I really dislike this post. It is essentially propaganda. It claims (without providing any kind of evidence based assessment!) that all the good things in human history are the result of rational thinking, while all the bad things in human history are the result of stupidity. I think that’s quite clearly false.
First, most deaths in human history could not have been avoided, only delayed at best. No one person could have created an industrial society on their own, no matter how clever they might have been. If Da Vinci couldn’t save the world and stop death, then no one else should be perceived as having failed. They did what they could, mostly, even if their lives were not lived perfectly.
Second, stupidity has caused some good things. Many humans are prone to naivety. They trust strangers to handle their wealth, or decide to cooperate in one shot instances of the prisoner’s dilemma even when there are large rewards that might await them. The effect of such stupidity is on the whole good for our society. Rational, highly intelligent beings cannot take the same kinds of shortcuts that more limited beings can. Thus, they can sometimes face heightened transaction costs.
Third, intelligence has caused some bad things. The United States would never have atomically bombed Japan if no scientist ever invented nuclear weapons, for example. Every major evildoer in history was only able to do evil due to certain ideas which entered their minds. Ultimately, knowledge is simply power, and power is neither totally safe nor totally dangerous. We are not soldiers in a war against evil irrationality; we are human beings simply trying to live and evil is hard to identify or fight without looking at specifics and context.
Of course, there is an imaginable utopia in which every single human being is perfectly rational and everyone cooperates and there is perfect happiness. But envisioning utopias is a bad way to decide which causes to support, as utopias of all types are very easy to imagine. A conservative might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to conservative principles the world would be better off, and a progressive might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to progressive principles the world would be better off, but such assumptions of perfection are so unrealistic that they don’t help us to decide which principles we should actually believe in or support.
I really dislike this post. It is essentially propaganda. It claims (without providing any kind of evidence based assessment!) that all the good things in human history are the result of rational thinking, while all the bad things in human history are the result of stupidity. I think that’s quite clearly false.
First, most deaths in human history could not have been avoided, only delayed at best. No one person could have created an industrial society on their own, no matter how clever they might have been. If Da Vinci couldn’t save the world and stop death, then no one else should be perceived as having failed. They did what they could, mostly, even if their lives were not lived perfectly.
Second, stupidity has caused some good things. Many humans are prone to naivety. They trust strangers to handle their wealth, or decide to cooperate in one shot instances of the prisoner’s dilemma even when there are large rewards that might await them. The effect of such stupidity is on the whole good for our society. Rational, highly intelligent beings cannot take the same kinds of shortcuts that more limited beings can. Thus, they can sometimes face heightened transaction costs.
Third, intelligence has caused some bad things. The United States would never have atomically bombed Japan if no scientist ever invented nuclear weapons, for example. Every major evildoer in history was only able to do evil due to certain ideas which entered their minds. Ultimately, knowledge is simply power, and power is neither totally safe nor totally dangerous. We are not soldiers in a war against evil irrationality; we are human beings simply trying to live and evil is hard to identify or fight without looking at specifics and context.
Of course, there is an imaginable utopia in which every single human being is perfectly rational and everyone cooperates and there is perfect happiness. But envisioning utopias is a bad way to decide which causes to support, as utopias of all types are very easy to imagine. A conservative might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to conservative principles the world would be better off, and a progressive might claim that if everyone perfectly adhered to progressive principles the world would be better off, but such assumptions of perfection are so unrealistic that they don’t help us to decide which principles we should actually believe in or support.
Vague aesthetic insight I’ve just had upon rereading this comment of mine, which I don’t want to forget:
“Trust, then verify” works much better for building good social systems than “verify, then trust”.