妥协的贫乏The Poverty of Compromise
Brett： 这种对某些领域中你此前认为坚不可摧的事物提出质疑的想法，真的非常有意思。
几千年来，人们一直在思考，构想民主的最佳方式是什么。
柏拉图问道："什么是民主？"他提出的是"谁应该统治"的问题。据说，这就是民主的全部要义。我们得弄清楚谁应该统治。该由哲人王来统治吗？还是由全体公民来统治？
柏拉图认为，群氓会轻易投票剥夺少数人的权利，而他认为这就是民主的本质。
但波普尔质疑了这种"民主是什么"的整体思路。他走得更深，大意是说："民主与谁应该统治毫无关系。民主是这样一种制度，它让你能够以最有效率的方式、不用暴力就能撤换政策和统治者。而这就是你评判不同民主制度的标尺。"
所以，你实际上可以对法国、英国、美国、澳大利亚、加拿大做出评判：这些地方的民主是好是坏，取决于我们能否真正快速、高效、轻松、不流血地把我们不喜欢的人从民主制度中赶走。
这才是衡量一个良好民主制度的标准，而不是试图弄清楚哪种制度能给我们带来最好的统治者。这跟说"哪种科学方法能给我们带来正确的理论"是同样的错误。没有任何科学方法能给我们带来正确的理论。
科学是一套纠错机制。我们所能期望的，只是剔除坏的想法。通过剔除它们，我们纠正了部分错误，然后才能继续前进，找到比之前更好的理论。
这就引出了一个问题：当你与别人争执不下时，该如何做出好的决策。
有一种观念认为，妥协在某种程度上应该是一种美德，但它不是。如果两个人无论如何都无法达成一致，并且将要陷入某种争斗，那么妥协只是比暴力对抗略胜一筹罢了。
假设甲有想法 X，乙有想法 Y，通常理解的妥协是介于 X 和 Y 之间的某个东西：甲得不到他想要的一切，乙也得不到她想要的一切。他们想出一个妥协方案，也就是理论 Z。
当理论 Z 被证明行不通时，我们不应该感到惊讶，因为从一开始，两个人谁都不认为它是最好的想法。甲回头说："我早就告诉过你，X 才是正确的想法"，乙也回头说："我早就告诉过你，Y 才是最好的想法"。
他们完全没有取得任何进展。他们证明了 Z 是错的，但一开始根本没人认为 Z 是对的。
这就是妥协的贫乏，也是科学在某些时候会遇到的情况。在政治中，它同样无处不在。
Brett: This idea of questioning things that hitherto you thought were unassailable in a particular domain is really interesting.
For millennia people have wondered about the best way to conceive of what democracy is.
Plato asked, “What is democracy?” and he had the question about who should rule. That’s the whole idea of democracy, supposedly. We’d have to figure out who should rule. Should it be the philosopher kings who should rule? Should it be the population of citizens?
Plato decided that the mob would readily vote away the rights of a minority, and that’s what he thought democracy was.
But Popper questioned this whole idea of looking at what democracy was. He went even deeper and roughly said, “Democracy has got nothing to do with who should rule. Democracy is the system which allows you to remove policies and rulers most efficiently without violence. And that’s how you judge different democratic systems.”
So you can actually make a judgment on France, England, the United States, Australia, Canada. Do these places have better or worse kinds of democracy to the extent that we’re actually able to get rid of the people that we don’t like from the democratic system quickly, efficiently, easily, without violence?
That’s the measure of a good democratic system, rather than trying to figure out which is going to give us the best rulers. That’s the same mistake as saying, “What method of science is going to give us the true theory?” No method of science is going to give us the true theory.
Science is an error-correcting mechanism. All we can hope for is to get rid of the bad ideas. And by doing that, we’ve corrected some of our errors, and then we can move forward to find something that’s a better theory than what we had before.
This raises the idea of how to make good decisions when you’re at loggerheads with someone else.
There’s this idea that compromise is supposed to be a virtue of some kind, and it’s not. It’s preferable to having a violent confrontation if you’ve got two people who otherwise can’t possibly reach an agreement and they’re going to get into a battle of some sort.
If you’re in a situation where person A has idea X and person B has idea Y, the common understanding of a compromise is that it’s somewhere between X and Y: Person A won’t get everything they want, and person B won’t get everything they want. They come up with a compromise, which is theory Z.
We shouldn’t be surprised when theory Z proves not to work, because neither person ever thought it was the best idea in the first place. Person A goes back to saying, “I always told you that X was the correct idea,” and person B goes back to saying, “I always told you that idea Y was the best idea.”
They haven’t made any progress whatsoever. They’ve shown that Z is wrong, but no one ever thought that Z was correct in the first place.
This is the poverty of compromise, and this is what you get in science at certain times. It’s everywhere in politics as well.