On the one hand, there are those that actually don’t want anything to change, but don’t want to be seen as such for one reason or another, or don’t want to think of themselves as preferring that.
On the other hand, the world is complicated, and most proposed ideas that haven’t been tried at the relevant scale before probably legitimately would not work very well at least without adjustments (because after all, it would be unrealistic to expect one person to understand it all well enough to come up with a well functioning system on the first try).
It would seem highly unlikely that what we have is the best possible system, and therefore there should be something that will work, or at least work better. Probably quite a few different somethings that could. But at the same, when dealing with the complex dynamics of human society, an answer that can be phased as “but what if we just…” is unlikely to ever be sufficient by itself, and if something does have some obvious flaw, it shouldn’t shut down the whole effort to find something better to point that flaw out, so that a better idea can be found or the flaw with the original one can be addressed.
most proposed ideas that haven’t been tried at the relevant scale before probably legitimately would not work very well
Before you can even get to those, you have to stop all the people who are proposing ideas that have been tried, over and over, and didn’t work every one of those times.
Even that has nuance. When someone is proposing something that has been tried before, which is common enough, one can point to the relevant historical examples. But sometimes someone is trying to propose a variant on something that hasn’t worked, with the intent on fixing whatever the problem with the idea seemed to be, which depending on if that variant has also been attempted or if there are obvious problems with the proposed fix, may or may not be worthy of further discussion.
It doesn’t help that a lot of labels used to describe political or economic systems are extremely broad, a bit vague or have contested definitions, or are commonly misunderstood, because you can get an idea with some merit dismissed by virtue of sharing a broad label with something unsuccessful, or conversely, someone insisting that this is the case for their idea even though their suggestion really has been tried or clearly doesn’t address the issues with whatever they’re basing it on.
It should be taken into account that some amount of trial and error is probably inherit to developing new systems or laws, and the nature of trial and error is such that anything that works is likely to be preceded by similar things that did not, or at least not as well.
There’s two sides to this I think:
On the one hand, there are those that actually don’t want anything to change, but don’t want to be seen as such for one reason or another, or don’t want to think of themselves as preferring that.
On the other hand, the world is complicated, and most proposed ideas that haven’t been tried at the relevant scale before probably legitimately would not work very well at least without adjustments (because after all, it would be unrealistic to expect one person to understand it all well enough to come up with a well functioning system on the first try).
It would seem highly unlikely that what we have is the best possible system, and therefore there should be something that will work, or at least work better. Probably quite a few different somethings that could. But at the same, when dealing with the complex dynamics of human society, an answer that can be phased as “but what if we just…” is unlikely to ever be sufficient by itself, and if something does have some obvious flaw, it shouldn’t shut down the whole effort to find something better to point that flaw out, so that a better idea can be found or the flaw with the original one can be addressed.
Before you can even get to those, you have to stop all the people who are proposing ideas that have been tried, over and over, and didn’t work every one of those times.
Even that has nuance. When someone is proposing something that has been tried before, which is common enough, one can point to the relevant historical examples. But sometimes someone is trying to propose a variant on something that hasn’t worked, with the intent on fixing whatever the problem with the idea seemed to be, which depending on if that variant has also been attempted or if there are obvious problems with the proposed fix, may or may not be worthy of further discussion.
It doesn’t help that a lot of labels used to describe political or economic systems are extremely broad, a bit vague or have contested definitions, or are commonly misunderstood, because you can get an idea with some merit dismissed by virtue of sharing a broad label with something unsuccessful, or conversely, someone insisting that this is the case for their idea even though their suggestion really has been tried or clearly doesn’t address the issues with whatever they’re basing it on.
It should be taken into account that some amount of trial and error is probably inherit to developing new systems or laws, and the nature of trial and error is such that anything that works is likely to be preceded by similar things that did not, or at least not as well.