Lego people
Part 2a
To recap from the previous part: we can get different properties of the general system by only rearranging the constituents. No new ingredient, and no large scale re-education programs strictly necessary.
The next step is looking at who is the principle actor in this. Most economic theory assumes these are our “well informed and rational individuals”. Let me try to change the view on things a little. I’ll just arbitrarily say that it is not you who decides most of you actions but it is your network (e.g. family and close friends, political party, or the laws and mores of your society - perhaps depending on the matter in question) who decides, and only to a small degree you yourself have an active role. So this way of looking at the network would replace individuals with bigger clusters (perhaps about 100 (Dunbar’s number). Does this really change things though? Perhaps not as much as one would think. Let’s try the opposite and divide the individual. Not possible? Ha: Are you the same person you were 20 years ago (with respect to your decisions and actions?), the same you will be in 20 years (e.g. with kids or grand-kids)? What would Freud say about that? And even if we leave him out of that - could sunny days, rainy days, habits, workplace, recent experiences, accidents, drugs, or sleep deprivation, (perhaps imagined) pressure from ideals (not to mention ancestors, peers, dependents, or people in positions of authority) not change your reaction? It looks like we’ll get to a very similar situation, only through a different lens that looks at the smaller scale*. So this could be called self-similar. However the structures we’re looking at don’t need to be the same, even when a snapshot of it looks the same - they can have different underlying dynamics.
For example most of the time the influences that inform your “personal” decision are relatively “close” to you. E.g. your family, close friends, and the communities in which you feel (or want to feel) most at home (this increasingly includes online communities - so “close” refers more to an emotional closeness/importance than a location based closeness). But this is not the whole picture. You may also be influenced by certain ideals - in spite of what your current immediate environment thinks (again modern communication technology amplifies this effect). I would argue, if you are some sort of “change maker” it is significantly more likely that you stand out, in some (often invisible) respect, compared to your environment. Maslow’s hierarchy may not apply reliably in such cases.
Now it usually becomes quite important to consider the scale of the clusters we are looking at in our network structure - because they can organize and communicate (internally and externally) by different means. Here are just a few cognitive biases that are mostly rooted in the individual level - and this is just the brain talking to itself!
If we bring in other people - are they all exactly like us? No, for example there may be different types personalities such as MBTI (just one example), who like to approach problems in different ways, or identify them differently. So we have different lego-pieces we can build our solution with? Yes and no.
If we run into bigger problems we tend to make bigger groups (sometimes intentionally using different personality types) to address them, or alternatively take more time and do it alone. Both options have their own issues.
If we make groups, we inevitably get group dynamics, so we usually have the problem that not always the people with the best ideas get heard and promoted (and we have problems to decide what the best idea is in the first place). Certain people end up in certain positions with a high probability, and perhaps more importantly certain members are extremely unlikely to fill certain roles. This likely evolved over time to effectively address problems that were common throughout our long prehistoric existence, and is thus deeply rooted in us. I assume for the problems that (they couldn’t solve and) face us today, they are probably more a liability than an asset - because this behavior keeps derailing us from a path that could lead to a solution. I believe many organizations are doomed to fail, based exclusively on the narrative dominant in their human resources department and their promotion schemes, but that is perhaps a different story.
However generally it is not hard to see, if a group selects a subgroup out of a subgroup, out of a subgroup - each time filtering out specific types of personalities while enriching others, this has consequences. You typically end up with final subgroup that has a very limited perception (because they all see the same things, in the same way, and overlook a large fraction most others would perceive), and often very limited means of communication (because they all prefer a certain mode, and their vocabularies are not complementary) and narratives to guide them in solution design. Does that sound familiar? National governments, organizations’ interest groups, top level experts? Add some cognitive bias, and it is not hard to see why “they” ruin the world so much. The only problem is - most of us are the same. Unless you are in the club of people that hate clubs. So how do we fix that? [Hint]
[@Nadia @alberto if there are articles on edgeryders I could link to on edgeryders that corroborate some of my blathering I could edit the post to link to them. If my stuff is inconsistent with other articles - even better - we could discuss!]