We do a poor job of being inclusive. I think most of that is not intentional.
If it's written in English, it's not because the author seeks to exclude people who speak something else. It's because I the author knows English.
Getting anything to work at all is hard. It's made harder in a highly multicultural world of billions.
If you think only of your culture, you get a colonial system. Europeans came to the US and saw wilderness. They did not recognize lands actively managed by a mobile society with a completely alien culture.
Trappers would show up first. Natives felt there was enough to share and saw no reason to forbid their activities or kill them. The trappers operated much like the Natives.
Settlers followed. Settlers did not operate like Natives. They laid claim to specific plots of land, usually the best plots. They often showed up while there was no current presence of people. When Natives returned to the area, as they tended to do seasonally, the settlers saw them as trespassers. They didn't recognize that they were the trespassers.
Agricultural societies can readily outcompete hunter-gatherer societies. You produce more per acre if you cultivate the land. So the conflict was probably inevitable.
I don't know the solution here. But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.
Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to recognize the benefits.
Before we had regulation, fire fighters from neighboring towns couldn't help in a serious emergency because their equipment wasn't compatible. They would show up, then find they couldn't connect their hoses because it was a different size.
When I was a child, the Swiss were famous for their neutrality during WW2. That was seen as virtue. At some point, that narrative changed and I began seeing stories about how the Swiss were guilty of being Nazi collaborators due to their neutrality.
Most things are a two-edged sword. We laud them when we can see how it benefits us. We attack them when we are the ones getting hurt.
Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.
That's not nefarious intent. That's just how it is.
>> But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.
This may be true of the examples you cited for the more distant era. However post WW2, with the invention of technologies of mass control, this has really become a default case now.
>> Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.
If one is aware of this then one should factor that into the systems to minimize the harm or refrain from building such systems. We don't see any evidence for that.
It's extremely challenging to envision the path not taken. Even in cases where you can, it's more challenging still to effectively communicate the other path and that you are, in fact, correct.
I don't know that the world would be a better place had we not done x, y or z. When people decry a thing, they routinely focus on the harm it has done without accounting for the good it did.
Maybe the path not taken is far worse than the problems we currently struggle with.
They built wells in India and Bangladesh, iirc. The intent was to stop a quarter of a million deaths annually from contaminated surface waters, such as collected rainwater.
Some of the wells caused arsenic poisoning. The scale of this new disaster was compared to Chernobyl and pronounced worse than that.
This comparison largely ignored the millions of lives already saved by the wells.
We solve a problem. We find some new bug in the system. We iterate.
Yes we cannot re-simulate the world or do A/B testing with different versions of it. It is what it is.
I find Progress to be a nebulous/relative term. Defining it depends whether on you can measure things. Things that cannot be measured are outside its purview. For all our pervasive data gathering capability we lack intuitive understanding of how the complex interconnected adaptive system, that is the real world, works. Some change one would consider minor or harmless might balloon into a crisis years down the line, because the conditions have changed or we didn't consider feedback or were not even aware of it.
I agree with you that whether to act or not is indeed a dilemma. But when we do, the question is, are we acting with this humbling awareness, or are we just arrogantly tinkering with it. In hindsight, we find it has been mostly the latter, at least for the last 500 years.
"Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to recognize the benefits."
Most of us recognized the benefits of regulation, and then we recognized those systems being brutally and hopelessly overwhelmed.
The regulatory state has not withstood history: the regulatory capture that goes all the way back to the earliest of political machines, the two-tier justice system (as the speaker mentioned, and as the Holder doctrine confessed), the russian-doll configurations of persona ficta (corporations, universities, non-profits, etc) that hide the personal agendas of wealth behind faceless platitudes.
It's just like the libertarians who go, "If only we returned to our founding priciples..." In other words, regression, but with the expectation that things will work out differently this time.
Absolutely right. Much of this isn't so much "system" as adhoc conflict. Swiss neutrality is particularly relevant because, as a neutral, they offered banking services beyond seizure to both sides of the conflict. To both Jews fleeing persecution and Nazis fleeing justice - often the latter banking wealth that had been stolen from the former. Some of this was eventually cleaned up in the long legal fallout of WW2.
If it's written in English, it's not because the author seeks to exclude people who speak something else. It's because I the author knows English.
Getting anything to work at all is hard. It's made harder in a highly multicultural world of billions.
If you think only of your culture, you get a colonial system. Europeans came to the US and saw wilderness. They did not recognize lands actively managed by a mobile society with a completely alien culture.
Trappers would show up first. Natives felt there was enough to share and saw no reason to forbid their activities or kill them. The trappers operated much like the Natives.
Settlers followed. Settlers did not operate like Natives. They laid claim to specific plots of land, usually the best plots. They often showed up while there was no current presence of people. When Natives returned to the area, as they tended to do seasonally, the settlers saw them as trespassers. They didn't recognize that they were the trespassers.
Agricultural societies can readily outcompete hunter-gatherer societies. You produce more per acre if you cultivate the land. So the conflict was probably inevitable.
I don't know the solution here. But I don't think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.
Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to recognize the benefits.
Before we had regulation, fire fighters from neighboring towns couldn't help in a serious emergency because their equipment wasn't compatible. They would show up, then find they couldn't connect their hoses because it was a different size.
When I was a child, the Swiss were famous for their neutrality during WW2. That was seen as virtue. At some point, that narrative changed and I began seeing stories about how the Swiss were guilty of being Nazi collaborators due to their neutrality.
Most things are a two-edged sword. We laud them when we can see how it benefits us. We attack them when we are the ones getting hurt.
Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It's made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.
That's not nefarious intent. That's just how it is.