391–400 of 675 posts
This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of…
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This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.
You ask a difficult and important question. The two relevant ideas I know are: 1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand. 2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and lea…
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The most highly approved of DMs do tend to be good at concealing the railroad tracks...
I was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D
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>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence >In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will p…
The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time. Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer? Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money? Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs? For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place. The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.
The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status quo before tracking down why might end up making things worse.
The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…
The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy imple…
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I was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D
I think they mean Dungeon Master, the architect / narrator of multiplayer role playing games. A good DM will guide the players through a well-planned story, in part by making the layers feel that they are in control of the story themselves.
The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy imple…
The comparison of different voting systems is what clued me in to this. A number of "generally" more optimal voting systems have degenerate outcomes in certain edge cases which would lead to poor acceptability. It's not enough to have an optimal voting system- people also need to find the outcome somewhat acceptable to consent to the result. The current two-party-first-past-the-post system in the US is an example tha…
No, it absolutely does. Imagine a campaign issue where 60% of the electorate wants to plant more trees, and 40% wants to pave all the forests over with parking lots. Candidate A proposes planting oak trees, Candidate B proposes planting maple trees, and Candidate C loves him some asphalt. The final results: 30% for A, 30% for B, 40% for C. Vote-splitting like this is an unacceptable outcome of FPTP; it may not show up when we arbitrarily limit the system to two parties, but it's preposterous that we need to limit the vote to two candidates in order to avoid this outcome, and the two-party system produces all sorts of other problems on its own. This isn't to say that other voting systems are perfect, but they're all better than FPTP, which has no virtue other than being the simplest thing that can be called democracy at all (which mattered a lot in a world of illiterate people who had little familiarity with self-governance, but not so much these days).
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I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today. Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough t…
> I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).
They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.
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Perhaps I'm being too US-centric but I feel like you at-best mean conservatism with a lower-case 'c'. Even then the very definition of conservatism explicitly avoids any change: > commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.
I called it "the sane version of Conservatism". There are many others. Political scientists probably have a more specific name for mine. I should learn that some day. Yeah, many people with very different ideas call themselves conservatives. > I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing. Have you never known conservatives…