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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

And if it can't?

We can't avoid all problems, so the general strategy we need is to get more knowledge so we can be better at solving unforeseen problems.

And it's not reasonable to fear the unknown on principle. Being "conservative" by avoiding an advance doesn't make sense in isolation. It might cause a problem. It also might solve one. We don't know that. We do know technology is useful.

But "gung ho" doesn't sound right. Sometimes we have a substantive idea about a way an upcoming technology could be dangerous. In that case we should respect and consider that foresight, not just charge forward anyway.

BTW David Deutsch's TED talk touches on this.

Yeah, that's more what I'm getting at. I don't like straight knee jerk conservatism, but sometimes it is a useful instinct and it warns us to count the costs.

IMO revolutionaries are worse than conservatives. They are more destructive. And there's more ways to be wrong than right.

It's a bit like doing rewrites of major production systems. Not a good idea. But of course it's much worse because human culture is more complex than a computer program.

But also like major production systems, we definitely can improve them. Now we just need unit tests for cultures to make refactoring easier.

Plus, most revolutions aren't really revolutionary in idea. They mainly retread tired, broken ground that the "conservative" position was meant to fix. I'd say a significant amount of innovation in the political, social, and philosophical realm is merely forgetfulness.

Want to give a couple edifying examples?

PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?

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