In hope of getting closer to understanding our disagreements on intellectual progress: how does this post make a good case for the importance of industrial literacy? As far as I can tell, it just asserts it:
With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.
A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.
I definitely disagree with the extreme interpretation of these assertions, and it’s pretty unclear to me whether a “reasonable” interpretation of these assertions is true or not; the post certainly didn’t give any evidence for them.
Sorry, I wrote this in a bit of a hurry, and I was actually planning to write a more in-depth curation notice sometime today that goes into a bit more detail. Agree that as written above, I wouldn’t stand by that phrasing.
I mostly liked this post because it’s a pretty decent short reference for a concept that I’ve wanted a pointer to in the past. I also think it does actually make some case for the concept being important, by highlighting a shared structure between a number of really high magnitude events (all of the ones listed above). It doesn’t do so explicitly, but implicitly I expect most readers of this post to come away with a decent model for why this concept might be important.
I don’t really agree very much with the section of the post that talks about broader societal problems caused by lack of industrial literacy. That kind of broad sociological modeling is usually wrong, and is probably also wrong here. I think the post would be marginally better if it didn’t have the second of the two paragraphs you quoted.
On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.
In hope of getting closer to understanding our disagreements on intellectual progress: how does this post make a good case for the importance of industrial literacy? As far as I can tell, it just asserts it:
I definitely disagree with the extreme interpretation of these assertions, and it’s pretty unclear to me whether a “reasonable” interpretation of these assertions is true or not; the post certainly didn’t give any evidence for them.
Sorry, I wrote this in a bit of a hurry, and I was actually planning to write a more in-depth curation notice sometime today that goes into a bit more detail. Agree that as written above, I wouldn’t stand by that phrasing.
Ok, now a more proper notice:
I mostly liked this post because it’s a pretty decent short reference for a concept that I’ve wanted a pointer to in the past. I also think it does actually make some case for the concept being important, by highlighting a shared structure between a number of really high magnitude events (all of the ones listed above). It doesn’t do so explicitly, but implicitly I expect most readers of this post to come away with a decent model for why this concept might be important.
I don’t really agree very much with the section of the post that talks about broader societal problems caused by lack of industrial literacy. That kind of broad sociological modeling is usually wrong, and is probably also wrong here. I think the post would be marginally better if it didn’t have the second of the two paragraphs you quoted.
On a tangent, I’m curious: do you think “broad sociological modeling” is fundamentally misguided? Or is it “usually wrong” just because it’s really hard, or subject to bias, or something like that?
I do think it can work, but if it works it looks more like economics, or something like that. Like, we can definitely identify some broad sociological phenomena that allow us to reliably make good predictions, but it’s definitely not easy, and there are lots of traps along the way that are full of arguments that are rhetorically compelling, but not actually very useful for figuring out the truth, much more so than in other domains of inquiry.