Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
7 days ago
Ah, another apt time to mention one of my favorite papers, Michael Huemer's In Praise of Passivity. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm
Basically it argues the most moral thing in a democracy is to do nothing at all. You simply can never make a truly well informed decision over such a complex system, not even with several lifetimes of dedicated work towards it.
Generally speaking I don't take anyone's political opinion seriously unless they have read and have a cogent response to this paper. I'll gladly just let them yap away and think I agree with them, regardless of my actual views. It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.
"Things are hard, so don't try"?
Seems like it's just advocating for cowardice hiding behind moral grandstanding.
Don't make yourself out to be the grandstander here, that's my job. Politics is so hard and so complicated that your expected contribution is almost certainly net negative, so take that time and energy and apply it to things you actually have a hope of reliably improving. The true cowardice is spending 6 hours a day spinning your wheels instead of getting to work on things that actually work.
An example inspired from the paper: I'm sure medieval surgeons felt they were doing God's work, putting in 12 hour days incising people with razors, and yet without a basic understanding of germ theory they almost certainly make many people much worse off. For a more recent example, did you know that less than 50 years ago it was believed infants didn't need to be anesthetized when modern surgeons operated upon them, despite showing extreme pain responses?
Politics is many orders of magnitude more complex than both germ theory and anesthesiology, and yet people somehow feel they need to study it systematically even less. It's not hard to summon a litany of state sponsored actions which would make Genghis Khan blush, and yet, for each one of those actions, some group of people thought it was such an obviously good idea it simply had to be done.
> It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.
Solipsism only makes sense if you completely reject the concept of objective reality. It's mostly sophistry. The lack of being able to prove that reality exists beyond your own perceptions is not sufficient to prove that it does not, nor to make that assertion. See also "Simulation Theory".