I ran back across this quote today, from one of Jonah Goldberg’s G-Files from a few years ago:
In Suicide of the West, I argued that our biggest cultural problem is that entitlement has eclipsed gratitude. This seems to be a variation of that. We all want to know stuff, but we increasingly resent the idea of having to learn it. It’s like wanting to be in great shape but not wanting to exercise. And when we discover something—like, say, the colonial divisions of Africa—that is actually important and useful to us, our sense of entitlement leads us to think it must have been hidden from us on purpose. Even our own ignorance is someone else’s fault. The proper (and healthier) response to learning something interesting that you didn’t know is gratitude. “Hey, thanks! I didn’t know that.”
In the piece ($) he’s making the argument that just because you didn’t know something doesn’t mean you were slighted, or that someone that does know the thing was advantaged against you. They may have had an advantage of some sort. But most often that person went out of their way to earn said knowledge.
It reminds me of something I used to hear earlier in my career from colleagues. When I’d advocate learning or reading up on a particular skill (one I enjoyed having invested in), I’d hear variants of “well that’s easy for you to say, you already know X”, or “yeah of course you’d be in favor of that, you got to learn Y already”. It used to piss me off royally, the entitled lack of respect.
That I knew how to use Linux or the command line or how to write coherently — these weren’t gifts from above. And at the time I had no explicit understanding that these things would become valuable skills to me later in life. I spent countless hours in college building and rebuilding computers, reading books, and writing on the internet because I enjoyed them and saw some value in them for myself — all while the critics were partying or watching TV instead.
There’s a common misconception that evolution is “seeking” fitness — that there’s some inherent motivation in the process pushing toward a particular objective.
But evolution is an undirected process of mutation, testing, and accidental discovery of fitness. Within the genes of an organism, there is no memory acquiring feedback from these experimental genetic guesses. Genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection are evolution’s conjecture and criticism. But the criticism feedback loop doesn’t close in a single generation.
Evolution’s feedback loop is survival. If a gene survives, it will replicate. If it doesn’t, that mutation is “found” not to have worked (though the genes themselves never receive the message directly)1. A gene’s only goal (if one can call it that) is to copy itself. The environment provides the pressure to select one mutation over another. But the environment has no goal either. It merely is, and genes have evolved to continually mutate, then poke and prod at the environment to perpetuate their replication.
Though from the Big Bang to now it appears evolution is seeking ever-higher forms of intelligence, this too is deceiving. There are no steps on a ladder, no “global maximum” on offer. Further complexity often confers an advantage, but not always. This fact fools us into believing evolution is in search of higher-order complexity on purpose.
We’re fooled into believing there’s an objective because humans have a tendency to seek patterns. Because we ourselves can conceptualize abstract goals and proceed incrementally on a planned path, we imbue evolution with a similar characteristic.
Evolution is a soup of primitive ingredients being continually mixed, matched, and tested against the chaotic environment around it. When thought of as its own form of knowledge creation distinct from the way human-created knowledge works, it’s a helpful mental model for thinking about all forms of complex adaptive systems.
The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.
A good summary of Hayek’s famous 1974 address, “A Pretence of Knowledge.” Thinking you can “figure everything out” with expertise is dangerous.
If we truly wish to improve society, we must be humble and realize the bounds of what is possible with social science. Rather than attempting to shape society directly like a sculptor shapes a statue, we must seek instead to understand and to create the right environment for progress, like a gardener in a garden. Overconfidence in the use of science to control society will make a man a tyrant, and will lead to the destruction of a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has instead grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
