We should be wary of political vapourware. If somebody’s alternative to the status quo is nothing, or at least nothing very specific, then what are they even talking about? They are hawking political vapourware, giving a “sales pitch” for something that doesn’t even exist.
Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don’t think that it’s an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.
no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as “no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable”, then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).
I’m not saying “result” but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution)
Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.
As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.
Perhaps a more precise point is that the first American government failed. John Hanson and the other 9 Presidents of the United States under the articles of confederation were operating the true government they threw the revolution for. It failed almost immediately—you would be astonished at how hard it was to convince someone to run the country, hence the extremely high turnover on Presidents.
I, and many other people here on Less Wrong, live in a massive, surprisingly enduring Plan B of a government.
[It’s worth pointing out I like this one better, because we can find appropriately qualified staff, which is, ya know, pretty good. But alas, I was not a father of the American Revolution.]
The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
They wanted to create a government which was democratic, at least to a certain extent. They had a revolution. And they got one. It’s true that some of the exact details weren’t written down until after the Revolution, but they didn’t have a revolution and then get a dictatorship, or something unsustainable, or find that all private property was abolished two years later—they got something which was clearly within the parameters they were trying to achieve.
They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
That’s taking a very narrow interpretation of “planned to introduce”. If you had asked them “when you overthrow the Communists, do you plan to have a free market system”, they would have said yes. I count that as “planning to introduce a free market system, and getting what they planned for”.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand.
The point of that sentence was to rule out saying “But if you look at the government over 200 years later, they clearly wouldn’t have anticipated high tax rates and gay marriage, so they didn’t get the system they wanted”. If the system produced by the revolution is at least as stable as a non-revolutionary system, even if it has enough instability to show up after 200 years, it should count.
I think quite a few people on the left can tell you a few catch phrases about how their alternative system should look like that are as vague as demoractic.
No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn’t mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
We do agile development where I work. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn’t mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them “do whatever comes to mind” without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it’s trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it’s because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
If you ask people to give you a clear alternative of a poltiical system then the only way to give you what you are asking is to give you something that migth work in theory but that’s not based on empiric reality.
One of the big problem with Soviet style communism was that a central planner made a plan with wasn’t well based on empiric reality.
As a result there are valid reasons for part of todays left to dislike the idea of central planning.
This strikes me as a common failing of rationality. Personally I’ve never really noticed it in politics though. People arguing politics from all corners of the spectrum usually know exactly what they want to happen instead, and will advocate for it in great detail.
However, in science it is extremely common for known broken theories to be espoused and taught because there’s nothing (yet) better. There are many examples from the late 19th/early 20th centuries before quantum mechanics was figured out. For example, the prevailing theory of how the sun worked used a model of gravitational contraction that simply could not have powered the sun for anything like the known age of the earth. That model wasn’t really discarded until the 1920s and 30s when Gamow and Teller figured out the nuclear reactions that really did power the sun.
There are many examples today, in many fields, where the existing model simply cannot be accurate. Yet until a better model comes along scientists are loath to discard it.
This irrationality, this unwillingness to listen to someone who says “This idea is wrong” unless they can also say “and this alternative idea is right” is a major theme of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
I’ve asked SJs whether there was ever a time in their lives when they thought they were in a group that was satisfyingly inclusive, whether there was some experience they were trying to make more common. Admittedly, I only asked a few people (and with tact set on maximum). The only answer I got was no.
It’s possible I was overgeneralizing in several ways, but I was asking because it seemed to me that what I’d read of anti-racism had a tone of “something hurts, it’s urgent to stop the pain”, but there was no positive vision.
This might have something to do with political (and maybe even choices inside businesses) which actually make life better vs. those that don’t. There’s always some sort of vision, but maybe there are issues related not just to whether pieces of the vision are accurate, but whether it’s clear enough in appropriate ways. For example, was part of the problem with centralized economies that no one had a clear idea of how information would get transmitted? (This is a real question.)
That someone has never experienced some state X does not imply that they do not have a vision for the state X they wish to achieve in the future. If you want to know what someone’s positive vision for the future is, ask them, “What is your vision for a better future?”; not “Have you experienced something better than this in the past?” These are two very different questions.
Most people grow up in some status quo.* That doesn’t mean they can conceive of no alternative to that status quo.
What qualifies as “status quo” is of course very local to some time, place, and subculture. The status quo described in the article quoted isn’t remotely close to anything I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accurate reflection of the status quo at one particular English-speaking university in Montreal in the early teens.
Yes, that’s it—I think SJs is more polite than SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), but I’m guessing about that.
It’s a rather confused area of terminology—there’s an older use of “social justice” (note lack of capitalization) which, so far as I know, consisted of advocating for various groups, but didn’t include the ideas of privilege and calling out.
Feminists, antiracists etc. Often something like intersectional something or other. They don’t have a name that most of them are happy with, which is why a name that was just a joke about them ‘fighting for social justice’ stuck.
The trouble with “SJs” is that it looks like an abbreviation but there doesn’t seem to be anything it stands for. “Social Justices”? (That would mean judges who like to party, I guess.) “Social Justicers”?
Maybe something longer is needed. “SJ people”? “SJ folks”? “The online Social Justice movement”?
We have to assess claims about oppression based on more than just what people say about themselves. If I took the idea of the infallibility of the oppressed seriously, I would have to trust that dragons exist. That is why it’s such an unreliable guide. (I half-expect the response, “Check your human privilege!”)
I don’t buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding “What would you replace it with?” when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can’t exist because the change in question hasn’t been tried recently.) After a few repetitions, I simply lump the asker in with the kind of troll whose reply to every comment is “Cite?” and add him to my spam filter.
An explicit argument that lack of regulation would produce better results than the current regulatory system is not the same thing as disliking and actively opposing the current system yet having no idea what to replace it with.
Everything Is Problematic, an account of getting out of radical left wing politics.
Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don’t think that it’s an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.
Waterfall is no good design paradigma.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as “no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable”, then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).
I’m not saying “result” but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.
As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.
Perhaps a more precise point is that the first American government failed. John Hanson and the other 9 Presidents of the United States under the articles of confederation were operating the true government they threw the revolution for. It failed almost immediately—you would be astonished at how hard it was to convince someone to run the country, hence the extremely high turnover on Presidents.
I, and many other people here on Less Wrong, live in a massive, surprisingly enduring Plan B of a government.
[It’s worth pointing out I like this one better, because we can find appropriately qualified staff, which is, ya know, pretty good. But alas, I was not a father of the American Revolution.]
They wanted to create a government which was democratic, at least to a certain extent. They had a revolution. And they got one. It’s true that some of the exact details weren’t written down until after the Revolution, but they didn’t have a revolution and then get a dictatorship, or something unsustainable, or find that all private property was abolished two years later—they got something which was clearly within the parameters they were trying to achieve.
That’s taking a very narrow interpretation of “planned to introduce”. If you had asked them “when you overthrow the Communists, do you plan to have a free market system”, they would have said yes. I count that as “planning to introduce a free market system, and getting what they planned for”.
The point of that sentence was to rule out saying “But if you look at the government over 200 years later, they clearly wouldn’t have anticipated high tax rates and gay marriage, so they didn’t get the system they wanted”. If the system produced by the revolution is at least as stable as a non-revolutionary system, even if it has enough instability to show up after 200 years, it should count.
I think quite a few people on the left can tell you a few catch phrases about how their alternative system should look like that are as vague as demoractic.
No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn’t mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
I’m reminded of Eisenhower:
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
Then why does every modern startup do agile development instead of spending more time on planning?
We do agile development where I work. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn’t mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them “do whatever comes to mind” without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it’s trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it’s because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
Why do you ask?
If you ask people to give you a clear alternative of a poltiical system then the only way to give you what you are asking is to give you something that migth work in theory but that’s not based on empiric reality.
One of the big problem with Soviet style communism was that a central planner made a plan with wasn’t well based on empiric reality.
As a result there are valid reasons for part of todays left to dislike the idea of central planning.
This strikes me as a common failing of rationality. Personally I’ve never really noticed it in politics though. People arguing politics from all corners of the spectrum usually know exactly what they want to happen instead, and will advocate for it in great detail.
However, in science it is extremely common for known broken theories to be espoused and taught because there’s nothing (yet) better. There are many examples from the late 19th/early 20th centuries before quantum mechanics was figured out. For example, the prevailing theory of how the sun worked used a model of gravitational contraction that simply could not have powered the sun for anything like the known age of the earth. That model wasn’t really discarded until the 1920s and 30s when Gamow and Teller figured out the nuclear reactions that really did power the sun.
There are many examples today, in many fields, where the existing model simply cannot be accurate. Yet until a better model comes along scientists are loath to discard it.
This irrationality, this unwillingness to listen to someone who says “This idea is wrong” unless they can also say “and this alternative idea is right” is a major theme of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
I’ve asked SJs whether there was ever a time in their lives when they thought they were in a group that was satisfyingly inclusive, whether there was some experience they were trying to make more common. Admittedly, I only asked a few people (and with tact set on maximum). The only answer I got was no.
It’s possible I was overgeneralizing in several ways, but I was asking because it seemed to me that what I’d read of anti-racism had a tone of “something hurts, it’s urgent to stop the pain”, but there was no positive vision.
This might have something to do with political (and maybe even choices inside businesses) which actually make life better vs. those that don’t. There’s always some sort of vision, but maybe there are issues related not just to whether pieces of the vision are accurate, but whether it’s clear enough in appropriate ways. For example, was part of the problem with centralized economies that no one had a clear idea of how information would get transmitted? (This is a real question.)
That someone has never experienced some state X does not imply that they do not have a vision for the state X they wish to achieve in the future. If you want to know what someone’s positive vision for the future is, ask them, “What is your vision for a better future?”; not “Have you experienced something better than this in the past?” These are two very different questions.
Most people grow up in some status quo.* That doesn’t mean they can conceive of no alternative to that status quo.
What qualifies as “status quo” is of course very local to some time, place, and subculture. The status quo described in the article quoted isn’t remotely close to anything I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accurate reflection of the status quo at one particular English-speaking university in Montreal in the early teens.
SJs? Can you elaborate? I’m not sure what you’re referring to.
I think in this context it refers to people who advocate for social justice.
Yes, that’s it—I think SJs is more polite than SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), but I’m guessing about that.
It’s a rather confused area of terminology—there’s an older use of “social justice” (note lack of capitalization) which, so far as I know, consisted of advocating for various groups, but didn’t include the ideas of privilege and calling out.
What do the people that people call SJWs call themselves?
Generally, progressives.
SJWs to progressives are like crusaders to Christians.
Feminists, antiracists etc. Often something like intersectional something or other. They don’t have a name that most of them are happy with, which is why a name that was just a joke about them ‘fighting for social justice’ stuck.
There is a lot of terms involved.
A person might say: I’m a third wave feminist. The also might say: I’m an ally.
The trouble with “SJs” is that it looks like an abbreviation but there doesn’t seem to be anything it stands for. “Social Justices”? (That would mean judges who like to party, I guess.) “Social Justicers”?
Maybe something longer is needed. “SJ people”? “SJ folks”? “The online Social Justice movement”?
I don’t particularly agree with this quote, but the link it comes out of is excellent.
It’s amazing!
I don’t buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding “What would you replace it with?” when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can’t exist because the change in question hasn’t been tried recently.) After a few repetitions, I simply lump the asker in with the kind of troll whose reply to every comment is “Cite?” and add him to my spam filter.
An explicit argument that lack of regulation would produce better results than the current regulatory system is not the same thing as disliking and actively opposing the current system yet having no idea what to replace it with.