I see this as a result of two things, “Goodheart’s law” and “wireheading by default”.
Goodheart’s law means that if you’re aiming for “just”, as operationalized in a certain way, you will start to get thing that are unjust which nevertheless appear “just” through that limited lens. In order to combat this, you gotta keep your eye on the prize, and make sure you can find the injustices and update your definitions as fast as things get out of whack. If you’re more perceptive than the people setting the target, the world will always seem unjust from your perspective, but that just means you have something to offer if you can show people how their definitions fail to capture the value.
Pain is an error signal that tells you when something is wrong, but “out of the box” people have trouble distinguishing the pain signal from the thing that it is signalling. If you can’t tell the difference between “no error signals because everything is fine” and “no error signal because I’m looking the other way”, then a lack of an error signal is all the proof you need that things are good and you can relax. The moment you start seeing yourself get in trouble from failing to pay attention to error signals, avoiding those error signals by looking away from things stops seeming like such a good idea. Instead of plugging your ears, you want to hear what people are saying about you. After enough instances of hurting yourself worse because of pushing through physical pain, you ask the doctor he’s got anything to make the pain *worse*.
The problem with a lot of these things like “victim blaming” or the practices that led to the replication crisis is that the person doing the not-looking isn’t the one directly paying the price. In order for people to start noticing when they’re world isn’t just in the way that they want to believe it is, they have to see that not seeing it is even worse for them and the things that matter to them, and that means making sure that their unfairness is visible enough to be expected to be punished by others.
I see this as a result of two things, “Goodheart’s law” and “wireheading by default”.
Goodheart’s law means that if you’re aiming for “just”, as operationalized in a certain way, you will start to get thing that are unjust which nevertheless appear “just” through that limited lens. In order to combat this, you gotta keep your eye on the prize, and make sure you can find the injustices and update your definitions as fast as things get out of whack. If you’re more perceptive than the people setting the target, the world will always seem unjust from your perspective, but that just means you have something to offer if you can show people how their definitions fail to capture the value.
Pain is an error signal that tells you when something is wrong, but “out of the box” people have trouble distinguishing the pain signal from the thing that it is signalling. If you can’t tell the difference between “no error signals because everything is fine” and “no error signal because I’m looking the other way”, then a lack of an error signal is all the proof you need that things are good and you can relax. The moment you start seeing yourself get in trouble from failing to pay attention to error signals, avoiding those error signals by looking away from things stops seeming like such a good idea. Instead of plugging your ears, you want to hear what people are saying about you. After enough instances of hurting yourself worse because of pushing through physical pain, you ask the doctor he’s got anything to make the pain *worse*.
The problem with a lot of these things like “victim blaming” or the practices that led to the replication crisis is that the person doing the not-looking isn’t the one directly paying the price. In order for people to start noticing when they’re world isn’t just in the way that they want to believe it is, they have to see that not seeing it is even worse for them and the things that matter to them, and that means making sure that their unfairness is visible enough to be expected to be punished by others.