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Vaniver comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong
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I think a lot of political questions hinge on what's possible, and also what the consequences of policies are. If someone says "I think we should arrange marriages instead of letting individuals pick," then the immediate questions to settle are 1) will people allow such a policy to be put in place / comply with it, and 2) what will the consequences be?
(There's also the "does this align with principles" deontological question, but this is relatively easy to answer without looking at the past or present so I'll ignore it.)
And the past provides our primary data source to answer those sorts of questions. Yes, we can imagine multiple different causal effects of attempting to arrange marriages, but how those interplay with each other and shake out is hard to know. But other people tried that for us, and so we can investigate their experiments and come to a judgment.
The problem I see in using the past as evidence is that the further we go from our era, the more what we know is mostly made up.
True, we have documents and evidence and so on, but they only paint a relatively sketchy picture of what the society was, we mostly made up the details in a reasonable manner. Plus we don't get any statistical data on things like happiness, income, etc.
The risk of mistaking noise for signal is so high that it's probably worth throwing it all away, especially when the starting point of the conversation is "People were happier / sadder in xth century, so we should / shouldn't do as they did".
How can you possibly know?
Sure, quality of data degrades with distance, both in space and time. But I don't think it degrades to the point where it actually is worth throwing it all away.
Is this a serious question, or a statement of anti-epistemology? (That is, all knowledge is uncertain, and so the right question is "how did you get to the level of uncertainty you have" rather than "how do you justify pretending that there is no uncertainty?")
It's not only that data becomes more scarce. It's also that it becomes noisier. Case in point: many people believe the Gospels to be a semi-accurate narration of what happened during that era, but actually they were compiled centuries later, and historically contemporary source are both scarce and painting a completely different pictures.
The furthest we go, the higher the possibility of having bogus evidence.
A bit of both, I guess. A cautionary tale, but also a question I would definitely make if I were discussing with someone with that point of view.