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6a of 3

Posted by Baldur on Tuesday, January 16 2018 at 08:34:42AM
In reply to Part 5 of Part 3 posted by Dissident on Monday, January 15 2018 at 8:38:39PM

"Oh, I noticed, which is why I pointed out that you seem to do well in our norms in every way except that one thing; it may be a huge thing, no doubt, but you seem to be willing to live with it. Or, at the very least, you nevertheless accept MOST of the norms that hold us and the youths we love to the present status quo as inviolable."

I'm actually pretty unconventional in many ways, though in some of those ways I am unconventional because I hold to older, long-standing norms.

But for most things - yes, I agree with the status quo. You do too, whether you recognize it or not. We deal with thousands of cultural assumptions every day and never think much about it. Like the fish that never notices the water. Norms are norms for a reason: because most people agree about them. And they tend to agree with them because they are correct, or at least are close enough for all practical purposes.

The things people disagree about are a very small potion of those norms - but we pay attention to these things precisely because we disagree about them.

There is another reason to usually stick to the status quo. Biologists have a catchphrase, "Evolution is cleverer than you." We may think ourselves very clever, and come up with some very neat ideas, but we are not really prepared to consider the vastness of time over which life evolved, trying an untold number of different designs and strategies. But Natural Selection is harsh: if something doesn't succeed, it doesn't survive; and therefore we can presume that anything that has survived has an element of some degree of success. We may think we have come up with some great new idea that will succeed where all others failed, and occasionally we might be able to do this - but more often than not things are the way they are because that is what works best - because that is what has survived from the past. There is no method for success more powerful than trying everything and using whatever ended up surviving.

And thus, humanity's recent exponential growth in ability probably does not stem from us being any smarter than our ancestors, but soley from two things: our greater numbers, which allow us to run more experiments as to what works well and what does not; and the values of the Enlightenment including laissez-faire politics that allow a large portion of the human population to freely engage in this experimentation and to succeed or fail quickly.

And I am very tired now and will have to continue later, but I wanted to get these ideas out there while they were fresh in my mind.




Baldur






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