I have some thoughts about extending “humans aren’t automatically strategic” to whole societies. I am just not sure how much of that is specific for the place where I live, and how much is universal.
Seems to me that many people believe that improvements happen magically, so you don’t have to use any strategy to get them, and actually using a strategy would somehow make things worse—it wouldn’t be “natural”, or something. Any data can be explained away using hindsight bias: If we have an example of a strategy bringing a positive change, we can always say that the change happened “naturally” and the strategy was superfluous. On the other hand, about a positive change not happening we can always say the problem wasn’t lack of strategy, but that the change simply wasn’t meant to happen, so any strategy would have failed, too.
Another argument against strategic changes is that sometimes people use a strategy and screw up. Or use a strategy to achieve an evil goal. (Did you notice it is usually the evil masterminds who use strategy to reach their goals? Or neurotic losers.) Just like trying to change yourself is “unnatural”, trying to change the society is “undemocratic”. We should only follow the uncoordinated unstrategic moves of millions of unstrategic individuals, and expect all the good things to happen magically (unless they simply weren’t meant to happen, of course).
If you start following a strategy, all your imperfections may be reinterpreted as costs of following this strategy. Let’s say that you don’t have many friends. That’s okay, there are many people like this. But let’s say that you don’t have enough friends while studying Japanese. Well, that means you are a heartless person who sacrificed human relations because of their stupid obsession with anime, or something like this. A group of people can be criticized for taking things too seriously and spending too much time following their goals (any value greater than zero can be too much). Even worse sin would be not accepting someone as their member, just because the actions of the person are contrary to the group’s goals.
I am not sure where this all goes, I just have a feeling that if you want to live in a good society, you should not expect magic to happen, but you should find similarly thinking people, create a group, and try to make the change you want to see. And you should expect to be attacked completely irrationally from all sides. Than includes from inside, because even some of your well-meaning members will accept the anti-epistemology, and will try to convince you to self-destructive actions, and if you refuse they will leave you disappointed.
Given the abstracted tone you seem to be trying to go for here, you might consider modifying the examples in your fourth paragraph to point to more widely separated points in subculture-space, so as to reduce the chance that an uncharitable reader might interpret this as a defensive reaction to how some particular subculture is often treated.
I have some thoughts about extending “humans aren’t automatically strategic” to whole societies. I am just not sure how much of that is specific for the place where I live, and how much is universal.
Seems to me that many people believe that improvements happen magically, so you don’t have to use any strategy to get them, and actually using a strategy would somehow make things worse—it wouldn’t be “natural”, or something. Any data can be explained away using hindsight bias: If we have an example of a strategy bringing a positive change, we can always say that the change happened “naturally” and the strategy was superfluous. On the other hand, about a positive change not happening we can always say the problem wasn’t lack of strategy, but that the change simply wasn’t meant to happen, so any strategy would have failed, too.
Another argument against strategic changes is that sometimes people use a strategy and screw up. Or use a strategy to achieve an evil goal. (Did you notice it is usually the evil masterminds who use strategy to reach their goals? Or neurotic losers.) Just like trying to change yourself is “unnatural”, trying to change the society is “undemocratic”. We should only follow the uncoordinated unstrategic moves of millions of unstrategic individuals, and expect all the good things to happen magically (unless they simply weren’t meant to happen, of course).
If you start following a strategy, all your imperfections may be reinterpreted as costs of following this strategy. Let’s say that you don’t have many friends. That’s okay, there are many people like this. But let’s say that you don’t have enough friends while studying Japanese. Well, that means you are a heartless person who sacrificed human relations because of their stupid obsession with anime, or something like this. A group of people can be criticized for taking things too seriously and spending too much time following their goals (any value greater than zero can be too much). Even worse sin would be not accepting someone as their member, just because the actions of the person are contrary to the group’s goals.
I am not sure where this all goes, I just have a feeling that if you want to live in a good society, you should not expect magic to happen, but you should find similarly thinking people, create a group, and try to make the change you want to see. And you should expect to be attacked completely irrationally from all sides. Than includes from inside, because even some of your well-meaning members will accept the anti-epistemology, and will try to convince you to self-destructive actions, and if you refuse they will leave you disappointed.
Given the abstracted tone you seem to be trying to go for here, you might consider modifying the examples in your fourth paragraph to point to more widely separated points in subculture-space, so as to reduce the chance that an uncharitable reader might interpret this as a defensive reaction to how some particular subculture is often treated.