Comment by scsilver
5 years ago
If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you're gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.
Ginsburg and Scalia obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so. I share GP's view that this is a pretty basic part of being an adult.
That being said, I fully agree with the rest of your comment. This deficiency isn't new: Most people in any period of history have been unable to engage with ideas like adults, and there are a host of social technologies that prevent these infantile tendencies from blowing up society. Dramatic shifts in the way we live and engage with others (like those brought about by the Internet age) obsolete these safeguards, leaving this type of person vulnerable to a world of epistemological hazards until new tools and processes are created for them to follow by rote.
I suppose your defenition of maturity is different than mine, I would assume that maturity is defined by the traits held by most adults in a species. If it isnt held by most adults in that species, is it really an indicator of maturity? But we are getting into pedantics here. I agree with you, I just assume from human history that what we as a society claim to be maturity is a idealist goal that we set out to achieve but ultimately fall short of. He are going to have to up out maturity baseline in order to tackle the challenges we have created for ourselves.
>Dirac and Bohr obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so.
See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult. "Being an adult" is even more open ended. What does it mean, who defines it? Do you have to be "An Adult" to get elected to office and make rules that others have to follow? Is "An Adult" necessary to implement features on a website that dictate how people interact with each other?
I agree with your agreement statement. Infantile grownups in the past generally did not have a global audience in which they could wreak havoc with, and there issues tended to be local in context.
> See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult.
In what way does this sound silly? We could easily be talking about Dirac and Bohr both learning how to read, in which case "they're so smart, you couldn't possibly do anything they did" would be obvious nonsense. The point here is that exceptional people doing something doesn't imply a high bar, and
> "Being an adult" is even more open ended.
Well obviously. There's no objective test of what makes one an adult[1], so it's inherently an opinion. An adult _can_ do all of those things, though they probably shouldn't, and a big part of what makes the world shitty is down to people like this doing things and making decisions that they shouldn't be, including in the way they vote (it still boggles the mind that people think it makes sense to vote on the basis of a policy you haven't bothered to even _try_ to educate yourself on).
[1] Colloquially, obviously. The legal sense is defined fairly rigorously (though it doesn't mean quite the same thing as the colloquial sense)