Why octopus.law.blog?

I have some clusters of ideas and questions bubbling around in my head. I’d love to explore them and build upon them further, but I’m concerned that I won’t manage to do this in any real way unless I begin funneling them into something more creative and constructive. So I’ve decided to write a blog. It’s not the first time I’ve decided to write a blog, and it might not be the last. It’s called octopus.law.blog because, when such a URL is available, it must be used.

So, what are the ideas and questions bubbling around?

Accidents of History

The overarching and general question is: how have we ended up here? How have we humans ended up being as we are and doing what we do? From the little I’ve read so far, it’s clear that much of what we take for granted in the way we live and work has come about more by accident than by design. I want to understand more about the accidents of history which have landed us where we are. Hopefully, this might help us work out how we unpick ourselves from some of the more knotty and undesirable accidents, and how we might engineer things differently so that we can have more happy accidents in future.

Social Reality

I’m particularly interested in ‘social reality’. I’m using ‘social reality’ very broadly, to mean everything we humans bring to the world by convention or behaviour, such as money, laws and corporations. Unlike planets, sticks and atoms – which exist regardless of what us humans are up to, and would be here even if we’d never existed – money, laws and corporations only exist because we humans collectively behave in certain ways. A £5 note wouldn’t be money if ATMs didn’t dispense them and no shops accepted them. And laws wouldn’t exist if there were no courts, no police, and no agreed consequences whatsoever for any sort of action.

I think many of the ways in which we humans have gone awry, many of the bad historical accidents we’ve undergone, have resulted from our social reality distorting our view of actual reality. I think this is why we allow people to die of cold and hunger while others hoard immense wealth. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘not having enough money’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘not having enough food or shelter to survive’. We’ve allowed the mere social reality of ‘countries with borders’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘where humans can physically move freely’. 

Most pressingly, we’ve allowed the social reality of ‘economic growth’ to dictate the actual reality of ‘how we use and manage our resources’. The economics of our social reality has blinded us to the environmental limitations of our actual reality, and so we’ve severely mismanaged our resources. 

Our resource management has been tailored to an economic social reality where infinite growth is possible, resources aren’t finite and there are no environmental impacts. In actual reality, none of those things are the case. It’s like we’ve been playing by the rules of poker, but the game has been chess all along. And unsurprisingly, that means we’re losing at chess.

To zoom out again: I think most of our screw-ups are the result of our social reality distorting our view of actual reality, or at least becoming dangerously uncoupled from it.

Isn’t that obvious / trivial?

I realise there is a sense in which it is totally trivial to say that social reality is the source of our screw-ups. Because our screw-ups must be things we humans are responsible for bringing to the world, and if ‘social reality’ is broadly defined as pretty much anything we bring to the world which can’t exist independently of us, then of course our screw-ups will have a basis in social reality.

That is indeed trivial, and I’m trying to say something more specific. It’s not just that our screw-ups have a basis in social reality. It’s that the screw-ups happen when our social reality becomes decoupled from our actual reality, becomes misaligned with it, or maybe even outright contradicts it. In other words, our major screw ups happen when our social reality fails to respect actual reality. They happen when we get too big for our boots, and forget that our human endeavours will always, sooner or later, bump up against cold hard reality. They happen when we delude ourselves that the world is exactly as we think it is, rather than something much larger and more complex that we only have a narrow and selective perspective upon. 

It may seem odd to think that our screw-ups are due to, essentially, a failure to understand the world. We have mastered the scientific method as a means of deepening our understanding, enough that we have been able to make great leaps in technology and medicine. Isn’t our understanding pretty good?

I think it’s very telling that we don’t find the scientific method, or even just empirical observation, being employed much outside of laboratories and academic institutions. When was the last time someone at work made a decision based on extremely scant evidence, or none at all? Or neglected to properly observe actual outcomes so that those observations could inform future decisions? When was the last time a government implemented policy which wasn’t adequately researched or evidenced? This happens all the time. It is remarkable how little, in the ways we live and work, we properly observe how something is panning out, and then make adjustments informed by what we’ve observed.

To ‘properly’ observe and adjust is important, because we are subject to an array of cognitive biases that skew and distort the way we perceive and react to the world. So even when we’re doing our best to observe and adjust, if we’re not mitigating for our cognitive biases, we’re likely to be observing patterns that aren’t really there, searching for evidence that supports our already held beliefs, and making unfounded assumptions about the best actions going forward. 

Given all of this, it’s not surprising that our social reality of institutions, companies, laws, economics, etc, could have become dangerously decoupled from actual reality, in ways we’re not always aware of.

So there’s the main question I’m interested in pursuing: are humanity’s major screw-ups due to social reality becoming decoupled from actual reality? And if so, what are the implications? How can we avoid the decoupling, and keep our social reality better aligned with actual reality?

As a first step, I’ll read John Searle’s book The Construction of Social Reality.

I’ll end for now by calling out some other things I’m interested in exploring:

• How does ‘design’ relate to social reality? And can we proactively ‘design’ our social reality so that it works better for us?
• I suspect that we agree on more than we think, in terms of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. What we disagree on is how to get to the things we agree are good, like fairness, safety, and security. Is this true or not? And either way, what are the implications?
• I suspect the biggest failures of social reality occur when it becomes easier for us to do bad things than it is to do good things. If this is true, then we could improve things greatly by making bad things hard to do and good things easy to do. Is there promise in this, or is it naive?

If you can recommend any relevant books, articles, sites, podcasts, etc, please let me know.