do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can’t even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can’t in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for—but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren’t needed so much—say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace—and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of “unknown knowns” about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them—all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds—and that consciously interpreting and articulating these “unknown knowns” can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can’t even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can’t in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for—but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren’t needed so much—say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace—and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of “unknown knowns” about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them—all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds—and that consciously interpreting and articulating these “unknown knowns” can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
The fact that people have lot of “unknown knowns” in no way implies that they don’t have many “unknown unknowns”.
People frequently tend to think the know more than they actually do. When it comes to knowledge people are frequently overconfident.