(2017-07-21) Rao: Eagles Don't Flock Elephants Don't Dance

Venkatesh Rao: Eagles Don't Flock, Elephants Don't Dance. ..often work closely with rich people trying sincerely to do "good" things, the topic of getting them to work together came up. We arrived at the consensus that this is really hard to do,

eagles don't flock

It is analogous to the phrase used to describe the limit to the power of bureaucratic institutions: elephants don't dance.

they need no help collaborating on sociopathic exploitation schemes; the rich-to-rich networking protocol works fine for that)

While it gets less attention than wealth inequality, an equally stark feature of the post-industrial world is that public-mission stewardship is monopolized by sclerotic institutions that aren't mission-driven at all.

What the David Sessions critique gets wrong is implying that impersonal public-mission institutions such as universities, a free press, and "non-partisan" government bodies produce "better" intellectual output.

Consider for instance, the efforts taken on by Sam Altman (the United Slate political reform initiative) and Reid Hoffmann/Mark Pincus (Win the Future, or WTF)

13/ I'll go on record right now and tag these well-intentioned efforts as doomed from the start, based purely on the structure and the impedance mismatch between effort and desired impact.

The three R2R economic sectors (personal high-trust dealings, bagman low-trust dealings, and cargo-cult world-running) together constitute what political scientists call a neopatrimonial polity

the complexity and wealth of post-industrial world makes most worthwhile societal "good things" out of the reach of even the richest individuals to take on individually.

the eagles must learn to flock. This is not just about pooling large amounts of money. It is also about pooling influence, and crafting larger shared narratives rather than individual hero's journeys.

Wealthy society is a fragmented, persistent, polyglot confederacy of individual manorial economies designed to operationalize mutual intra-wealthy suspicions and keep out the unwashed masses.

In both cases, the gatekeeping is based on demanding extreme proofs of loyalty

Pournelle's Law ensures that trying to get these institutions to solve big problems is like trying to teach elephants to dance (or getting the King's horses to put Humpty-Dumpty together again).

We are in an age of what Peter Turchin diplomatically calls elite overproduction: roughly, too many over-educated people producing a glut of idea-economy products that require education to produce

Worse, taking on and solving big problems -- what I like to call Great Works (Grand Challenge) in this newsletter -- requires ideas, and ideas themselves are a big problem in their own right.

Elite overproduction comprises such things as too many lawsuits, artworks, blog posts, architectural plans for nice buildings, save-the-world manifestos, artisan shops, analyst reports and kickstarters.

Unfortunately for the Rest of Us,™ elite overproduction also includes far too many ideas for Great Works trying to get resources from eagles that won't flock and elephants that can't dance.

In an elite overproduction society, there is only a market for loyalty. If you're willing to offer personal loyalty to a wealthy individual, or ideological loyalty to a sclerotic institution, you can stay secure in the creative class.

An example of sclerotic institutions demanding loyalty is the global authoritarian left, for whom language policing has been turned into a means to control key public institutions

The right has its own institutions with ideological boundaries enforced through loyalty tests.

On the eagle side is the trope of wealthy or famous individuals asking members of their personally loyal tribe to do extreme/weird things, like find 100 ostrich eggs in the middle of the night.

The work of finding new baby elephants, and teaching them to dance while they are young, is a long-term task that will occupy many people for decades. We must turn to eagles in the meantime.

When the rich and powerful ask for integrity, they open up the possibility of eagles flocking. This means bigger things become possible.

Unlike the closed, suspicion-driven economy of bagmen, fixers, and spin artists, an idea economy asking high-integrity questions, which might discover uncomfortable answers, can scale.