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That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of
by revelio 3y ago
That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good.
For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!).
Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose).
Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess.
These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not.
Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoWell, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.
- revelio 3y agoThese things are conflated because it usually takes time to accumulate wealth especially if self-made, so older people will tend to both be richer and more small-c conservative. Also although in the tech industry this link has been broken/inverted, there's usually a correlation between excessive risk taking (i.e. lack of conservatism) and losing all your money. In most sectors of society wealth is built up over time through care and perhaps a bit of moderate risk taking, but not too much.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoOlder people being richer is actually a relatively modern phenomenon. Ref: "Have the Boomers Pinched Their Chiren's Futures", David Willets, Royal Society lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A
- nervousvarun 3y agoAnecdotally speaking it came with paying taxes not with accumulating wealth (though I wish it were the latter). My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative. By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it". BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
- lbriner 3y agoNot sure why you are downvoted, this is one of the best comments I've read in a long time. How idealism turns into realism and the sweet spot is probably somewhere in the middle.
- revelio 3y agoIt's because conservatism whether big or small c, political or technological, tends to be seen as standing in the way of progress by those who didn't arrive at the same underlying intuitions about the difficulty of tabula rasa development. Because the intuitions are so deep, we barely articulate them and that leads quickly to misunderstandings. Conservatism can easily be perceived as errant obstructionism or even the result of a hidden agenda that stands in the way of a better future, if Great Leaps Forward feel easily achievable. Hence why the OP said when he was younger he saw the past as "evil" - a very common way for young radicals to perceive conservatives. For example, most companies with large software assets will at some point go through a fight between the old hands and younger devs about whether to do a rewrite in the hot new thing. Which side you're on may appear dominated by age, but it's really more about your intuition about the risks of rewrite projects. That in turn is determined by your experiences of people's ability/inability to fully comprehend complex systems. Also I didn't try to to be neutral, hence the digs at communism and academia. If I was aiming for karma I'd have left those out. But I'm not.
- parthianshotgun 3y agoSteven Colbert once jokingly said, "Reality has a well known liberal bias". It should probably be the other way around, that liberals have a reality bias, but it doesn't quite land. Liberalism is based on what can be proven. Especially in science, starting with some preconceived reservations leads to inaccurate models. If you can't articulate it, all the worse. Even things like categorization and taxonomy can't account for our in-built intuitions, there's always an exception. So, we really must try a tabula rasa type approach. This tends towards a, you guessed it, a world view more constrained by reality, which typically falls left (see, most of academia). I'd say holding on to heuristics is good, but I don't think we'd be where we are today by not trying to rethink, destruct, unravel, play, squish, open many mental gateways. If your contention is with Whig history then we might agree. But I don't think there's any surity in being sure.