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0 pointsrevelio2y ago0 comments

It's because conservatism whether big or small c, political or technological, tends to be seen as standing in the way of progress by those who didn't arrive at the same underlying intuitions about the difficulty of tabula rasa development. Because the intuitions are so deep, we barely articulate them and that leads quickly to misunderstandings. Conservatism can easily be perceived as errant obstructionism or even the result of a hidden agenda that stands in the way of a better future, if Great Leaps Forward feel easily achievable. Hence why the OP said when he was younger he saw the past as "evil" - a very common way for young radicals to perceive conservatives.

For example, most companies with large software assets will at some point go through a fight between the old hands and younger devs about whether to do a rewrite in the hot new thing. Which side you're on may appear dominated by age, but it's really more about your intuition about the risks of rewrite projects. That in turn is determined by your experiences of people's ability/inability to fully comprehend complex systems.

Also I didn't try to to be neutral, hence the digs at communism and academia. If I was aiming for karma I'd have left those out. But I'm not.

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parthianshotgun2y ago

Steven Colbert once jokingly said, "Reality has a well known liberal bias".

It should probably be the other way around, that liberals have a reality bias, but it doesn't quite land. Liberalism is based on what can be proven. Especially in science, starting with some preconceived reservations leads to inaccurate models. If you can't articulate it, all the worse. Even things like categorization and taxonomy can't account for our in-built intuitions, there's always an exception. So, we really must try a tabula rasa type approach. This tends towards a, you guessed it, a world view more constrained by reality, which typically falls left (see, most of academia).

I'd say holding on to heuristics is good, but I don't think we'd be where we are today by not trying to rethink, destruct, unravel, play, squish, open many mental gateways.

If your contention is with Whig history then we might agree. But I don't think there's any surity in being sure.

revelioOP2y ago

Trying desperately to stay on technical topic here, I'd say the only places where this dichotomy comes up are in cases that are inherently ambiguous and subjective. If something is genuinely proven then everyone does actually accept it. Conservatives and liberals don't disagree on the energy of an electron or the color of the sky. Disagreement occurs over things that can't be proven: how valuable is spending time on feature X instead of rewrite Y? Is this choice of library really "debt" that needs to be paid down by rewriting, or is it a mature tech whose imperfections should just be accepted as an inevitable part of life? If you rewrite, how likely is the project to create new problems at the same time as solving old ones? How can anyone prove such a thing one way or another ahead of time? It will ultimately always boil down to a complex interacting set of intuitions and experiences which vary between people.

The Colbert snark is illuminating because it gets to the nub of the conflict. It's an attempt to claim that reality, something often ambiguous and subjective, as if it was simple and obvious. Look at how straightforward the world is to comprehend - why, all you need is a few nice and neutral academics who do a few studies, write it all down in a model and you're done! Now you know what everyone, everywhere should be doing. Others look at this aghast and say no, that approach has a history of going spectacularly wrong. The model did not match reality and disaster followed.

In the software space it leads to conservatism of the Joel Spolsky "never do rewrites" variety. That's too strong, but it's a famous and widely cited essay even 20 years later because it represented a rare articulation of the value of conservatism in technology along with clear real world examples of cases where the lack of it led to (commercial) disaster. Fortunately, attempts to rewrite Navigator or Word only led to financial disaster and only for specific companies. When attempts are made to rewrite society instead of software the cost of failure is drastically higher.

TRiG_Ireland2y ago

> If something is genuinely proven then everyone does actually accept it.

This is demonstrably untrue. Vaccines. Evolution. Anthropogenic Global Warming.

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