American Inefficiency Warfare Strategy

Quick Note: Apologies for my absence recently, I’ve been a bit occupied and have fallen behind a bit on my plans for the site. There may also be a few spelling errors and whatnot as I didn’t review this as many times as I would’ve liked in the interest of getting this out sooner. That aside, enter the piece…

This piece will in part be a response to a conversation that I listened to a few days ago, and a question that I see as being raised within. The question is something like, “Can the DIY or garage mentality help to address various modern American system inefficiencies?” Much of this thinking will likely apply to situations that live outside of a narrowly American context, but the specifics will be adapted for the American situation as that’s what I’m most familiar with and I think America can provide a good example for other scenarios. First and foremost, I’d like to take a moment to define the terms of this discussion. By “garage mentality” or GM, I’m talking about the idea that a passion for individual problem solving and system building outside an official context can create large disruptive waves that radiate outward if enough people engage in it. A specific example that was offered in the conversation that inspired this piece, was the question of whether some number of intelligent bloggers, who appreciated a high degree of nuance, had high levels of charity, were let’s say financially savvy and approached things in a scientifically rigorous manner, albeit outside the mainstream, could have any significant impact on various American institutions and machinery. The response that I heard to this, is that the institutions operate using a code including the GIN or “gated institutional narrative”. In other words, the mainstream networks only listen to themselves, thus any noise on the outside has basically no effect. My problem with this line of thinking, even though I think it’s mostly right, is that if individual power, and people in great numbers offering alternative hypotheses or formulations to various issues has no real impact inside the institutions, how are we then supposed to fire corrupt or incompetent officials and fix or replace broken systems? In tandem with that, how has any charismatic and technically competent individual or group ever created a 20 something billionaire, should we buy individual power to be unimpressive? I realize that basing our thinking off of a couple of unicorns or super-humans may seem flawed but the point is that such examples existing at all is a testament to the possibilities.  

My version of all this, is that while I might be aiming too high I would like to improve the world’s economy, culture, technology and so on, not only because I think we obviously can, but because not doing so and continuing on the current path I propose, will lead to ruin faster than we may expect. The primary thing that I think has to change, particularly in the American situation, is that we must face the incentives and structures that make smart people play stupid and make it incredibly unattractive and risky to speak out against orthodoxy even in a very rigorous manner, from any non, anti-fireable position. Our inability to separate bullshit and science, leaves us without the tools and frameworks needed to debug many of the systems that we are watching fail. In other words, my analogy for this is that we have fallen into a system that makes cooperation between sharp minds and sharp elbows incredibly difficult, and it’s become more and more rare to find those who possess both in one person anywhere near official channels. As I talked about in my other piece, the disappearance of polymaths and their culture has taxed us much more than we have likely realized, and leaves us unable to bring science and technical analysis into governance and system maintenance. The culture that permeates research science and areas where we’re interfacing directly with source code, of debugging based on technical ability and an ultimate desire to make the code run rather than ask questions of should, or ask of the credentials of those improving the code seems essentially absent in policy making, and at the level of institutional leadership in many cases.

Something I’ve thought about quite a bit, is that though we seem expressly focused on voting with one’s ballot, we seem to neglect the more important kinds of voting that we do with our energy, attention, time and other such resources. We allow the status quo to persist by sitting around and allowing the status quo to continue to run its course. The saying about evil thriving when good people do nothing comes to mind. It’s not that reasonable people who would like something way better than what we have are few in number, but that the number of them contributing to a better tomorrow is quite small. We need to find a way to reinvite disagreeableness into mainstream, official spaces, and get orthodox people, DIYers, polymaths and more, working together to solve the problems that we face in the modern era. That means bringing in the debug culture from the “source code” sciences, creating incentives and systems that allow for financial and job security for those that speak out against orthodoxy, because even when and if they are wrong, it’s an incredibly important job that we can’t afford to make so damn expensive, and many other things. In order for us to address some of the core basics, like healthcare, education or opportunity, we will need to create a culture much more conducive to actual innovation and dynamic and interesting problem solving. That will be necessary to rework the culture, and from there we can work on becoming more of a problem prevention type society and world, than one that creates problems to later put a band-aid on. To answer the question of whether GM could make a difference, I think the answer is yes, provided it can find ways to work with orthodoxy and not just against it. My issue with the way this is generally discussed, is that we are given two or a small handful of incomplete or bad answers and often not allowed to bring in nuance or even combine various provided answers. It’s not that orthodoxy is completely broken, or that GM is either the only way, or a non-option, but that the two ways of thinking need to join together for us to see real, meaningful change.

As always I hope that this has been thought-provoking and useful in some way and I hope you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog author