Nov 29 2021
The Poverty of Compromise 妥协的困境
Compromises test ideas no one ever thought were correct in the first place 进行妥协测试去验证一开始就没有人认为正确的想法
布雷特： 这种质疑迄今为止你认为在特定领域无懈可击的事情的想法真的很有趣。
Brett: This idea of questioning things that hitherto you thought were unassailable in a particular domain is really interesting.
几千年来，人们一直在思考什么是民主的最佳形式？
For millennia people have wondered about the best way to conceive of what democracy is.
柏拉图问道：“什么是民主？”他有一个问题，即谁应该去统治。据说，这就是民主的全部理念。我们必须弄清楚谁应该统治。应该由哲学家国王统治吗？应该由公民统治吗？
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?
柏拉图认为暴民会轻易地投票剥夺少数人的权利，这就是他认为的民主。
Plato decided that the mob would readily vote away the rights of a minority, and that’s what he thought democracy was.
但波普尔质疑了审视民主是什么的整个想法。他更深入，粗暴地说：“民主与谁应该统治无关。民主是一个允许你在没有暴力的情况下最有效地废除政策和统治者的制度，这就是你评判不同民主制度的方式。
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.”
所以你实际上可以对法国、英国、美国、澳大利亚、加拿大做出判断，这些地方的民主制度是更好还是更差，以至于我们实际上能够快速、高效、轻松地、不使用暴力地将我们不喜欢的人从民主制度中赶走？
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?
这是衡量一个良好民主制度的标准，而不是试图弄清楚哪个会给我们带来最好的统治者的问题。这与说“什么科学方法能给我们真正的理论”是一样的错误，没有任何科学方法能给我们真正的理论。
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.
科学是一种纠错机制，我们所能希望的就是摆脱错误的想法，通过这样做，我们纠正了一些错误，然后我们可以继续寻找比我们以前更好的理论。
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.
这指出了当你与他人发生争执时如何做出正确决定的想法。
This raises the idea of how to make good decisions when you’re at loggerheads with someone else.
有一种观点认为，妥协有时是一种美德，但事实并非如此。如果有两个人不能达成协议，他们将陷入某种战斗，那么妥协比暴力对抗要好。
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.
如果你处于 A 有想法 X 而 B 有想法 Y 的情况，那么对妥协的普遍理解是它介于 X 和 Y 之间：A 不会得到他们想要的一切，而 B 也不会得到他们想要的一切。他们想出了一个折衷方案，这就是 Z 理论。
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.
当 Z 理论被证明行不通时，我们不应该感到惊讶，因为两人一开始都不认为这是最好的主意。A 会说，“我总是告诉你 X 是正确的想法”，而 B 会说，“我总是告诉你， Y 是最好的主意。
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.”
他们没有取得任何进展。他们已经证明 Z 是错误的，但从一开始就没有人认为 Z 是正确的。
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.
这就是妥协的困境，这就是你在某些时候在科学中得到的结论，它在政治中也无处不在。
This is the poverty of compromise, and this is what you get in science at certain times. It’s everywhere in politics as well.
马丽：要达到AB双方都认可或接受的一种妥协操作办法，是接纳一些双方的观点、要求、形式或操作方式，然后AB双方都同意组成一个全新方案、全新操作方式--即Z，然后去执行Z，进行落地实施。但因为一开始在接受这个妥协折中的新方案Z的时候，AB都是持怀疑态度的，都认为自己的方案才是正确的，所以往往在最后都验证了Z是错误的。这是妥协的终局--不得善终。这些妥协的困境在方方面面，小到日常决策、大到zhengzhi，都是客观存在的。
科学是一种试错方法，通过不断地试错、验证，尝试过一千种一万种错的理论，可能验证、筛选出一种正确的观点，但它不一定是最优的方法，世间万物没有最优解，唯一方式，是某人、某人群、某团体在某一特定领域、某个时间、三维空间中试错，然后找到那个特定时空而言相对更优的方式、方法。
