This stuff is analogous to PID controllers in robotics. Position, integral, derivative.
- these seem to usually be used when the sensor is ignorant of ground truth in some sense. Is that a cause of the political attitudes? Maybe inherently contested concepts Lead to this kind of debate?
- When are these suboptimal and is this linked to the failures of political discourse?
Trajectory, location, and rate of change progressivism, conservatism, and reaction.
- can wrap up essay by saying it seems like there are some people who are progressivists about the rate of change, (e/accs), but none who are progressivists about the rate of change of the rate of change. Except these people do exist in the minds of conservatives or reactionaries mental models of progressives. People’s models of other people are fixed by how a moving body would appear to another moving body in space, e.g. accelerating towards vs. away from, but maybe not moving relative to absolute space. What is absolute space here though? The world/ground truth? Seems quite realist.
- Would be nice to come back and use this model to explain rational political polarisation. see Kevin Dorst blog post
Mostly aesthetics - One form of conservatism is a simple attachment to the familiar, and consequent resistance to change. Another form is the assertion that such-and-such form of life and of society (fill in the blank: feudal, Christian, etc)—one that, as it happens, was realized in the past—is the right one, and is known to be right; we should, therefore, return to it. If the second form of conservatism is based on knowledge, a third form, the one of interest here, is based on skepticism. What Hume said about our capacity to know, this conservative says about our capacity to live well. Edmund Burke was this kind of conservative; explaining his opposition to the French Revolution, he wrote
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.
Does progressivism/conservatism arranged in order of epistemic humility map neatly on to these distinctions?
Joseph Henrich’s The Secret to Our Success is a book about culture and evolution, but really it is a secret case for Burkean conservatism.
There are the abstract descriptions of beliefs about change, and then the more concrete understructure of these beliefs, which are typically beliefs about the drivers of that change, e.g. beliefs about capitalism, technology, immigration, etc. There’s often a conflict between conserving rates of change and conserving states.
Should mention the everyone driving slower than me is a moron, everyone driving faster is a maniac for relativism?