I'm aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken.
Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people's only access to information about world affairs.
Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What's amazing about the world's problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn't a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.
Like racism. Maybe there's an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Like racism. Maybe there's an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Or maybe populations with low IQ's are simply more prone to violence. Especially, when there's a reluctance to punish them the same way as high IQ people for fear of being "racist".
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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