
Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years - MrXOR
https://www.edge.org/conversation/alexander_rose-how-to-create-an-institution-that-lasts-10000-years
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zachguo
Aren't institutions evolving on their own like super-organisms?

The origin of modern universities is kinda funny. Basically, a flock of
students, a few erudite scholars, and local landlords fought with each other
until they reached an agreement about a set of rules that everyone was happy
with, then institutionalized it.

The process is roughly 1) a few scholars stayed together in one small town in
Italy, which attracted a flock of knowledge-hungry students 2) local landlords
charged high rents for the students 3) students unionized to fight against
landlords 4) student union became powerful enough to put pressure on teachers
too 5) teachers also unionized to counter student union 6) fights among
student union, teacher union and local landlords continued 7) they reached
agreements about the syllabus, grading, tuition, dedicated real estate for
classrooms, and admin department to handle all these.

[http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010064367...](http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100643670&fa=author&person_id=445)

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zwkrt
If one takes a meta viewpoint about evolution not as how single organisms
evolve over time but instead the complex processes that happen to be occuring
on the surface of the Earth, then you don't actually need to separate your
thoughts about biological, cultural, or technical evolution. It's all part of
one big ball of mud rolling down the same hill! The only reason that humans
seem to think that microchips and sailboats and GIFs are fundamentally
different than oxygen and proteins and honey is that humans think other humans
are Very Important.

~~~
zachguo
Sounds like Evolutionary Dynamics or Complex Adaptive Systems.

~~~
lukifer
See also: complexity thresholds in Big History:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History)

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qzw
_> It’s unclear if civilization started because we could ferment things, or we
started fermenting things and therefore civilization started..._

Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing? I would think the
alternative would be "or civilization started and therefore we could ferment
things."

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valarauko
>Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing?

Yup. Both posit causality from fermentation -> civilization.

~~~
qzw
I suspect the second part was supposed to read "or we started fermenting
things _because_ civilization started..."

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davidw
Maybe we're a little fuzzy from too much fermented stuff.

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maxxxxx
It’s an interesting idea but I don’t think it makes much sense. Society
changes a lot during that time so what could such an institution be based on?
Closest is probably religion but considering that most religions are based on
the understanding of the world at time of their creation they would either be
obsolete after 10000 years or they would have to preserve the status quo and
limit scientific progress. The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold
progress only for a few hundred years.

~~~
tathougies
> The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few
> hundred years.

The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial
sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as
much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is
a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of
millennia.

Your point on scientific progress is especially obtuse, given that the entire
reason for the study of science in the West was at the behest of Christianity.
I can't think of any time the church sought limiting scientific progress as an
end unto itself.

~~~
maxxxxx
It's true that the Church supported science but there are plenty of examples
where it didn't like the results and tried to bury them.

~~~
gen220
From my understanding, it's more that the personalities of certain powerful
individuals in the Church didn't rub well with the personalities of certain
influential citizen-scientists (@Galileo, principally), and the former
individuals abused their power to torment the latter. The actual results were
much less important to the people involved than the prestige of "being right".

For context, these inquisitions happened at a time when the printing press was
democratizing ownership of authoritative information (i.e. the Church) – not
too dissimilar to today, where the web's information is upending traditional
news sources. The inquisitions were a reaction to a perceived loss of power.

From that POV, it was less an ideological, Church vs Science thing (although
this conflict is real today, though it seemed to be less real in the past),
and more a butting of egos. Many people today experience zero dissonance
between their religion and their scientific beliefs, and this observation is
an old one (see the writings of any number of religious scientists throughout
history). Anyways, just my 2¢! :)

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maxxxxx
Yes it was a power play. My point is that a 10000 year organization will have
a tendency to do so because otherwise progress will quickly make it obsolete.
It needs to control progress so it has time to adapt.

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intrasight
Of course I immediately thought of "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson ;)

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joycian
Anathem was inspired by the 10K clock project in the first place right?

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hprotagonist
It's probably fairer to say that Neal was involved with The Long Now anyway,
and wrote a novel about it and also some Liebniz he wanted to tell you all
about.

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rmbryan
hprotagonist on a Stephenson thread, glorious.

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adamsea
Movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.

~~~
hprotagonist
and ancient sumerian, let’s not forget.

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amirouche
That is very inspiring thoughts. I love The Long Now project.

I think more people should get interested in those topics and in general on
the long standing impact of humans.

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mordae
Libraries appear to be pretty durable - as an idea.

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b_tterc_p
My university was fond of saying it expected to serve students for thousands
of years to come. Always thought that was laughably naive. It was maybe 70
years old at the time.

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neural_thing
The way progress has been accelerating... "Vanilla" humans are not going to be
important 10,000 years from now, and might not even exist.

You can debate whether we will see radical improvement through genetic
engineering or brain-computer interfaces, or whether AI makes humans obsolete,
or global warming wipes us out. But all of those reach "tipping points" way
before 10,000 years from now. We just don't know which will strike first (I am
betting my time and money on brain-computer interfaces).

~~~
devoply
What isn't political and should be political is the nature of change on this
planet using technology. It's taken for granted that change is a constant and
constantly necessary. That stability is impossible, though this is not
factually true -- stability in short time frames like 10,000 years is
historically definitely possible at many levels. That infinite competition is
necessary and that the people are simply cogs in that system... where that
system should serve people. Instead people serve the system. In such a system
open to constant change and destruction it is rather difficult to create other
systems that survive the destruction of the meta system that contains them.

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Mirioron
I think it is necessary. If you stop improving then it means that anybody that
could've benefitted from the improvements that would've happened don't get
those benefits. Furthermore, if some part of society ignores your drive for
stability and still keeps trying to improve, then over time they'll simply
take over, because they'll be more advanced in many ways.

~~~
devoply
That's really the crux of the issue. That it's a global political matter and
because we're organized in nation states which are competing against one
another it is impossible for anyone to stop or change the terms of the
agreement. It's really a constant economic war fought with weapons of
technology, which perhaps sorely needs disarmament.

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Mirioron
I don't think it's due to us being divided into nation states. Even inside a
nation state you have different groups fighting one another. The side that
stops improving disappears.

I don't think any kind of "disarmament" could ever work either, because the
problem isn't limited to _technology proper_. We have constant advancements in
"social technology" as well. Think about how many "hacks" happen nowadays.
It's usually not through vulnerable software or hardware, but theory social
engineering instead. If you took a modern smart person and threw them into the
1800s then they could probably get a lot of power, because they could use
ideas such as pyramid schemes to amass a lot of wealth. People from that time
are unfamiliar with these kinds of "social technologies" and would probably
fall prey to it. Even ideas like ponzi schemes are part of that improvement
and if you don't keep up then eventually you won't even know how the other
group took power. Eg I think that what Trump managed to pull off is probably
one of those moves that people in the future will find obvious, but to many of
us it was baffling (the idea that he said outrageous things so that the media
would constantly keep talking about him, because familiarity often breeds
fondness).

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devoply
Everyone knows how to build and use an a-bomb. Yet no one does. Why? MAD.
Similarly any piece of technology you can know how to use it, you can keep
doing research on it, you can accumulate more knowledge about it and its uses.
You just can be limited from making use of it publicly and even privately
through surveillance. And how do you stop people from doing anything if it's
known, fines and jail through policing. You can't control nation states as
they don't answer to no one except each other. Individuals answer to the
state.

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UnFleshedOne
A-bomb is rather hard to make in your backyard and materials are relatively
easy to detect and control. Lots of cooperation and time is needed. Imagine
though a technology more lethal and easier to produce, available to everyone.
For example bioengineering advanced to the point every script kiddie with a
cheap biofabricator from aliexpress can design a contagion on their holodeck.

Sure, serious people will have orders of magnitude more advanced techniques to
fight it, but could they be deployed fast enough to save half of the megapolis
attack was released in?

See Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis for other examples. Summary and
link here: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tx6dGzYLtfzzkuGtF/the-
vulner...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tx6dGzYLtfzzkuGtF/the-vulnerable-
world-hypothesis-by-bostrom)

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brookhaven_dude
Hinduism

~~~
earthboundkid
Traditionally, many Indian classics were transmitted orally. This supposedly
led to a lower error rate over time because if I mistranscribe a letter in a
written text, all descendants of my text will have the same error, but a
single misspeaking in oral transmission is unlikely to persist. On the
flipside, the classics tend to be shorter and gnomic and rely on commentary to
make them intelligible. They also needed to create a system to preserve old
Sanskrit pronunciation even after the spoken language changed.

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cobbzilla
Great discussion. Institutions have to deal with continuous changes over long
time spans. Most are “made for their time” and thus cannot survive when the
deviations are big enough.

Memes can survive way longer than institutions. Here’s some memes that have
been with us since the paleolithic: gathering around a fire at night to tell
stories; fear of spiders; smiles, hugs and kisses. Any others that are as old
or older?

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sova
That's quite a loose characterization of the word meme. Campfires predate the
Internet by about a million years. but on this note you do bring up an
interesting point about archetypal action and behavioral psychology. an old
girlfriend of mine explained to me once that kissing is suspected to come from
bird moms feeding bird babies. Other things that are very significant are
simply sharing a meal. (Break bread together) did you know that a blind person
will put their hands up into the sky victoriously when they win the race even
without ever having seen another human being do it? some of the nature of your
interested in is more innate than can be known by the eye alone.

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cobbzilla
A meme is a unit of cultural transmission. At some point long ago, humans did
not have these behaviors, they were not innate, they were learned and
continuously passed on to the present day.

I hope you don’t think memes are limited to pictures with some witty text on
them.

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knolax
It used to be that you could mention the word meme in the Dawkinsian sense
without it being conflated with funny internet pictures. Ironically, the
concept of a meme is itself a very weak meme.

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sova
Yeah, and the Earth is actually Terra. Swimming against popular parlance and
convention is not gonna win any points. Well, maybe on here. But not many
other places! _shakes fist in Dawkins ' general direction_

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cobbzilla
you kids get off my lawn!

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hellllllllooo
Am I the only one who finds The Long Now obnoxious? Mostly rich people who
spend their money and time thinking about 10000 years from now as some kind of
grandiose, pretentious, self-important hobby.

Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone:
[http://longnow.org/clock/](http://longnow.org/clock/)

~~~
colanderman
One could say it's helping advance research into how to deliberately create
lasting institutions, which benefits the future of the human race.

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blahblahthrow
Given the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make
10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions
we have now.

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LargeWu
Because of short term thinking. Nobody cares about what will happen beyond the
next election cycle, the next quarter, the next iPhone release. A bit more
long-term thinking would not hurt anybody.

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hellllllllooo
No one is objecting to 20-100 year thinking and even then planning is hard if
you look back 100 years and see what has changed. I would be very happy if
these people were putting their time and money into solving problems on this
scale like the Gates foundation etc. This is just a sci-fi hobby.

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LargeWu
My point stands. Uber has been a public company for all of 5 hours now, and
their stock is a few dollars less per share than it opened, and everybody is
freaking out and wondering what it all means.

It's not about planning out 10,000 years, or even 100; it's something more
abstract than that. What will your legacy be? Your family's legacy? Your
country's? Humanity's? I don't have any personal connection to somebody who
will be alive 1000 years from now, or even 200, but I still don't want to
leave them a dead, depleted planet.

Is the clock a bit frivolous? Sure. But it's not about the clock. The clock is
merely a symbol, that we have considered our place in history, that we
recognize we are part of something larger, and we want to be good stewards of
our future.

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hellllllllooo
Fair enough, if you think mere symbolism is more important than putting the
money ($42M) towards tangable things like childhood education which has an
actual 70 year impact. Having so much time and money to spend on symbolism is
pretty obnoxious when there are actual long term issues we can actually solve
for real people.

