Hacker News Reader

Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

What human institution has endured? For more than say a few centuries? Of those few, how many served any of their original purposes, but instead optimized for the continuation of the organization to the exclusion of the stated mission?

"Gimme that old time Religion" and "here come the New Boss"

View on HN

> What human institution has endured?

Those were Malthusian times, before industrialisation and widespread literacy and the internet. We don’t have evidence that this time is different. But we can’t reject that hypothesis, either. The biggest thing we currently lack is a culture that believes it can break the cycle.

What, other than belief, do you think it would take?

Fortitude and grit.

Literally every culture believes they have fortitude and grit. That's just another platitude. I was talking about what implementable standards would it take. Elections and democratic rule were a pretty big advance. I think built in transparency may also be helpful.

Do you think more transparency would have changed recent US politics events? Do you believe objective measures and systems would solve for certain belief systems? It’s easy to argue my points are platitudes, but I’d argue that the problems we face are collectively emotional.

I don't know. That's why I was asking the question. I agree that much of the problem is emotional, but I do believe technocratic solutions exist. We probably aren't anywhere near those solutions because we still can't separate emotion fr governance (maybe we never will). I didn't mean to insult your response, just that I was looking for something more concrete -- opinions about solutions.

No insult taken. Hard problems typically require complex solutions. Staying curious and open minded is essential on the path to truth.

We should be able to look at how well institutions last and see in gradually grow, modulo certain black swan events. Before the 1900s, how many banks lasted more than a hundred years? Now many of our banks can trace their lineage that far back. Constitutions and national borders also seem to be growing more stable over time.

> Before the 1900s, how many banks lasted more than a hundred years?

Lots of banks. Honestly, I have a hard time finding a bank that is large today that were created in the 1900s. Most seems to come from 1700s and early 1800s.

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

I think the biggest reason you don't see more banks is that the concept of a bank is fairly novel, and they exploded in popularity with the printing press and industrialization. World war 1 and 2 didn't end these big banks, and if they can survive those then they can survive most things.

If SETI were to confirm a signal from an older alien civilization, that might help us believe it's possible to break the cycle.

It depends, the populations from present-day Mexico didn't ally between themselves when Cortez (who might just have been an alien to them) arrived, quite the contrary, some of them became allies of Cortez against the Aztecs.

I had a 4th grade teacher who thought and preached that the American natives regarded the Europeans as gods because they were whiter and blue eyed.

Let's put aside the obvious racism. The Spanish weren't extraterrestial. They were different, smart and had cool gadgets. So, poor kid meets Ironman?

And horses. Those were almost extraterrestrial.

The Catholic Church has done pretty well for itself (~2000 years and counting).

How did you arrive to that number?

Well that's the age of the universe of course /s

I believe the misunderstanding is between "Christianity" (the religion, old) and "the Roman catholic church" (the institute, younger)

The Roman Catholic Church is less than 1700 years old. The Council of Nicea was in 00325 CE, and the bishops derived their authority from their local congregations rather than from a pope until roughly the Council of Chalcedon in 00451. If you believe that it's closer to 2000 years old, you must also believe that its original purpose was to prepare for the end of the world and the Day of Judgment within the lifetimes of the first Christians. More plausibly, its original purpose was to remove the threat Christianity posed to the political stability of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire fell in 01453, almost 600 years ago.

> The Roman Empire fell in 01453, almost 600 years ago.

The Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium or the Byzantine empire, fell in 1453. They weren't under the authority of the Catholic church ( great schism and all that).

The Western Roman Empire fell much earlier.

The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine. Guess where his capital was?

The Roman Empire fell when Constantinople fell. And that fell was in part due to Catholic Church hating the orthodox christians.

The Catholic Church dates since the Great Schism. So it is not 1700 years old.

Not a particularly important distinction in this context. Both 2000 and 1700 are greatly larger than "a few centuries".

But it stopped serving its original purpose within a century.

It's not like it has remained stable all those years.

It changed pretty significantly with the donation of constantine, and more recently, the second vatican council made some pretty big changes. Opinions can be had about whether that was a long overdue overhaul, or the church succumbing to the heretical evils of modernity, what can't be denied is that they were pretty significant.

"...but instead optimized for the continuation of the organization..." This sums it up. It takes a very narrow / well-defined focus to avoid optimizing for the organization. Power corrupts. I wonder if it would be possible to have a built-in / designed reset. Or if it's even possible to have a narrow enough or well defined enough focus that the target of the reset is understood and agreed upon.

Banking (call it 2500+ years, in the sense of marks in a ledger being equivalent to some method of stored value)

Australia has had people living in it for 60,000 years, with basic animal husbandry, fish traps, basic agriculture, a messaging network, a national trading network - we don't know how long each of these aspects existed of these 60,000 years (for wooden evidence doesn't conserve well) but it'll definitely be much, much longer than European institutions

Quite a few companies. Many universities. Many schools. Many temples and religious communities.

There are surprisingly few that are more than a few centuries old.

Printing presses became popular about 500 years ago, any large scale organization was really hard to run before then as there was no cheap and easy way to create and distribute large amounts of information.

You'd think small-scale organizations would be more stable, though.

Over a long enough time period, a small scale organization is kind of likely to just get blown up by a catastrophe because it isn't big enough to absorb it. At least that would be my guess.

Well, consider my example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286002 of al-Azhar University, which is 1050 years old. It was founded under the Fatimid Caliphate, which fell 200 years later after a century of civil war, replaced locally by Saladin's Ayyubid Sultanate. Another 80 years later Cairo fell to the Mamluk Sultanate, which held Egypt for 270 years until the Ottoman conquest, which the Ottomans lost 350 years later to Napoleon. Five more governments later (if we count Nasser, Mubarak, Morsi, and Sisi as a single government), here we are, and al-Azhar has survived the fall of nine governments, all of which entirely ceased to exist. This suggests two points:

1. There are a lot more small organizations at any given time than large ones. There were only two Caliphates at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate (the other being the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, to which we owe Western Civilization, such as it is), and they covered the entire Middle East. But at the same time and in the same place there were thousands of schools and universities, some of which did get blown up by catastrophes (like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad) and some of which did not.

2. There are a lot of catastrophes that are harder for a big organization like the Fatimid Caliphate to absorb than for a smaller organization like al-Azhar University. More generally there are certain kinds of organizations, such as universities, that are very resilient.

The British monarchy managed about a thousand years, as did the Roman empire

The British monarchy lost most of its power in the Magna Carta in 01215, was interrupted by the establishment of the Commonwealth in 01649, was replaced by the Glorious Revolution in 01688, lost most of its remaining power to Parliament in 01689, and became British in 01707. I'll give you the Roman Empire, which lasted close to 1500 years, and also, for example, the Imamate of Oman, the Japanese Imperial Family (which has lost and regained its power over Japan two or three times), and Al-Azhar University, which celebrated its thousandth birthday about 50 years ago. There are a few other examples.

> 01215

Why are you prefixing the years with a zero, is that a thing? Are you preparing for those who might read this in a few millenia after us?

It is octal, write '01215' in a browser javascript console and you get '653'.

(Not sure if that is what he meant, but if he did that for ease of parsing it will just make it harder)

Makes it easier to cater for events in the span of 30-40k. I'm the grim darkness of the future, there will in fact be long lived institutions.

You are the grim darkness of the future?

Haha thanks auto-correct!

History is accelerating, events happen faster and empires will last far less than they used to.

ty. And the French monarchy. Can we consider all European monarchies as part of the same institution? They did have some similar titles and sucession rules

Freemasonry

Reply on news.ycombinator.com