=institutions =voting
Suppose you're a choosing an
expert for an important project. One approach is to choose a professor at a
prestigious university whose research is superficially related to the
project, and ask them to recommend someone. People have a better
understanding of some conceptual and social area that's close to their
position, so this is like a gradient descent problem, where we can find
gradients at points but don't have global knowledge. Gradient descent
typically uses more than 2 steps, but people tend to pass along references
to people they respect, so because of social dynamics, each referral is like
multiple gradient descent steps.
Considering that similarity to
gradient descent, for a given topic, we can model people as existing on an
energy
landscape. If we repeatedly get referrals to another expert, does that
process eventually choose the best expert? In practice, it definitely
doesn't: there are many local minima. If you want to choose a medical expert
starting from a random person, that process could give you an expert on
crystal healing, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, etc. If you choose
a western medical doctor, you'll probably end up with a western medical
doctor, but there are still various schools of practice, which tend to be local minima.
Within each school of some topic, whether it's medicine or economics or
engineering, people tend to refer to others deeper in that local minima, and
over time they tend to move deeper into it themselves. The result is
multiple clusters of people, and while each may be best at some subproblem,
for any particular thing, most of those clusters are mistaken about being
the best.
From recent research into artificial neural networks, we
know that high dimensionality is key to good convergence being possible.
Adding dimensions creates paths between local minima, which makes moving
between them possible. If this applies to communities of experts, it's
better to evaluate experts with many criteria than with few criteria.
Many people have written about various inadequacies of Donald Trump and
Joe Biden, but I don't want to get into ongoing politics, so instead I'll
say that I don't think George W Bush was up to the standard of George
Washington or Vannevar Bush. More generally, I think the average quality of
American institutional leadership has declined.
Why might such
decline have happened?
Evaluations using many criteria tend to be
less legible
and harder to specify. If such legibility was prioritized, evaluations could
become lower-quality because they discard information, but also, per the
above energy landscape framework, the lower dimensionality of evaluations would
cause a proliferation of local minima, which I think could be seen in
various government agencies and large corporations having their leadership
become dominated by various strange subcultures.
A pattern that's evolved in many
large government agencies and large corporations is having top management
move between different departments, different companies, or between
government and companies. That reduces the ability of managers to specialize
by learning details particular to one department, but it does reduce the
development of local minima and weird subcultures in any one particular
department.
However, I think that only delays the problem. Today,
America has developed a management omniculture; "conventional" top
management across big corporations is similar, but is a weird and irrational
subculture to lower-level employees, engineers, and society as a whole.
There are 8 billion people alive
today, perhaps 7% of all humans who have ever lived. The internet exists:
all human knowledge and communication with anyone in the world, all
available instantly at negligible cost. If your process for finding the best
people isn't at least finding people comparable to the greatest minds of
history, it's probably getting stuck in some local minima.
What, then, is the alternative?
Is is better to have more subjective and less formalized evaluations in hope
of increasing dimensionality? That's what was switched away from, and there
were reasons for that change. When you have subjective evaluations with no
rules, and some of the people involved are in groups with high ingroup bias,
over time, institutions are taken over by one or more of those biased
groups. Nepotism is a classic example - people appointing other family
members, until their family either takes over or is noticed and countered.
Many current institutions have mechanisms that prevent nepotism in
particular but aren't effective against larger and more abstract biased
groups.
I wrote this post to introduce the concepts of:
- people existing on an energy landscape with respect to
evaluations of expertise on a topic
- increasing dimensionality as a way
to avoid local minima, applied to an energy landscape of expertise
I don't want to limit those concepts to a single application, but I think they can be used to evaluate democratic mechanisms. Different people have different criteria, and by merging their evaluations with a voting process, results can be better than evaluation by any one individual. But, in the framework I introduced, there are 2 problems with voting as currently used:
- As neural
networks have shown, convergence of high-dimensional systems requires more
iteration than finding a local minimum in a lower-dimensional system. Maybe
what's necessary for a good process isn't a large group of voters or iterative selection of experts by individuals, but a
combination of those approaches.
- Imagine a group of voters who all
evaluate by a combination of some Criteria X and a random individual
criteria. Obviously, Criteria X will be overweighted in the overall
evaluation. Ideally, shared criteria would be reduced in weight somehow if
they're not of proportionately greater importance. This indicates to me that
outlier scores and outlier voters tend to be underweighted, at least for
initial steps of an iterative expert selection process, because they may
have information that most people don't. Compensating for that would require
a system where most scores are moderate.