I’m aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken.
Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people’s only access to information about world affairs.
Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What’s amazing about the world’s problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn’t a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
The war on drugs seems to have been the result of a small number of people. So far as I know, the trail of Tears was something Jackson pushed through that the rest of the country didn’t especially want.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Or maybe populations with low IQ’s are simply more prone to violence. Especially, when there’s a reluctance to punish them the same way as high IQ people for fear of being “racist”.
Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people’s only access to information about world affairs.
Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What’s amazing about the world’s problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn’t a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Examples?
The war on drugs seems to have been the result of a small number of people. So far as I know, the trail of Tears was something Jackson pushed through that the rest of the country didn’t especially want.
Or maybe populations with low IQ’s are simply more prone to violence. Especially, when there’s a reluctance to punish them the same way as high IQ people for fear of being “racist”.
And then the American Irish replaced their hardware from low-IQ to high-IQ in a course of 150 years. Wait, no, looks more like a software change: http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a2.html
Your link says nothing about IQ. There are many ways to stop being poor other than raising your IQ.