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The analogy I use for this is gravity vs. space travel. Anyone who says "gravity is the natural state of nature, it's impossible to fly or go to space" would cl
by lukifer 7y ago
The analogy I use for this is gravity vs. space travel. Anyone who says "gravity is the natural state of nature, it's impossible to fly or go to space" would clearly be wrong. Yet someone who says "gravity is a social construct, if you're not able to fly, just flap your arms harder" is wrong as well.
To overcome gravity requires a deeply precise and intricate understanding of gravity. So it is with human nature: the point of a deep understanding of our biological nature and evolutionary baggage is not to succumb to them as fait accompli, but to increase our agency and efficacy within those constraints, such that we become able to transcend them.
- wpietri 7y agoAbsolutely. To me the two poles here are the naturalistic fallacy and the moralistic fallacy. The former is basically "what is natural is right", and the latter is "what is right is true". Both of them for me are Mencken's "clear, simple, and wrong". "Natural" is basically a billion years of historical accidents, so there's no reason to expect it to be optimal from our perspective. We need to think about what we truly want the world to be. But we can't assume that the world is just going to be like we want. As when building anything, we must look closely at the characteristics of the raw materials and work with them to achieve our goals.