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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

Conservative in this sense means something like 'resistant to deviation from established norms'. I think a lot of the headline-only readers take conservative to mean 'of the character of a specific political movement' which ironically seems more activistic than change resistant.

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Perhaps you could call it "integral controller" (like the I in "PID controller")? Because systems that have a memory behave like ones, and we are definitely in a feedback loop with those systems.

And, from what I remember from my control theory classes, the integral part of a controller introduces lag, inertia, generally making the output more resistant to input changes.

(Also note that the "non-conservative" Proportional and Derivative components in a PID by definition don't learn - they react to input and its change.)

That's a pretty interesting corollary! I suppose I could extrapolate that in such a system, too much change over too little time would invite a strong conservative response / lag to future input.

Our 20 year old millennium has seen a tremendous rate of change in both technology and social norms. Perhaps politics has some similar inertial dynamics.

But isn't “resistant to deviation from established norms” at least partly what conservatism means politically?

On paper, yes, but in practice, there is significant lag time between a new noem being established and conservatives giving up the old one in favor of the new normal. For example, being against gay marriage (as opposed to it being a non-issue) is still seen as the conservative opinion despite pro-gay-marriage being the plurality opinion for eight years and an outright majority for six[0]. Further, since economic deregulation is seen as the conservative stance, being in favor of abolishing the minimum wage labels someone as a conservative, despite it being nationally established for seven decades.

[0] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

Mostly only in America does it have this association. I read it as a bias towards not changing unless it's something clearly related to the US political system

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