patrissimo comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong

82 [deleted] 05 September 2010 06:08PM

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Comment author: patrissimo 12 September 2010 12:59:29PM 5 points [-]

There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems.

There is also a human tendency towards criticizing things by comparing them with an impossible perfect solution, "The Nirvana Fallacy". This is very common in discussion of government/politics. The problem is that the criticisms often get used to implement even worse solutions, because the same critical viewpoint is not taken to the solution as to the original problem. The classic example is to observe a market failure, assume the existence of a disinterested and perfect regulator, and implement regulation that causes even worse problems.

Identifying problems w/ no solutions is fine, just don't suggest change based on the identified problem unless you have a good reason why the change will have less problems. Maybe it's just because political system reform is my field, but I see the NIrvana Fallacy vastly more often than I see people refusing to consider unsolved problems.