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There is a vast body of ways we can act irrationally. It doesn't make sense to let people make mistakes and slowly, individually learn each flaw through their o

There is a vast body of ways we can act irrationally. It doesn't make sense to let people make mistakes and slowly, individually learn each flaw through their own mistakes. It's much more efficient to teach them from an accumulated body of scientific knowledge and create a mechanism to "automatically" preventing the gravest mistakes.

vixen99 11y ago
What gobsmacking arrogance. Who do you suggest does the assessing of 'mistakes' and 'teaching' thereof? http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0465025226 http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Revised-Expanded...: as one review puts it - Thomas Sowell - gets right to the warped mindset of the elite intellectual. It should be a must read for every high school senior in the country.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  You seem to be reading much more than I actually stated. I was contending with the overly broad criticism of the government (and other institutions) as protective figure through laws, rules and regulations. Letting the system evolve without rules by exploiting irrationality, letting individuals learn exclusively by mistake is a bad mechanism. His "evolutionary" argument could apply to most rule systems -- do you believe rules are inherently bad? That's nonsense imo. The assessing of mistakes and teaching is done by domain experts (rule makers or law makers), who know much better than new entrants the perils of a given system, in the case of a well functioning system. There is also evolution in those systems, but it's a more effective form: usually when a single actor finds an exception or flaw in the rules, the rule makers are warned and may rewrite, propagating this knowledge to everyone. If we had infinite capacity to learn, reason and absorb minutiae of the world around us, we wouldn't need rules. But if you go, for example, work in a dangerous factory environment, you don't want to study about all the systems and every way you could die, or even worse (per the 'naive evolutionary' suggestion), try yourself going everywhere. You want someone to tell you "You can't step outside those lines; when working at this machine, you can't put your hand in those places", because you trust the rule maker has gone through everything and you won't walk out missing a limb. Is this "babysitting"? Probably, it's still the best way to go about it. That's not to say every activity should have strict rules. Rules are good fit in general where the environmental conditions don't change very rapidly (in time or across the actors) and where the perils they protect against are sufficient to warrant learning and enforcing the rules in the first place. They remove flexibility for each actor to make it's own optimum choice (only relevant when this varies in time or across individuals) and take resources to formulate, teach and enforce.

vixen99 11y ago

What gobsmacking arrogance. Who do you suggest does the assessing of 'mistakes' and 'teaching' thereof? http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/0465025226 http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Revised-Expanded...: as one review puts it - Thomas Sowell - gets right to the warped mindset of the elite intellectual. It should be a must read for every high school senior in the country.

darkmighty 11y ago
You seem to be reading much more than I actually stated. I was contending with the overly broad criticism of the government (and other institutions) as protective figure through laws, rules and regulations. Letting the system evolve without rules by exploiting irrationality, letting individuals learn exclusively by mistake is a bad mechanism. His "evolutionary" argument could apply to most rule systems -- do you believe rules are inherently bad? That's nonsense imo. The assessing of mistakes and teaching is done by domain experts (rule makers or law makers), who know much better than new entrants the perils of a given system, in the case of a well functioning system. There is also evolution in those systems, but it's a more effective form: usually when a single actor finds an exception or flaw in the rules, the rule makers are warned and may rewrite, propagating this knowledge to everyone. If we had infinite capacity to learn, reason and absorb minutiae of the world around us, we wouldn't need rules. But if you go, for example, work in a dangerous factory environment, you don't want to study about all the systems and every way you could die, or even worse (per the 'naive evolutionary' suggestion), try yourself going everywhere. You want someone to tell you "You can't step outside those lines; when working at this machine, you can't put your hand in those places", because you trust the rule maker has gone through everything and you won't walk out missing a limb. Is this "babysitting"? Probably, it's still the best way to go about it. That's not to say every activity should have strict rules. Rules are good fit in general where the environmental conditions don't change very rapidly (in time or across the actors) and where the perils they protect against are sufficient to warrant learning and enforcing the rules in the first place. They remove flexibility for each actor to make it's own optimum choice (only relevant when this varies in time or across individuals) and take resources to formulate, teach and enforce.