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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Major plus in my book. Anyone who wants to talk politics with me first gets redirected to https://studiahumana.com/pliki/wydania/In%20Praise%20of%20Pa... -

"Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes. Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. This is partly because political knowledge is very difficult to attain, and partly because individuals are not sufficiently motivated to attain it. As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good."

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A defeatist argument. We would need a crystal ball, there's no point in even trying!

I propose we create models to reduce complexity, and then make adjustments to approximate reality with increasing accuracy. If this works out in our favor, let's also give it a name, like science.

The fact that no person can understand everything in detail doesn't mean some of us shouldn't try in some capacity.

Kindly read the part of the paper about expert knowledge, it's not very long. Huemer is not arguing that all knowledge is useless, not even close - he's concerned by the fiendish complexity of political knowledge specifically.

Not long ago 'how can birds fly' was a subject of fiendish complexity.

Then the human race spent a few centuries studying physics.

Sociology may be running in circles now (i.e. replication crisis), but imagine what it can discover in a similar timeframe.

Meanwhile, our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same planet.

>imagine what [sociology] can discover in [a few centuries]

See Section 3.3, "Social Theory is Harder than you Think". It would be nice, but I'm very doubtful.

>our best course is educating ourselves, no matter how futile, because inaction is not a good way to live with other people on the same plane

Many possible rebuttals here, but let's take the simplest one: Opportunity cost.

Huemer argues for political inaction, not freezing yourself in a block of ice. All that time you save on politics could be time you spend on e.g. discovering new drugs for terminally ill patients, or making it cheaper to desalinate water. Or, just doing your normal job. These are not easy tasks, certainly not as easy as reading The Sociological Times for 8 hours a day, but they will almost certainly end up doing far more good for people.

Culture has shifted, and every action is now also a political action.

Especially if you have a new drug in your hand, or have a better way to get clean water. One tribe will milk the optics, the other will sabotage and rally people against the thing.

Have a co-worker in Kiev, and you say you're worried? Boom, your neighbor buries you under Russian propaganda.

Got vaccinated? Congrats, half your family just disowned you.

Every decision is taking a side, if not in our own minds, then in those who breathe the same air.

But I must say, Andrew, this is awesome, and you gave me a lot to think about.

This leads to a strong status-quo bias (“uncontroversial” and “stop trying to solve social problems”).

Status quo bias unfairly benefits those who are at the top of the social hierarchy and perpetuates ongoing harm against those lower on the hierarchy.

To take one example, this attitude would be very convenient for white men to take and encourage others to take, but would be seen as negative for people of color, women, LGBTQ people, etc. Pushing this attitude in a corporate setting would then turn off recruitment for those people and limit the diversity of the company, which has longer term implications for hiring quality and product appeal.

Put simply, the desire to “avoid politics” favors certain classes of people to the detriment of others.

I am not saying the answer is to bring politics in to the office, but I am suggesting a more nuanced response to those who desire to do so. Encouraging people to “stop trying to solve social problems” is very transparently an attempt to solve the social problem of political activists making choices you view as flawed. If you truly don’t want to be involved with social problems yourself that includes letting others make their own choices and being sensitive to that (while still balancing workplace norms). For example you might decide not to encourage others to stop their activism, but limit activism at work that distracts the company.

Your answer is well intentioned and well written, but it doesn't address any of Huemer's abstract points in a way I find convincing. You're welcome to walk through the paper and try your hand at it, though. Maybe there are holes in his logic I'm having trouble seeing, it wouldn't be the first time with these philosopher types.

Indeed you linked to a PDF with 25 pages of main body text, and I generally come here for the comments. I can just as well respond to your excerpt, as it is clear to me the implications of such an attitude. If you view all activism as folly and encourage others to do the same, you can be quite assured that those who do choose to influence the world will have more success in your absence.

I am happy to respond to any specific questions you have (even with excerpts) but I am not here to read a 25 page PDF. And as an aside, I see in the author's conclusion that they are wholly dismissive of Karl Marx, which I view as a serious error. I suppose the author is not familiar with the excellent work of modern Marxist intellectuals like Richard Wolff and David Harvey who have quite effectively applied Marx's original works to modern day economic analysis. If the author were familiar with their works it would be clear that modern Marxist intellectuals view the 20th century not as a complete failure of Marx's theories, but of the application of those theories in the hands of the centralized state. When applied with coercive violence those theories lose the very democratic power they had hoped to capture and give way to human greed and demand for accumulation of power. We can nonetheless learn from Marx's analysis of the problems of class-based society and the benefits of worker or community control of the means of production. As Wolff and Harvey repeatedly explain in their work, the task is not to dismiss Marx's analysis but to learn from 20th century experiments of the importance of democratic control. As a practical example, Wolff's primary takeaway from all this, informed by the desire to reduce the importance of class and expand worker based control of production, is that we should aim to move our economy to one where firms are more predominantly worker owned. That we would move from top-down managed firms to worker-managed firms is a well founded and reasonable argument that bears no resemblance to Stalin's USSR, for example. I don't know if the author balances the arguments of pro-Marxist and anti-Marxist intellectuals or simply chose only to look at one side and believe they had the full picture, but it only reinforces my belief that if someone advocates for a depoliticized society, they will simply favor the status quo.

I would encourage reading or listening to the words of people of color and other marginalized groups to ensure that any prescriptive views of society you hold take in to account the different ways that marginalized people experience the world. You mentioned you are interested in holes in Huemer's logic, and that is where you will find them.

Huemer mentions Marx as an example of someone whose politically motivated actions broadly led to more harm than good over time, in his view. One can swap in Stalin or Mao, for their Cultural and Russian Revolutions which both killed many hundreds of thousands, or some living memory political actor like George W. Bush or the 9/11 airplane hijackers themselves for their political actions inciting and stoking the flames of the War on Terror, which killed some 3 million in its own right. The paper condemns all of these people for their part in mass murder, and thinks the world would have probably been a better place if they did nothing at all.

Marx doesn’t fit in to this group. All he did of consequence was write books. Stalin, Mao, and George W Bush all directly or indirectly ordered the murder of millions. Marx just wrote theory which only when misapplied by a violent state led to suffering. Marx never killed anyone!

It seems to me to be a gross intellectual error to conflate Marx with mass murderers. Marx’s theories were popular among revolutionaries at the time of Lenin’s rise and he took advantage of that appeal when he styled himself a Marxist. But even then he created his own theories we call Marxist-Leninism, so called because they are not based purely on Marx.

To say Marx played any real part in mass murder is like saying the Nasis were socialists because they put “socialist” in their name - intellectually vacant. I implore you - do not put so much stock in the writing of someone who has led you down this path! There are better answers out there without these gross errors.

Lol this is ridiculous

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