Re:Why Fiction Beats Truth
by TeMPOraL on Monday May 27, 2019 @08:07AM
(#20021451)
> Even assuming that everyone agrees on the model of policy responses - introducing tax X has result Y
This is a purely objective question, and can be discussed between honest parties until a common conclusion is reached.
> people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects.
This is a mix of potentially subjective values and objective statements about how those values are affected by proposed solution; I argue that even if a common conclusion cannot be reached, we can usually come pretty close to it.
> People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
People don't usually think in these categories; between lack of information, misinformation, opportunity costs (no one has time to be up to date on everything, or even to think through everything) and psychological discounting ("I worry about securing food for my children tomorrow, not about some uncertain future 50 years from now"), you end up with people who believe in things that are wrong even when taking their own subjective values into account.
I feel the problem we have isn't with subjectiveness - most political issues are objective enough in principle. We have a computational problem - we can't get enough people to think and talk through issues deeply enough. Instead, people fall back to computationally efficient heuristics - ideologies and soundbites. Pattern matching everything into beliefs like "capitalism is bad", or "government regulation is bad" is a faulty generalization, but it saves on thinking.
It may be that at the scale of our current problems, this computational barrier is in practice insurmountable. If so, we're fucked, and I'm not sure what to do. But it's probably why there's so much pushback against democracy from the "intellectual elites" - because they realize that this problem only scales with the number of people you need to involve to make a decision.
(N.b. trust is another computation-saving hack humanity has used since forever, and what enables us to have societies as large as today. The trust that other people don't try to hurt me, that they have my interests in mind. It's damn effective, and that's why I'm particularly hateful towards individual, company and government activities that erode this trust.)
This is a purely objective question, and can be discussed between honest parties until a common conclusion is reached.
> people will still have strong opinions about the distributive effects of those and even the relative importance of the environmental effects.
This is a mix of potentially subjective values and objective statements about how those values are affected by proposed solution; I argue that even if a common conclusion cannot be reached, we can usually come pretty close to it.
> People don't usually come out and say "I'm not willing to spend a dollar to prevent Miami and Bangladesh being submerged", because that sounds bad, but they come very close to it.
People don't usually think in these categories; between lack of information, misinformation, opportunity costs (no one has time to be up to date on everything, or even to think through everything) and psychological discounting ("I worry about securing food for my children tomorrow, not about some uncertain future 50 years from now"), you end up with people who believe in things that are wrong even when taking their own subjective values into account.
I feel the problem we have isn't with subjectiveness - most political issues are objective enough in principle. We have a computational problem - we can't get enough people to think and talk through issues deeply enough. Instead, people fall back to computationally efficient heuristics - ideologies and soundbites. Pattern matching everything into beliefs like "capitalism is bad", or "government regulation is bad" is a faulty generalization, but it saves on thinking.
It may be that at the scale of our current problems, this computational barrier is in practice insurmountable. If so, we're fucked, and I'm not sure what to do. But it's probably why there's so much pushback against democracy from the "intellectual elites" - because they realize that this problem only scales with the number of people you need to involve to make a decision.
(N.b. trust is another computation-saving hack humanity has used since forever, and what enables us to have societies as large as today. The trust that other people don't try to hurt me, that they have my interests in mind. It's damn effective, and that's why I'm particularly hateful towards individual, company and government activities that erode this trust.)