A recent experimental paper* reported: "Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior." The human capacity for to create and respond to norms as if they were empirical facts about the word brought a new level of cooperation, between individuals and across space and time, that has allowed a single species of ape to take over the planet. For most of us, most of the time, this process is essentially transparent, apart from odd bewildering moments of culture clash like when Trump gets elected president. :)
In this sense, the aide spoke a truth: if you can create the norms, you can control human activity. However, as Karl said, this process can run of the rails perilously, imagining that this control is complete. It ain't. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." — Richard Feynman * https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27634004 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
