I claim that, if it matters for world history who wins WWII (as just one example), then the great man theory of history is straightforwardly correct.
Bismark and Hitler come to mind: if you substitute them with their counterparts from nearby worlds, the power balance of Europe, and the world, looks radically different in their time and, I think, today.
And I think it DOES matter who wins WWII (for instance), because, at minimum, which nations have the "center of mass" of power is going to influence the way the deployment of transformative AI plays out.
Which isn't to say that Trends and Forces™️ aren't also a thing.
But it seems pretty obvious that at least sometimes, the exceptional skill, or particular incompetence, of specific people in positions of power, changes how history flows.
Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time?
Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease?
I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how "mazy" an organization is.
I considered the metric of "how much output for each input", but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn't help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes.
I hadn't realized this, but it seems like a crucial insight.
Systems incorporate the powerful effects of the things that they're exposed to, so that there are diminishing marginal returns to those powerful effects.
"Powerful" in this sense is relative to a time and place.
Is it possible to train people to be good rulers? So that the people with privilege are good social stewards instead of assholes?
I don't know. The historical record is not great on this point. It seems like trying to be a social steward tends to morph into thinking that you're better than everyone else, and deserve the best stuff at the expense of everyone else.