[HN Gopher] Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight t...
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Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever
made
Author : longdefeat
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-07-28 01:59 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
| coderintherye wrote:
| I think you can apply the author's thinking to also looking at
| how our societal and economic outcomes relate to our
| circumstances of birth. People want to delude themselves into
| believing they succeeded from "hard work" where others were lazy
| rather than recognizing that had another seed been planted in
| your place and nurtured with the same resources (or lack thereof)
| it'd probably have equal chances of having surpassed your success
| as it would have of having withered in failure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In a free country, the circumstances of one's birth matter the
| least.
| whatshisface wrote:
| People still deserve credit or blame for their actions even if
| some percentage within their demographic will do more than them
| and some percentage will end up in jail. (Whether you deserve
| any credit for making money is another question...)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Indeed, even if you take a completely deterministic view of
| human behavior, you still have different people at the end of
| the day.
|
| Someone fated by circumstance to commit murder, is still a
| person that murders others. Someone fated by circumstance to
| saves lives is still saving lives.
|
| You have to figure out if you want to treat these people
| differently, even if you dont blame them for the things they
| do.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How do you find that this relates to the article? Do you really
| think that hard work as a concept is a delusion?
|
| Buy your own metaphor, a different seed planted and nurtured
| the same has a chance of success or failure. The fact that
| chances at all implies that the seed matters and not just the
| environment, otherwise any seed would be expected to have an
| identical outcome.
|
| To speak plainly, children from the same parents with the same
| opportunities can and do have drastically different lives.
|
| The crookedness the article speaks of is unpredictable and
| unique to every tree. Seeds planted in an orchard of the same
| soil do not produce identical trees
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sympathize with view in article. But straight things can be made
| from crookedness. Classic example: Single cake. Two crooked
| children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Perhaps
| argue that humanity stripped. I think not.
|
| Of course, meta-problem: how to ensure that is technique? How to
| ensure exploitation of technique: "you cut" (because I know you
| can't cut straight).
|
| Still, meaningless for technocrat to feel "annoyance with the
| recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery".
| Behaviour such as this is roughly modelable.
|
| First-order planning is "Here is a plan that will work if all
| will abide". Second-order planning is "Some will not abide. Here
| is a plan that will work given that". Third-order planning is
| "Some will not abide. Both the plan and compliance with it will
| alter the conditions of the plan. This is how the plan works
| given that." ad inf.
|
| You can hew great stability out of the unstable: A logical
| network reliable to some degree out of an unreliable physical
| network. Nothing is perfect: not knowledge (you can only reach
| some falsifiability), not networks (you can only get some
| reliability), not even logic or mathematics (since the proof is
| subject to our human fallibility).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think the author would agree with you based on their
| conclusion:
|
| >... we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our
| history: the communities we've belonged to, the friends we've
| made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and
| triumphs, the stories we've internalized about the world and
| about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us
| down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our
| crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within
| ourselves and in one another.
| dang wrote:
| I've replaced the baity word "crookedness", which was likely to
| lead to uninteresting associations and arguments, with the phrase
| "crooked timber" (from Kant) that the article itself mostly uses.
| I know it's pretentious, but in a case like this, having the
| title be a bit of an obstacle is probably a good thing - and at
| least I didn't make it say "Embrace your crooked timber of
| humanity".
|
| Edit: never mind I've got a better idea - let's just put Kant's
| line in the title.
| ninja-ninja wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| ninja-ninja wrote:
| got it, sorry
| nologic01 wrote:
| Wonderful post.
|
| I have this loose hypothesis that stacking a lot of crooked
| timber builds something that you could almost call straight. But
| it takes time and it may not be stable.
|
| In any case if biology gives you crooked timber you better become
| an expert carpender.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Conversely, a structure of crooked Timbers may be stronger due
| to its irregularity, it is just more difficult to understand
| and defies engineering.
|
| I'm reminded of Inca temples with a irregular stones, which due
| to their differences make the structure more resistant to
| earthquakes. I'm also reminded of biological diversity and
| variation, which enable species to evolve and adapt.
|
| If you want to get technical, think of the thousands of crooked
| proteins that make up our bodies, each with their unique
| properties, behaviors, and functions. Not even a proto-cell can
| be built with a uniform materials, only viruses and prions are
| identical.
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(page generated 2023-07-28 23:01 UTC)