I like thinking about new things, and so I like this recent post by Vitalik (the Ethereum crypto guy) talking about what he calls "the tree ring model of culture and politics." The basic insight of the model is the following:
How a culture treats new things is a product of the attitudes and incentives prevalent in that culture at that particular time.
How a culture treats old things is primarily driven by status quo bias.
To explain why the world seems to work like this, he uses the analogy of tree rings, which are also called annual rings or growth rings. Trees grow in diameter each year and the result is a set of successive rings.
Importantly, each tree ring is a result of the conditions that the tree experienced during its growing season. A wide ring typically suggests a favorable growing season and a narrow ring suggests a stressful growing season.
Once the growing season is over, the ring becomes set, which is why dendrochronology is a thing, and why tree rings can be used to tell us about what happened in the past.
The parallel with culture and politics is that it's far easier to shape new things during their initial growth cycle, then to try and do it later. Because once the growth cycle is over and it becomes an old thing, attitudes are then guided by the status quo. They become set.
To quote Vitalik: "What is easier is to invent new patterns of behavior that outcompete the old, and work to maximize the chance that we get good norms around those." This makes a lot of sense to me and it's a reminder to stay open to new things.
Cover photo by Aleksandar Radovanovic on Unsplash
