I think this is the point of the story of Babel.

And I also think that social media had kind of short-circuited the benefits of having our opinions/orthodoxy/norms more localized (I mean geographically, culturally, linguistically, etc) and led to, as you say, much greater danger or the whole world being able to coordinate on delusions.

Yeah maybe instead of big nation, we could divide into like 50 sovereign states. Those could be divided up into smaller counties, and those into cities.

Then each could democratically decide what is best for themselves.

Nah that’s crazy. It’s better to have 49% of a nation be unhappy with things, even in cities where 80% think one way, they must do what the 20% want because at the national level that 20% is the 51%.

If it wasnt obvious, the pandemic demonstrated beyond any doubt that the distribution of decision making power in society is completely broken. The nation-state in particular is way too dominant and distorting, especially when you have a bunch of self-absorbed "meta-nations"

Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)

It's easy to forget this in our era, but the reason the nation-state exists in the first place is that it's the most effective means we know of to defeat an external adversary in a contest of organized violence. The nation-state's internal distortionary effects on its population — which I agree are absolutely real — are simply the collateral damage you get when you optimize hard enough for victory in the external contest. It's not immediately clear how one might do better on this level either, since any serious decentralization effort has to sacrifice some degree of external security — and then you risk just getting conquered by a different centralized nation-state.

Its a very interesting question why (in the spectrum of community organization size) it is the nation-state scale (> 10 mln or so) that has come to become dominant. "Defeating external adversaries" is in general more of a sabre rattling game than actual warfare, so maybe that is the scale where "mutual destruction" is assured

But this precarious equilibrium is not technology independent. What works for blades and projectiles and missiles might not work for engineered viruses. If we don't find ways to quench this adversarial dynamic maybe our days are numbered...

no one wants to use engineered viruses for war because its to indiscriminate. if the viruses is effective a crippling a adversary it will do that to my people to.

you can't make a American seeking virus any more than yo can make a Chinese seeking virus. at that level we are all just bags of the same lipids proteins and ions. and all national boarders are porous and it will get through and kill your people.

viruses are in the same bucket of bad war ideas as mustard gas that we dont use because they kill everyone instead of who i point them at.

I think that's wrong though. Hypothetically you could have a vaccine engineered alongside the virus and deploy it in secret, or at least using some mode of obfuscation. Not that it would be simple, and not that it wouldn't leak, but it's not an impossible scenario to have a country immunized, I don't reckon.

I mean, look at COVID response, Russia and China both have their own vaccines, what's to prevent them from sliding in something extra to prevent another disease which has been engineered?

to do that you would have to start mass manufacturing a vacine a somehow administer it to the whole population secretly. without any other country getting wind of it. then you have to pray it doesn't mutate enough to make your vaccine ineffective. it is to big a project to not leak just based on everyone involved having to not tell anyone. from the researchers the administration of the program to the people working at the production facility.

> to do that you would have to start mass manufacturing a vacine a somehow administer it to the whole population secretly.

To play devil's advocate:

This could be happening _right now_.

1) Create and release CoVid.

2) Engineer a vaccine, that also protects against a secondary, 100% deadly virus. (SinoVac?)

3) Vaccinate your own population.

4) Release the super-deadly, secret 2nd virus.

5) Profit.

> it is to big a project to not leak just based on everyone involved having to not tell anyone.

Yeah. This where it, and most of the other grand conspiracy theories, start to become unrealistic. It would be impossible to keep the secret from coming out.

But it would make a great plot for thriller novel.

I'm reasonably certain Cussler, Clancy, or Chrichton have done subsets of this at least.

I'm not really sure that we saw anything is broken in the US. There isn't a strong consensus for intervention among the people, and we saw some states with intervention and some states with out, and not a lot of federal intervention. The results of intervention or not don't seem to have convinced many people to change their opinion, either.

This is what I would expect on any issue where there are large groups with strong feelings for and against intervention. Only if there is broad concensus or at least broad apathy would I expect uniform decision making.

It's certainly true that it's hard to make major interventions in such a decision making environment, but that's the system we set up. A benefit is that it's a lot easier to move to a different US state than to move to a different country if you don't like the government.

Surely the pandemic showed the advantage of the centralized nation-state. It could take into account externalities, like vaccination benefiting others, and use its power to keep everyone safer. Decentralized decision-making led to e.g. some states in the US deciding not to lockdown and having higher disease rates, which then put the whole country at risk.

You've missed the point entirely of the parable and the parent comments. Even if you like the way something worked out (or pretend to for the reasons discussed) bring subject to large scale collective decisions in a single state leaves one completely vulnerable to bad decisions being made. The solution is to insulate people from the whims of collective thinking though strong protections of individual liberty. You can't have it both ways, where you can force people to act a certain way when you agree with it, but are free to not do things you disagree with. It amazes me how many people ignore this.

But why is individual liberty more important than collective thinking? Many places do very well with collectivism. I'm not sure you can just say it's better without evidence. I think it depends on many factors whether individualism or collectivism is best for a particular location and problem.

Well its philosophical isnt it. Individualism means that people with different priorities are not arbitrary subjected to what the collective wants - and relevant to the post, maybe what nobody actually wants but everyone is disincentives from opposing.

Through human history, groupthink has led to lots of horrible things - maybe there are examples where individual rights have too, or maybe you could argue the benefits of collectivism outweigh the cases where it has led to trouble. It really depends on what you're trying to optimize for - which again depends on individual priorities.

I wrote the parable, at least this version of it. I hope I haven't missed its point entirely.

We can't avoid being subject to large-scale collective decisions. Humans can't live in hunter-gatherer bands any more. The individualist US, just like collectivist Sweden, spends large amounts on public goods via its government. Even in an anarcho-capitalist utopia, large firms and other collective bodies would emerge, and would have to coordinate upon collective decisions.

As well as things like climate change right?

The problem is imagine if all the investment put into green energy was actually put into just making fossil fuels and their use far more efficient.

It might’ve had a far better impact on the environment, but it would’ve hurt the pocketbooks of the congressmen who have money invested in these specific solutions. (The other side pushing for more fossil fuels doesn’t actually care they just have their investments there).

An individual is still able to make the best decisions for themselves and the less you allow them to do this, the more danger and misuse of resources you’ll find.

If you are claiming that individual action would've solved climate change, this seems like a fantasy. Public goods problems are real.

It does a pretty good job of figuring out the correct price of things.

No, that's false when public goods exist. The market can't figure out the correct price of carbon, because when I produce carbon, it harms other people than me.

Off-topic, but... this is Econ 101! I feel a bit like a programmer would feel when someone says "hey, our car is programmed using an HTML5 supercomputer". It alarms me that an argument which has been known for 250 years, and formalized for 60 years, still hasn't percolated to the educated general public. Markets can't magically work out the correct prices in the presence of externalities.

(To head off a nerdy counter-argument: yes, yes, Coase theorem, blah blah. If you think we can automatically negotiate to internalize all externalities, then fine - that seems wildly wrong to me but it's not a logically invalid argument. But if so, markets per se add nothing. Property rights plus individual contract law get you all you need.

> I wrote the parable, at least this version of it. I hope I haven't missed its point entirely

Haha I obviously didn't catch this. I guess then I missed your point. Between your essay and the parent comments, my takeaway is about the danger of enforcing collective decisions on everyone, because even if everyone says they agree, they can still all be delusional, or at least just too scared to speak out.

“media-nations”

How would that work geopolitically? How would all those tiny nation states defend themselves against behemoths like the Russian Federation and the PRC?

Perhaps they could be united in some way for defense while preserving localised governance.

You could call it the North American Treaty Organisation, or something.

Or if you include nation-states across the sea, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or something.

Unfortunately in my state, the party of small government does not like cities deciding what to do for themselves and has taken away a lot of our city's power to make rules for itself.

I for one am in favor of the kind of division you mention, for precisely the reasons you mention. But some people are not happy just deciding things for themselves. They are only happy when they also can decide for others. Lots of people from all walks of life and government like this.

This is where I always plug Infomacracy by Malka Older. Micro democracy with all voting blocks the same population size, can switch party/state.

It already exists - it’s called Switzerland.

Economies of scale are real, this is not even controversial. Stopping things from growing arbitrarily is not a strategy of any kind.

economies of scale are "real" until their risks vastly outweigh the benefits - which always happens at some level of concentration.

Habitually embedding attenuation in any system we develop (social, political, financial etc) is likely the only generally applicable risk management strategy. The only one that does not require detailed, correct prior knowledge about a system and timely application

Detailed knowledge and just-in-time application is great in theory - its just not a real-life strategy of any kind...

This is why I love the hacker news