Mental Model of the World

1. Clarifications:

World includes physical and social realities (Types of Reality)
Social >> Physical

2. Scales of Social Reality

Fundamentally, the human world is constructed across multiple scales. Changes to how elements at different scales interect can (but not necessarily) filter up or down across scales. There are two challenges that arise from this interpretation of the world.

What is the meaningful metrics to assess that current state and trajectory of each scale?
How do you determine changes that have trivial effects across scales and changes that have catastrophic or beneficial effects?

2.1. Base Layer: interactions between individuals

This is fairly self explanatory. People have interacted with each other differently across time. How people behave and the rules than govern their interactions and integration into larger groups is constantly changing. One frontier of this change in the west is the so called 'culture war.' This change is interesting as it does appear to bubble up (at least superficially) to corporate entity and government behaviour.

Another concrete example is a criminal codes, which is also an example of a megalith (government) causing changes at the individual scale.

2.2. Middle Layer: interactions between groups

This layer makes the shades of grey between the megalithic institutions and the individual. It includes things like small political organisations, small to large niche businesses, universities etc.

2.3. Top Layer: interactions of the megaliths

Another obvious layer, where governments and transnational corporations (with the scale of nations) operate.

3. Physical Constraints

We live on Earth and rely on complex systems with physical constraints for things like food and energy. Risks to those basic supply chains will inject noise into, and upend the current order at each scale.