Why Things Go to Shit

try gardening.

To see a tiny seed grow into a massive sequoia is way beyond the scope of one of our lifetimes, but we can still experience a few dozen years of it.

Just as humbling as kafka-esque everything-is-bullshit or entropy theory, and it just feels better.

But yours is a nice essay. Yes the more we read the news lately, the more it all seems like BS. But I try to remember Bannon's warning that we would soon be flooded with it.

This point in particular just... clicked:

"So democracies can’t go to shit, right? Wrong. They just go to shit more slowly and quietly. There’s no incentive for democratic governments to provide objectively good policies (as opposed to good-sounding policies), because voters lack the expertise to assess the complex effects of any particular policy on any desired outcome. This is because 1) it is extremely hard (if not impossible) to acquire that expertise, 2) voters are largely ignorant and biased by tribal allegiances, and 3) each citizen’s vote has essentially zero impact on political outcomes, giving them essentially zero incentive to acquire that expertise or overcome those biases. Therefore, democratic governments gradually accumulate good-sounding (but ultimately bad) policies, grow increasingly sclerotic and inefficient, and go to shit."

Okay this was a tough read even if not bad. Allow me to elaborate why I struggled reading it, especially with inanimate or non-thinking objects "having no incentive". A plant's genetic coding has a strong incentive on producing as much seed pods as possible (and some plants want to be eaten by animals enjoying the fruit around it, so their faeces spread the seeds across the earth). Plants are competitive in growing larger to have more sun than a moss cover that evolved to thrive even in low light.

Even a rock containing an ore had an incentive to form. The behaviour of elemental orbitals determines which phases and minerals crystallize first and last (see HFSE).

You can take this further that even sand dunes have emergent behaviour governing their formation and movement in a desert. Is everything still going to crap when we run out of energy and reach a final state of entropy? Sure! But this is one hell of a ride.

Now in regard to Doctorowian Enshittification: Companies favour short term solutions these days because they cannot function like something that evolved over millions of years to perfection. We started with probably 3 streaming services (for movies), now we have 30 and they wonder why we cannot pay each of them 55 USD as we had to with cable and 100+ paid channels?

They don't know (yet/ever) the real incentive is to find an evolutionary niche to thrive on. You can never cater to all tastes at once. Explain this: Why do most restaurants focus on one nationality? (the owner can have a different nationality and it still works). Now you have hit the jackpot to de-shittify.

What you call “going to shit” I call “garbage collection”. It’s something you can’t avoid in any environment with finite resources

It's a good article, with some truth, but the author should read Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene" which explains how groups with genes for altruism can outcompete groups without. Evolution isn't just a matter of individuals competing against each other: it also applies to groups.

The universe tends toward entropy. There are vastly more ways for disorder to exist than for order.