Rain comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong

82 [deleted] 05 September 2010 06:08PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (161)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Yvain 06 September 2010 01:36:59PM 15 points [-]

There is a big difference between some of the examples in this post: factual issues like atheism and P=NP on one side, and political issues like Marxism and anarchism on the other. The one side we evaluate on its truth, the other side, we evaluate on its goodness.

One would hope that there is some theory that is completely true; therefore, any deviation from optimum in a theory is a genuine problem that needs to be solved. But as many commenters have said already, there isn't always a perfect solution to a political problem; a non-optimum result might still be the best option available.

It's probably a bad idea for a language to use the same words, like "right" and "wrong", to apply to both situations.

In particular, I agree with everyone who's said criticizing an optimum but imperfect social policy might be a selfish action with negative externalities. Going on about how bad it is that capitalism leaves some people poor makes the one person who does it look extra compassionate, but if everyone does it, then eventually you end up getting rid of capitalism.

So I agree with this post about factual theories but disagree when it comes to policy.

Comment author: Rain 04 October 2010 02:29:52PM *  0 points [-]

I think it works well for policy. The way I handle it is to keep a running tally of things to fix should the opportunity present itself. A lot of my thoughts work like a partially completed checklist in this manner.

"This economic theory works really well, and we're generally happy with it; it's the best we've got at the moment. It has these problems {1, 2, 3}, which we would like to patch, but don't have solutions for. At some point, if we do come up with a patch, or an entirely new system which we can prove works better, we'll go with that instead."

One has to keep the unchecked boxes in mind when consulting new solutions, or the problems last forever.