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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Now, some of that may even be right.

It takes exactly one issue of this type that I'm right on to lead the entire country to ruin.

But we can look at people's prediction posts and see how easy it is for them to get anything wrong for the one lousy year. For smart, conscientious people, making predictions they have no stakes in. Doing it one, two, three generations in advance? Madness. Predicting those sorts of future means making thoroughly unfalsifiable claims, and I'd prefer we treat people who claim to know what'll happen in ages beyond the one we live in accordingly.

This of course also applies to the suggested changes as well. If we're going to claim to be unable to predict what will come from our meddling I'd quite prefer us not to meddle until we do. There is a much to lose.

It takes exactly one issue of this type that I'm right on to lead the entire country to ruin.

It was dumb when Pascal came up with it, and it's a dumb wager now.

If someone tells me they're able to look seventy-five years into the future, I default to thinking they are a huckster or a fool, not a grand visionary. It takes impressive evidence to assume the latter. In absence of that, I'll treat any insistance otherwise similarly: that people aren't smart enough to look quite so far ahead. It just isn't within us.

I'm not trying to predict the price of corn in 70 years, I'm using the historical record and some basic understanding of systems to make cause and effect predictions. It's the exact same reasoning you must use in order to even propose a change, otherwise how could you claim it's going to make things better? The golden goose is laying eggs and I think we should have quite a high prior against fucking with it, especially in ways we know to have killed other geese. I think you have no appreciation for the stakes at play and that alone is enough for me to want you to be very far from the levers of power.

The historical record how? Basic understanding where? Fucking with what now? You've talked very little policy, and instead kept asserting that you're extremely sure you know better than some hypothetical other what you might do. Having a prior against fucking with society is the original conservative impulse. Arguing that things from generations ago are what's wrong is and should be taken as a radical claim, one that requires more than a 'trust me bro' to believe.

I think we must have lost each other somewhere in the abstraction because this response makes no sense whatsoever to me. The thing I'm trying to point out is that if your political system has a progressive side that wants to make periodic changes and your control structure is a conservative side that tests those changes and attempts to reject ones that could threaten the status quo as of the last ~30 years then you are vulnerable to a periodic change that happened more than 30 years ago that will never the less be ruinous. A healthy political system needs to be able to look critically at the status quo from a conservative perspective.

I take the view that we're still very much riding the wave from the French revolution and it's not quite certain we're going to get to keep this new fangled liberty thing. The population disarming themselves in the year 2000 might not actually bare its wicked fruit until the year 2050 or 2100 the next time there is a WW2 sized shock. Hell, some countries seemed on the verge of dissolving basic rights because of a pandemic, wait until there are credible accusation of spying by a real rival super power.

What healthy political system do you propose, then? For all the talk of disarmament and COVID restrictions, the west lives with politicians more accountable and representative than ever. Democracy's competitors got themselves outcompeted for what seem to me rather good reasons, and for however long ago the French revolution may be, I've yet to see a better alternative rear its head.

What healthy political system do you propose, then?

The one we have now but where we all recognize that changes made before we were born are legitimate targets for conservative critique. Which may just be the one we have now but I certainly don't want the proposed one where it's not considered conservative to undo changes that happened a long while ago because then if there are truly bad changes that age long enough they're impossible to undo.

We have a word for such changes: they are reactionary. There's no need to insist they're conservative when it's both untrue and when a better term already exists.

I've always found the word reactionary rather useless if not actively harmful. Opposition to a proposed policy doesn't magically transmute into an entirely different faction the moment it gets passed. It's just an artifact of trying to map complex ideologies onto a spectrum. But I guess that critique applies to all the other words used as well.

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