Sunday, July 21, 2024

It is an unsolvable problem just like all the other unsolvable problems we have solved.

From Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies? by Dan Williams.  The subheading is A deep dive into four factors that prevent members of open societies from understanding political reality: complexity, invisibility, incentives, and politically motivated cognition.  He discussing the epistemic challenges for individuals in a large, complex, evolving attention economy where the rewards of deceit can be large, and the probability of punishment is small.  

It used to be that institutions (Church, Guilds, Associations, Political Parties, Cultural Norms, Social Norms, etc.) functioned as epistemic stabilizers but that has eroded.  Technology has exacerbated the problem but the decline in epistemic functionality of institutions has made the problem far worse.

This has an important implication: In ordinary social life (and in the small-scale societies that characterise almost all of human evolution), humans can typically check what people tell them against reality. That is, although our species has always depended on communication and social trust, we can often test people’s trustworthiness. If Harry tells me that Sally is dull, and I learn firsthand that she is exciting and interesting, I will decrease my trust in Harry.

Nothing like this is true in democratic politics. We can rarely directly verify the information we acquire from others. We can cross-check it against the competing testimony of others, but we cannot directly verify that testimony either. This complicates the optimistic vision of a “marketplace of ideas.”

Williams is markedly pessimistic about how the challenge might be resolved.

I am less despondent.  We are humans.  The value of knowledge and wisdom is increasing.  Our old mechanisms for creating and transmitting knowledge and wisdom have eroded due to global prosperity, integration, and ideological assault.  Hayek's The Knowledge Problem is ever more real.

But we are humans, we do respond to incentives, and our responses are often innovative.

Yes, it is easy to see the existing degradation.

Yes, it is hard to see how we restore epistemic functionality as we once had.

But I am confident we will find better ways of creating and transmitting knowledge and wisdom.  In ways we don't yet anticipate.

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