Dienstag, 9. September 2025

Why Things Break:

I prefer Robin Hanson’s thoughts on cultural drift (he once mentioned he even wants to write a book on the topic — and that relationships or pair-bonds often dissolve because of drift) much more than David Pinsof’s ideas. Nevertheless, Pinsof gets straight to the point:


"A lot of people wonder what it’s all for. Does the universe have a purpose or a destination? Are we coming together, expanding, or building up to something momentous? Where’s it all going in the end?

Well, I have the answer: to shit. Flesh decays, stars burn out, democracies backslide, matter drifts apart, status games collapse, cars break down, cancer grows, and organisms go extinct. There’s only one thing standing in the way of this lugubrious process: incentives.

In a previous post, I defined incentives as “things in the world that human primates evolved to want.” In this post, I’ll define them even more broadly as things in the world that human primates, and physical systems in general, want or move toward.

This brings me to The Big Law—the idea at the heart of this post:

Everything goes to shit, unless there’s an incentive for it not to."

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"Pinsof’s “Big Law”: basically a translation of the second law of thermodynamics into social and cultural life. Things decay, drift, or collapse unless there’s some counterforce — an incentive that keeps energy flowing in.

Hanson’s drift: less nihilistic, more subtle. Relationships, institutions, even cultures don’t explode dramatically; they just slide apart slowly because interests diverge and there’s nothing strong enough to bind them.

The overlap: Pinsof describes the general decay; Hanson describes the mechanism. Without continual reinforcement, alignment erodes, whether in marriages, companies, or empires.

The implication: endurance requires not just structure but ongoing incentive to maintain it. Incentives are the “fuel” that slows drift, though never fully cancels it.

The darker angle: even incentives themselves decay (think of once-powerful religions or political ideologies). So the “Big Law” might be recursive — incentives must be renewed, or they too go to shit.

In short: Pinsof is blunt, Hanson is diagnostic. Together they describe why nothing lasts without constant tending."

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