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RomeoStevens comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong
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If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?
Note that in the late 19th century, many leading intellectuals followed a scientific/rationalist/atheist/utopian philosophy, socialism, which later turned out to be a horrible way to arrange society. See my article on this. (And it's not good enough to say that we're really rational, scientific, altruist, utilitarian, etc, in contrast to those people -- they thought the same.)
So, how might we find that all these ideas are massively wrong?
We should be wary of ideologies that involve one massive failure point....crap.
Could you elaborate/give-some-examples?
What are some ideologies that do/don't have (one massive failure point)/(Lots of small failure points)?
The one I was thinking of was capitalism vs communism. I have had many communists tell me that communism only works if we make the whole world do it. A single point of failure.
I wouldn't call that a single point of failure, I'd call that a refusal to test it and an admission of extreme fragility.
That's kind of surprising to me. A lot of systems have proportional tipping points, where a change is unstable up to a certain proportion of the sample but suddenly turns stable after that point. Herd immunity, traffic congestion, that sort of thing. If the assumptions of communism hold, that seems like a natural way of looking at it.
A structurally unstable social system just seems so obviously bad to me that I can't imagine it being modeled as such by its proponents. Suppose Marx didn't have access to dynamical systems theory, though.
This is what some modern communists say, and it is just an excuse (and in fact wrong, it will not work even in that case). Early communists actually believed the opposite thing: an example of one communitst nation would be enough to convert the whole world.
It's been a while since I read Marx and Engels, but I'm not sure they would have been speaking in terms of conversion by example. IIRC, they thought of communism as a more-or-less inevitable development from capitalism, and that it would develop somewhat orthogonally to nation-state boundaries but establish itself first in those nations that were most industrialized (and therefore had progressed the furthest in Marx's future-historical timeline). At the time they were writing, that would probably have meant Britain.
The idea of socialism in one country was a development of the Russian Revolution, and is something of a departure from Marxism as originally formulated.