Federalist No. 3

Speed. Do you often think about geological epochs, the Anthropocene, and why humans dominate the planet? I do, constantly. So I'll start from afar. How long did it take ants to unlock eusociality? Tens of millions of years. How long did it take us to unlock societies much longer than Dunbar's number? Well, the beginnings of civilization were around 10,000 years ago, and we became Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago, so 100-3,000 times faster. How long did it take us to start using oil for life? Well, again, almost instantly after eusociality, even though no one else had really learned how yet. But what's the efficiency of converting energy into work? Almost zero. A car carrying 1-2 people uses fuel to move 1.5 tons, so the payload is roughly 10%. But that's not important, because at such speeds, we're not competing with organic matter, for which extracting and processing oil is a simple matter. The same applies to history. It takes a long time to train an archer, but distributing muskets to new recruits is almost instantaneous. Time itself is a very interesting and powerful substance. For example, time is measured using the ancient Sumerian base-12 system, not the newfangled metric system. This rigidity, in my opinion, stems from the fact that time, especially astronomically, is an extremely stubborn thing, making it difficult to work with. Now, let's move on to cooperation and bureaucracy. Cooperation generally strives to be as fast as possible. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is always slow because its job is to manage risks. You can't sell an apartment with the click of a button; you have to tinker with it precisely to reduce the risk of error. But you can trade the same amount at millisecond speeds using algorithms, and that's perfectly normal. But let's say the true quality of a check is determined by the procedure, not simply by time. Those same profilers in the Israeli metro are more effective than security theater with frameworks, despite being faster. That is, a blunt slowdown of the process covers a certain class of threats that otherwise wouldn't be caught, but overall, if a process takes an absurd amount of time, then these are poor procedures that are also likely flawed. How can we speed up transactions where they are currently slow? The most accurate way to define the scope of slow transactions is as serious, reasoned discussions involving experts and data from various agencies. A cauldron is needed, of course. A cauldron of arguments for ultra-fast transactions sounds dubious for several reasons: - Is it possible to quickly mine data? - Is it possible to engage people so that they constantly participate in the discussion? - Is it possible to consider the issue from different angles quickly enough, without lengthy delays searching for new aspects? For specific questions, we'll try. So, 90% of reasoning simply requires knowledge of orders of magnitude. Fermi calculations and all that. That is, they can be conducted even without expert support. But the remaining questions, unless they're government-related, require two or three experts with different backgrounds to cover the remaining 9% of accuracy. For people to participate in such a discussion, there needs to be a pie. That is, if the fruit of such a discussion is a specific conclusion, which is needed, like the result of a lab analysis. Not some information for general development, but an answer to the question, "How should I best proceed in the near future?" Or not for me personally, but for the organization I'm interested in or that pays me. To consider all these facets, you simply need a variety of viewpoints. Discussion usually slows down because different perspectives have to be found and considered by a handful of people. In general, if we can turn systematic argumentation into a product, it becomes a source for a large number of cultural innovations and businesses that otherwise would have been slow to emerge. Author: Light