Complex plans and taste can only form in singular minds or tight discourse circles. But they can be propagated and extended to large crowds of action through simple statistically-driven methods.
The mistake of many online crowdsourcing link aggregators and comment threading systems is they try to use statistical methods to define their fundamental taste and strategy. This is a mistake.
Use professional moderation to define fundamental complex intention for a community, and crowdsourcing to carry it out. Best of both worlds; wisdom of crowd, discernment of a single visionary. This requires new voting systems that explicitly target this spec.
Machine learning can do cool things, but I bet it can do even cooler things if you take it out of the decision loop and have it suggest decisions to a human strategist, continuously retraining itself to better match their revealed preferences.
Machine learning can do cool things with raw data, but I bet a crowd of human judgements can form a very high quality signal to interpret.
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I think we have to understand mathematics as a new kind of consciousness.
By disciplined study you can learn to see in terms of the secret relationships behind nature.
Not a mistake that the philosophers centered mathematics in liberal education!
For those keeping track of types of consciousness:
Raw physical primitive consciousness
Evolution by natural selection
Cellular control systems
Neuronal consciousness
Linguistic social/cultural consciousness
Mathematics/precise diagrammatic culture?
Networked computing machines
The single most important causal cultural factor behind the industrial revolution isn't any political system or philosophy other than the tradition of (applied) mathematics itself.
It is the precision and depth of mathematics that gives us access to technology.
It's interesting that the emerging principle of legitimacy of the regime is that its subjects are morally compromised by various intersectional bigotries. Not "we are leading you to a great future" but "you have no right to complain and are probably a bad person".
Is this similar or different from past essentially stagnant regimes?
Like a cruel inversion of aristocracy. A moral gradient from rulers to ruled, but negative instead of positive: the ruled are especially depraved and deserving of oppression, rather than the rulers being especially enlightened or virtuous.
Our aesthetic culture in all areas is defined by an extreme conservatism of form right now. Simple lines, flat design, tight greyscale pallets, and aestheticized poverty.
Extravagence, complexity, flair, joy, and fun would be very powerful if done well right now.
But maximalism needs discipline, meaning, and skill, or it just becomes a gaudy and messy LSD-core. The difference between complexity and entropy is virtue.
Have we lost the skill or cultural depth to produce or appreciate complex visual meaning?
Here's what complexity looks like done well. Very different aesthetic philosophies. All religious, all overflowing with life and virtue. All very different from modern minimalism.
Want your team to write good software? Put in a time-delay killswitch on event processing. If any event blocks the process for more than 5ms, crash with a BSOD.
5ms is plenty. But demands for computation grow without finite bounds until DISCIPLINE is imposed.
ENFORCE hard realtime 60 frames per second. All updates and redraws finished and flushed every 16 ms or CRASH.
This counts for startup too. If your program isn't responsive within 5ms of startup, CRASH you're FIRED.
It's clear our current paradigm for how to achieve civilizational progress doesn't work anymore. Maybe it exhausted it's gains, maybe we lost the true thing.
Either way, what comes next?
Six ideas:
One: we need to consciously think in terms of purpose hierarchies more. Society at its best is a holistic collective project, and it's parts can be understood as functional parts towards our missions. This has limitations, but we currently completely neglect it.
Two: justice is closely related to institutional functionality. It is not just consequentialist. It's about the institutional standards of excellence that get us where we want to go. Currently, justice has no grounding, and institutional functionality has no moral legitimacy.
Unless the family is the economic apex predator, the human race will not achieve our potential.
Replacing the family with more modern forms of economic apex predator institutions created the modern wealth and power we have, but it has come at the expense of fundamental capital stocks.
In maoist terms, we have to find a way to manage this contradiction.
Here's what happened: when families were top of the food chain, the economy could only reproduce biologically.
The modern transition mobilized people to work outside of family contexts, which caused the demographic transition and decentered human life.