Modeling Society as a Damped Harmonic Oscillator
Epistemic status: Oversimplification of complex things, but I think the basic idea is sound.
Consider a damped harmonic oscillator. This behavior of the system depends on the constant
, where c is the damping coefficient, and mk is the product of the mass and force constant. There are three scenarios for this system1:
Overdamped (ζ > 1): The system returns (exponentially decays) to steady state without oscillating. Larger values of the damping ratio ζ return to equilibrium more slowly.
Critically damped (ζ = 1): The system returns to steady state as quickly as possible without oscillating.
Underdamped (ζ < 1): The system oscillates, with the amplitude gradually decreasing to zero.
Let's now model society as a damped harmonic oscillator. Assume society has two forces: a progressive force (corresponding to the km), that pushes society towards what it thinks is the right way to go2. And a conservative force, corresponding to c, that acts as a damping mechanism.
Our goal as a society is to reach the steady state as quickly as possible, which suggests we want exact critical damping - that is, we ζ to be as close as possible to 1. If ζ is larger (too much conservative sentiment in society), we overdamp and take too long to reach equilibrium (It's hard to think of a obvious example for reasons explained later, but gay marriage seems like a good one). If ζ is too small we can overshoot, with disastrous consequences (the obvious example being communism - and note that since the fall of the USSR, Russia swung wildly towards overt oligarchy again, exactly like we'd expect from an insufficiently damped oscillator).
What's the periodicity of critical damping? This is a huge abstraction with a lot of assumptions, but society has a lot of momentum, and at least one major component of social change is the older generation dying off and being replaced by a newer generation. This suggests that the natural periodicity for critical damping is somewhere on the order of decades.
So from the outside view, a functioning society should always look like There's a huge conservative faction holding back obviously-needed progress. From the inside view, I still think California's policies on housing and scooters are an awful example of status quo bias. But from the outside view, I guess it's pretty inevitable that I'd feel like that.
Another thing we learn from this is that society doesn't have a good way to deal with rapidly changing needs. California dealt with its sudden demographic shift and urban population surge pretty terribly, but that's pretty much inevitable - it takes decades to adjust society to something like this, and California didn't have decades.
If there's a lesson on how to fix it, it's that the best way to deal with society changing too slowly relative to what it should isn't to be more progressive, it's to be less conservative (in the mathematical sense), so that we don't overshoot. It seems true that we need this - technology and demographics are changing much faster than they used to, so society probably should too. In practice, this probably means that it's better to try to convince people around you to be more flexibly minded, instead of trying to convince them you're right on the object level.
(There's another possible interpretation of this, which is that with society needing change faster we need to be more conservative, since it increases the progressive force. At this point I have no idea which side to take - from the inside view more progress seems obviously necessary, but from the outside view that's what I'd inevitably think. I'll take solace in the fact that on the object-level issues of housing and climate change, at least, there seems to be obvious evidence that we should be moving faster).
1. Taken from Wikipedia↩
2. I'm implicitly assuming the progressive force will push society in the right direction. I'll avoid justifying this assumption here, since my thoughts on that get complicated pretty fast and I don't have them organized in writable form, so if you disagree just take this as our double crux and move on.↩