# The Control System Going Out of Control

"Control system" is a term of art with a simple intuitive meaning. It's a setup with at least one sense, which has at least one preference, and at least one way to affect what it's sensing. Your thermostat and heater is a control system; it knows what temperature it is, wants the temperature to match what it's set to, and can turn on the heat if it thinks the temperature is too cold.

Social groups have control systems. Like many control systems, they're prone to a certain kind of mania and overreaction.

I. Sensor Bias
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Take your thermostat. 

It's common for a household thermostat to only measure the temperature in one or two places. Temperature very roughly flows throughout the house, so if the thermostat sensor is in the living room and the radiators are all over the ground floor but happen not to be in the living room, as it gets colder overall the living room will get colder. The thermostat notices this, and turns on the radiators, which warm up everything on the ground floor, including the living room. Noticing this, the thermostat turns the radiators off again.

But sometimes the doors are closed, and heat doesn't flow through the house very well. The living room with the thermostat is cold, and so the thermostat keeps turning up the heat. The rest of the house grows hotter, uncomfortably so. The control system is doing sensible things for sensible reasons from its perspective. It keeps struggling to correct a problem, and it's *not wrong* \- the living room is too cold.

Or for another example, take your car brakes.

I grew up in Vermont, on rural roads that often iced over in winter. Like many Vermonters, I've had the experience of driving along, only to tap my brakes for some small reason, and finding out that I was on a patch of ice and my brakes didn't matter. 

It's a scary moment, especially the first few times. The most natural thing in the world when you tap your brakes to slow down a little and nothing happens is to press harder on the brakes, and when nothing continues to happen to push the pedal all the way down and hold it there. This is the wrong move; you can't stop the car like that while you're on the ice.

In this specific case, there's also a wrinkle that when you eventually get off the ice, the way the tires and snow and sudden change in traction interact mean that you're likely to go out of control. When you finally get a patch of real traction you're pushing too hard.

Like the thermostat, me and my car are capable of overreacting. Unlike the thermostat, there's an emotional component to trying to slow down on an icy road. The lesson that I was taught explicitly and repeatedly as I learned to drive was **don't panic**. If tapping the brakes didn't work, don't slam on them.

II. Control Can Be Social
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Social groups have control systems. 

There's a lot of small social regulation that happens, especially in person. Someone tells an off-colour joke, and nobody else laughs. Someone spreads their arms for a hug, and gets a handshake instead. One friend quietly says to another, "hey, I've got some deodorant in my bag if you want to borrow it." A parent says to nobody in particular, or maybe to one person in particular, that they'd rather not have a lot of swearing around their kids. 

This is the equivalent of gently tapping on the brakes. 

It's a control system that can sense things like how bad someone smells or how loud they're being, has preferences about people's presentation or the atmosphere of the gathering, and has several tools for trying to change people's behavior. This control system is much more complicated than the thermostat, and sometimes has some contradictory preferences as different people in the crowd have different social norms. It's absolutely a control system though, just not the kind cybernetics theory usually talks about. And just like with the brakes, there's an emotional component to people's reactions.

In [Process Crimes and Pedantic Rules](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hXCNaXnHwYYnwYstp/process-crimes-and-pedantic-rules) I talk a little about how dinner party invitations work. I can invite whoever I want to my dinner parties, I can not invite other people to my dinner parties, and it's bad form for someone to show up uninvited. This is the control system at work.

Or to pick another control system that runs on people and cares about their behavior, governments care a *lot* about their ability to sense and influence the population. 

The United Kingdoms, taken as a single entity and reified to have such things as preferences and desires, cares tremendously about whether it has the capacity to make one of its resident citizens to stop doing something. The UK makes for a clear example given its surveillance ([one source suggests there's one camera per ten people](https://clarionuk.com/resources/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-in-london/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)) and disarmed population (going so far as to restrict knives, much less firearms) but this is not unique to the UK. The same desire is present in the reified USA, in Russia, in Japan, and in fact in most nation states. There's an argument that maintaining the monopoly on violence *is* the defining characteristic of a nation state.

Most of the time the government doesn't feel the need to point this out, and the population doesn't make it necessary. 

Sometimes I imagine the USA as a single entity with emotional responses, and in the US's actions I see the same emotions I felt when I push the brakes on a patch of black ice. Or I let the USA dissolve again, once more looking at trees instead of forest, and imagine the person giving more and more instructions trying to regain control.[^hggekxcimeu]

III. Control Is Good
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Controversial position: I think the control exerted by control systems is generally good. Like car brakes on a cold day, it would be bad not to have the ability to slow things down, and the damage comes from overuse.

This means that I default pretty strongly towards helping the control system achieve its goals with small nudges. 

I don't gatecrash events I'm not supposed to be at. I'm proactive about telling dinner party hosts if I'd like to bring a plus one. I'm a touch scrupulous about inviting guests into spaces. There's a retreat I've been at where it was optional to pay more and having catered food, I decided not to pay, and I haven't eaten any of that food despite it sitting right there with nobody watching. I wait at red lights and stop signs even when nobody is around, and I'm straightforward and honest on my tax returns and in my interactions with law enforcement. [^hggekxcimeu]

I don't think I deserve special praise for any of the above. 

(I do sometimes handle conversations under confidentiality. I'd actually be pretty cheerful about running a "do you gatecrash?" survey and [following up with people who said yes under some kind of confidential expectation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zEoXQhxBGQLy8gjeF/information-versus-action), because it seems like useful general information.)

If Bella wants to do something minor at a dinner party which Adam, the host, does not want Bella to do, it's easy for Adam to keep escalating. Perhaps Bella lights up a cigarette, and Adam doesn't want anyone smoking at his house. 

"I'd like you to stop smoking here."

That's a fairly gentle bit of control being exerted. It's not even phrased as a boundary or rule, it's just making a preference known. This is the stage at which Bella could put it out, perhaps apologize, and probably all is forgiven. But say she doesn't. Adam isn't about to stop having his preference.

"Please stop smoking, or else leave my house and don't come back."

Less gentle, and there are implied social consequences here, but there's still a line of retreat and it's still just words. Adam's plausibly going to remember this even if Bella stops. There are many subtleties in tone of voice here but it can be easy to hear this as harsh. It's still worth it. But Bella doesn't accede. From my observation, this is around the point where Adam starts getting that slippery, out of control feeling. The brakes aren't working.  Sometimes hosts decide this isn't worth it, and stop pushing for the moment, though they're probably going to do what they can not to let Bella back. 

"It's time for you to go."

Sometimes it keeps escalating. Sometimes it gets loud enough that other guests will hear, and may step in to add additional social pressure to leave; the thermostat is turning up the heat even more. At this point, the path to retreat is leaving without more escalation. There isn't a clean repair mechanism to stay. Notice that now it isn't because of a specific thing Bella's doing anymore. 

"I'm about to call the police. Get out of my house."

The control system is now concerned more about maintaining the ability to influence what people do at the dinner party than it is about the original issue.[^hggekxcimeu] It's not about the cigarette anymore.

IV. Calibration In Control
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The first danger is that the control system can be disconnected, no longer sensing or influencing the temperature.

Surprisingly often people will look at what happens when the control system is going out of control - when I have my brake pedal pressed flat on the floor, when my heater is going full bore trying to warm the neighborhood, when a conference organizer is pulling out all the stops to ban someone from their event and any related events via security guards - and think the problem is that the control system has the capability to push that hard.  

But when you remove the ability to regulate[^grl3lakz11o] the social group, that doesn't mean people suddenly all get along in perfect harmony. Depending on the selection effects and exactly how removed the regulating effects are, it means the most odious behavior gets worse and drives out more and more people. People who at least dipped their toe in 4chan then decided they prefer hanging out somewhere on the internet other than 4chan has a sense of this. People who have hung out at a public park full of litter and prefers spending time in a gated community has a sense of this. 

The second danger is that the control system can go out of control, pushing ever harder and harder to enforce its preferences.

I argue people who are involved in regulating the norms of a space should consider how much effort they're spending and where. Are you overreacting? If so, is the overreaction going to cause more damage than the original issue?

(Though giving up on regulating things is a big part of how you get 4chan. [Walled gardens die by pacifism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism).)

My current best method is to consider what I would want the outcome to be, just considering the original issue that sparked the control system trying to influence things. What do I want to happen *just given* Bella was smoking? Probably I want her to put the cigarette out and maybe not be in my apartment if she smells like an ashtray. Split that out, and keep it in mind as the original stake. Track all the other exceptions stacked on top of her making the control system work in a separate pile. They're relevant, they matter, and also that's the part I'm going to be tempted to spiral more and more on.

I've also seen it help to leave a line of retreat.[^2v3orxz3bnw] At each escalation, consider what the deescalation looks like and how we all step back from this point. An acquaintance of mine introduced me to the term 'repair mechanism' to describe things like apologies. I always want there to be a way we all climb down from the ledge, if not a fast or immediate way.

The third danger is that the control system's set up wrong in the first place.

Like, you can totally connect a thermostat backwards, such that it turns on the AC when it wants the temperature to go *up* and turns on the heater when it wants the temperature to go *down.* I don't know about everybody else, but I remember being a teenager and being told not to do something only experience an impulse to do it more. For that matter, I remember feeling that impulse last week.

You're smarter than a thermostat. Look at your senses, remember what you've tried at different times and places, and consider whether what you're trying to achieve is likely to just make things worse.

Look at the control systems around you. Set yours up well. Take care not to let them go out of control.

[^hggekxcimeu]: Appendix: What Am I Not Saying?I'm not saying all efforts at social control are good.I'm not saying government authoritarianism is good.I'm not saying the heavy handed, brake-pedal-to-the-floor control attempts are good.I'm not saying the control system is always sensing things correctly.I'm not saying a social group's attempts to influence behavior are even moving their target the right direction instead of making it worse.I'm not saying nobody can smoke. You can totally do it if you want, you can even do it in someone's house if you want.  

[^grl3lakz11o]: In the sense of "regulating temperature like a thermostat" rather than "regulating vehicle emissions via legal statute." 

[^2v3orxz3bnw]: When you surround the enemyAlways allow them an escape route.They must see that there isAn alternative to death.—Sun Tzu, The Art of War