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Viliam_Bur comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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I don't know if there are short words for this, but seems to me that some people generally assume that "things, left alone, naturally improve" and some people assume that "things, left alone, naturally deteriorate".
The first option seems like optimism, and the second option seems like pesimism. But there is a catch! In real life, many things have good aspects and bad aspects. Now the person who is "optimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are worse than expected. (And vice versa, the person who is "pessimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are better.) In both cases, a typical explanation is human intervention. Which means that this kind of optimism is prone to conspiracy theories. (And this kind of pessimism is prone to overestimate the benefits of human actions.)
For example, in education: For a "pessimist about spontaneous future" things are easy -- people are born stupid, and schools do a decent job at making them smarter; of course, the process is not perfect. For an "optimist about spontaneous future", children should be left alone to become geniuses (some quote by Rousseau can be used to support this statement). Now the question is, why do we have a school system, whose only supposed consequence is converting these spontaneous geniuses into ordinary people? And here you go: The society needs sheeps, etc.
Analogically, in politics: For some people, the human nature is scary, and the fact that we can have thousands or even millions of people in the same city, without a genocide happening every night, is a miracle of civilization. For other people, everything bad in the world is caused by some evil conspirators who either don't care or secretly enjoy human suffering.
This does not mean that there are no conspiracies ever, no evil people, no systems made worse by human tampering. I just wanted to point out that if you expect things to improve spontaneously (which seems like a usual optimism, which is supposedly a good thing), the consequences of your expectations alone, when confronted with reality, can drive you to conspiracy theories.
I don't think that accurately describes a position of someone like Alex Jones.
You can care about people and still push the fat man over the bridge but then try to keep the fact that you pushed the fat man over the bridge secret because you live in a country where the prevailing Christian values dictate that it's a sin to push the fat man over the bridge.
There are a bunch of conspiracy theories where there is an actual conflict of values and present elites are just evil according to the moral standards that the person who started the conspiracy theory has.
Take education. If you look at EU educational reform after the Bologna Process there are powerful political forces who want to optimize education to let universities teach skills that are valuable to employeers. On the other hand you do have people on the left who think that universities should teach critical thinking and create a society of individuals who follow the ideals of the Enlightment.
There's a real conflict of values.
In this specific conflict, I would prefer having two kinds of school -- universities and polytechnics -- each optimized for one of the purposes, and let the students decide.
Seems to me that conflicts of values are worse when a unified decision has to be made for everyone. (Imagine that people would start insisting that only one subject can be ever taught at schools, and then we would have a conflict of values whether the subject should be English or Math. But that would be just a consequence of a bad decision at meta level.)
But yeah, I can imagine a situation with a conflict of values that cannot be solved by letting everyone pick their choice. And then the powerful people can push their choice, without being open about it.
You do have this in a case like teaching the theory of evolution.
You have plenty of people who are quite passionate but making an unified decision to teach everyone the theory of evolution, including the parents of children who don't believe in the theory of evolution.
Germany has compulsory schooling. Some fundamental chrisitan don't want their children in public schools. If you discuss the issue with people who have political power you find that those people don't want that those children get taught some strange fundamental worldview that includes things like young earth creationism. The want that the children learn the basic paradigm that people in German society follow.
On the other hand I'm not sure whether you can get a motivation like that from reading the newspaper. Everyone who's involved in the newspaper believes that it's worth to teach children the theory of evolution so it's not worth writing a newspaper article about it.
Is it a secret persecution of fundamentalist Christians? The fundamentalist Christian from whom the government takes away the children for "child abuse" because the children don't go to school feel perscecuted. On the other hand the politician in question don't really feel like the are persecuting fundamentalist Christians.
The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into 'good Christians".
In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don't want it?
Yeah, when people in power create tools to help them maintain the power, if those tools are universal enough, they will be reused by the people who get the power later.
The trade-offs need to be discussed rationally. The answer would probably be "yes", but there are some negative side effects. For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda. (Just like those Christians did with the compulsory education.) Maybe a third option could be found. (Something like: Don't say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are "failing in biology".)
Why have governments control exams at all? Have different certifying authorities and employers are free to decide which authorities' diploma they accept.
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
And this differs from the status quo, how?
I was under the impression you wanted to improve things significantly. Hence why I mentioned that issue--and it IS an issue.
My point is that a child's parents are more likely to make good decisions for the child then education bureaucrats.
Maybe elites that push their agenda have a much better chance keeping their power that don't? I'm not sure how much setting precedents limit further elites.
Basically you try to make the system more complicated to still get what you want but make people feel less manipulated.
Complicated and intransparent systems lead to conspiracy theories.
Pessimists can also believe that education started out decent and has deteriorated to the point where it's worse than nothing.
In addition to Armok's alternatives, there's also those who believe the tendency is a reversion to the mean (the mean being the mean because it's a natural equilibrium, perhaps).
And what about those that tend to assume things stay the same/revert to only changing on geological timescales, or those that assume it keeps moving in a linear way?