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by api
1316 days ago
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I've thought for a long time that this is why you see so much innovation during wartime. War overrides conservatism and gets risky things funded. The same can apply to war-like scenarios. A lot of novel biological research got funded during COVID. We should expect to see a burst in advancement in biomedical technology as it bears fruit over the next 5-10 years. The core problem is probably that conservatism makes the most sense at the individual level for most people. Even if you had a casino whose net payout was positive, it still may not make sense individually to gamble. If individual rewards are sporadic and concentrated on a power law distribution then statistically most players will lose. An obvious solution is a less power-law type distribution, which tends toward some kind of socialism, but that has its own problems. Nobody's figured out yet how to provide a productive channel in a socialist system for humans' totally normal drives to compete and maximize individual outcome. Trying to suppress it doesn't work; it's like trying to totally suppress sexuality. Extreme socialist societies (e.g. Soviet Communism) often evolve into totalitarian mafia states because if there is no positive outlet for those urges they drive people into crime. Eventually you get a meritocracy concentrated in crime and the mob takes over everything. |
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Nobody has figured out how to maximize individual outcome, or provide a channel for such pursuit. Period. Socialism has nothing to do with it. People are crap at managing more than a few dozen other people, even for the best managers who have ever lived. And the systems we have in place since agriculture took over are trying to manage many, many more people.
Most people in more developed countries live in partially socialist systems. This doesn't prevent them from getting private sector jobs, creating companies, and otherwise trying to pursue the maximization of their individual outcomes.