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0 pointsintended24d ago0 comments

> I hope.

For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

0 comments

Have humans ever had a grand plan for society and succeeded in carrying it out such that the desired goal was reached? I'm not talking about something like the Marshall plan, which was a reaction to previous failed attempts and was created during an urgent need for such action, but a plan where a group of people figured out the best course of action, despite humanity existing in a different paradigm, and then enacted that plan and saw it come to fruit as they predicted?

econ24d ago

I never got to a full plan but over the decades I had many creative ideas that try to be good but might not be. The interesting pattern is that few people are curious enough to thing (or help think) about it. Best most can do is find flaws or state it will never happen.

Never is a long time and grand plans need to be executed for their real flaws to appear. The kind of flaws that are never what we thought in advance, usually much worse.

We do need to think about it until the end of humanity. We've build countless societies/civilizations and non of them survived the test of time. It's our ultimate puzzle.

There is probably [say] someone at MS who knows how an OS should work but replacing parts in a running machine isn't easy. Burning everything to the ground isn't ideal either but it does make building more attractive.

Eisenstein23d ago

The point I was making was more that trying to proactively shape society for some goal will always miss something critical and fail in a spectacular way. Look at Communism or the neocons of Bush Jr era with the Iraq invasion. It sounds smart on paper but when you execute it then it falls apart with tremendous human cost, and the people who are doing it refuse to acknowledge it until they are physically removed from the levers of power.

Now that I think about it though, it is more to do with inflexibility of the plan, rather than having a plan itself. If you are working off of a ideological commitment, rather than setting an end goal with a fuzzy time frame and a loose path to get there, then that's when you land in trouble.

econ23d ago

Adaptation is good but it might turn reactionary if not populist. You also want to limit experimentation to measure results. Like when you change few or many lines of code and performance changes.

Animats16d ago

The U.S. constitution?

NoGravitas24d ago

You might ask, What Is To Be Done?

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