Math can explain everything if you've restricted the scope of everything to the kinds of things that math is good at explaining. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively. What should we count to wisely operate a nation state? podcast 
It's really easy to measure student graduation rate, satisfaction scores and employment salaries after college. It's really hard to measure whether students became more wise, whether they became more curious, whether they are more reflective.
Similarly the medical world for example, targets things that are easily measurable like lifespan and saving lives and doesn't target things that are harder to measure like various forms of rich and complicated quality of life.
Imagine you have a population of scientists and they all are identically rational in the same way they believe whatever theory has the most evidence behind it, this seems good, right? That's actually terrible.
You want a diverse environment in which people have different sensibilities. Maybe some people do the most with the evidence and maybe some people just fall in love with weird theories and once in a while those pay off.
It is really good and healthy for human beings to live in an ambiguous environment with a pluralistic set of goals.
That is an essential tension with the methods of large scale collective organization. If it's true that for an organization to cohere it needs to have clear policies so it can act coherently, then we should not expect that kind of ambiguity to survive at scale.
And so there's this gap and I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome. I think that we can get some distance otherwise I wouldn't be a modeler of social systems. I think that we can do things but it's necessarily going to be a bit more abstract.
There's this tension between localized knowledge and hyper universalized knowledge and the metric is the darling of cross contextual universal knowledge but it misses out on the kinds of things that require a huge amount of subtle situational awareness or context.
There will always be incentives but it doesn't necessarily mean that there have to be quantitative metrics and it doesn't necessarily mean that there has to be one big bottleneck that everyone's trying to get through. Maybe there are many small bottlenecks in that might be better.
Your concern is here are some fixes that might work, but how do we implement them? Where I'm chasing is like what if there's an unsolvable problem baked into our nature, which is that social organization at scale will never adequately serve individuals.
When you ask a question like have we gone past the ideal scale of humanity that implies that there is an ideal scale that we could plausibly hit if we could somehow convince people to scale back. For me the real worry is there's no ideal scale of humanity cuz different things we wanna be involved in demand different scales.
So it's not about like an equilibrium so much as it is about a dynamic balance or a zone at which these different forces are able to coexist. How do you deal with all of this in light of both the need for global coordination and bio-regional organization and neighborhood level personal relationships, et cetera?
If you're talking about affordances for survival in a highly scaled up environment, I think actually we kind of already know what those are and they're kind of old fashioned. Like I think about things like the play attitude, the aesthetic attitude, irony.
If we have good ideas, what does the best complex system science and the best philosophy tell us we can do to disseminate them because I witnessed this on a daily basis. The situation is moving faster than the explanation for how to course correct can even be communicated.
We know almost nothing about how cultural evolution works in a modern wired, large scale, diverse society because so many of the models were developed for pre-industrial societies.
There's also, the communication aspect. Let's say I have a really coherent formal theory about the way things work. Such a theory is gonna be flawed and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands because the way social systems work, it can be immediately exploited by nefarious actors.
It's also important to disseminate that understanding because people should know what to look out for, right? If you know how, let's say certain actors are behaving and what the consequences of those actions are, you're more likely to be able to say, wait a second, I know the consequences of you doing that.
If I'm doing such and such in some domain, then I know how to use these theories of social behavior. If my plans based on those theories are then accessible to the public, I think the concern possibly is that people are going to misunderstand what the intentions are, misunderstand our motivations, misunderstand the reasoning behind them.
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I've aggressively shortened this transcript. Those interested should definitely listen to the full conversation. I also distinctly remember requisite variety mentioned but don't see this in the transcript.