Would you disagree with the claim that several significant social problems have in fact been solved over the history of human civilization, at least in parts of the world? Or are you saying that those were the low-hanging fruit and the social problems that remain are nearly impossible to solve?
Looking at the list, I would say that to the extent progress has been made towards them (and to the extent they’re worthy goals, the “sustainable development” one is trying to solve the wrong problem and the “gender equality” one is just incoherent) it is incidental to the efforts of the UN.
The problem with Yvain’s argument is that it appears to be an example of the PHB fallacy “anything I don’t understand is easy to do”. Or rather the “a little knowledge” problem “anything I sort of understand is easy to do”.
During the Enlightenment, when people first started talking about reorganizing society on a large scale, it seemed like a panacea. Now that we have several centuries extremely messy experience with it, we know that it’s harder than it at first appeared and there are many complications. Now that developments in biology seem to make it possible to make changes to biology it again looks like a panacea (at least to the people who haven’t learned the lessons of the previous failure). And just as before, I predict people will discover that it’s a lot more complicated, probably just a messily.
Social problems are nearly impossible to solve. The methods we have developed in the hard sciences and engineering are insufficient to solve them.
Would you disagree with the claim that several significant social problems have in fact been solved over the history of human civilization, at least in parts of the world? Or are you saying that those were the low-hanging fruit and the social problems that remain are nearly impossible to solve?
What would you say about the progress that has been made towards satisfying the Millennium Development Goals?
Looking at the list, I would say that to the extent progress has been made towards them (and to the extent they’re worthy goals, the “sustainable development” one is trying to solve the wrong problem and the “gender equality” one is just incoherent) it is incidental to the efforts of the UN.
Yvain seems to agree.
The problem with Yvain’s argument is that it appears to be an example of the PHB fallacy “anything I don’t understand is easy to do”. Or rather the “a little knowledge” problem “anything I sort of understand is easy to do”.
During the Enlightenment, when people first started talking about reorganizing society on a large scale, it seemed like a panacea. Now that we have several centuries extremely messy experience with it, we know that it’s harder than it at first appeared and there are many complications. Now that developments in biology seem to make it possible to make changes to biology it again looks like a panacea (at least to the people who haven’t learned the lessons of the previous failure). And just as before, I predict people will discover that it’s a lot more complicated, probably just a messily.