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The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have." One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False": """This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him.""" https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/ https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/

jfrunyon 5y ago
> At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty LOL okay I literally can't go any further than the first sentence. Very good much wow so projection. I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Didn't even bother to read the citation for that statement? > This has now been true for over a century, and as early as 1855 J. S. Mill could say (see my John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor [London and Chicago, 1951], p. 216) that "almost all the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide." > I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy. Textbook example of an ad homenim.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    That's pretty loaded language, but it makes sense. When an area is sparsely populated it doesn't matter as much how people behave. They aren't harming other people because there are none around. As the population density increases the same actions like emitting pollution of one kind or another (air, sound, light, etc...) becomes a problem and all of the other people come together to ask you to stop, thus infringing on your liberties. All of society is just people trying to get along with your neighbors. The more people you live near with the harder it is to stay on good relations with all of them. As the population continues to grow it becomes increasingly difficult to not live near other people, effectively impossible for an ever growing percentage of the population. Some of this may even partially explain the rural/urban divide in politics.
    - fancifalmanima 5y ago
      "all of the other people come together to ask you to stop, thus infringing on your liberties." You've very insight-fully described the policy debate/disagreement between people in pretty much any liberal democracy. Respecting my property rights is actually an infringement on your liberty. Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty. What's often lost in the conversation on liberty is that everyone agrees that its a matter of degree. IE -- everyone having absolute liberty isn't viable. Absolute liberty would effectively just be an anarchy. Its just a matter of where the lines are. But somehow the conversation ends up getting reduced absolutes on both sides.
      - jfrunyon 5y ago
        > Respecting my property rights is actually an infringement on your liberty No, disrespecting other people's property rights is an infringement on their liberty. You being told not to disrespect other people's rights is NOT an infringement on your liberty. > Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty WTF? > everyone agrees that its a matter of degree Oh how I wish that were true. Not even most people can agree on that.
  - 5y ago
tshaddox 5y ago
This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  You're not wrong. However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.
- imgabe 5y ago
  The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    No, I only mentioned the ones that seem terrible because those are the ones you would be most inclined to change.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      Ah, well I think the answer would be to investigate whether something that seems terrible, is in fact actually terrible or not, and then act on that rather than a superficial impression.
    - narag 5y ago
      The most terrible ones could also be the most difficult ones to change. Because if they're so terrible, the hidden reason to keep them in place must be specially strong. Or they could be extremely difficult to change because of some shadowy societal forces that lead to unintended consequences.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Another problem here is that the when society reaches scale of extreme complexity is the point when cultural practice stop being shared. After all, sharing unstated culture is clearly hard than sharing overt culture.
ren_engineer 5y ago
>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence >In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
- csours 5y ago
  The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time. Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer? Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money? Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs? For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place. The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.
  - KeepFlying 5y ago
    Except many of those do have reasons, those reasons are just outdated or immoral or context dependent. The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status quo before tracking down why might end up making things worse.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Yup. The issue of course is that there are many false positives for ‘why’ that can also result in it being thrown away to great suffered - and many folks who frankly don’t have the time to spend. Best one can do is where it clearly gets in the way of doing what YOU need to do, try to tear it down, but with one look over your shoulder to see if anyone is coming to get you for doing it. If they do, they at least feel a need to keep it, even if nonsensical to you. If no one does, then apparently no one remembers or cares enough to keep it there, so entropy wins and put it goes. Might be a mistake, but might not be - and at least your problem will be easier to solve, which you concretely know and can experience, which is something.
WalterBright 5y ago
Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.) Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.
- enimodas 5y ago
  Work well as long as you don't care about externalities such as polution, congestion; poisoning, maiming and killing consumers and employees
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Communist countries have a much worse track record on that.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The free market works well in spite of downvotes, too!
- nickpp 5y ago
  I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator. People will still look for a planner though…
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    While you are admiring Darwinism, keep in mind that all-natural ecosystem collapse is a thing, and 6 all-natural mass extinction events had >90% of all living things disappear.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > 6 all-natural mass extinction events Are you sure about that? Or have people just not discovered the cause yet? Pick one, let's explore it.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society. > (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and society, I think of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents where the individual can never be free.
- chii 5y ago
  > may be rational for one person to not pay taxes it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Hypothetically it’s all cash based. It’s the tragedy of the commons. What is rational in isolation is not overall like pollution.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I think you are talking about the problem of Collective Action and the Free Rider problem... I think they are a little different, because those are situations about needing to cooperate for the best outcome, but having no way to enforce cooperation while having individual incentives to not cooperate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Yes that is it! Thanks!
davnn 5y ago
I wonder if that idea also makes sense in an organizational context. Big corporations often seem very ineffective on first sight, yet they produce something meaningful nevertheless.
aaron695 5y ago
Friedrich Hayek idea is totally different to the idea that a lack of understanding is good. Friedrich Hayek is just a standard idea for mature programmers. Something that's 10 years old won't just be remade in a weekend or easily changed. People think their idea will just change HN for the better. For most people it's smarter to trust the decade+ of work put into it. Things like Wikipedia being hard to edit is a good thing. Many morons, don't know this which is why they keep trying to make editing easier. But it's ok to tell them why edits should be hard.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great. Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them. But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society. Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.
- jlawson 5y ago
  Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference. Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't? Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works? Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school. We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.
  - calf 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seer 5y ago
Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach. In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results. A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”. You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results. Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion. I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.
- ajuc 5y ago
  > The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation". Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.
DarylZero 5y ago
LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit
vkk8 5y ago
Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
- blumomo 5y ago
  Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.
- IcyClAyMptHe 5y ago
  I'll have to check that out. It's something I (as an atheist) feel as well. There seem to be a number of religious practices which align quite nicely with mental health practices. The ones that immediately spring to mind are responsibility transfer (short-circuiting anxiety spirals by throwing faith into an imaginary party who says it will all be ok), and "gratitude" practices - practicing thankfulness for what you have, meeting quite nicely with the practice of saying grace before a meal. At first glance it seems foolish for a poor family praising their god for the pittance of food in front of them, but the idea that pausing to be grateful for what little they do have may make them feel better mentally (regardless of the wider injustice of the situation) has merit.
  - IcyClAyMptHe 5y ago
    It seems like the process could be - do a thing, see positive results (maybe from improved outlook), interpret it as gods reward for pleasing him, codfiy the practice.
gbrindisi 5y ago
This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...
NumberCruncher 5y ago
> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have." I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever." Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.

jfrunyon 5y ago

> At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty LOL okay I literally can't go any further than the first sentence. Very good much wow so projection. I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy.

generalizations 5y ago
Didn't even bother to read the citation for that statement? > This has now been true for over a century, and as early as 1855 J. S. Mill could say (see my John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor [London and Chicago, 1951], p. 216) that "almost all the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide." > I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy. Textbook example of an ad homenim.
- jandrese 5y ago
  That's pretty loaded language, but it makes sense. When an area is sparsely populated it doesn't matter as much how people behave. They aren't harming other people because there are none around. As the population density increases the same actions like emitting pollution of one kind or another (air, sound, light, etc...) becomes a problem and all of the other people come together to ask you to stop, thus infringing on your liberties. All of society is just people trying to get along with your neighbors. The more people you live near with the harder it is to stay on good relations with all of them. As the population continues to grow it becomes increasingly difficult to not live near other people, effectively impossible for an ever growing percentage of the population. Some of this may even partially explain the rural/urban divide in politics.
  - fancifalmanima 5y ago
    "all of the other people come together to ask you to stop, thus infringing on your liberties." You've very insight-fully described the policy debate/disagreement between people in pretty much any liberal democracy. Respecting my property rights is actually an infringement on your liberty. Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty. What's often lost in the conversation on liberty is that everyone agrees that its a matter of degree. IE -- everyone having absolute liberty isn't viable. Absolute liberty would effectively just be an anarchy. Its just a matter of where the lines are. But somehow the conversation ends up getting reduced absolutes on both sides.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      > Respecting my property rights is actually an infringement on your liberty No, disrespecting other people's property rights is an infringement on their liberty. You being told not to disrespect other people's rights is NOT an infringement on your liberty. > Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty WTF? > everyone agrees that its a matter of degree Oh how I wish that were true. Not even most people can agree on that.
- 5y ago

tshaddox 5y ago

This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.

mandmandam 5y ago
You're not wrong. However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.
imgabe 5y ago
The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  No, I only mentioned the ones that seem terrible because those are the ones you would be most inclined to change.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Ah, well I think the answer would be to investigate whether something that seems terrible, is in fact actually terrible or not, and then act on that rather than a superficial impression.
  - narag 5y ago
    The most terrible ones could also be the most difficult ones to change. Because if they're so terrible, the hidden reason to keep them in place must be specially strong. Or they could be extremely difficult to change because of some shadowy societal forces that lead to unintended consequences.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Another problem here is that the when society reaches scale of extreme complexity is the point when cultural practice stop being shared. After all, sharing unstated culture is clearly hard than sharing overt culture.

ren_engineer 5y ago

>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence >In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

csours 5y ago
The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time. Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer? Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money? Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs? For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place. The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.
- KeepFlying 5y ago
  Except many of those do have reasons, those reasons are just outdated or immoral or context dependent. The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status quo before tracking down why might end up making things worse.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Yup. The issue of course is that there are many false positives for ‘why’ that can also result in it being thrown away to great suffered - and many folks who frankly don’t have the time to spend. Best one can do is where it clearly gets in the way of doing what YOU need to do, try to tear it down, but with one look over your shoulder to see if anyone is coming to get you for doing it. If they do, they at least feel a need to keep it, even if nonsensical to you. If no one does, then apparently no one remembers or cares enough to keep it there, so entropy wins and put it goes. Might be a mistake, but might not be - and at least your problem will be easier to solve, which you concretely know and can experience, which is something.

WalterBright 5y ago

Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.) Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.

enimodas 5y ago
Work well as long as you don't care about externalities such as polution, congestion; poisoning, maiming and killing consumers and employees
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Communist countries have a much worse track record on that.
WalterBright 5y ago
The free market works well in spite of downvotes, too!
nickpp 5y ago
I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator. People will still look for a planner though…
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  While you are admiring Darwinism, keep in mind that all-natural ecosystem collapse is a thing, and 6 all-natural mass extinction events had >90% of all living things disappear.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > 6 all-natural mass extinction events Are you sure about that? Or have people just not discovered the cause yet? Pick one, let's explore it.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society. > (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and society, I think of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents where the individual can never be free.

chii 5y ago
> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Hypothetically it’s all cash based. It’s the tragedy of the commons. What is rational in isolation is not overall like pollution.
cortesoft 5y ago
I think you are talking about the problem of Collective Action and the Free Rider problem... I think they are a little different, because those are situations about needing to cooperate for the best outcome, but having no way to enforce cooperation while having individual incentives to not cooperate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Yes that is it! Thanks!

davnn 5y ago

I wonder if that idea also makes sense in an organizational context. Big corporations often seem very ineffective on first sight, yet they produce something meaningful nevertheless.

aaron695 5y ago

Friedrich Hayek idea is totally different to the idea that a lack of understanding is good. Friedrich Hayek is just a standard idea for mature programmers. Something that's 10 years old won't just be remade in a weekend or easily changed. People think their idea will just change HN for the better. For most people it's smarter to trust the decade+ of work put into it. Things like Wikipedia being hard to edit is a good thing. Many morons, don't know this which is why they keep trying to make editing easier. But it's ok to tell them why edits should be hard.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great. Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them. But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society. Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

jlawson 5y ago
Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference. Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't? Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works? Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school. We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.
- calf 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

seer 5y ago

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach. In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results. A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”. You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results. Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion. I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.

ajuc 5y ago
> The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation". Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.

DarylZero 5y ago

LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit

vkk8 5y ago

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

blumomo 5y ago
Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.
IcyClAyMptHe 5y ago
I'll have to check that out. It's something I (as an atheist) feel as well. There seem to be a number of religious practices which align quite nicely with mental health practices. The ones that immediately spring to mind are responsibility transfer (short-circuiting anxiety spirals by throwing faith into an imaginary party who says it will all be ok), and "gratitude" practices - practicing thankfulness for what you have, meeting quite nicely with the practice of saying grace before a meal. At first glance it seems foolish for a poor family praising their god for the pittance of food in front of them, but the idea that pausing to be grateful for what little they do have may make them feel better mentally (regardless of the wider injustice of the situation) has merit.
- IcyClAyMptHe 5y ago
  It seems like the process could be - do a thing, see positive results (maybe from improved outlook), interpret it as gods reward for pleasing him, codfiy the practice.

gbrindisi 5y ago

This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...

NumberCruncher 5y ago

> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have." I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever." Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.