The number of ways that your solution can fail are innumerable:
- Your solution may not be possible to implement at all.
- Your solution may violate human nature. [Gender Neutrality programs]
- Your solution may only be implementable in pilot state. [Education reforms?]
- Your solution may require more long-term will/discipline than is available [Democratic War]
- Your solution may not actually impact the problem. [ Race-disparity in education]
- Your solution may not solve the problem even though it impacts it.
- Your solution may solve the problem for a short period of time, until reality routes around your solution. [ Internet Censorship]
- Your solution may make the problem worse instead of solving it.
- Your solution may solve the problem at too great a cost (to other values, including $).
- Your solution may improve the situation now, but lock in a solution that prevents even better solutions, thus creating a net worse result over time. [Seat Belt Law]
- Your solution may do exactly what you thought it would do (in predicted terms), and you may still prefer the old state.
- Your solution may solve the problem you wanted to solve, and create a different (worse) problem. [ AFDC ].
- Your solution may solve the problem for a very narrow subset of the relevant group, and screw everyone else.
- You may almost solve the problem (with nearly zero net welfare gain), but not be able to find the control levers that would actually solve the problem.
- etc.
The only game in town is how to arrange the system to allow/encourage trial, error, and observation...and to improve the feedback loop.
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8 comments:
So how did Einstein get derive relativity, then?
I suppose Einstein did trial and error with the math.
What constitutes a problem is often a point of view. Unwanted pregnancies were viewed by some as a problem in the 1950s, but others saw it as the way the human race propagated itself.
So birth control pills were invented to solve the "problem" of unwanted pregnancies, but this equaled high achieving women sterilizing themselves. So instead of a solution, we get sabotage.
Alrenous,
Again...sounding snide, but not being.
Luck.
From a prior point of view...he didn't know what was true...he had a guess...other people had guesses. His guess turned out to be right. Other folks not so much. My insight is not intended to say you can't be right up front...it's that you can't know that you're right...and all your attempting to justify maybe pushes likelihood up to 1/6.
2. Science is (relatively) easier than engineering. What math model works to predict the future is easier than building stuff that works.
I happen to agree. Perhaps not about Einstein specifically - I don't know enough to be sure - but most discoverers are not discoverers due to any personal virtue. You can tell because of independent discovery. If neither Newton nor Leibniz had discovered calculus, someone else would have done so within a few years.
How do you tell the difference between necessary and contingent in this case? How do tell the difference between Einstein happening to be lucky, and Einstein having no method but to get lucky?
Alrenous,
I consider the huge issue to be ex-post vs. ex-ante reasoning. Before the case, we ought to have expected that Einstein was one of a hundred mistaken theorists with very good math. After experiment...it shifts substantially from unlikely to likely.
How do you tell the difference between Einstein striking lucky with the math and Einstein striking lucky will skill, which resulted in good math?
ALrenous,
Talking to Einstein? Alternatively, reading his writings...or even looking at the beautiful math he did around Special Relativity...so clean, so elegant. Clearly, given my exposure to the math of relativity, it was a skill-deep strike. But skill-deep strikes are not necessarily true.
My assumption...skill increases your chance of being lucky from 0.01% (or less) up to maybe 5% (not much more).
Albert O. Hirschman wrote a book titled "The Rhetoric of Reaction" in which he categorized objections to "progressive" reform as falling under claim of perversity, futility and jeopardy. Conversely, progressives tend to fall for "the synergy illusion", "the imminent danger" and "history is on our side".
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