[earthboundkid]

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

[roenxi]

Yes and no. There are large amount of economics where the describing what is going on doesn't change the outcome.

Eg, a free market puts tremendous downwards pressure on profit margins. Identifying that means the powers that be fight against free markets with hook and crook - but it doesn't change the fact that if there is a free market it will find an equilibrium where people are indifferent to starting a new business.

[smegger001]

SO what you are saying is we should distinguish between a descriptive, and predictive science.

[earthboundkid]

The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting. You’re so blinded by it that you’re just assuming that the theory is correct, so therefore the theory can’t have an effect!

A) empirically, that was wrong and disastrously so (not as bad as communism but very bad) B) assuming reflexivity can’t exist is silly even within the neoliberal framework. It’s like assuming that the dollar bill you see on the sidewalk must be fake because it’s there.

[roenxi]

If you want a citation; that little theory is vaguely from Karl Marx. Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III according to Wikipedia [0]. Pretty good theory, and somewhat older than 40 years.

Notwithstanding that, what you say may be true.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

[pdonis]

> The last forty years has been shaped by neoliberalism, which is exactly based on the idea of free markets as self-correcting.

This is not only wrong, it's laughable. Governmental interference in the economy has grown over the last forty years, not shrunk. And not with good outcomes, either: the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling over a period of decades finally catching up with everyone.

[progre]

> the crash of 2008-2009 was due to too much government meddling

I thought it was because of irresponsible speculation in dubious securities backed by by corrupt rating houses?

[pdonis]

Irresponsible speculation in dubious securities by investment banks who knew the government would bail them out (or bail out the insurance companies underwriting their risk, which comes to the same thing) because they were "too big to fail".

And the dubious securities themselves were derivatives based on the housing market, which was in a huge bubble caused by government policies that basically forced banks to lend to people who couldn't afford the loans in order to encourage home ownership, as antepodius pointed out.

[antepodius]

The US government had a policy of increasing home ownership through affordable housing.

[abathur]

I agree with the core premise (scholarships of society are more reflexive), but this nonetheless made me wonder about the relative rates of incarceration and suspicious death among practitioners of the various arts and social sciences.

[beambot]

When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron.

Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.

[earthboundkid]

I agree that absent Locke, there would be no US as we know it.

[inerte]

We also got eugenics based on “science”

[lopmotr]

We've successfully applied it to animals so it works. Just because it's against your sense of morals doesn't mean it's not based on real science.

[shash]

The problem with eugenics isn’t the idea of selective breeding, but the conflation of mostly irrelevant traits or uninheritable traits with important and inheritable ones. Leading to a loss of genetic diversity and concentration of genetic diseases.

“If done right”, but I doubt it can ever _be_ done right...

[alexashka]

Huh? You can cherry pick an attempt to do something in any discipline and then go on to doubt if it can ever be done right.

What you said is not even an argument - it is just an expression of personal preference towards specific actions.

I like apples, you like bananas, where do we go from here?

I heard somewhere that there are three types of information: facts, fiction and fiction masquerading as facts.

It seems to me that you're engaging in the third type, as are many others who hear an opinion that seems to make sense and aligns with their preconceived preferences, which they then go on to repeat with an incredible level of certainty. I'd argue 99% of what people say is of this variety, which is a problem because it is so pervasive, that hardly anyone seems to notice. It's like we're in the matrix, maaan.

[shash]

> What you said is not even an argument - it is just an expression of personal preference towards specific actions.

Which is the whole point. Eugenics is “fiction masquerading as fact”, as you put it. The core hypothesis (selective breeding works) is sound, but the traits that historical Eugenicists were trying to breed into the populace were all subjective, fictional correlates of what they thought were desirable. It’s not about MY preconceived preferences, but about what preconceived preferences the person running the eugenics experiment has.

When I say it can’t be done “right”, what I mean is that what constitutes the “eu-“ part of eugenics, meaning “good” or “best” is inherently subjective, and the choices of a particular experiment may end up being counterproductive to the goal of creating the “best” humans.

[alexashka]

This 'everything is subjective' non-sense is fiction masquerading as fact of the highest calibre.

People liking water and not liking dying of thirst is not subjective.

You're using 'everything is subjective' to defend 'I don't have the faith in humanity to not fuck it up' and you cannot do that because everything is subjective is a non-sensical claim. What you're really expressing is deep pessimism, which I happen to share :)

What I think we should say is, eugenics is an excellent idea, but the current ruling elite is too infantile to implement it in a way that wouldn't lead to a dystopia of one type or another.

---

Another interesting thought is to contemplate that we already enable some to breed and raise children in far better circumstances than other people, by design. Is that not eugenics? We're doing selective breeding and providing selective advantages and we always have. Is that not eugenics?

If you ask me, I'd rather we go extinct because of a scientific experiment of immense beauty, than the usual petty fight for limited resources where the rich sit back and watch, while the innocent slaughter each other by the millions.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Eugenics was an idea pondered by the ancient Greeks. I’m not defending it, but it’s not the brainchild of a certain genocidal political party that many people seem to think it is.

[throwaway2048]

Not sure how that changes anything about it being psuedoscientific garbage

[lopmotr]

What do you mean? It's selective breeding for humans the same as we do for farm animals and cats and dogs. It's not pseudoscientific.

[TheOtherHobbes]

No - it's pseudo moral. It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots who don't even understand the limits of the science - or why breeding humans like farm animals really isn't such a great idea.

[catalogia]

The GP didn't seem to claim it was moral. Making nerve gas isn't moral either, but that has nothing to do with whether making nerve gas is pseudochemistry.

[pluto9]

> It's reviled because proponents are reliably racist idiots

It's reviled because it's inherently immoral. Its proponents are indeed usually racist idiots, but even if they had the best of intentions, it would still be immoral.

[mistermann]

Is part of it not based on breeding, which we have done with plants and animals?

[naushniki]

By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.

[stanfordkid]

Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.

[jaundermann]

Maybe, but the laws as we know them do. People create and change them.

[stanfordkid]

Sure. But updating the equations doesn't change the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment or make a ball fall up instead of down -- it simply converges on a more precise outcome.