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People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

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Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#401

Post by dahart »

simonh wrote: post #358

I think people are dumb, and I'm not being derogatory about 'the 'masses' or any such crap. I'm unbelievably dumb. It often takes me a ridiculously long time to come to a solution to a problem, where the answer seems like it should be obvious. Instead my slow, feeble mammal brain takes forever to grope blindly around the issue before getting any traction. Lets say there is a scale of sentience that goes from 1, which…

> So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.

I totally agree with you, and you have some interesting points. But, this is a subjective definition of “dumb” that is tautological. It ignores the possibility that it could have taken longer. For example, there are other sentient species on this planet for which it hasn’t happened yet.

You could also phrase what you said with the optimist’s glass-half-full phrasing: we are literally the smartest and most intellectually capable beings to get where we are, otherwise it would have taken longer.

Do you know of Sturgeon’s eponymous Law, “90% of everything is crap”? I didn’t realize at first (maybe because I’m dumb) that this isn’t a statement that things are bad. It’s a subjective and un-arguable proposed definition of what bad is. There’s a distribution of stuff, let’s just call the top 10% good and the bottom 90% crap. Sturgeon’s law applies to people as much as anything else.

> most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher.

This thought has occurred to me before, and I think it’s super interesting to ponder. Today I’m not as sure as I once was that this paints an accurate picture of how progress works. History tends to over-inflate the importance of individual contributions and leave out the vast majority of context and help that luminary figures had. The progress we feel around us today takes immense commercial effort that involves uncountable numbers of people. The US launched first into modern computing because the political and economic conditions were right, not because we had more geniuses.

Perhaps it’s not the top sliver of civilization that is driving innovation at all, perhaps the it’s the average intelligence that hit a threshold, or perhaps it’s not much to do with intelligence but with economy and culture, or maybe it’s inevitable once written language happens. It’s hard to speculate about these things since we have no basis for comparison.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#402

Post by dasil003 »

simonh wrote: post #358

I think people are dumb, and I'm not being derogatory about 'the 'masses' or any such crap. I'm unbelievably dumb. It often takes me a ridiculously long time to come to a solution to a problem, where the answer seems like it should be obvious. Instead my slow, feeble mammal brain takes forever to grope blindly around the issue before getting any traction. Lets say there is a scale of sentience that goes from 1, which…

How do you quantify "sooner" on an evolutionary time scale?

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#403

Post by hutzlibu »

gilbetron wrote: post #310
hutzlibu wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, care to provide arguments? I provided mine: we had empires as default, they needed lots of slaves. Slaves must be strong, but stupid. Smart slaves were trouble. So got sorted out. Simplified, yes, but "uneducated" where?

> Interesting, care to provide arguments? Read a history book. Hell, read Timeline by Michael Crichton.

Not an argument. I believe I read a lot of history books. So can you then provide me with your enlightened wisdom that you got, I apparently failed to grasp?

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#404

Post by dbingham »

Zelphyr wrote: post #216
ucaetano wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This isn't strictly true, and I'd love to see you provide extensive data on such a exceptional claim. There is a lot of evidence showing that harsher punitive measures often have little to no impact on crime and wrongdoing.

I don't think he was referring to harsh sentences or punitive measures when someone breaks the law. I think its more that when its life and not the Government that is going to punish you for failing, you're going to work harder at not failing. In addition to the punishment provided by the Government there is also fall back mechanisms (bankruptcy protection, social security, medicare/medicaid, etc...) that they provid…

> I think its more that when its life and not the Government that is going to punish you for failing, you're going to work harder at not failing.

> I would counter that without those punishments and protections, its possible that fewer people would do things like start businesses

Again, the evidence rather strongly suggests the opposite.

As people's brains are more stressed out by the fear of failing, their decision making gets worse not better. There's tons of evidence that shows that being poor severely screws with your ability to make rational, intelligent decisions about long term planning. (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br... ; https://theconversation.com/study-links-poverty-and-poor-dec...)

Likewise, there's data that shows one of the things that's special about entrepreneurs is the fact that they have strong familial safety nets. Part of their risk taking is literally that the risks are less risky for them, because their families will catch them. Which suggests that, if you want to increase the number of new businesses - implement a stronger social safety net (like a basic income). (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare... ; http://www.nber.org/papers/w19276.pdf?new_window=1) . The paper I linked there focused on the "smart" and "illicit" avenues and completely brushed past the "come from wealthier families" part, but I've seen other papers (that google isn't coughing up readily in the 5 minutes I have right now) that focused more on that latter part.

Conversely, you just have to look at the countries that do a good job of taking care of their citizens - Scandinavia, Canada, etc - to see pretty strong evidence for the idea that a well cared for populace is able to make better decisions.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#405

Post by tvanantwerp »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #34

This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…

I don't think this follows at all. True, I probably don't want zero health and safety regulations. But government--an institution notorious for both pervasiveness and inertia--can get things wrong just like individuals and market institutions. And when the government does it, it does it at massive scale and for a very long time.

Thaler's "libertarian paternalism" is not about controlling choices, but making better choices easier to make while allowing people to still choose something else. Big government in practice is typically about picking an option and not allowing anything else. And if that one chosen option turns out to be wrong, it will take ages to undo it as the now-vested interests who manage to benefit lobby to keep the status quo.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#406

Post by lagadu »

Magmatic wrote: post #239
DesiLurker wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My preferred solution for governance problems is basically to have smaller governing units (nations/states/districts). this gives people better representation and is pretty effective in managing the 'tyranny of the majority'. considering the environment in US today the majority is essentially 51%. Now if one considers how bi-polar favorite policies for each side has become, it (mandate) is nowhere near enough to just…

We could also collapse the yes/no questions with better voting systems, something not first pass the post. While local government is totally necessary, I don't think we can afford to not have big government. If wind currents made air pollution a non-issue in say, Ontario because wind currents blew it all down to Nebraska, how would we deal with that? Many of our most pressing societal problems live at the interstate…

You most certainly could not have big government, in that scenario each state would be its own sovereign nation.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#407

Post by loco5niner »

stingraycharles wrote: post #248
aantix wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how you revealed that you dislike joke comments on HN and unintentionally killed it at the same time.

Didn’t intent on killing the joke, I was hoping it would allow more people to appreciate it. But apparently I failed at that. :)

I would not have gotten it otherwise

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#408

Post by jjoonathan »

backpropaganda wrote: post #350
jjoonathan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The descriptive work of he-who-shall-not-be-named is leagues ahead of his prescriptive work (not surprising -- fixing problems tends to be harder than finding them). The problems he addresses still abound and it's really a pity we have culturally suppressed the vocabulary and arguments he put forward to talk about them. So, my guess: serious.

Funny how when I replaced the big hyphenated word with the 4-letter name, it actually triggered an emotional response in me which made me dismiss the rest of your comment, even though I was fine with the comment without the substitution. Weird how human brains work.

Even crazier: I have the same emotional response to the substitution and I'm the one who wrote the comment.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#410

Post by remusrm »

ucaetano wrote: post #156
rvern wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will sev…

> People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This isn't strictly true, and I'd love to see you provide extensive data on such a exceptional claim. There is a lot of evidence showing that harsher punitive measures often have little to no impact on crime and wrongdoing.

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