Hegar

Digging stick

All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.

People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.

A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren’t viable before, though not a single input is new.

because it literally can’t innovate.

I was with you 100% until this. “Innovation” is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize “innovation” as some kind of magic.

I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.

Belief that heirarchies are natural and desirable because some people are better than others is the worldview required to be vulnerable to the lie of fascism, it’s the precursor to all supremacist thinking.

If you look at opinion polling across countries, die-hard support for supremacist candidates hovers around 25-40%. Die hard as in will support those candidates no matter how poorly they’re doing. Support levels wax and wane as anxiety goes up and down, or as supremacist candidates tend to be winning or losing, but the core support base for authoritarian ideals routinely comes out around 25-40% across most western countries.

hierarchy and order

I don’t believe these two go together, heirarchies tend to be characterised by tension and discord.

highly authoritarian individual will be the first to volunteer when someone needs to run into a burning building to save someone … to volunteer … to organize

It’s actually the exact opposite! The phenomenon of Elite Panic is well established and included in disaster planning.

During an emergency, most people exhibit “spontaneous self organisation” - bucket lines, food distribution, search parties, etc. Whereas people with authority are much more likely to freak out, to fail to understand that the situation is different, to enforce detrimental rules, to feel threatened, to generally act badly.

For sure it’s more effective with entreched heirarchies, bit i think it’s possible to use that organisational structure without it metastisizing into a perminant heirarchy. Anarchist federations do this, sortition is useful, turn-taking etc.

societies that did not have hierarchy

I don’t believe such a thing ever existed. Other mammals display heirarchies so it was probably present in a distant ancestor, predating humans and our societies.

It’s the nature, duration and intensity of heirarchy that has changed so remarkably in the last 15k odd years.

I don’t think it’s ingrained and then rejected, i think it’s present in some % of humans because heirarchic organisation is useful in limited, temporary contexts.

Pirate ships were feircely egalitarian until a target was sighted, then the captain is a dictator until the loot was secure. Some hunter-gatherers had a season of authoritarianism (say, hunting season) in between seasons of different social organisation.

So like how sickle cell anemia is debilitating but grants near immunity to malaria, heirarchophilia has just enough limited benefits that it remains as a variant within the population.

Or that’s how i think about it.

These heirarchies caused or exaserbated just about every major tragedy in history - war, genocide, slavery, rape, empire, colonialism, capitalism, etc.

But depending on how you look at it, 25-40% of humans just like heirarchies and want them, despite the misery they cause for both the empowered and disempowered.

That’s a huge problem - fascism will likely always have a base of supporters to come back from no matter how many times we defeat it, and you just can’t imprison/disenfranchise/exile that high a % of people for a wide variety of obvious reasons.

I fear this is a “this is who we are as an organism” problem that will follow our species wherever we go.

Exactly. Anthropic are notorious for pretending to be terrified of claude to hype up how powerful their product is. This unsourced rumor smells like marketing.

Producing a correct answer doesn’t imply comprehension, using the word “solve” doesn’t imply comprehension. Computers have been “solving” math problems for decades.

There is no attribution of comprehension implied in that phrase.

The rich will never feel save while we, their victims, have privacy.

They know better than even we do how much reason we have to be plotting against them.

It’s going to make snr devs get fired, surely?

They either refuse to sign off when boss wants them to and get fired or sign off and get fired when ai code they signed off on causes issues.