foster_nyman

I like that framing, and I think Bateson will give you useful traction on it.

One way to translate your exogenous/endogenous split into his language is: runaway happens when the “selection function” gets trapped inside the system it’s selecting, so the feedback loop selects for its own reinforcement rather than for wider viability. Sexual selection is the clean biological example because preferences can become an internal amplifier: once a trait becomes a strong signal, the preference and the trait can co-evolve into something locally stable but globally costly (tails, antlers, etc.).

Where Bateson gets especially sharp is on schismogenesis (i.e., interaction patterns that escalate because each side’s behavior becomes the stimulus for more of the same). In that sense, a lot of ethno-nationalist / eugenic thinking looks like an attempt to institutionalize a narrowing selection function (“select for X”), while simultaneously insulating it from the broader ecology of feedback (social, economic, moral, informational) that would normally check it. That’s how you get stable local maxima that are brittle and, often, destructive.

On exogenous selectors, though, I’d be cautious. External selectors can absolutely be less confounded by local identity incentives, but they also bring their own blind spots (mis-specified metrics, distance from consequences, Goodhart effects). Bateson’s recurring warning is basically that the more you collapse your evaluation to a single axis, the easier it is to optimize yourself into a corner.

If you want a specific thing to watch for as you read Ecology, keep an eye on how often he treats “pathology” as a property of relationships and feedback, not of individuals. That’s the bridge between mating preferences, ideology, and organizational dynamics.

"It should be noted that the global stability of the universe depends on the law of compensation: when the catastrophes are frequent and close together, each of them, taken individually. will not have a serious effect, and frequently each is so small that even their totality may be unobservable. When this situation persists in time, the observer is justified in neglecting these very small catastrophes and averaging out only the factors accessible to observation."

“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.” ― Paul Graham

As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.

A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here isn’t that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms) dominate but that dominance reprices the entry conditions and eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole thing dynamic. These axioms read like something straight out of a Batesonian case study in runaway.