I often imagine civilization as a human body, extraordinarily complex, interconnected, host to lots of bacteria.
Trying to deliberately modify the body to fix things you don't like is only good in a very narrow set of actions, or else you risk rippling and confusing side effects.
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Replying to
I view regulations very much like medications for the body, except with a fraction of the attention paid to side effects. Yes, some might work, but how much are you disrupting the rest of the system in invisible ways that might manifest in deadly symptoms in a decade?
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We live in an overmedicated system, under an accumulating pile of regulations meant to fix our ails, but most of the ails that are being fixed are just side effects of prior regulations. But when a new symptom pops up, we demand another quick fix - simple to understand, direct.
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Imagine how different it would be if we treated lawmaking like medicine; we ran regulatory trials in the smallest possible locations first, we studied those trials, we gradually expanded, and we actively looked for ripple effects and denied regulations that cause too many!
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Replying to
The paper In Praise of Passivity, by philosopher/libertarian/transhumanist Michael Huemer, uses this analogy to urge us to stop overconfidently poking society with arbitrary interventions:
spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers
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Hayek got a nobel when he explained that.
Then everyone disregarded that in policymaking
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Careful young lady!
Check the Spencer connection.
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Replying to
Tower of Baal and Icarus are good stories of humans hubris. We’re humans prone to error and always will be. That’s why I prefer slow steady tested progress to rapid activist logic progress. Society is crazy complex, and any action we take will have unintended consequences.
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