curi comments on David Deutsch on How To Think About The Future - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (197)
read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch. It discusses that Diamond book and other similar works.
Yes European society was not favorable to non-conformists. One period I've studied, which is later (so, i think, better in this regard) is around 1790 ish. At that time, to take one example, the philosopher william godwin's wife died in childbirth and he published memoirs and people got really pissed off because she had had sex out of wedlock and stuff along those lines. when godwin's daughter ran off with shelley there were rumors he had sold her. meanwhile, for example, there was lots of discrimination against irish catholics. i know some stuff about how biased and intolerant people can be.
but what i also know is a bit about static societies (again, see the book for more details, or at least check out my website, e.g. http://fallibleideas.com/tradition).
when a society doesn't change for thousands of years that means it's even harsher than the european society i was talking about. preventing change for such a long period is hard. stuff is done to prevent it. the non-conformists don't even get off the ground. everyone's spirits are squashed in childhood -- thoroughly -- and so the adults don't rebel at all. if there were adults who were eccentric then the society simply wouldn't stay the same so long. european society was already getting fairly near fairly rapid changes (e.g. industrial revolution) when it started colonizing the new world.
This doesn't follow. (Incidentally, I don't know why you sometimes drop back to failing to capitalize but it makes what you write much harder to read.) For example, if one doesn't have good nutrition then people won't be as smart and so won't innovate. Similarly, if one doesn't have free time people won't innovate. Some technologies and cultural norms also reinforce innovation. For example, having a written language allows a much larger body of ideas, and having market economies gives market incentives to coming up with new technologies.
Moreover, innovation can occur directly through competition. When you are convinced that your religion or tribe is the best and that you need to beat the others by any means necessary you'll do a lot better at innovating.
There's also a self-reinforcing spiral: the more you innovate the more people think that innovation is possible. If your society hasn't changed much then there's no reason to think that new technologies are easy to find.
There's no reason to think that Native American populations were systematically preventing change. There's a very large difference between having infrastructural and systemic issues that make the development of new technologies unlikely and the claim that "everyone's spirits are squashed in childhood -- thoroughly".
Minor remark: Your essay about tradition is much more readable than a lot of the other material on your site. I'm not sure why but if you took a different approach to writing/thinking about it, you might want to apply that approach elsewhere.
I think the difference is you. I wrote that entire site in a short time period. I regard it as all being broadly similar in style and quality. I attempted to use the same general approach to the whole site; I didn't change my mind about something midway. I think it's a subject you understand better than epistemology directly (it is about epistemology, indirectly. traditions are long lived knowledge). The response I've had from other readers has varied a lot, not matched your response.
I do know how to write in a variety of different styles, and have tried each in various places. The one I've used here in the last week is not the best in various senses. But it serves my purpose.