Comment by throwuwu
2 years ago
I think you’re weighting the contribution of authority a bit too highly. The bad actors to be concerned about are a very small percentage of the population and we do need institutions with authority to keep those people at bay but it’s not like there’s this huge pool of “high variance” people that need to be screened out. The vast majority of people are extremely close in both opinion and ability, any semblance of society would be impossible otherwise.
> it’s not like there’s this huge pool of “high variance” people that need to be screened out. The vast majority of people are extremely close in both opinion and ability, any semblance of society would be impossible otherwise.
Yes, but I'm saying it's not an accident - I've mentioned mechanisms like culture, social customs, and education, which we've been using in some form for all our recorded history. I should've probably added violent conflicts within and between tribes/groups, too, which also acted to reduce variance, by culling the more volatile and less agreeable people. People today are "extremely close in both opinion and ability" because for the past couple thousands years, generation by generation, we've been busy reducing the variance of individuals.
EDIT: keeping high-variance individuals locked up safely away is just one of the methods we use, specifically to deal with outliers. It too traces back to the dawn of recorded history - shunning, expelling individuals from the tribe (which often meant certain death), sending them to faraway lands, or forcing them into war, were other common means past societies used to eliminate high-variance outliers.
As for authority, it's a separate topic - I argue that hierarchical governance is an artifact of scale: it's necessary to coordinate groups past certain size (~Dunbar's number), when our basic social intuitions are no longer up to the task. But the first level of hierarchy can handle only so many people, and if you want to coordinate multiple such groups, you need to add another layer... and that's how, over time, human societies scaled from tribes of couple dozen people, to nation states of hundreds of millions.
Even as the focus is usually on the national governments, the entire hierarchy is still there - you have states and lands/vovoidships/counties with their own governance, then another level for a major city and surrounding villages, then yet another level in each individual village, and one or two levels in the city itself, etc. We don't often pay attention to it, but the hierarchy of governance does reach down, in some form, all the way to groups of couple hundred people or less.