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You make a great point about TV. I'd like to go farther. We've evolved to function in small tribal groups, and that we instinctively want to do so in all sorts

You make a great point about TV. I'd like to go farther. We've evolved to function in small tribal groups, and that we instinctively want to do so in all sorts of contexts, be they political, economic, etc. But the fact is that the incentives that allow this to work on a tribal scale break down when we try to apply them so broadly. F.A. Hayek argues that this is a big part of the "Fatal Conceit" through which socialists wrongly believe that they can successfully manage an economy (and thus a society).

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Yes, it's the same fallacy just in a different context. I feel like mankind is having final exams and although we were given all the answers, none of us have studied very much. Whether it's the efficient allocation of resources, the nature of public versus private discourse, the necessity of reproducibility in science, or the overuse of aggregate data and correlation as a proxy for causation -- there are a bunch of fundamental topics we all need to be on the same page about. This is because they're all converging together as we as a species converge together online.