in the framing.
With an understanding of the larger variety of choices that were originally hidden, visit in conversation with your fellow humans and ask of them how they see that landscape and set of choices.
This discovery process through engagement may yield more insight than the self-centered utilization of your brain's optimization machinery. This process makes yourself available for teaching moments that are usually more impactful both for teacher and learner than any specific optimization insight and may help in further writing/sharing those moments.
Best wishes.
Obviously there are many exceptions, I wonder if on average interest in such questions peaks. If so, does the average peak coincide with an age or a period of life. Do we lose interest in our late 20s/early 30s, on average, because that’s when we have kids or is that just how long it takes for people to get bored with contemplative pondering?
I sort of hope it’s that having kids, a partner, a more challenging career soaks up the extra cycles. But even without those things, I find my passion ebbing. I worry this is an inevitable part of aging.
A lot of these "large ideas" are really large. Like the amount of work they take is the amount of work it took to get through college, or master your profession, etc. More time than most people can afford to spend.
So the first thing to do is learn how to use the work other people have put in to answering the question. Learn how to judge the reliability of sources. Get to know the structure of the existing discussion of the issue. Look for ways to take advantage of existing knowledge in related areas to shortcut those tasks.
If you get good at those things, you'll at least get better at understanding the real complexity of the questions you're asking. You'll still do your own thinking, but realize that you're not in a position to just jump into that. You need to learn the context first. As other comments noted, you likely don't really even understand the question yet.
1. What is the most simple representation of the idea? What in the MVP (minimal viable product)? How can you reduce this to it's simplest form?
2. What sub-problems or sub-ideas need to be tackled in order to realize this larger project? Try to figure out which ones must be solved first and which ones can be solved independently.
3. Try to find existing solutions to your abstractions - there's a good chance you're not the first to ask these questions. If there isn't something existing, repeat from step 1.
A ridiculously important part to solving these smaller tasks is to figure out how they can be tested. You don't want to get to the end and figure out some part doesn't work as it needs to.
For example, with question driven development in this context it was related to learning how to build a web application in a new programming language or web framework in an efficient way.
But I think the same thing can be applied for a lot of things. It boils down to breaking things down and solving each sub-problem as it comes up linearly and then you bust out Socratic questioning to really explore a specific sub-problem to understand it better.
So for learning a new language one of the first questions you might ask is "how do I install xyz language", which you tackle on the spot. Then you move onto the next question which might be "how do I install xyz web framework", and then you move to the next thing. Before you know it, you're a few hours into learning and you already solved basic things like how to get things installed, have a project generated, maybe respond with HTML on a couple of URL endpoints. Not only have you solved these problems but you have something to show for it too.
Independent of question driven development, Socratic questioning has been one of the most valuable things I learned in the last couple of years. You can think of almost anything, big or small and attack the problem with the same set of questions. It almost works like magic when you combine both for learning and applying something where you're trying to reach an end goal.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/learning-a-new-web-framework-...
[1]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/would-socrates-use-docker-tod...
Start by defining "best".
this would get me to a point where i could inquire into the meaning of organize .. in this case probably realizing that there's sufficient self-organization that i'd have to think about needs/support and self-emerging structures.
at that point we could look at how the situation differs from the understanding implied in the question.
its only after i get my and the questioner's terms and models straight that i could begin to define some kind of scale to deal with someone's idea of best in order to work on generating 'deliverables'.
at least for me its best to become an expert in the things i want to change before suggesting changes in or to them; if i don't do that, or start from or with any kind of enthusiasm engendered by the power vested in me by big questions, good outcomes tend to move toward the vanishing point instead of forming solid new baselines.
but thats what you're suggesting the questioner do by having them question the use of the subjective term 'best'. right? :)
Fortunately, many have been written. In addition to conventional stuff like memory training, vocabulary building, etc. I highly recommend exploring (self-)hypnosis.
To your question: your mind is much larger, if you will, than the part you're conscious of moment to moment. You can learn to let it do thinking for you. (In fact, you have: language, walking, etc. your mind learns and operates vastly complex systems. That's why the brain is so large. It uses something like 20% of the oxygen you take in.)
Subjectively, you cram your brain with information (mostly via reading and direct experience. Take a train trip, etc. Get out and gather primary data.) Then sleep on it, often literally. Next thing you know, in the shower, or while buttering your toast, out of the inky blue will come some great insight, or a solution to some problem. (Be sure to keep a pad of paper and pencil handy at all times, esp. by your bedside.)
HTH, ta!
I ask because it changes my answer depending on whether the sample question is representative and how you are thinking about it, either as an author imagining an ideal situation or as a political theorist trying to understand human behavior of as a political reformer writing out a five year plan.
The issue being that politics is a team sport, and it doesn't really matter what you think is the most ideal system so much as what 100m people will agree to.
(Which isn't to say I have a problem with thinking about the ideal situations which have no chance of being implemented; I spent far too much time yesterday coming up with a proposal to redefine the foot-pound-second units as 1 second = 9.5x10^9 caesium-133 oscillations, c = 1 billion feet per second, and 1 pound = mass of 10^25 atoms of Si-28.)
Prototypes can be as simple as writing a short piece of what one vision could be and then putting it on a blog to get people's comments. It could be creating a storyboard type of comic painting that alternative future. It could be making memes that aim to get people's responses to the idea.
The important part is to just start the conversation and slowly start to uncover all of the messy and complex systemic factors.
And then continue to gather the information, divide it into smaller parts, talk to specialists about the parts that are outside your immediate expertise, and definitely do what others suggested and apply cross-domain thinking to it. The solutions to some challenges already exist in some form in other unrelated domains.
But as long as you can treat what you create as 'disposable' you won't go wrong with a design(make) first approach.
i.e how do you organize a small group of roommates:
* collect money for shared expenses
* nominate people to be responsible for particular roles
* establish a shared understanding of acceptable behavior
There is no 'best way' there is are going to be ways to maximize for certain desired qualities (i.e prosperity as defined by productivity, health, growth) or minimize for certain unwanted qualities (i.e injustice) and these may happen over different time scales - some approaches may provide short term prosperity but long term misery if left uncorrected.
First you have to look at the biological/tribal tendency of the human species. As a species, there is a specific number that we tend to break into, that we can conceptualize, and past that it is difficult to wrap our heads around on an instinctual level. We can cognitively grasp a nation of greater than one hundred million, just like we can cognitively grasp an ever expanding universe, but on a visceral level, it doesn't exist. So, you'll have to tackle breaking down people into units they can comprehend on a visceral level while maintaining a national identity and not creating splinter groups and intergroup competition. No small feat.
Second is the actual governance of this 100+ million people. The actual administration and paperwork (well digital and greatly automated, hopefully). But, the communication, repairs, money system, transportation, food network, etc. etc. For a group this size, this is a Herculean task to be orchestrated and to keep out corruption, good luck.... Oh yeah. Crime and military fall into this category, as well.
There are others that I can't think of off the top of my head, but there are more. The best way (at least to me) is to think of an abstract. The horrible question, "What does a liberal democracy of 100+ million animals of this type require?" Then break down those answers into solutions. Usually those solutions are code functions, but in this case they are practical solutions.
So if you have a big problem that seems difficult to implement, then try to break down that problem and attack each piece from different angle. And once you have enough leverage within the community/user-groups then go after the grand vision.
1) First principles
"Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism." (Lee Kuan Yew was the founding Prime Minister of modern Singapore)
2) Experimentation (while recognizing the limitation of models and the increasing error between models and ground truth as scale increases)
"Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249
bingo. logical identities are not equivalencies in life.
Generally a well-understood stable system of any kind (including a democracy) evolves from a smaller stable system.
This principle is more or less built into the scientific process, where smaller results are peer reviewed and kicked around to a while before being combined to solve large problems.
I also use the concepts app [2] on my tablet to draw out mindmaps / charts /etc.
I use taskpaper vim plugin so I can quickly collapse and expand items to not make the file too overwhelming. In the file I group topics / questions based on what makes sense for that project, and at the top of the file I often have a 'topic' where I can quickly dump thoughts, that then later have to be refactored into one of the real topics.
I hope to one day find a way (and the time) to connect my ideas app with the repo txt file approach, so I can sync both.
Conceptually I think the hard part of most problems is figuring out the real important questions you want to ask yourself. Once you think you know them, then the answer is either obvious, or requires you to do something (research, build prototype, etc).
[1] Idea Growr app - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.juliushuij...
[2] Concepts app - https://concepts.app/en/
Depending on what you are building, there are multiple approaches.
There are two sayings 'You can't see the forest for the trees' and 'You can't see the tree for the forest' ... Basically, with any massive problem, we have to find a middle ground, we need to understand the existence of the forest but also every single tree.
When thinking about large systems, you need to know enough about many subjects so you can cover most of the problems. Ability to see the society but also a single person and his psychology and what drives people is crucial.
Like the answer to the question "How to eat an elephant?" - "Start with the first bite."
In regards to the concrete idea you mentioned maybe you should look into Global Challenge New Shape Library - https://globalchallenges.org/new-shape-library/ you will find many ideas there, I was one of the 14 finalists out of 2700 submissions....
After years and years, when I am still referencing and thinking about them, I know I was on to something and fully intend to go back to them and execute: just as soon as the current large idea has come to fruition...
In terms of a strategy for immediate and motivated analysis, if you have the motivation to focus, I like to see ideas as an apple and different perceptions as perspectives thereof. To pick the apple up in your hand and to turn it in your mind is to consider it as a life form, as an asserting potential life form (seed bank), as a series of competing life forms (seeds), as a subject of aesthetics, as a food source, as a mood, as a colour, or as a home to insects is to conceive of it in a different way.
Also, to smash it to pieces - perhaps as performance art - and to just walk away...
I have an unconventional approach. I just don’t work on ideas that I don’t find interesting or am not passionate about. Passion is the only thing that makes it easy to work through the hard parts to see the idea through, so I stopped trying to lie to myself about HAVING to work ideas. I change my mind a lot, but literally dream about my projects sometimes and will turn and try those ideas out sometimes. I’m not going to take over the world, or work well with others this way, but I absolutely love it and maybe I’ll be able to finish something soon and be able to sell it! If not whatever I’m an experienced software developer I can go find work
If you're able to focus on ideas you are passionate about, that's great, but not everyone is the same. Some people have issues focusing, AD/HD, or self-destructive procrastination habits. If they are posting on HN asking for help, saying "I'm just able to do it naturally, why don't you try that?" isn't really helpful.
We've built a society where being distracted by mindless consumption is by far the easiest path through life. Some people need help getting out of that swamp, and the way to help is not to say, "don't bother".
I’d go so far as to say I basically said “the secret to getting over depression is to to just not be sad” which is insensitive and not helpful
It's just that personally... I feel the passion maybe 10% of the time, even on projects I'm really excited by. I feel passion sharing stuff, hitting big milestones, etc. But I need more than that to get myself through the grind of the unpleasant bits.
I don’t think any answer to this question will be satisfactory, as it’s just too easy to say “yeah but what if THAT TOO falls apart?” You just have to figure out how to deaden that questioning of yourself to some extent. There are always going to be a million reasons why you can and probably will fail, I agree that you shouldn’t pretend they aren’t there.
So maybe try to start big, and zoom in to focus in on one piece of the puzzle. There's a good chance that whatever you choose can be used in other ways if the primary idea doesn't work out.
Developing an understanding of the experience you want to enable and the scope of implementing it are obviously important. And for me, the specific objective is to avoid doing the life's work of implementation only to discover it didn't turn out the way I wanted.
I think you also have to consider why you are working on the problem. Is it genuinely to “solve” it? Or is it to think it through so you understand your own position? Is it so you can advocate and work within or against a system?
All of those have different tools. As a side note, almost all start with research.
The example question has a lot of effort put towards it. From philosophers, government think tanks, NGOs, novelists, etc.
And a lot of applicable real life situations — from Brazil remaking their currency to stop rampant inflation [0] to Chile’s efforts to rewrite their constitution [1] to the UN’s nation building work in Somalia [2].
With all that in mind, my personal efforts at this kind of thinking often revolve around building a defensible point of view with the goal of meaningful participation. I start by collecting and reading material, using progressive summarization, and once I get to a point of view, I try to find and join allies.
And then I see what comes next.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...
[1] https://www.vox.com/21534338/chile-constitution-plebiscite-v...
[2] https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/unosom1backgr2.html
I quite like the happiness focused stuff as a new approach as in see which systems seem to make people happiest in surveys eg. Finland, Denmark and then see if you can use that stuff to figure which system wins.
Have you heard of Paolo Soleri's "arcology" concept? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
My dream is something like Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language, extended with the content and patterns from Bill Mollison's Permaculture Designers' Manual, and leavened with the arcology concept.
(What about John Todd's "Living Machines" work? You hip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M )
I like to take working examples from nature or existing problems. The email spam filter was discovered by applying how viruses work. Road Traffic problems have a lot of common ground with Computer Networking.
Break the problem into elements and study working solutions, examples of those. For example, to learn social media marketing, I have been learning network science, work of A Barabási
- Find an inspiration around your or nature.
Favorite text editor,
Draw out the systems at play, choose a salient aspect present in many of the nodes, take a stab at writing about it over the course of several days/weeks/months.
Got something interesting as a result? Start a newsletter.
It seems to me that the best results come about after contemplating things for a while and then having a conversation with someone such as on a forum or internet-chat and sharing the dialogue with others. Easier to follow and usually more impactful than long-style writing on one's own.
1) Figure out how to organize a democracy of 10 people.
2) Once you got that down, bump the number to 100 people, and identify / solve any new problems that arise.
3) Bump the number again to 1000. Rinse & repeat until you get up to 100 million.
In simpler terms, break the problem / idea into something you can confidently solve in a reasonable time frame, even if the first step (ie. "how to organize a democracy of 10 people") seems far removed from the end goal (ie. 100 million people).
However, I think the 100, 1k, 100M approach might have drawbacks to finding the _best_ solution because the final iteration carries forward assumptions from the previous iterations. In CS terms, we may arrive at a local maximum this way, instead of the global max.
In startup terms, generally it's necessary to start with a MVP, from which you build on. The iterative approach is effective at ensuring you make progress toward the problem you're solving, but I agree, the risk is that you might end up carrying forward or "inheriting" problematic assumptions which can impede your ability to effectively solve the larger problem in the long run.
On the flipside, the iterative approach at the very least will help you understand the problem domain thoroughly from multiple perspectives (iterations), even if that means you periodically need to throw out all of your work and start again from scratch.
> "what is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100"
Start by solving sub problems in the situation, e.g; best way to manage property, and then determine effects this solution will have on other sub problems.
This iterative approach will you arrive at an optimal solution much like gradient descent.
However, I've been using it for just a month or so, and it's too early for me to form any conclusions.
For more free thinking the best thing is to keep it in the back of your mind and stay close to a notebook at all times. With several similar ideas they will cross-pollinate and put you in a mindset to explore them further.
Also you need a wall onto which you can cast an Ontology with Nodes and Edges. Then deep dive research into relevant topics while simultaneously refining your VGO. Every foray into a topic should yield additional nodes and edges to your Ontology.
Continuously check and adjust. Refactor and pivot when new knowledge and data points in a new direction.
From there, it was a matter of adding/changing rules to match what desired and seeing the outcome.
In 90% of cases: you need to ignore these thoughts as they can be time-consuming. You are not going to solve anything worthwhile related to organizing a 100M democracy if you are not in that field. You will not just "pick it up" unless you are a freak of nature and you are not.
You can break it down into smaller problems. You can also assemble all of the individual problems into a large problem.
2) execute the plan
The plan is likely hasty and will prove to be a failure when you execute on it. That's fine. The plan is little more than worthless, but the process of planning is invaluable. Once failure or any collision become clear repeat the process with a modified plan. Don't wait for clarity to strike.
Whether you use metaphors or first principles, to even capture the scope of the problem and the important pieces that influence it is the first task.
Market Research, Wireframing, and Design by Balaji S. Srinivasan
Link: https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/startup/lecture_slides...
Then dig into the issues. Where do principles get challenged? Ignored? The interesting answers are in the conflicts.
http://www.appleseeds.org/Press-On.htm
https://trello.com
I use it to implement the processes described in other comments here.
For example: "what is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?"
- How can you tell than an organization is better than another? (i.e. what does best mean)
-- This implies a set of comparison criteria, find those
-- which criteria is more important
-- do you get a total order or a partial order?
- Who is a citizen?
- What liberties (i.e. rights) does your democracy grant?
-- Under what circumstances?
-- Is there a hierarchy of rights? (i.e. if two conflict, which one is more important)
-- What happens when there are not enough resources to grant those rights?
And so on...
You could spend rivers of ink writing about those. And the interactions between sub-problems can get mind boggling, but you just make a note, and make a call and keep going.
In problems that involve other people, you have to include them. Ask how the look at the problem, try strategies of communication, etc.
At some point, you just need to do something about one of the sub problems. The one you deem most impactful right now. It will hopefully take you closer to your end game.
As you move, the problem space will move.
And you'll have to revisit all your assumptions again and again.
Each action you take, will have unintended consequences. Some problems will be solved, some new ones will pop up. Things that weren't important are now urgent, and things that seemed essential are really not.
You deal with those as they come, but keep moving.
Abstraction gets rid of the irrelevent minutiae of the specific problem and gives us the opportunity to solve the more general problem first. There may be a series of increasingly abstract representations of the problem, like a hierarchy classes in OOP.
My (rather vague) understanding of mathematicians is that they have a menagerie of increasingly abstract math objects (sets, groups, categories), and are able to apply proofs from the more abstract objects to any of the derived objects. This seems to work well for them.
So, if possible, try to solve the problem at the highest abstration layer first. If you don't suceed there then try to solve it at the next layer instead. If you do succeed, then you have a general solution that applies to that abstraction layer and all layers below it (possibly with tweaks, like overridden methods in OOP).
Wrt the specific question ("what is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?"):- This problem is already fairly abstract, but first, define "best", "organize", and "democracy".
-We can only know a solution is best if we first find all solutions. Depending on the problem, this might not be worth the effort, an aproximate solution might be adequate.
-In this context I assume that 'organise' means getting the population to do something.
-Quite a few countries have elections, are they all democracies?
Some relevent questions to consider are:
-Is the aim to get the population to all agree on an action?
-Is there a clear benefit to a proposed action, or is it subject to unknowns?
-Is the population rational?
-Do they understand the advantages of action?
-Are there any disadvantages of action? Do they understand those?
-In general any solution is likely to have a number of different aspects each with their own costs and benefits (monetary cost, time cost, health cost, ...)
-Are all members of the population equally affected by the advantages and disadvantages, or are subsets affected unequally? This is likely to be unanswerable, given that individuals are likely to assign different costs to different aspects.
-Can they be coerced? (Yes, liberal democracies coerce too! think taxes on carbon fuel for example).
In a problem that compares apples and oranges and shellfish and pyramids, "The best way to organize..." seems to depend on the whim of whoever happens to be pulling the levers of power; there is no best solution to this.
One bite at a time.
First, I think it would be naive to think there's any sort of formulaic approach that works for all large questions or ideas. Nor will the same approach work for everyone, or even a notable group of people. With that said, here are some generalizations that may help:
- Your most valuable asset is the perspective of others. When you can, talk about ideas with others and you may be surprised what results. Reminder: read the room and audience. You want willing participants in good spirits, not an annoyed or begrudging focus group :)
- Make sure to zoom out often. For my entire philosophy, I have an outline that fits on a half a page, even if each bullet point can be expanded to an entire essay. Keeping an eye on the big picture allows you to ensure all of the pieces are consistent.
- Keep some sort of documentation of small ideas / notes. I have an entire "idea log" that I transfer from my phone's notes app (filled randomly through my life) every month or so. It's a good way to ensure you don't lose smaller nuances you may encounter. This then requires a "synthesis" on the other end to re-examine these. Often over time, your feelings towards these notes can change and that can be interesting in itself.
- Sometimes I even copy entire conversations into the doc if they are digital. Full context is important. Same goes for links to articles, essays, and books. Think of it as informal citation you can go back to. I spend a good deal of effort cataloging my media consumption (tv, movies, and books in particular) for this reason.
- Scheduling or forcing time to work on ideas tends not to work. If you choose to schedule time, it should be to explore and flesh out details of an idea you have a decent deal of hope or confidence in, not to "brainstorm" for new ones IMO.
I would say the first half of my approach resembles that of a librarian or archivist. I collect sources, perspectives, and various ideas I think of or encounter. Then I sort and organize these. The other half then becomes the synthesis, which is typically more sitting down to write and explicitly focus.
Based on your question, it sounds like you may be trying to do more "synthesis" while you're out and about. I would perhaps recommend focusing on the micro level more when you're out and about, and then see what sort of building block or base that lends later. If you try to tie everything together on the fly, it may limit the development of new ideas you encounter that could actually dramatically shift where your big picture is currently if explored more.
Again, to overstress this, everyone thinks differently. Find what works for you, and don't expect there to be a formula or a strict regiment that will make everything easy for you!
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