@Riggerjack, excellent analogy of the theater, thank you.
Thank you for your generous interpretation of my post.
I haven't been posting here for a while, because I have noticed my tendency to post what I think of as "yes, but" posts, where I am trying to point out the missing piece not mentioned in the post I am replying to. My problem is I seem to run out of steam, without giving enough information to follow my own models.
The post above is a great example of me running out of steam before getting all the important details into the post.
Jacob is referring to the Cipolla model, wherein stupid people are defined as "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." As such, I don't think stupid people as a derogatory term, but as a class of actions. And when I am honest, I can apply the term to myself when my actions warrant it (such as the post above).
My post above reads like an autistic rant on societal privilege. That wasn't where I meant to go.
What I was trying to express is that "stupid", looks different, from different perspectives. And that up close, a stupid choice can look like a reasonable decision, given the information and priors of the stupid person making the choice. That when one understands this, one can then look at the information and priors available to the stupid person, and see that those are part of the theater design. (There was never an intent to make this individual stupid, but the sum of the theater design decisions was to make some number of GA stupid, and this number is being increased by the way we run the theater.)
Stupid people are not "managed" by the authorities in our society, but created by our society. So when authorities in our society create obstacles, they use the inherited knowledge of the box seats to show that these obstacles are necessary to herd the Stupid. While being very quiet about the secondary effects of obstacle creation, more Stupid, requiring even more obstacle creation. And more stupid, creates cover and opportunity for more banditry.
One does not see this from box seats looking down. One sees this by studying obstacle creation and effects.
An excellent example would be how we handled Covid, masking and truthiness. If one believes that public health officials were protecting one from stupid by adding a low obstacle of obvious lies, then it is reasonable to see this as "good administration". That was an obstacle down in GA, helping keep the stupids away from the stairways. No real harm, because stupid will be stupid
On the other hand, if one perceives stupid people trying to make reasonable decisions from the stupid options presented to them, the harm is obvious, and the cause is environmental. Then one needs to attend to how that environment that promotes/nurtures stupid and bandit behavior is created and maintained. (This leads to looking at theater design.)
From that perspective, one can see the public health response as causative, rather than preventative of stupidity. Adding unnecessary obstacles, that in no way mitigated the behavior of stupid, but did cause stupid behavior to be highlighted.
From there, rather than focus on how the theater protects one from stupidity, one can focus on how the obstacles that create the incentives that drive stupid/bandit behavior are a vital part of our theater design.
I know that Jacob is working on the metacrisis. I was trying to point out that the tool he was holding up as being designed to protect from stupidity, is in fact creating stupidity.
I believe this to be very common in the G-ladder of the MOC model. Tools with a primary function that is tracked, and many "unintended but perfectly obvious consequences", that aren't.
I posted, because if one is still thinking in terms of stupid people, and protective theater design, I don't know how one would make any progress on the metacrisis problem.
@RJ- Aren't you essentially making the case for determinism? That people don't have a strong sense of agency and are set on predetermined paths by the overarching society.
Um... no. I am trying to make clear the feedback loop between managing stupid, and creating the incentives for more stupid choices. And that accepting the view from one's own seat, where ever it may be, is not sufficient to show one the information necessary to understand the problem.
For what it's worth, David Graeber's book "Utopia of rules" goes down similar lines to what I am trying to express, and he's a far better communicator.
BUT...now where do we find ourselves? Yes, everything is relative and the objective is better known as the inter-subjective, and every thesis has its anti-thesis...
Yet, we still wish to be happier and retain our own teeth into old age and get laid and read good books maybe even fly in a dirigible to Paris one day, so we require some means by which to figure out what set of practices will best serve our dividual or transdividual purposes, so...yikes, once again we’re constructing a hierarchy, but let’s, please, be more careful, much more self-aware, much more aware of the perspectives of others, so as to not construct hierarchies whose purpose (whether blatant or blind) is to reinforce status rather than to point the way forward.
Well, to be clear, I am pointing out problems with our current hierarchy design. I'm of the opinion that tall hierarchies are better at creating/exporting issues than resolving them, and that this is what an effective modern hierarchy is
for. But it's hard to make that case when so much of what we know/believe is determined by our preprogrammed experiences within such organizations.
If one is still watching stupid, and being comforted by the obstacles that make them so entertaining to watch, one is not thinking about the circumstances creating stupid. One is instead performing one's intended role, and supporting the theater.
This severely restricts one's solution space for the metacrisis.
