Thread by @EpistemicHope

From here: eugenewei.substack.com/p/remains-of-t…

This quoted text seems really important. How societies and individual institutions adapt to the pandemic, is probably the thing that dominates the "sign" of the impact of the pandemic.

I agree that COVID does seem to be right in our Goldilocks zone: not civilization-hobbling in the long term, but bad enough to cause us collectively to take notice and (ideally) to face up to and correct the flaws in our systems.

It's extreme enough that we have to try possibly radical ideas that wouldn't usually see the light of day in order to succeed.

But it looks like that barely happened at all. It seemed like there was very little innovation.

Indeed it looks more like we doubled down repeatedly, on systems that proved inadequate.

One counterexample is launching fast grants.

That seems like exactly the thing I'm talking about: slow, inefficient, bureaucratic grant making has been a problem for decades, but the pandemic makes it urgent and important such that it is worth it to push through an alternative.

And if it works, you might expand that program, or do more things on that model, down the line.

That's the way it works in an emergency, in a healthy-enough system. The emergency kicks you out of your complacency.

Maybe there was similar stuff happening behind the scenes in vaccine production. It seems like they pulled off a bit of miracle.

But overall, it sure doesn't look like our civilization is going to come back stronger from covid that it was before.

And, I think that this is a really bad sign. Institutions (like everything that grows and dies) build up technical debt overtime. In order to survive they need to outpace technical debt with new creative solutions.*

You're either growing or your dying. There's no static option.

* - citation needed

I've not been sure what to make of people talking about civilizational collapse / decline.

I've wondered if they're simply viewing the past through rosy colored lenses, and neglecting the way things have always been a mess, and people have always been mostly incompetent (with a few bright spots).

But in this frame, it seems pretty obvious.

We were handed a medium-sized challenge, and apparently (maybe I'm wrong) failed to grow from it.

That is a damning incitement if things are always either growing or dying.

I think that means we lose.

In contrast, America really did change, in permanent ways (good or bad), as the result of both the depression and WWII.

(WWII is a cheap example, because you don't often get to win a major war that decimates the whole world, except for you.)

Vanevar Bush is an example of the thing that I'm talking about. He had an idea for how to do science and engineering at scale, and the emergency of war gave him opportunity to execute that vision. And some version of it has stuck around to this day.

(Arguably his vision and its execution is what is causing much of our oviduct-troubles, though I don't think that that is where the bulk of the problem is.)

Currently I don't see a plausible path in which we look back and realize the the pandemic made us as a civilization, stronger.

(The closest I can think of is maybe it has shown the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, and so the big tech companies will drive harder bargains with governments: producing geographic areas where those tech companies are much closer to in charge?)

So, unless there's something I'm missing, we lose.

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