I feel that this global rebellion against authority will seriously damage us as a civilization. This is mass insanity caused by somewhat justifiable lack of trust, amplified millionfold by the media. It's psychological reactance happening at scale, and we're doing it to one another.
What I mean is - even though probably half of psychology (and definitely more than half of dietetics) is wrong, it gets made wronger 10 times more by journalists. If you, dear "rebel against 'no-skin-in-the-game' insiders" are reading popular media crap and believing it, instead of standing in front of their offices with pichforks, you're responsible for this. If you repeat that bullshit further, you're responsible more, and God forbid you actually make a business from propagating it to people. And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong.
Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?
The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?
"And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong."
I think you misunderstand what he means when he says "listen to your grandmother".
He is talking specifically about time tested heuristics that have survived a for thousands of years - memes that competed, and won.
The best example I can think of is fasting: this is a tradition that appears to be very well preserved among all of the worlds religions and advocated by all of the worlds great thinkers - from the ancient greeks to Christ to Muhammad. And now in 2016 we're figuring out what a great idea it is from the perspective of "science".
Those are the kind of "grandmother was right" insights that he is guiding us towards, as opposed to (for instance) the more modern "eat little snacks all day long" which is probably a disaster from an insulin response / oxidative stress standpoint. That's the junk message from no-skin-in-the-game authorities.
Caveats:
If your grandmother is in the United States, like mine is/was/are, they never followed this heuristic and instead took the eating schedules of the pioneer farmers (three squares a day!) into the urban environment with disastrous health consequences.
Yes, of course, but you have some guideposts - the more deeply and widely a heuristic is held, the greater attention you should give it.
Another good example is the sabbath - widely adopted and prescribed by all ancient religions, and something that every modern society needs to relearn (and fight for, in the case of urban workers in the industrial age).
Fasting. Remembering the sabbath and keeping it "holy". You could do a lot worse than things like that ...
>Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?
People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.
>The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?
maybe because it's practically impossible to have the information needed to optimize at global level at any point in time (primarily because information becomes redundant faster than it travels to the global hierarchy and gets processed there), and because competency and impartiality to do global optimization is near impossible.
Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.
> People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.
I'm not saying capitalism is a problem compared to other economical regime alternatives. I'm saying that we're pretty clear that a lot of our problems - both local and global - come from too much greedy capitalism, and it's sort of obvious the answer to them isn't more greedy capitalism.
> Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.
True, though again I'm not thinking about black/white distinction and "global" as in "entire world". More like a spectrum (more scope better than less scope; "global" over "local" may just mean not fucking over your neighbours or fellow citizens of your town), and more like a mindset.
> Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?
Why do you equate doing things on the local level with individualism? That's not even remotely the same.
> The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?
And why does it baffle you? Sure, mathematically, global optimization is usually better. And mathematically, producing something at the cheapest place is great for "us all" in the long run - but what about the short term consequences? People without jobs? People who cannot feed their families?
Reality is not one-dimensional, things can be bad on a local level and good at the global level at the same time. And if you tell someone "well, I know that you have nothing to eat right now, but that is okay, because you know globally we are still better off .." then you will probably not get "okay, that's fine." as response.
Honestly this is why so many people like a person like Donald Trump. They crave an alpha leader: strong, unafraid, confident. Which he definitely is. He's 180 degrees from the thoughtful, intellectual, politically correct yet fundamentally dishonest and self-serving leaders we've had for the past 30 years. It's in our primal pack psychology from when we all lived in tribes.
What I mean is - even though probably half of psychology (and definitely more than half of dietetics) is wrong, it gets made wronger 10 times more by journalists. If you, dear "rebel against 'no-skin-in-the-game' insiders" are reading popular media crap and believing it, instead of standing in front of their offices with pichforks, you're responsible for this. If you repeat that bullshit further, you're responsible more, and God forbid you actually make a business from propagating it to people. And either way, you're still much better off listening to half-wrong field of psychology than to your grandmother. They at least have some context and try to get it not terribly wrong.
Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?
The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?