I sometimes think when we're all bitching about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket (which it is, on many dimensions - maybe not in the aggregate as people like Steven Pinker argue, depending on how you "measure" that, but I think it's fair to say we could do much better), typically because of the foolish behavior of one "stupid" group or another, do we maybe underestimate the significance of how differently each of us perceive and conceptualize the world?

>> Being 17 or acting as part of a group don’t make you less culpable.

> Yes it does. Boys do strange things, boys in groups do stranger things, like not testifying against each other, especially if they feel society has abandoned them and the world is against them.

Both of these seem arguably "true" to me.

> Sorry, but a 17 year old knows what it means to rob and murder someone and knows the difference between right and wrong. That’s the basic criterion for culpability.

This seems arguably "true" as well. But then, what does the word "knows" mean in this context, precisely? For example, we all "know" we should be kind to others, and clean up our acts in general, but when your life falls apart as a consequence of not acting in the way you know you should have, does "know" have the same meaning as it did before? We use the same word for both situations, but is the meaning the same?

> especially if they feel society has abandoned them and the world is against them

There are all sorts of complications in life that we kind of just take for granted because our mind processes them subconsciously. If society has "abandoned" people, and they subsequently use that as a parameter ("excuse") during (conscious + subconscious) judgement of what to do in certain future situations, whose fault is that, and why? Shall we deal with reality as it "should" be, or as it is?

Another example is laws. Should we follow the law? Well of course. But then, are all laws just? Are all people equally/fairly impacted by our vast collection of laws? Are all laws enforced fairly? Are all people equally able to defend themselves? Should these and other questions have any bearing on how we organize our societies and planet, or how we judge others when they've "clearly" gone astray?

The world is an infinitely complex place, and each individual is infinitely complex in their own right. Different people, or even the same person, will often react in completely opposite ways under seemingly identical inputs. We all can clearly see this sort of thing when we're discussing the phenomenon in a philosophical context, but how well do we remember it when we're dealing with an incident in the heat of the moment?

How should people behave? How, precisely, do we even determine what is right and wrong, under various circumstances? Sure, we can write all sorts of complex legal regulations, but how do we know they're right? What does that word even mean in this context? Is everything a matter of fact, or are some things matters of opinion?

I believe until we start to get serious widespread appreciation of these complexities (which are rapidly grower larger every day in our hyper-connected and globalized world), and start to put as much effort into studying and mastering the soft sciences as we've done with the hard, we will continue to stumble around like overconfident but naive children until the complexity we've built (while spending no time learning how to wield it wisely) starts to collapse upon us.

I like this story about Richard Feynman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI&feature=youtu.be...

> You see, I have had in my life a number of pleasant experiences. One of the earliest ones was when I was a kid I invented a problem for myself, the sum of the powers of the integers, and in trying to get the formula for it I developed a certain set of numbers, the formula for which I couldn’t get, and I discovered later that those were known as the Bernoulli numbers and discovered in 1739. So I was up to 1739 when I was about 14 you see. And then a little later I discovered something that I’d find out I just may have invented a thing which we now call operator calculus. That was invented in 1890-something. Gradually I was inventing things that came later and later.

> But the moment when I began to realize that I was now working on something new was when I read about quantum electrodynamics at the time and I read a book, and I learned about it. For example, I read Dirac’s book, and he had these problems that nobody knew how to solve that were described there. I couldn’t understand the book very well because I really wasn’t up to it. But there in the last paragraph at the end of the book it said, “Some new ideas are here needed.” And so there I was. Some new ideas were needed? OK! So I started to think of new ideas.

Hundreds of thousands of scientists and technical people have been thinking (and collaborating) really hard for centuries, and marvel at what they've built! Do we have anything remotely comparable in the social sciences, which is arguably a much harder problem space? Where would we even look for new ideas?

I think at least part of the answer lies within the ideas of people who are often considered the oddballs of society. I like this video of Terence McKenna interpreting Plato's ideas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-J09gk0mJk

> How can you tell one theory from another, and is science better than religion and this and that? After a lot of arm waving it should be conceded that the final call is aesthetic. That, because we are monkeys, because we are so far from God, we cannot set knowing the truth as the standard for choosing among the models we can produce. We must set our aesthetic compass towards the more true. What Wittgenstein called the true enough. And then the question is well how do you how do you recognize that? Well, this is a rich field of human study called philosophy of science, or theory, epistemology, and ontology. How do we know what is real?

> But Plato, who all the rest of philosophy is a footnote upon, Plato said that the key lay in the concepts the good, the true and the beautiful. The good, what is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky... The true, what is it? Trickier, even trickier... The beautiful, what is it? Easy to discern! The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste, really, really, and if you have no taste, you know, God help you! Because you are you are self condemned to an appalling nightmare. You won't be getting it, all the subtle stuff will go by you, while your head is filled with Kant, nonsense, foolishness. So again, the the metaphor of the dream and of making choices based on beauty and beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams. So that's the way to set the compass, not toward truth, not toward the good, not because these aren't fine things, but because they're so slippery.....but toward beauty, and with that in place, to my mind, life hope follows as a natural consequence.

Spiritual jibber jabber and woo woo as a result of excessive drug consumption? Sure, at least somewhat. But what if it is also simultaneously true, at least to some degree, but as a result of mankind's hubris (also a powerful drug), no one bothers to take a serious look into it? It would be kind of cosmically hilarious if the answer was right in front of us, but we were too stubborn to look.