@eshear - Chapman summarizes the problem with

There are models in the choiceless mode too. If you believe that the hunt succeeds because of the favor of Artemis, this is a model of hunting. Choiceless mode models are simple models made of very complex parts.

“Artemis” is a very complicated idea, drawing on intuitive understandings and archetypes. “Favor” is another complicated idea. But once you have those as primitives, “Artemis’s favor makes the hunt succeed” is a simple proposal. It contains very few parameters!

So the definition of a model that I gave in part 1 is actually the how you see a model in the systematic mode. Systematic models are reductionist. They strive for the simplest possible parts so that the complexity can be explicit.

Explicit models made of simple, orthogonal parts are shockingly effective. They enable you to understand the world as a system with fine resolution, to run experiments to determine causality, to set goals and achieve them.

So starting around 1900 (±50 years depending how you look at it), we enter the modern era. The era of systems. We begin to manage our entire world with systematic reductionist models: companies, economies, schools, forests, medicine, etc etc.

This leads to great success! It turns out reductionist systematic approaches are very powerful. You make what you measure, and if you can systematically measure throughout your system you can make a lot.

For example, one out of three babies used to die before they turned five. But we got systematic about medicine and hygiene, and lo we did SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Modernity took over the world and it is important to understand why: power to change the world.

And yet we cannot help but notice that this seems to come with certain downsides. Many people have commented on the downsides of modernity. The complaints start long ago. Examples include Marx (alienation), Weber (disenchantment), Durkheim (anomie).

Our banks are Too Big To Fail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail, our institutions are increasingly fragile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kVgIfMMeWM, we are Bowling Alone, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/16643

I gave this talk on how technology is intrinsically isolating along the same lines as Putnam’s insight, which they repackaged to be about Streaming Entertainment for some reason https://www.ted.com/talks/emmett_shear_what_streaming_mea…

Our resident insightful cynic @robinhanson articulates a very insightful version what’s going wrong with modernity here https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/beware-cultural-drift/ and here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-big-oops.

Scott Alexander reviews James Scott here. The problems of modernism are all about Seeing Like A State, of managing to optimize what we can measure. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-…