Beware Macro Decay Modes - by Robin Hanson
When a house burns, it is in a decay mode. As it is when it is abandoned. The large systems in which houses are embedded try to prevent and resist such decay modes, but even so such modes still happen at times.
When our bodies get sick they are in decay modes, modes we try to prevent and resist. But even when not sick, our bodies are mostly in a slow overall decay mode of aging. As are typically our houses, cars, and organizations.
Science and business seem to be improving, not decaying, even as individual scientists and business firms decay. But in history whole empires not only fell into fast temporary decay modes like famines and pandemics, they also typically entered slow decay modes, and went away. You might hope that empires just rose more slowly than rivals, and so were displaced, but its seems that, no, empires mostly decayed from within.
Firms decay even though they have internal processes of innovation and improvement, and entire biological species have also decayed, even though they have internal innovation driven by natural selection.
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