Governance Beyond Dunbar's Number: Daniel Schmachtenberger & Lex Fridman

[00:00:03]you mentioned something about the state so what role let's talk about companies governments parents all the mechanisms that can be a source of conditioning which flavor of ice cream do you like do you think the state is the right thing for the future so governments that are elected democratic systems that are representing representative democracy is there some kind of political system of governance that you find appealing is it parents meaning a very close-knit tribes of conditioning that's the most essential and then uh you and michael malus would uh happily agree that it's anarchy or the state should be dissolved or destroyed or burned to the ground if you're michael malus giggling um holding the torch as the fire burns so which which is it is the state can the state be good or is the state bad for the condition of a beautiful world a or b this is like an s you like tests you like to give these uh simplified good or bad things um what i like the state that we live in currently the united states federal government to stop existing today no i would really not like that um i think that would be not quite bad for the world in a lot of ways uh do i think that it's a optimal social system and maximally uh just inhumane and all those things and i wanted to continue as is no also not that um but i am much more interested in it being able to evolve to a better thing without going through the catastrophe phase that i think it's just non-existence would give so what size of state is good in a sense like do we should we as a human society as this world becomes more globalized should we be constantly striving to reduce the set you we can we can put on a map like right now literally like the the centers of power in the world some of them are tech companies some of them are governments should we be trying to as much as possible decentralize the power to where it's very difficult to point on the map the centers of power and that means making a state however there's a bunch of different ways to make the government much smaller that could be reducing in the united states reducing the the funding for the government all those kinds of things their set of responsibilities the the set of powers it could be i mean this is far out but making more nations or maybe nations not in the space that are defined by geographic location but rather in the space of ideas which is what anarchy is about so anarchy is about forming collectives based on their set of ideas and doing so dynamically not based on where you were born and so on i think we can say that the natural state of humans if we want to describe such a thing was to live in tribes that were below the dunbar number meaning that for a few hundred thousand years of human history all of the groups of humans mostly stayed under that size and whenever we'd get up to that size it would end up cleaving and so it seems like there's a pretty strong but there weren't individual humans out in the wild doing really well right so we were a group animal but with groups that had a specific size so we could say in a way humans were being domesticated by those groups they were learning how to have certain rules to participate with the group without which you get kicked out but that that's still the wild state of people and and maybe it's useful to do as a side statement which i've recently looked at a bunch of papers around dunbar's number where the mean is actually 150. if you actually look at the original paper it's a range it's really a range so it's actually some somewhere under a thousand so it's a range from like two to five hundred or whatever it is but like you could argue that the uh i think it actually is exactly two uh two the range is two to five hundred and twenty something like that and this is the mean that's taken crudely it's not a very good paper the the in terms of the actual numerical numerically speaking but it'd be interesting if there's a bunch of dunbar numbers that could be computed for particular environments particular conditions so on it is very true that they're likely to be something small you know under a million but it'd be interesting if we can expand that number in interesting ways that will change the fabric of this conversation i just want to kind of throw that in there i don't know the if the 150 is baked in somehow in the heart into the hardware we can talk about some of the things that it probably has to do with up to a certain number of people and this is going to be variable based on the social technologies that mediate it to some degree we can talk about that in a minute um up to a certain number of people everybody can know everybody else pretty intimately so let's go ahead and just take 150 as a as an average number everybody can know everyone intimately enough that if your actions made anyone else do poorly it's your extended family and you're stuck living with them and you know who they are and there's no anonymous people there's no just them and over there and that's one part of what leads to a kind of tribal process where it's good for the individual and good for the whole has a coupling also below that scale everyone is somewhat aware of what everybody else is doing there's not groups that are very siloed and as a result it's actually very hard to get away with bad behavior there's a forced kind of transparency and so you don't need kind of like the state in in that way but lying to people doesn't actually get you ahead sociopathic behavior doesn't get you ahead because it gets seen and so there's a conditioning environment where the individuals behaving in a way that is aligned with the interest of the tribe is what gets conditioned when it gets to be a much larger system it becomes easier to hide certain things from the group as a whole as well as to be less emotionally bound to a bunch of anonymous people i would say there's also a communication protocol where up to about that number of people we could all sit around a tribal council and be part of a conversation around a really big decision do we migrate do we not migrate do we you know some something like that do we get rid of this person and why why would i want to agree to be a part of a larger group where everyone can't be part of that council and so i am going to now be subject to law that i have no say in if i could be part of a smaller group that could still survive and i get a say in the law that i'm subject to so i think the cleaving and a way we can look at it beyond the dunbar number two is we can look at that a civilization has binding energy that is holding them together and has cleaving energy and if the binding energy exceeds the cleaving energy that civilization will last and so there are things that we can do to decrease the cleaving energy within the society things we can do to increase the binding energy i think naturally we saw that had certain characteristics up to a certain size kind of tribalism that ended with a few things it ended with people having migrated enough that when you started to get resource wars it you couldn't just migrate away easily and so tribal warfare became more obligated it involved the plow in the beginning of real economic surplus there were so there were a few different kind of um forcing functions but we're talking about what size should it be right what size should a society be and i think the idea like if we think about your body for a moment as a self-organizing complex system that is multi-scaled we think about bodies of wonderland our body is a wonderland yeah uh you have that's a john mayer song i apologize but yes so uh if you think about our our body and the billions of cells that are in it well you don't have like think about how ridiculous it would be to try to have all the tens of trillions of cells in it with no internal organization structure right just like a sea of protoplasm your democracy and so you have cells and tissues and then you have tissues and organs and organs and organ systems and so you have these layers of organization and then obviously the individual and a tribe in a ecosystem and each of the higher layers are both based on the lower layers but also influencing them i think the future of civilization will be similar which is there's a level of governance that happens at the level of the individual my own governance of my own choice i think there's a level that happens at the level of a family we're making decisions together we're inter-influencing each other and affecting each other taking responsibility for the idea of an extended family and you can see that like for a lot of human history we had an extended family we had a local community a local church or whatever it was we had these intermediate structures whereas right now this kind of like the individual producer consumer taxpayer voter and the massive nation state global complex and not that much in the way of intermediate structures that we relate with and not that much in the way of real personal dynamics all impersonalized made fungible and so i think that we have to have global governance meaning i think we have to have governance at the scale we affect stuff and if if anybody is messing up the oceans that matters for everybody so that that can't only be national or only local everyone is scared of the idea of global governance because we think about some top-down system of imposition that now has no checks and balances on power i'm scared of that same version so i'm not talking about that kind of global governance it's why i'm even using the word governance as a process rather than government as an imposed uh phenomena and so i think we have to have global governance but i think we also have to have local governance and there has to be relationships between them that each where there are both checks and balances and power flows of information so i think governance at the level of cities will be a bigger deal in the future than governance at the level of nation states because i think nation states are largely fictitious things that are defined by wars and agreements to stop wars and like that i think cities are based on real things that will keep being real where the proximity of certain things together the physical proximity of things together gives increased value of those things so you look at like jeffrey west's work on scale and finding that companies and nation states and things that have a kind of complicated agreement structure get diminishing return of you of production per capita as the total number of people increases beyond about the tribal scale but the city actually gets increasing productivity per capita but it's not designed it's kind of this organic thing right so there should be governance at the level of cities because people can sense and actually have some agency there probably neighborhoods and smaller scales within it and also verticals and some of it won't be geographic it'll be network-based right networks of affinities so i don't think the future is one type of governance now what we can say more broadly is say when we're talking about groups of people that inter-affect each other the idea of a civilization is that we can figure out how to coordinate our choice making to not be at war with each other and hopefully increase total productive capacity that's good for everybody division of labor and specialty so we all get more better stuff and whatever but it's a it's a coordination of our choice making i think we can look at civilizations failing on the side of not having enough coordination of choice making so they fail on the side of chaos and then they cleave and an internal war comes about or whatever or they can't make smart decisions and they overuse their resources or whatever or it can fail on the side of trying to get order via imposition via force and so it fails on the side of oppression which ends up being for a while functional ish for the thing as a whole but miserable for most people in it until it fails either because of revolt or because it can't innovate enough or something like that and so there's this like toggling between a order via oppression and chaos and i think the idea of democracy not the way we've implemented it but the idea of it whether we're talking about a representative democracy or a direct digital democracy liquid democracy republic or whatever the idea of an open society participatory governance is can we have order that is emergent rather than imposed so that we aren't stuck with chaos and infighting and inability to coordinate and we're also not stuck with oppression and what would it take to have emergent order this is the most kind of central question for me these days because if we look at what different nation states are doing around the world and we see nation states that are more authoritarian that in some ways are actually coordinating much more effectively so for instance we can see that china has built high-speed rail not just through its country but around the world and the us hasn't built any high-speed rail yet you can see that it brought 300 million people out of poverty in a time where we've had increasing economic inequality happening you can see like that if there was a single country that could make all of its own stuff if the global supply chains failed china would be the closest one to being able to start to go closed loop on fundamental things uh belt and road initiative supply chain on rare earth metals transistor manufacturing that was like oh they're actually coordinating more effectively in some important ways in the last call it 30 years and that's imposed order in post order and we can see that if in the u.s if no let's look at why real quick we know why we created term limits so that we wouldn't have forever monarchs that's the thing we were trying to get away from and that there would be checks and balances on power and that kind of thing but that also has created a negative second order effect which is nobody does long-term planning because somebody comes in who's got four years they want re-elected they don't do anything that doesn't create a return within four years they will end up getting them elected re-elected and so the 30-year industrial development to build high-speed trains or the new kind of fusion energy or whatever it is just doesn't get invested in and then if you have left versus right where whatever someone does for four years then the other guy gets in and undoes it for four years and most of the energy goes into campaigning against each other this system is just dissipating as heat right like it's just burning up as heat and the system that has no term limits and no internal friction in fighting because they got rid of those people can actually coordinate better but uh i would argue it has its own fail states eventually and dystopic properties that are not the thing we want so the goal is to accomplish to create a system that does long-term planning without the negative effects of a monarch or dictator that stays there for the long term and accomplish that through uh not doing the imposition of a single leader but through uh emergent so that doesn't that perhaps first of all the technology in itself seems to me maybe disagree allow for different possibilities here which is uh make primary the system not the humans so the the the basic uh the medium on which the democracy happens like like a platform or where people can uh make decisions do the choice making the coordination of the choice making where emerges some kind of order to where like something that applies at the scale of the family the extent family the city the the country the the continent the whole world and then does that so dynamically constantly changing based on the needs of the people sort of always evolving and it would all be owned by google you