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Applying sub-Dunbar thinking to super-Dunbar level problems
One common pattern of argument you often see from people who have not been doing too well in life is that they often blame rich/powerful interests for why they have not been successful, or alternatively why a certain social institution does not seem to work in the best interests of all of society. Their thinking is that to fix the problem, all we need to do is bring these rich/powerful people to heel. The problem according to such people is that fundamentally these small interest groups are disproportionately sucking up value from society and to fix this, they need to be punished.
The quintessential example I can think of is the problem with rising rents here in the UK. Rents have been going up faster than wages due to decades of underbuilding and general NIMBYism. Things are not quite as bad as say Ireland or Berlin (thankfully we've managed to not fall for the populist poison apple of rent control) but they're still becoming quite the issue with ordinary couples in London spending close to 40% of their take home pay on just shelter.
Recent regulations putting additional burden on landlords and making it harder for them to generate a profit (e.g. energy rating requirements and the removal of mortgage interest deduction from taxes) have led to them selling, further reducing supply more than demand goes down (renters who buy tend to buy bigger than what they were renting, thus reducing the total amount of supply in aggregate, e.g. a couple living in a 1 bed rented apartment may buy a 2 bed one, thereby reducing rental demand by 1 room but supply by 2 rooms, leading to a net loss of 1 room) which then pushes up prices even further.
This has gotten to the point where there are now over 20 prospective tenants competing over each property, which naturally leads to people having to bid over the landlord's asking price/paying months of rent in advance/submitting references if they want to actually get the place for themselves. This has lead to cries that landlords are "exploiting" poor tenants who have nowhere else to go and that they are capital-B Bad People who society needs to give a stern scolding to so that they go back to acting in pro-social ways.
If you were to point out that the current situation is in part caused by society making it harder to be a profitable landlord and that the correct remedy is to make things easier for landlords to make a profit (the real correct remedy is to build more, but good luck doing that in NIMBYland) that standard refrain is that the landlords are already doing far better on average than their tenants, so why should society do even more to help them out? Indeed, they say, we should be playing the world's smallest violin for such hard done up landlords who have hundreds of thousands of pounds to their name. No, what is happening here is that Landlords are capturing a disproportionately high percentage of the fruits of the labour of ordinary tenants (true, compared to historical values), and the solution is to do something that prevents so much of the hard earned money of your average Joe ending up in their hands, ergo Rent Control.
This type of thinking is something that actually works pretty well when we're dealing with small groups of up to 250ish not very technologically advanced people you couldn't just easily get up and leave for a different one like those humans spent most of their evolutionary history in. In such a group it is very well possible to use social shaming and exclusion to ensure a more balanced distribution of resources instead of having a few people hog it all. The lack of advanced technology means that there are no large economies of scale to the group as a whole (and thus eventually you) from having resources concentrated in a few hotspots rather than being more widely spread out. Thus in a small, sub Dunbar's number sized group, ostracism and gossip about how someone is behaving selfishly is the correct course of action to take for the betterment of everyone.
Unfortunately it fails catastrophically when applied to our modern society. It doesn't matter one bit that landlords are richer than tenants for why the current rental market in the UK is as bad as it is. Every single property could be owned by Elon Musk, right now the richest man in the world, and if he was selling off his portfolio because it was no longer profitable the situation would be just as bleak for renters (no more, no less) as it is right now with many disparate landlords independently coming to the same conclusion. Equally they could all be owned by a mutual fund investing the life savings of the poorest half of the planet and if that fund was leaving the rental market due to poor returns it would cause rents to rise just as much as they are doing now. The outcomes for the tenants are the exact same in each of the three cases.
The idea of shaming and making life harder for the people who are disproportionately capturing the economic surplus in an area to shame them into being more altruistic and thus improve outcomes for all of society just does not work in environments where people have a lot more freedom of association than you would get in a typical pre-industrial society. As we see in the example above, that can often be quite counterproductive.
The correct way to fix the issue in our large, super-Dunbar sized societies is the mirror opposite of the sub-Dunbar solution, namely we need to make it easier for landlords to make a profit so they enter the market (hopefully through building new units, but even switching a house form owner-occupied to "for rent" helps relieve the pressure on rents) and increase supply. The correct metric to look at here if you care about the tenants doing well is not how badly the landlords are doing, of the difference in how much value the landlords get vs the tenants from renting out their units, but quite simply "how much value are the tenants getting for what they pay" with zero reference to the sum total welfare of the landlords. And the way to increase tenant welfare? Increase rental supply in the area that people want to rent so there is competition amongst landlords and tenants are able to command more market power than the mere morsel they have today.
Another example of where sub-Dunbar level thinking fails in modern society can be seen in funding for technological advancement. Modern research and development has large capital costs, which requires large pockets of concentrated capital to progress. In a smallish society of 250 people where nobody can really get away from the others, if one of the members has a large windfall it makes total sense for the members of the society to want its fruits to be spread out for their own benefit.
Imagine a world where 250 people each have $2,000, but one person suddenly wins a lottery worth $1,000,000,000 (and gets access to goods worth that much, so it's not like the extra cash causes massive demand pull inflation). As a non lottery-winner, it is in your interest to agitate for the money to be distributed equally amongst everyone, giving everyone $4,000,000 rather than letting the winner keep it, even if they protest that they intend to use the money to fund the development of a drug which will add a year onto everyone's life expectancy (most people will take $4M over 1 QALY). Plus, if your society is not technologically advanced, the chances of that drug being successfully developed in the first place are extremely low, even if all the money is spent finding it. It makes complete sense to redistribute the money, the lottery winner will be pretty unhappy about it, but who cares about 1 person vs 249 and anyways that person's survival is strongly tied to the group's success, and he can't just take his money and run elsewhere.
On the other hand if instead of 250 people, your society has modern day technology and consists of 1 billion people each having $60,000 and someone comes into $1,000,000,000 and promises to develop a +1 QALY drug, it makes total sense to let them keep the money. Even if you took it all and redistributed it amongst everyone that's only $1 per person, which is worth a lot less than an extra QALY (compare to the small society case where everyone got $4M instead). Also the existence of modern technology makes it more likely they'll be able to find and manufacture the drug in the first place.
Indeed here is a case where even the famous Egalitarian philosopher John Rawls would have been in favour of the inequality, as his difference principle permits inequalities where their existence is beneficial to the worst off in society as it is here: for a non winner $60,000 + new drug is a better world than $60,001 but no new drug (a crowdfunding effort to raise money to publicly develop the drug isn't going to raise an extra $1 billion if everyone in society has $60,001 vs $60,000; you really need to have the concentration of wealth in the hands of an actor who's willing to embark on this project). The correct course of action for everyone in the super-Dunbar sized society is to let the lottery winner keep his money, the exact opposite of what they should do in the sub-Dunbar sized society.
Given all this, why is it still the case that many people in our modern world are big proponents of sub-Dunbar level thinking? After all, they would all agree with you that we are quite technologically advanced and no longer live in small societies where you can know everyone else who has a significant influence on your life. For most of human history, sub-Dunbar type thinking would have yielded better results for you and yours instead of the opposite, so it sort of makes sense why deep down we default to it so much, but equally for most of human history violence was extremely common and today we're by far the most peaceful we've ever been as a species.
I would say that this aberration is due to a pernicious effect of modern communications technology. We humans have an availability heuristic where we categorize how common something is in the world based on how often we see it. This works quite well when we're deciding between whether there are more yellow berries or red berries in a valley when the last few times we went foraging we saw around twice as many red berries than yellow ones, but it works a lot less well when modern communications deliberately amplifies rare events (after all, you're a lot more likely to hear "man bites dog" on the news than "dog bites man", despite the latter being much more frequent - ironically this is not true at the moment here in the UK due to the XL Bully dogs rampaging around, but the general idea is valid).
As a result of this amplification, modern day humans who are bombarded with media stories of the rich and powerful think deep down in their subconscious that such people are a lot more common than they actually are, and even worse, that such people are in the same 250ish Dunbar "tribe" as themselves (because the frequent updates about such people make one think these are genuine interactions between them and ourselves), in which case it makes complete sense for why they default to their instinctual, limbic thought process and feel that the way to make the modern world a better place for everyone is very similar to the ways that made life better for antediluvian man.
This is seen in regard to blaming the FDA and peer review for impeding progress of new ideas and treatments. The FDA does not impede progress and peer review does not stop news ideas. Treatments that fail the FDA are not denied because of bureaucracy, but because they simply do not work, not because there is some conspiracy by rich people, drug companies, or governments to deny treatments. That is what a clinical trial does. But very few experimental drugs yield a successful treatment, especially for cancer. it does not even make business sense for a drug company to 'horde' treatments given that the government is paying for it anyway under Medicare or Medicaid. Regarding peer review, the process is not to block new ideas but block things which are unscientific to begin with, poor fit for the journal, or not written in a logically coherent way.
The denial of a drug isn’t the problem. The problem is the decades long process of very expensive, repetitive testing that can often add billions of dollars in research costs and delay the deployment of the drug. There’s also the issue of the drugs that don’t get released because the expected costs of bringing them to market isn’t that much less than the profit they can get for the drug, either because the disease is too rare to profitability treat, or because the disease is mild enough that patients won’t buy the drug if it costs too much.
If the disease is rare then the drug becomes absurdly expensive and covered by Medicaid .
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I feel like you could have chosen literally any other example and had a more compelling argument, particularly given our history here. Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs, Did A Melatonin Patent Inspire Current Dose Confusion?, etc, etc, etc. Sometimes high costs are because it takes billions of dollars to sift through millions of candidate chemicals and determine their effects on a noisy sample of thousands of people. Sometimes the high costs are because "Epipen" is easier to write than "Epinephrine Autoinjector".
Gleevec was approved to treat acute leukemia and was a major breakthrough. I would say that was progress. The vast majority of trials yield no improvement or even make the patient worse. yeah, regulation imposes a cost, but so does actually developing the drugs. There needs to be some firewall against useless or harmless treatments. A generic EpiPen was approved in 2018 https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-generic-version-epipen
Okay? The FDA does not perfectly impede progress isn't a contentious claim. How about bromantane from my last link (An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology):
Does that count as impeding progress?
It only took them nine years! Congratulations to Teva Pharmaceuticals on their achievement.
I suppose it also comes down to the baseline we're discussing. Does the FDA impede progress relative to what, and by how much?
I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator, and the difference is enough to make a material impact on a decent fraction of people.
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This would be a better argument if we didn't have plenty of evidence of peer review being used to sabotage new ideas for all manner of reasons from moneyed interests to petty university politics.
Besides, the idea that the current publishing process' point is to root out unscientific publications is both ahistorical (this is not how it came about) and practically risible (it has not in fact succeeded in doing so, and has produced more unreplicated garbage than ever).
There is no general rule. Institutions aren't inherently trustworthy or untrustworthy. The men that make them are probably much more important than the stories they tell about themselves.
you'd have to consider the counterfactual of no peer review though... lots more papers disproving Einstein, proving/disproving the Riemann hypothesis, etc. based on demonstrably wrong arguments . Peer review, as imperfect as it is, is better than the alternative. One can argue "let the community decide" in which case the communtiy is flooded with a deluge of unscientific junk and only a finite amount of time to process it.
The thing is, we do have the counterfactual, which is what happened before the reification of scientific publishing and what still happens in novel disciplines: it was a free for all with all manner of cranks and yet the quality of scholarship people actually cared about wasn't worse, on the contrary. Nor indeed was it any harder to parse than what journals have now become where most of what is published is garbage and even the most prestigious ones are not what they used to be.
I hint at it in my previous post but the point of journals and peer review was never originally to credential knowledge production (which is actually anathema to the scientific method) but to solve a logistical problem for institutions that had to rely on paper and its very narrow and expensive bandwidth. A problem that no longer actually exists in any meaningful sense.
If you snapped your fingers and took all of Elsevier out of existence tomorrow, I'd wager the lives of scientists would actually become easier by a large margin. And I submit as evidence the fact that most scientists in most disciplines actively circumvent copyright laws on the daily.
I also submit to you that it is in fact the credentialist approach that produces the greater incentive for fraud as the rewards of State funding are much easier to game when they are behind a list of bureaucratic checkboxes than behind a genuine need or the true esteem of one's peers.
time is a finite resource. so is manpower. people who read journals do not want to have to sift through piles of crud. peer review is not just about saving space but about curation.
The crank ideas fell out of favor because of peer review. Otherwise we'd still be seeing papers about luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, and perpetual motion machines. It's not so much as a 'free for all' , but that competing ideas can coexist and then one wins out as being correct and the other is discarded.
This entire line of argument is a post-hoc rationalization. Again this isn't actually how peer review came about, this is the excuse to keep it going, but regardless of the merits of peer review, that excuse is nonsense, because the process has proven quite unable to filter out garbage science.
What it does do is prevent heterodox publication, which is completely different
What's you're describing here is paradigmatization as conceptualized by Kuhn, the process in which a discipline becomes more structured and predictable by producing more incremental work based on an assumed theory or framework until it becomes so untenable that some crank show it all to be wrong and the process begins anew.
Now if you want to say that this process is necessary for science to move along, that's fine, and I'll agree. But if you want to say that increasing the level of control on publication to exclude the bad stuff is how you get new discoveries then that's just plainly wrong. It's quite the opposite actually. Scientific revolutions come from the margins.
And in that light, it makes attempts at sorting out the cranks from the serious people by establishing some bureaucratic authority and process quite futile.
Yeah, maybe if we'd tightened it a little more we would even not have to see papers about semiconductors, aerodynes, and other such discredited impossible things. What a great win for humanity that would have been.
Again, to bring this back to my main point, peer review , contrary to popular belief here, does not suppress new or fringe ideas. The only criteria is the ideas must follow some guidelines, like be mathematically or logically consistent. For example, Alcubierre Miguel's 1994 paper about warp drives, which is speculative even by the standards of theoretical physics, was published in a peer reviewed journal, and the idea has now gained mainstream attention from that original publication. Same for ADs-CFT, in 1997. or theories in which Newtonian physics is modified.
Speculative and heterodox are different concepts.
But I mean, you're not going to convince me something I have witnessed first hand doesn't exist.
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