More generally speaking, when you optimize on a particular set of metrics to the extreme (when it comes to social issues this is what utopias try to do), you will inevitably cause another set of metrics to be correspondingly de-optimized to the extreme (which can be qualified as dystopian).
There is no way to optimize everything simultaneously because many things are fundamentally inversely correlated with each other (e.g. security vs freedom). So you either have a state that is relatively balanced (everything is mediocre), or a state with more spread (some aspects are really good and some are really bad).
Take a... Syria during civil war society and compare it to... Norwegian society.
I'd argue Norway has vastly more security and freedom. Increasing one didn't increase the other. And both metrics are pretty close to maximum.
Using your example of security vs freedom, yes there are measures you can take to increase security at the cost of freedom.
But there's also many measures you can take which do not compromise freedom. As a very basic example, having laws against murder. These laws (I can't imagine) effect "freedom" in any meaningful way, so I can't agree that they're fundamentally opposed in some kind of inherent way.
What we call security and freedom (and utopian for that matter) are just words, definable in any number of subjective ways.
But a theoretical Utopia is something theoretically perfect, which while technically possible, we probably agree is not practical.
I suppose my point is that subjective, indefinable properties like "infinite security" and "infinite freedom" are not fundamental, literal forces that increase when the other decreases and vice versa.
They're just words, and anything is possible, including a society where everyone enjoys maximum freedom and maximum security (by some definition)
Though I obviously don't know exactly what OP meant, but maybe there is a difference between simply looking at Norway as a pretty close to utopia versus doing that from scratch in one step, skipping the organic "annealing" of culture and politics.
Simply having a few determined goals means the design necessarily have to be biased against the unmentioned goals. And those might be important for the general state, but it can be a hidden preference.
Bias against the unmentioned goals? Sure, plausible. But theoretically is argue not necessary.
There's no reason why all goals could be covered, in some not to hard to imagine system (perhaps a post-secondary society simply allows anyone with a grievance to get in touch with whoever can fix it, if it should be fixed,as opposed to having a bunch of top down goals)
Also, I don't see why being optimum in one goal, let's say transparency, wouldn't help many other goals, like freedom and security.
I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.
That said, humans are far from perfect, so their societies are difficult to perfect.
But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?
It's harder to optimize a system if there are a lot of dimensions.
For example, tax report transparency is bad if you have inequality and also lack an efficient anti-hate-crime enforcement system, because then people will lynch/rob rich folks.
So even just getting closer to the optimum takes time and a lot of resources.
> I just don't think these concepts are as simple as levers, and I think anything is possible.
Exactly. It's a complex dynamic system with path dependence. Trajectory is everything.
> But with enough education, knowledge, and a sprinkle of genetic engineering, maybe?
Maybe :) Though the problem is that without a great society powerful tools will be used to entrench the interests of those that lead the existing not-so-great society.
And it's very hard to align the interests of the leaders with the commoners.
That does indeed appear to be the core problem in societies in this and the last century (and before, presumably.)
I'd argue that social democracy seems to be doing pretty well at distributing income and wealth and power. It's a shame "social" is a dirty word in the states.
If the EU can develop successfully over the next few decades into something superpower-like, maybe the benefits of such a system will become attractive to other powers and the ideas will spread.
Or maybe the China system of repression and threatening the neighbourhood will turn out to be more competitive globally and we'll see more of that.
And pardon the absurd typos in my last comment, my phone's keyboard is pretty terrible. I'd fix them but HN doesn't allow edits after a certain amount of time so the gibberish must remain.
I put it more bluntly, the Smart People who have all the solutions greatly overestimate their own intelligence, to the detriment of the victims of their hubris. This is by and large independent of political leanings.
I agree. It's also worth noting the lifecycle of most optimizations, including the non-partisan variety:
1. Early on many benefit and costs are minimized per capita.
2. As the benefits diffuse across the population, smart/wily/greedy individuals push the optimization to squeeze more value for themselves.
3. Benefits begin to centralize among the smart/wily/greedy. Awareness of costs starts to grow. The general population becomes ambivalent. Regulation can keep the system in this state for a while, but it too will eventually be optimized.
4. The arms race of optimization ultimately excludes all but the smartest/wiliest/greediest from any benefit while the rest of the population eats the cost. The optimization is now Bad For Society™.
My gut says this pattern is true for any social construction, from marriage and markets to card games and communism. The only meaningful insight I take away from it is that ideological conflict (competition between optimizations) is literally the foundation of a functioning society.
The relative balance that tension provides doesn't strike me as mediocre. Without it, everything devolves into an oscillating heaven and hell, mirroring your ideology.
> ideological conflict (competition between optimizations)
This is an important idea. Optimality shifts when the environment shifts, and some ideas which work well in one environment may end up working badly when the world changes.
Because the world is inevitably complex and stochastic, we need enough dynamism in society in order to continually adapt, and for that we need a system that permits competing ideas, as well mechanisms to limit the amplification of the effects of bad ideas (good democratic institutions do a decent job at the latter).
Using 'optimization' here makes it an odd construction where I don't think I've quite understood what you are trying to say.
Is it synonymous with social change? Most social changes aren't optimisations, they are complicated changes to how resources are distributed; leading to unpredictable outcomes.
Take social welfare. This can probably be considered a social optimisation and most reasonable people would agree that some level of welfare is appropriate. But there doesn't seem to be any particular agreement on the economic or social front about whether the optimum amount is more or less. Or what we are optimising for.
Optimization in the sense of optimizing for a specific (often ideological) outcome, rather than optimizing away an objective inefficiency.
Social welfare is a perfect example of "competing optimizations" precisely because there are so many different (and often mutually exclusive) organizational models and success metrics.
From your linked definition, it is a word "coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems"
Taken metaphorically, a utopia is a idealized state of affairs where perfection (optimality) is reached. This state of affairs is imaginary however, because the world in which such a perfection is attained is also imaginary. Attempts to achieve it in our reality (communism, etc.) ends up running up against a complex system of nonlinear tradeoffs, which is what I imagine the OP is alluding to.
There was a discussion of the SR-71 a few months ago that I found excellent. One of the comments took the opposition approach - The SR-71 was an engineering failure, because it leaked fuel, it required tight tolerances and most of the parts were thrown out because of it, etc [1].
I think it's a correct view. I think they're absolutely right about the SR-71. I posted a comment arguing they're wrong, because I think my comment is also a correct view. The SR-71 is the wrong plane for many, many applications. For the few that needed it, it was an absolutely vital tradeoff. Engineering isn't just about optimizing a metric. It's about optimizing many metrics, and finding a set of tradeoffs that fits. It's about finding the point on the line where people are satisfied.
Perhaps - Engineering is about finding the proper fitness functions, and then finding the optimal solution from there. Both are hard problems. Having the right fitness function/requirements gathering is the most screwed up stage of any development, and software developers are no exception, but I feel our industry has gotten away with a lot. Optimizing globally is often an unbounded problem, so finding efficient approximations (like evolutionary algorithms or hill climbing functions) is often the right approach - But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try for the correct one.
What does correct mean? Engineering is about solving problems.
Ultimately it was the right solution for a very specific scope and time. The knowledge gained helped avoid nuclear conflict — an extreme benefit worth a lot of cost.
Once satellites matured, it’s utility was reduced. Once drones were a thing, it’s utility went to zero. Top-secret state of the art stuff in 1990 is on the deck of a mueseum today.
There is no way to optimize everything simultaneously because many things are fundamentally inversely correlated with each other (e.g. security vs freedom). So you either have a state that is relatively balanced (everything is mediocre), or a state with more spread (some aspects are really good and some are really bad).