It's the difference between breach of trust and denial of goods.
I'm not just talking technically here, but as I can't be bothered to rehash the arguments right now, I'll link to to a post of mine in an old JE.
Please also note that I'm not saying that breach of trust is a good thing: society is built on trust. I am only saying that piracy and theft are not the same thing,
Think of the Children!
on
Own the Last Mile
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If this last mile is how one gets out of the "tiered internet", it presumably means that one gets out of ISP censorship. Government might (in effect) block this initiative, therefore, by requiring anything approximating an ISP to perform basic censorship, wiretapping, etc. to the extent that only a large, established ISP can provide.
I expect that you'll find large ISPs ever-keener to "work with government" to address "common concerns" (as opposed to say real, quantifiable risks) if this took off.
Stallman's acting to maximise his measure of utility, which is a perfectly capitalist thing to do!
There's nothing in capitalism that requires self-interest, but rather simply property and trade. The rest we deduce from those who attempt to justify their own self-interest, but that has nothing to do with capitalism per se. Ayn Rand is wrong.
In short, interests don't need to be self-interests. This is known in politics when politicians (occasionally) have to declare which charities they're involved with, amoungst other things.
Remember that evolution is simply random mutations. The most successful being the smallest and useful changes. Just because some is successful for an organism in no way means we can adapt that into our technology. I find it interesting to look to random mutations for inspiration but a possible pit fall if you're relying on that for innovation such as the early attempts at flight.
This imperfection proves that evolution is false. There is no "nearly right" when dealing with absolutes!!1!one1!
I have to say that it's a new line for Industry Lobbyists to be taking:
"The public interest is getting too much representation! We need funding so that we can counter it!"
You can be sure that other lobbies will soon be arguing the same thing. It's worked for the Creators' Rights Alliance, why not any other interest group?
Piracy is bad, it hurts the economy, it hurts businesses, not to mention it's against the law.
I agree that piracy is bad: it undermines the natural sense that we should respect the terms of a contract, however to say that it hurts the economy and business, at least in the case of 'cultural works' turns out to be false: the advertising effect cancels out the displacement effect almost exactly, at least when the pirated work isn't payed for.
The real sin then is to charge for pirated work: this causes a real displacement of funds that would otherwise have been funding new works. People appear to spend as much of their spare income upon music and film, whether they pirate or not.
It is against the law, certainly, but I'm afraid that you've very much earnt yourself a "-1, wrong". Sorry: what appears to be common sense or even is integrated in the assumptions behind the wording of the US constitution itself isn't necessarily true.
If common sense is reality, why do physicists waste their time studying quantum theory?
As for the Bari case, there is no proof of anything, except in so far as I have met her and do not believe she was capable of bombing anything.
I'm sure you're right...
I am interested in hearing what your experiences with the paranormal are, for I too have had experiences that lead to to believe, well, at the very least that there is certainly the possibility of an emergent intelligence in the universe. Not a creator God, I don't think, but a, shall we say, created God. And it's waking up. I am a cynic of the old school, though, which means I don't believe or disbelieve things. I entertain ideas, if you catch my drift.
I count Taoism as an influence, so there's some similarity in outlook.
My expriences include many synchronicities, telepathy, and even (following a breakdown) telekinesis.
I don't think that anything's waking up, although you might be discovering what was already there: a naturalistic will. If there is an apparence of "waking up", that is the effect of man coming into conflict with that will more often. The universe is so big that we should not flatter ourselves that we're able to rouse it, or that the time of our existance is special...
You have a good point about selfishness. For example, capitalism assumes selfishness, and so in fact encourages it. In my way of looking at things, 99% of people don't need to be taught the right thing to do, they just need to not be taught the wrong thing. Therein lies the conundrum of all moral and ethical systems: in accounting for the 1% who do need to be motivated towards good, we must not screw up the other 99%! Most systems fail to some extent in this regard. Buddhism is a good example of a system that accepts slower progress in order to, as Hippocrates said, "First, do no harm."
I think that "capitalistic" culture encourages selfishness, and there are selective pressures for selfish traits. But it is the culture rather than capitalism itself that is the root cause (having said that, change the culture, and our attitude towards property will also change). Capitalism merely assumes that we each have a consistent view of utility, where others may reasonably differ (fascilitating trade). Through trade, we are able to boost one another's measure of utility, but it is Randite dogma that the measure of utility has to be a self-interested one. By weakening this assumption, substituting personal utility for the selfishness that is assumed between the lines of economic texts, one is able to immediately see a better world, and that is before you start to make property rights more sensible.
Returning to the habits that are the building blocks of behaviour, we can see that it is entirely possible to reconfigure outselves so that simple cohesion, rather than necessarily 'self'-interest, is a sufficient glue to put them together. Naturally, we cannot ignore such things as food, or even sex, but with the glue being simple coherence, such drives manifest themselves, well, proportionally. After all, it is a simple efficiency that you manage your own food intake, for example, even from a completely eusocial perspective.
I think that individual actions need to be considered from the perspective of doing more harm than good, statistically speaking. "Do no harm" is too restrictive of freedom, as it disallows risk-taking. Systems live in people's heads, so changing the system has to, by necessity, be the result of the accumulation of many such acts. Acts that challenge the assumption of selfishness alone are quite powerful, for example, whereas (I'm sorry) arguing for socialism causes little progress on the ground; there are as many nasty people on the left as there are on the right, those who believe that their self-interest will be better served through collectivism, but you'll be no closer to a generous people tha
I'm marking you as a friend because I love intelligent discourse. Dialectic, the interplay of ideas, to me this is the most beautiful thing about being human.
Thank-you! Give me some time to read your comments and journals, and I might do the same. Even if I do not, my fans are given a small bonus, so what you say will more likely catch my eye. I've taken a couple of months to reciprocate before, and there are one or two that have fanned me, and I've still not taken the time to peruse their writing...
I too enjoy healthy, intelligent discourse. I find it amusing that I am sometimes seen as being a lefty, sometimes a capitalist. I suppose that I am no longer bothered to clear up misunderstandings in advance: the reponsibility for the error of applying conventional political categories isn't mine, IMO.
Did you read the Mark Twain essay? It's very short, and quite profound, well worth the read even if you don't agree with him in the end. I am an idealist at heart, and I wouldn't wear my hair shirt of supposing actions are inherently selfish unless I found real explanatory value in it. The way I see it, the very fact that unselfish acts arise from selfish motivations is beautiful. It shows that what we consider to be good is so for a reason, that what we conventionally see as good is in fact smarter than evil, to use two terms that often just muddy the waters.
I skimmed it very quickly the first time, and now I've read it somewhat more thoroughly. It is beautiful, and contains a good deal of insight, but is partly outdated by our modern understanding of science.
First, "drives" aren't fundemental: habit is more fundemental, as (for example) when driving we apply the breaks before we could have processed the risk of hitting something, or someone. The consciousness of hitting the breaks has to occur coincidentally with, or after actually hitting them. Habit is selected for, but the selective criteria are those of cohesion with other behaviour and biology rather than those of preordained 'self-interest'. Apparent self-interest results from the cohesion of self, which is in many cases highly indulgent, but the 'selfish' drives come second rather than first in complex behaviour, although with simple behaviour (eg. need to eat), it is more direct.
Second, life (both individual and collective) exhibits self-organised criticality. This means that individual events can be highly leveraged (although you can't predict which ones), both within the brain and within the flow of society. Particular faces tend to be represented with a single neuron for example, so that far from having a highly redundant and deterministic system, we leverage random influences and quantum effects to a high degree to give us non-deterministic behaviour. Similarly, we make a mistake considering ourselves wholly formed and uncreative. Yes, we are not in control of our influences, but their effect is hugely affected by accident, such as what we happen to be thinking at the time. Even if the range of our thinking is restricted by previous experience, the thought within that range that is prevalent at the precise moment of a new influence is not predetermined, leading to divergent paths though life, even if they remain statistically conditioned.
You might be interested in this discussion (I'm the "Morosoph" fellow).
I posit that society exhibits self-organised criticality too, leading to divergent social evolution of groups, both small and large (eg. nations). From this also follows that Marxist analysis is wrong, as the smallest events can find themselves occuring at critical points, so that revolution isn't inevitable, and beneficial evolution from the status quo isn't excluded. Of course the state of production still leads to statistical shaping of populations, but how it will manifest itself, especially at major decision points, is not determined.
I was attempting to bridge the gap between our understanding of selfishness and altruism, showing that what can be seen as selfless behavior is only enlightened self interest. I am a ntural believer in altruism, so it was hard for me to accept that we always actn out of our own self interest. Indoing so, I had to explain all of what I had previously thought of as "good" in terms of self interest, but it turns out that they are not incompatible.
Interesting, but I believe mistaken: this is a hair shirt that you do not have to wear. The reason is that if anything, it is our genes and "memes" that are selfish, not ourselves, and further they are selfish in the sense of self-perpetuation, not in the sense of saving the specific instance. In fact (consider a meme for noble self-sacrifice), the specific instance can be hindered, but the extra effort that it induces in the host can still cause it to replicate successfully. Yes, we are hugely mechanical, but it is errornous to deduce selfishness as a corollary.
Noble values cannot withstand cynicism, though. Those who believe that we are by nature selfish, even if they reason that unselfish motivation is selfish deep down, are going to fail to "take" nobler values at the level of behaviour, for they fail the "reality" test, but it is all a mistake.
The biggest problem is that motivations are in practice mixed, that is: impure. The popular mode of thinking is towards cynicism, so mixed motives are seen as "really" being selfish. The glass is half empty through such grey-tinted specs.
I am also an Anarchist of the old school, Bakunin style. I perhaps lean closer to syndicalism than you seem to, but that is probably my radical labor activist background talking. I was an organizer with the IWW. Not many people know they still exist, or that as soon as Judi Bari started telling loggers that their rights as workers and protecting the environment coincided, someone decided to blow her up.
Interesting. I'm not surprised about Judi Bari; there are some nasty types in the world, and many who believe that it is worth distorting reality to uphold and strengthen the hierarchy from those who undermine the status quo. In modern times, such authoritarians would paint themselves as democrats (small 'd'), and they are likely to believe themselves to be. If your world is one where anarchists are near-synonymous with terrorists, as appears to be the case with the FBI in the Wikipedia article, you're going to think that they're carrying, rather than being bombed. Everything reinforces prior perceptions. The bomber probably believed that he (I'll assume it's a he) was protecting civilisation in his small way, as well as defending what he perceived to be his interests.
Just as one can be "irrationally" selfless, so many people are "irrationally" spiteful and mean-minded.
My own politics are orthogonal to the left-right divide. I'd have been rated still more (socially) libertarian, where I not to have experienced certain paranormal phenomena, so that I conceive of the universe having an emergent intelligence (belief in the paranormal is supposed to be an authoritarian trait).
I agree that belief that naive selfishness is good is a horrible idea. But people need to be shown why that is true for them, rather than being hit over the head with abstract concepts like good, justice, altruism, or selflessness. As Robert Heinlein had Lazarus Long say, "Never appeal to a man's better nature. He might not have one. Appeal to his self interest instead." And so ironically, if we want to bring about a world of selflessness we have to use selfishness.
I think that there are two issues here: How to motivate people in large numbers, and how to encourage the development of character. The real problem is that values differ, but self-interest is pretty normal, so that if you want to give one message to m
Your positing of sef-interest as primal is no more than faith. It cannot be true, as the reward comes too late (after the act), so the reward cannot induce the act.
We are complex entities, and we have a hand in wireing ourselves; motivation is a harnessable drive, but we have some control over how it drives us. That is: we can structure our motivation. In addition, complexes of ideas have a hold on us, and themselves direct ("subvert") our interests.
What is our self-interest? Our happiness? Our genes? Our freedom? Our values?
If it is the last, then we have nothing to fear of 'self'-interest, but people usually mean something more synonymous with 'greed' when they talk of self-interest, and not something that will do others good. For the sake of argument, I will define greed as the excessive consumption of finite resources, although that leaves open what one means by 'excessive'. Still: the intent is fairly clear.
BTW socialism isn't about concepts being 'socially defined', but is rather a doctrine of the centralisation of will (not necessarily through government: consider political correctness), thus socialism is about uniformity. A system of property will tend to be evolved in the first instance, so that instead of resulting from a centralisation of will, it comes from below, and is recognised, rather than imposed by majority will.
I am not saying this in order to say that I am uncritically in favour of property; I am not, but it is clear that property is not a form of socialism, although it is a restriction of freedom though first social norms, and then through law.
My view is that both pure socialism and capitalism suck. I have anarchic tendencies myself, close to those of the classical anarchists (ie. I'm neither a syndicalist, nor a capitalist), although I do not believe that anarchism is tenable in our present state of society. Neither capitalism, nor socialism bring freedom.
What I do believe, though, is that faith in our perfect selfishness is just about the most harmful and prevalent ideology that we hold today. It is worse than just about any political system, and allows the worst political systems to become truely barbaric.
As explained in my JE, there's nothing in capitalism that proscribes that interests are necessarily self-interests. Your interests can be (and frequently are at least partly) unselfish without that necessarily involving collectivism or compromise.
When pursuing my (definition of) good, I need not advance your (definition of) good, although it will frequently be a side-effect, or else the result of trade (I advance your good if you advance mine).
As an example, let's say my good is "The Greatest Freedom of the Greatest Number", and your good is "The Greatest Happiness...". We are going to agree upon many things, and will find it advantageous to cooperate most of the time. In particular, we are going to "screw" the interests of the racist, who would himself be willing to harm his immediate biological interests for his ideal (preference within society for those who have a particular combination of seven or so genes that determine skin colour).
Socialisms are not the advance of superior values: they are defined by "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat"; whatever you consider superior, the population will have some who are superior to it, and some who are inferior. Arguably individualism and trade allows a diversity of values to manifest themselves through social 'bio'-diversity; any single measure (even if 'democratic') is going to score those who don't naturally align themselves with those values (say Christians in an Agnostic population) less highly, and render the good delivered to society less manifold.
Capitalism is a system of ownership and trade; it is not quite the same in conception as free markets where the emphasis is upon naturalness, rather than property (consider intellectual property), but individualistic trading to advance differing values is no more necessarily 'grasping' than the official is necessarily blind and doctrinare in a socialistic system.
The ideal in capitalism is that people have the freedom to further their values (which they get to choose, influenced by varied pasts and significant events so as to produce diversity). The ideal in socialism is that people agree on values and further them as a unity, rather than through plural trade.
'Greed' is not an ideal of capitalism, but is only one of a number of possible measures of 'good'. Greed is simply a very narrow one, but it is certainly not a necessary one. It is not even desperately well-defined...
In regards to the topic at hand, the RIAA is simply saying their statistics show that there is growth in legal music downloads, but illegal peer-to-peer is not growing.
This is wrong. The RIAA is not simply saying anything. They are encouraging the reader to draw an inference, and a false one at that. The saturation of illegal filetrading together with growth of legal downloads does not prove causal link, although the correlation might suggest it, were the state of evidence weaker than it currently is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between breach of trust and denial of goods.
I'm not just talking technically here, but as I can't be bothered to rehash the arguments right now, I'll link to to a post of mine in an old JE.
Please also note that I'm not saying that breach of trust is a good thing: society is built on trust. I am only saying that piracy and theft are not the same thing,
Here you go!
If this last mile is how one gets out of the "tiered internet", it presumably means that one gets out of ISP censorship. Government might (in effect) block this initiative, therefore, by requiring anything approximating an ISP to perform basic censorship, wiretapping, etc. to the extent that only a large, established ISP can provide.
I expect that you'll find large ISPs ever-keener to "work with government" to address "common concerns" (as opposed to say real, quantifiable risks) if this took off.
Make that maximising their own measures of utility, and I'm with you.
Stallman's acting to maximise his measure of utility, which is a perfectly capitalist thing to do!
There's nothing in capitalism that requires self-interest, but rather simply property and trade. The rest we deduce from those who attempt to justify their own self-interest, but that has nothing to do with capitalism per se. Ayn Rand is wrong.
In short, interests don't need to be self-interests. This is known in politics when politicians (occasionally) have to declare which charities they're involved with, amoungst other things.
There's not a lot of tolerace for criticism of corporations, is there?
I think that most coders feel the same way.
-- nt --
This imperfection proves that evolution is false. There is no "nearly right" when dealing with absolutes!!1!one1!
You can be sure that other lobbies will soon be arguing the same thing. It's worked for the Creators' Rights Alliance, why not any other interest group?
A hardware guy.
It's not so bad, but still, he is now doing software, and somehow...
A friend of mine who is a freelance engineer found that an engineer at one place he was contracting hadn't heard of Linux (this was a few months ago!)
If you act automatically, send in your CV, stay within "course boundaries" etcetera, it can be amazing what you miss!
I agree that piracy is bad: it undermines the natural sense that we should respect the terms of a contract, however to say that it hurts the economy and business, at least in the case of 'cultural works' turns out to be false: the advertising effect cancels out the displacement effect almost exactly, at least when the pirated work isn't payed for.
The real sin then is to charge for pirated work: this causes a real displacement of funds that would otherwise have been funding new works. People appear to spend as much of their spare income upon music and film, whether they pirate or not.
It is against the law, certainly, but I'm afraid that you've very much earnt yourself a "-1, wrong". Sorry: what appears to be common sense or even is integrated in the assumptions behind the wording of the US constitution itself isn't necessarily true.
If common sense is reality, why do physicists waste their time studying quantum theory?
I'm sure you're right...
I count Taoism as an influence, so there's some similarity in outlook.
My expriences include many synchronicities, telepathy, and even (following a breakdown) telekinesis.
I don't think that anything's waking up, although you might be discovering what was already there: a naturalistic will. If there is an apparence of "waking up", that is the effect of man coming into conflict with that will more often. The universe is so big that we should not flatter ourselves that we're able to rouse it, or that the time of our existance is special...
I think that "capitalistic" culture encourages selfishness, and there are selective pressures for selfish traits. But it is the culture rather than capitalism itself that is the root cause (having said that, change the culture, and our attitude towards property will also change). Capitalism merely assumes that we each have a consistent view of utility, where others may reasonably differ (fascilitating trade). Through trade, we are able to boost one another's measure of utility, but it is Randite dogma that the measure of utility has to be a self-interested one. By weakening this assumption, substituting personal utility for the selfishness that is assumed between the lines of economic texts, one is able to immediately see a better world, and that is before you start to make property rights more sensible.
Returning to the habits that are the building blocks of behaviour, we can see that it is entirely possible to reconfigure outselves so that simple cohesion, rather than necessarily 'self'-interest, is a sufficient glue to put them together. Naturally, we cannot ignore such things as food, or even sex, but with the glue being simple coherence, such drives manifest themselves, well, proportionally. After all, it is a simple efficiency that you manage your own food intake, for example, even from a completely eusocial perspective.
I think that individual actions need to be considered from the perspective of doing more harm than good, statistically speaking. "Do no harm" is too restrictive of freedom, as it disallows risk-taking. Systems live in people's heads, so changing the system has to, by necessity, be the result of the accumulation of many such acts. Acts that challenge the assumption of selfishness alone are quite powerful, for example, whereas (I'm sorry) arguing for socialism causes little progress on the ground; there are as many nasty people on the left as there are on the right, those who believe that their self-interest will be better served through collectivism, but you'll be no closer to a generous people tha
Thank-you! Give me some time to read your comments and journals, and I might do the same. Even if I do not, my fans are given a small bonus, so what you say will more likely catch my eye. I've taken a couple of months to reciprocate before, and there are one or two that have fanned me, and I've still not taken the time to peruse their writing...
I too enjoy healthy, intelligent discourse. I find it amusing that I am sometimes seen as being a lefty, sometimes a capitalist. I suppose that I am no longer bothered to clear up misunderstandings in advance: the reponsibility for the error of applying conventional political categories isn't mine, IMO.
I skimmed it very quickly the first time, and now I've read it somewhat more thoroughly. It is beautiful, and contains a good deal of insight, but is partly outdated by our modern understanding of science.
First, "drives" aren't fundemental: habit is more fundemental, as (for example) when driving we apply the breaks before we could have processed the risk of hitting something, or someone. The consciousness of hitting the breaks has to occur coincidentally with, or after actually hitting them. Habit is selected for, but the selective criteria are those of cohesion with other behaviour and biology rather than those of preordained 'self-interest'. Apparent self-interest results from the cohesion of self, which is in many cases highly indulgent, but the 'selfish' drives come second rather than first in complex behaviour, although with simple behaviour (eg. need to eat), it is more direct.
Second, life (both individual and collective) exhibits self-organised criticality. This means that individual events can be highly leveraged (although you can't predict which ones), both within the brain and within the flow of society. Particular faces tend to be represented with a single neuron for example, so that far from having a highly redundant and deterministic system, we leverage random influences and quantum effects to a high degree to give us non-deterministic behaviour. Similarly, we make a mistake considering ourselves wholly formed and uncreative. Yes, we are not in control of our influences, but their effect is hugely affected by accident, such as what we happen to be thinking at the time. Even if the range of our thinking is restricted by previous experience, the thought within that range that is prevalent at the precise moment of a new influence is not predetermined, leading to divergent paths though life, even if they remain statistically conditioned.
You might be interested in this discussion (I'm the "Morosoph" fellow).
I posit that society exhibits self-organised criticality too, leading to divergent social evolution of groups, both small and large (eg. nations). From this also follows that Marxist analysis is wrong, as the smallest events can find themselves occuring at critical points, so that revolution isn't inevitable, and beneficial evolution from the status quo isn't excluded. Of course the state of production still leads to statistical shaping of populations, but how it will manifest itself, especially at major decision points, is not determined.
I'll pause for now...
I was attempting to bridge the gap between our understanding of selfishness and altruism, showing that what can be seen as selfless behavior is only enlightened self interest. I am a ntural believer in altruism, so it was hard for me to accept that we always actn out of our own self interest. Indoing so, I had to explain all of what I had previously thought of as "good" in terms of self interest, but it turns out that they are not incompatible.
Interesting, but I believe mistaken: this is a hair shirt that you do not have to wear. The reason is that if anything, it is our genes and "memes" that are selfish, not ourselves, and further they are selfish in the sense of self-perpetuation, not in the sense of saving the specific instance. In fact (consider a meme for noble self-sacrifice), the specific instance can be hindered, but the extra effort that it induces in the host can still cause it to replicate successfully. Yes, we are hugely mechanical, but it is errornous to deduce selfishness as a corollary.
Noble values cannot withstand cynicism, though. Those who believe that we are by nature selfish, even if they reason that unselfish motivation is selfish deep down, are going to fail to "take" nobler values at the level of behaviour, for they fail the "reality" test, but it is all a mistake.
The biggest problem is that motivations are in practice mixed, that is: impure. The popular mode of thinking is towards cynicism, so mixed motives are seen as "really" being selfish. The glass is half empty through such grey-tinted specs.
I am also an Anarchist of the old school, Bakunin style. I perhaps lean closer to syndicalism than you seem to, but that is probably my radical labor activist background talking. I was an organizer with the IWW. Not many people know they still exist, or that as soon as Judi Bari started telling loggers that their rights as workers and protecting the environment coincided, someone decided to blow her up.
Interesting. I'm not surprised about Judi Bari; there are some nasty types in the world, and many who believe that it is worth distorting reality to uphold and strengthen the hierarchy from those who undermine the status quo. In modern times, such authoritarians would paint themselves as democrats (small 'd'), and they are likely to believe themselves to be. If your world is one where anarchists are near-synonymous with terrorists, as appears to be the case with the FBI in the Wikipedia article, you're going to think that they're carrying, rather than being bombed. Everything reinforces prior perceptions. The bomber probably believed that he (I'll assume it's a he) was protecting civilisation in his small way, as well as defending what he perceived to be his interests.
Just as one can be "irrationally" selfless, so many people are "irrationally" spiteful and mean-minded.
My own politics are orthogonal to the left-right divide. I'd have been rated still more (socially) libertarian, where I not to have experienced certain paranormal phenomena, so that I conceive of the universe having an emergent intelligence (belief in the paranormal is supposed to be an authoritarian trait).
I agree that belief that naive selfishness is good is a horrible idea. But people need to be shown why that is true for them, rather than being hit over the head with abstract concepts like good, justice, altruism, or selflessness. As Robert Heinlein had Lazarus Long say, "Never appeal to a man's better nature. He might not have one. Appeal to his self interest instead." And so ironically, if we want to bring about a world of selflessness we have to use selfishness.
I think that there are two issues here: How to motivate people in large numbers, and how to encourage the development of character. The real problem is that values differ, but self-interest is pretty normal, so that if you want to give one message to m
Your positing of sef-interest as primal is no more than faith. It cannot be true, as the reward comes too late (after the act), so the reward cannot induce the act.
We are complex entities, and we have a hand in wireing ourselves; motivation is a harnessable drive, but we have some control over how it drives us. That is: we can structure our motivation. In addition, complexes of ideas have a hold on us, and themselves direct ("subvert") our interests.
What is our self-interest? Our happiness? Our genes? Our freedom? Our values?
If it is the last, then we have nothing to fear of 'self'-interest, but people usually mean something more synonymous with 'greed' when they talk of self-interest, and not something that will do others good. For the sake of argument, I will define greed as the excessive consumption of finite resources, although that leaves open what one means by 'excessive'. Still: the intent is fairly clear.
BTW socialism isn't about concepts being 'socially defined', but is rather a doctrine of the centralisation of will (not necessarily through government: consider political correctness), thus socialism is about uniformity. A system of property will tend to be evolved in the first instance, so that instead of resulting from a centralisation of will, it comes from below, and is recognised, rather than imposed by majority will.
I am not saying this in order to say that I am uncritically in favour of property; I am not, but it is clear that property is not a form of socialism, although it is a restriction of freedom though first social norms, and then through law.
My view is that both pure socialism and capitalism suck. I have anarchic tendencies myself, close to those of the classical anarchists (ie. I'm neither a syndicalist, nor a capitalist), although I do not believe that anarchism is tenable in our present state of society. Neither capitalism, nor socialism bring freedom.
What I do believe, though, is that faith in our perfect selfishness is just about the most harmful and prevalent ideology that we hold today. It is worse than just about any political system, and allows the worst political systems to become truely barbaric.
When pursuing my (definition of) good, I need not advance your (definition of) good, although it will frequently be a side-effect, or else the result of trade (I advance your good if you advance mine).
As an example, let's say my good is "The Greatest Freedom of the Greatest Number", and your good is "The Greatest Happiness...". We are going to agree upon many things, and will find it advantageous to cooperate most of the time. In particular, we are going to "screw" the interests of the racist, who would himself be willing to harm his immediate biological interests for his ideal (preference within society for those who have a particular combination of seven or so genes that determine skin colour).
Socialisms are not the advance of superior values: they are defined by "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat"; whatever you consider superior, the population will have some who are superior to it, and some who are inferior. Arguably individualism and trade allows a diversity of values to manifest themselves through social 'bio'-diversity; any single measure (even if 'democratic') is going to score those who don't naturally align themselves with those values (say Christians in an Agnostic population) less highly, and render the good delivered to society less manifold.
Capitalism is a system of ownership and trade; it is not quite the same in conception as free markets where the emphasis is upon naturalness, rather than property (consider intellectual property), but individualistic trading to advance differing values is no more necessarily 'grasping' than the official is necessarily blind and doctrinare in a socialistic system.
The ideal in capitalism is that people have the freedom to further their values (which they get to choose, influenced by varied pasts and significant events so as to produce diversity). The ideal in socialism is that people agree on values and further them as a unity, rather than through plural trade.
'Greed' is not an ideal of capitalism, but is only one of a number of possible measures of 'good'. Greed is simply a very narrow one, but it is certainly not a necessary one. It is not even desperately well-defined...
I wrote a JE about this: Free Markets do not require Self-Interest.
And is, furthermore, an excuse for ignoring the evidence.
Is now better than real turf, apparently.
Do you have SELinux turned off?
Picassa doesn't work for me. Okay, scratch that: it does, but I've needed to turn off SELinux.
Turns out that SELinux needs only be turned off for the first run.
-- nt --
People have been producing ball lightning in microwave ovens for years!
Why's that? Even if he gets a payback, it costs you no more.