= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (457)
--1635 The Eastern Front
Even if all Rumata has are a few history books and overwhelming weaponery, he should be able to make some solid improvements in the social organization. And if he has the full backing of a spacefaring civilization, he should be able to do a lot.
I haven't read Hard to be a God (it does sound interesting), but my proposal:
Basically plagiarize shamelessly from the nicer parts of history and keep your eyes open for how to use what you have.
I do recommend the book. It's not at all about sociotechnical difficulties of uplifting a medieval society...
Proceed to become horrified by the actions of the demagogues voted into office.
As Lumifer alludes to, your proposals, while interesting, solve problems other than the ones faced by Rumata. Here's the key issue:
Rumata is not allowed to visibly interfere with the social structure of the society he is trying to "uplift". He can work only subtly, in the shadows, disguised as one of the locals, such that his actions are indistinguishable to even (most of) his local allies from the actions of a bored, eccentric aristocraft. He is not allowed to kill. One of his colleagues describes their work as "not even sowing, but only preparing the soil to be sowed"; slowly nudging the society's development in the right direction, without the local population suspecting a thing.
More details for the curious:
Hard to Be a God takes place in the Noon Universe, a fictional timeline of the future shared among many of the Strugatskys' novels. One of the core concepts in the Noon Universe is that of the "progressors", professional uplifters of sorts, who infiltrate less-advanced societies and work from within to steer them in the progressive, idealized-technocratic-communist direction (which is how Earth has developed, in this fictional world).
The events of Hard to Be a God happen early in that timeline, where the ideology behind progressorism has not yet fully developed; where humanity is still unsure whether we have the moral right to interfere in alien societies at all. Rumata and his colleagues sometimes refer to themselves as "historians"; nominally, they are there to study the alien society; their actions are tightly constrained by the rules that govern their profession. Rumata is one of the first who takes actions that push the limits of his mandate. (Exactly how far he ends up going, or not going, is a plot point.)
There is also this (Rumata's senior colleague, Don Kondor a.k.a. Aleksandr Vasilievich, lecturing Rumata on the problems with direct action):
Basically, the novel is rather pessimistic about human nature, and in particular the likelihood that inhabitants of medieval societies will respond to well-meaning liberators by embracing freedom, equality, and brotherhood. (Finding examples from the real world to support, or oppose, such pessismism are left as an exercise for the reader.)
As I said in the comment above, I highly recommend reading the sequel ("Beetle in an anthill", or something like that in English), in order to understand what uplift might look like from the other end. It's not all roses.
Not being uplifted isn't exactly roses either.
I don't know that I'd call Beetle in the Anthill a sequel to Hard to Be a God, per se (except insofar as they both take place in the Noon Universe), but yes, I agree with the recommendation. The sequel to Beetle, which I believe is called Time Wanderers in English (Waves Silence the Wind in Russian), illustrates this even more starkly.
Seems rather realistic to me, actually. Do you know of many examples where "well-meaning liberators" did not end up causing more suffering shortly after their intervention (or forced withdrawal)?
There are some, but mostly they are cases of "local situation deteriorated to the point of piles of skulls" prior to the intervention, so foreigners stomping around were welcomed instead of shot at.
Does technological development count as well-meaning intervention?
I am not sure what you mean here. Is it introducing new technologies as a part of a conquest, like the British did in India?
No, I just mean developing new technologies. That is, at time T this community doesn't have the technology, then someone intervenes, and at time T+1 the community does have the technology.
If that's out of scope for the kind of interventions you're asking about, that's fine, but if it isn't, then I suspect there are plenty of examples where well-meaning folk end up not causing more suffering after their intervention in a community.
I think to answer that, we'd need to be clear about what we mean by saying that a community "has" a technology.
If I go to a tribe of hunter-gatherers, hand them a bunch of solar-powered toasters, and leave... do they now "have toaster technology"?
I think not. I'd have to think a bit harder to define exactly what I would consider to be "having technology", but my intuition says that being able to build the thing, and/or having people in your society who understand how it works, is a requirement.
To our hypothetical hunter-gatherers, the toasters are outright magic. They haven't the first clue of the most basic scientific or technological principles behind the artifacts that are in their physical possession.
So I'd have to ask what you think is an example of an intervention that causes a community to have a technology, where previously they did not.
Jiro's example of making mobile phones available to a town that lacks the facilities for building its own mobile phones (factories, etc) seems to me a good enough example of an intervention that causes a community to have a technology they previously lacked.
Sure. Note, though, that what you're doing there is effectively making said town part of your community (in the context of who "has" what technology, in any case).
Consider these scenarios:
You show up to some remote island, build a bunch of cell towers, hand out mobile phones, and leave, never to be seen again.
vs.
You show up to the neighboring town, build a bunch of cell towers, which you connect to your own cell network, hand out mobile phones, and continue to administer and maintain said towers, and provide support for said phones.
In the latter case, yeah, this community now has cell phone technology. But only because they're a part of you now. If you cut them off from yourself — by ceasing to provide maintenance and support for the technology you just gave them — they no longer have any technology, just a bunch of artifacts which work (for a while, anyway), but are as magic.
Semantics aside, I agree with the particulars of what providing cell phones (in a functional sense) to a town that can't manufacture them itself comprises.
And I'm willing to use that definition of "part of my community" in this conversation if you like, though of course there are many implications of that phrase which don't apply to the scenario in question, so we should be careful about connotations.
I'm not sure why it matters, though. Does something additional follow from that town now being part of my community (in this sense)? If so, perhaps it would be useful to state that consequence explicitly, because I'm not seeing it.
In the present day, the average third world country doesn't "have" cell phones, by this definition. In fact, the average first world inner city doesn't have them either.
I think this is perfectly reasonable, though it could be argued that the first world inner city does not really constitute a fully separate culture.
I agree that organic technological development is beneficial on the whole, with some exceptions. It's the "prime directive violations" which backfire nearly uniformly. And that's what the story is about, if I recall (been many years since I read it).
I agree, shminux. By "pessimistic" I didn't mean to imply "unrealistically pessimistic". The Strugatskys' views were well-informed by both history and contemporary events (Russian/Soviet policies in the Caucasus and Central Asia, to name one example relevant to this case).
I believe that Yvain cited an example of such on his blog, but I think that it was on the older one whose contents have been recently deleted. It was a recent one, and the "liberators" were the French, but I don't recall enough relevant info to google it.
He did recently mention the British conquest of Afghanistan vs. the American conquest of Afghanistan, but that was mostly the question of how quickly and successfully the country was pacified, not liberated.
This was definitely a different example than that, and drew on more recent history than the British conquest of Afghanistan.
This plan is full of good intentions... Try conducting a premortem on each one.