Re:100 years of whatever this will be
by rustmachine on Thursday December 02, 2021 @02:19PM
(#29421076)
I agree with this, well put. Are people evil, or are our structures and systems so complex that we are unable to find best solutions?
Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.
Re:100 years of whatever this will be
by lowbloodsugar on Thursday December 02, 2021 @02:48PM
(#29421479)
>Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.
Re:100 years of whatever this will be
by munificent on Thursday December 02, 2021 @04:46PM
(#29423127)
I would happily take that bet. I'm sure it's higher than the percentage of general population, but I'd bet money it's still less than 20%.
I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes:
1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a crowd crush is deliberately commiting evil, yet the result is dead bodies. Designing large scale human systems with the desired emergent properties is extremely hard, like controlling the weather while also being a raindrop.
2. Since culture lives inside human brains and gets enshrined in physical artifacts, large scale systems change extremely slowly. Even when we (for some definition of "we") know better, there is a large lag before we can see the change.
3. Even well-intentioned people are fallible and make mistakes. Some level of power variation is useful, so you will inevitably sometimes have people in power who screw things up and whose position magnifies the negative consequences. This is particularly true when the consequences are long-term and hard to predict like leaded gasoline or CFCs.
4. Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power.
Conventional wisdom is that these are in increasing order of importance and that most of the bad we see comes from megalomaniacal billionaires. I don't like those dudes either, but my belief is that this is actually in descending order. I think most of our problems are because the systems we're part of are just huge and unpredictable with emergent effects no one anticipated or wants. You can't really blame the problem all on evil billionaires because the production of billionaires is itself a property of the system.