Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. [...]
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among “conservatives” (in a loose sense) complaining about how “intellectuals” (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against “technocrats” and “ivory towers” in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip “Evolution is smarter than you are”, or the similar principle of “Chesterton’s Fence”.
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don’t see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn’t have such value.) For instance:
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
I’m fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn’t find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton’s Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton’s Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don’t know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you’re doing. But actually there’s lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
I’d actually extend that from natural phenomena to any sufficiently complex system. I spend a lot of my time working with a codebase that dates back to about 1993 and has been accumulating tweaks and refactors ever since; there’s enough obscure side-effects that it’s often a good idea to make a good-faith search for unusual consequences of seemingly vestigial code, but more often than not I don’t turn up anything. I can be fairly confident that any particular code segment was originally put in place for a reason, if not necessarily a very good reason, but if I understand the rest of the local architecture well and I can’t figure out why something’s there, it’s more than likely that all the original reasons for it have succumbed to bit rot.
Societies are one of the better examples of Katamari Damacy architecture that I can think of outside computer science, so it seems to me that a similar approach might be warranted. Which isn’t to say that you can get away with not doing your homework, nor that most aspiring social architects have done so to any reasonable standard.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Isn’t this one of the arguments sometimes invoked in favour of environmentalism?
Hm, this sucks, a bunch of birds are eating part of our harvest each year. Lets get rid of them!. Changing some things in your natural envrionment that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, might be a very bad idea.
Also it as argument that can be used in medicine. It can be a bad idea to take something to artificiality reduce your fever for example. Changing some things in your own body that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, is probably a very bad idea.
I would say that for societal adaptations that have come into being without design the case is stronger than with the natural environment but weaker than with your own body. Maybe there should be a thing like Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Sure, changing some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea. Failing to change some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea too.
And, yes, human history is a long series of decisions along these lines: do we build habitations, or keep living in caves? Do we build roads, cities, power grids, airplanes, trains? Do we mine the earth for fuel, for building materials, for useful chemicals? Do we burn fuel on a large scale? Do we develop medicines and tools that interfere with the natural course of biological development when that course is uncomfortable? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Mostly, humanity’s answer is “Yes.” If we can do it, we typically do, just ’cuz.
Have we thereby caused bad consequences? Sure.
Have we thereby caused net bad consequences? Well, I suppose that depends on what you value, and on what you consider the likeliest counterfactual states, but if you think we have I’d love to hear your reasons.
Me, I think we’re unambiguously better off for having chopped Chesterton’s Fallen Tree into firewood and burned it to keep warm through Chesterton’s Deadly Winter. And in practice, when I see a fallen tree in my yard, I don’t devote a noticeable amount of time to evaluating the possible important-but-nonobvious benefits it is providing by lying there before I deal with it.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
This might lead us to contemplate the most terrifying and unthinkable proposition yet, not named anywhere else on this thread—that, perhaps, Stephen Wolfram was right!
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Interesting. I haven’t given this a lot of thought, but my intuition is the opposite of yours… I think of most social constructs as evolved over time rather than intentionally constructed for a purpose.
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among “conservatives” (in a loose sense) complaining about how “intellectuals” (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against “technocrats” and “ivory towers” in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip “Evolution is smarter than you are”, or the similar principle of “Chesterton’s Fence”.
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don’t see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn’t have such value.) For instance:
I’m fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn’t find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton’s Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton’s Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don’t know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you’re doing. But actually there’s lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
I’d actually extend that from natural phenomena to any sufficiently complex system. I spend a lot of my time working with a codebase that dates back to about 1993 and has been accumulating tweaks and refactors ever since; there’s enough obscure side-effects that it’s often a good idea to make a good-faith search for unusual consequences of seemingly vestigial code, but more often than not I don’t turn up anything. I can be fairly confident that any particular code segment was originally put in place for a reason, if not necessarily a very good reason, but if I understand the rest of the local architecture well and I can’t figure out why something’s there, it’s more than likely that all the original reasons for it have succumbed to bit rot.
Societies are one of the better examples of Katamari Damacy architecture that I can think of outside computer science, so it seems to me that a similar approach might be warranted. Which isn’t to say that you can get away with not doing your homework, nor that most aspiring social architects have done so to any reasonable standard.
Isn’t this one of the arguments sometimes invoked in favour of environmentalism?
Hm, this sucks, a bunch of birds are eating part of our harvest each year. Lets get rid of them!. Changing some things in your natural envrionment that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, might be a very bad idea.
Also it as argument that can be used in medicine. It can be a bad idea to take something to artificiality reduce your fever for example. Changing some things in your own body that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, is probably a very bad idea.
I would say that for societal adaptations that have come into being without design the case is stronger than with the natural environment but weaker than with your own body. Maybe there should be a thing like Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Sure, changing some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea.
Failing to change some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea too.
And, yes, human history is a long series of decisions along these lines: do we build habitations, or keep living in caves? Do we build roads, cities, power grids, airplanes, trains? Do we mine the earth for fuel, for building materials, for useful chemicals? Do we burn fuel on a large scale? Do we develop medicines and tools that interfere with the natural course of biological development when that course is uncomfortable? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Mostly, humanity’s answer is “Yes.” If we can do it, we typically do, just ’cuz.
Have we thereby caused bad consequences? Sure.
Have we thereby caused net bad consequences? Well, I suppose that depends on what you value, and on what you consider the likeliest counterfactual states, but if you think we have I’d love to hear your reasons.
Me, I think we’re unambiguously better off for having chopped Chesterton’s Fallen Tree into firewood and burned it to keep warm through Chesterton’s Deadly Winter. And in practice, when I see a fallen tree in my yard, I don’t devote a noticeable amount of time to evaluating the possible important-but-nonobvious benefits it is providing by lying there before I deal with it.
Gall’s law:
This might lead us to contemplate the most terrifying and unthinkable proposition yet, not named anywhere else on this thread—that, perhaps, Stephen Wolfram was right!
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Interesting. I haven’t given this a lot of thought, but my intuition is the opposite of yours… I think of most social constructs as evolved over time rather than intentionally constructed for a purpose.