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Grammar-Bolshevik posted:
hahaha wtf, we really need to refine the argument that if people can take more free time on their hands without going homeless, they could organize independently of the shambling party apparatuses and make money less influential as local voices become more trusted than TV spots. Like, that guy in particular could go be a politician because he gets what normally only trust fund kids who become politicians got
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 18:28 |
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# ? Jun 13, 2024 06:52 |
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Stinky_Pete posted:hahaha wtf, we really need to refine the argument that if people can take more free time on their hands without going homeless, they could organize independently of the shambling party apparatuses and make money less influential as local voices become more trusted than TV spots. Like, that guy in particular could go be a politician because he gets what normally only trust fund kids who become politicians got Man, I forgot how often Communist Dictators replaced all labor with robots. It happens so often!
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 18:34 |
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Communists: Famously not protectionist.
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# ? Jan 11, 2018 18:34 |
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Polygynous posted:Ignoring the thousands of loopholes corporate tax attorneys get paid to exploit... no, probably not even then. What part did I get wrong?
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# ? Jan 15, 2018 10:57 |
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Mr Interweb posted:What part did I get wrong? I was I think at least half joking, but the serious part was that while the numbers may be correct for your perfectly spherical boss with ten employees who calls himself a CEO, what use that is in reality is questionable. vv
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# ? Jan 15, 2018 15:23 |
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Odd request, but I figured I'd field it in this thread. I am going to be attending a public discussion with Sam Harris, Matt Dillahunty, and Lawrence Krauss. I've been a huge Harris fan since he published his first book, and would consider myself a pretty loyal fan despite him not being to popular here on SA. The fact that most of his discussions have an underlying theme of utilitarianism has always been a draw for me. On more than one occasion he has come out in support of the concept of BMI, and has spoken often on the consequences of AI in the work place. It is pretty clear he is no fan of libertarians as several years back he posted what I thought was a pretty spot on refutation of that ideology prompted by hate mail from libertarian fans of his that were shocked to find out that he thought the rich should pay more taxes. https://samharris.org/how-to-lose-readers-without-even-trying/ and the piece that prompted the hate in the first. https://samharris.org/how-rich-is-too-rich/ However, beyond this article he has tended to stay away from issues of economics, which is fair because the man isn't an economist. That being said, I've been wanting to hear more from him on the topics surrounding the likelihood AI effecting employment, and what is the best way to approach uncoupling the link between work and human-worth in a capitalist society that is likely to find itself with an ever increasing number of people who's labor is not needed to sustain the system. Basically, I am trying to come up with something to present at the Q&A that is succinct, but properly conveys how badly I feel our current economic system hamstrings us in tackling some of the largest problems we are going to face in the future. Global Warming, Artificial Intelligence in the job market, genetic engineering, etc. I feel most of these are only problems when taken in the framework of capitalist system, but am completely at a loss as to how to transition away from this system, and would like to hear the thoughts of a particular speaker I admire. TheArmorOfContempt fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 18:55 |
he doesn't want to transition away from capitalism, he says in that first article that he's a libertarian who believes that humans are too irrational to practice libertarianism with a good outcome. which is true, except any libertarian society would be awful and humanity's limitations only exacerbate that. but he quickly backpedals away from the vaguest hint of endorsing socialism, implicitly measures everyone's value by how much they work, etc. he just wants the mid-20th-century liberal consensus back
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 19:18 |
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“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women.” He added, “The atheist variable just has this— it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.” Sam Harris is real bad. He's like a baby's first "philosopher" for stem dudes. He's maybe a step up from Dawkins in terms of "scientist thinks his degree makes him an expert in topics he doesn't know poo poo about" and far better than getting into objectivism or something, but still an idiot with bad takes.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 19:28 |
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Harris is absolutely no libertarian: he is supportive of FBI and CIA hacking cellphones and skeptical of Apple's attempts to thwart them, skeptical of Snowden-type leaks, for higher taxes, more gun regulations, and for heavily controlled/restricted immigration. He's a bit of a social democrat/liberal, and a bit of a Classical, Millian Liberal on some social issues, and of course staunchly utilitarian, which Libertarians by and large aren't (Nozick's defence of property rights is explicitly Kantian). I like Harris plenty, but I think this is not really the thing to ask him. As you say, it's really not his area of expertise. He's probably too thinly spread already. Beyond that, I think you can probably ask him about the more mundane, short-term negative consequences of below-human or near-human, non-general AI, i.e. driverless cars, and he'll probably say something like, "it's an issue, but you'll have to ask my friend Elon Musk about it". There are things he's good about, but AI and economics are not those things. Although admittedly, getting people to talk about similar issues in a digestible way is something he's good at, so maybe I'm too pessimistic here. But still, I'd rather ask somebody who's closer to the issue to begin with. Jazerus posted:he doesn't want to transition away from capitalism, he says in that first article that he's a libertarian who believes that humans are too irrational to practice libertarianism with a good outcome. which is true, except any libertarian society would be awful and humanity's limitations only exacerbate that. but he quickly backpedals away from the vaguest hint of endorsing socialism, implicitly measures everyone's value by how much they work, etc.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:07 |
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I think at this point only the very ignorant or stupid can fail to identify the failings of the status quo and only the even stupider would suggest that the solution is to go more laissez faire. So more you're either some degree of socialist or you're an idiot. Also if someone is willing to offer opinions on subjects they don't understand you should definitely ask them about them and try to get them to say the stupidest thing possible.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:09 |
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OwlFancier posted:I think at this point only the very ignorant or stupid can fail to identify the failings of the status quo and only the even stupider would suggest that the solution is to go more laissez faire. Suzanne Langer posted:The chance that the key ideas of any professional scholar’s work are pure nonsense is small; much greater the chance that a devastating refutation is based on a superficial reading or even a distorted one, subconsciously twisted by a desire to refute.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:17 |
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You say that in the libertarian thread..? Why on earth would you start with the assumption that someone is right and then require it to be proven otherwise?
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:19 |
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Cingulate posted:
Thanks, yeah I figured it might be a bit of a stretch. He makes a lot of noises that I tend to agree with, and he has a particularly good way of unpacking things that really appeals to me. I remember recently in a Q&A someone asked him something along the lines of "Where do you feel government should be involved" or "what is the boundary between what should be privately run vs. public" and he gave a nuanced answer that basically this is something that shifts over time, and has to be determined on a case by case basis. That was kind of the point where I wished he had kept going. Something along the lines of what are some areas that government/public not involved in enough. Cingulate posted:Are you saying you're either a socialist, or a libertarian? The thing furthest from my goal at this point would be to start an argument over Harris. I suppose if anything I'm looking for well thought out rationales on how we get from our current capitalist state and how we even begin to work our way towards something more socialist, or at least socialist in the areas we have identified as problems where public welfare trumps the generation of personal wealth.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:20 |
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Organize a bunch of people to compel the status quo to change under threat of force, same as you always do... it's not a complicated question.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:21 |
Cingulate posted:Are you saying you're either a socialist, or a libertarian? no. i'm saying that it's useless to ask sam harris about what he would want to do to transition away from capitalism because it's quite clear from the articles posted that he does not want to transition away from capitalism; he wants to restrain its excesses while retaining the same economic form. he literally says he's a libertarian in the top article. but that he feels he must make concessions to reality, essentially
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:22 |
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OwlFancier posted:You say that in the libertarian thread..? Uroboros posted:The thing furthest from my goal at this point would be to start an argument over Harris. I suppose if anything I'm looking for well thought out rationales on how we get from our current capitalist state and how we even begin to work our way towards something more socialist, or at least socialist in the areas we have identified as problems where public welfare trumps the generation of personal wealth. Jazerus posted:no. i'm saying that it's useless to ask sam harris about what he would want to do to transition away from capitalism because it's quite clear from the articles posted that he does not want to transition away from capitalism; he wants to restrain its excesses while retaining the same economic form.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:29 |
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Cingulate posted:What? I can't connect that to what I posted. What does that say other than "people who are paid to have opinions are very unlikely to be wrong, if you think they're wrong you're just biased against them"? It completely ignores the possibility that there could be an entire industry around constructing wildly incorrect yet politically useful or appealing fictions and is, in general, a spectacularly idiotic thing to say. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:35 |
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OwlFancier posted:What does that say other than "people who are paid to have opinions are very unlikely to be wrong, if you think they're wrong you're just biased against them"? Surely, most, probably all, experts are wrong about a lot of things. Of course, they contradict each other all the time! But careful, honest observation shows that they're usually not completely wrong in a trivial manner. I.e., Newton was wrong about gravity, but he was not wrong in the "the Earth is flat! Wake up, sheeple" sense, he was wrong in the "Jesus gently caress special relativity is literally insane" sense. Now libertarian economists are no Newtons. But nobody in this thread is an Einstein.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:39 |
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Cingulate posted:It's not saying "they're unlikely to be wrong". It's saying: if you come across an established scholar, an expert, an academic, ...; and you think that with one simple argument, you can undo/disprove their entire body of work at once; then you are probably wrong. Except that's bollocks, because as I said, success in politics and economics has bugger all to do with being correct and everything to do with being useful to the people in power, which itself has bugger all to do with being correct and everything to do with inertia. So it is entirely possible and indeed probable that the majority of people who are regarded as "experts" in those fields are completely and utterly wrong because they have no motivation to be right whatsoever, and their material success and acclaim in fact hinges on them being utterly wrong in a way that is useful to their benefactors. There is no profit in rewriting Marx but there's plenty of institutions that'll set you up for life if you are willing to devote your life to writing at length about why we need to legalize and deregulate the sale of children. Again you're posting this in the libertarian thread. There is possibly no better refutation of that position on the planet than the existence of libertarians and libertarian "scholars". Sorry if that's too simple of an argument. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 20:53 |
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OwlFancier posted:Organize a bunch of people to compel the status quo to change under threat of force, same as you always do... it's not a complicated question. I would disagree, it seems pretty complicated, with an even more complicated answer when it comes to talking about the details. Jazerus posted:no. i'm saying that it's useless to ask sam harris about what he would want to do to transition away from capitalism because it's quite clear from the articles posted that he does not want to transition away from capitalism; he wants to restrain its excesses while retaining the same economic form. I suppose I am in the same boat, that I at least find it hard to envision a future where some sort of market economy doesn't exist, I don't think he is necessarily married to capitalism. It seemed pretty clear that libertarian is not meant in the sense as we in the forum have come to understand it, but more of a vague commitment to individual liberty, which I assume we all largely have in common with libertarians except when it comes to economics. When we talk about socialism I assume we are talking about the nationalization or heavy state oversight of key industries such as oil that effects the well-being of the entire nation, and greater global community. On the other hand I wouldn't really expect the government to exercise much control in the manufacture and distribution of video games, perhaps beyond general guidelines that ensure employees are reaping an adequate amount of the profits being generated by sales.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:15 |
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Uroboros posted:I would disagree, it seems pretty complicated, with an even more complicated answer when it comes to talking about the details. If you want a more complicated answer then change comes in response to circumstances. Not automatically the change you want and as a single human you can do very little to effect it. But cirucmstances breed ideas, so failing capitalism increases support for things that aren't capitalism. Whether you get fascism or socialism or something else depends on which takes root and snowballs most effectively which depends on the qualities of the society in question. The basis for change is laid well before anybody thinks it's going to happen so it's not something you can really control. As your question is what can be done, none of that really matters, because again, all you can do is try to organise people for your preferred ideology. Either lots of other people will do the same and it will succeed, or they won't and it will fail. The idea that you have significant agency either way is a silly one. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:21 |
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OwlFancier posted:
Nothing in here I disagree with, but not particularly helpful. I suppose a better question is there any more contemporary writers that you expose people to that lay out the flaws in Capitalism in the modern age, and pros to more socialist policies as a solution to these issues? There seem to a legion of lazy libertarian/objectivist platitudes that really seem to be eaten up by the uninformed (taxation is theft, etc) that it seems it could do well to have concise answers that could be presented to people. TheArmorOfContempt fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:31 |
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Uroboros posted:Nothing in here I disagree with, but not particularly helpful. *scratches nose, tugs on shirt marxistly*
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:32 |
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I mean I think the communist manifesto still rather effectively demonstrates the problems and the fact that it's still enormously applicable 170 years after its publication only lends it further credence? It's also short and fairly punchy. Leftists have been writing similar things for a very long time but it doesn't change much because the problems don't change. If you're encountering resistance to the idea it's probably because the person in question isn't interested in having their mind changed and thus won't read anything you send them anyway. The reason libertarianism appeals to people is because it reinforces their beliefs about themselves and their lives, it says "yes, you are/could be doing well purely because of your personal diligence/brilliance, and you definitely don't live in a monumentally unjust society which both profits you and also uses you. You have individual agency, you are meaningufully free, there is hope for you and it's within your power to better your situation." Communists/socialists reject that, they say that your situation and hope for your future is outside your control, that it relies on the actions of vast numbers of others, not you. And someone who wants to believe in individual agency will not conscience anything that suggests otherwise unless they are held down and forced to, usually by circumstances beyond their control, though even then many prefer to believe the fiction. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:35 |
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I think its safe to say that anything labeled Marxist or Communist will not be read, regardless of content, a combination of propaganda against such ideas and real world failures of nations that outwardly claimed those titles will forever pollute those words in the American mind. What you have suggested is basically like recommending The God Delusion as a method to sway someone on divine origin of The Bible.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:42 |
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Well I wouldn't recommend Dawkins to anybody for any reason, but as I said, if someone wants to believe something they will. You can't convince someone who isn't already looking to doubt. Only force is going to do that, and you aren't allowed to use that against people and hell, even if you did, they would not unreasonably blame you rather than side with your argument. The best way to convince someone that a system is flawed is for that system to victimize them in a way that they can't ignore, and that is not something that happens to everybody and not everybody has the proper reaction to it. If someone's doing alright out of a system they're likely to support it and be hostile to any threat to it, as they perceive it as a threat to them. Additionally some people identify with the predatory aspects of capitalism regardless because they aspire one day to be in the position of the predator, and would sooner risk never achieving that and always being on the receiving end, than taking away the possibility of that relationship existing at all. Some people are just perennial pessimists and don't believe change is possible, some others use that as cover for one of the prior positions. But all of these positions are unlikely to change merely by exposure to ideas because they will not honestly engage with them unless they have reason to. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 21:45 |
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OwlFancier posted:Well I wouldn't recommend Dawkins to anybody for any reason, but as I said, if someone wants to believe something they will. You can't convince someone who isn't already looking to doubt. Only force is going to do that, and you aren't allowed to use that against people and hell, even if you did, they would not unreasonably blame you rather than side with your argument. Good for you, I'd suggest The Selfish Gene or The Greatest Show on Earth to anyone interested in Evolution. But you seem confident everything he has done is garbage. Anyway, the concept that you can't convince someone who isn't already doubting isn't true. It is perfectly possible for someone to be unintentionally swayed, however determining what might cause such a reaction is the obvious hard part. Also, it is pretty contradictory to recommend force as a method of changing a persons mind, and then immediately saying it is likely achieve an opposite effect. Clearly forcing people isn't a good method at all if the person being forced is going choose opposite of what you want out of spite. OwlFancier posted:The best way to convince someone that a system is flawed is for that system to victimize them in a way that they can't ignore, and that is not something that happens to everybody and not everybody has the proper reaction to it. How insightful.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:10 |
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I don't recommend force because there is no practical way you can force someone to sit down and engage with an idea. As I keep coming back to, there isn't very much you can do full stop, the belief that there is might be appealing but it doesn't have any bearing on its accuracy. Sure there are occasional apparent outliers to the rule but I maintain that functionally you are wasting your time individually arguing with people who have no reason to want to believe what you're saying. Your efforts would be better spent targetting people already on the fence and relying on mass action to either sway or suppress the more stubborn ones. Because otherwise you're arguing with a systemic force that acts to keep people believing that capitalism works, the whole point of it is that it gets buy-in from people by promising them the possibility of power over others, and because we live in a society dominated by it, that allure of that idea is fostered from birth. There's no one weird trick to undo that conditioning, the effective counter is conditioning to the contrary by being perpetually victimized by the system. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:12 |
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OwlFancier posted:
Then this goes back to the original question. Surely there is something more coherent than Bernie Sanders facebook page.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:27 |
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Why surely? As I said for the past 170 years there have been plenty of people advocating plenty of well articulated alternatives to capitalism but if you're going to say "no I can't suggest anything that identifies as communist or socialist because those ideas will forever be anathema to Americans" then yeah, the best you're going to get is don't-say-the-S-word bernie? You can either have the ideas that have been formulated and tried and re-examnined and reformulated as reactions to capitalism or you're going to be left with rather insubstantial and ineffectual "well I don't like capitalism but maybe we can't quite throw it all out just now". Which I suppose explains why you like Harris. But that ground is occupied by pathological centrists who lack any intellectual rigor and are just trying to get jobs in politics by being a windsock, there is nothing valuable in a position that says "Ok I identify the problems with capitalism but I don't advocate any of the solutions, so just try not to complain so much oh and also robots are cool!" That position has been the prevailing attitude in a lot of the world for decades, and it's currently what is on the decline because people feel duped by the promise of the third way. You're not going to find much in that area that's compelling. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:29 |
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OwlFancier posted:Why surely? Yes, In the year 2018, we find ourselves at a time where people are probably more sympathetic to the ideas behind socialism than at any point since the early 20th Century, and you don't think any sort of new literature is needed to clearly delineate where the line between public and private enterprise should be. Hell, there might be something out there that already does, but you seem determined to be of little use in this regard.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:51 |
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OwlFancier posted:I mean I think the communist manifesto still rather effectively demonstrates the problems and the fact that it's still enormously applicable 170 years after its publication only lends it further credence? It's also short and fairly punchy. It's a pity Marx and Engels included part 3 where they tediously bash on prior and concurrent socialist parties and movements, as it takes away from the timelessness of their arguments and drags things down into the petty politics of mid-19th century leftism (and also smacks of peevishness at times). I mean, I get why they included it, it's just not nearly as relevant as the rest of it anymore. Uroboros posted:Good for you, I'd suggest The Selfish Gene or The Greatest Show on Earth to anyone interested in Evolution. But you seem confident everything he has done is garbage. Dawkins has produced decent work in the past, but he has long since disappeared directly up his own rear end and unfortunately helped blaze the path that most New Atheists enthusiastically follow, which is to bash Islam at every possible opportunity and buy into debunked "clash of civilizations" bullshit for reasons that they swear have nothing to do with race, honest.
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 22:53 |
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Captain_Maclaine posted:It's a pity Marx and Engels included part 3 where they tediously bash on prior and concurrent socialist parties and movements, as it takes away from the timelessness of their arguments and drags things down into the petty politics of mid-19th century leftism (and also smacks of peevishness at times). I mean, I get why they included it, it's just not nearly as relevant as the rest of it anymore. Eh you can just not read the last bit if you want. Uroboros posted:Yes, In the year 2018, we find ourselves at a time where people are probably more sympathetic to the ideas behind socialism than at any point since the early 20th Century, and you don't think any sort of new literature is needed to clearly delineate where the line between public and private enterprise should be. Er, the line is that property is theft and private ownership is invariably an inferior idea ethically and practically and this is articulated quite well by lots of people already, again for a very long time. hth. As I said, the idea that we need to figure out where "the line" needs to go and that it is somewhere in the middle is the essence of third way bollocks and that definitely isn't a new idea with new things of value being written about in the year 2018. If you really want to get people to read books about it I'm sure Clinton or Blair have written things on it but I doubt you'll find anybody nowadays who is going to be inspired by it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 17, 2018 |
# ? Jan 17, 2018 23:06 |
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OwlFancier, I'm not sure what your goal in this exchange is, but it surely does not seem like you're engaging in a good-faith, open-ended discussion with Uroboros, and it surely doesn't look like you're doing anything in the hope of getting them to see things from your point of view/becoming convinced of your take on things.OwlFancier posted:There is possibly no better refutation of that position on the planet than the existence of libertarians and libertarian "scholars". OwlFancier posted:Why surely?
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# ? Jan 17, 2018 23:54 |
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Harris on AI is not about actual real-world AI, but about the made-up sci-fi Unfriendly AI threat perpetuated by Eliezer Yudkowsky, with whom he's collaborated. This, btw, is how you can tell you're in the simulation and didn't donate enough. also: Cingulate, jesus just stop loving posting you querulous shithead.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:08 |
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Cingulate posted:How? You will have to be more specific, because what is so self-evident to you, is not so self-evident to me. The assumption that a scholar won't be completely and trivially wrong relies on the fact that in most fields of study, their fellow scholars would point out such trivial flaws before anything could be published. However, in economics, literally billions of dollars have been spent on libertarian propaganda, so as long as a "scholar's" work is materially beneficial to the richest people in the world it will not be subject to the constraints of reality. Which means that those of us who actually live in reality can see that the work is trivially and completely wrong, despite being accepted by its ideological allies.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:17 |
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Mornacale posted:The assumption that a scholar won't be completely and trivially wrong relies on the fact that in most fields of study, their fellow scholars would point out such trivial flaws before anything could be published. However, in economics, literally billions of dollars have been spent on libertarian propaganda, so as long as a "scholar's" work is materially beneficial to the richest people in the world it will not be subject to the constraints of reality. Which means that those of us who actually live in reality can see that the work is trivially and completely wrong, despite being accepted by its ideological allies.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:26 |
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Cingulate posted:What? I can't connect that to what I posted. The idea that someone's ideas must be right and valuable simply because they are Published and have a following
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:26 |
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Cingulate posted:I think social democracy/liberalism is probably good. I'm not sure if that counts as "an alternative to capitalism" to you or as "not quite throwing it all out just now". That's "actually capitalism is fine" so I don't know if it counts as either. Cingulate posted:Ok, I'm sticking with the point: even as you think you have reason to dismiss the field (by accusing them of motivated reasoning or corruption), I am saying that libertarian economists are probably not completely wrong in a trivial manner. It remains to be seen if my intuition is true or false here. Why on earth are you approaching this from the position that they are assumed correct and have to be proven wrong? That's not how it works in any loving field. Try this way, why do you think libertarians are right? What do they offer that is useful to anybody who isn't looking for an ideological defence of morally and functionally deficient practices? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jan 18, 2018 |
# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:30 |
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# ? Jun 13, 2024 06:52 |
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Hey this alt-right "intelectual" has a huge following on patreon and works at a real university, he must have some good points on cultural marxism and trans folk.
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# ? Jan 18, 2018 00:34 |