For a different take on the consequences of being “rational”, I would highly recommend James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book summary of SSC is pretty good, but when he gives his opinion on the book he seems to have missed the point of the book entirely.
He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.
He remains focused on the expected crops per acre, even though every case study in the book illustrates that such a single variable doesn’t encompass the multitude of uses that the acre in question has. I don’t think I could describe it better than Reddit user u/TheHiveMindSpeaketh does:
The point of the book is not to point and laugh at the technocrats who failed to squeeze the most X out of Y because they didn’t listen to the noble savages. The point is that ‘how do we squeeze the most X out of Y’ is a bad way to position yourself in relation to your surroundings. The point is that technocrats often succeed in squeezing more X out of Y over a relevant period of time via their techniques, but that treating a forest like a timber-maximizer is already missing the [..] point because a forest is also a home for woodland creatures, and a source for medicinal herbs and fruits and berries, and a nice place to take a hike and stare at the stars. The point is that the mistake was not made at the level of what was implemented, the mistake was made at the level of what was valued, and the implementation mistake was an inevitable downstream consequence of that. The point is that even if traditional Tanzanian farming methods didn’t produce more crops per acre, they might still be preferable, because they are more sustainable or less time-intensive or etc, but that these benefits become unintelligible to the technocrat who has already committed to a value system where land is only judged by its yield per acre.
I personally think this is an important question for EA’s to grapple with: can we reason abstractly about doing good without this abstraction causing mistakes at the level of what to value. Scott’s technocrats surely did not think they were making that mistake, but they were. If we believe that we are somehow different, that is kind of arrogant.
For a different take on the consequences of being “rational”, I would highly recommend James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book summary of SSC is pretty good, but when he gives his opinion on the book he seems to have missed the point of the book entirely.
What do you think is the point of the book that SSC missed?
It is most apparent in this piece of the review:
He remains focused on the expected crops per acre, even though every case study in the book illustrates that such a single variable doesn’t encompass the multitude of uses that the acre in question has. I don’t think I could describe it better than Reddit user u/TheHiveMindSpeaketh does:
I personally think this is an important question for EA’s to grapple with: can we reason abstractly about doing good without this abstraction causing mistakes at the level of what to value. Scott’s technocrats surely did not think they were making that mistake, but they were. If we believe that we are somehow different, that is kind of arrogant.