&gt; then you don&#x27;t understand your own beliefs.<p>Then most human knowledge is not understood, yet a lot of progress has been made without equations. Sometimes, the model is too approximate and statistical, that putting it in an equation is useless; that&#x27;s just not an appropriate representation. That doesn&#x27;t mean that general qualitative observations are wrong. Even behavior of non-linear ODEs is sometimes described in prose because we can only describe it in very broad strokes.<p>I mentioned elsewhere that 19th-century-style hyper-optimism regarding technology in some groups (esp. in SV), which is based not on some deep philosophy but on utility. Namely, they believe that if it works and has utility that means we know it. If that&#x27;s the case, the same logic should apply to social events. We have made progress; we made revolutions, therefore we know enough about society to change it (and please don&#x27;t ask me to define progress. For whatever definition you choose, a social movement has made it happen someplace on Earth).<p>&gt; but refuse to actually state why simple arithmetic doesn&#x27;t apply to counting humans.<p>I did not evade the question. I specifically said there are feedback loops. Linear extrapolations are a terrible approximations of ODEs, and this is much more complicated than that. Maybe the economy will grow, maybe new fields will be opened up. We can hardly predict the weather for more than a few days; it stands to reason that trying to predict a much more complex system decades into the future is futile.<p>&gt; This is why collective action problems usually require enforcement mechanisms<p>Enforcement mechanism arise naturally through a process that starts with self-reinforcement. Modern democracy was started in the American and French revolutions. Those are just two examples. In fact, most big social changes started this way. This is again an opinion which stands in complete opposition to historical facts.<p>You are not motivated to action because your position is not threatened enough. If it were, you would be and others too, and then you&#x27;d see how changes are made. This happens <i>all the time</i>. In about any given moment, there is at least one such <i>major</i> change happening somewhere in the world, and many more gradual ones. It is the rule rather than the exception.