In Praise of Passivity (2012) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

In Praise of Passivity (2012) [pdf]

studiahumana.com

45 pointsTomte26 comments

Trying to identify a few of the most ethically controversial premises:

* Government is ethically responsible for adverse results of acting to change society (or of limiting people's choices), but not for those of failing to do so.

* People's strongly-held hypothesis and intuitions about what might make society better are so unreliable that they're typically at least as likely to make society worse. True or reliable ideas of this kind are exceptionally rare and take a long time to develop.

* It isn't especially important for government to do what people in general think or say they want, because beliefs are so tenuous or unreliable or have so many unintended consequences.

Some ideas that might still be useful to people who reject some or all of those premises:

* Almost everyone believes that they are right and that their values will make things better, even people who strongly disagree with each other.

* Almost everyone believes that their own values and beliefs are well-supported or obvious, even people who strongly disagree with each other.

* Apparently well-thought-out political programs and proposals often fail or backfire in some way.

* (Not so explicit here, but sort of alluded to in passing, and found in similar writers) The ability to diagnose or describe a problem well isn't necessarily the same thing as the ability to propose a workable or effective solution to that problem.

Edit: compare David Simon's view at

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-ca...

> I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

* Some problems could be extremely intractable or only solvable at very high cost. Some changes that lots of people agree are desirable might still be out of reach in some sense; some outcomes that lots of people agree are bad may be beyond those people's power to avert or mitigate very substantially, even if they passionately agree that those things are bad.

I think these two are the 'real' crux of the matter:

* Almost everyone believes that they are right and that their values will make things better, even people who strongly disagree with each other.

* Almost everyone believes that their own values and beliefs are well-supported or obvious, even people who strongly disagree with each other.

These two things are incredibly difficult for people to come to terms with. The corollary to these, which in fact leads to the real problems is:

* Almost everyone finds it extremely difficult to believe that those who hold beliefs or a belief system fundamentally at odds with their own could mean just as well, or even more challenging, be equally 'right' in the context of that system. That is, "there's more than one way to skin a cat".

I've been thinking about this lately, and one of the problems is that most politics and government can be boiled down to tribalist behaviour and gross generalization. Us vs. Them. I defend this solutions because they work and are the ones I've always have believed with my pears. The guy in front of me is wrong because (cherrypick some obvious and probably true examples) and doesn't have a clue. Government could better be performed if done similary to a doctor prescribing to a patient, today you need this treatment, but maybe in a year you have improved enough and you need a touch of the opposite one, and then we have to try something new with this other problem.

But current believes don't let politicians try this (I don't think they even believe it's possible), and even if they tried we voters wouldn't trust this kind of "changing sides".

If X policy worked so well till now, why I'm not going to apply it to every problem we have or imagine we have?

Of course it's more complex than this (as it's just a generalization) but I have not seen this said in too many places.

Historically, most governance switches between "business as usual" and "urgent crisis" without much gradient. This gives the appearance of stability most of the time as most of the political effort in the business as usual scenario is behind the scenes, trading horses, serving the high bidders, driving a wedge on an issue to create a new support base, or shutting down challengers. But when a crisis hits, everyone's plans go out the window and chaos ensues. When it finally settles, there is a new order and a new set of policy issues, not always for the better.

What we have at this moment, across many nations, is a set of crises that none of the existing governments have the resolve or imagination to solve. That's why the parties are tearing themselves up - they are realigning everything.

At ground level this manifests as partisan politics in part because the remnants of the old platforms are in do-or-die mode; with no stable middle to appeal to, they have to pick a place to move to, and it is going to be left or right of their old position.

> I've been thinking about this lately, and one of the problems is that most politics and government can be boiled down to tribalist behaviour and gross generalization. Us vs. Them.

The more I learn about history, and see how things like tribalism were the driving factor in many decisions, the more I see the same in our current world. I'm not going to get into politics, but: We have a tendency to look into the past and think "How did those crazy people ever behave that way?!?" and then turn around and do the same exact thing "But our world is different! Our enemies really are the bad guys this time!"

We really are just a group of big, technologically advanced tribes, fighting for perceived scarcity of resources. The scariest thing about learning history just how much nothing changes.

The scariest thing about learning history just how much nothing changes.

It's changed a lot. Several thousand years ago, we realized that having a king solves a lot of problems, such as tribal warfare, and squabbles between small groups of people. Pax Romana it might be called, although it was found on a smaller scale before that.

The Greeks appreciated the power of a monarch, but didn't like to be told what to do, and their emphasis on individual freedom eventually led to democracy like the Roman senate. Unfortunately, the roman senate couldn't handle changing demographics very well, and became indolent, corrupt, and useless, so a dictator was an improvement.

Throughout the middle ages, philosophers put a lot of thought into the idea of, "How to find the best monarch?"

Eventually the United States came up with an idea of how to balance the power of state with individual freedom, and put some procedures in place to handle demographic changes, learning from the Roman's failures.

Learning takes centuries, but it definitely happens. The improvements to the legal system since Sumerian times is notable as well.

I didn't mean to sound so pessimistic there, and I could have worded it better. I agree we have learned a lot. I think things have gotten much better. My day-to-day life is amazing compared to most of history.

But I stand by the statement in the area of: In many ways, we are just large tribes, fighting each other for stupid, selfish reasons. If you abstract things away enough, we may be different, but we still act the same.

That's kind of the essence of political science though, right? You have different people, with different desires....how can their differences be reconciled? There is no right or wrong here, just different preferences.

In theory yes. But the implementation of reconciling those differences a lot of right or wrong can happen. That's how wars, institutionalized bigotry, etc can happen.

Cf. G.K. Chesterton: "The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."

The examples around terrorism undermine the article. Anyone paying attention, presumably including politicians, knows why Islamic terrorists want to attack the US; the problem is the political difficulty of clearly stating the facts in public without being accused of being unpatriotic or of attacking America's allies.

Likewise, the article glibly states all experts oppose protectionism, but in the words of Ha-Joon Chang, "Almost all of today's rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies." (http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm) Appeals to authority don't work; economists cannot be expected to be systematically unbiased, if their funding tends to depend on particular economic theories having political currency.

The problem isn't that expertise is impossible, it's political structures which push objective inquiry aside. "It is very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it."

The global warming "debate" also backs this point up. There is no doubt the experts are reliable, that global warming exists and is a serious threat. But we are unable to come up with an effective policy response, because fossil fuel companies can buy an opposition.

> If we want to test whether fiscal stimulus cures recessions, we cannot prepare two identical societies, with identical recessions, and then apply fiscal stimulus in on e society but not the other. Nor can we take a large collection of societies with recessions and randomly assign half to receive fiscal stimulus and half to receive no fiscal stimulus.

There is no reason that randomized controlled trials of economic policy could not be done on particular regions, and this is occasionally done already (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/12/randomis...). It's really a bit outrageous that we'd introduce far-reaching economic changes with less evidential support than for a new brand of athlete's foot cream.

>> Anyone paying attention, presumably including politicians, knows why Islamic terrorists want to attack the US; the problem is the political difficulty of clearly stating the facts in public without being accused of being unpatriotic or of attacking America's allies.

Source?

>> the problem is the political difficulty of clearly stating the facts

> Source?

Gitmo, The iraq war, backing of Israel,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak

Why do terrorist want to attack France? Turkey? Is it the same reason they want to attack the US or are they all different?

Maybe - French troop seem pretty active in joint US military activities.

Your comment represents your own biases rather than reality. For example, you said:

  >Appeals to authority don't work....
  >There is no doubt the experts are reliable

Appeals to authority don't work in the specific case of economists, for the reasons I mentioned.

economists cannot be expected to be systematically unbiased, if their funding tends to depend on particular economic theories having political currency.

The same can be said of any group of scientists largely funded by the government. You chose the group whose conclusions you disagree with.

I wholeheartedly agree with much of what is written, but in the spirit of the text here is a counter argument that I considered. I would be happy to hear others' opinion on it.

Perhaps a good reason for people to form and voice opinions (like voting for example) even when they generally don't know what they're talking about is what's dubbed "crowd wisdom": the idea that a group of almost clueless laymen can somehow miraculously come to a very good decision when grouped and averaged out outperforming experts. At least for some problems.

Perhaps the OP's suggestion that only well educated "experts" should voice there opinions robs society of this slow but powerful driving force?

>These campaigns are a terrible idea. Most voters have no idea what is going on–they may not even know who their leaders are, and certainly do not know who is the best candidate. Imagine that someone asks you for directions to a local restaurant. If you have no idea where the restaurant is, you should not make it up. You should not tell the person some guess that seems sort of plausible to you. You should tell them you don’t know and let them get directions from someone more knowledgeable.

The next step from here is delegative democracy.

I don't understand how doing something that you believe is right is worse than doing nothing to prevent ongoing harm.

If you may fail; it doesn't mean you should stop trying.

The opposite is more likely: the more you try the more you know the better the chances.

In many cases, "what you believe is right" is worse than doing nothing. For example, injecting massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere to stop global warming could be worse than doing nothing.

In fact, if you make large changes to a system without deep understanding, it is likely you will cause problems. There is a software analogy here. An incremental approach, taking small steps at a time, is usually better.

It's a matter of humility, and hinges on the empirical claim that uninformed actions are more likely to harm than help in complicated systems (hence, the George Washington blood-letting example). Hastening someone's death because you can't admit you don't know what you're doing is and, by golly, you're trying, is not an excuse.

> Political leaders, voters, and activists are well-advised to follow the dictum, often applied to medicine, to “first, do no harm.” A plausible rule of sthumb, to guard us against doing harm as a result of overconfident ideological beliefs, is that one should not forcibly impose requirements or restrictions on others unless the value of those requirements or restrictions is essentially uncontroversial among the community of experts in conditions of free and open debate. Of course, even an expert consensus may be wrong, but this rule of thumb may be the best that such fallible beings as ourselves can devise.

We would have great beneficies if all religious politicians would think about this before acting.

Why the downvote? I am from Brazil and here we have many politicians who think that we need law to prohibit this because their religion its against it, and by the news I see the same things happening in the USA with the same-sex marriage.

You don't like, don't do. No need to make illegal to others do.

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