2024-05-16 Tribalism -> Decay

What I Did

More technical debt payments. Nothing new to report there. It gets boring at times.

I’m also slowly creating a new workstation in preparation for an upcoming trip. Also nothing exciting to talk about there.

What I Learned

What is exciting to talk about is a new discovery of how societies break apart. While my next order of business is to clean up a shedload of edits, this new discovery was too juicy to pass up sharing here beforehand.

Now, my method typically strips away all context from the material I use. This allows it to be easier to parse, and also easier to communicate. After all, the messenger is typically at risk of tripping over themselves while delivering their message. I’ve heard unique insights from both Don Lemon and Steven Crowder, but simply name-dropping them makes you expect something, and the idea is transcendent to them.

Anyway, this was stripped from a free Hillsdale course called American Citizenship and Its Decline, and it describes how tribalism leads to decay:

1. Within a group, the selection for members’ promotions will be defined intuitively by aptitude, at least at first.
2. Eventually, the leadership will introduce a bias, often presented as enforcing fairness. This bias will over-emphasize a people group, typically racial or ethnic, and will naturally pick a “losing” subgroup.
3. The individuals, in individually-defined acts of self-preservation, will identify (at least publicly) as anything but the scapegoat group.
4. The group’s and leadership’s judgments will slowly base on secondary characteristics to aptitude, which may include the racial or ethnic domains, or may branch into another division (e.g., ideology).
5. By the time any of the above expresses explicitly, the group has become a bad system, and will eventually keep devolving.

Figured I’d share it, since it’s been a while since I chewed on something so profound.

What I’m Doing Now

Marching through my Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 10,057 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

1. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d): 3686 left.
2. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (000-001->100-86170).
3. Update the old content I’ve already written (100-750).
4. Finish out a few easy pages (800).
5. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
6. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (8580).
7. Finish the Management pages (8590).
8. Finish the Math pages (180).
   • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is, traced along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education:
     • Basic arithmetic
     • Algebra
     • Geometry/trigonometry
     • Statistics
     • Calculus
     • Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.
9. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (86013-86170).