A Seekrit Plan for World Conquest... or something

[dr_tectonic]

Hey, where'd my day go? Luckily, instead of trying to think of something novel to write about, I can answer one of dpolicar's questions pretty quickly.

5. A capricious billionaire offers to pay for you to spend a year working on any project you choose, providing any necessary resources and services plausibly available in the real world (including large-scale things like labs full of researchers, manufacturing plants, etc., though you have to manage them), plus a comfortable stipend to live on. Do you accept, and what's the project if so?

I would accept with enthusiasm and alacrity. I don't know that I could be the super-competent engine that something like that would probably need to really go, but I could at least get the ball rolling.

I'm thinking that my project would probably be to try and get a bunch of really smart people working on the problems of "civology", which is to say, the study of civilization. This isn't quite the same thing as sociology or anthropology or political science or business science, though there is overlap. I often feel like we have a lot of really advanced understanding and technology when it comes to subjects like building stuff and healing people and making pictures, but when it comes to organizing ourselves and working collectively on hard problems, we're sorta retarded. I mean, several millenia of civilization, and the best system we can come up with for government is representive democracy influenced by purchased mass-media ad campaigns?! LAME! There has GOT to be a better way of doing things.

What I want is a field where we can look at human organizations -- businesses, governments, churches, universities, etc. -- in the same way that ecologists look at critters in the field. I want us to have observations of what these entities are, what their lifecycles are like, how they interact with one another, etc. so that we can engineer technologies that will let us live in harmony with them. I think that's the big challenge for the next millenium: taming organizations of humans so that they benefit humans (individually and collectively) just as much as they benefit themselves.

I went looking at "Intro to X" textbooks in the library a couple years ago, to try and find out what kind of work has already been done in this field, and I was really disappointed. The entire field of sociology, as far as I can tell, consists of Famous Thinkers™ pulling theories out of their asses about why people do things. Nobody actually goes and just observes. Well, anthropologists do, but most of the work there focuses on ancient history, primitive peoples, and people-who-are-very-different. Nobody puts up a duckblind in a cube farm to watch the native folkways of the office dweller. The business community seems to have a lot of embedded practical knowledge of these kinds of things, but it's all viewed through the weird lens of capitalist profitability.

So that's what I'd try to do: get an institute going that started making this kind of thing into a science that we could turn into technologies, so that we can persuade Godzilla-like entities like the energy industry to quit stomping on the metaphorical Tokyo of the atmosphere, and instead go fight the Mothra of resource distribution inequity. Or something. I can't figure out how the two tiny ladies fit into that metaphor, though.

That, or I would build an earthquake projector ray that actually worked, unlike the piece of crap I have now that takes out a dozen of my henchmen every time kung_fu_monkey looks at it cross-eyed. And maybe some giant cybernetic mutant attack moles that were remotely trainable for guarding secret underground lairs. I swear, is that so much to ask?

Comments

[bryree.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm...alacritous mutant attack moles...


Maybe serious-er stuff later. Interesting post.

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Well, you'll be glad to know that the Stata Center's design leaves plenty of little nooks where you could set up a duck blind to do anthropological observation of the cube farms inside. This can't just be an accident.

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

Dude, if you ever start an Institute of Civology, I am so there. Heck, I'd work as the janitor to be there. This sounds like a nice summation of the stuff that I'm interested in, which always confuses people because I read books from management, from cog-sci, from sociology, etc. But it's all fundamentally about the question of how do we live together as people, which sounds like the study of civology to me. The tack that currently interests me is how we design software to be function for groups, not just users, but that's just a specific example of the general question. Neat idea. Yay.

[kung-fu-monkey.livejournal.com]

As we discussed this morning:

It's not my problem if your earthquake projector ray is faulty and cracks under sress.


Ook!

[dpolicar]

Actually, there are people who work on organizational behavior. I haven't looked into the literature in over a decade, but some of it is the type of thing you have in mind... watch people in organizations, see what they do, see how information propogates, see how decisions actually get made, see whose ideas get implemented and whose don't, try to model and predict observed behavior. Most of this is corporate behavior 'cuz that's where the money is, but some of it is academic, and quite a lot of it involves children.

Sadly, turning it into practical tech has been lacking. Generally what happens is some pattern starts to emerge, some group latches onto it and turns it into a "powerful new program for effecting institutional change" and makes lots of money giving seminars on it, it dies from being overhyped and something else comes along. That is, we're still in the "snake oil" stage.

[kung-fu-monkey.livejournal.com]

sress=stress.

I can type dammit.

Would you like some moles for christmas so you can start training them?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I'm not comfortable agreeing that most work here is crap or non-scientific. For example, sociology underwent a pretty nasty revolution in the 90s when quantitative social scientists started to largely dominate the theoryish cultural studies-ish folks. I wouldn't be surprised if this was relatively poorly documented in Soc 101-type texts; these tend to lag the field a lot, esp. because they have to be usable by Prof. Hasbeen at West Upper State.

All that said, I do agree that this is one of the more pressing topics facing our world...

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

So far the only good theoretical framework I've seen about how to study organizations is Hayek's notion of how each form of organization is a channel for information, and its flaws emerge when you see what kind of information fails to be channeled when, where and how. Hayek of course applied his ideas from his own stilted perspective, but then, who doesn't? And it's something you can reapply in the context of economics, anthropology, sociology, polisci, so on and so forth.