1. Nuclear Power: Intended to bring cheap, clean energy, but first arrived via weapons and arms races.
2. Commercial Internet: Began with academic ideals, scaled mainly through spam, pornography, and monopolistic platforms.
3. mRNA Vaccines: Underfunded until a global pandemic created an emergency rush that finally drove major investment.
4. Electric Vehicles: Oil industry and carmaker resistance gave way only when climate disasters and market forces pushed EVs mainstream.
5. Data-Driven Policing: Pitched as a solution for fair law enforcement, but mostly emerged from “tough on crime” politics and mass surveillance before it could be repurposed for better outcomes.
High Road Possibilities (Short List)
1. Montreal Protocol: Quick global action on CFCs to protect the ozone layer.
2. Smallpox Eradication: Coordinated WHO campaign that wiped out a human disease for the first time.
3. Antarctic Treaty: Major powers voluntarily reserved a resource-rich continent for science and peace.
4. CERN Collaboration: Nations pooling resources for fundamental research, giving rise to the World Wide Web.
5. Global Landmine Ban (Ottawa Treaty): Widespread support to limit a horrific weapon, driven largely by a moral coalition of NGOs and governments.
Struck me after I posted this that this is basically the big-brother hypothesis to the Richard Gabriel "worse is better" hypothesis about code.
Technologies often have a version of this: TCP/IP vs. OSI, betamax vs. VHS, Sony HD vs. DVD, HTML vs. og hypertext vision/Xanadu etc etc. What this model adds is the socio-political dynamics of low-roadism even when there are no tech "razors" driving choices.
Thanks for the great datapoints as usual, but this one’s leaning Cope for me. The idea that we often end up in the same place despite high or low paths hold, but “low” is flexing a bit too much for me.
- First, I’m having a hard time believing it doesn’t matter if we got there in the worst way possible so long as we got there. Or relatedly, that striving for the high doesn’t still have redeeming effects even when failing. The worry being once we embrace the low and resign ourselves to it—at the beginning—we will have changed our constitution such that the endpoints start getting lower too.
- I’m not sure you’re saying this exactly, but the low path shouldn’t be defined by things getting worse before they get better. The higher, more moral road typically involves upfront sacrifices and costs for long term gains. Relative to that, the low path is not investing in those costs—avoiding/refusing to pay short term costs and taking casualties later.
- Leaders pitch and are selected specifically for their supposed ability to run the high road. Rationalizing their failure to stay high because we got there anyway feels like coping. This is why we chose them so it is how we should judge them.
- There's a few definitions of the low path, but the one where it “starts off by weaponizing the problem to feed a more base motive” is an interesting one. It feels right, but the remote work example feels different. We got to prevalent remote work by a low path of Covid and death, yes, but I couldn't quite follow how that counted as weaponization.
- I also suspect that the attempt for the high road has a way of improving the endpoints. I'm thinking things that failed by virtue of having taken the low road—and then because they failed we don't really count them. So when we say we usually take the low path to the same endpoint, we're missing all the times we took the low path to a much lower endpoint. If we take as a premise that the high road was everybody locking down and masking for two weeks and the low road was sick and dead people and praying pharma companies develop a vaccine fast enough, there's a version where they don't. Putting aside the deaths (which I'm explicitly arguing above, we shouldn't), I guess you could view the endpoint as the same in that we have an endemic Covid. It's just that the low path swings us much nearer to an irreversible endpoint where so many people get Covid we don't make it—and that little high-road-mindedness we did have (locking down, masking, etc.) helped improve our chances of evading it.
Still, I can easily see we mostly end up on the low road.
Mostly loved the way you've framed the theory and the I hope you're right about how it will extrapolate to important crises, but part of me feels you're cherry picking a little bit. False positives as well as false negatives...
I still think that anything resembling meaningful, quantum progress has a better chance of seeing reality if there is a motivation and a willingness among those who have the wherewithal to actually opt for the high road and consciously forego the low road. To counter your example of Gandhian methods in the Indian context, how would you look at the efforts of say Ram Mohan Roy, or a Phule or an Ambedkar? Or any other anti-establishment "social reformers"? To me, those were all extremely high roads that got us to high places in a way that low roads just wouldn't. Even in more trivial terms, if you look at actions that truly mark time in extraordinary way, high roads typically have taken us to places where an easily available low road just wouldn't have. The Taj Mahal or the moon landing or even the iPhone come to mind as examples where there had to have been a much easily accessible low road. The moon landing in fact was arguably a race to get to the highest road possible.
I know some of these examples might feel a little bit specious because we're not talking about morality anymore. But the point I'm trying to make is that there's some room to refine the theory of low roads getting to high places...maybe some nuance around the type of situation that applies to? Like "If getting to high a place requires a critical mass of people being on board, a low road is a better bet, but if the high place is a truly new frontier, a high road stands a better chance"? Maybe a 2x2 is in order lol?
asked ChatGPT for some further examples:
Low Roads to High Places (Short List)
1. Nuclear Power: Intended to bring cheap, clean energy, but first arrived via weapons and arms races.
2. Commercial Internet: Began with academic ideals, scaled mainly through spam, pornography, and monopolistic platforms.
3. mRNA Vaccines: Underfunded until a global pandemic created an emergency rush that finally drove major investment.
4. Electric Vehicles: Oil industry and carmaker resistance gave way only when climate disasters and market forces pushed EVs mainstream.
5. Data-Driven Policing: Pitched as a solution for fair law enforcement, but mostly emerged from “tough on crime” politics and mass surveillance before it could be repurposed for better outcomes.
High Road Possibilities (Short List)
1. Montreal Protocol: Quick global action on CFCs to protect the ozone layer.
2. Smallpox Eradication: Coordinated WHO campaign that wiped out a human disease for the first time.
3. Antarctic Treaty: Major powers voluntarily reserved a resource-rich continent for science and peace.
4. CERN Collaboration: Nations pooling resources for fundamental research, giving rise to the World Wide Web.
5. Global Landmine Ban (Ottawa Treaty): Widespread support to limit a horrific weapon, driven largely by a moral coalition of NGOs and governments.
It’s seems to be conflating low causal events and low roads in a moral sense for some reason
The mRNA low road for eg is vax vs anti-vax wars. The tech itself was invented years before covid.
Nuclear bombs —> power is a good example though.
Yeah I thought the nuclear one was solid.
Smallpox seems legit too. Would need to delve more
Struck me after I posted this that this is basically the big-brother hypothesis to the Richard Gabriel "worse is better" hypothesis about code.
Technologies often have a version of this: TCP/IP vs. OSI, betamax vs. VHS, Sony HD vs. DVD, HTML vs. og hypertext vision/Xanadu etc etc. What this model adds is the socio-political dynamics of low-roadism even when there are no tech "razors" driving choices.
Thanks for the great datapoints as usual, but this one’s leaning Cope for me. The idea that we often end up in the same place despite high or low paths hold, but “low” is flexing a bit too much for me.
- First, I’m having a hard time believing it doesn’t matter if we got there in the worst way possible so long as we got there. Or relatedly, that striving for the high doesn’t still have redeeming effects even when failing. The worry being once we embrace the low and resign ourselves to it—at the beginning—we will have changed our constitution such that the endpoints start getting lower too.
- I’m not sure you’re saying this exactly, but the low path shouldn’t be defined by things getting worse before they get better. The higher, more moral road typically involves upfront sacrifices and costs for long term gains. Relative to that, the low path is not investing in those costs—avoiding/refusing to pay short term costs and taking casualties later.
- Leaders pitch and are selected specifically for their supposed ability to run the high road. Rationalizing their failure to stay high because we got there anyway feels like coping. This is why we chose them so it is how we should judge them.
- There's a few definitions of the low path, but the one where it “starts off by weaponizing the problem to feed a more base motive” is an interesting one. It feels right, but the remote work example feels different. We got to prevalent remote work by a low path of Covid and death, yes, but I couldn't quite follow how that counted as weaponization.
- I also suspect that the attempt for the high road has a way of improving the endpoints. I'm thinking things that failed by virtue of having taken the low road—and then because they failed we don't really count them. So when we say we usually take the low path to the same endpoint, we're missing all the times we took the low path to a much lower endpoint. If we take as a premise that the high road was everybody locking down and masking for two weeks and the low road was sick and dead people and praying pharma companies develop a vaccine fast enough, there's a version where they don't. Putting aside the deaths (which I'm explicitly arguing above, we shouldn't), I guess you could view the endpoint as the same in that we have an endemic Covid. It's just that the low path swings us much nearer to an irreversible endpoint where so many people get Covid we don't make it—and that little high-road-mindedness we did have (locking down, masking, etc.) helped improve our chances of evading it.
Still, I can easily see we mostly end up on the low road.
Mostly loved the way you've framed the theory and the I hope you're right about how it will extrapolate to important crises, but part of me feels you're cherry picking a little bit. False positives as well as false negatives...
I still think that anything resembling meaningful, quantum progress has a better chance of seeing reality if there is a motivation and a willingness among those who have the wherewithal to actually opt for the high road and consciously forego the low road. To counter your example of Gandhian methods in the Indian context, how would you look at the efforts of say Ram Mohan Roy, or a Phule or an Ambedkar? Or any other anti-establishment "social reformers"? To me, those were all extremely high roads that got us to high places in a way that low roads just wouldn't. Even in more trivial terms, if you look at actions that truly mark time in extraordinary way, high roads typically have taken us to places where an easily available low road just wouldn't have. The Taj Mahal or the moon landing or even the iPhone come to mind as examples where there had to have been a much easily accessible low road. The moon landing in fact was arguably a race to get to the highest road possible.
I know some of these examples might feel a little bit specious because we're not talking about morality anymore. But the point I'm trying to make is that there's some room to refine the theory of low roads getting to high places...maybe some nuance around the type of situation that applies to? Like "If getting to high a place requires a critical mass of people being on board, a low road is a better bet, but if the high place is a truly new frontier, a high road stands a better chance"? Maybe a 2x2 is in order lol?
Either way, excellent read! :)
Venkatesh - to paraphrase you (and with apologies to MLK) - “the arc of the (im)moral universe is long, but bends towards acceptable mediocrity”..