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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#491

Post by DarylZero »

ip26 wrote: post #349
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

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…

How do more optimal systems produce a selection that is "flat-out broken & invalid"?

Are you saying that it will be perceived that way just because people don't understand the system?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#492

Post by adrianN »

imgabe wrote: post #472
adrianN wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.

We did outlaw driving without seatbelts. Against strong protests at the time.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#493

Post by DarylZero »

jollybean wrote: post #108
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

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…

There's a term for this and it's called 'Public Communications' sometimes into the domain of propaganda. This is not a 'new' concept it's as old as time and 100% of people with real power have an awareness of this, it's almost a defining feature of an elite class. Policy should obviously be guided by 'Truth' and we need transparency, at the same time, irrespective of how smart individuals are, as crowds, we act with…

That's ridiculous. Not only are any such deaths carefully tracked, they are massively publicized in mainstream media. The first reported AZ deaths were on the front pages of every newspaper. Might as well have been a presidential election.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#494

Post by gbrindisi »

danblick wrote: post #83

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…

This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#495

Post by JadeNB »

seer wrote: post #453
danblick wrote: post #83

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…

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible…

> Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

This sounds like a classic sort of "those were the bad old times, but now we live in modern times" argument. How should I know when facing a problem whether we live in the modern times when solutions are well mapped and I should copy someone else's, or the bad old times (relative to that problem) when solutions are poorly understood and/or implemented and I'm better off with gradually exploring the possibilities myself?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#496

Post by esyir »

csours wrote: post #257
ren_engineer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Isn't that the point though? The implied meaning of Chesterton's fence is simply: Understand the root motivation that belies a rule/norm/etc before you contest it.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#497

Post by vkou »

pdonis wrote: post #419
vkou wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason we no longer live under hereditary monarchies, ruled over by privileged-by-birth nobles who are very explicitly and shamelessly above the law, is because revolutions have done a great job of either killing off those monarchs and nobles, or by scaring the surviving ones into giving up their power. I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct produc…

I live in the U.S., so the basic rights I take for granted were already in place before the French Revolution. They are the result of the American Revolution, and before that the English one a century earlier. (And before that a long history of England and Britain gradually transferring power from the monarch to Parliament, going all the way back to the Magna Carta.) While neither of those revolutions were bloodless,…

Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution.

But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.

Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers

And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#498

Post by nikitaga »

baking wrote: post #404
salt-thrower wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug? Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated.…

I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismiss whatever you have to say because it disagrees with their "reality". Because apparently online propaganda is more real to them than everything they see in person and everything their loved ones tell them.

I envy you if "sitting down" with them worked for you.

I think most people did give their best, repeatedly, only to be blown off, repeatedly. At some point, the people you care about stop being those people and start being abusive assholes, being personally responsible for killing your friends and family with their stupidity, and dragging us all deeper into this crisis.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#499

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

mherdeg wrote: post #54

Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot. Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group…

There is also the old fashioned way of earning people's trust, by being honest and demonstrating with your actions that you are trustworthy. Censoring discussions, enforcing vaccinations, displaying double standards (elite partying unmasked) and so on are the opposite of that.

Also, to many it may be acceptable to risk some lives in exchange for freedom. In fact society does that all the time, sending people to police the streets, or to wars. Individuals also do risky things for the sake of freedom all the time, for example riding motorbikes or seeking adrenaline kicks in dangerous sports.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#500

Post by GhettoComputers »

raxxorrax wrote: post #480
GhettoComputers wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought pork was just full of worms. I heard in the middle east it was just not as productive as chickens, which would not only give meat but eggs, they used to eat it there.

Chicken spoils quickly too, but you aren't usually storing it in large quantities. But maybe it was also worms, just reinforces the point.

Pigs make lots of manure, lbs of it.
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