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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Why wait when we could just not be dicks?

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

— <https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyon...>

Did you just

Its not just a tendency to assume the best or worst, instead of investigating and dealing with reality. Its a full blown feature of evolution:

Its OP. Signals engagement and understanding to society, while expending no energy on work. Idealisation is not retardation, its optimisation.

You need both people with their heads in the clouds dreaming of fantasy futures as you also need those promoting the status quo. The former gives us direction and hope (motivation) while the latter gives us stability. There is a balance. To use reinforcement learning terms: exploration and exploitation. In reality there are many more subsets that each pull in different directions. I agree that this is optimization and most of them play essential roles. But it also means we should adjust the weights and pay attention when one starts to dominate and throw things out of balance. And I'd argue that this is exactly what has happened in academia. The bureaucrats won and threw things out of balance. I'm not asking to go somewhere we've never been before, but I think many have because they don't know what the past looked like.

It can be part of a viable solution.

Someone’s plan when investing in early Solar panel R&D went something like: If everyone would just… “follow their economic interests” driving down the cost of panels will dramatically increase adoption further driving down costs in a feedback loop.

Unlike most “if everyone would just” plans that one actually worked because the desired behavior aligned with people’s interests.

> Someone’s plan when investing in early Solar panel R&D went something like: If everyone would just… “follow their economic interests” driving down the cost of panels will dramatically increase adoption further driving down costs in a feedback loop.

I'm not sure if that is a good paralel. The difference is that we didn't needed "everyone" to innovate on solar panels. It was enough if "someone" was, and those who did not got left behind with their inefficient processes. That's not a true "everyone would just" situation.

Getting a handful of people to act differently is rarely the issue, especially if they think they’ll get rich by doing so.

The customer base continually expanding is the “tough” side of the equation. 100’s of millions of people behaving differently is the hard part of those “If everyone would just” plans.

  > “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution

Unfortunately this is not a reasonable argument. I get where you're coming from but what I'm asking is that everyone just do their job. Surely "do your job" has to be a reasonable version of this.

What I mean by "not be a dick" is to check the alignment, the goals of the process compared to what we're actually achieving. What is the point? The author of the article lays out a lot of reasons and even is stating how these things are well known. Which unfortunately means someone needs to actually take action. When we're in a situation where many people want change but no one is willing to fight for that change, then we will just keep doing what we've been doing and headed where we've been headed. Even if that is knowingly off a cliff.

I don't need everyone to just do something, I only need a few more people to stand up. And yes, I will tell those that are saying "keep your head down" to shut up. Some things are worth fighting for and for me, one of those things is the integrity of science.

>[W]hat I'm asking is that everyone just do their job.

>I don't need everyone to just do something.

Naked contradiction. Either everyone needs to just do their job or not everyone needs to just do their job.

>Surely "do your job" has to be a reasonable version of this.

There are entire fields of research centered around answering why people don't 'just' do their jobs like good little worker bees in exquisite detail. Some terms I'm aware of that you may find useful to look into, in rough order of how general to the problem they are: Agency problems; the Case theorem; malicious compliance; work to rule; collective bargaining; moral hazard; perverse incentives; adverse selection; rent seeking; regulatory capture. If you want to read up on people trying to design actually working systems from scratch, look into the world of mechanism design, starting with auctions and branching outwards.

>When we're in a situation where many people want change but no one is willing to fight for that change, then we will just keep doing what we've been doing [...]

One could argue that the past ~century of scientific and technological development has probably beat any other 100 year period your could pick hands down along any natural metric. So "what we've been doing" is actually pretty great, and it may not be a good idea to stake such a hugely important enterprise on some newfangled and only theoretical ways of doing things.

> >[W]hat I'm asking is that everyone just do their job.

> >I don't need everyone to just do something.

> Naked contradiction. Either everyone needs to just do their job or not everyone needs to just do their job.

It's not a contradiction; "just something" is not the same thing as "their job". "I need everyone to do their job" does not contradict "I don't need everyone to just do something." (Emphasis added for clarity about the differences.)

  > One could argue that the past ~century of scientific and technological development has probably beat any other 100 year period

You could make this argument about most centuries. But it's a meaningless argument if the metrics you're evaluating on are implicit and assumed to be well agreed upon by all others.

My reply is the same to the other arguments you've made

Almost no one is a dick on purpose. Everyone belives in their truths. Mutually incompatible truths. That is perceived as being dick from other person's truth perspective. That's the tragedy of situation. Everybody is right to some extent. Plus ego plus interest plus strong belives makes hard to move from own truth. So no, we can't stop being dicks. We're just being normal humans.

It would be nice if that was true. But school and university has taught people to first and foremost be obedient. That means a large majority of people doesn't care about the truth at all, only what the relevant authorities are saying.

Many of those authorities have learnt that deciding what is true based on reality is good and all, but you live longer and better by making friends and not disagreeing with them.

This is a societal failing.

> school and university has taught people to first and foremost be obedient.

That's not inevitable. I count myself lucky that it didn't happen to me.

Unfortunately I don't know how to improve schools to the level of those I attended over half a century ago. And I lack the get up and go to make it happen anyway.

This is such a weird perspective because the attitude I associate with people who go through the university system on the academic path is not obedience at all, but ruthless self advancement. Like literally where are all these obedient people you are talking about?

I would characterize the problem with science as being a failure to increase the available resources commensurate with the population of people capable of doing science. In this situation, the competition becomes sufficiently fierce that it is statistically better to lie, cheat or knee-cap your competitors in some other way than it is to actually do good science, which is unreliable. What you see as fealty to scientific authority is actually just a system which has become totally dominated by resource competition to the exclusion of its actual purpose.

  > Almost no one is a dick on purpose.

This is true, but that does not mean people are not being dicks.

What is important is to have self reflection and to recognize when you have been a dick, to apologize (make amends if necessary), and try not to repeat. Yes, habits die hard, but we can still improve. But the biggest dick move is to double down. We've created a culture where we act as if being unintentionally wrong is a bad thing and that the worst thing you can do is admit a mistake and self-correct. But we are always wrong (to some degree) and so the only thing there is is to self-correct.

So yes, we can stop being dicks. It's how humans evolved. We wouldn't have expanded from our small tribes to villages, to cities, to countries, to a global economy if we weren't capable of this. The arc may be slow and noisy, but it has always expanded to be more inclusive.

Because you don’t know which side is the “dicks”. Evidence is rarely conclusive, and progress isn’t made by cowtowing to the researcher with the biggest mouth.

Why risk it when you can be a dick and assure your success?

If you are using a first order approximation, then yes, this is the correct strategy. But when you consider the elements of time or consider that there are other players in the field (incorporating either will do, both is better), then this strategy becomes far from optimal. In fact, it will lead you down the wrong direction, making your own life harder. The thing is, bullshit compounds. Builds up slowly, but we all know that's how you boil a frog.

Humans have always advanced through the formation of coalitions. To optimize your own success you have to simultaneously optimize the success of others.

There is right now a thing that you believe strongly that is false. If someone were to point it out to you you would get angry. C'est la vie.

I actually really want to test your theory on myself. . . I wonder how I could best do that.

My method is to help your "adversary". The way I think about it is this: we can't obtain absolute truth, so we're always somewhat wrong; we have limited data and information, so we need to be able to consider what others have that we don't. Arguments can be both adversarial and cooperative, right?

If your goal is to seek truth, then you need to reframe the setting. It is not "I defend my position and they make their case", that is allowing yourself to change but framed to maintain your current belief. Sure, you have good reason to maintain your belief and I'm not saying you shouldn't hold this, but it should be a byproduct of seeking truth rather than the premise.

Just pick a position you feel strongly about and imagine how your world would change if it was false. How your relationships would change. How stupid your previous statements would be.

Pick anything. Climate change is a big one. I would definitely have to eat some chaff if it was shown to be false personally.

Yes. But you have to convince me that it is false (of course)[0]. I'm actually happy to tell you what I think the best way to do that would be. Would I get angry? Probably not, but it is hard to know.

In fact, this is even how I review papers. I am much more detailed than my peers, and get very specific. I always also include a list at the end detailing what factors are the most important and what I think the authors could do to change my mind (if I'm rejecting). If I'm accepting, I'll also argue my points to the other reviewers and make them stand for their arguments.

Truthfully, if no one is willing to change their minds, I'd say they can't be a scientist. It is a fundamental requirement simply because we are all wrong and all the time. While we can get ever and ever closer to it, absolute truth is fundamentally unobtainable. So you must always be able to update your beliefs, or else you will become more wrong as time marches on.

[0] I also recognize that the inability to convince me does not mean I am right and the other person is wrong. But this too is why I specifically make a point to try to help the other person. At least as long as I believe they are acting in good faith. If I am wrong then I WANT to know. I take no shame in being wrong, but I take a lot of shame in being unwilling to right myself.

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