Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years | Hacker News Reader

Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years

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93 pointsMrXOR90 comments

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...

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.

Sounds like Evolutionary Dynamics or Complex Adaptive Systems.

See also: complexity thresholds in Big History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History

> Aren't institutions evolving on their own like super-organisms?

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy describes one of the underlying dynamics: "...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

>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."

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

Yup. Both posit causality from fermentation -> civilization.

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

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

It's a strange sentence anyway.

I suppose he calls civilization to the Neolithic, so civilization started with agriculture, and with agriculture you have something to ferment (and more people trying different things). Doesn't look so mysterious to me.

You can have something to ferment before you're growing it yourself: take the fruits (or whatever) growing in nature.

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.

I've wondered if a religion that specifically carved out space for areas of knowledge that are expected to mutate would be viable.

this will be difficult. Usually discoveries in one area will also have impact in other areas.

> 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.

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.

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¢! :)

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.

The extent to which this is true depends on which "Catholic Church" you mean..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Orthodoxy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicanism

and, many in these would argue that the extent of the roman repression of the renaissance was a direct side effect of the unique theological positions of the roman church..

Also, the same thing could be said to one degree or another for science which is not politically acceptable in the modern context..

In most contexts, including within Anglicanism and the Orthodox Churches, saying the Catholic Church (with a capital C) indicates the Church of Rome. While all those churches consider themselves catholic, in the sense of universal, the phrase 'Catholic Church' in English has a very well understood meaning, and indeed, this was the church I was indicating in my post.

understood, and agree that this is generally the case; however, contextually, it is also presented as the only 2000 year institution of Christianity, and so its behavior can be extrapolated and viewed as representative of a 2000 year religious institution, which clearly is not true.

I see... point taken. Perhaps I should say the diocese of Rome and the various other dioceses of the original Pentarchy, most of which have stayed relevant in some form in their various regions for the last two thousand years.

Like what? My interpretation is that the church, at various points in history, didn't like the person who found the results (usually for unrelated, or only tenuously related, reasons) and enacted various sanctions against them which today are interpreted as direct revenge for the findings, rather than a personal beef.

It took them a long time to accept evolution for example. Eventually they will come around but they need time.

'Not explicitly accepting' is very different from 'rejecting'. For example, the Church has not explicitly accepted the second law of thermodynamics (which is completely at odds with the church's claim that God will recreate the universe, thus decreasing entropy), but you'd be hardpressed to find an instance of the Vatican censuring that. The initial reactions to evolution by natural selection were rather neutral, and mainly focused on the ensoulment of species. The first official vatican encyclical (which is really the first kind of document that can be applied to the whole church on this topic) was Humani Generis, which took a neutral position on the topic. Not accepting every theory is not a sign of rejection. The church does not typically care to interfere in the minute details of every scientific endeavor. As natural selection became more popular and evidence mounted in its favor, the church responded favorably to it.

Can you cite an instance where the church as a whole rejected natural selection and censured the person writing about it? And I mean, an example not in the context of someone arguing that natural selection means there is no God, because that would go back to my original claim that the various censures were due to reasons unrelated to the purely scientific claim.

By the time Darwin published his findings the church didn’t have enough power to suppress him as they could do a few hundred years earlier.

But that's assuming the church would want to suppress him for publishing his work. I don't see any evidence that that would be the case. You are assuming.

I think this is an overly polarized view of history. We can often see the past in the most accurate fashion by looking at the world today; history has a habit of repeating itself. Genetics especially seems to be playing out this scenario, point for point, again. What science says and what many in society would prefer to believe are in sharp contrast. And indeed geneticists who speak too strongly of things such as hereditary traits tend to face censure, or worse.

So will history look back at our time and write of society 'burying' disliked science? I doubt it. I think in reality it's simply that science changes rapidly and society changes glacially. And, perhaps most importantly, how do you even adapt to new information without a moral collapse? Something that was undoubtedly an issue in the past and equally undoubtedly is one in the present.

Galileo is such a great example of this. He had no less than the Pope as an advocate who tried to help guide him forward in a way that could help drive his view and evidence forward with the gentle touch it required for such a sharp and controversial change to the worldview. Galileo instead decided to act with all the grace of a raging bull in a china shop. That he was right, and knew he was right, was an even bigger argument for tact. Had he been able to tame his ego, it's possible that his views could have been adopted many decades prior to when they finally were, perhaps even during his own life. And in any case when you know you are right, giving fair consideration and representation to all views is always the best way forward since you know only one view lay in accordance with all the facts of reality.

You don't need to look very far to see the Church limiting scientific progress. The Catholic Church banned many scientific books. One of these lists of banned books was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum). For 100 years it included books that advocated for heliocentrism. The pope Paul V himself explicitly asked Galileo to abandon the idea of heliocentrism.

Saying 'for 100 years, it advocated books that advocated for heliocentrism' means very little for an organization that is 2000 years old, and for which, for 1500 years of its existence, geocentrism was considered the correct, scientific viewpoint.

Heliocentrism was first advocated for by Copernicus who was a devout Catholic, possibly even a priest. Other scientists before Galileo advocated for it, and it was a popular enough opinion at Galileo's time, held by other scientists as well. Galileo was arrested (completely unfairly, in my opinion) for disobeying the pope. This places the case squarely under my exception of those arrested for unrelated, tenuously related, or personal reasons.

> 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.

This is very true. The Catholic church is not going anywhere soon. Worldwide membership is 1.2 billion people (self reported numbers). The Catholic church is one of the largest land owners in the world, with 177 million acres worldwide. The catholic church has one the largest art and antique collections in the world. The Catholic church has a large impact on worldwide culture and politics. It's never had a larger worldwide footprint than today and it has so many assets and members that it would take centuries of decline to go away.

Sure, christianity as a whole has declined in Europe. That's just one continent. Let's not ignore the fact that 16% of the world population is Catholic.

It doesn't seem like it is much of a secret how they manage this. You just have to make sure it is part of your institution to force it upon the minds of your newborn children. You now have a possibly infinite self replicating virus.

If that were true how come many famous scientists were catholic and went to catholic school? If the church is impressing upon the minds of the young the urge to not pursue science and rationality how could it produce so many (faithful) scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc

I don't believe I implied those things were mutually exclusive. The only thing that matters is that it perpetuates itself.

Whether he was supernatural or not, Jesus of Nazareth did launch a crucial institution which plays a huge role in our everyday lives.

Namely: the institution of "not following tyrants who proclaim themselves to be gods".

In Jesus's day, world leaders did proclaim themselves gods, and used sword and pen to enforce it. Praise Jesus that doesn't happen any more. The reason it doesn't happen any more is because no amount of gunpowder or brainwashing can sway a born-again Christian to bow down and worship a worldly king. Once Christianity spreads and takes root in an area, it becomes impossible for the rulers of that area to enforce their own godhood. Caesar can no longer make himself god when a sizable portion of the population believes the Gospel of Jesus.

The kingdom of heaven is near.

You are thinking only about the Abrahamic religions. In fact, only about one of them.

I can imagine a very scientific Buddhist society.

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

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

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.

hprotagonist on a Stephenson thread, glorious.

Movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.

and ancient sumerian, let’s not forget.

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.

Libraries appear to be pretty durable - as an idea.

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.

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).

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.

You would like Meditations on Moloch, if you haven't read it already.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

Are any emerging BCI companies already public?

No.

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

In his books in the Accelerando continuity, Charlie Stross has a "human fundamentalist" movement. What we have in the 20th and 21st century, is that it's much harder for tech and culture to go away completely. Someone, somewhere makes it their hipster shtick, establishes a little shop in Tokyo, or bases a PhD and an academic career on it. This might well happen for the technology of Homo sapiens.

(What if we go extinct, then only exist in simulations, then come back from that? That might make for a good Sci-fi novel!)

I'm a big fan of the 'brain in a jar' concept. We might need more than just the brain, but if quality of life is comparable for that individual via BCI to what they would have had with a full sized biological body (or better), it will happen. For one thing, that person requires fewer resources, such as nutrients, physical space and waste management. For another, it could increase lifespans and would definitely reduce cancer risk. I suspect it could eventually become a requirement for many types of space exploration.

"progress has been accelerating" mostly due to an abundance of cheap energy, which is both limited and now showing consequences far more destructive than we initially imagined. I wouldn't worry too much about people in 10,000 years living all to differently than they did 10,000 years ago.

Hinduism

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

you kids get off my lawn!

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is a bit of hubris...

To give them credit he says in the article that the issue is that the SV hippies are all getting older and new people will take it over and criticise and change it.

So he's not without some thought of the actual changes that will occur in the next 50 years. But they aren't thinking more about people not liking their project after they are gone

>Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone

You will be happy to hear that, according to policy, the millions they spent buying the clock were taken away from them as punishment for using resources and causing so many people to labor. Presently, I believe the fine for causing other people to do $1M worth of unnecessary work is a little over $1M (due to taxes).

You got a point but at least it's interesting. Definitely better than buying a new yacht or a bigger house.

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