Any attempt to “rationalize” our laws in the name of science would almost certainly produce an even worse situation, with laws based on junk science or laws that flapped and fluttered with every little breeze that blew. Our country has a zillion laws, many of which are contradictory, and the average citizen can not help but break numerous laws as they go through life.Ģ.
What informed this story was two aspects of such a “perfect” justice system:ġ. Harkaway’s well-received novel - which I have not read but now added to my “hopefully I can read this one day” list - apparently goes into the human aspects of such a “perfect” police state. And we have a great deal of real-world experience in seeing policies informed by social science go badly awry: a Great Inflation caused by theories that said inflation could end unemployment an obesity epidemic worsened by claims that fat was our biggest concern hiring decisions made by an implicit bias test that has turned out to be worthless. I am extremely dubious of these ideas because social science is in the throes of a replication crisis where many of its results have proven to be garbage. And the idea that such a technocracy is a desirable goal. But I hate throwing things away and there is one aspect of the story I really wanted to get out: an attack on the idea of Rationalia, an attack on the idea - very popular on the Left in particular - that we should enact various polices because social science tells us they will work. The novel Gnomon is apparently based on the idea of a society creating a “perfect” police force guided by an overwhelming surveillance state and the problems that flow from it.įor a while, I was just going to toss the story in the rubbish bin. Just more so.īut in reading through that analysis, I found out that the story I’d written had already been done. So a society run by algorithms is still a society run by humans. I am very skeptical of this idea, since algorithms are not magics spells they reflect the thoughts and beliefs and biases of their programmers. What stimulated the publication was this article at Reason, which looked at the idea of a society run by algorithms. If you want to avoid spoilers, go ahead and read it then come back. It is now here or on the link to pages to your right. Eventually, I rewrote it an epistolary, which I hope you will find enjoyable. They story was written but I didn’t like it. When I wrote it, I mentioned a short story connected with it. I put forward various argument about why this was a terrible idea: that science would be politicized, that science is a moving target and that morals matter in constructing a society as much as facts do. Almost two years ago, I wrote a post about the idea of “Rationalia”, a country run on scientific principles.
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