Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit

Hi Ymous,

   Your post is, as always, fascinating. 

You talk about diversity increasing resilience to shocks. I suspect you’re familiar with it, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Anti-Fragile, makes much the same argument. He goes farther: he wants society to not just resist shocks and black swans, but to be stronger as a result. Like a machine learning system that uses new data to adapt and evolve, Taleb argues society should structure itself to do the same. As you say, a key part of that is accommodating and accepting diversity: having a lot of different experiences, worldviews, and backgrounds in society makes us better able to adapt in response to problems. 

I don’t think that’s as easy as it sounds, unfortunately. When someone has a good idea, they understandably want to spread it: believers on both right and left want to convince others that they have found the one true path and that they can make society better off. They might even be right. The problem is that in doing so, they homogenize: by forcing everyone to adopt the solution, we lose diversity. It seems to me that one key element in increasing societal resilience therefore needs to be humility: an acceptance that no one has all the answers, and that we need to give others space to live their lives as they choose, within certain limits. 

Even that makes me nervous. I’m sure you know Tetlock’s research about foxes and hedgehogs when it comes to experts: foxes, experts who know many things, are often better able to predict the future than hedgehogs, experts who know one big thing. Unfortunately, hedgehogs get all the good press: the media likes certainty, even if it’s wrong, and hedgehogs are certain. The modern world seems to make that worse: the humble don’t get much press, and aren’t likely to become president either.

Like you, I’m optimistic: humanity has come a long way in the past few thousand years, and we are richer, healthier, freer, and better educated than our forebears could ever have imagined, though there remains much work still to do. Still, I think humility is in order, and to use your term, I’m not sure how we shape our collective reward function to give points for humility. I’m a behavioural economist, and I believe in nudging where it makes sense: can we nudge people to be more humble? I think we probably can through thoughtful societal design, but maybe I’m hoist by my own petard: if we standardize that in society, that too would reduce diversity.