I think the central reason it’s possible for an individual to know something better than the solution currently prescribed by mainstream collective wisdom is that the vastness in the number of degrees of freedom in optimizing civilization guarantees that there will always be some potential solutions to problems that simply haven’t received any attention yet. The problem space is simply way, way too large to expect that even relatively easy solutions to certain problems are known yet.
While modesty may be appropriate in situations regarding a problem that is widely visible and considered urgent by society, I think even within this class of problems, there are still so many inefficiencies and non-optimalities that, if you go out looking for one, it’s likely you’ll be able to actually find one. The existence of people who actively go looking for these types of problems, like within Effective Altruism, may demonstrate this.
The stock market is a good example of a problem that is relatively narrow in scope and also receiving a huge amount of society’s collective brainpower. But I just don’t think there’s nearly enough brainpower to expect even most of the visible and urgent problems to already have adequate solutions, or to even have solutions proposed.
There may also be certain dynamics where there are trade-offs between, how much energy and effort does society have to spend in order to implement a specific solution, and how much would this subtract from the effort and energy currently needed to support the other mechanisms of civilization? This dynamic may result in the existence of problems that are easy to notice, perhaps even easy to define a solution for, but in practice immensely complex to implement.
For example, it’s within the power of individual non-experts to understand the basic causes of the Great Recession. And there may have been individuals who predicted it to occur. But it could still have been the case that, actually, it was not feasible for society to simply recognize this and change course quickly enough to avert the disaster.
But rather than for society to simply say, once a disaster becomes predictable, “yes we all know this is a problem, but we really don’t know what to do about it, or if it’s even possible to do anything about it”, the incentive structures are such that it’s easier to spend brainpower to come up with reasons why it’s not really that bad and perhaps the problem doesn’t even exist in the first place. Therefore the correct answer gets hidden away and the commonly accepted answer is incorrect.
In other words, modesty is most reasonable when the systems that support knowledge accumulation don’t filter out any correct answers.
I think the central reason it’s possible for an individual to know something better than the solution currently prescribed by mainstream collective wisdom is that the vastness in the number of degrees of freedom in optimizing civilization guarantees that there will always be some potential solutions to problems that simply haven’t received any attention yet. The problem space is simply way, way too large to expect that even relatively easy solutions to certain problems are known yet.
While modesty may be appropriate in situations regarding a problem that is widely visible and considered urgent by society, I think even within this class of problems, there are still so many inefficiencies and non-optimalities that, if you go out looking for one, it’s likely you’ll be able to actually find one. The existence of people who actively go looking for these types of problems, like within Effective Altruism, may demonstrate this.
The stock market is a good example of a problem that is relatively narrow in scope and also receiving a huge amount of society’s collective brainpower. But I just don’t think there’s nearly enough brainpower to expect even most of the visible and urgent problems to already have adequate solutions, or to even have solutions proposed.
There may also be certain dynamics where there are trade-offs between, how much energy and effort does society have to spend in order to implement a specific solution, and how much would this subtract from the effort and energy currently needed to support the other mechanisms of civilization? This dynamic may result in the existence of problems that are easy to notice, perhaps even easy to define a solution for, but in practice immensely complex to implement.
For example, it’s within the power of individual non-experts to understand the basic causes of the Great Recession. And there may have been individuals who predicted it to occur. But it could still have been the case that, actually, it was not feasible for society to simply recognize this and change course quickly enough to avert the disaster.
But rather than for society to simply say, once a disaster becomes predictable, “yes we all know this is a problem, but we really don’t know what to do about it, or if it’s even possible to do anything about it”, the incentive structures are such that it’s easier to spend brainpower to come up with reasons why it’s not really that bad and perhaps the problem doesn’t even exist in the first place. Therefore the correct answer gets hidden away and the commonly accepted answer is incorrect.
In other words, modesty is most reasonable when the systems that support knowledge accumulation don’t filter out any correct answers.