Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Is there a term for the division of broad social/political views, going back to Plato vs. Aristotle, between “top-down” design and “bottom-up” evolution? Plato’s Politeía (“Republic”) tends to the prescriptive, focusing on designing a utopian ideal city-state from first principles, while Aristotle’s Politiká (“Politics”) is rather more descriptive, and views communities as growing out of humans’ social nature. The former view includes James C. Scott’s “high modernism” and his examples in Seeing Like a State. (It’s also the sort of thing that contributes to stuff like the Tanganyika groundnut scheme.)
It also seems to relate to a kind of view I like to describe as “creationist-adjacent”, in that it holds that unguided “evolutionary” processes are by nature so “crude,” “clumsy,” “random,” et cetera that their products are never anywhere near the trade-off frontier, and further, that a moderately competent intelligent designer is guaranteed to produce something far superior with only moderate effort. For one stark example, the idea that free-market competition and selection forces on firms, greed-driven and chaotic, can only give rise to an economy so inefficient that a few Marxist central planners would quite obviously be able to intelligently design a vastly superior and more productive economy from the top-down.
(Some of the people I’ve encountered with radically optimistic expectations of what human genetic engineering will achieve in the next few decades seem to me to derive those expectations from a similar view.)
In case you can’t tell, I’m with Aristotle on this one. Indeed, that’s one of the main reasons for asking: is there a good term for my position, opposing “high modernism” and “top-down” central planning (particularly of the “one-size-fits-all” variety), in favor of local, “bottom-up” evolved systems?
Isn't this just the authoritarian/libertarian axis in the (modern, memed-to-death version of the) political compass? Though I guess on the libertarian end of that there's perhaps only an alliance of convenience between the pragmatic "these are usually the best rules for evolving better systems" believers and the idealistic "these are the human rights we must never violate" believers.
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