Thursday, November 04, 2004
Why Katie is wrong: We should not wipe out all males and start over with a female dominated society, because . . .
"However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up. [ . . . ] And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. " - Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
His argument is a somewhat better than mine, which was a little more along the lines of "that's a crazy feminist thing to say."
"However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up. [ . . . ] And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. " - Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
His argument is a somewhat better than mine, which was a little more along the lines of "that's a crazy feminist thing to say."
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"And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society"
I disagree with this statement. I agree that it is impossible to predict the behavior of a single human being, but I believe that it is much much easier to predict the behavior of millions or even billions of humans. In fact, I'd say that the more people you have in a group, the easier it becomes to predict their behavior.
I disagree with this statement. I agree that it is impossible to predict the behavior of a single human being, but I believe that it is much much easier to predict the behavior of millions or even billions of humans. In fact, I'd say that the more people you have in a group, the easier it becomes to predict their behavior.
ok allan wins round 1, a large population samples would tend to normalize and be easier to predict than individual behavior, maybe. But what's the goal here? -less people dying? it's a pretty big initial investment, to wipe out half the population for uncertain future returns.
Prediction would become easier as soon as there is more than one person. Two people would be easier to predict than one. It would still be almost impossible to predict the behavior of two people though. But there is no magical cutoff point where it suddenly becomes easy to predict the behavior. I would think it would be more of a linear equation....or maybe exponential. I don't really know, I'm just kinda making all this up. Seems logical to me though.
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