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ciphergoth comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
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No, it speaks of remedy. It's not about beliefs about the world, but about courses of action, and there he's dead wrong - a course of action can only be bad by comparison to a better alternative.
I don't think either of you are getting it right. I'm not familiar with the context of this particular quote, but knowing it's from Mencken, he's clearly referring to various idealistic busybodies and their grand (and typically disastrously unsound) plans to solve the world's problems. The quote is directed against idealists who assume moral high ground and scoff at those who question their designs.
Ah, so it's about whether a plan meets some absolute standard, rather than which plan is best, and the moral is that just because I don't know of a plan that meets standard X is no reason to think your plan will - in fact the reverse.
I think the absolute standard in question is the status quo. Will the proposed remedy make things worse? Mencken has no remedy of his own. In the first sentence he denies that this lack is evidence in favour of the proposition that somebody else's remedy will be an improvement on leaving things alone.
Basically, yes. For instance, the alcohol prohibitionists of Mencken's day were a prime example of the sort of people he targeted with this quote.
We can call a course of action bad if doing nothing is a better alternative.
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." is a fallacy. (The Politician's Syllogism.) Mencken's statement pretty clearly includes the course of action of not taking action; he's stating that any action is not necessarily better than no action, and that taking on any belief is not necessarily better than holding no belief.
But sometimes that better alternative is "let's wait and see". And that's what many people aren't willing to do.