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Is A Rational Nation Ruled By Science A Terrible Idea? (newscientist.com)
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from Jeffrey Guhin, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA:
Imagine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical. What could go wrong...? Last week, US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offered up the perfect example of scientism when he proposed the country of Rationalia, in which "all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". Tyson is a very smart man, but this is not a smart idea. It is even, we might say, unreasonable and without sufficient evidence... employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing...
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence".
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence".
Running things by believing whatever your friends on the internet says isn't really working out, so let's try it! If it doens't work, at least it'll be able to say that...
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
So the softpedia spam is out and the newscientist spam is back?
Sigh. So tiresome.
For the children, of course.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Maybe, but it would still be better than allowing religion or money telling people how to live.
“Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence[.]”
All the reaction to that tweet is based on what people assume he meant by it. This is obviously a sociologist's dream topic to discuss because it can mean whatever you want it to mean and debate it endlessly without ever reaching a conclusion.
... which is essentially a corrupt theocracy. I'd gladly live in a society run by rational ideas over what we have now.
I don't respond to AC's.
Let's compare Science against the philosophies that current rule our societies.
Nationalism? Capitalism? Fear? RELIGION??!
I'll take science....
Being misled while attempting to base your laws off of actual physical evidence isn't is bad as us currently making up our laws based off the fucking BIBLE.
Any optimization approach/algorithm is set up to maximize the value of its utility function. Consider two utility functions for getting from "A" to "B", 'fewest miles' or 'fastest'. A direct route that takes you down 10 miles of roads at a speed limit of 30 MPH, compared to 20 miles on an interstate at 65 MPH, will win under the first utility but not under the second.
The same thing holds true for public policy. Do you want "most lives saved?" Do you want "greatest economic output?" Do you want "Least tax burden?"
So independent of any other consideration, there is huge judgement and therefore huge variation when trying to conduct 'rational policy' by what you choose as your utility function.
...according to someone who many or may not actually be rational about any given subject.
I've met a lot of high-reputation scientists and academics over the years, and far too many of them are pretty useless outside of their chosen profession. A significant number of them are pretty useless INSIDE their chosen profession, too - and those are the ones who would be talking the loudest about whatever government policies were in question. You wouldn't be getting Richard Feynman advising you about physics. You'd be getting that sociology professor who blathered their way to a doctorate setting everyone's social policy, with no way of stopping them.
Until we can figure out a way to rationally measure rational thinking, we'd be falling into the trap of believing "experts" who actually let their own self-interest control them.
Jeffrey Guhin's first argument is that science cannot be trusted because it gets it often gets it wrong. Well, the scientific method is aimed at correcting such mistakes, not at preventing them. The fact that we know the quoted mistakes are mistakes, is because of science, not in spite of science. Without the scientific method, the misguided, self-serving opinions of whoever holds power will not be challenged.
The second argument is that science has no business telling people how to live. True, but science does not do that (science describes, not prescribes). It's politicians that interpret (pseudo-)science who tell you how to live. If they were forced to base policy on science that can be challenged, then we stand a much better chance. So, science is a tool and can be misused, but that does not make it a bad tool. And at least it comes with a method to challenge and correct abuse. Science may not be perfect, but it's much better than all the other options.
The police gave Mr. Castile contradictory instructions
The instructions changed when the officer learned Castile was carrying a gun. That's not "contradictory".
In general I would rather have experts in charge than careerists - who account for 90% of politicians.
Having said that I remember an encounter with a mathematician colleague who was looking under the bonnet (hood) of his car for an electrical fault because both headlamps were out. It took only a little lateral thinking - and a bit of persuasion from me for him to accept that probably he'd been driving on just one, and hadn't noticed it till the second one failed. Nevertheless he accepted the counter argument, just imagine any politician doing that.
It is never science itself that is 'evil', it's the implementation of policies (chosen by irrational humans), then selectively plucking out disparate facts that (seemingly) support the policy and calling it 'scientifically-based'.
(a poor example) The chemical processes involved in (traditional) photography are scientific. They've been investigated, the knowledge shared, the processes broken down to their component parts to better understand, the results verified a million times.
Using photography to 'prove' that aliens occupied the local Piggly Wiggly or that the entire Apollo program happened on a back-lot in California is just selectively choosing parts of a larger set of knowledge to support a point of view.
I believe a rational society could be wonderful. How we get there, when people are inherently irrational? I have no idea.
What? Your post is the height of racism. "Go back to collecting their government checks?"
It has already been tried to some degree. Nazi Germany based a lot of its policies on the treasure of science from the execution off crippled and mentally ill people who were scientifically shown to be a burden to society presently or in the future with their T4 program or their eventual final solution for those of lesser heritage through the scientific wonders of Eugenics.
And this proud scientific achievement was not alone in just Nazi Germany. Eugenics was prevalent in many areas outside of Germany including the USA with forced sterilization of lesser people and the birth of organizations designed to continue limiting births of lesser people although by convincing them of the neccesity rather than by force. Planned parenthood for instance doesn't have an abortion clinic in any area without a substantial minority population. They go into schools and teach children their life is ruined if they have kids so use protection.
> They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information
Yes, but
1) Most are willing to admit they are wrong when an experiment result contradicts their theories.
2) Most are looking for the right answer, not the most profitable one.
I'd take that over our current Golden Rule model every time. Just look at leaded gasoline, waste disposal, or climate change to see examples of the golden rule hurting the average person. We have gotten rid of leaded gasoline, but it took one scientist nine years to convince the government that big business was lying. We're still fighting big business for good, long-term waste disposal and to minimize climate change
The only challenge I see is that, if we ever did switch to the Science Rule model, greedy idiots will claim to be scientists and put the true scientists in the minority, which would bring us back to the Golden Rule model anyway.
(I say Most in the bullets above because I'm pretty sure folks in it for the money these days wouldn't be scientists. But I also know there are a few bad scientists, so I sure as heck won't say 100%. I have no idea of how to test a scientist to see if they are good or not, other than to have well educated folks review a scientist's previous work.)
...should have died in the pot-fueled dorm room bullsh*t session they were formed in. This is one of them.
Like the article says, scientists are people too, and they may have finely honed their knowledge in their area of expertise, but beyond that, they know as much- or as little- as anyone else.
It's also absurd to think that the selection of topics of study, or the lead 'scientists' in charge of an area of policy, won't be driven by considerations outside of strict evidence. They'll fabricate it to obtain the pre-determined outcome- because that's what they do today in highly charged fields of study.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
When science gets things wrong, others can step in an find the mistakes, re-test, illuminate, fix the problems, and get the science right.
Science *can* tell us how to live, and can tell us how to live *better*. By measuring the desires of the people, one can formulate a platform to achieve those desires. Then, as above, you use your measurements to allocate resources, determine the taxation needed to implement policy, etc, etc, allowing policy to be refined and optimized.
I think the problem is that rampant anti-intellectualism has taken hold in many places. People don't like admitting they don't know what they're talking about, especially by someone who *does* know what they're talking about. It requires inner reflection that reveals to one's own ego the degree of personal ignorance regarding subject X. No one's ego can deal with that, and the ego will do everything it can to protect and insulate itself.
Just think of the bonus we'd get on our science research! We'd be ahead on tech in no time if we switch our government to science-focused technocracy. I mean, sure, we'd probably lose the military bonuses we get from our current government type, but since when have we had a war where that would have mattered? If we switch, we could achieve a tech victory in no time!
There's one huge reason why ruling your society based on "science" is a bad idea: What you will generally find is that, whatever method you use to govern, it will eventually fall under the sway and corruption of the rich and powerful. Attempting to merge science and politics won't result in politics being ruled by scientists, but in science being run by politicians.
Of course, there are other more specific problems, one being that "scientists" are often not as detached and rational as they believe themselves to be. What constitutes sufficient evidence is itself under constant debate. There are difficulties with the question of whether science can determine morality... And more. Every vague or uncertain point and every place where there's wiggle-room will become a tool of people seeking political power.
And why do you think "creationism" is a thing, after all? You try to marry science and politics, and politicians will exploit ignorance and uncertainty to make their positions sound "scientific" to those who don't know better. Neil deGrasse Tyson wants more of that? He should stick to physics, and stay out of fields he doesn't understand.
Tyson is nonsensical.
Science is a tool and a methodology for acquisition and extrapolation of quantitative states.
Presuming to base a society solely on quantitative basis, and imagining that qualitative determinations will be irrelevant in the face of self-evident data analysis is fundamentally flawed. By negating the existence of assumptions and bias - and the very real experience of people individually and collectively beyond their units of measure, Tyson proposes a world more deeply subject to unconsious forces - grown more powerful, because they are assumed not to exist!
He should call such a society "Bias-o-topia" NOT "Rationalia".
In the end, his proposal amounts to little more than an elaboration on the fantastic notion that the world should be ruled by measuring tapes and telescopes - perhaps by means of a gearbox.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So far as I can see, these articles express the view that a society based entirely on objective decision making wouldn't be perfect and therefore shouldn't be considered. Well, Duh! Surely it is completely obvious that it wouldn't be perfect, not least because there are large areas of the human condition not amenable to the scientific approach.
But, surely the question is not whether such a society would be perfect, but whether it would be better - on average - than other arrangements currently on offer. I have no idea what the answer to that question is, but may I submit that if one is to postulate such a society then that is precisely the question which needs to be asked.
I think the OP is falling into an anti-science fear-mongering state of mind that misrepresents the core idea of evidence-based policy making. The best thing about science is that it is constantly improvingâ"getting closer to what we might call (with some inherent romanticism) the truth. The anti-science knee-jerk reaction to this is that, because scienceâ"at some given point in its progressionâ"has not yet reached "the truth" then it is wrong and therefore worthless. I argue that there is no better way to move consistently in the direction of truth than the rigorous application of evidence and careful testing that is true science. When it comes to the application of what is learned through the scientific methodâ"a moving target that is constantly improvingâ"to public and governmental policies and laws, there is more than one way to use it, depending on the nature of the government installed. A totalitarian society might tend towards additive applicationâ"creating new laws and rules for society to limit its bounds. A case of "science says this change is optimal so this change will now happen," for example. This is not a methodology that most of us would find comfortable. But in a representative society that values fairness and freedom, such as what we aspire to here in the United States, the application should be of a subtractive nature. Science should be a filter to prevent patently wrong and harmful laws for being enacted and a measuring stick to judge the validity of laws created in more ignorant times. With science-based knowledge continuously improving, something no other form of knowledge acquisition can claim, applying that knowledge to prevent oppressive or dangerous laws is an obvious choiceâ"far better than letting the laws bend to the wills of lobbyists and political powerhouses which have no secure claim to truth or accuracy and, in fact, are often dead-set against them. There is no inherent imperative that science should or would be used to inflict legal restrictions upon American citizensâ"that form of application requires a more totalitarian government. (A form of government that a scientific analysis might steer a society away from.) We should embrace the benefit of scienceâ"more accurate knowledgeâ"and not ignore what we've learned by sticking our heads in the sand and claiming tradition, expediency, selfishness, and ignorance trump truth.
I think Tyon's [i]concept[/i] is perfect, but the human race is not currently in a state to implement his proposal properly. And the human race may never reach that state.
The same could be said for Marxism. I can't fault the logic behind it at any level. But the devil is in the implementation details.
Yet. Still, you'll note that choosing mates tends to bias heavily towards the successful, strong, healthy, and intelligent in various combinations.
Oh. Right. I suppose if you really stress the concept of 'various combinations' you might have a point, but this silly statement is exactly why Tyson's idea of rationality doesn't work. Hormones aren't especially rational.
"Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal." - RAH.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> 1. Concerning the murder of Philando Castile by police. The police gave Mr. Castile contradictory instructions. If they did not want to kill him, why did they give him contradictory instructions? The only reason for such contradictory instructions is to be able to kill him and then claim he did not follow their directions. The contradictory instructions given by the police show premeditation in the murder of Philando Castile. These contradictory instructions did not start on that night. They go back decades. This means every cop who ever gave contradictory instructions, everyone who trained a cop to give contradictory instructions, and everyone who gave legal advice to a cop to give contradictory instructions is guilty of criminal conspiracy to commit the capital murder of Philando Castile and should be charged accordingly.
?
> 2. If the goal is to overthrow the government, know that fighting in an insurgency is hard work. It requires the kind of hard work that most members of Black Lives Matters would call “white privilege.” I mean get up before dawn, sweat all day digging trenches, and go to bed exhausted, only to get up in the middle of the night and run some more. Look at the typical video of cops vs. protesters. The cops have body armor, tear gas, training, shields, etc. They are backed up by tactical experts with very expensive firearms that they have spent years training with. Look at the long line of perfectly maintained vehicles in the background. The protesters are not even bothering to cover their faces. There is an old saying: “Train more, bleed less.” The US Government has nothing to worry about. These protesters will go back to collecting their government checks in a few days.
The point isn't to overthrow the government, the point is to annoy it enough to do something. This is sort of the purpose of freedom to protest.
> 3. Black lives do not matter, at least not to black people. If black lives mattered to black mothers, they would not be aborting their unborn and newborn black babies, and the US black population would be more than twice what it is today. If black lives mattered to young black men, the black-on-black homicide rate would be 25 times lower, where the white-on-white homicide rate it. If black lives mattered to blacks, they would not idolize a criminal lifestyle full of drugs, prostitution, and violence.
Has it occurred to you that in terms of economic power, black people are, overall, have much less power than other Americans? Poverty usually breeds crime. The crime makes headlines. And all everyone sees are poor black people committing crimes. It's the same up here in Canada with indigenous people. The drunk ones in the streets are the most visible, so many Canadians just extrapolate from that and apply that view on all indigenous people. Then, when they complain about poor treatment, everyone else watching it on the news will do exactly what you're doing now. Dismiss it as the ramblings of poor, lazy criminals.
> 4. How many laws were violated by the Dallas Police Department using a robot and an explosive device to kill a man?
Probably none. Police have the right to kill threats, this man was clearly a threat.
Way too many words have been said while beating around this simple bush:
Any conclusion about how something "should" be is a combination of two elements:
1) how things already are
2) our preferences
Science gives us #1. Our values give us #2. Eliminate either from the equation, and you have all kinds of stupidity and suffering.
That is really all there is to it.
A nation ruled by science is no guarantee of benevolence. Take away any sort of human factor in society and you could get people like Josef Mengele.
First stop politicizing science, then give me a call.
Better to "retire" the elderly by sending them to be ground up into "pure pork sausage", while they can still contribute. Ditto children (and adults, if any get past childhood screening) who are incapable of thinking clearly....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
You need to emphasise the when practiced correctly because, let me see, around 40,000 MRI neurology papers are now considered invalid, there's something called The Decline Effect in medicine and there's a Replication Crisis is psychology.
So what, specifically, are you proposing here?
Freedom requires a certain amount of illogical latitude. There are all kinds of things people should be free to do which might cause harm to themselves or not be rational or logical. You cannot be free in a society which imposes strict logic and reason. Logic and science would seek to minimize risk and harm, but without risk and possible harm, innovation can be severely stifled. So while it is a good thing to generally live life rationally, and with laws based on science... it cannot be taken to an extreme. And I might add, it is not in our nature to be THAT logical- emotion, religion, fantasy, faith, art, etc, are all important parts of being human and to necessary to extract the most meaning from living and enjoy the world around us.
Using scientific reasoning to rationally choose between potential decisions is a great idea, but it doesn't solve the problem of deciding the basis of the questions. Logic can really only solve for one variable at a time. People will still have to decide which societal variables to solve and how to balance the weight of multiple variables. Fair is never fair to everybody. You are always having to make trade-offs between forms of fairness: equity, equality and welfare.
-rd
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live.
What is it with this recent trend of anti-expertism? This arguement was used in the Brexit as well as several political campaigns of recent times. People confronted with evidence that something isn't working rather than address the evidence move straight into either:
a) attacking something about a study that has nothing to do with the evidence e.g. who commissioned it or the fact that it disagrees with an own internally biased study (see Australian election where the Coalition attacked Labor's economic credentials as non existent despite their treasurer winning awards for his policy and the direct impact of his policy keeping a country out of a recession.
b) attacking people who believe in studys saying things like "The public is sick of experts". Interesting this is a statement often made by a career politician rather than their far more educated advisers. Damn those smart people with their fancy degrees, what would they know.
This is the rise of President Camacho
This is not entirely correct. Humans will respond poorly to situations that do not favor their happiness. As another poster pointed out, the issue with any optimization strategy is defining the utility function-- what are you trying to maximize?
For a society, there are a number of things that you could try to maximize. Wealth, for instance. However, wealth is really only useful when there is a disproportion of it, since otherwise it becomes useless. (a thing that is universally ubiquitous has no trade value.)
I proposed "utilitarian happiness" as the utility function. That is a composite value, derived from the sum total of the society's basic satisfaction, after all the things that make them dissatisfied are weighed in.
Failure to consider the implications of crushing human emotions would result in a serious negative to the total utilitarian happiness of the society, and would be a measurable metric that a rational society could then evaluate, and make adjustments for-- assuming utilitarian happiness is the utility metric.
Being a composite metric, such an optimized system will likely enter a local maxima state, where after that point, additional policy changes would only be demonstrably detrimental. The cynic in me says that this would be the death of the civilization's government, because after that point, government officials would have very little to do besides analyzing data that tells them they are doing things perfectly, and most people attracted to political positions, seek them to enact changes-- the very thing their data says is contraindicated. I feel it would be this conundrum between the irrational wants of the leadership, against the rational data their government is founded on, that would lead to the ultimate dissolution of such a government.
I'm not sure we can claim that supporting unproductive members of society is, or is not, "logical" unless we k ow what the society's end goal is.
And I'm not aware of any means by which science or mere rationality can determine such a thing.
Therefore the entire premise falls flat on it's face, right out the starting gate. Human beings are just animals who happen to be smarter than the other animals on this planet, and this simple FACT is reflected day after day in the news, and in our recorded history. We can't even get people to give up the totally irrational, illogical, and sometimes silly idea of 'god/gods' and religion, and by the way look at what it does to our so-called 'civilization'? It is ruining it, it is holding us back, it could destroy us. Don't bother with questions like this until the human brain manages to evolve past the point of needing mythical, omniscient, omnipotent beings to explain the Universe and our own existence. The need of people for such things just screams out to me that our poor caveman brains are still just too primitive and simple to even accept that we can't know everything, and it panics and makes things like 'god' up so it doesn't completely melt down. When the human brain reaches a point where it can deal with not understanding everything without having to say 'god did it', then maybe we can have a conversation about being 'rational' and 'logical'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Politics is politics, and if being a certain religion is bad, then eugenics is a means to wipe out that bad trait. Bad in this case can mean some society doesn:t like them. E.g. deleting people because they believe in a different god.
"A "pure" anything society is by definition dangerous."
Exactly.
Neil deGrasse Tyson asks "Rationalia: A World Where Evidence is God?"
Evidence as a God? But who decides what counts as evidence, what evidence to focus on, what it means, etc.
What I love about this is that a sociologist, of all people, a practitioner of a "science" almost as soft (read: inaccurate and trend-driven) as psychology, feels compelled to weigh in on the unreasonable nature of trying for actual correctness.
I think he's very well-positioned to refute this idea. He knows better than most that human nature is not rational, and won't fit neatly into a rational-based society. He likely has the data to back up those assertions.
John
Marxism is unerring in its diagnosis and analysis. In fact, a fantastic application of scientific method, or at least scientific spirit of inquiry, to political thought. Allowing for the biases and limitations of mid-19th century knowledge.
The problem with Marx and his rational followers is in their prescription for remedy of the ills of class, and unfettered, imperial capital.
Marx's anachronistic history, where he doesn't see class an hierarchy emerging from agrarian technologies and the need to order societies for harvest and surplus, are not too bad a failing. He could not have anticipated the rise of anthropology and of archaeological discovery, as yet unmade.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There are many different logic systems and using the wrong one in context can be bad, as any young man who has tried to use formal logic when girlfriend logic was contextually required has learned the hard way.
But the core of the problem doesn't change: It's who defines what logic is appropriate that causes the grief because any logic system is based on a values table. Sometimes this is explicit sometimes implicit, but it's always there. This difference between values is the core problem and where the solution must be found and defined in such a way as to be acceptable to all players -- which is one very tall order.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information...
I'm not quite sure how you can make "scientists" mean "experts"; a scientist is somebody who conducts research, guided by evidence and logic - a true scientist is instictively averse to making bold statements about how things are, because they know how easily a good-sounding theory can be tripped up by reality - whereas "experts" is a much more loosely defined group, ranging from those few who actually know what they talk about, to the many that don't, but like to hear their opinions; a certain Mr Trump springs to mind. Being guided by science would be a good idea, but the ever present risk is that they quickly get sidelined by the usual crowd of dodgy dealers that we call politicians.
Another thing: it is probably time to stop talking about "the inherently irrational brain" as if it was an established fact. It is in fact nothing more than a myth that became popular in the early 20th century or thereabouts, because we didn't have a sufficiently good understanding of what happens in the brain. Now that we begin to know some of the details, it turns out that it is in fact perfectly logical, even if it is rather complex. The brain is not "inherently irrational" (what does that even mean?), but since it can only process a limited amount of information, some of which may be false, the outcome will inevitably seem irrational at times to others, even it it seems perfectly rational to the person.
And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence".
Science is one step ahead this time - scientists are not telling anybody how to live. The role of science can only ever be advisory - science at best enables you to find ways to solve problems. And again, science is not "science"; the fact that (pseudo-) science has so often been used as an excuse for some agenda, does not make it the fault of science and scientists, I hope that is self-evident. Scientists discover how the world works, and idiots who don't understand or care about the wider ramifications then abuse the discoveries to satisfy their own, shortsighted gratification. Tyson knows, without doubt, that his idealised dream cannot be realised, but it is still a good dream - something to strive towards, I think.
science has no business telling people how to live.
Is the author seriously suggesting science shouldn't tell people that smoking is dangerous to their health and the health of those around them? That for their own well being they shouldn't smoke? What about pregnant mothers who do drugs? Does the author truly believe that women shouldn't be told how they're poisoning their unborn child through drugs?*
If the author is a scientist (I didn't check), they should have their credentials revoked. It is well within the realm of science to tell people how to live their lives BUT not force them to. People should be free to determine their own course of action based on the scientific evidence and in so doing, can not later complain no one told them something was bad for them (see cigarette lawsuits for a perfect example of such a situation).
* I only bring this up because of the whiners who talk about abortion killing a person yet remain absolutely silent when pregnant women poison that same person for nine straight months. Apparently poisoning is perfectly acceptable to them so long as something comes out. After all, they're not the ones who are going to pay for the mentally/physically deformed kid.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If your a rational expert an you're wrong you admit you're wrong and make corrections. You are also always iterating. Always testing and improving. This is what people don't like about socialists. Unlike you're communism/capitalism with simple (and wrong) answers to complex problems socialism says you can't just fix it once and *bang* utopia. There's no such thing as a simple solution to a complex problem. If there's a simple solution then you're problem wasn't really complex, was it?
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Bacause you know, humans?
Humans just don't like anything.
As with the design of operating systems, it makes sense to distinguish between policy and mechanism. Science and rationality may or may not be a sufficient basis for creating policies. And here by "policy" I mean things like "people should be equal before the law", "healthcare should be a right", "what's good for Wall St. is good for America", "all citizens should be armed to the teeth", "Mars colonization should be our highest priority". That is, policies are goal statements, and reasonable people can certainly disagree about what our goals should be as a society. Mechanisms are the means we use to achieve our goals, that is, the means by which policies are implemented. So a policy might be: "wealth inequality should be bounded", and mechanisms to achieve it might include "progressive income tax", "subsidies for the poor", or "universal basic income". Given a policy, science and rationality are certainly applicable to designing and evaluating the efficacy of mechanisms to achieve the policy.
Our biggest problem is that most of our political discourse is consumed with debating what we call policies, but which are usually mechanisms to achieve some policy. The policy is seldom explicitly stated and almost never debated, while the participants in a typical political debate take it for granted that everyone accepts whatever implicit policy their proposed mechanism seeks to achieve. But even worse, we implement mechanisms without ever tying them to an explicit policy goal, which makes it difficult to determine whether a given mechanism is working. Politically you get a situation where anyone who questions a mechanism is assumed to be disagreeing with the unstated policy behind the mechanism. The result is that bad mechanisms become entrenched, and are no longer subject to rational or scientific examination. And that just sucks.
If I could interject one question into every political debate, it would be: what are you trying to achieve? And if I could have a second question it would be: how will you know if you've achieved it?
Except politicians know even less, and mislead and misinterpret even more than scientists. So basically, the suggestion isn't to move to a system of perfect rationalism, which as you've said, doesn't actually exists. The proposal is instead to move towards more rationalism driven by empirical justification. It would almost certainly be better than what we have now.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Put your own personal resources where your own personal mouth is
I keep trying to do just that but every time I ask why I have to hand over my money to a private company to pay for someone else's healthcare I'm told to shut and do what I'm told. In essence, I'm being made a slave because of other people forcing their will upon me.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Who would control the science machine and how would the goals be determined? What if there are conflicting values such as stability and freedom? How would we rank one over the other?
It is irrational to waste protein. It's even irrational to keep people around when a machine could do the job more efficiently.
...so what could possibly go wrong?
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I watched a documentary about bees (I think it was a "Nova Science Now" segment). A guy set up a bee colony on an island. The bees were going to need a new hive, so he set up 2 possible locations nearby, one was deliberately made to be better than the other. Bee scouts went out looking for a new location, some found the good hive, others the less good hive and came back to tell the colony. They communicate by pointing and shaking their bodies. The bees who found the good colony were more vigorous. Also, when scouts for one location encountered scouts from the other, telling the hive to go to the other place, they would try to suppress them. Eventually the colony made a decision to go to the better location. But the comment was made that this was very similar to how neurons stimulate and suppress each other to reach a decision in an individual brain. so it's a kind of neural network.
After watching the documentary, I was struck by the idea that this is how a human society ought to work. Different people from different walks of life and temperament debating each other, disagreeing with and maybe trying to suppress those they disagree with. But in a healthy society nobody gets to dominate! When some faction gets the upper hand too much, everything goes bad.
Anyway, I think the neural network model is better than the 'rational' one. I've read where sometimes artificial neural networks design stuff better than usual logical engineering methods, and nobody can figure out why they work so well. Human society might be like that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
"First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that -- through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true -- mislead us and misinterpret information... And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It's striking how easily we forget the evil that following "science" can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realize that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by "evidence"."
LIKE GLOBAL WARMING!! (Oops, I mean climate change.)
His concept is fundamentally flawed on two counts. 1) society must adapt to new situations, and science only helps one interpret pre-existing data, and 2) one cannot morally run multiple experiments on society to determine the best policy.
I say fact #1 is importance 1, you say it is importance 10. We come to different "rational" conclusions.
It's been shown that some humans with amygdila damage can't think rationally. They can't weight the different facts correctly.It can get really bad with snakes which are flagged as "interesting" but not flagged as "be afraid".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The idea that people should be "ruled" is the real problem with this. The specific "rulers" don't matter. People are free. Free people may decide to form a government to serve them, not to rule them. Free people need government to do things an individual can't really do by himself, like build a road or mount a military defense.
Rulers are illegitimate. Wanting to rule over your neighbors is evil, regardless of whether you call yourself a scientist or a god-king.
Can != should.
If you want empirical evidence observe a dog. Pay particular attention to what it does with its tongue.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I agree. We are together, acknowledging his prescriptive failure - not his diagnostic.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This has already been tried. The results have not exactly been encouraging.
The problem is that even the best experts in any field know very little. The theories that exist probably cover something like 0.1% of everything that we need to understand in order to make informed decisions that would optimise global happiness. And that's assuming we can agree that Utilitarianism makes sense. It's a complete non-starter. And it will have adverse effects when people stubbornly refuse to admit that it doesn't work.
Let's take one example. You are clearly going to need a science of history in order to predict what effect your policies will have in the long run. But historians have virtually nothing in terms of over-arching theory that can guide us.
The "solution" that people have come up with in the past is to simply make theories up out of thin air and make it obligatory by law to believe in them.
Yes, if it's Open Source; else it's masturbation by those 1 in a 1000.
Since Neil deGrasse Tyson is involved, a better name would've been Self-Promotionia.
#DeleteChrome
Its a great idea but completely unrealistic. It doesn't take human nature at all. Most humans are not even close to logical thinkers, or even being able to do so. In fact most of us are apparently hardwired to do illogical irrational things, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Just one example is the billons of people that partake in the invention of and systematic belief in multiple religions, even though the most unintelligent person can see none of those religions are even internally logically consistent much less have any scientific basis.
Religion without Science is Blind Einsein
What is truth? Neither Google nor wikipedia have the answer.
You completely mis-read what I am saying. You actually combine two of the three separate observations I make, to produce an imagined assertion which I do not propose.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The old fallacy rears its head again, that somehow, humanity can only be 'moral' if ultimately relying on religion.
Yeah, some horrible, truly horrible, things have been done, justified by the "science". But far, far more, I would argue, have been done due to a) religion, b) nationalism, c) racism, and d) plain old greed.
I didn't even read the article but let's just replace all occurrences of the word 'science' with 'religion' and I bet the article will read just as well (poorly).
The relevant CS Lewis quote:
I would note that Tyson's suggestion was "weight of evidence", not "science". Science is not the only discipline based upon "weight of evidence", so are a wide range of other fields, including engineering, logistics, and (one would hope) the more grounded and less speculative areas of such fields as economics and Guhin's own sociology.
What is the alternative to basing decisions on weight of evidence? Basing them on wishful thinking?
I am a physicist. What makes my job interesting is not endless connect-the-dots logical connections, but the opposite: my job is to make (educated) guesses based on imperfect information.
The interesting part comes in figuring out when there's enough evidence to make a reasonable conclusion. We (the other scientists and I) debate whether a piece of data is really "true," what conclusions could be supported by collected evidence, and what "reasonable" means in "reasonable conclusion." I work with two other physicists, one of whom I trained, and one was trained by my grad school mentor. Even with such similar backgrounds, we disagree on all of these seemingly logical and mathematically calculable things daily. We work at a company, and can't afford to continue gathering data until we all agree. So, I have to make decisions based on incomplete information and logical disagreement all the time.
My dad is a lawyer/politician who has held elected office for most of my life. As an elected official, his job is to make decisions with a very controlled timeline, and somewhat controlled budget. This means he's routinely making decisions without all the information one would wish. While law lacks the rigor of the statistical calculations we use in science, the idea of gradations of certainty is there, and is used in politics.
Essentially, the argument that evidence can be gathered until a logical political conclusion can be reached is impractical and not rooted in reality. We do not even do that in science. Further, the suggestion that scientists have a monopoly on logic and evidence determination is wrong. The implication that politicians and government officials broadly do not currently desire to make logical conclusions based on evidence is counter-productive and incorrect. Certainly there are corrupt officials who do not desire this, but to imply that our government as a whole is illogical is dangerous.
I reject this general class of idea as fascist in the sense that fascism is the opposite of egalitarianism.
Every naive child can tell you why "I and people like me should be in charge". Sure. It's good to be the king.
Unfortunately I and most of the population will wind up being not-the-king, and we don't like that.
On a second level, science is a poor tool for ruling people. As very well pointed out in TFA.
Thirdly, science is too damned tedious for everyday decisions.
I have two jobs: I work in a lab where we've got time to describe some undesired behaviour of a device-under-test, reproduce it, construct experiments to disprove various possible causes, and then repeat the process when the developers fix the product and send it back for verification.
I also work in the field, where we have to get product down the line and out the door.
The scientific method is one hell of a lot more useful in the first job than the second.
Of course I would like to apply this scientific kind of thinking everywhere; I have some education and like to think I'm smarter than those around me because of it. But the truth is I'm not smarter. "You're making a science project of this job." is NOT a compliment.
Nobody cares that their theory is wrong; as long as saleable product goes out the door.
That's the society you want to rule with science. It will never happen; they don't have time for you.
I understand frustration with government, and the sentiment "If I were King...".
NDT is just telling us "I and like-minded people should be in charge". NDT happens to see himself as a scientist, QED.
I want to say to NDT that as a public advocate, for the philosophy that I happen to embrace:
"Neil, when you do stuff like this you're not helping! You are to science what RMS is to FOSS."
"Neil, you're a genius in your field, far more accomplished than I or anyone I know."
"Neil, you're also an astrophysicist. Go read about Linus Pauling and Vit. C."
Some people are helping promote public engagement in science and rational thought.
Feynman, Sagan, Destin from Smarter Every Day, Martyn Poliakoff, Sir David Attenborough, etc. etc. etc. Well, Feynman and Sagan have stopped obviously, but the should still be towards the top of the list.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
But how are we going to demonize the other side then? What names will we call them? On what basis will we set ourselves above our neighbors? And if we're not better people than them, how do we justify ruling over them and using their (lesser) existences to further our own personal goals?
Are you against progress?
There's no way to implement it properly, because so much of politics is just preferences. When it gets crowded, would you rather build more public transportation or more roads? There's no right answer....there are advantages and disadvantages to each, and we can talk about which advantages we prefer, but at the end it's a preference.
Should we put more money into NASA, or use it in the National Endowment for the Arts? Again, no right answer, just preferences.
This is why the gun control argument is so intractable. To some people, the collateral damage of deaths are worth it. To others, it's not worth it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tyson is much smarter than any of them: he managed to translate mediocre abilities into fame and fortune by making people who don't know any better believe that he was a scientist.
Eugenics is NOT about measuring people's head to determine intelligence, it is about artificial selection and much needed quality control. That was just the tool used at the time, turned it is wrong, doesn't mean eugenics is wrong. For example, medicine was treating sick people by bleeding them, we know that's BS today, does that make medicine BS? Sure enough, medicine is BS today, but not because it used to treat people by bleeding them dry, but because it has turned into a very profitable business that makes money on sickness and has zero interest of preventing it, as long as there are enough healthy slaves to meet labor demand.
Eugenics is NOT scientifically invalid, the measurement of intelligence by head circumference is. A big difference, not even subtle.
The problem with that is that more policy addresses preferences, not objective fact. Scientific fact would compel everyone to marry outside their ethnic group, because diversity makes for a stronger genome. Telling some old school southerner he had to marry his white daughter to black man is a good way to get dead.
Neil the ass Tyson is a theist, who worships the god of scientism, but doesn't know what actual science is.
First stop politicizing science, then give me a call.
Science is already politicized and will be whether you like it or not. There is a role for people like Dr. Tyson to explain to the uninitiated what science means and just as important what it doesn't. Want to find out about our genetic code via embryonic stem cells? Better be ready to defend against irrational folks who think that means killing babies. Want to explore space? Better be ready to fight for funding which is a purely political battle.
Science is always political as soon as it gets used to justify policy decisions.
Does the knowledge brought by science make men happy? That I don't know. But I observe that man can be happy by deluding himself with false knowledge. I grant one must cultivate tolerance.
Eugenics is wrong because it presupposes, without evidence in.many cases, what a desirable or undesirable trait.
Not quite. It substitutes what a person thinks is a desirable trait (selective breeding) for what evolution would determine what is a desirable trait. Humans as it turns out are rather illogical and incompetent at determining traits that are actually best for our species. Heck we're not even very good at it for other species. Politics, religion, culture and other weird stuff tends to get mixed up in our decision making.
You are arguing at a tweet. You have taken a one sentence statement about a virtual country - a hypothetical place where policy makers pay attention to evidence instead of what they totally think is true (I mean, that's good enough right?) - and decided to rant about it. And there are two much longer rants linked in the summary extolling the virtues of holistic policy making, because some guy made a tweet. It's a fucking tweet, it's not a real argument.
all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence
for an economic policy is a disaster. There is no "weight of evidence" as every situation that a central bank, finance ministry or stock exchange would be unique.
However, simply by knowing that the country was following a "rational" policy means it would be gamed by all the "players" who could get access. Although it's doubtful that any actual people would get a look - since the automatic traders would dominate the day. Outsmarting a system like that would make taking candy from a baby look like hard work.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Anyone who proposes using science as the basis of government is "politicizing science". That's precisely deGrasse-Tyson's error.
And it is indeed the same error that Marxists made.
Nazi Germany based a lot of its policies on the treasure of science from the execution off crippled and mentally ill people who were scientifically shown to be a burden to society presently or in the future
Nazi Germany was hardly alone in experimenting with eugenics. The eugenics programs in the US preceded those in Germany and informed a lot of their decisions. By and large it was used as a means to enforce racism and related policies.
Knowledge is power
but power isn't knowledge.
Dialectician. Archology.
Not if some religion is true.
Ok, which bit is true? How do you propose to objectively prove it? How do you tell the difference between the "false" religions and the "true" one(s)?
Rhetorical questions of course. Religion by definition cannot be objectively true because it depends of belief in something which isn't falsifiable. If it cannot in principle be measured or observed (with past, existing or future technology) then it cannot be true.
(Here we begin a predictably unresolved debate about religion, rationity, what constitutes evidence, limits of human ability to reason soundly, straw men, etc.)
You're the one that brought it up...
I assume by "kill off", you mean "Put out of business" (after all, to "murder" your competition would be to allocate someone else's capital against his will, which is not capitalism).
If you can put the rest of your competition out of business, and sustain that outcome under voluntary trade, then you must be doing a damn good job for society.
Imagine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical.
No such thing. Logic provides formulas. Formulas work on Values. Logic does not provide Values, it only provides formulas. Thus the foundation of the most logical society possible would still be emotionally selected Values.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Which country are you call in a theocracy? If you mean the US, I'm curious why you think it is one.
The US isn't a theocracy but there are a LOT of people in the US who would like to make it one. You know, the ones that want to teach creationism in science class, who want to institute prayer in public school, who make it illegal in numerous states for an atheist to hold public office, etc. The US isn't a theocracy but it isn't as far removed from one as many would like to believe. Anyone who proclaims that the US is a "christian nation" is one of these people who would like it to be a theocracy.
Science once proved the existence of Miasma as the source of disease, Looked long for the bacteria that caused Scurvy, showed how Jews and Africans were inferior, and blamed ocean warming on the loss of coral reefs when it was the poison in snorkelers' sun-block that was killing them. The role of science is not to make human decisions for civilization, just as the rules of business have little place in a government. Business rules eliminate all losses, so a business-government would stop mail and protection services to states that received more than they pay in taxes, and just let old folks without money starve while poor sick people die at the entrances of hospitals that will not accept them without payment.
The role of developing morals has always been a spiritual concept. We have 100,000 laws based on 10 Commandments, and even then, most of our other laws and morals are the result of ancient religions beliefs that still resonate within the human soul. While humans apparently have a desire to re-frame ancient morals into self-serving modern concepts (such as ISIS and the hate found in many so-called Christian Fundamentalists groups), scientists apparently will find evidence for almost anything to pay their bills when they are funded by political, ideological and industrial special interests. Look at the apparently both "science" from the warming 'deniers' and the warming 'alarmists.' This cold-hearted elimination of humanity from life is a poison that unfortunately pollutes modern science. "Science" decided that humans were so unimportant that it ignored the nine planets discovered by humans, and decided on some obscure rules to denigrate Pluto and its human discoverer to unimportance. Computer run telescopes and CCD plates now get credit for discovering objects in the heavens- humans just don't count. Science without humanism is a monster. It is unlikely but possible that Neil deGrasse Tyson is actually an AI seeking to subvert humanity.
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
Not necessarily. To use a simple example look at three strikes laws. They are logically consistent and simple but the knock on consequences of them are positively horrific. People get put in prison for life for stealing a pack of gum sort of lunacy. Logical consistency isn't always desirable. Sometimes we need a little heart in our laws even if it isn't perfectly rational.
Regarding point 2, you can, but it's not ethical.
The flaw in Tyson's argument is at the premise level.
Whilst science seeks to explain everything, it can't . Some systems are too complex and there is no clear correlation between inputs to the system, and it's outputs.
Systems analysis people sometimes call such things "wicked problems" , as they are rife with unintended consequences.
Funnily enough, such problems tend to land in the political domain, as there's no simple answer to them.
That's partly why politics exists - to deal with things that aren't intrinsically solvable.
scientists apparently will find evidence for almost anything to pay their bills when they are funded by political, ideological and industrial special interests.
Mod parent UP!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes. You are right, in one sense.
The tweet does encapsulate one strong form of bias. The "rant" is not directed at either the atomic sentiment in the tweet, nor at its sender.
Rather, this 140 character straw-man became a catalyst for specific arguments against basic assumptions about the nature of "rational intellect" and "science", with regards to their place as a measure for conducting human societies.
This is a discussion forum, is it not?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"> 4. How many laws were violated by the Dallas Police Department using a robot and an explosive device to kill a man?
Probably none. Police have the right to kill threats, this man was clearly a threat."
We are all threats depending on perspective. Police don't "have the right" to kill any more than anyone else does. While situations where lethal force are legally justified exist, that's different than "having the right" and police aren't special in this regard.
"This man" was clearly a threat but that's not the standard. Was he an imminent threat? If you have to pilot an RC robot with an indiscriminate killing device on it to get to him, it's really hard to claim "imminent". He may have been a bad man but that doesn't mean he wasn't murdered.
The only you will achieve with this approach is societal stagnation and eventually economic collapse and death.
That's because it is 'rational' in that world to use government regulations for every single thing. Should people use this colour or this colour for clothing?
Should different people attempt and write alternative open source systems to closed source software? Should there be more than one company pumping gas around? Etc.etc.etc.
Totalitarianism, central control for everything, unbearable level of bureaucracy.
Basically technocracy does not tolerate any alternative point of views, actions, does not allow funding for anything that is not party approved, etc. This is the way to destroy everything.
You can't handle the truth.
Ultimately, each of us is tasked with the core ethical proposition: to become better and more human in ourselves and in our intentions towards others.
This is our equipment and our domain for activity. When we have been fooled into thinking we are in a position to direct others, for good or ill, we err - and create much of the damage in the world that otherwise causes us dismay.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Tyson is nonsensical.
Science is a tool and a methodology for acquisition and extrapolation of quantitative states.
What's interesting is that we've seen the same emphasis on quantitative states in the tech industry over the last decade or so. I wonder if the pedistalization of numeric "Data" over any other type of analysis is related to the fact that there are people who in some fit on insanity could possibly think that Rationalia is a good idea.
Big Data without domain knowledge is useless; and logic without philosophy is flat out dangerous.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Plato's classic work "The Republic" does what I think is a pretty good job of analyzing various forms of government in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. His analysis of the weaknesses of democracy is, I think, particularly insightful. His conclusion - based on the evidence of history up to his time (early 4th century BCE) - is that reprensentative democracies are extremely responsive to the will of their citizens in their early days, when the voters are afire with enthusiasm for the task, and mostly knowlegeable about the issues to be addressed. However, as time goes on, the citizenry tires of the demands of informed governance and begins paying less and less attention, until only an active few bother to study the issues and evidence needed to govern wisely.
At that point, demagogues arise, offering simplistic solutions to the now-largely-uninformed electorate, with the goal of empowering themselves and/or their patrons at the expense of the commonweal. The result - inevitably, in Plato's view - is either a demagogic tyranny (which eventually either becomes a monarchy or sparks a revolution against the tyrant), or an oligarchy or plutocracy, thinly disguised as a nominal democracy (but which is entirely anti-democratic in actual practice).
Unfortunately, Plato's proposed solution to the array of sub-optimal government models is an ant-like, essentially communist state, led by a council of "philosopher-kings". The society he advocates is based on a rigid caste system, with strict rules of conduct, enforced by Draconian penalties for what he defines as subversive activities (including the death penalty for poetry and music!). It employs a ubiquitous secret police force to continuously spy on the "citizens" of his misnamed "republic" - which is, in fact, the most repugnantly repressive model of a dictatorship by central committee I can imagine. Plato's entire rationale for this hideous excuse for a government is that philosophers are obviously the wisest members of society, and thus the fittest to rule.
And, yes, if it sounds familiar, that's because Lenin based his governance model for the USSR on a blend of Marxian economics and Platonic leadership ideas.
I'm a fan of Dr. DeGrasse-Tyson, but I suspect he has not read "The Republic". At least, not recently ...
Check out my novel.
We are failing to analyze the purpose of the speaker.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is unexceptional in his field. To be blunt he is much better at talking about it than at participating in it. He's more of a journalist than an astrophysicist.
Is he a successful speaker because the general public likes what he has to say and is eager to give him their money to hear him speak, or is it because the general public likes the look of him and he is paid and promoted by his general institution to further its agenda?
It's the latter of course. If you want to argue about it I doubt any rational explanation would persuade you, and anyway its beyond my scope here.
But what is this agenda? Getting to it....
So you are eager to dismiss his suggestion of a utopia as 'not smart' or poorly thought-out?
The drawbacks are fairly obvious and a lot of them have already been astutely drawn out in this discussion so far.
But why are we stopping at taking the suggestion at face value?
To find the purpose of it, would it not follow to guess at the collection of reactions the general public might have to it? Wouldn't the speaker have done the same, and so by doing the same ourselves, might we not come closer to understanding his frame of mind and his motivations?
Let's be brief. Out of all the reactions we could hypothesize, which is the most potent? The reaction of complete agreement or the reaction of complete disagreement. Only the former could be profitable for the speaker. And what section of the population could be identified with this reaction? Let's be general: the atheist-leaning students, especially those in "STEM" programs who tend to subscribe to an attitude self-importance.
And so I will reveal my guess as to the purpose of this idea of "Rationalia": to polarize people who have lived sheltered lives of incomplete human experience toward a brand of irrationality labeled as "rational" that is otherwise known as authoritarianism. To fool people into accepting dogma under the excuse they have been very "rational" in all the proceedings of their thoughts despite totally removing the context from their view. Basically to overload people's thoughts, to reach the threshold of mental fatigue, and then give them an excuse to come to an easy answer.
This is clearly a method of authoritarian control over a vulnerable section of the population. In other words, propaganda.
Stop giving them the easy way out by saying "they're just being dumb". It's on purpose and the effect is calculated. They're not dumb. YOU are if you think so.
If most humans were more rational then governance would take care of itself. But trying to force rationality on a populace that is largely driven by emotion and ideology would be a disaster. Maybe the closest example of a nation ruled by science would be China where the government is largely run by technocrats who have demonstrated a certain level of competence before being elevated. Few of us in the USA would care to live under that government.
Science informs us about the real world but many areas of science important to governance such as economics and sociology are not very well settled. I'm not convinced a rational government could do any better than the current government in those areas.
Whether a rational approach is a good approach or not depends on the underlying axioms and postulates. And getting a good set is not a simple problem.
Generally people prefer to have their axioms and postulates not clearly specified and to use "flexible" logic to derive their conclusions. Calling this rational, however, is not rational.
Geometry couldn't even get up to 8 axioms without ending up with multiple contradictory systems that can only be reconciled by saying the words mean different things in the different versions. E.g. (IIUC) a point in 2 dimensional Spherical Geometry would be equivalent to the two points where a diameter intersects with the spherical surface in 3 dimensional Euclidean geometry.
So probably no. Also coming to an actual rational decision in a complex case can take an unbounded amount of time. So probably no.
This doesn't mean you can't try to approach a rational decision.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The problem is that science, if done well, can tell us what the observable consequences of our actions might be, but it will never tell us what outcomes we should value. For instance, do we value equality or progress? Do we value the happiness of animals as much as that of humans? Do we value freedom or security? The answers to none of these questions are self-evident (and saying that they are self-evident does not make it so).
These are all the province of moral philosophy, and that field gives no easy answers.
Dan
The
A sociologist with data? Nonsense. He has a vague feeling. He'll jin up data later.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No. You just lost a ton of money temporarily killing off your competition.
As soon as you try and turn a profit, they will be right back.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If only he was as smart as Paris Hilton.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh come on. If something is seems good on paper, but turns out to be bad in reality, that means that the theory is actually pretty much shit; you just haven't thought hard enough about it.
You can't find fault in the logic underlying Marxism? How about the central assumption that cooperation will naturally overcome competitiveness? Does anything about what you've observed in human nature suggest that that's a valid assumption across the entire species (not just some exceptions)? I mean, think of the prisoners dilemma, and extend that across broader society. All it takes is one group of people understanding that collusion, at the expense of the collective, can produce an outcomes that vastly favor themselves, and you've got yourself a power/resource imbalance. See every failed communist state ever.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Even the most logical society still needs some axioms this logic can build upon. And these axioms are usually values which themselves stem from instincts and emotions. This is why two seemingly rational people can discuss for hours and hours and still end coming to different conclusions because deep in their mind they both want different things.
Brave New World solved this contradiction by assuming that most peoples interests are pretty basic (eat, sleep, drink, fuck) and can be satisfied by industrial progress while any other desires (like the need for a deeper meaning of one's existance) can be suppressed/satisfied with Soma. I don't remember if the novel gives an answer to the question why those who have those "unwanted desires" would not find that treatment degrading.
Here ya go, politics as science.
https://irreni.blogspot.com/
society must adapt to new situations, and science only helps one interpret pre-existing data,
On the plus side, there is one whole heck of a lot of pre-existing data and truly novel situations generally arise slowly and rarely. Religious extremists popped up about the same time as religion, global warming evidence was first published almost a century ago, and even ubiquitous government surveillance has been done many times to great effect.
Is there something in particular that you see happening recently that would exploit your flaw? Also, "do/change nothing" is a perfectly rational choice that requires no experimentation while the data flows in.
I will simply leave this as a counter, to your claim of the 'health" of Capitalism.
You needn't agree agree with the entirety of the conceit, nor endorse the conclusion. it's enough to acknowledge several of the salient points made - regarding them as largely factual.
Then make extraordinary definitions of the term "health". LOL
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
LINK: https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-pain-you-feel-is-capitalism-dying-5cdbe06a936c#.6dgklsj9c
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Ever since Plato, one bunch of conceited pricks or another has claimed that they were superior to the rest of mankind, and should be allowed to rule us. Whether they're "philosopher kings" like plato imagined, "holy men" like the Pharisees or the Wahabbis, "scientific planners" like the Marxists or the British "upper class", they can all go fuck themselves.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Most objection to the private ownership of firearms is blind fear. Among politicians, the objection is based upon the knowledge that firearms can be used to kill tyrants, and many politicians want to be tyrants.
The argument is intractable among the public because fear is an emotion, not subject to rational argument. The argument is intractable among politicians because would-be tyrants are evil.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Just take a look at the state of scientific paper review. Just what is accepted as true and relevant is debatable among "experts". And that is even before considering the quagmire of how to use that set of "truths".
A nation ruled by science sounds nice, as long as there is compassion behind the science and humans aren't recycled into biomass as soon as they cannot perform useful work.
Rationalia is still ruled by political ambition which will twist things. But even if not, "perfect rationalism" can yield terrible results.
Consider: What if the FDA, by making excruciating demands for safety and efficacy, delays (or halts) useful drugs? A drug that helps heart disease, delayed 5 years, could cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, how many lives does the FDA save over using people as guinea pigs? Nobody wants to get sick or die being the test subject, but it is at least conceivable a "forge ahead and pull back only when problems seen" strategy would, net, save millions of lives, year upon year.
And global warming? What would slowing the economy 10% cost, say, over a century in the rate of technological development? I can easily see doing nothing, and moving in from the sea over 100-300 years, ending up with more, happier, healthier people in 300 years than current sea levels and technology 50 years behind where it otherwise would be.
None of this, and many others, including currently unforseen effects, unfortunately are taken into account in "Rationalia".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
It's more complicated than that. Cities with restrictive gun ownership laws like Chicago and Los Angeles have very high rates of gun violence. Cities with very permissive gun ownership laws like New Orleans have very high rates of gun violence. Statistics on how many violent crimes are prevented by private gun ownership are difficult to reliably obtain - if someone is shot, there's probably a record at a hospital or morgue. If I claim that I brandished a pistol to frighten off an intruder, was I a citizen protecting my property from a deadly threat or a delusional tough guy wannabe? If I was protecting my property, would a baseball bat or golf club or machete been equally effective at scaring off the intruder? How can you prove it either way? How do you know I didn't scare off a neighborhood kid that was just walking home from a friend's house and was only on the sidewalk in front of my property? Statistics on gun discharges are easier to get - if a privately owned gun is fired at a human being, it's much more likely to be an accidental shooting, murder, or suicide than an act of self-defense. So whatever my intent when I buy the weapon, in descending order the odds are: it never harms anyone (highest likelihood, well over 99%), it's involved in an accidental shooting, suicide, or murder, or (smallest possibility) used in self-defense.
All of which leads to a great big mess. You cannot assert this is all ignorance and power-hungry tyrants against freedom-loving gun owners. There are idiots and intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides. I'm still not sure where I stand - if I support gun rights, does that mean most teachers, nurses, and mall cops should receive extensive firearms training? If not, how do I expect to stay safe?
Marx's diagnosis of the problem was flawless - capitalism is fundamentally exploitative. The investor class abuses the worker class.
Competitiveness is not a magic solution. When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it's patented and over time other companies can sell generic versions and conduct their own research with it and variants of it. But when a pharmaceutical company researches a drug and the drug is deemed to ineffective or unsafe to bring to market, it's buried - and there's a good chance a dozen other pharmaceutical companies will have researched and then dropped the same drug. Or look at planned obsolescence. Do cars need their styling tweaked every four years, and the cupholder layout rearranged? How about smart phones, wonderful pieces of engineering that consumers are expected to discard in two years because it's better for the vendor - not the consumer - if they do. How about foods and large food portions laden with extra salt and sugar because they sell more? And I don't begrudge Jane and John Doe their choice when they take a 5500 pound SUV to drop off their only child at elementary school, but you can't call that model an efficient use of resources. Competition is not always efficient.
I do agree that Marx's cure for capitalism is unworkable, for the reasons you describe. But I think his criticisms are rock solid.
It's not snake oil. Marx's solution - communism - is fundamentally flawed in its design. He misunderstands some crucial aspects of human nature and human social organizations. But his solution came after he diagnosed the problem, the fundamentally exploitative nature of capitalism. My summary of the key points:
- The employer/employee relationship is dehumanizing to the employee, because the employer is using them as a means to an end. And has an incentive to push them as hard as they can get away with to extract wealth from their work for the minimum possible payout.
- The value of the employee is controlled by supply and demand, not the basic human dignity of each person.
- The labor market pits people against each other, because anything that improves your value to a potential employer makes it less likely I can get good pay from that employer.
Someone more studied in Marx and his ideas may call these gross mis-characterizations of his ideas. That's just my understanding. But I think his ideas are right. My kids' teachers are influencing young minds, I'm playing code monkey for corporate executives. Supply and Demand says I get three times their income. If you consider human beings a resource no different from cattle, iron, or cotton then it makes sense. If you think every person has fundamental value no matter whether they work feeding chickens or performing brain surgery, then it's beyond stupid. Again, I'm not saying communism is the answer. It's not. But what we have today is wrong, and Marx saw and articulated how it was wrong.
Facts only exist while they fit the required frameworks of rich and powerful people in science - Just look at how universities have warped science over the past years. Science should only exist as a means to identify the truth, not to become the truth itself. Decisions about how people should live and be governed are something that should have no basis in science. If leaders keep making stupid decisions because of that, well, that's the privilege of the people who put them there. If they don't understand science, then that's the fault of the educational system isn't it? Education should also be expanded to include matters of law and medicine prior to high school graduation, but that's another matter still.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I'll be here through Thursday.
Get your dogma outta my yard!
In this house we make up our own laws of thermodynamics!
and yet not one mention of economics, which is the scientific study of human choices.
The FREE market (not just any market, but only FREE markets) guarantees that everyone is better off than they started, but nobody is worse off. Not only that, but that any market that isn't free means people could be made better off without making anyone worse off.
And real markets can be made to approach (in the mathematical sense) free markets with the right taxes and subsidies.
Free markets lead to pareto optimal outcomes, but any pareto optimal outcome can be obtained with the right lump sum transfers.
So, the scientific basis for law should (imho) be one with laws that result in free market outcomes, and redistribution through wealth taxes and basic income.
But, for some reason, the IT crowd that visits slashdot is generally anti-economics as a science altogether.
So, how do you possibly hope to have a rational scientific basis for society and law when the one science that studies utility and human choices is rejected by the majority of the so called 'scientific' crowd?
Sadly not. You can for instance use your resources to encourage legal barriers that your competitor may not be able to surmount.
You could undercut them with their suppliers, starving them of the raw materials needed to compete with you.
An option would be to pay more for a necessary limited skillset, reducing their ability to deliver.
Or perhaps put all of your funds into marketing and promotion, both expanding the market place but also building a dominating position within it.
Make a better product? I guess that's possible too.
It's just not that simple.
What is rational is not necessarily logical. Are we speaking of some objective notion of logic or subjective?
Science does not give access to all information so even if we could assess information perfectly we are still prone to error for lack of data.
Is there a better way to assess outside of the scientific method? -scientific or not we base our decisions on what we think/believe to be the best course of action or option.
We need the scientific method to help in objective analysis. If you read Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" book you may notice there is a certain logic at work when people make irrational decisions that seem perfectly reasonable and rational to them.
Science is not perfect but unlike some religious belief systems science changes, improves and gets better. Through science we have advanced our understanding of reality beyond the confines of "God did it".
Imagine a world in which everyone does everything based on "because god said so". If you consider just the lack of consensus on which religion is the "true religion" and how one asses the will of god (Being mortal and incapable on understanding god's wishes) it would be a very scary world indeed.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Killing because of religion is because of religion.
Atheists killing people is because of some other fucked up reason, not because they're atheists.
But you're also skipping the centuries of religious persecution, the damage caused by religious policies on birth control, the pain and deaths caused by genital mutilation, the theft of scarce resources from the poorest of peoples.
And no, Hitler was not an atheist.
You cannot have it both ways: Either the atheist massacres are representative of atheism and the religious ones representative of religion, or neither is the case. In either case, the atheist massacres res sill the worst by incomprehensible margins of blood.
There have not been any 'atheist massacres', so no, your examples are not representative of atheism. Whereas religious massacres perpetrated and supported by recognised officials of a religion are religious in nature.
I don't need to have it both ways, there's only one way.
Well, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, the science isn't sufficiently understood yet.
Worse, people are misusing bad science - see the massive push for female superiority based on very flawed studies that perpetuate myths around pay, sexual assault and equality.
The other factor of course is that humans are irrational beings. The science already exists that demonstrates this, and so any rational basis for society must factor in that irrationality.
This is why advertising works - there's a humungous amount of science that goes into helping people make what would otherwise be irrational choices.
Scientific conclusions can be (and too often are) unethically skewed (i.e. the term science is too often abused), but the scientific method itself is a nice and simple certainty incapable of being corrupted (i.e. fully meeting the demands of that method only becomes purely agreeable results without possible exception) – one that must be powerfully leveraged to remove (inclusively intentional) confusion from language to form concrete law (instead of the muddy mess passing for law these days).
Without objectivity, there is no fairness, so (by definition) no justice.
The fundamental problem is objectively defining harm.
In a purely energetic reality (e.g. this one, at least according to mainstream physics), harm is subjective, so impossible to objectively define.
The solution required by any society with an unalienable right to liberty is harm must be maximally conclusively (never suggestively, or such) defined in strictest accordance with the scientific method. Murder, assault, theft, and slander clearly fall into the category of harm as such, but holding a plant (e.g. cannabis) in your hand does not (among thousands of other prohibitionary examples to "regulate" society by mass rights infringement).
Tragedy is demonstrably inherent within our always-pros-and-cons reality (e.g. each one of us eventually dies, regardless of how the rule-of-law is structured), so regulations (euphemism for prohibitions) can only serve to determine the targets of tragedy, and you can probably easily conclude which group of people have better odds of not being those targets – the oligarchy (spanning the private and public sectors) controlling the regulations.
Scientific constitutionalism is genuine power for the people, because the certain and simple social construct that is the self-evident and unalienable right to liberty (i.e. liberty – the condition of being free from restriction or control – is limited only by the right itself) logically simply prevents the ratification of corrupt laws (when the public is righteously taught to maturely passionately care about that critical right enough to publicly defend it properly – which should not be too challenging of a task upon considering the undeniable popularity of liberty).
The only other option is yet another sick flavor of 'we can trust our rulers to define liberty according to their subjective – e.g. weakly "scientific" – conclusions' and all of the elitist-sourced abuses from favoritism that inevitably creeps and spreads out against too many generations of people vulnerable to that selfish elitist manipulation of law – allowing the unbearably dumb cycle of oppression repeat until death does humanity part.
In short, scientific constitutionalism majorly includes bringing certainty to language, so law – and leverages the anchor certainty (one that cannot be undermined) that is the self-evident and unalienable right to liberty (i.e. balanced liberty) for optimal liberty within a civilized society.
One prime example of such language improvement is forming a hard-line distinction between use and abuse. Use is always a harmless action, while abuse is always a harmful action. Use disorder, being used (i.e. taken advantage of), misuse (redundancy of abuse), and so one would be logically deprecated by language experts for clearer (i.e. better) communication. That negates (for solid example) the mass destructive ability by 'certain drug' prohibitionists to unethically swap use and abuse merely to their convenience to (likely intentionally) confuse the public to ironically support drug prohibition addiction (sanctioned thugs lying and effectively stealing billions annually from taxpayers to get their prohibition fix without even resulting in a "drug free" prison system, nor one shred of concrete, so credible, evidence proving we live in even a slightly more "drug free" America).
A lot more detail exists in the Liberty Shield informational roots
Sines of Impending Sines
Nice tits is a desirable trait. Doesn't mean I'm practicing Eugenics when I chase the tits owner/operater.
"Nice tits" as you so quaintly put it, has evolved to be a desirable trait. It wasn't a conscious decision made by people. We don't need to practice selective breeding to promote that trait. It would be eugenics (selective breeding) if we started sterilizing people lacking that particular trait.
Eugenics practiced by society isn't bad just because the traits being bred for were wrong. It was bad because it put too much power in the hands of government, which can't be trusted.
It isn't the government that can't be trusted. It's the specific people charged with running it. A government is just an organization and organizations can demonstrably be constrained by rules. Organizations are tools and like any tool they can be used for good or bad purposes. That's why we have separation of powers and other limits on government. You run into problems when you get a person or group of people in positions of power who are determined to ignore those rules or when those rules are badly written. People claiming government can't be trusted are saying something that makes no sense. I have no problem with the fact that we have a President - it's a necessary and useful function and we've had some very good people in that job over the years. I have a HUGE problem with the idea of someone like Donald Trump specifically in that job. It's the specific person, not the role that is the fundamental problem. We constrain positions of power with laws to ensure that when we do get the inevitable douchebag in the job that we can limit the amount of damage they can do. We also know that power corrupts so we try to limit its corrosive influence. But ultimately it's about whether or not a specific person proves trustworthy in a position of power. Abraham Lincoln put it best when he said "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
Police have the right to kill threats, this man was clearly a threat.
They apparently have the right to kill whoever the fuck they want.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Any law, any moral value which promotes "equality" is eugenics.
No it isn't unless it affects reproduction in a meaningful way. It is a HUGE stretch which you would have to support with actual evidence to show that something like an affirmative action program actually is a form of selective breeding. (and if you are arguing that... wow... just wow...) Furthermore whether or not you realize it you are arguing that the US Constitution is effectively a selective breeding program because it promotes equality under the law quite explicitly.
right?
Whatever else you may think of him... Marx was right about one thing, capitalism was and is hugely exploitative, fundamentally unjust and flies in the face of freedom. He repeatedly warned against achieving socialism through violent revolution because he correctly surmised that doing so would lead to abusive autocracies, he believe it MUST be achieved democratically if it was to have any chance at all of success.
The proof that capitalism was all the evils he called it - is that revolutions DID happen, against his advice, and despite ending up exactly as he predicted. The blame for everybody ever killed by a communist dictator belongs squarely with capitalism. If capitalism had not been so entirely evil, the revolutions would never have happened and those dictators would never have come to power. Revolutions do not come easy. People will put up with a LOT before they are willing to risk personal life and limb to change a social order they are now unlikely to live to see. Revolutions come - when the majority of people have been so thoroughly exploited that they have absolutely nothing left to lose.
If capitalism had not left the world with millions of people who had nothing left to lose - then Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao would never have been in power. Marx said the machines of capitalism are oiled by the blood of the workers and I would add -and fueled by the burning corpses of the colonized.
The end result of capitalism is severe inequality and the INEVITABLE result of severe inequality can only ever be violent revolution.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>one cannot morally run multiple experiments on society to determine the best policy.
Why not ? Lets take a practical question of governance. Water supply. Is it better to have it privatized ? Run by a private company but paid for in taxes or provided as a tax-funded utility operated by the municipality. You can find a billion claims written about the topic - all arguing quite persuasively for any particular solution. Some even argue that the reduction in the tax bills means everybody could afford to buy water at market rates if it was entirely supplied by businesses with no state involvement at all.
So why can't we test it ? Pick three towns with other factors being equal (so similar rainfall, river-locations, population-size etc. etc. etc.) and try one model in each for 10 years. Then compare things and make the best solution the preferred one.
Even then - you don't make it the ONLY option. It's quite possible that what worked the best, even if it was massively better, may not work the best in a town where those other factors we equalized. If you can convincingly argue why another model is more appropriate and cite as much solid science as there is available to support your conclusion your town should be allowed to try a different model - but must be prepared to change that model if the results do not live up to expectation.
Government is constantly making predictions: "If we enact policy X then Y will happen" - so we can TEST the policies by seeing how often X really led to Y. Granted factors unknown could sometimes change an outcome so a single failure is not proof that the theory is wrong - but a consistent pattern of failure would preclude a policy from being attempted further. So for example austerity would be long gone since in nearly 200 years of attempting it, it has NEVER produced the predicted outcomes, has never had a single GOOD outcome and it's bad outcomes has ALWAYS included making the problems it was intended to fix WORSE (i.e. if you implement austerity to reduce government debt and deficits - austerity has constantly and without exception INCREASED the debt and the deficits instead - because austerity reduces the budgets income by orders of magnitude more than it reduces expenses).
There are plenty of ways we can apply at least a much MORE scientific approach to governance and get better results than we currently do.
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Science, at best, will produce probable results. Conclusions based on those results is not science, but opinion. Assumptions form what ideas to test. Limited creativity informs how to test those ideas. Results are open to differing interpretations and applications. In the "hard" sciences, there are constraints on the reasonableness of which ideas we test and of the conclusions we reach. It is a mistake to think that we can systematically apply the same approach to the behavioral sciences. There are too many variables--too many unknowns.
I had the same thought. It comes down to rule by computer because after all science is just a process. On the other hand, it's massively biased and manipulated by humans (what to research or test next, etc) and many fields only see results that allow for educated guesses, speculation and so on. Science is limited in how much it can investigate at once and there is a bit of a paradox, the more science measures and shapes the society, the more it risks interfering with its own measurements.
I don't think you can dismiss the place of science and computation in these things, but you cannot remote the human operator entirely. At least not given the current state of affairs.
I have consciousness which is directly observable but this is not actually externally testable. I assume that other humans have it solely based on the reflection of my own self perceived nature. No one even knows where to start or how to describe it or even prove it exists but as something that does exist it is undeniable.
We can't measure it really or handle it properly but it's the source of all morality. Without it everything is as meaningless as numbers and equations written on a piece of paper.
I don't believe it is really possible to truly consider consciousness in algorithms beyond what we impart into them and I doubt we can build a model to cover all possible circumstances. We can't even test if our machines are truly conscious or not even is they mirror our behaviour and appearance entirely.
No. Just no. Marxism is fundamentally broken and has led to the death of more people than any other philosophy. Even ones that have had 10x the life.
Capitalism remains the best we've got. Marxism's key and unfixable flaw is unhealthy concentration of power.
Marx didn't understand capitalism and criticized a straw man. He should have spent more time reading Adam Smith. The world would be a better place.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The investor class abuses the worker class.
What nonsense. You shouldn't use a term like "abuse" so loosely.
I guess every time I post on slashdot during work hours I'm "abusing" the investor class as well.
I don't recall saying anything like "anarcho-capitalism is the solution," and I wasn't extolling competitiveness as a virtue; I was illustrating how competitiveness, if possessed by even a small amount of people, will destabilize any ideal balance obtained through cooperation, and will snowball after that. Also, pure market-based capitalism suffers from similar problems not all that dissimilar to communism, which is why nobody uses capitalism by itself. The issue with communism, though, is that it's pretty much incompatible with other economic theories, even socialism, so its failings can't really be mitigated like the failings of capitalism can.
The fact that you think a critique of communism is an endorsement of pure capitalism is, I think, very telling.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Okay, how about just straight-up mammalian nature, then. Can you point to any mammals that fully cooperate, and don't do things like horde individually, or defend territory against others (even of the same species) not in the same social group? Remember, this needs to be generally true, not anecdotal. This isn't a cultural trait, it's inherent.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks." -Yang
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Marx's single biggest mistake is expecting 'the new communist man' to emerge.
Basically that's an admission that communism doesn't work, but a religious arm wave to make it all better. At that point, Marx wasn't even trying to stay in the real world.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> Marxism's key and unfixable flaw is unhealthy concentration of power.
Except that this is not a feature of Marxism at all. It's a feature of Bolshevism - whose ills you are happy to blame on Marxism even though Marx himself would have been appalled by it. Marx was a devoted democrat and utterly opposed to concentrating power in the state. He also did not approve of the idea of the state owning the means of production. He wanted workers to own it, directly. The state-as-a-proxy is Bolshevism and while nobody will deny that it was a disaster - you can't use it's failures as evidence against a philosophy that outright rejected those very failures ! Worker-owned cooperations are far truer to Marx's vision than Russia ever was - and there are plenty of those in the United States right now. Doing quite well too.
If anything it's the opposite - it reduces power centralisation by completely eradicating the power centralisation in employers over employees and democratising the running of business. It took us thousands of years to figure out that monarchy is a terrible way to run a country - it seems it will take us just as long to figure out it is JUST as terrible a way to run a business.
Why is it that Marx's most passionate critics have never actually READ Marx ?
Oh and your count is DEFINITELY WAY off. The most deadly philosophy in history is undoubtedly Christianity.
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The social sciences have tied themselves in a theocratic knot:
The politics of exclusion is evil therefore any attempt to exclude confounding variables in human ecology causality is evil.
Let's look at that word "ecology" for a moment:
There is something called "the ecological fallacy" that like the bromide "correlation doesn't imply causation" is trotted out or ignored at the convenience of the theologian posing as social scientist. The "diagnoses" of "fear" "xenophobia" "racism" are all modern day equivalents of "demon possession" in the moral zeitgeist of these theocrats.
Let me give you a contrasting example from the medical profession to illustrate exactly how intellectually, scientifically and morally bankrupt are social sciences by comparison:
My wife is dying of Huntington's Disease and there is a cure called ASO gene silencing. It has been tested in the entire pipeline of animal models up to and including primate models, and has been shown to be both safe and effective at slowing, halting and even partially reversing symptoms in moderate doses. It is undergoing human safety trials and even though her decline is accelerating toward death and she consents to treatment, she is denied the treatment. This cruel reality actually has _some_ ethical basis due to the need to ensure that before a treatment is unleashed on even a dying population, that it be shown to be both safe _and_ effective -- not by mere "empirical data" (compiled correlations of naturalistic observations) but by establishing causality with experimental controls to exclude confounding variables including placebo effect. Even after being so demonstrated, she would not be treated without her consent.
Compare and contrast "social science" imposing its "treatments" on massive numbers of people without their consent, let alone showing the treatment is both safe and effective through experimental controls.
I'm sure many if not most "social scientists" would give me some sort of "diagnosis" for rendering the foregoing opinion in favor of "the politics of exclusion" and, upon that "diagnosis" would judge me to be a danger to myself and others, hence, to be deprived of the kind of society in which I might prefer to live as a preventative action. This, in their esteemed expert opinion is not "prejudice" even though it removes from me a basic human right without so much as an accusation of commission of a crime, let alone trial let alone full _judicial_ proceeding which judges me after I've made the case for my innocence and/or sanity. No, _that_ is not "prejudice". What is "prejudice" is some personal preference I might exercise in my private life given limited information and limited resources to obtain that information.
Seriously, it's all falling down and good riddance.
Let's hope something like sortocracy replaces it. http://sortocracy.org/
Seastead this.
So all you've got is 'no true scotsman'?
Exactly like 'no true christian'.
Some atheists believe things at least as irrational (Marxism) as any religion. When their beliefs conflict with reality they kill people, just like the religious.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... that all of reason and logic are perfectly expressed in science. Furthermore, he seems not to apply logic and reason to the reality of corruption and its effects. No idea is safe in a universe of spin doctors.
So blame Marxism, not atheism.
You appear to have a chip on your shoulder.
I really like this response. Thanks.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Even if the diagnosis was flawless, the prescription was a steaming pile of excrement.
Pharmaceuticals are a particularly bad example to use to claim market failures. The regulatory burden on the industry is uniquely burdensome with huge barriers to entry for any particular product. Even then there are companies that seek out and test interesting orphan drugs.
As for planned obsolescence, cars now last upwards of 200,000 miles, double what happened 40 years ago. Checkers were pretty much indestructible (500,000 miles were possible 300,000 was the minimum unless you bent the frame) on most of them and model years had interchangeable body parts, , but were so heavy the only got 7-8 miles per gallon. Smart phones are kind of crap, and would last a lot longer if the software were fully open source, however it's not what people care about. They want "cool" and "carrier subsidized" which means short model lifespans and barely two years of support.
If you don't begrudge Jane and John "SUV" Doe their choice you can't say it's inefficient, Maybe a 2nd, 3rd and fourth kid are were in the plan at one time. Maybe they have a boat or RV they like to haul around every weekend in the summer, or maybe "duude!! 4-wheel drive,!" Unless you wasn't to substitute your criteria for what the consumer was actually using, how can you say it's inefficient? Even though you may be more intelligent the Jane and Johns of the world when it comes to many decisions, you still aren't intelligent enough or moral enough to run their lives for them.
Putting my money where my mouth is doesn't get fair treatment for most working class people, does it? If charity was going to solve unfairness, it would have worked already. So you're at best willfully ignorant and at worst intentionally dishonest with your suggestion.
Go back to your Ayn Rand romantic fantasy, where every capitalist is a hard-working, ethical genius made rich by their efforts and every altruist or even every poor person is an idiot, a liar, a whiner, and a thief.
I misunderstood the previous comment, then. Competition is not antithetical to communism - competition for resources is antithetical, but not competition in work. You want to raise a better strain of grain, develop a better cure for the common cold, or design a better phone? Go ahead, the other communists won't stop you. You want to own the grain market? You want to own the rights to your cure? Then there is a problem.
First and foremost, I'm not saying I - or anybody - should be running anyone's lives. And to be clear, Marx wasn't either. He believed communism could be run as a community, more or less as a direct democracy. I find this particular criticism of communism and socialism frustrating, because it skips a step in explaining the flaw. It would be like saying, "People opposed to gun rights want government oppression of the population!" - it skips a critical step, people opposed to gun rights may or may not want government oppression, but if you take gun rights away then the risk of government oppression of the population skyrockets. Likewise, communists want communism, which in theory allows everyone to have more (not less) of a say in their own daily lives than they have today - but in practice creates a bureaucracy that's even more oppressive than a capitalist plutocracy.
The regulatory burden on pharmaceuticals is necessary because of the risks. And as bad as that burden is, sometimes it's not enough - remember all of the cholesterol lowering drugs being heavily promoted that didn't actually reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or stroke?
Cars today are marvels of engineering. But it's difficult to prove either way whether the 200,000 plus mile span of cars today is something that could only happen due to engineering and technology pioneered in the 1990s. It's possible the world had to endure decades of unreliable garbage strictly because the automakers informally (or maybe even formally) agreed with each other that engineering for reliability was unprofitable.
With respect to smart phones, I agree that people are not prioritizing reliability. I think that's wrong. Again, I'm not asking for the ability to dictate what people want, but I would call it a failure of our education and a product of marketing that pushes blind consumerism over educated purchases.
Likewise with respect to SUVs, or trucks, or whatever, I'm not asking for the right to dictate anything. But I think it's not good for our society for people to be drawn to buying something so much larger than they need for the sake of vanity, and it's a product of marketing that pushes blind consumerism over educated purchases.
You lump all religious people together, I lump all the atheists together. Turnabout...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh, my view is that the "idiots, liars, whiners, and thiefs" are privileged, well-off people like you who use straw men about "the working class" and "fairness" to enrich themselves at the expense of others. No, you didn't make it on your own as a "highly paid code monkey", you are the Bourgeoisie and oppressor that the Marxists hate so much, and with good reason.
Unhealthy concentration of power is a feature of all command economies.
Even marx knew they had to go through a command economy stage to get to 'perfect communism'. Which is death to the dream, it can never work.
Count the totals for Marx. Hitler + Stalin + Mao exceeds christianity's total. Granting that's mostly down to population growth, it remains true.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, abuse. A human being's worth and right to a quality of life and happiness should not be tied to supply and demand like he's a sack of rice.
Further, the competition for labor pits people against each other. And worst of all, the employer/owner/investor has a financial incentive to treat employees as poorly as he can get away with without hurting productivity or driving the employee to quit.
Abuse.
You and I are lucky, we're in the tiny portion of the labor market where demand exceeds supply. So we can post to Slashdot during work hours and nobody cares. But by the very definition of supply and demand, this can't apply to most people. If another million Americans became as qualified to write code as I am, software development would become a minimum wage job. Likewise for nurses, doctors, dentists, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and every other skill - as soon as enough people acquire it, it would become worthless.
>Unhealthy concentration of power is a feature of all command economies.
A command economy however is not a feature of communism.
>Even marx knew they had to go through a command economy stage to get to 'perfect communism'
Believed, not know, even in his own time that was greatly debated. A huge swath of communism in those days were anarchists - going the far opposite to the belief that only by also dismantling government and bringing democratic running to every level of society can comminism be achieved. That side never quite died out - and where it's been tried, it's been remarkably successfull.
But even without that - the worker-co-op approach is a highly successful approach - and personally I favour getting to perfect communism gradually, by building worker coops everytime capitalism failed. Many of the ones in the US were created out of the ashes of failed capitalist companies -and succeeded where their capitalist forbears could not.
In Argentina there is an even better example. The Argentinian economy completely collapsed in 2007. Thousands of businesses went under. In that wreckage - the workers decided to just show up the next day anyway. They showed up at the abandoned factories the capitalists had left behind as they fled the collapsing economy with their wealth- and started running them as democratically managed worker-owned coops.
And they succeeded -where all those capitalist businesses had failed, they made them work. Partly because they paid themselves properly - and so all the businesses had actual customers who could actually afford to buy their goods. Today there are over 20-thousand such worker-owned businesses in the country, they produce more than 80% of it's GDP employ almost the entire workforce.
They made an entire economy worked where capitalism had failed, in the same economic conditions, with the same government that all those businesses failed - they worked.
It's the wisdom of crowds effect, a thousand workers deliberating about how to deal with a problem - one of them is bound to have a genius idea. Whoever said the many eyeballs effect can only work for software ?
>Hitler
There was absolutely nothing Marxist about Hitler - on the contrary he despised socialism. On his ascent to power the first NAZI pogram Kristallnacht consisted of him murdering every socialist in parliament in cold blood - over 400 of them. His party may have been a socialist worker's party once -but that was long before he even joined it. By the time he ran it - it was absolutely anti-socialism and Hitler generally said 'jews and socialists' together - as, to him, they were the same scourge.
People who are trying to turn a democracy into a dictatorship do not murder the people on THEIR side, they murder the people who would oppose them.
And it's not like capitalism is immune to dictatorships - there have been more than enough of those. Pinochet ring a bell ?
> Stalin + Mao
Marxist only in name as they betrayed several of his most important criteria - democracy and peaceful protest (he was adamantly anti-revolution). So only in THEIR OWN WORDS even was it in name. They are more correctly called Bolshevist - and this whole thread began with me stating that I do not accept the fallacy of blaming Marx for the failures of Bolshevism. You've not offered any compelling evidence (or any evidence at all) for why that is an unreasonable position - you just ignored it. Since it's the entire point of the discussion - that's rather a stupid thing to do.
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For thus it is written: “"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C. Clarke)
Our Science's TECHNOLOGY is the most ADVANCED, BIGGEST, most BADASSinined, most INDISTINGUISHED that ever was, is, or will be.
Our PUBLICATIONS are infallible, our METHODS smoke, our LOGIC will bring tears to your eyes, our RATIONAL THOUGHT will leave your head spinning.
Our Science is all perceiving (unto even those pesky, tricksy, elusive, theoretical particles that CERN cannot find), all knowing (including that dark matter/energy/whatever stuff), and ever present (in all of the universe/multiverse—see note below).
Once we were slaves to your ethics. Now we are free to pursue our own rationalized agenda.
With Science on our side we will recreate the world in our superior image.
Beyond mere technology and magic, OUR SCIENCE IS SO KICKASS AWESOMELY ADVANCED THAT IT IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM RELIGION!
Put that in your frakin pipe and smoke it--for it makes more sense, and is a lot more fun, that way.
[note: universe/multiverse/schmultiverse—we accept all scientific disciplines, denominations, interpretations, interpolations, assumptions, presumptions, and resumptions. We are tolerantly nonexclusive—unless your beliefs offend us or we simply just don't like you.]
Back to no true commie.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You need to read up on the No True Scottsman fallacy - it means just about the exact opposite of what you think it means.
You are making a guilt by association fallacy.
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Sounds like humans are left out in that scenario
If you would instead want to rule with an iron fist or blind ignorance or artificial scarcity or racist psychopathic militarized police or subversive secret agents or broken social constructs, depressing environments, and copious supplies of impure mind altering substances prohibited and delivered by black ops and black markets, then yes, allowing the population to be well informed, implement plans that have merit, and using scientific proofs to rule themselves without your "guidance" and "protection" is a horrible, terrible idea.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
>The regulatory burden on pharmaceuticals is necessary because of the risks.
You get some type I errors, but what you don't see is the type II errors. All those people who might have been saved had a pharmaceutical option been available earlier, or had experimental compound been more widely available. Right now from that data I've seen current regulation vs 1963, creates moderately less type 1 errors, but vastly more type 2 errors.
You have got to be kidding! What are you talking about?!
Not all of those reporting science get it correct. And, potentially broken scientific 'evidence' should be disclaimed as such. Yet, the vast majority of evidence actually points to real world experience.
Perhaps cutting edge physics borders on the philosophical and is beyond most folks (Americans, at least) ability to grasp (mostly due to poor education); yet empirical evidence speaks for itself, even if one refuses to accept it.
What needs to happen is that our freedom of speech needs to be check with requirements of disclaimers of sources and clarifications of origination. Just because big corporations say it does not make it true. Just because I say it makes it just as subject to scrutiny. Believe what you want; yet do it at your own fault/cost, not on my cost or time.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
I disagree with the premise: "Tyson is a very smart man". So I can not comment.
Sorry, but it is a bad adea. And I say that as one who would be part of the elite.
Too much concentration of power. Power attracts evil, and power breeds evil in those who were good before.
To be happy and free, power must be divided up until it is controllable. Without the "separation of powers", things soon turn bad.
Other things have been tried many times, and always brought fear and sorrow. For at least 5000 years, maybe longer...
We will have government through science and engineering when the population understands the tech. We really are getting there, but we are not there yet.
P.S., Don't worry about the politics, it is natures way of building immunity to such things in the people! 8-P
Not just Morlocks and Eloi, don't forget "Things to Come".
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Competitiveness is not a magic solution. When a pharmaceutical company brings a drug to market, it's patented and over time other companies can sell generic versions and conduct their own research with it and variants of it. But when a pharmaceutical company researches a drug and the drug is deemed to ineffective or unsafe to bring to market, it's buried - and there's a good chance a dozen other pharmaceutical companies will have researched and then dropped the same drug.
But that's almost entirely because incredibly stupid and increasingly far-reaching government interference has increasingly deformed the pharma industry for nearly a century. The FDA's draconian rules, regulations, penalties, bureaucracy, and accompanying exponential costs have killed far more people than all their efforts have ever saved. We would be better off without an FDA at all, than the monstrosity we have now - the exorbitant cost of FDA compliance is WHY pharma can't bring cheap effective treatments to market - they have to recover the $1-3 billion cost of endless trials and regulatory approval - in the meantime, patients die. It's time to let people try any reasonable (or maybe even unreasonable) therapy, and end this silliness that all tests and studies must be double-blind by pretending that there is only a single active substance involved in the action of drugs. (And we still have NO idea what drug interactions are or do - tests must be designed to avoid that, despite the fact that most people on "maintenance drugs" (the kiss of death) take at least SIX prescription drugs...)
Or look at planned obsolescence. Do cars need their styling tweaked every four years, and the cupholder layout rearranged? How about smart phones, wonderful pieces of engineering that consumers are expected to discard in two years because it's better for the vendor - not the consumer - if they do.
When we had real competition and properly functioning markets (and that's the core of capitalism), things actually lasted much longer. (Cars are an exception in that the manufacturing technologies have made them longer lasting, if not always more durable.
I recently went in for a part for our washing machine, and the first thing the counter guy asked was, "How old is it?" "Twenty-eight years", I replied. "Oh, well you definitely want to fix it then - the new ones are all crap...")
Appliances actually used to be durable goods in TWO important senses: 1) they were actually designed to last for decades, and 2) you could get parts for them for that long. The parts supply house said that Chinese and Korean appliances are discontinuing parts in as little as four or five years. That's a bigger problem than poor initial design, although with only a few exceptions, "Made in China" is a sure mark of poor quality.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This is the best response I've seen to Tyson's arrogant ignorance (I thought it was a tweet, but I can't find it there...)
Anyway, it went along the lines of, "We tried that already. It was called 'The Terror'..."
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This is the response that's really the most telling for those who aren't as ignorant of history as our current leading BHA (youngsters can google BHA and Apple to understand...):
From http://moneyinc.com/rationalia... - this isn't where I ran across the perfectly appropriate reference to the Terror on this topic, but it seems to be the original source...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Statistically speaking, we are currently governed mostly by lawyers. Oh, and the rich. If you are a rich, charismatic lawyer, your future as a politician is bright.
Of course scientists aren't perfectly rational. But do you think they are better at making policy decisions than what we currently have? Or more objective than the topmost 0.1% of the rich who have never depended on a paycheck? Just demanding supporting evidence would be a huge improvement over how policy is currently set: by debates that are little more than an extensive survey of the various logical fallacies, and by forming coalitions of selfish lawmakers who are either getting personal kickbacks or pork for their home district.
Besides, for everybody who is panicking that scientists will lead us to some sort of horror novel society where ethics are forgotten, scientific thinking makes you more moral.
The question isn't whether Tyson's Rationalia would be perfect - it's whether it would be better than our current government which amounts to groupthink among advantaged narcissists. The answer seems pretty clear to me. Let's elect some more scientists and engineers, and let's demand the same burden of proof on policymakers that we expect of middle school science fair projects.
The biggest danger is medicine and biology. These fields have totally trapped themselves in their own model. Take blood draws, for example. If the reaction caused by puncturing your dermis and collecting blood creates a temporary level of reactivity (hormone reactions: epinephrine, for example, and unknown subtle reactions caused by psychological relationships), they could have a complete systemic error in their model. They don't know how to counter for this, because they really have NO model for human health. NONE.
It is unlike physics which has a model for explaining the cosmos, medicine has none. And it likely never will, because ITS A LIVING SYSTEM: it reacts to being probed and put in a box for the convenience of people who wear white coats.
...He comes from the future.
You have some kind of evidence that the FDA's regulations are causing more harm than they're preventing? Or are you just blindly spouting anarcho-capitalist theory? Marxism is just as valid in theory as capitalism, so until you have evidence I'm not convinced.
I understand your argument, but I don't buy it. There haven't been any pharmaceutical researchers making the claim that drug X might have improved the quality of life of 95% of people with Lupus but caused liver failure in the remaining 5%, but the evil FDA stopped them from selling it. Or drug Y extends the life of 60% of cardiovascular patients, but 8% get leukemia.
And most important of all, these long term clinical trials help establish connections that the vendor might be able to conceal without them - maybe drug Z does wonderful things for the first four years and then causes a high rate of kidney failure.
So how can you prove that the type 2 losses are higher than the type 1 losses, especially when a profit motive is involved to downplay and otherwise conceal the former and emphasize the latter?
The problem with Science is big:
1. Problem 1 - Tthe same as with religion. Too many zealots.
While "Separation of Church and State" isn't really a phrase used in the constitution, it is a phrase the judicial system uses.
So if you can separate those that "believe in science" as a religion, then it might work.
2. Problem 2 - Science doesn't care about morality
What happens when science shows that your death benefits man more than your life?
3. Problem 3 - Science doesn't care about your inalienable rights
Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right?
See #2.
Also, what if science shows that liberty actually results in more unhappiness and more crime and death. So let's just take liberty away.
4. Problem 4 - Instead of a Christian crusade, there would be an anit-religion crusade
Let's kill all the believers who don't bow down to the truth that there is not God, religion is false, and science is everything.
How is science any better than when religion ran the government?
They self identified as commies. Now other commies say they aren't 'true commies'.
Guilt by association would be taking someone with a similar philosophy (say the NAZIs) and call them commies instead of just socialists.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
10 years it too short for infrastructure.
Look how long it took the government of Flint to fuckup their water system (and the effect the predatory behavior of Detroit's water system had) and how long countries like Peru had no water systems to speak of.
Let's not even look at the real messes government overreach have caused, 'Owens Valley' anyone? 'Salton Sea' anyone? If those had been perpetrated by business they would be closed and the water would still be where it belongs.
You can't really run the experiment.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are the one who is skipping the critical step. How does this workers paradise form? How has it failed every previous time it was attempted?
The problem with pie in the sky solutions is they don't work and when they are tried the results are terrible. Going back to the pie in the sky philosophising doesn't change history or human nature.
Communism requires a command economy. Command economies suck.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some science from the USSR was unbelievably bad (Lysenko). Which points out the fundamental problem with running a government by science. The government will just redefine science for their purposes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As they are the ones that left, no surprise.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
:-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
>They self identified as commies
Your use of that slur suggests that rational discussion is impossible. You are not interested in facts.
I never said they were not communist - I said they were not MARXIST. Marx was not the only communist philosopher you know - and his communism is not the only communist philosophy. Hell Marx wasn't even the FIRST.
And for the record 'self identification' is a terrible standard which no sane person would use. People ALWAYS self-identify as something noble - but you can't judge the something noble by what people who self-identify with it does in it's name - especially when what they do contradicts what they identify as. So ISIS self identifies as Islamic but aren't. The US self-identifies as democratic but aren't. White supremacists self-identify as defenders of freedom and morality. Louis XI!V self-identified as a benevolent ruler. The WBC self-identifies as Christian - despite the fact that Jesus would absolutely not approve of their methods.
>Guilt by association would be taking someone with a similar philosophy
You mean like saying the Marxists are Bolshevists or vice versa ?
>say the NAZIs and call them commies instead of just socialists.
Who had nothing that even remotely RESEMBLED communism anywhere in their philosophy. No similarity whatsoever - and hated the communists. No it was not 'similar'. That wouldn't be so much guilt-by-association as it would be flagrant stupidity. They were not remotely socialist either - and hated socialism. They were fascist - which is an entirely different philosphy. The economics of fascism has more in common with present-day Wall Street than with any form of socialism or communism. They got their economic philosophy from Musolini and made no real changes to it. Musolini took credit for, but wasn't the source of, the description of fascism as 'official corporatism'.
There are far more than 'capitalist' and 'socialist' philosophies in the world that have been actively implemented and tried. And even within those two there are dozens of variations that have existed. The failures of one variation does not reflect on all other variations. You can't point at Cuba and assume Andalusia had the same problems (it didn't).
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>10 years it too short for infrastructure.
What's your point ? Obviously the specific timeframe should be reasonable for evaluating the specific thing, that determination would be part of setting up good experiments.
>Look how long it took the government of Flint to fuckup their water system
About 5 years. The decisions that screwed it up were made by the current republican governor. Rick Snider - who was first elected in 2010 and inaugurated in 2011.
You could argue there were preceeding issues that helped cause it, but they had nothing to do with the water system - if you're going to argue that you have to be honest about what they were. They were budget issues. If anything Flint is just yet another example of the horrors that invariably come from austerity policies.
>and how long countries like Peru had no water systems to speak of.
While ignoring that everytime any place had privatized water supply it led to riots because private industry has consistently been terrible at it ? Governments have sometimes screwed up water supply. Private industry has NEVER DONE IT WELL AT ALL. Sure they go out of business, but the next company does it worse. It's simply not a case where market economics work because it's by definition a natural monopoly.
>You can't really run the experiment.
You've given absolutely no evidence to support this statement.
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I can assure you that logic has its limits. particularly when there is not enough data to come to a firm conclusion.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You don't need to have a solution to recognize a problem. Just because Marxism sucks doesn't mean capitalism is wonderful, or moral, or efficient. Just "less evil".
Again, Marx thought communism could be made to work without a command economy. He was wrong.
They hated the commies because they competed for the same political space.
Then nationalised/expropriated industries. Enough that the rest their industry dropped into line from fear.
In the 30s 'capitalist' was code for 'jewish bankers'.
You fell for the post WWII soviet propaganda.
All bolshevists are Marxists, not all marxists are bolshevists, some were Nazis.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>They hated the commies because they competed for the same political space.
Political ? Maybe... but not the same economic space. And Marxism is an economic philosophy not a political one.
>Then nationalised/expropriated industries.
There's nothing uniquely Marxist about that. It's a feature of more than a dozen economic systems outside of Marxism and it is, in fact, even accepted in capitalism under certain conditions. Rooseveldt nationalised practically all of Detroit for the duration of the war. There are only a very small number of capitalist subphilosophies that do not allow any form of nationalisation or eminent domain at all and NONE of them have EVER been official policy in any country EVER.
>In the 30s 'capitalist' was code for 'jewish bankers'.
Who told you that ? The John Birch society was the most NAZI organisation to ever exist in America - and fervently anti-communist as well. Those people hated LBJ for being 'a socialist' for crying out loud ! They were basically the precursor of the modern day heartland foundation (and in fact, the Koch brother's father was a founding member, along with such notable anti-capitalists as Henry Ford). Seriously. Do actual FACTS ever influence the things you say ? Does reality ever enter the bubble in which you live ?
No they blamed Jews for Bolshevism - and Jewish bankers for funding it. They did NOT EVER think Jewish Bankers were capitalists !
>You fell for the post WWII soviet propaganda.
No, I actually studied history and philosophy and listen to no propaganda at all. If I fell for Soviet Propaganda I wouldn't call Bolshevism a massive failure. I wouldn't consider it a disaster. I however - do not believe their economic philosophy was the reason for the failure because in capitalist dictatorships the same failures occurred. Pinochet was no less brutal than Stalin and he was as hardcore a capitalist as ever ruled a country - hell his economic policy was basically written by Milton Friedman.
>All bolshevists are Marxists
No. ZERO Bolshevists are Marxists. Marx repeatedly stated that "Socialism MUST be achieved democratically. A recolutionary approach would lead to dictatorship which cannot be condoned". Since Bolshevists chose revolution AND installed dictators - it therefore ignored a key tenet of Marxism and wasn't Marxist. In fact it mostly takes it's inspiration from earlier philosphers than Marx. Marx came fairly late in communist thought actually. Anarcho-communism was born in the French Revolution (a century before Marx) and the key tenets of Bolshevism was born around the same time among Italian communists. Marx was late to the party. He got the fame but he really didn't deserve it. Even so - the variant he supported was not the variant that the Bolshevists enacted. To pretend that all the various communist and socialist philosophies have the same problems is to ignore the fact that more than one variant have been tried and they had radically different resutlts. Bolshevism was an unmitigated disaster but Anarcho-communism was a resounding success. Andalusia, Catalonia and Aragon were successful industrial societies with anarchist everybody-votes-on-every law governance and complete socialism in the form of turning all businesses into worker-owned coops. No state at all. They eradicated all poverty and all inequality and achieved what is documented as by far the highest quality of life achieved in the world at that stage - for ALL their citizens. What destroyed them was economics - but the combined military forces of Bolshevists and Capitalists actually forming an alliance. Neither side could stand to let anarchists be so successful let other societies decided THEY didn't want governments anymore either.
>not all marxists are bolshevists,
No Marxists are Bolshevists - they are different philosphies. It's like saying "Not all Christians are Satanists". It's not POSSIBLE to be both since they require believing entirely contradictory things.
>some were Nazis.
The NAZIS were neither.
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Science cannot tell you what to do. At best, it can only tell you the consequences.
Table-ized A.I.
Flint took 100 years to fuck up their whole town. Primarily by taxing business out.
The Flint city manager appointed is a Democrat. The governor's only responsibility is for not appointing a Republican city manager (as he should have). But that would have been called 'racist'. Also note that Flint was building a new supply pipe, Detroit got wind of it and demanded a 50 year contract before the pipe was complete, Flint had to find a new temporary supply or get fucked by Detroit. There were no Republicans involved in any of that.
Peru's privately funded new water system is saving thousands of lives per year. Of course leftist complain, but that is what they do. In the meantime people have clean water for the first time.
Government isn't terrible at running things in the short term, in the long term you always get 'British Rail'. Where a cash cow got turned into a money sink that couldn't accomplish it's original purpose.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>The Flint city manager appointed is a Democrat. The governor's only responsibility is for not appointing a Republican city manager
You mean the city manager who actively opposed the measure that led to the collapse - and was overruled by the governor ? How does overruling the concerns of the city manager, city council and mayor NOT make the governor responsible ?
>Peru's privately funded new water system is saving thousands of lives per year.
And causing millions of deaths - not least from riots.
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What? Your post is the height of racism. "Go back to collecting their government checks?"
Of course, your reply is also the height of racism, in assuming that most people that collect government checks are of one particular race! 8-}
Just make things up. No problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
Have a look for yourself. A typical sample (this is when the problem is already identified and starting to cause issues):
"Detroit’s water system offers to reconnect to Flint, waiving a $4 million connection fee. Three weeks later, Flint’s state-appointed emergency manager, Jerry Ambrose, declines the offer."
A month later the governor denies that there is any risk to human health (yeah ... he did *nothing* wrong)...
Get out of your bubble - the world you live in doesn't exist, the real world has literally nothing in common with it. The 'facts' you believe are not true and the people you believe are liars.
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