“Stuff will keep getting worse because we won’t know how to fix it, and our stupid attempts to fix it will make things worse.”
YES! I’ve been feeling that last part in my bones lately. I think rationalists place too much confidence in science, reason, and technology. This sacred trifecta is extremely constrained in its capacity to solve o…
“Stuff will keep getting worse because we won’t know how to fix it, and our stupid attempts to fix it will make things worse.”
YES! I’ve been feeling that last part in my bones lately. I think rationalists place too much confidence in science, reason, and technology. This sacred trifecta is extremely constrained in its capacity to solve our problems. The world is complex and riddled with unobservable relationships. There’s no way for us to grasp all the knock-on effects of the decisions we make in steering civilization, much less the 3rd or 4th order effects, and so on. The reason why natural selection is good at engineering systems that can exploit these invisible relationships to solve problems is because it’s omniscient—it need not infer or simulate solutions based on limited information (like we do). In fact, I think our reliance on science, reason, and technology is as much the problem as it is a solution, or as you say—our stupid attempts to fix things will make them worse.
“Stuff will keep getting worse because we won’t know how to fix it, and our stupid attempts to fix it will make things worse.”
YES! I’ve been feeling that last part in my bones lately. I think rationalists place too much confidence in science, reason, and technology. This sacred trifecta is extremely constrained in its capacity to solve our problems. The world is complex and riddled with unobservable relationships. There’s no way for us to grasp all the knock-on effects of the decisions we make in steering civilization, much less the 3rd or 4th order effects, and so on. The reason why natural selection is good at engineering systems that can exploit these invisible relationships to solve problems is because it’s omniscient—it need not infer or simulate solutions based on limited information (like we do). In fact, I think our reliance on science, reason, and technology is as much the problem as it is a solution, or as you say—our stupid attempts to fix things will make them worse.