(Untitled)

[ratatosk]

The poll in my last post produced the results that I expected -- people mostly went with the third option -- but I don't know if that's a result of how I phrased the question.

faerieboots came up with an example that I think neatly encapsulates what I was looking for, and I wish I had had it before posting the poll: I was looking for the difference between

Comments

[squirrelitude]

I was treating the "humanity" part as "how much do you trust large groups of people to be smart?"

[ratatosk]

The trouble with the concept of "large groups of people" is that, when phrased that way, they tend to be specific large groups of people, and not just people in general. So I'd worry that thinking in those words might muddy the results.

E.g. it is like the difference between "do you trust humanity to not make political choices that end in disaster for our species?" and "do you trust the voters in US presidential elections to not make terrible choices?".

[vespid_interest]

I think it depends on the situation. I've been puzzling over this since you asked but I haven't come up with a consistent opinion. The car one is a good example where I trust individuals more. A situation where I trust humanity more is the zombie apocalypse, where I think humanity might pull through but I don't trust the other 20 people in line at the store with me to be able to work together to survive.

Or take Tom Waits, who has a gravelly voice -- I don't expect the people around me to like him (as I do), but humanity in general seems to approve of his music.

With guns, I trust individuals more than humanity.

There must be some patterns to categorize these situations, but I haven't tried figuring them out.

[ratatosk]

I expect that's true for a lot of people. The poll was trying to get at those who had a clear, mostly-across-the-board tendency. I was surprised so many people were able to confidently answer it, actually.

[kelkyag]

I expect otherwise unspecified individual humans to do things which are dumb rather than malicious. Where does that fall?

[ratatosk]

I think for the purposes of my poll, dumb == malicious.

[kelkyag]

At the least, whether I thought someone was being dumb or malicious would affect how I dealt with the situation after unfortunate things had happened.

[tla]

Hm, so I would err more on the side of defensive driving with individual cars (in contradiction of my poll answer) but on the other hand, for example, I often trust an arbitrary stranger to watch my laptop while I go off for a minute, despite assuming that it will get stolen if I leave it unattended. (You could read all sorts of classist things in there I suppose, but I think the real point is that "not stealing" is about trusting them not to be evil, and "not crashing the car" is about trusting them not to be stupid, which I'm a lot worse at.)

[metaphortunate]

To me this is the wrong question. Humans are not good or bad but just as we are. We are very clever about short-term gain and have a hard time with long-term strategy. Driving is DEMONSTRABLY not very safe so keep an eye out. We are crap at waiting and watching for something that almost never happens so it is less TSA airport agents' fault that they miss stuff and more the fault of the system designers. Both in general & specific I expect people to be good at some things & bad at others.