Learning from our mistakes

"it is difficult enough to be critical of our own mistakes, but it must be nearly impossible for us to persist in a critical attitude towards those of our actions which involve the lives of many men and women. To put it differently, it is very hard to learn from very big mistakes." Karl Popper, 1944 (Piecemeal Social Engineering)

The longer the HPC is allowed to continue with its large scale utopianist experiment, the less likely it is to learn from it. It has recently been noted that the ambulance drivers are disproportionately victimised by the FTP process - they are turning up far more than any other group on the HPC register. Also, more men are pushed into the process, even tho the majority of people on the register are in fact women. The HPC has commissioned some 'research' to discover whether the former fact is significant (I don't think they are worried about the second fact yet). I wonder what the outcome will be of that piece of work.

The point that Popper makes here is that there are two reasons for the difficulty to learn. The first is that, because of "the scale of a utopianist experiment, it is impossible to say which particular measure is responsible for any of the results.... Even the greatest efforts to secure a well-informed, independent and critical statement of these results are unlikely to prove successful. But the chances" he goes on to say "that such efforts will be made are negligible; on the contrary, there is every likelihood that free discussion about the holistic plan and its consequences will not be tolerated."

The passage from which I draw these words gets more and more interesting. Written in 1944 - before the end of the second world war, a whole lifetime ago - it seems amazingly relevant to the question before us today:

It will not be tolerated, because: "every attempt at planning on a very large scale is an undertaking which must cause considerable inconvenience to many people (to put it mildly) and over a considerable span of time. Accordingly there will always be a tendency to oppose the plan, and to complain about it. To may of these complaints the Utopian engineer will have to turn a deaf ear if he wishes to get anywhere at all; in fact, it will be part of his business to suppress unreasonable objections. But with them he must invariably suppress reasonable criticism too. And the mere fact that expressions of dissatisfaction will have to be curbed reduces even the most enthusiastic expression of satisfaction to insignificance. Thus it will be difficult to ascertain the facts, ie, the repercussions of the plan on the individual citizen; and without these facts scientific criticism is impossible.'

Popper uses the word 'scientific' to mean critical thinking, and speaks often of its many different forms. Not for him the unified 'gold standard' that we find ourselves bogged down with under the 'evidence based' experiment of today.