Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years

https://www.edge.org/conversation/alexander_rose-how-to-create-an-institution-that-lasts-10000-years

by MrXOR • 7 years ago

93 76 7 years ago

edge.org

intrasight• 7 years ago

Of course I immediately thought of "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson ;)

joycian• 7 years ago

Anathem was inspired by the 10K clock project in the first place right?

hprotagonist2• 7 years ago

It's probably fairer to say that Neal was involved with The Long Now anyway, and wrote a novel about it and also some Liebniz he wanted to tell you all about.

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

It’s an interesting idea but I don’t think it makes much sense. Society changes a lot during that time so what could such an institution be based on? Closest is probably religion but considering that most religions are based on the understanding of the world at time of their creation they would either be obsolete after 10000 years or they would have to preserve the status quo and limit scientific progress. The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few hundred years.

toasterlovin• 7 years ago

I've wondered if a religion that specifically carved out space for areas of knowledge that are expected to mutate would be viable.

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

this will be difficult. Usually discoveries in one area will also have impact in other areas.

tathougies8• 7 years ago

The Catholics tried that for a while but could hold progress only for a few hundred years.

The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of millennia.

Your point on scientific progress is especially obtuse, given that the entire reason for the study of science in the West was at the behest of Christianity. I can't think of any time the church sought limiting scientific progress as an end unto itself.

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

It's true that the Church supported science but there are plenty of examples where it didn't like the results and tried to bury them.

rockinghigh• 7 years ago

You don't need to look very far to see the Church limiting scientific progress. The Catholic Church banned many scientific books. One of these lists of banned books was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum). For 100 years it included books that advocated for heliocentrism. The pope Paul V himself explicitly asked Galileo to abandon the idea of heliocentrism.

max76• 7 years ago

The Catholic church is more vibrant than ever, and still holds substantial sway over many many people. Most modern organizations are unable to hold as much sway over members as the Catholic church does. If anything, the church is a case study in how to make an organization relevant over the course of millennia.

This is very true. The Catholic church is not going anywhere soon. Worldwide membership is 1.2 billion people (self reported numbers). The Catholic church is one of the largest land owners in the world, with 177 million acres worldwide. The catholic church has one the largest art and antique collections in the world. The Catholic church has a large impact on worldwide culture and politics. It's never had a larger worldwide footprint than today and it has so many assets and members that it would take centuries of decline to go away.

Sure, christianity as a whole has declined in Europe. That's just one continent. Let's not ignore the fact that 16% of the world population is Catholic.

izzydata2• 7 years ago

It doesn't seem like it is much of a secret how they manage this. You just have to make sure it is part of your institution to force it upon the minds of your newborn children. You now have a possibly infinite self replicating virus.

xamuel• 7 years ago

Whether he was supernatural or not, Jesus of Nazareth did launch a crucial institution which plays a huge role in our everyday lives.

Namely: the institution of "not following tyrants who proclaim themselves to be gods".

In Jesus's day, world leaders did proclaim themselves gods, and used sword and pen to enforce it. Praise Jesus that doesn't happen any more. The reason it doesn't happen any more is because no amount of gunpowder or brainwashing can sway a born-again Christian to bow down and worship a worldly king. Once Christianity spreads and takes root in an area, it becomes impossible for the rulers of that area to enforce their own godhood. Caesar can no longer make himself god when a sizable portion of the population believes the Gospel of Jesus.

The kingdom of heaven is near.

Shorel• 7 years ago

You are thinking only about the Abrahamic religions. In fact, only about one of them.

I can imagine a very scientific Buddhist society.

amirouche• 7 years ago

That is very inspiring thoughts. I love The Long Now project.

I think more people should get interested in those topics and in general on the long standing impact of humans.

hellllllllooo3• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who finds The Long Now obnoxious? Mostly rich people who spend their money and time thinking about 10000 years from now as some kind of grandiose, pretentious, self-important hobby.

Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone: http://longnow.org/clock/

colanderman• 7 years ago

One could say it's helping advance research into how to deliberately create lasting institutions, which benefits the future of the human race.

blahblahthrow• 7 years ago

Given the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make 10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions we have now.

thinkingemote• 7 years ago

There is a bit of hubris...

To give them credit he says in the article that the issue is that the SV hippies are all getting older and new people will take it over and criticise and change it.

So he's not without some thought of the actual changes that will occur in the next 50 years. But they aren't thinking more about people not liking their project after they are gone

whatshisface• 7 years ago

Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone

You will be happy to hear that, according to policy, the millions they spent buying the clock were taken away from them as punishment for using resources and causing so many people to labor. Presently, I believe the fine for causing other people to do $1M worth of unnecessary work is a little over $1M (due to taxes).

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

You got a point but at least it's interesting. Definitely better than buying a new yacht or a bigger house.

qzw2• 7 years ago

It’s unclear if civilization started because we could ferment things, or we started fermenting things and therefore civilization started...

Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing? I would think the alternative would be "or civilization started and therefore we could ferment things."

valarauko• 7 years ago

Wait, aren't those two ways of saying the same thing?

Yup. Both posit causality from fermentation -> civilization.

qzw2• 7 years ago

I suspect the second part was supposed to read "or we started fermenting things because civilization started..."

RobertoG• 7 years ago

It's a strange sentence anyway.

I suppose he calls civilization to the Neolithic, so civilization started with agriculture, and with agriculture you have something to ferment (and more people trying different things). Doesn't look so mysterious to me.

SilasX• 7 years ago

You can have something to ferment before you're growing it yourself: take the fruits (or whatever) growing in nature.

brookhaven_dude• 7 years ago

Hinduism

earthboundkid• 7 years ago

Traditionally, many Indian classics were transmitted orally. This supposedly led to a lower error rate over time because if I mistranscribe a letter in a written text, all descendants of my text will have the same error, but a single misspeaking in oral transmission is unlikely to persist. On the flipside, the classics tend to be shorter and gnomic and rely on commentary to make them intelligible. They also needed to create a system to preserve old Sanskrit pronunciation even after the spoken language changed.

neural_thing3• 7 years ago

The way progress has been accelerating... "Vanilla" humans are not going to be important 10,000 years from now, and might not even exist.

You can debate whether we will see radical improvement through genetic engineering or brain-computer interfaces, or whether AI makes humans obsolete, or global warming wipes us out. But all of those reach "tipping points" way before 10,000 years from now. We just don't know which will strike first (I am betting my time and money on brain-computer interfaces).

devoply3• 7 years ago

What isn't political and should be political is the nature of change on this planet using technology. It's taken for granted that change is a constant and constantly necessary. That stability is impossible, though this is not factually true -- stability in short time frames like 10,000 years is historically definitely possible at many levels. That infinite competition is necessary and that the people are simply cogs in that system... where that system should serve people. Instead people serve the system. In such a system open to constant change and destruction it is rather difficult to create other systems that survive the destruction of the meta system that contains them.

neural_thing3• 7 years ago

You would like Meditations on Moloch, if you haven't read it already.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Mirioron2• 7 years ago

I think it is necessary. If you stop improving then it means that anybody that could've benefitted from the improvements that would've happened don't get those benefits. Furthermore, if some part of society ignores your drive for stability and still keeps trying to improve, then over time they'll simply take over, because they'll be more advanced in many ways.

7373737373• 7 years ago

Are any emerging BCI companies already public?

neural_thing3• 7 years ago

No.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

The way progress has been accelerating... "Vanilla" humans are not going to be important 10,000 years from now, and might not even exist.

In his books in the Accelerando continuity, Charlie Stross has a "human fundamentalist" movement. What we have in the 20th and 21st century, is that it's much harder for tech and culture to go away completely. Someone, somewhere makes it their hipster shtick, establishes a little shop in Tokyo, or bases a PhD and an academic career on it. This might well happen for the technology of Homo sapiens.

(What if we go extinct, then only exist in simulations, then come back from that? That might make for a good Sci-fi novel!)

slfnflctd• 7 years ago

I'm a big fan of the 'brain in a jar' concept. We might need more than just the brain, but if quality of life is comparable for that individual via BCI to what they would have had with a full sized biological body (or better), it will happen. For one thing, that person requires fewer resources, such as nutrients, physical space and waste management. For another, it could increase lifespans and would definitely reduce cancer risk. I suspect it could eventually become a requirement for many types of space exploration.

baron_harkonnen• 7 years ago

"progress has been accelerating" mostly due to an abundance of cheap energy, which is both limited and now showing consequences far more destructive than we initially imagined. I wouldn't worry too much about people in 10,000 years living all to differently than they did 10,000 years ago.

mordae• 7 years ago

Libraries appear to be pretty durable - as an idea.

cobbzilla3• 7 years ago

Great discussion. Institutions have to deal with continuous changes over long time spans. Most are “made for their time” and thus cannot survive when the deviations are big enough.

Memes can survive way longer than institutions. Here’s some memes that have been with us since the paleolithic: gathering around a fire at night to tell stories; fear of spiders; smiles, hugs and kisses. Any others that are as old or older?

sova2• 7 years ago

That's quite a loose characterization of the word meme. Campfires predate the Internet by about a million years. but on this note you do bring up an interesting point about archetypal action and behavioral psychology. an old girlfriend of mine explained to me once that kissing is suspected to come from bird moms feeding bird babies. Other things that are very significant are simply sharing a meal. (Break bread together) did you know that a blind person will put their hands up into the sky victoriously when they win the race even without ever having seen another human being do it? some of the nature of your interested in is more innate than can be known by the eye alone.

cobbzilla3• 7 years ago

A meme is a unit of cultural transmission. At some point long ago, humans did not have these behaviors, they were not innate, they were learned and continuously passed on to the present day.

I hope you don’t think memes are limited to pictures with some witty text on them.

zachguo2• 7 years ago

Aren't institutions evolving on their own like super-organisms?

The origin of modern universities is kinda funny. Basically, a flock of students, a few erudite scholars, and local landlords fought with each other until they reached an agreement about a set of rules that everyone was happy with, then institutionalized it.

The process is roughly 1) a few scholars stayed together in one small town in Italy, which attracted a flock of knowledge-hungry students 2) local landlords charged high rents for the students 3) students unionized to fight against landlords 4) student union became powerful enough to put pressure on teachers too 5) teachers also unionized to counter student union 6) fights among student union, teacher union and local landlords continued 7) they reached agreements about the syllabus, grading, tuition, dedicated real estate for classrooms, and admin department to handle all these.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010064367...

zwkrt• 7 years ago

If one takes a meta viewpoint about evolution not as how single organisms evolve over time but instead the complex processes that happen to be occuring on the surface of the Earth, then you don't actually need to separate your thoughts about biological, cultural, or technical evolution. It's all part of one big ball of mud rolling down the same hill! The only reason that humans seem to think that microchips and sailboats and GIFs are fundamentally different than oxygen and proteins and honey is that humans think other humans are Very Important.

zachguo2• 7 years ago

Sounds like Evolutionary Dynamics or Complex Adaptive Systems.

natmaka• 7 years ago

Aren't institutions evolving on their own like super-organisms?

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy describes one of the underlying dynamics: "...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

b_tterc_p• 7 years ago

My university was fond of saying it expected to serve students for thousands of years to come. Always thought that was laughably naive. It was maybe 70 years old at the time.

Creating an Institution That Lasts 10k Years

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