Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.

View on HN

Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism.

[edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199

> renewal mechanisms

Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com