curi

Please consider yourself to have no obligations to me, and continue things only if you want to.

It's a bit like doing rewrites of major production systems. Not a good idea. But of course it's much worse because human culture is more complex than a computer program.

But also like major production systems, we definitely can improve them. Now we just need unit tests for cultures to make refactoring easier.

And it's not reasonable to fear the unknown on principle. Being "conservative" by avoiding an advance doesn't make sense in isolation. It might cause a problem. It also might solve one. We don't know that. We do know technology is useful.

But "gung ho" doesn't sound right. Sometimes we have a substantive idea about a way an upcoming technology could be dangerous. In that case we should respect and consider that foresight, not just charge forward anyway.

BTW David Deutsch's TED talk touches on this.

It's not clear to me how to judge which is better, but it is clear to me that both are awesome.

Let's team up. How about you become a billionaire and I'll keep working on befriending you.

you create wealth. you give it to other people in exchange for money -- for promises to pay you back in wealth later. then accumulating money means you don't call in those promises, you just hold on to them. as long as you do that, other people got wealth you created, and you haven't gotten anything back yet. (well of course you spent some money, but the more you accumulate, the less you've asked in return for what you did)

But you seem to have brought up your own imperfection as a point of possible disagreement. I'm guessing that has more to do with this other issue:

The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him.

Here your comments about different ways people can be unreasonable are important. If a problem is due to someone's ignorance then it makes sense that good ideas can solve the problem. Ideas clearly are capable of reducing ignorance.

If it's a problem of akrasia, lack of self control, emotions run wild, or solidly entrenched bad ideas, then what to do is less clear. What if the person, adult or child, won't listen to reason? If what he wants isn't based a reasoned decision then why would reason change his mind?

I have some answers to those questions. But first I want to check in to see if you agree so far, and if this is the sort of question you are interested in.

PS FYI I might potentially be able to give a more helpful reply in private; I try to avoid personal comments in public about both myself and others.

(I'd just vote but I can't.)

What parents don't generally do is have an attitude of trying to get whatever their child likes. They do that "within reasonable limits". Reasonable being a matter of their own judgment. They have preconceived ideas about what shows are bad, and try to avoid their child finding out about them instead of refuting the bad ideas. They fear "bad influences", instead of thinking that the worse an idea is, the less persuasive it is.

One consequence of this attitude is that sometimes children want something, and their parents refuse, supposedly for the child's own good, and the child gets upset. Plenty of parents would, if their kid saw an episode of Veggie Tales (or whatever) and liked and repeated some ideas from it, say "omg the evil christians are polluting his mind" and forbid him from seeing the second episode that he's looking forward to. That's the wrong approach. Keeping people ignorant of ideas you think are bad is not the path to the truth.

Yeah, that is the thing I've been disagreeing about.

I don't think "stuff the parent thinks is good/bad" is a reasonable criterion for what a child gets to see or not. It should be the child's decision, with advice from his parent.

The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him. If your child wants to see a religious video despite your advice, then he should see it. If it's full of dumb ideas it won't be very persuasive anyway, right? Certainly not more persuasive than the wise parent..?

(I'm assuming it was killed automatically so humans don't have to take the time to moderate all his comments.)