Comment by MatekCopatek
7 days ago
I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.
The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.
I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.
If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.
To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.
That seems overly reductive.
> It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
I mean, if someone says "Let's pollute the rivers!" and another person says "Let's not pollute the rivers!", that's a pretty clear cut objectively good and bad position. Or "Let's put people in prison if they jaywalk.", etc.
That's not to say there are no positions that have a clear cut good or bad outcome that can be measured beforehand. For example, putting a tax on sugary drinks. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but you have no way of being sure beforehand, because you can't A/B test reality and the complexity of the system is such that you can't accurately predict human behavior at a large scale.
But the existence of positions that don't have a clear answer that can be determined ahead of time doesn't mean there's no objective way to determine whether it's good or bad, just that we don't have the tooling to do so at this point in time.
Great examples!
Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.
Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.
A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.
Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.
Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.