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0 pointsparthianshotgun3y ago0 comments

Steven Colbert once jokingly said, "Reality has a well known liberal bias".

It should probably be the other way around, that liberals have a reality bias, but it doesn't quite land. Liberalism is based on what can be proven. Especially in science, starting with some preconceived reservations leads to inaccurate models. If you can't articulate it, all the worse. Even things like categorization and taxonomy can't account for our in-built intuitions, there's always an exception. So, we really must try a tabula rasa type approach. This tends towards a, you guessed it, a world view more constrained by reality, which typically falls left (see, most of academia).

I'd say holding on to heuristics is good, but I don't think we'd be where we are today by not trying to rethink, destruct, unravel, play, squish, open many mental gateways.

If your contention is with Whig history then we might agree. But I don't think there's any surity in being sure.

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revelio3y ago· 2 in thread

Trying desperately to stay on technical topic here, I'd say the only places where this dichotomy comes up are in cases that are inherently ambiguous and subjective. If something is genuinely proven then everyone does actually accept it. Conservatives and liberals don't disagree on the energy of an electron or the color of the sky. Disagreement occurs over things that can't be proven: how valuable is spending time on feature X instead of rewrite Y? Is this choice of library really "debt" that needs to be paid down by rewriting, or is it a mature tech whose imperfections should just be accepted as an inevitable part of life? If you rewrite, how likely is the project to create new problems at the same time as solving old ones? How can anyone prove such a thing one way or another ahead of time? It will ultimately always boil down to a complex interacting set of intuitions and experiences which vary between people.

The Colbert snark is illuminating because it gets to the nub of the conflict. It's an attempt to claim that reality, something often ambiguous and subjective, as if it was simple and obvious. Look at how straightforward the world is to comprehend - why, all you need is a few nice and neutral academics who do a few studies, write it all down in a model and you're done! Now you know what everyone, everywhere should be doing. Others look at this aghast and say no, that approach has a history of going spectacularly wrong. The model did not match reality and disaster followed.

In the software space it leads to conservatism of the Joel Spolsky "never do rewrites" variety. That's too strong, but it's a famous and widely cited essay even 20 years later because it represented a rare articulation of the value of conservatism in technology along with clear real world examples of cases where the lack of it led to (commercial) disaster. Fortunately, attempts to rewrite Navigator or Word only led to financial disaster and only for specific companies. When attempts are made to rewrite society instead of software the cost of failure is drastically higher.

TRiG_Ireland3y ago

> If something is genuinely proven then everyone does actually accept it.

This is demonstrably untrue. Vaccines. Evolution. Anthropogenic Global Warming.

revelio3y ago

Vaccines aren't proven compared to things like the color of the sky, are they? Who on earth still believes that after "95% effective against COVID infection and will end the pandemic" turned into whatever this week's version of the story is. COVID shots demonstrated unequivocally that scientists and officials will happily assert things with 100% certainty that are falsifiable, and then continue to assert them even after they've been proven false in front of everyone.

And that's my point - if you intuit that the world is simple and progress easy, you become committed to mental shortcuts like "if a professor/civil servant says it, then it must be true". The education system forces this mentality on you, even. When other (usually older) people who don't take such shortcuts say "but actually that's not true" then it turns into a fight over what reality actually is, which is an enormously complex thing. Rather than engage down in the weeds where they might lose, young radicals prefer to just try and shout down objections. This pattern crops up again and again.

Evolution is an interesting one because in that case it's the creationists who have adopted an overly simplified model of reality and don't want to let it go. Same problem, just different groups. I don't personally think the word "conservative" is all that useful for that reason even though you often have to use it, because it just means trying to conserve things, which as a position is neutral with respect to what's being conserved.

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