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but the real reason is...
Aug. 3rd, 2019 12:33 pmWhen I was a child and learning about why democracy is great, the reasons given would be stuff like "it's fair!" or "if we ask everyone, we're more likely to get the right answer!". There's nothing wrong with telling children that, but if you asked me now I'd say things like "regularly changing who is in power prevents violent revolutions" and "politicians want to stay in power and the fact they might get voted out gives them non-zero reason to care about popular opinion". It seems likely that someone finds these reasons just as naïve as the earlier ones, I'm certainly nothing like an expert of why and how political systems work. (And of course, many people answer 'Why does democracy work?' with 'It doesn't'.)
Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan talk about how education isn't about learning. You might explicitly model yourself as going to university and learning things that make you better at a job (or just make you a well-rounded human being, or something), and maybe some learning is happening, but the actual value there is just proving to an employer that you are smart and conscientious. This view does not seem to be mainstream, either among educators or students. Are Hanson and Caplan right? How should I know?
theunitofcaring recently got some anons about circumcision, whether it should be illegal, and whether you should have a religious exemption. They were replying to an older post where she says she is in favour of a religious exemption, and that a lot of people don't understand why religious exemptions exist. It's not that we think, as a general rule, "if your religion says you have to do something then we are going to let you". Modern society bans lots of things mandated by religion. It's a cost-benefit analysis of "if we ban circumcision, some religious groups are going to do it in secret or travel somewhere else where it is legal and enforcing the law even in those cases would mean babies would risk dying because their parents wouldn't take them to the hospital after an improperly performed circumcision". This cost-benefit analysis makes sense for some religious exemptions and not for others. But if you were a politician announcing a circumcision ban with an exemption for Orthodox Jews, you would probably say things about respecting religious sentiment and not about cost-benefit analyses.
Some people in Argentina have recently tried (unsuccessfully) to decriminalise abortion. One of the stated arguments of the pro-choice side is that the same number of abortions happens either way, but with decriminalisation they happen at hospitals and fewer people with unwanted pregnancies die. I am also pro-choice, but I don't think that argument is correct. I'm fairly sure you'd get more abortions if they were decriminalised, and I think that's acceptable anyway.
Society does not keep a big book of "Things we told you we were doing for one reason but we were doing for a different one", to give out to children once they are considered mature enough to understand. Partly because many of these aren't lies to children, they are lies to adults. Partly because sometimes, nobody knows what the real reason is.
What was going through the heads of ancient Athenians when they decided democracy was a good idea? What about the American Founding Fathers? What about the subsequent independence movements in the Americas, like the one that resulted in my country being a democracy and me reading books aimed at children about it? Did they think it was fair and just? Did they think a democratically elected ruler had some guarantees of competence, or a decision arrived at by popular vote was likely to be better? Did they think it was a good way to balance incentives or prevent revolutions? Was it just one thing they could sell to everyone else?
If education really does work how Hanson and Caplan view it, then it would seem this is not because people actually involved in making the decisions of how education works thought so. And I think part of this thesis is that we make bad decisions about how to spend money on education, because we have the wrong model in mind.
If everyone thinks religious exemptions happen because of a general principle that religious rules are important, they might either say "Hey, we need to add a bunch of new exceptions" or "Hey, actually, we don't think that's a good principle, let's get rid of them".
If you think abortion decriminalisation is only justified because it doesn't increase the total number of abortions, and then after carefully measuring it turns out it does, are you going to campaign to roll it back? And when I say that was never the reason, are you going to call me a hypocrite?
If you ask people around the town and everyone tells you that Chesterton's fence was just there to keep away Chesterton's bull, are you gonna tear it down now that the bull is dead? Has someone built anything else, knowing the fence was there?
It seems to me it is easier to look at things and observe there are hidden reasons than it is to find the real reasons. You can learn the lesson "there are lies to children" and decide, well, I came up with something that sounds appropriately cynical, that must be it. And nobody is actually going to spell out the reasons for you, so how will you know if you got it wrong?
And you might, in all that, lose track that even if you found something cynical to say, and even if you think that sounds like what The People In Power would actually do, ultimately what you need to know is not the reasons anyone had but the reasons it actually works (and the ways in which it doesn't). But we don't keep track of that. Maybe because we never knew it. Maybe because working to figure it out would make it harder to sell the palatable lies.
