8.2.2026 – How can we accelerate the rate of variation;

At the moment, the central issue I will be pursuing is how we accelerate the rate of variation; I think of them as experiments. We need to speed this process up by at least an order of magnitude.

Yes. That moves the center of the project from improving institutional selection to radically increasing the production and testing of institutional variation.

The central proposition becomes:

Human societies do not generate and test institutional experiments at anything close to the rate required by the accelerating crises of climate change and resource exhaustion. Directed cultural evolution must increase the rate, diversity, and speed of institutional experimentation by at least an order of magnitude.

The relevant evolutionary sequence is:

Changing conditions and emerging crises
                ↓
Generation of institutional experiments
                ↓
Local implementation and testing
                ↓
Observation and comparison of outcomes
                ↓
Selection influenced by:
• cognitive filters
• incumbent elites
• existing institutions
• public values and interests
                ↓
Replication, modification, scaling, or abandonment
                ↓
New rounds of experimentation

The primary intervention is therefore at the variation stage. Selection remains essential, but selection cannot produce adaptation when the available range of experiments is too narrow, too infrequent, or too slow.

What “ten times faster” should mean

An order-of-magnitude increase should not mean merely ten times as many policy proposals. It should involve several dimensions:

1. More experiments: Many more institutional arrangements operating concurrently.
2. Shorter experimental cycles: Years rather than decades between conception, implementation, evaluation, and revision.
3. Greater diversity: Experiments based on genuinely different institutional principles, not minor adjustments to the same model.
4. More independent sites: Cities, regions, cooperatives, public agencies, universities, workplaces, and transnational networks testing alternatives simultaneously.
5. Faster learning: Results systematically documented, compared, and transmitted across jurisdictions.
6. More recombination: Successful components from different experiments combined into new institutional forms.
7. Higher tolerance for failure: Failed experiments treated as information rather than as proof that experimentation itself is dangerous.

This distinction matters because ten nearly identical pilot programs do not constitute ten meaningful variations. The objective is to expand the institutional possibility space.

The experiment as the unit of variation

For your purposes, it may be useful to replace the abstract term cultural variant with the more concrete term institutional experiment.

An institutional experiment would be:

A deliberately bounded attempt to organize a social function differently, with specified purposes, observable consequences, and a mechanism for revision, replication, or termination.

Experiments might concern:

• ownership and governance;
• resource allocation;
• energy and material use;
• political participation;
• food production;
• housing;
• transportation;
• work and compensation;
• conflict resolution;
• public information;
• intergenerational decision-making.

The experiment need not be created by a central authority. It may emerge from a municipality, community organization, cooperative, social movement, professional network, public agency, or dissident group within an existing institution.

Why institutional variation is currently slow

Institutional systems often suppress variation before experiments can begin. The principal barriers include:

• legal uniformity and regulatory restrictions;
• dependence on incumbent funding;
• centralized political authority;
• professional norms defining alternatives as unrealistic;
• high costs of entry;
• fear of visible failure;
• short electoral and financial time horizons;
• intellectual property and restricted information;
• incumbent elites’ ability to deny resources, legitimacy, or legal permission;
• cognitive filters favoring familiarity, authority, conformity, and protection against perceived loss.

This means incumbent elites and cognitive filters influence not only the later selection of experiments. They can also affect the conditions under which variation is generated, for example by withholding resources or making certain experiments legally impossible. Conceptually, however, it remains useful to distinguish these constraints on experimentation from the subsequent selection among experiments that actually occur.

A revised role for incumbent elites

Incumbent elites should not be treated simply as opponents of experimentation. Their role is structurally ambivalent.

They may:

• finance experiments;
• authorize protected experimental spaces;
• provide technical and administrative capacity;
• connect experiments to larger systems;
• prevent experiments from occurring;
• narrow their permissible scope;
• capture their design;
• select only variants compatible with incumbent interests;
• suppress threatening results;
• absorb innovations while eliminating their transformative features.

The problem is therefore not how to exclude elites entirely. That is unlikely to be possible. The problem is how to construct an experimental system in which no incumbent group possesses effective veto power over the production, evaluation, or diffusion of institutional variation.

The institutional infrastructure for experimentation

Accelerating variation will itself require new institutions. A society cannot rely on occasional reformers and spontaneous social movements to produce a tenfold increase.

A deliberate experimental infrastructure would need:

• protected legal authority to conduct institutional trials;
• independent and plural sources of finance;
• temporary exemptions from obstructive rules;
• transparent experimental designs and outcome measures;
• repositories containing both positive and negative results;
• networks connecting experimenters across regions;
• protection from incumbent capture and premature suppression;
• predefined procedures for modification and termination;
• pathways for replication without requiring immediate universal adoption;
• continuing participation by the people affected.

This might be understood as a distributed institutional research-and-development system. Modern societies invest heavily in technological research and development but devote comparatively little systematic capacity to researching and developing new forms of governance, ownership, coordination, and resource allocation.

A sharper formulation for the project

The immediate problem of directed cultural evolution is not to identify a single ideal institutional order. It is to create a social capacity for generating, conducting, evaluating, recombining, and replicating institutional experiments at least ten times faster than existing political and economic systems permit. Cognitive filters and incumbent elites influence which experiments are selected, but effective selection first requires a sufficiently large and diverse field of institutional variation.

That also changes the fundamental question. It is no longer primarily:

Which new institutions should replace the existing ones?

It becomes:

What institutional system could continuously produce and test enough genuinely different experiments to discover workable responses before environmental breakdown forecloses the opportunity?

That is a more tractable question in one sense: it does not require anyone to know the final answer in advance. But it is also more radical because it requires societies to institutionalize experimentation itself.