felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
This meme raises the question succinctly. The bald bipeds beasts that bestride the Earth in 2024 are really into lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating.
They are clever, and have won great victories in the competition of Man against Nature. They are clever, and have created terrible weapons in the competition of Man against Man.
The rationalist project is that science and reason get used to build utopia. Are we actually headed towards global thermonuclear war, or towards a Lebanese style multicultural kakistocracy? The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion.
The discussion moves on to the theory of second best. What is possible within the limits of human nature? If space aliens turn up and their space ship is an ant heap with monoclonal genetics, they will diagnose our problems easily enough. The scientist who values truth and refuses to sell out, is a nerd and doesn't get the girl. The scientist who monetizes "truth" and sells it to the richest corporation marries and has a mistress and propagates his anti-science-and-reason genes into the next generation. That is the diagnosis, but it offers no treatment.
One idea is bringing up children to believe in God. A God who commands scrupulous honesty and always is watching, even when all humans present are in on the scam and bought or compromised.
That probably gives the interstellar ants a good laugh. Humans have such a complicated relationship with self-awareness. What happens when the children brought up to believe in God work out that God is a pro-social myth? Some of them retain the honesty in worldly affairs that they were brought up with, and work to promote and preserve the pro-social myth. This involves an attitude adjustment from telling the truth because God commands it, to participating in the lie and the cover-up because society depends on the prosocial myth. But that is rare. Most fall into these two camps. Those who blurt out the truth in front of the children, as though the God they no longer believe in was watching, ready to punish them for telling the lie that He exists. Those who revert to instinct and seek reproductive success by lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating, while also believing that they are choosing a variety of behaviours for themselves, not simply following their genetic programming.
Do you have an alternative idea? The rationalist project implicitly assumes that man was created by God with a divinely granted capacity for good. The rationalist project implicitly denies that man is an evolved creature, whose self-defeating duplicity is enforced and created by human genetics. The rationalist project, in as much as it ignores the true horror of being an evolved creature, is just another high fantasy. What is there left to discuss?
felis-parenthesis
16d ago
That is a bad comment. You are replying to a comment that claims there have been twenty-four years of disasters and laments that people are not learning. Have there been twenty-four years of disaster? Does past performance predict future performance? Is this time different? There is plenty to engage with. But your comment is negative, low effort, and unresponsive.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I see paragraph structure as creating what a computer scientist would think of as a "scope". My sentence
Life is too short to debate, argue,and win.
is local to the paragraph, and part of the discussion of potent, recurring bad ideas.
I'm happy enough to debate Socialism_2.0. If I argue against Socialism_2.0 and win, I will consider the time well spent. But I notice that most advocacy for Socialism is for Socialism_1.0. It is advocacy for a straight repeat of policies that have failed and are doomed to fail. To argue against Socialism_1.0 and win is a terrible waste.
Perhaps you are uncomfortable placing yourself in my shoes. Fair enough. Try instead walking a mile in the shoes of those who advocate for Socialism_2.0. They notice that the arguments over Socialism_1.0 suck the oxygen out of the room. They cannot recruit opponents. They would like moderate push-back. If opponents take Socialism_2.0 seriously and point out flaws, that opens the way to correct the flaws, create Socialism_2.1 and see it adopted. They cannot recruit allies. Young people who are Socialist inclined have no patience for understanding why Socialism_1.0 will never work, nor for mastering the intricacies of Socialism_2.0 nor indeed for creating the intricacies of Socialism_2.0. In the world of endlessly recurring bad ideas, advocates of Socialism_2.0 are marginalised. There is no formal apparatus of censorship, and yet the ends towards which such an apparatus would be directed, are mysteriously achieved.
That said, what am I doing here? We both joined in September 2022. You have made 640 comments, I have made 17. I am not much "doing here". I am defeated by age and ill health. And also by the sense of the futility of political engagement. It is all so "Oh no! Not again!". I'm haunted by a comment that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, eleven years ago.
I want this site to stop feeding its trolls and would prefer a community solution rather than moderators wielding banhammers, and I want this site to focus its efforts positively rather than in amazing impressive refutations of bad ideas which is a primary failure mode of any intelligent Internet site.
Yudkowsky is concerned with the failure of websites. But what of the failure of whole societies? Do we need to focus our efforts positively? Does society as a whole need a banhammer to limit the costs of repeating impressive refutations of bad ideas?
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I accept that you are 95% right about the big picture. The huge difference between coffee and fentanyl is the only thing that really matters.
Notice though, that I zoomed in on the specific issue of timing. Who dares to doubt an intervention that works well for the first year? I dare.
Looking at my reasoning, we see that it is mostly about social dynamics. Friends put out feelers to friends. The black market slowly becomes monetized and professionalized. Since it is illegal to offer bribes to policemen, there are several years of nudges and winks before police corruption takes hold. The social dynamics set a slow time scale that is not obviously related to specifics of what has been prohibited.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I'm keen to get some mention of budget or money into the short name.
Why? I reckon that the way that Support fails is that the proponents come up with a plan. The plan is good in itself, but costs ten times what is politically feasible. The plan goes ahead anyway, with 10% of the funding that it really needs. Fails badly :-(
A good comment reminds us of Scott's epic critique of addiction research. Perhaps we don't have affordable answers to addiction, and Suport has a good plan that requires 100 times the politically feasible funding. Gets 1% of the funding it needs; fails very badly.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
That is a good question and exposes that I'm a little out of my depth. But I've spent a happy half hour writing some crude dice rolling simulations, so what follows is partially checked (I'd like to draw some scatter plots too!)
Consider a data generating process using a red d6 and a green d6, where d6 is jargon for the ordinary cubical die with 6 faces. We regard the red and green dice as generating the red and green random variables. A third, yellow random variable is generated by adding together the red and green rolls.
Then red and yellow have a correlation of 0.7 (Will checking with pencil and paper discover that this is 1/√2 ?). Yellow and green also have a correlation of 0.7. Red and green have a correlation of 0.00506. Now I'm regretting writing a dice rolling simulation, rather than a computation using distributions. That has to be really 0.
But lines don't really work. Two of the scatter plots have lines at a definite slope, but red versus green is just a filled in square showing zero correlation.
I'd really like to get the third correlation to be negative rather than zero, to make the point about non-transitivity more strongly. Can I do that with dice? Yes.
Roll five dice, A,B,C,D,E. Generate three random variables
Red = A + B + C
Yellow = A + B + D + E
Green = - C + D + E
Red and yellow share A and B giving them a correlation of 0.57. Yellow and green share D and E giving them a correlation of 0.59 (it has to be the same, but I'm out of time to do the computation exactly)
Meanwhile Red and Green share C but with C subtracted from Green, for a correlation of -0.3
That is shocking. Red correlates positively with yellow. Yellow correlates positively with green. But red and green have a negative correlation.
Now we have reached the point where I really need scatter plots. I think the Red/Yellow plot and the Yellow/Green plot are basically the same (there is an offset because the red mean is 10.5 and the green mean is 3.5, but I don't think that matters). Red/Green contrasts by sloping down rather than up. It doesn't lie between Red/Yellow and Yellow/Green at all.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
The Star Trek episode with the men who are black on one side and white on the other works first time through, but then it makes things worse. A black man watches the episode, gets the anti-racist religion, and invites a white man onto his basket ball team. The team starts losing matches because white men cannot jump. He gets two wake up calls.
The first is that racial differences are real.
The second is about TV shows pushing messages. The message was that racism is wrong because racial differences are illusory. The reasoning turns out to be invalid. Is racism right or wrong? Technically, an invalid argument sheds no light on the matter because it is invalid. Now what?
The unsuccessful message-push invites an adverse inference. Perhaps the adverse inference is that the script writers went with a "racial differences are illusory" narrative because they are naive people who have lead sheltered lives. Perhaps the adverse inference is that the script writers are aware of racial differences, but realized that an artistically truthful story may encourage racism, so went with false story to suit their ideology.
The second wake up call could stimulate more than one concern. Viewed narrowly it could make viewers think: that was a bad argument against racism, maybe racists are right. Viewed more broadly it could make viewers question all the teaching stories that they have learned from. As a child, one longs to grow up, yet the grown up world is complicated and confusing. One hopes that shows such as Star Trek are not irresponsible entertainments, but teach good and true lessons about the adult world.
The allegory for racism is implicitly claiming that racial differences are illusory. Worse than that, the screen writers assume that the audience will not notice that this is false. Should one look for a Straussian reading? Perhaps the script writers want to warn their audience that racism is true, but are not allowed to do so. They construct a parable: different races are merely mirror images of each other, not really different at all, therefore racism is bad. The script writers hope that their audience will notice for themselves that racial differences are real and important, and then the true, racist message will be revealed. Err, no. I'm over thinking Star Trek.
A more realistic concern goes like this. One rather hopes that the Philosopher-King has convened a council of philosophers to chose age appropriate wisdom to be embedded in shows for children. Philosophers aren't screen writers. Screen writers aren't philosophers. Yet the team effort does the trick. The screen writers write entertaining children's shows and the embedded messages are truly wise. One's hopes are dashed. The screen writers write an anti-racist allegory that is stupid and maybe ends up discrediting the anti-racist message. There is no Philosopher-King, no council of philosophers, just advertisers demanding high viewing figures and TV executives demanding low production costs. The screen writers do their best to be productive and churn out passable product as quickly as they can. Uncontroversial scripts in line with conventional wisdom. Perhaps poor life lessons, but the merchandising is profitable.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.
Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
We have a rule against sarcasm. One advantage of adhering to the rule is that it imposes an intellectually interesting exercise.
Write a sarcastic comment. Remember the rule. Now what?
You can start over and write the comment directly. The story goes: err, actually I'm not touching that story, I'm all sarcasmed out
Giving up on the particulars, sarcasm generally works as a cognitive tax. Enough effort gets wasted on the inversion, writing as well as reading, that little is left over to notice dangling threads. One creates/latches-on-to the opposite meaning to become one of the in crowd that makes/gets the sarcasm, and one misses the telling details that are worth exploring.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Searching his name, I find his videos https://youtube.com/watch?v=tKfpXVce9c0
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Scott's post is worth re-reading.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
... large countries with no internal barriers ...
That is a sharp observation. I've written as though the mobility boundary was the whole story. What about the political boundary?
The Canadian fishery that collapsed was on the East coast. Presumably the fishermen could move to the West coast of Canada and pivot to different fish (Perhaps salmon instead of cod?). So Canada, with different fisheries on the East and West coast, lets us ponder what we think of political boundaries.
Imagine that geography and fish biology makes fishery regulation trickier and more expensive on the East coast. Let us fill in the details, first that politics is uniform across Canada, but mobility is restricted. This creates a perverse incentive. Fishermen on the West coast don't want restrictive catch laws and expensive inspections that they don't need. But what if the fishery on the East coast collapses? Won't the fishermen from the East move West, compete for jobs and drive down wages? No. In this hypothetical there is an internal mobility boundary different from the political boundary. Fishermen on the West coast can ruin things for fishermen on the East coast and not have to care.
Second branch of the hypothetical: Canada is a single, big unitary country with full internal mobility. There is a fight on the East coast, within the East coast fishing community, between those seeking catch restrictions so that there will be fish to catch next year and those with bills to pay this year. If stocks are higher on the West coast, the large size of the country dilutes the urgency of local concerns, the catch restrictions don't get imposed, the East coast fishery collapses. Later, an influx of East coast fishermen to the West coast, drives down wages, and drives up catches. The conflict between those looking to the future and those pressed by immediate concerns repeats, with the same outcome. Classic progressive collapse, first East, then West.
Third branch of the hypothetical: Canada is divided. (Perhaps the division is somehow fishing specific. I haven't thought how such a thing would play out in the long term.) Fishermen cannot change coast. But each coast decides its fishing policy independently.
I've thought of PaCCAP as the question of how big should the PaCCAP be, in the sense of comparing the second case with third. In both cases the mobility boundary and the political boundary coincide. The first hypothetical probes what happens if one has fewer and larger political units than mobility regions. It looks bad. There is obviously much scope to argue about the correct size for a PaCCAP, but the mobility boundary and the political boundary should always coincide.
And what about effects of scale that historically allowed large countries to dominate smaller ones?
I've been thinking about why defensive alliances fail to keep collections of small countries safe. We talk about fighting for King and Country. But why did Britain enter the Great War (1914-1918)? The country involved seems to be Serbia, or maybe Belgium, not England. I'm pondering that small countries have historically been unsuccessful in staying safe because the concept of a defensive alliance is ambiguous. Inventing new terminology I ask whether "defensive alliance" means "chaining alliance" or "isolating alliance".
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I'm looking at this graph which runs from 1999 to 2021 and depicts a terrifying rising trend.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I've just watched this footage of Rand Paul asking Anthony Blinken for information relevant to the lab leak debate. It seems clear that there is information on file that would settle the debate, one way or the other. The AstralCodex article is about sifting the information that we are allowed to see, hoping to work out the answer from that limited information. This seems futile; once the real information comes out, it will trump all that we learned with our attempts at Bayesian integration of piles of weak, probabilistic evidence. Worse still, the refusal to release the information that we are not allowed to see is also informative. I think the fact of the refusal is in itself sufficient to prove that it was a lab leak.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I see examples as the key to complying with the rule to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." The highlighted phrase is part of a 136 word paragraph that is emphatic without being explicit.
For example, "It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again.". I feel as though I have learned something about Americans and their politics. But have I? I imagine telling a friend "America politics is so toxic that if Trump wins, it will start fights between men and their wives." And my friend will be skeptical, pushing back with "Really? How does that work?" and I won't know. I've just got the vibe, but if I'm pushed as to what specifically is meant by "incessant leftist whining", I have to fall back on what I already know.
Perhaps what I already know is wrong. The emphatic nature of the paragraph encourages me to believe more strongly in what I already know. The lack of explicitness deprives me of the opportunity to believe less strongly in what I already know because it clashes with the examples given.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?
I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.
Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.
(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)
Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)
Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.
Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.
Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.
Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?
My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.
Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I see an ambiguity in the notion of learning the lesson of history.
One version involves people poring over the history. Doing X didn't work last time. It didn't work the time before either. People make adjustments, informed by the past. They do X version 3. It doesn't work. Merde! Some commentators claim that the adjustments were silly and stood no chance of making a difference to the outcome. People knew the history and did X anyway because they don't learn from history.
An alternative version involves people ignoring the history. A few point out that X didn't work last time. One more knowledgeable person points out that it didn't work the time before that either. The naysayers get told "this time is different". The people saying "this time is different" know nothing of last time and know of no difference between this time and last time. But they want to do X and "this time is different" are the magic words that let you do X. They repeat X version 1 and it fails the same way it failed the previous two times.
I believe in both versions. Sometimes there is a real, but unsuccessful effort to learn from history. We say that people didn't learn from history, because we judge by results. But there was an honest effort. I see no reason to censor such efforts. Other times, only a few people study the history. They are unanimous: don't do it! But they get out voted, and X gets done with foreseeable bad results. If you were paying attention, you notice that the bad results were actually foreseen. We would be much better off if we censored those saying "We should do X. This time is different."
Well, that is my claim. I don't think it fails because it is hard to learn the correct lesson from history. I think that there are cases were a policy doesn't work in theory, doesn't work in practice, and those in the know, know. There are low hanging fruit, ripe for plucking. Society screws up because people ignore the history because they don't care.
But is my claim true? I think that the weakest point is that the power to censor is a power honey pot that will attract a lot of wasps. I'm talking of technocrats carefully selecting the low hanging fruit. But society is run by chancers and grifters who don't care whether the fruit hangs low or is ripe. They want power. They want money. If there is an Office of Censorship, they will fight to control it, planning to censor any-one who blocks their route to power and money. I don't know what to do with this insight. It proves too much. If I take it seriously I end up an anarchist and reject government and power structures entirely.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Consulting the 1899 edition of the Century Dictionary I find an unhelpful entry for reification
Materialization; objectivization; externalization; conversion of the abstract into the concrete; the regarding or treating of an idea as a thing, or as if a thing.
The definition of reify is simpler
To make into a thing; make real or material; consider as a thing
and the use of the word is illustrated with a long quote, referenced as J. Ward, Encyc. Brit., XX. 78.
Encyc. Brit. = The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1875-1888. It is in 24 volumes, so my guess is that XX means volume twenty. Perhaps 78 is page 78 of Volume XX. And J. Ward must be the name of the author of the entry and this man That is perhaps a lead on English usage. The quote in the Century Dictionary is
The earliest objects of thought and the earliest concepts must naturally be those of the things that live and move about us; hence, then --- to seek no deeper reason for the present --- this natural tendency, which language by providing distinct names powerfully seconds, to reify or personify not only things, but every element and relation of things which we can single out, or, in others words, to concrete our abstracts.
Going back to 1880ish a psychologist was using reify (and presumably reification) without a Marxist slant.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Seconded. I think that the words transwoman and transman are the wrong way round.
Whenever I read the word transwoman, the image that pops into my mind is Dianne Keaton playing Annie Hall. Then I have to mentally stop and engage reverse gear; the text I'm reading is almost certainly using the word transwoman to refer to a man who has gender dysphoria and picked wearing a dress as their best coping strategy.
But reading on is a struggle. I feel that I've been had. Conned into assenting to "transwomen are women" because I reflexively imagine a woman with gender dysphoria and a prescription for testosterone. And feeling that this wasn't an accident. The words were deliberately made the wrong way round to trick me into accepting that "transwomen are women" only to later reveal that I've signed up to a man in a dress being a woman.
I've seen Gender Critical folk use TIM: Trans-Identified Man instead of transwoman.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.
felis-parenthesis
1d ago
In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.
Where do I even go in 10 years?
That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is
Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.
Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.
Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
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