We do not take notes

As explained in Taking Notes:

• Taking notes is a process composed of two parts: writing things down, and reading them regularly.
• Taking notes is the only way to reliably commit things to memory.

What happens when we do not take notes? We forget.
And we forget quite a fucking lot.

When politicians make promises, we do not write them down, nor do we collectively check up on them regularly. As a result, there is no incentive for them to keep their promises.

When a new law is passed, we do not write down our expectations from it, nor do we collectively check up on it regularly. Thus, by default, laws outlive their intended purpose: there is simply no process that ensures they meet any needs.

Intellectual public figures do not write down their beliefs in a conveniently refutable list. The closest that I knew of was Scott Alexander's list of predictions that he used to do each year, but I don't think he does it anymore. (I don't see any for 2023 or 2024.)

Institutions do not write down their goals, nor do we collectively check up on them regularly. As a result, they naturally drift from their original purpose and decay.

In academia, it is not customary for fields of inquiry to write down their main questions, nor do they regularly check their progress on those questions.
I don't care that much about researchers p-hacking when they have forgotten what they should be working on in the first place.

On both legacy and social media, there is no mechanism ensuring that:

1. Corrections are published after false beliefs are spread.
2. Corrections are seen more than the original false beliefs.

As a result, because false beliefs are more common than true ones, they will naturally spread more.

Overall, we are societally quite primitive. We do not use the tools at our disposal to commit things to our collective memory.
Instead, we rely way too much on oral tradition, personal taste, and authority.

Predictably, we collectively struggle at learning from our mistakes. We struggle at accounting for our failures, let alone keeping people and systems accountable for them.

Above, "we" can refer to Humanity, The West, various states from the west, or even just people who think like me.

The practical consequence of this choice of "we" is mostly the scale at which we should solve this problem.

If "we" refers to Humanity, it implies building a global institution that keeps track of global properties of the world (think of anything measured by Worldometers). This institution would then:

• Publish a report every year to report on the progress of each of those indicators.
• Plotting where we are vs where we wanted to be vs where we planned to be.
• Listing the top 10 ongoing projects to improve each of those indicators, and how much progress can directly be attributed to each of them.
• Publicly reflecting on which indicators should be added, removed or changed.

If "we" refers to people who think like me, it implies more specific goals (missing).