yRegge

Smart people disagree ON societal design. Wise people disagree WITH societal design. Below, Crow defends Shear's idea by saying that he is a "smart, thoughtful dude". If you defend an idea by saying its author is smart and thoughtful, you reveal your underlying assumption of bad ideas come from stupid or thoughtless people. That's not so. Stupid or thoughtless people don't have bad ideas for what Crow calls "societal design"; they have NO ideas. The really bad ideas come from smart people. There's hidden traps in certain IQ levels, and the largest and most dangerous one is "I can design a better society". People fall so in love with their own intelligence that they get seduced by this one great-sounding idea they have for fixing everything or making everything better. It is that category of idea that ends up getting millions of people killed and collapsing entire civilizations. Everything works on paper because you assumed that people are rational actors, or that everyone has perfect market knowledge, or that prices don't carry information, or that the chicken is a sphere (to make the math easier). But in practice, kaboom. People with ideas like this are doubly dangerous precisely because they are so intelligent. They are good at making just-so stories that sounds workable, and they are good at convincing others that their ideas will work. And decades later, people are wondering why insulin costs as much as a mortgage payment. See, society doesn't advance through policy. It doesn't advance with big central plan from a really smart guy, executed by hordes of minions all marching in the same direction. It advances when some dude decides to try something on his own, and 99 times out of 100, he blows himself up or goes bankrupt, but that other 1 time, it works and everyone imitates him. All of this is why you get a lot of socialists between IQs of 115 and, say, 135. It's not because socialism appeals to the intellect. It's because socialism appeals to the intellectual. It presents him with the prospect of a ready source of centralized power that he can harness to solve all of society's problems with the power of HIS massive brain and brilliant ideas, and then everyone will oooh and aaaaah over how smart he is, just like mom did when he was 7 years old and he solved a difficult math problem. Policy ideas tend to come from people who put lots of points into intelligence and charisma, but used wisdom as a dump stat, and consequently they can understand the concept of Chesterton's fence, but they're also oh-so-very-good at convincing themselves that it doesn't apply here. So, to make myself crystal clear: Socialism isn't just an example of a bad idea in societal design. It is a bad idea because societal design itself is a bad idea.