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Comment by danblick | Hacker News Reader

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"

I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":

"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""

https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/

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>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have

sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

>In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time.

Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer?

Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money?

Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs?

For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place.

The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.

Except many of those do have reasons, those reasons are just outdated or immoral or context dependent.

The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status quo before tracking down why might end up making things worse.

Yup. The issue of course is that there are many false positives for ‘why’ that can also result in it being thrown away to great suffered - and many folks who frankly don’t have the time to spend.

Best one can do is where it clearly gets in the way of doing what YOU need to do, try to tear it down, but with one look over your shoulder to see if anyone is coming to get you for doing it.

If they do, they at least feel a need to keep it, even if nonsensical to you.

If no one does, then apparently no one remembers or cares enough to keep it there, so entropy wins and put it goes.

Might be a mistake, but might not be - and at least your problem will be easier to solve, which you concretely know and can experience, which is something.

>For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick.

Even if the pigs themselves were fine, perhaps there are other benefits that come from not eating pork.

I'm not an expert by any means, but I could definitely see how eating Kosher could have helped prop up Jewish businesses in the areas where they were a minority.

> the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time.

Exactly. I think there should be a blanket negative to customs, practices or systems that objectively cause harm. It would be reprehensible to see someone try to defend, say, Female Genital Mutilation… using “Chesterton’s Fence”. Just don’t fucking do it to people; stop doing it right now, the “why” might be for anthropologists to ponder at a later date.

Chesterton liked to be restricted, as his own adoption of Catholicism instead of looser Anglican faith attested. He also liked to restrict others, as with his abominable fence that we can't move or even stop talking about long after he's dead. I'm not philosophy kink shaming but it's just not right without consent.

Why not just "genital mutilation"? You don't have to be that specific about it as if there were some acceptable cases of it.

Ah yes, the curious culture of circumcision in the United States is a great example of something that could use a bit of reexamination.

Mr. Kellog, the Corn Flakes guy, in the late 1800s led a zealous crusade against masturbation. Eventually, he somehow managed to sell doctors and the public on circumcision as the answer to one of the hot-button social issues of the day: preventing teen boys from having the occasional wank. Freud would have likely deduced that Kellog himself was a hopeless and compulsive fapping addict.

All jokes aside, I have some friends who feel very resentful about not having had a choice in the matter. And other friends who strongly defend the practice, also likely due to not having had a choice in the matter.

My thinking is that American foreskins will remain on the chopping block until a majority of doctors change their views.

Society does not care as much about males?

Just because "society" is doing something doesn't mean that you have to. Society lies, steals, murders, rapes, but I don't have to.

I agree with you. Fwiw I was speculating on the motive. I thought about it and that was honestly what I think is most likely. Society doesn't care as much about males so if you make it about females your argument looks stronger. And I think people do it for this reason without consciously realizing it.

Isn't that the point though? The implied meaning of Chesterton's fence is simply: Understand the root motivation that belies a rule/norm/etc before you contest it.

A big problem is that people don't agree on the root motivation.

I believe that policies against women being religious leaders is based in historical misogyny. But if you go ask people in these organizations, they'll say that women are fundamentally less capable of leading religious groups and that God made this rule for a reason.

What do you do then? I'm pretty darn sure that the stated reason is not actually true and bigots rarely say "the reason we are oppressing this group is because we hate them" but instead make up rationalizations for their policies. A bias towards keeping social systems and policies as long as there appears to be a justification for it enables oppressive systems to defend themselves more effectively.

> they'll say that women are fundamentally less capable of leading religious groups and that God made this rule for a reason

Thats kinda of rather easily pointed out as misogyny tho. What makes them less capable?

I don't see how that's an issue.

You can take their argument at face value, then deconstruct it and refute piecemeal.

Rationalisations generally fall apart under further scrutiny, and if they don't, then maybe they aren't just rationalisions after all.

Yes, this is key: even the "bad examples" you gave, might have particular (non explicitly obvious) reasons behind them.

Things that are normalized because they're "common at the time" is not the only failure (false positive) mode.

Another is the (false negative) of "things denormalized because they're not popular anymore" (when they have utility that people can't readily see).

Hayek was talking about something more fundamental. There are countless of beliefs and behaviors we have to accept and internalize before we can even talk about changing a fence. "What is a fence? Can people respect access to property? Why can people own property? Why should we respect a fence?"

For the most part we do so unconsciously and unquestioningly.

We could not function in society if we stopped to question everything. Society is far too complex for any one person to understand "all of it."

The only reason society works at all is because we all tacitly agree to follow most of the rules without question. It's only when we shine a spotlight on a particular rule that we thin about it at all.

This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.

You're not wrong.

However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc

Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.

The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.

No, I only mentioned the ones that seem terrible because those are the ones you would be most inclined to change.

Ah, well I think the answer would be to investigate whether something that seems terrible, is in fact actually terrible or not, and then act on that rather than a superficial impression.

The most terrible ones could also be the most difficult ones to change.

Because if they're so terrible, the hidden reason to keep them in place must be specially strong. Or they could be extremely difficult to change because of some shadowy societal forces that lead to unintended consequences.

You ask a difficult and important question.

The two relevant ideas I know are:

1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.

2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.

The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.

I'm not a conservative myself, but as I've grown older and wiser, I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.

> Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.

Right, but the quote I was questioning seemed to indicate that this principle should be applied in cases where no one knows or perhaps even there is no way to know what the purpose is or even in there is one.

That’s a much stronger claim than Chesterton’s fence, because a fence is at least a pretty clear indication of human intent (prevent creatures or objects of a certain size from traveling from one particular area to another), and the class of reasons to build a fence is fairly bounded and can feasibly be investigated.

Also, I’m not sure how Chesterton’s fence is used in detail, but I wouldn’t agree that you must discover the original reason for the fence to justify removing it. You should investigate all the normal reasons a fence would be there, and if no extant reason turns up, tear down the fence and maybe keep an eye out for a while in case you missed something.

I don’t want Chesterton’s fence to devolve all the way to the precautionary principle. Sure, maybe the fence was never needed as a traditional fence, and instead was built by ancient people because they were visited by aliens who said they will destroy Earth if there is ever not a fence in that location. Sure, that’s probably physically possible, but keeping the fence around because of that possibility is terrible epistemology.

> You should investigate all the normal reasons a fence would be there, and if no extant reason turns up, tear down the fence

No, you should give up the idea that you can justify tearing down the fence by any intellectual investigation. If you really believe it would be better if the fence came down, then you need to work to convince everyone who has an interest in the fence to agree with you. If you succeed, then the fence will come down on its own without you having to force anything. And if you don't succeed, perhaps your belief that it would be better if the fence came down was wrong.

I think you’re conflating multiple things here. As far as I know, Chesterton’s fence is not about anything like property rights. We’re not talking about justifying entering your neighbor’s land and tearing down their fence without permission. Presumably the analogy is a fence on some land you’ve just acquired, or a fence on public lands. The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.

> The debate isn’t about whether you have the right to unilaterally tear down a fence, it’s about whether it’s a good idea for the fence to be removed.

And the point is that no individual person can figure out, just by using their own reason, whether it's a good idea for the fence to be removed. The only way to know that is for the long-winded social process of people interacting with each other to either eventually convince them that the fence should be removed, or not.

> And the point is that no individual person can figure out

That clearly doesn't apply to every argument.

There are lots of times when "society" was wrong, and regular people could see that, and also aught change it.

Yes, sometimes society makes makes mistakes, or, even worse, does things for fully understandable, but bad reasons.

"which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy"

A more judicious takeaway might be that revolutions often have tragic periods.

The French revolution had its blood-soaked Terror and Thermidor, lead to the Napoleonic wars in which many perished, etc. But it also liberated millions, spread an ideal of democracy and human rights cherished by much of the world today.

The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction were in every sense a revolution against slavery. Who can deny that despite it all, this revolution was necessary, and did not go far enough in achieving its aims?

Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people from learning the obvious lesson that maybe revolutions just aren't a good idea.

As for the Civil War, the U.S. had to spend a million lives in that war to end slavery. (And, as you appear to recognize, that still didn't really improve the lives of the former slaves all that much--more than a century of Jim Crow was still to come.) The British Empire did it without spending any lives at all, and has never had the kind of Jim Crow issues the U.S. has had. So what is the advantage of revolution, again?

The only reason we no longer live under hereditary monarchies, ruled over by privileged-by-birth nobles who are very explicitly and shamelessly above the law, is because revolutions have done a great job of either killing off those monarchs and nobles, or by scaring the surviving ones into giving up their power.

I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct product of the rivers of blood shed in those struggles.

I live in the U.S., so the basic rights I take for granted were already in place before the French Revolution. They are the result of the American Revolution, and before that the English one a century earlier. (And before that a long history of England and Britain gradually transferring power from the monarch to Parliament, going all the way back to the Magna Carta.) While neither of those revolutions were bloodless, they were a lot less bloody than the French Revolution, not to mention a lot more stable once they were done. Britain's unwritten constitution has not changed all that much since 1688 (the monarchy has continued to lose power, but it had already lost most of it by then); The U.S. Constitution is still in place; France since its revolution has had a reign of terror, an emperor, another monarchy, another revolution, and five republics.

So if I were to pick a revolution or revolutions that set the pattern for guaranteeing basic rights, it would be the English and American ones, not the French one.

Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution.

But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.

Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers

And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.

I agree that the English Civil War was much bloodier than the French Revolution. However, that was not what started the pattern of guaranteeing basic human rights in England. The English Civil War was followed by Cromwell, whose regime was anything but a respecter of basic human rights, and then by the restoration of the monarchy, without very much in the way of change. The Revolution of 1688 was the one that really changed things in terms of respect for human rights in the English system.

I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.

The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

> I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths)

uh Why? Because of the rights of man and the metric system? Think you need to elaborate.

The French Revolution inspired the Russian one, which created the Soviet Union; and the Russian revolution inspired the Chinese one, which created Communist China. Those in turn inspired further Communist revolutions in various countries, the most salient being Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Those Communist regimes were responsible for more than a hundred million deaths in the 20th century.

Uhhh...... No the french revolution did not cause Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Just No.

All revolution does is put a different group of people in charge than previously.

The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII.

Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great.

We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also describe those as a 'worse outcome for the citizenry'?

[1] Which could also be described, if not as de-colonization, as an end to Soviet imperialism.

A war of independence is a quite different thing than a revolution!

For one thing, when it's won, the losers go back home. After a revolution, they stay around. Which is you often end up killing them.

>the losers go back home

It should be noted that often when wars of independence happen there are still many people who identify with the side of the "losers" whose homes are on the "winners" side, and vice versa.

For example Greek independence did not magically transmit the Turks living in their borders to Turkey, nor did it transfer the Greeks living in Turkey to Greece. What was needed to resolve that situation was ethnic cleansing via the deportation of the populations to their respective countries, in such that a country where they hadn't lived before can be called "theirs".

The American Revolution and the American War of Independence are synonymous.

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s

And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.

That still sounds like a revolution to me.

If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!

> That still sounds like a revolution to me.

The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.

And by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

This is absolutely a case of survivorship bias.

> by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

In other words, if the actual facts had been different, we would use a different word to describe what happened. Yes, indeed. That's why we have different words: to capture meaningful differences in the facts we are using the words to describe. If we simply called every change in government a "revolution", the word would be useless.

My point is that when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless. If you're going to condemn revolutions as a whole, you have to condemn the bloodless ones as well, for that same reason.

> when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless.

I think that's rarely the case, at least not when the people starting the revolution are reasonably sane (by which I mean they have a reasonably good grasp of reality and use that to guide their actions). I think the people in Eastern Europe who started "revolutions" when the Soviet Union fell had a pretty good idea that little or no bloodshed would be required.

It's quite possible that the people who started the French Revolution didn't realize how much blood would be shed, but to me that just means those people were not reasonably sane. And there is plenty of other evidence that they were disconnected from reality.

(By contrast, I think the people who started the Russian Revolution, and the Communist revolution in China, were well aware that much bloodshed would be required, and they were perfectly OK with that. That makes them reasonably sane by my definition, but it does make them "insane" by other definitions--psychopathic or sociopathic, for example.)

The revolution itself was absolutely brutal, but overall had a positive effect on all kinds of emancipation.

While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back.

Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized that thought.

That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

liberty equality fraternity - yes, the revolution was bound to happen. You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes. And democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

> Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous

You must be joking. Even ostensibly democratic governments have no problem at all treating the people as subjects instead of as masters.

> That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.

There are lots of ways to end a monarchy which, while they are not bloodless, do not involve insane murderers rising to the top. But the fact that insane murderers did rise to the top in the French Revolution was not a "side effect"; it was an obvious consequence of the way that revolution was done, dictated from the top down by a small group of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason".

> You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes.

The totalitarian regimes that killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century were not "monarchist". They were, as I have said, inspired by the French Revolution, and by the horrible idea that a small group of people can totally restructure society based on "reason". Every time it's been tried it has ended in, to use your phrase, insane murderers rising to the top.

> democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.

You do realize that "democracy" is also the term that regimes like the one installed by the French Revolution, and the Soviet Union, and the other totalitarian regimes that arose from small groups of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason", used to describe themselves, right?

> Wait until you understand.

But you might never understand; that is part of Hayek's point. Which means you can never just "tear it down". Your #2 is really the essential point.

But this isn't a falsify-able conjecture - if you claim that this thing could never be understood, but nevertheless essential and helpful for you, you're asking people to just put in faith. This borders on the idea of religion, rather than scientific, rational thought.

> but nevertheless essential and helpful for you, you're asking people to just put in faith

Accepting that it's essential and helpful is also blind faith.

"Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable"

Let's imagine for a second that we really believe is this idea - society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

Well, first obvious effect is that any change regarding woman rights, etc. would not have happened the way it did. That's in line with the Conservative viewpoint.

But more importantly, the society changes all the time from technology and market forces- it has changed massively with globalization, introduction of mobile phones, and social networks. Nobody talk about that!

No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'. So if you are not willing to apply the principle consistently, are you just using it a a charade to mask some irrational belief of personal gain? It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.

> society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

That's not what the GP said. He only said the consequences of societal change are unknowable. That doesn't mean we should never change society because we're afraid it will break. It means we should change society slowly, gradually, recognizing the limitations of our knowledge, instead of forming grandiose plans and trying to impose them top-down.

Women's rights is actually a good example of gradually changing society. Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything they thought was wrong. It took centuries for changes relating to women's rights to happen (and they're still happening). And even then we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences of those changes. But I don't think any reasonable conservative would say we shouldn't have made those changes.

> society changes all the time from technology and market forces

Yes, that's quite true. And we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences from those changes as well. And I would say that the changes that are the most problematic in these areas are the ones resulting from some one person's top-down intentions, rather than from bottom-up evolution based on the natural interactions of many people. For example, Facebook isn't a problem because of gradual social evolution; it's a problem because Mark Zuckerberg has grandiose visions about how social media and society should work.

> "Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything"

Are you sure about that? I think they felt quite strongly about their cause

"The suffragettes had invented the letter bomb, a device intended to kill or injure the recipient, and an increasing amount began to be posted... the former home of MP Arthur Du Cros was burned down. Du Cros had consistently voted against the enfranchisement of women, which was why he had been chosen as a target"

Women’s rights historically aligned well with gdp/capita growth.

> Women’s rights historically aligned well with gdp/capita growth.

How much of this is simply a consequence of the fact that if you take care of your kids, it is not counted as a part of GDP, but if you pay someone else to take care of your kids, it is a part of GDP. So the GDP would increase even if the kids get exactly the same care, and even if all the money the woman makes is spent on paying the babysitters.

The man makes $1000, the woman stays at home with kids = GDP $1000.

The man makes $1000, the woman makes $1000, they pay $1000 for babysitting = GDP $2000.

In the latter scenario, GDP is twice as high, but the family only keeps $1000 either way.

In the latter scenario, an extra person made an extra $1000.

> Well, first obvious effect is that any change regarding woman rights, etc. would not have happened the way it did. That's in line with the Conservative viewpoint.

I don't think you fully got my point.

The idea is not to oppose every change, but to change incrementally, letting society adapt, and learn from it when you do the next change.

Women's rights changed gradually over the whole 20th century as society gradually changed. To me that's a very well executed set of incremental changes!

> No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'. So if you are not willing to apply the principle consistently

Instituting a new, wide-sweeping government ban is itself a major change. It's not unusual for conservative families to implement those sort of rules in their households.

>Let's imagine for a second that we really believe is this idea - society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.

Surely you see the problems with technology, you don't think that the world was more social, people less polarized, and less isolated? Why do we have to assume its not when its obviously true, smartphones did change society greatly, so did online dating apps. They are not beliefs or guesswork.

>No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'.

American conservatism isn't about preventing changes, its about less govenment control. In fact to other countries they are considered very liberal. Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?

>It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.

They think aborting which is killing an unwanted baby is murder, but they ignore who takes care of the child after, its something I have a problem with too.

> They think aborting which is killing an unwanted baby is murder, but they ignore who takes care of the child after, its something I have a problem with too.

But this also seems like sloganeering since the data suggests they also donate more to poor children. It’s a good slogan though.

Is it about less governmental control? Conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization and are more supportive of police than liberals.

>Conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization and are more supportive of police than liberals.

Who legalized marijuana in California, and said he inhaled on video?

>more supportive of police than liberals.

NIMBY are not liberal or conservative, when did you last hear defund the police?

Pointing out a single pro legalization politician does not invalidate the claim that conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization than liberals. Look at any poll out there.

>Look at any poll out there.

I don't trust polls. Dehumanizing people into numbers is pointless. People are not numbers, and the elections showed how worthless they are.

During Obama there were raids on dispensaries. These labels are meaningless.

We are not liberal or conservative. We are people with many different often hypocritical viewpoints, nobody is consistent. Nixon’s universal healthcare would have been more comprehensive than Obamacare, but Senator Kennedy rejected it. Politicians are opportunistic, Obama said he was not pro gay marriage, and Nixon said he’d never put in price controls (he did). Clinton was a carbon copy of a republican and weakened welfare and popularized super predators as well as deregulate heavily.

Let’s not fight over labeling, let’s agree all politicians are dishonest.

I’m a fan of lower taxes (I think it’s silly to expect to give money to government and expect a bigger return), deregulation in over regulated markets that serves to only help big businesses, entropy in energy waste/use, removing subsidies from farming since it’s harmful to the environment and health, making natural resources into corporations so they have the sane rights as citizens and can sue for damages done.

If labels are meaningless then why claim that conservatism is about less government control?

Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless. https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-... Also polling people isn't dehumanizing them.

83% of Democrats support legalization vs 48% of Republicans. These margins are too great to be explained away by poor polling.

So again if Conservatives were actually about less government control then they wouldn't support the government making marijuana illegal.

>If labels are meaningless then why claim that conservatism is about less government control?

Republican and Democrats are not conservative or liberal.

Example: Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?

Clinton defunded welfare, was racist, and also deregulated the market. Is he conservative?

Trump mentioned he would like to deregulate all drugs. Does that make him liberal?

Obama raided on dispensaries for federal reason, does that mean he is conservative, or does that mean he is liberal for strong central government?

I mention these heads because the polls don't matter, the policy makers do. The politicians do not work for the people, they are not beholden to their promises or any morals. Does it matter that a bunch of people want weed to be legal and have no way to make it legal, or does one person who can sign it into law matter more? I know my answer, hundreds of my pot smoking friends have less power than one politician.

>Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless.

Lets look at the example of "Political ideology"

How do you quantify that? If I consider myself liberal, I am liberal? If I consider myself conservative, I am conservative? These are not concrete definitions. I don't vote downballot. People are hypocritical. What value does this poll give to anyone? What use will it have? What can anyone use it for? When Trump ignored polls he won. When Florida was a bellwether, it is not anymore. I don't see any use in them at all.

Would you call Schwarzenegger a liberal despite him being Republican? Do moderate Democrats share the same value as the ones that are openly communist? Do fundamental christians, libertarians, tea party members, and Trump's MAGA cult of personality really deserve to be lumped together? They are all hypocrites like all humans. I edited my comment, I care about values, not parties and neither party is either or.

I hate politics usually, but I hope my point is clear: I see conservatism as devolution and and I am happy Oregon is deregulating all drugs, there are more democrats than republicans, many unaffiliated with either and they are not letting central government push them around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Oregon

In another thread I mentioned how Bob Dole's achievements are very left wing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/us/politics/bob-dole-dead...

>He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995.

>Russell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.

also:

>It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.

Lets not focus on labels, and lets focus on policy, and remember nobody follows the rules, especially politicians.

Perhaps I'm being too US-centric but I feel like you at-best mean conservatism with a lower-case 'c'. Even then the very definition of conservatism explicitly avoids any change:

> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation

I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

I called it "the sane version of Conservatism". There are many others. Political scientists probably have a more specific name for mine. I should learn that some day.

Yeah, many people with very different ideas call themselves conservatives.

> I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.

Have you never known conservatives wanting to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, and decentralize decision making?

>Have you never known conservatives wanting to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, and decentralize decision making?

I know its not conservative or liberal, it depends how you look at it. Deregulation of markets was seen as liberal at one time, devolution is pretty well supported except by some that support strong central government control, and lower taxes is often seen as American conservative, instead of offering services that they skim, or taxing you and giving you back more money (lol) they just won't take it in the first place. Milton Friedman's negative income tax is a beautiful way to help the poor without sudden cutoffs for when they try to become wealthier too.

I would say that these labels aren't as useful as top down control (big government, tell people what to do) or bottom up control (power to the people, let them do as they want to). Both can be useful for different reasons. The ozone hole and banning freon was top down but the tragedy of the common would mean it would never get fixed. The federal government also shouldn't raid dispensaries and prevent weed smoking.

Most conservatives I know want to decentralize decision making, lower taxes, and deregulate the economy.

Except as regards gay or abortion rights, military funding, and drug policy. Right?

I know that's the case for every conservative I know, at least. They stand for those values in the abstract, as an ostensibly philosophy to undergird their politics... But oppose those values in practice.

Under the current Roe v Wade regime, abortion law is centralized to 9 judges on the Supreme Court.

Republicans want to decentralize this to democratic decisions in each state.

Why not decentralize this democratic decision further - let individuals choose whether they're pro-choice or pro-life?

If we talk about politics even the conservatives are liberal, both want society to be better with different methods. Few conservatives say do nothing, one critique of conservatives is "what exactly are they conserving?" Amish are one of the fastest groups to adopt solar panels and have done so for decades.

> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation

Trump was not traditional, and Obama was very moderate, even stating he did not support gay marriage. Don't trust general labels!

Even in the US that's a very uncharitable interpretation of conservatism that sounds like something I'd say in the heat of a Thanksgiving dinner argument.

The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's social and political traditions is necessary." [1] Progressive conservatives were the driving force behind abolition in Britain as well as natural conservation and the national park system in the United States, for example, so it's hardly a philosophy that resists all change.

A few presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower have called themselves progressive conservatives but in reality, the philosophy underpins the entire US Constitution and system of government going back to the founding fathers. It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning. It's the court systems that can delay or outright kill hasty legislation. The conservatives want to let the progressives leap into the future while they focus on conserving the good things about the present so that they don't become casualties to progress.

To be clear the GOP is neither conservative, nor progressive, nor progressive conservative. They're just the elephant in the room.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_conservatism

Eh, I agree the GOP is reactionary rather than conservative, but I think this is an equal charitable take, especially this statement -

> It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning.

I'm a fan of TR and Eisenhower to a lesser extent, so this isn't exactly a criticism. The US Constitution was definitely founded under the model you describe, but those things aren't necessarily indivisible from each other. The progressive conservatism you defined is a commitment to a hierarchical model of liberalism. Many of the achievements of both Roosevelts and Eisenhower were in the name of warding off Socialist and Communist movements in the early and mid 20th century. They were progressive in giving more rights and services to the common person (well, some of them, some of the time) and conservative in maintaining the ability of the wealthy to continue on with their necks and bank balances intact.

Although some of the critiques of conservative liberalism (as opposed to the historical, royalist conservatism) can be waved off as "the Republicans aren't actually conservative any more", there is a still a valid critique to be made if you believe that 250 years is more than enough time to embrace a more egalitarian model.

The differentiator between conservatism and progressivism is whether you seek societal change. If you believe that change should happens incrementally then you're a progressive. The examples you've given just sound like branding.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today.

Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough to be the main source of resistence to Progressive political movements.

After all, isn't the whole goal of Progressivism to create a society so good that one wants to Conserve it?

> I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully.

This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).

Politics is simply preference, some people prefer to speed, some would rather drive below the limit.

They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.

That characterization doesn't match my experience at all. You presume we all want to go in the same direction, but that our main disagreement is about speed.

In my experience, the main source of political conflict is direction, not speed.

I should have said velocity to clarify that people aren’t trying to go to the same place, again due to the diversity of preference.

My point was that the definition of progressivism is, literally "support for or advocacy of social reform", while conservatism is "seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions." If you want to see social change, then you're progressive. How you think that should happen -- whether it is measured or radical -- is secondary.

Under that definition, a self-proclaimed libertarian would be a progressive, as would someone who wants to replace public schools with religious institutions. A neocon, who wants to forcefully bring democracy to a foreign country, would be a progressive in that country. Perhaps different terms are more useful.

A terminology zoo is helpful when you want to encode additional information about political context, but if you're trying to draw parallels then less is more. In this case, "keep the status quo it might be important" and "ditch the status quo it might be the cause of our problems" are battle lines that get drawn again and again and again over many different issues under many different circumstances. It makes sense to draw the parallel.

I feel like this is very true, and why I am glad there are other options than: conservative, liberal, or generically "progressive".

These gradients feel more armchair philosophical than things that speak to the actual problems and patterns of the world as I, at least, know it. I can't imagine getting so hung up on some naturalistic sociological question of consensus, with the idea that would actually change our general trajectory. It all very much reeks to me of a history walking on its head.

Lincoln took great care to root his arguments against slavery in the principles of the Founding Fathers.

That definition does not say “avoids any change”. It says it opposes change, which can reasonably be taken as a general leaning. I mean, just think about it, do you think you could find even one single small-c conservative who argues that every possible change is bad?

Of course the big issue with the incremental change approach is getting stuck on local minima far far far away from the real good stuff

> Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.

> The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.

Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.

> If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.

"People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

To use your example, last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.

My personal opinion is that individual jurisdictions should experiment more at a small scale. Maybe SF abolishes the police, and Minneapolis increases funding for social work, and the Chicago police install robocops at every corner, and Nashville provides benefits only to families which stay intact. Then after two years it will be obvious which policies _really_ don't work, and after five years there will be a good handle on the set of policies that might work, and after fourty years most of the magnitudes of the possible second- and third-order effects will be understood, at least as well as it is possible to know them.

But it is impossible to have local experiments when the popular call is for immediate action on the national level. Alas, one is left with digging through the archves of history and trying to see where natural experiments have been done, and what confounding variables there were.

> First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

I'm not sure this is always true. Or at least, it is important to specify what confidence you demand here. If you demand an infinite regress of dissertations before taking any action, you can perform a denial of service attack on all progress. Almost any policy change can have chaotic and unpredictable effects and demanding flawless prediction of the outcome is demanding the impossible.

And further, "some bad outcome will come from this change" should not be sufficient to stop progress. You cannot make perfect be the enemy of good, and net progress can be achieved even if there are some things that regress with a new policy.

At almost every step of major social progress, agitators were told that they were unruly and moving too fast. In hindsight, can we really say that women's liberation or civil rights or gay rights movements actually moved too quickly? We can even have a historical example of aggression being more effective than respectability politics. Women's rights movements largely failed in the late 19th century and it wasn't until the "disrespectful" suffragette movement ("suffragette" was a derogatory term to contrast with the more respectful activists of the prior generation) that real progress was made.

> "People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

It's a necessary and important argument, but not sufficient by itself. I agree that decisions must be analyzed closely.

At the same time, that approach is used to create endless delays by people who are unmotivated for or opposed to change. Police reforms have been delayed for generations. It's not credible to either say 'people are suffering' or 'we must think it over'. Analysis can happen quickly.

> last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.

A bit tangential: 'Defund the police' didn't mean defund the services, just shift them between departments. The idea is to move many services to other government agencies. As a simple example, move response to mental health crises from police to mental health agencies. For a long time, police have (reasonably) complained that they are somehow expected to solve all of society's problems.

The short answer is, you can't. But you might be misinterpreting what Hayek is referring to by "the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society". Here is what he says a little later on, when he is comparing the individualist approach he advocates with the alternative:

"So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one."

We say that women cannot eat this food, its religion. We don't question it. They study the food and find it is toxic, causes abortions or fetal development issues, but the meaning was lost, its now our religion.

Don't eat pork because it spoils quickly. A rule deprecated by freezers, but still practiced quite often.

Don't drink alcohol because... well, luck favors the bold...

I thought pork was just full of worms. I heard in the middle east it was just not as productive as chickens, which would not only give meat but eggs, they used to eat it there.

Chicken spoils quickly too, but you aren't usually storing it in large quantities. But maybe it was also worms, just reinforces the point.

Pigs make lots of manure, lbs of it.

If you think pigs are bad with the environment, watch until you see the environmental damage that goats do. They literally graze everything to the ground. They fatally wound most trees. They leave behind desert.

Pigs (especially older breeds) do basically the same thing and will also go through the extra step of finding and eating roots.

There's a reason a pen containing goats is typically thought of as a pasture whereas a pen containing pigs is generally thought of as a mud pit.

The only time I've seen the quote, or similar ones to it, trotted out is to imply that the person being addressed by it is ignorant or doesn't understand something. It's an easy way to dismiss facts or arguments without really considering or addressing them in good faith.

This is exactly the reason why social media is so dangerous.

The strength of Western society was that we had freedoms that were managed by a elaborate social and information architecture that ensures we don't drift too far beyond the bounds (such as ethical failure in public office and being anti-science). Once you remove this it you find that there is a limit to how much 'free' speech can correct itself, and we discover how easy it is to divide and manipulate people with misinformation.

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.

In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.

A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.

You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.

> The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation".

Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.

> Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

This sounds like a classic sort of "those were the bad old times, but now we live in modern times" argument. How should I know when facing a problem whether we live in the modern times when solutions are well mapped and I should copy someone else's, or the bad old times (relative to that problem) when solutions are poorly understood and/or implemented and I'm better off with gradually exploring the possibilities myself?

You could just as easily argue that it was the Baltics that took the slow and steady approach. They built up a civil society to support the economic changes.

At least from the outside, it looks like the bigger country to the east just handed out private ownership to the upper echelon, because surely that's what made west economically successful.

Not sure how accurate that description is, of course. Their economies were vastly different from the start. The Baltic region also has historical and cultural ties to the Nordic region. But at least there are different viewpoints here.

>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.

[1] https://yle-fi.translate.goog/uutiset/3-12220417?_x_tr_sl=au...

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society.

> (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.)

Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and society, I think of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents where the individual can never be free.

> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes

it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.

Hypothetically it’s all cash based. It’s the tragedy of the commons. What is rational in isolation is not overall like pollution.

I think you are talking about the problem of Collective Action and the Free Rider problem... I think they are a little different, because those are situations about needing to cooperate for the best outcome, but having no way to enforce cooperation while having individual incentives to not cooperate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

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

Yes that is it! Thanks!

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.

I'll have to check that out. It's something I (as an atheist) feel as well. There seem to be a number of religious practices which align quite nicely with mental health practices. The ones that immediately spring to mind are responsibility transfer (short-circuiting anxiety spirals by throwing faith into an imaginary party who says it will all be ok), and "gratitude" practices - practicing thankfulness for what you have, meeting quite nicely with the practice of saying grace before a meal.

At first glance it seems foolish for a poor family praising their god for the pittance of food in front of them, but the idea that pausing to be grateful for what little they do have may make them feel better mentally (regardless of the wider injustice of the situation) has merit.

It seems like the process could be - do a thing, see positive results (maybe from improved outlook), interpret it as gods reward for pleasing him, codfiy the practice.

Another problem here is that the when society reaches scale of extreme complexity is the point when cultural practice stop being shared. After all, sharing unstated culture is clearly hard than sharing overt culture.

This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...

> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever."

Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.

LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great.

Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them.

But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society.

Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference.

Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't?

Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works?

Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school.

We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.

Have you ever experienced racism or do you have friends who have experienced it? Imagine telling your friend what they went through was simply evolution.

Murdering all of the men of the losing side of a war and taking their women as slaves to bear more of your children is evolutionarily adaptive - and I would presume that as a result I'm descended from at least one person who did so, and so would be the person I was talking to in your scenario.

"Adaptive" and "morally horrifying" can both be true of the same behaviour.

I hope that the things I consider moral win in the long run, but that's unfortunately not guaranteed.

Yes I have experienced racism, of various types and many times over the years.

The fact that I understand why it happened doesn't harm me. Does it make you feel better to believe that the bad things that have happened to you are due to spiritual evil? Personally I find a mechanistic, value-neutral explanation more conforting (and far more useful since it's, yknow, correct).

I wonder if that idea also makes sense in an organizational context. Big corporations often seem very ineffective on first sight, yet they produce something meaningful nevertheless.

Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.)

Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.

The free market works well in spite of downvotes, too!

I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

People will still look for a planner though…

While you are admiring Darwinism, keep in mind that all-natural ecosystem collapse is a thing, and 6 all-natural mass extinction events had >90% of all living things disappear.

> 6 all-natural mass extinction events

Are you sure about that? Or have people just not discovered the cause yet?

Pick one, let's explore it.

Sure, the Oxygen Catastrophe, 2.3 billion years ago.

I do, wonder, given that all the extinctions happened before humans existed, what possible alternative to 'natural' could there be, aliens?

> possible alternatives

Asteroids, vulcanism are the usual culprits. There also could be cosmic ray bursts from exploding stars.

> the Oxygen Catastrophe

There seem to be many hypotheses about that:

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

and it isn't clear to me there was a collapse, but a gradual replacement.

P.S. Evolution is not a stable system, and free markets aren't stable, either. Socialism promises stability, but history shows it's even less stable, as it is unresponsive to market changes.

"Asteroid and vulcanism are the usual culprits"

That is nature, thats my point - it is brutal and murderous.

If you don't want to die from them you don't rely on Darwinism and if you don't want economic collapse and famine every time a new strain of flue evolves you dont wait for 'muh free market' to save you.

You might want to investigate the economic collapses caused by government run monetary systems. Like the Weimar Republic you mentioned - that collapse led to Nazism. Not a ringing endorsement for central banking, amirite?

BTW, are you enjoying the 9% haircut we all got in the last year courtesy of central banking?

"Not a ringing endorsement for central banking, amirite?"

Which type of spherical cow free-market economy should i compare it too? No matter what system i pick, from medieval gold based systems to modern floating currency, someone goes "ThaTs NoT Real Free MaRKet!" It's like communism, not real life system was ever the real deal.

You can't, it is a religion.

I really think it is, amits ironic because they are ideologically oppose communists but act in the same way. Horseshoe effect in real life!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#:~:text=In%....

> Which type of spherical cow free-market economy should i compare it too?

The US system of free banking before 1914.

Nature is unpredictable and always changing. This is why any attempt at planning markets is destined to fail. And it has - the specter of famine was always-present during my life under communism.

Darwinism means adaptation. In markets, when people are free and allowed to keep their (majority of) gains, they will struggle to learn, change and adapt. Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the ones bringing the economic collapse. Look at the ham-fisted way they "avoided" last year's crash: not only we all paid a 9% tax, but we are now in a more fragile position than ever, dependent on a monetary policy we know is completely unsustainable at best.

"Planners are neither motivated nor able to do either. They are the ones bringing the economic collapse."

Erm, no, its the briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation.

The free-market has ensured that the entire continent of North America produced Zero medical masks in the first year of the pandemic because there is no meltblown production on the entire continent. There was zero stock because everyone is 'just in time manufacturing'

It is also free market that controls the velocity of money, and when people can't get the goods they need because they are all stuck on the other side of the olanet, they start outbudding each-other and yiu get inflation. Eve all central bankers stopped existing before this crisis, the inflation of consumer economy would be exactly the same

There is no free market when it comes to producing and selling medical equipment in the US. I remember reading about a business able and willing to start mask production but choosing not to because of the onerous requirements and not being allowed to raise price to the required levels.

In other, less-regulated countries, KN95 masks where missing for just a brief period of time in March then they were readily available again for the rest of the pandemic, of course at a higher price reflecting the demand.

> briliant free market optimised supply chains that have failed and gave us this inflation

Such a statement is quite funny in the context of the FED printing a fifth of all USD supply just in 2020.

Even funnier is to comply about disrupted supply chains in the context of countless heavy restrictions imposed by... you know... governments.

"In other, less-regulated countries, KN95 masks where missing for just a brief period of time"

"heavy restrictions imposed by... you know... governments."

I don't think we live on the same planet, UK government was trowing tens of billions at anyone who could supply masks, it took almost a year to fix supply while frontline doctors and nurses were dying. You could literally sell them masks that didn't actually work and they would take em.

I am not getting the feeling we are having reasonable discourse, it doesnt matter what happens, you always blame 'regulation', did regulation get millions of containers stuck in US, causing shortage of containers in China? Did regulation make it so you only have 2 ports that can unload giant container ships?

I live on the planet Eastern Europe and we had all the KN95 masks we needed from sometime around May 2020. In June people were vacationing in Greece. Don't know about UK, but in US I know ppl were complaining about not even finding surgical masks (which don't even compare).

> Did regulation...

Well I am no expert in those specific cases and I agree that there may be other forces at work as well, but I am betting there are tons of regulations about opening and operating ports unloading ships and tons of politics like unions and local administration to appease. So I do not know if regulation did it, but it sure isn't free market's fault.

so it only happening 6 times over the 2.3 billion years is not a bad record. Human designed systems have barely over 5000-10000 years of history, and most only last a couple hundred.

> I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

I feel like that's a bit of a charitable description considering the whole monopoly problem (and various other regulations in place to make the system actually work). Perhaps we just disagree on what "working just fine" means though :)

Monopolies (including the so-called "natural monopolies") are not a problem for the free market, but rather opportunities - bounded only by human ingenuity, imagination and capacity to innovate.

In reality most monopolies we encountered were actually created or sustained by governments, through their dear friends patents and regulations which raise the barrier of entry and compliance costs, create unintended second-order effects and generally dampen competition.

Markets are also created and sustained by governments.

Nope. Markets require just a couple of free participants willing to exchange goods or services. No governmental involvement there.

"Markets are" <-- actual existence

vs.

"Markets require" <-- some kind of logical construction

"Guy's you're just not doing it right" or "there would be more competition if we would just remove those pesky regulations on the meat packing industry". It's very convenient that the answer is always just "remove regulations" as though most of them weren't put in place to solve existing problems that otherwise weren't getting solved by the market itself.

I'll give you a different suggestion - what you're saying may work fine on a small scale, but not on a scale where consumers can no longer realistically have any idea how something was produced. Consumers can't select against things they don't know about or don't understand.

> may work fine on a small scale, but not on a scale where [...]

"Evolution may work fine for a small organism like bacteria, but it would never evolve something as complex as the human eye"

> consumers can no longer realistically [...] Consumers can't select

Your lack of trust in consumers is only surpassed by your lack of imagination. Repeat after me: "If consumers actually need something, a free market will provide".

Too much choice and quality too hard to check? Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Trip Advisor and any other aggregator with reviews like Booking.com or even Amazon will help. Food not killing me instantly (thanks, regulation!) but sickening me slowly with production-boosting chemicals (for nothing...)? We now have organically grown, local co-ops and various near-sourced grass-fed ethically slaughtered meats.

No regulation to thank to, just the good old free markets.

"the free market works well"

Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic, too much corruption like in Russia, too much monopoly like with Standard Oil, too many shenanigans leading to 2008-style meltdown (imagine that without central bank support), given working police and the justice system which is missing in many developing countries, given basic infrastructure like roads and electricity etc, etc.

> Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic

The government money printing press is not free market.

> too much corruption like in Russia

The government's role in a free market is to prevent corruption.

> too much monopoly like with Standard Oil

Standard Oil was very good for consumers, as SO brought about something like a 70% reduction in kerosene prices. Besides, SO never was a monopoly. It was accused of attempting to create one.

> imagine that without central bank support

Don't need to imagine it. It happened several times in the 1800s. Recovery tended to be as quick.

> given working police and the justice system

Free markets require a working police and justice system

"The government money printing press is not free market."

Oh no, not again this 'No True Scottman'-'Free market' myth.

Let's go down this path - what does 'free market' theory say, how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed? There is no natural process for it, whoever has lisense to print money can rule the world or collapse the economy. 'Free market theory' provides no answer, just like it provides no answer to most important economic questions.

Is using a physical valuable substance as money, let's say gold, free market? That's Mercantilism and it brought national economies to a standstill due to lack of liquidity. People couldn't trade goods, take loans, nations went to wars over silver.

Do you want to have gold standard and fractional reserve banking? Is it freely floating currency and a system where banks create money out of thin air? (governments don't print money any more by the way). Which one of these three totally different systems is the mythical true 'free market'?

Are private currencies owned by banks free market? That's what we used to have, they used to collapse all the time. That's why we invented central banks.

> how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed?

Great questions.

Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process. The pressure on it is to have the supply of money match the value in the collateral.

> whoever has lisense to print money

Under a free banking system, anyone can print money. Of course, anyone printing money has to convince others that it has value. Did you know that anyone can print money today? We call them "IOUs", "checks", and more recently, "credit cards". We're all familiar with having to convince others that our IOUs, checks, and credit cards will be honored.

I'm not aware of any that managed to rule the world or collapse the economy.

> no answer

I just gave you one! I can only surmise you've been talking to the wrong people. May I suggest Milton Friedman's "Monetary History of the United States". It's tough sledding, but worth it if you really want to know.

> Is using a physical valuable substance as money, let's say gold, free market?

Of course. Are you familiar with the commodities marketplace? It's the same thing, but would you call that mercantilism? Shipping gold around to settle debts, however, is clumsy, expensive, and dangerous, hence the rise of trading receipts for the gold instead, and later those receipts turning into bank notes, and even later became electronic entries in a ledger.

> Do you want to have gold standard and fractional reserve banking?

That's how free banking worked in the United States. It's free market.

> they used to collapse all the time.

Not all the time, but banks did fail from time to time.

> That's why we invented central banks.

That was the public reason. The real reason was to inflate the money. As for collapse, now we have fewer bank failures, but when they do fail, it's a doozy (Great Depression, 2008, etc.). Also, did you notice that as of this month 9% of the money you had last year disappeared? You can thank our fiat money system for that.

I grew up in the Carter stagflation years, and learned to never keep more than pocket money around. It's all in things that aren't inflated into worthlessness by the central bank.

P.S. How do I know all this stuff? My dad spent the last years of his career as head of the finance department at a college. We had many long and happy conversations about how banks worked. It isn't an easy subject, but I wish more people could have such an experience.

"Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process."

But there is nothing natural about it - the limit on money supply is how easy it is to get a loan. Bank could give out mortgages with 0% deposit, they could give out loans equal to 120% of the house value, and they indeed have done so.

What regulates the money supply is not 'natural process' but the rules set by the regylator on minimum reguirements. Is having no rules free market? But then it will be creating 2008 style event every tuesday.

Furthermore, this whole thing only creates money in our current floating-money system, right?

If you have medieval-style economy where you count literal gold coins, you can not create money, you would just be loaning out other people's deposits. The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

> But there is nothing natural about it

The natural pressures are the law of supply and demand. If the bank creates too much money relative to the collateral, it risks a run on the bank. Too little, and the bank goes out of business because it isn't making money.

> Is having no rules free market?

Yes (other than you cannot force people to do business with you nor can you defraud them).

> The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

Nope. You don't actually loan out the coins. You loan out a receipt for the coins. As long as people don't redeem the receipts, you can loan out a multiple of the coins in the vault. This is called "fractional reserve banking". After a while, instead of trading coins, people trade the receipts. The receipts evolved into bank notes.

It's a fascinating history.

> So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

Lots of commodities would work. People in colonial America used tobacco leaves. Today people "mine" bitcoins.

'If the bank creates too much money relative to the collateral, it risks a run on the bank.... This is called "fractional reserve banking". '

I dont fully understand the system, and its clear neither do you, or most people commenting here

We have not been using fractional reserve banking for at least 60 years now, as you sibling comment and this paper by the bank of England Explains. The only thing limiting hiw much bank can loan are capital requirements in the rules passed by parliament.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

It is true that the FDIC has eliminated the risk of a bank run.

It's still a fractional reserve system, at least in the US. The "capital requirements" sound like fractional reserve, too.

BTW, this will blow your mind. Let's say you have $300 in your bank checking account. You borrow $1000 from the bank. You bank checking account now has a balance of $1300.

Where did the thousand bucks come from? Where was it moved from?

Nowhere!

The bank just changed the amount in the electronic ledger from 300 to 1300.

Crazy, right?

Yes, crazy, but not exactly "nowhere". It "comes from" future earnings and the (projected) demand for US military protection and access to the markets which it enables. The bank (really the government) is helping you shift future consumption to the present, because you didn't save enough in the past. And why should you or anyone else be held personally accountable for not saving in the past? /s Because the US and its allies have god-like firepower, baby!

My mind was actually blown recently learning that fractional reserve banking has turned into a widely believed myth. Banks are still making low-interest loans and there's no reserve requirement!

I'm sorry, but if your definition of free market literally includes a government printing money to get rid of its debt (like the Weimar republic did), then your definition is just broken. The 'free' in free market literally refers to governments (or other actors) not interfering in trade. There is no prescribed free market monetary policy, but if you intentionally manipulate the market through monetary policy (as is common policy - the fed's goal isn't only monetary stability, they also account for things like unemployment), it's absurd to blame free markets if this goes wrong.

Using gold as your currency also isn't mercantilism. Mercantilism is about increasing exports while reducing imports. e.g. China today is quite mercantilist, despite not using gold.

It's definitely fair game to critique capitalism and free matkets based on actual implementations, not theoretical optimized scenarios.

If we're going for perfect scenario, communism is absolutely a great idea. Unfortunately, the real world is a bit different, and it turns out that capitalism and free markets can survive reality and bad actors just a bit better. And that's what counts in the end. Still, we shouldn't dismiss the failures of the system, since this is what shows misaligned incentives.

The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

The point I'm making is that the mechanisms by which an economy chooses what to produce are distinct by the mechanisms which determine who is in control of those choices are distinct from who the proceeds from the production accrues to.

> Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

That's Marx's explanation, all right.

What free markets are, is when people freely decide to make transactions with each other, without using force or fraud.

The simplest case is you have an apple tree, I have an orange tree. You have too many apples, and no oranges. I have the reverse problem. We trade. We are both better off. I exploit you for apples, you exploit me for oranges.

But we don't "have" trees. Owning a tree is dependent on a highly abstract concept of ownership, enforced by an organized state that monopolizes the use of force.

Saying a transaction is without force or fraud is only begging the question. If it is legal, and someone thinks it is illegitimate, then it logically involves both fraud and force from their perspective. It was fraud to write the rules down, and it is force to use guns to make people comply.

It's too easy to defend "free markets" while ignoring that the usual description is circular.

It's a little too easy to dismiss arguments by trying to redirect it into a debate about what words mean.

You and I both know what the terms mean.

It's also a little too easy to avoid arguments you find inconvenient by refusing to examine the assumptions that underpin the position you put forth.

Sorry, I've been down the tiresome path of what does "is" mean too many times. You can explore it if you like.

I don't think that's a fair assessment.

You absolutely have hidden assumptions about what the words mean. We all do.

Be open minded towards other interpretations you may take for granted.

From https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/john-locke-justificat...

'"He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when he pickt them up?"

Locke answered these questions by selecting the last of these options. The acorns became the private property of the owner when he picked them up, for it was in the gathering that labor was first expended. "That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right."'

I'm not endorsing or dismissing this, but notice how it conflicts with ownership of the tree.

You're still comingling the concepts of capitalism and markets. I actually 100% agree with your entire post (as a description, anyway, not as an ideal or with respect to the conceptual foundations of property rights), but is in no way a refutation of what I said or what Marx said. It's somewhat tangential entirely, really.

EDIT: Also, I wouldn't use the word "exploit" in such a simple descriptor of commerce.

Who picked the apples and oranges?

Free markets are a game with rules set by the government. "Without using force or fraud" just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government. It's a very deceptive way to describe rule-following. It implies a very idealistic, unrealistic vision of what those rules are and how they are made.

The people who benefit most from the rules control the system, making sure rules don't change.

The benefit they receive from the rules is to be in a parasitic, extractive, predatory relationship to most of humanity.

Why not use "force or fraud" to liberate yourself from predatory relations?

> just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government

You can make up your own definitions of things as you like. It's a common rhetorical device to divert a conversation into a swamp. Me, I'll stick to commonly understood meanings.

that's literally YOUR own definition, as you said elsewhere in the thread

> Free markets require a working police and justice system

You're greatly misinterpreting what I wrote. The government is needed to implement a free market. The government does not define a free market.

> The government does not define a free market

Complete fantasy.

Centrally planned capitalism doesn't exist. Private ownership, while technically separate from market vs command, definitely has an influence on it. Even market socialism has central planning elements (e.g. initial public investment).

> Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

how can there be capitalism when central planners tell the owners of the capital what to do with their capital? that sounds like authoritarianism to me (which is basically why all communist countries must be authoritarian, since without it, the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic).

> the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic

"Commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonyms. The former has existed for ages. The latter is comparatively recent.

Which is almost entirely my point. There's at least three concepts that are quite distinct components of an economic system that people commingle when they talk about these broad categories like capitalism and socialism in popular discourse.

This naive conflation of commerce with capitalism is certainly one manifestation of this conceptual confusion.

the thing is, there is no way for the workers to own the means of production, unless its a set of tools or stuff like that. But with a factory, you only have 2 options: owned by capitalists, who's goal is maximizing gain, and owned by the state, who's goal is in theory common wealth, in reality it depends on the people actually making decisions. And those people can be corrupt, or ideological lunatics, or just unmotivated clerks waiting to hit the clock at 5PM.

Why is there no way for workers to own the means of production? Do many of us software people not own shares in the companies we work for? All that needs happen is that all shares are owned by the employees of the company and, voila, the workers own the means of production. Obviously this is quite a simple and un-ideal implementation of said concept, but the practicalities of worker owned enterprises are not some kind of far fetched impossibility.

Because owning something means you have the right to trade it and sell it. Most workers, if they came into ownership of such shares, would quickly sell them to a few people who would build up many such shares: Capitalists.

You can't declare who will "own" what in the long term. The people who own it decide whether they will continue to own it - not you. They will decide not to.

If you say the workers can't sell the shares of their workplace, then they don't really own those shares. In fact, it's more like the shares own them. They are forced to continue "owning" part of their workplace, which someone decided should be their workplace. Variations of this are how authoritarian communism work.

(This is ignoring lots of other such issues with worker ownership, e.g. it becomes very complicated or impossible to bring new people on even if desperately needed since existing workers/owners don't want to dilute their shares. Also how can a new worker join if he cannot afford the shares to do so?)

Work well as long as you don't care about externalities such as polution, congestion; poisoning, maiming and killing consumers and employees

Communist countries have a much worse track record on that.

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