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> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing

> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing systems as solely the product of individual decisions is like viewing your brain solely as the product of the movement of individual atoms. You lose all predictive capability. If you do something immoral, is there some group of cells or atoms that I can directly 'assign blame' to? A more nuanced and honest view would be to observe that certain structures predictably result in the some consequences, often regardless of the initial beliefs, desires, or moral righteousness of the individuals caught within them. Sometimes the only way to change the outcome is to change the large-scale structure and incentives within the system. We can do that by changing laws, regulations, and also sometimes by naming and shaming certain individuals; but first we have to admit that systems do have 'a mind of their own'.

pharrington 8y ago
Actually measuring, or even hypothesizing about, the predictive capability of different models of varying levels of abstraction is something that happens disturbingly rarely in fields that aren't the hard sciences. I suspect an important (but not primary) reason for this is that most people simply don't have an opportunity to be exposed to the type of maths and analysis required for systems theory, and thus are extremely unlikely to surmise that something like systems theory is a distinct thing that can even exist.
smolder 8y ago
If there is a hierarchical structure to the brain wherein some highly influential neurons direct the rest of the brain toward the immoral behavior, you can at least assign the lions share to them. I do agree that carefully structured incentives and disincentives are the thing that can lead to the best outcomes.

pharrington 8y ago

Actually measuring, or even hypothesizing about, the predictive capability of different models of varying levels of abstraction is something that happens disturbingly rarely in fields that aren't the hard sciences. I suspect an important (but not primary) reason for this is that most people simply don't have an opportunity to be exposed to the type of maths and analysis required for systems theory, and thus are extremely unlikely to surmise that something like systems theory is a distinct thing that can even exist.

smolder 8y ago

If there is a hierarchical structure to the brain wherein some highly influential neurons direct the rest of the brain toward the immoral behavior, you can at least assign the lions share to them. I do agree that carefully structured incentives and disincentives are the thing that can lead to the best outcomes.