I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.
It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)
For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!).
Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose).
Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess.
These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not.
Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.
Ref: "Have the Boomers Pinched Their Chiren's Futures", David Willets, Royal Society lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A
My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative.
By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it".
BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
For example, most companies with large software assets will at some point go through a fight between the old hands and younger devs about whether to do a rewrite in the hot new thing. Which side you're on may appear dominated by age, but it's really more about your intuition about the risks of rewrite projects. That in turn is determined by your experiences of people's ability/inability to fully comprehend complex systems.
Also I didn't try to to be neutral, hence the digs at communism and academia. If I was aiming for karma I'd have left those out. But I'm not.
It should probably be the other way around, that liberals have a reality bias, but it doesn't quite land. Liberalism is based on what can be proven. Especially in science, starting with some preconceived reservations leads to inaccurate models. If you can't articulate it, all the worse. Even things like categorization and taxonomy can't account for our in-built intuitions, there's always an exception. So, we really must try a tabula rasa type approach. This tends towards a, you guessed it, a world view more constrained by reality, which typically falls left (see, most of academia).
I'd say holding on to heuristics is good, but I don't think we'd be where we are today by not trying to rethink, destruct, unravel, play, squish, open many mental gateways.
If your contention is with Whig history then we might agree. But I don't think there's any surity in being sure.
The Colbert snark is illuminating because it gets to the nub of the conflict. It's an attempt to claim that reality, something often ambiguous and subjective, as if it was simple and obvious. Look at how straightforward the world is to comprehend - why, all you need is a few nice and neutral academics who do a few studies, write it all down in a model and you're done! Now you know what everyone, everywhere should be doing. Others look at this aghast and say no, that approach has a history of going spectacularly wrong. The model did not match reality and disaster followed.
In the software space it leads to conservatism of the Joel Spolsky "never do rewrites" variety. That's too strong, but it's a famous and widely cited essay even 20 years later because it represented a rare articulation of the value of conservatism in technology along with clear real world examples of cases where the lack of it led to (commercial) disaster. Fortunately, attempts to rewrite Navigator or Word only led to financial disaster and only for specific companies. When attempts are made to rewrite society instead of software the cost of failure is drastically higher.
This is demonstrably untrue. Vaccines. Evolution. Anthropogenic Global Warming.
And that's my point - if you intuit that the world is simple and progress easy, you become committed to mental shortcuts like "if a professor/civil servant says it, then it must be true". The education system forces this mentality on you, even. When other (usually older) people who don't take such shortcuts say "but actually that's not true" then it turns into a fight over what reality actually is, which is an enormously complex thing. Rather than engage down in the weeds where they might lose, young radicals prefer to just try and shout down objections. This pattern crops up again and again.
Evolution is an interesting one because in that case it's the creationists who have adopted an overly simplified model of reality and don't want to let it go. Same problem, just different groups. I don't personally think the word "conservative" is all that useful for that reason even though you often have to use it, because it just means trying to conserve things, which as a position is neutral with respect to what's being conserved.
And vaccines don't cause autism. Some things we actually do know.
This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment.
There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.