in Previous PostI talked about how you should think about unintended consequences of your actions and how you should anticipate how those consequences might play out. If you haven’t read that post yet, it might be worth a read just for some background. That said, let me describe a situation that I believe is similar to the problem I’m addressing here.
Imagine I have a person who is in a medical crisis but cannot communicate clearly (they are ill and catatonic or they speak a different language). There is evidence of many symptoms – the patient is clearly in distress and pain, they are sweating, they have a high fever, and many other signs of a problem. However, against all odds, a mad philosopher has locked me and this person in a room that happens to be the largest medical supply warehouse in the world. I have every drug and medical device imaginable at my fingertips. The question then arises: should I use the vast medical supplies I have at my disposal to treat this person?
Reasons for: Something is clearly wrong. This person is sick/injured/in pain. If I can help, I should. It’s terrible to just ignore the problem when you can help.
Con: A significant amount House, MarylandI am not a doctor and I barely know enough to intervene appropriately. I have a vague idea of the various symptoms: fever, vomiting, rapid pulse, etc., but I have no way of knowing for sure what is causing these symptoms. I also have no way of knowing what, if any, available medications might help. I don’t understand this person’s medical history or the complications that come with it. They’re probably already taking some medication that may interact badly with other medications I administer. I have no way of knowing what the outcome of anything I try might be.
Now, at this point, some might say that we don’t know what the outcome of the intervention will be, so we don’t know whether the outcome will be better or worse. Technically, that’s true. know Yes, but do I have good reason to think that in this case my attempt is likely to result in either harm or good?
In this case, it is abundantly clear that my intervention would likely do far more harm than good. Explained In a similar thought experiment, Huemer points out that for most of human history, doctors have often done more harm than good because, for most of human history, we understood very little about how the body worked. George Washington The doctors of that time tried to help him with ineffective treatments, which almost certainly led to his death. He states: “The doctors in Washington were respected professionals and performed standard medical procedures. Why couldn’t they help him? Simply put, they couldn’t because they didn’t know what they were doing. The human body is an extremely complex mechanism. To repair it requires a detailed and precise understanding of that mechanism and the nature of the disease that afflicts it. No one had that knowledge at the time. Without such understanding, almost any significant intervention in the human body would be harmful.” In other words, medical intervention in ignorance can technically lead to unpredictable consequences of the intervention. Might be It will be positive, but it will be much probably The results will be negative.
This is due to the fact that there are many more ways to injure the human body than there are ways to heal it. Similarly, for the same reasons, there are many more ways to increase disorder in a complex system than there are ways to increase order. There are many more ways to upset the natural balance of an ecosystem than there are ways to stabilize it. This is why Most new ideas are terribleWhen intervening in complex adaptive systems that we do not understand, the valence of unexpected outcomes is much more likely to be negative than neutral or positive.
But one might say that not everyone is as medically illiterate as I am. What about medical professionals with training and years of experience? Wouldn’t medical intervention be a good idea if they were to intervene?
Certainly the situation will change. Obviously such intervention will be justified. Of course, this is perfection Knowledge and its attempts Guaranteed That’s an incredibly high bar to succeed. Doctors make mistakes, and sometimes unexpected complications arise. The standard here isn’t perfection. What makes the difference is how well doctors do it. Rightly believe Their intervention Very likely To help the patient recover. It may not get the right result in every case, but it does get the right result in most cases.
But at the risk of testing your patience, I’ll add one more thing to this thought experiment. I’m no medical professional, but I do know at least some basic first aid. Nothing special, but it’s useful when necessary. For example, I can bandage a wound to stop bleeding, clear a blocked airway, simple things like that. These are interventions I can legitimately perform, but if I tried to go beyond that, I might as well inject the patient with so much warfarin that it melts all of their skin. Because I know Since the results of using this drug are uncertain, there is no reason not to try it.
The key question here is: are technocrats, politicians, and policymakers similar to skilled medical professionals who treat patients based on a thorough understanding of their condition and medical history, or are they more like me, locked in a warehouse with my fictional patient and George Washington’s doctor?
Michael Huemer argues that policymakers are “in a similar position to medieval physicians: they have simple, pre-scientific theories about how society works and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies, most of which have proven ineffective or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism, and fixing it, if it were even possible, would require a precise, detailed understanding of the kind of thing that nobody has today.” I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. I think policymakers are more like me in a warehouse with my patients than medieval physicians. That is, there are some basic things that are actually well understood and can be done. These are general rule-level things, like protecting property rights, a stable system of laws, and prohibiting violent crime.
These basic general rules are equivalent to my ability to administer basic first aid. But proponents of technocratic policies think of themselves as skilled medical professionals with a detailed understanding of patients and the ability to execute complex interventions in complex systems to reliably produce beneficial outcomes.
Of course, this thinking is not new. This level of overconfidence has existed for a long time. And it is this thinking that Edmund Burke Bring ideas to life French RevolutionBurke also used the analogy of a sick person to suggest that our approach to social problems should be the same as “looking at our father’s wounds with reverent reverence and trembling compassion.” He compared those who act under the pretense of imaginary knowledge to those who rush to the sick with syringes of warfarin, and described them as “our own countrymen, who recklessly cut their aged parents into pieces and cast them into the sorcerer’s cauldron, in the hope of restoring their fathers’ constitutions with poisonous herbs and wild spells, and giving them a new life.”
