[danblick]

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"

I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":

"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""

https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/

[ren_engineer]

>You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have

sounds like Chesterton's fence to some degree

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

>In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

[timoth3y]

Hayek was talking about something more fundamental. There are countless of beliefs and behaviors we have to accept and internalize before we can even talk about changing a fence. "What is a fence? Can people respect access to property? Why can people own property? Why should we respect a fence?"

For the most part we do so unconsciously and unquestioningly.

We could not function in society if we stopped to question everything. Society is far too complex for any one person to understand "all of it."

The only reason society works at all is because we all tacitly agree to follow most of the rules without question. It's only when we shine a spotlight on a particular rule that we thin about it at all.

[csours]

The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time.

Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer?

Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money?

Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs?

For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place.

The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.

[tshaddox]

This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.

[BurningFrog]

You ask a difficult and important question.

The two relevant ideas I know are:

1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.

2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.

The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.

I'm not a conservative myself, but as I've grown older and wiser, I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.

[pdonis]

The short answer is, you can't. But you might be misinterpreting what Hayek is referring to by "the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society". Here is what he says a little later on, when he is comparing the individualist approach he advocates with the alternative:

"So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one."

[heavyset_go]

The only time I've seen the quote, or similar ones to it, trotted out is to imply that the person being addressed by it is ignorant or doesn't understand something. It's an easy way to dismiss facts or arguments without really considering or addressing them in good faith.

[imgabe]

The GP said aspects of society you don't understand. You changed "don't understand" to "seems terrible". Those aren't the same thing. This doesn't require you to accept things that you find terrible.

[mandmandam]

You're not wrong.

However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc

Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.

[GhettoComputers]

We say that women cannot eat this food, its religion. We don't question it. They study the food and find it is toxic, causes abortions or fetal development issues, but the meaning was lost, its now our religion.

[starfallg]

This is exactly the reason why social media is so dangerous.

The strength of Western society was that we had freedoms that were managed by a elaborate social and information architecture that ensures we don't drift too far beyond the bounds (such as ethical failure in public office and being anti-science). Once you remove this it you find that there is a limit to how much 'free' speech can correct itself, and we discover how easy it is to divide and manipulate people with misinformation.

[seer]

Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. And since there was a wide range of those countries with varying degrees of “rate of cultural change” you could really study the results. Those that changed more and faster, ended up much better than the “slow and steady” approach.

In my humble opinion what’s going on here is not that changing a society quickly is better, its that there is not just the society you live in. You might not understand why certain things are in either, but you can certainly observe the results.

A lot of the baltic state’s citizens didn’t _really_ understand how the west was structured, but they liked the results and figured “they must be doing something right”.

You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

I’m always inspired by Rwanda’s story - such an incredibly troubled place, and the president upon taking power - packed his bags and _just traveled_ along the world with his cabinet to investigate why some small newly developed countries were successful. Talk to them, emulate it and low and behold - it helped their country enormously.

[ajuc]

> The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture.

At least in Poland it wasn't perceived as "changing the culture" as much as "reforming the economy" and "returning to where our culture would naturally be if not for partitions and soviet occupation".

Which you can argue about, but if not anything else - presenting it that way was a successful social hack. Unemployment was 20% for a while in 90s but there were surprisingly few attempts to reverse the reforms. In fact only now that the perception is "we made it" - all the cultural problems are resurfacing.

[JadeNB]

> Revolutions like the French one led to terrible consequences in the end, mostly because people didn’t know what they were doing, and they just made it up as they went along. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore. We have countless examples of ideas from other cultures we can emulate and know at least the direction they would push society. At least that’s my humble opinion.

This sounds like a classic sort of "those were the bad old times, but now we live in modern times" argument. How should I know when facing a problem whether we live in the modern times when solutions are well mapped and I should copy someone else's, or the bad old times (relative to that problem) when solutions are poorly understood and/or implemented and I'm better off with gradually exploring the possibilities myself?

[xorcist]

You could just as easily argue that it was the Baltics that took the slow and steady approach. They built up a civil society to support the economic changes.

At least from the outside, it looks like the bigger country to the east just handed out private ownership to the upper echelon, because surely that's what made west economically successful.

Not sure how accurate that description is, of course. Their economies were vastly different from the start. The Baltic region also has historical and cultural ties to the Nordic region. But at least there are different viewpoints here.

[aqsalose]

>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.

[1] https://yle-fi.translate.goog/uutiset/3-12220417?_x_tr_sl=au...

[GhettoComputers]

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society.

> (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.)

Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and society, I think of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents where the individual can never be free.

[cortesoft]

I think you are talking about the problem of Collective Action and the Free Rider problem... I think they are a little different, because those are situations about needing to cooperate for the best outcome, but having no way to enforce cooperation while having individual incentives to not cooperate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

[chii]

> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes

it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortfalls consistently.

[vkk8]

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

[IcyClAyMptHe]

I'll have to check that out. It's something I (as an atheist) feel as well. There seem to be a number of religious practices which align quite nicely with mental health practices. The ones that immediately spring to mind are responsibility transfer (short-circuiting anxiety spirals by throwing faith into an imaginary party who says it will all be ok), and "gratitude" practices - practicing thankfulness for what you have, meeting quite nicely with the practice of saying grace before a meal.

At first glance it seems foolish for a poor family praising their god for the pittance of food in front of them, but the idea that pausing to be grateful for what little they do have may make them feel better mentally (regardless of the wider injustice of the situation) has merit.

[blumomo]

Religion isn’t about believing in the bearded man in the sky. To me it is about developing a wiser and healthier mind. That includes understanding things which are at times hard to believe at first. But that mustn’t necessarily be whether there’s that man in the sky. It could also mean whether there’s actual other life in the universe, maybe even more intelligent life which eventually degraded into the bearded man due the lack of a wise, developed mind. Maybe.

[joe_the_user]

Another problem here is that the when society reaches scale of extreme complexity is the point when cultural practice stop being shared. After all, sharing unstated culture is clearly hard than sharing overt culture.

[gbrindisi]

This reminded me of https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-sma...

[NumberCruncher]

> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever."

Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.

[DarylZero]

LOL imagine a black person believing any of that bullshit

[AtlasBarfed]

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great.

Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them.

But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society.

Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

[jlawson]

Simple example, but racism is simply a form of genetic ingroup preference.

Can you imagine, perchance, how groups who practiced ingroup preference would, over time, come to outcompete and ultimately defeat/destroy/dissolve groups that didn't?

Does it seem clear to you why all historical societies practiced ingroup preference, and the vast majority still do? Or are you confused on how that works?

Our society's concept of who the ingroup should be defined as is novel and still in flux. In fact it's pretty much the core question that is dividing our civilization at this point. Confusion on this point may well still lead to our downfall in the long term, so don't feel so certain about the simplistic moral narratives that are taught in school.

We still don't know how any of this will turn out. Certainly rival societies like China are not following our path - be humble enough to recognize that they may turn out to be right.

[davnn]

I wonder if that idea also makes sense in an organizational context. Big corporations often seem very ineffective on first sight, yet they produce something meaningful nevertheless.

[WalterBright]

Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.)

Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.

[ClumsyPilot]

"the free market works well"

Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic, too much corruption like in Russia, too much monopoly like with Standard Oil, too many shenanigans leading to 2008-style meltdown (imagine that without central bank support), given working police and the justice system which is missing in many developing countries, given basic infrastructure like roads and electricity etc, etc.

[nickpp]

I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

People will still look for a planner though…

[WalterBright]

The free market works well in spite of downvotes, too!

[enimodas]

Work well as long as you don't care about externalities such as polution, congestion; poisoning, maiming and killing consumers and employees

[rjbwork]

The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor.

Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

The point I'm making is that the mechanisms by which an economy chooses what to produce are distinct by the mechanisms which determine who is in control of those choices are distinct from who the proceeds from the production accrues to.

[generalizations]

Didn't even bother to read the citation for that statement?

> This has now been true for over a century, and as early as 1855 J. S. Mill could say (see my John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor [London and Chicago, 1951], p. 216) that "almost all the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide."

> I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy.

Textbook example of an ad homenim.