Good morning.

This year, the plan is to spend more time articulating the various and increasingly relevant

to our lives responses to the more than human predicament.

But before that, I'll need to dive into the various scenarios and possibilities ahead of

us, current theories of change and what they're missing, probabilistic,

planning, shortfall risk, and only then the broad categories of interventions and associated

subcategories. But today's topic underpins and precedes all these and is a deep one, and therefore a long one,

but also foundational.

On a recent frankly, I asked, why is it that most people day-to-day feel more pro-social than the picture of humanity that is currently formed from our media and institutions

and the recent Jeffrey Epstein files?

And yes, part of the answer is that one system scale,

a small minority with dark triad traits, can shape institutions and outcomes for broader society.

But is that it? I've started to think a lot more about scale itself and about the patterns and drivers that show up once populations morph from small to large to currently huge over $8 billion.

A lot of my earlier work, Gulp 20 years ago now, focused on the behavior of individual

human beings and small groups, steep discount rates, cognitive biases, supernormal stimuli,

addiction, social status, in-group, outgrowth bias, and the like.

These are important to understand, especially for recognizing

and maybe steering our own personal behaviors. However, the behaviors of individuals and

small groups have decidedly different dynamics than large groups of humans in the millions

or billions.

The 21st century's interconnected crises that we discuss on this platform are not emerging

because humans suddenly became stupid or lazy or especially malicious.

...