Re:The world is not an engineering problem
by TeMPOraL on Thursday November 08, 2018 @05:10PM
(#18410509)
> one of the many tradeoffs that are hard to decide via objective truths.
Those tradeoffs are "hard to decide via objective truths" only because they haven't been decomposed enough. You have to dig deeper into them, split them apart, ask why do we care about something, and then ask again and again. It might get hard to keep track of the expanding tradeoff space, which is probably why people shy away from digging into things too deep. But if you do the work, you may find out that there is a way to solve the original problem in a way that satisfies everyone's low-level values.
Reminds me of essays of Bret Victor, who occasionally seems to be making a related point - a lot of policy debates quickly devolve into appeals to emotions, because we lack tools to effortlessly decompose and analyze actual problems. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#media for a good example.
Those tradeoffs are "hard to decide via objective truths" only because they haven't been decomposed enough. You have to dig deeper into them, split them apart, ask why do we care about something, and then ask again and again. It might get hard to keep track of the expanding tradeoff space, which is probably why people shy away from digging into things too deep. But if you do the work, you may find out that there is a way to solve the original problem in a way that satisfies everyone's low-level values.
Reminds me of essays of Bret Victor, who occasionally seems to be making a related point - a lot of policy debates quickly devolve into appeals to emotions, because we lack tools to effortlessly decompose and analyze actual problems. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#media for a good example.