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Disnesquick posted:I think there is a distinction to be made between Malthusianism and eugenics. The idea that reproductive capacity is tied to socioeconomics is firmly rooted in the former (and to be honest, not particularly plausible to disrupt outside a classless society for many of the reasons you've stated). Abortion ties into that because it's so strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. The distinction I'd draw is probably quite a fuzzy one: Malthus is an implicit intent, the 'system' is almost a given and the selective pressure it applies is an emergent property. Eugenics is an explicit intent: The selective pressure is chosen on the basis of some criteria. Given the tenuous correlation between phenotype and socioeconomics (compared to how e.g the disabled would manage in a "wild" situation, i.e. someone with a crippling disability will probably do just as badly in a paleolithic setting as in a modern capitalist environment) it's hard to argue that the Malthusian dynamics are actually applying much observable selective pressure and instead just reducing the effective population size by biasing reproduction to a subset of the population. We do have quite a few handicapped hominid and early human remains/fossils, including some who clearly lived for several decades with their disabilities. I forget the name but there's one individual who appears to have become severely disabled in childhood, lived to about 45-50, and given a burial and grave with personal/ceremonial items. That's about as well as anybody can hope for in many parts of the world today. Disnesquick posted:The one-child policy is an interesting one because it looks to me like it should really be considered the opposite of eugenics. Narrowly defining eugenics as the increase of selective pressure based on certain traits (and I think that definition is supported by the etymology of the word) is at odds with a one child policy which reduces the capacity of anyone to out-compete anyone else. Obviously the possibility is there to have zero children so selective pressure still exists but (if applied rigorously) the policy stops a particularly successful (by whatever metric) family from having an RC > 0.5. Well with the one-child policy, parents overwhelmingly selected for boys, and girls were more likely to be aborted or adopted out. And now you have an enormous gender imbalance in China with millions of frustrated unpartnered men, and places are importing women from SE Asia and elsewhere and trying things like polymarriage to compensate.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:12
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Disnesquick posted:EDIT: You seem to be proposing a society that is almost ZARDOZ-like. An unchanging context for each individual to be born into, seek independent goals in comfort, and then die without leaving a trace behind so that subsequent generations can do the same. That's not a society that I would fight for. Hell, that's a society that I would vigorously fight against. I mean, that sounds pretty elysian to me. The obsession with leaving records and posterity is an odd one to me, which may be a product of the environment I live in but like, almost everybody doesn't do that, they live, they interact, they touch lives around them, they die, the lives they impacted die too, it is as if they never existed. But I don't think lives like that are absent of value, they are just as valuable as any other life, because the value of a life is to the person living it and to the other lives that intersect with it. Not all lives have to be historically spectacular, I would argue that none of them have to be, and none of them will be in the long run when the universe runs out of steam. They are important while they are here and shortly afterwards. It is possible to hope for improvements without going so far as to write off the entirety of human experience to date, which is what saying a society where people just live small lives happily, is not worth fighting for, would seem to do. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 21:23
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OwlFancier posted:I mean, that sounds pretty elysian to me. The obsession with leaving records and posterity is an odd one to me, which may be a product of the environment I live in but like, almost everybody doesn't do that, they live, they interact, they touch lives around them, they die, the lives they impacted die too, it is as if they never existed. But I don't think lives like that are absent of value, they are just as valuable as any other life, because the value of a life is to the person living it and to the other lives that intersect with it. Not all lives have to be historically spectacular, I would argue that none of them have to be, and none of them will be in the long run when the universe runs out of steam. They are important while they are here and shortly afterwards. So I guess my question is, then, how would we construct a society that reconciles attitudes like yours and mine? I mean, that's just not enough for me (and honestly, most of the people around me, although of course there's a MASSIVE selection bias there). I want to be part of big things and big change and I find the neoliberal death spiral absolutely suffocating with regards to that drive. Any post-capitalist society needs to accommodate both attitudes. As for the death of the universe, who knows? Maybe something will be figured out in a billion years. Red dwarfs have a projected lifespan of trillions of years. We probably have time to figure something out. Even if we don't, there's just as much meaning in trying as there is in the small-lives proposal. Different strokes...
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Dec 2, 2020 21:37
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I mean, I'm not sure you can reconcile the two, if you cannot find life worthwhile without believing that the maximal productive value of the world is being leveraged to achieve your desired goal then that is going to create a tension with people who find no value in that, who would rather not expend their time and energy for that. The question becomes whether you think it is justifiable or even desirable to utilize coercion to extract the maximum possible amount of labour from people, as long as you approve of what it is being used for. I don't, so necessarily I do not find any particular value in a society that does that, however fantastical the professed goal might be. I would go so far as to suggest that a society that starts with even very laudable goals will probably trend towards what we have now, because the structure of the coercive society necessarily erodes the desire of people to give a poo poo about big fancy idealistic goals and turns their view inwards instead, again to basic survival. As was pointed out earlier, we have a word for a social structure that values growth above all else, because it cannot abide stasis or contraction. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 21:46
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Ok Comboomer posted:We do have quite a few handicapped hominid and early human remains/fossils, including some who clearly lived for several decades with their disabilities. I forget the name but there's one individual who appears to have become severely disabled in childhood, lived to about 45-50, and given a burial and grave with personal/ceremonial items. That's about as well as anybody can hope for in many parts of the world today. I don't think you can describe a gender imbalance as eugenics because we are, after all, the same species and induction of such an imbalance doesn't skew selection, it just decreases the effective population size (which obviously DOES have effects on evolutionary outcomes but probably not ones that can be considered eugenic ones). The imbalance is not, after all, heritable to the next generation. Your point about sexual immigration is a good one though, I'm not even sure what kind of framework that would fall under but an increase in outbreeding and the random diversity that it results in does seem to also be at odds with the strong selection induced by eugenics. There's probably something to be said about mitochondrial eugenics in this but it's not clear that the abort-or-not for each girl would have any correlation to anything in the mitochondrial genome. With regards to disabled individuals, if we are talking about evolution specifically, rather than general social morality, then we'd need to restrict the analysis to congenital disability. I wasn't trying to make the point that such disabilities were entirely absent in prehistoric hominids but that the chances of survival under modern capitalism probably aren't worse than that. The whole thing is incredibly tricky though because, as discussed, it's incredibly hard to draw a line between an economic system that has evolutionary outcomes as an emergent property and proper eugenics where those outcomes are an explicit component of that system. I'm honestly open to the argument that there is no distinction (under the cybernetics argument of "the purpose of a system is what it does"). That kind of macroscopic uncertainty is probably why most of my research has involved nice contained little systems or in silico ALife. OwlFancier posted:I mean, I'm not sure you can reconcile the two, if you cannot find life worthwhile without believing that the maximal productive value of the world is being leveraged to achieve your desired goal then that is going to create a tension with people who find no value in that, who would rather not expend their time and energy for that. This really isn't remotely close to what I was saying though.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:49
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If you need society as a whole to be doing your idea of "progressing" then it kind of is? We all have to live on the same planet so if you want a society that expends resources and effort to achieve some big goal then it's going to come at the expense of people who don't share the goal, and then you have to contend with what society does with those people. We live now in a society that cannot abide people electing not to participate in the productive process for the purposes of enriching the already filthy rich, so we have systems in place to starve, freeze, and sicken them so that they will participate, because the part of society that wants that ever increasing wealth extraction and concentration cannot coexist with the part of society that would rather have the day off. Progress and stasis cannot coexist, because one prohibits the other, and more significantly a society dedicated to one certainly cannot abide the other within itself, it must work to marginalize the other viewpoint because the other viewpoint is an existential threat to the dominance of the first one. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 21:57
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OwlFancier posted:If you need society as a whole to be doing your idea of "progressing" then it kind of is? We all have to live on the same planet so if you want a society that expends resources and effort to achieve some big goal then it's going to come at the expense of people who don't share the goal, and then you have to contend with what society does with those people. We live now in a society that cannot abide people electing not to participate in the productive process for the purposes of enriching the already filthy rich, so we have systems in place to starve, freeze, and sicken them so that they will participate, because the part of society that wants that ever increasing wealth extraction and concentration cannot coexist with the part of society that would rather have the day off. I don't like the idea that the way the world exists right now is prescriptive of how it must work. A new system may not be capable of serving all people all the time, but it can still be a vast improvement over the old one.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:01
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I mean, yes there are a lot of ways you could improve the world but what I am saying is that those two preferences specifically would appear to be an example of an inherently conflicting pair of ideals, of desires, of goals. I don't really see how those two could coexist without being in the same kind of class conflict you would have now, where the desires of each class are mutually exclusive with each other, and one can only get what they want by taking from the other. It would be an actual argument between conservatism and progressivism except the conservatism would be wanting to conserve a society where everyone's material needs actually are met sustainably and they can pursue whatever interests they want within the bounds of that sustainability. Whereas the progressive side would seemingly be some mix between 18th century industrialists and people who are obsessed with space colonization for some reason. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 22:04
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OwlFancier posted:If you need society as a whole to be doing your idea of "progressing" then it kind of is? The alternative presented here seems to be a society that actively prevents me from seeking any kind of change at all. If the two extremes are all that are on offer then I would choose the vital structure over the dead one. OwlFancier posted:Progress and stasis cannot coexist, because one prohibits the other, and more significantly a society dedicated to one certainly cannot abide the other within itself, it must work to marginalize the other viewpoint because the other viewpoint is an existential threat to the dominance of the first one. On this I think we agree which then begs the same question I originally asked: Can a post-capitalist society find a reconciliation between these impulses? In the case that both societies exist next to each other, one vital and the other static, it seems like the former would outcompete the latter at some point.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:29
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Very probably, and so perhaps humanity is forever doomed to subjugation at the hands of people obsessed with writing their name on a big rock that says "I was here" rather than accepting the transience of their existence. But it would be nice to hope otherwise.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:49
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OwlFancier posted:Very probably, and so perhaps humanity is forever doomed to subjugation at the hands of people obsessed with writing their name on a big rock that says "I was here" rather than accepting the transience of their existence. I'm not sure why you think subjugation need be a part of that. Scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries in knowledge without any subjugation. Artists, similarly, are not subjugating anyone. Edit: The dichotomy here, as far as I can see, is between a vital non-hierarchic society and a static non-hierarchic society. The absence of subjugation seems to be a point that we are in strong agreement about. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 22:54
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Artists perhaps, though I would file that rather definitively under "seeking independent goals in comfort" as the art is meaningful to the artist, first and foremost. But science? No not at all, technology isn't apolitical, we had this argument a couple of pages ago, every thing that is invented changes the way the world works and technology carries with it inherent pressures on society, again I would bring up nuclear weapons and power, both very much a thing that put a massive weight on society towards centralization and the need to produce and maintain nuclear arsenals, with the ensuing political problems that stem from that. The entire concept of industrialization is what led us to where we are today, the idea that scientific advancements are only liberating is extremely bizzare to me. If someone invents a technology that can be used to gain a productive advantage, it becomes necessary for everybody to adopt it, lest they become subjugated by those that do, which can happen without force of arms, even, because the people who do adopt the technology would be able to produce things more easily and their non-adopting neigbours would become dependent on them for the things they produce. Technological changes drive societal changes. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 23:09
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Disnesquick posted:No. It comes from my love of living things and a desire to see endless varieties of life explode across the vast dome of heaven. Boy do I have a thread for you! 
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Dec 2, 2020 23:10
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Disnesquick posted:I'm not sure why you think subjugation need be a part of that. Scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries in knowledge without any subjugation. Artists, similarly, are not subjugating anyone. The general definition of such growth would imply exponentiality, otherwise the growth will eventually become unable to be perceived over the statistical wobble of the static society. And then there is a question of how such growth is defined. If it requires an ever increasing demand limited resources that might be bad for the people who favour long term stability. If it requires ever increasing borders it might be bad for outsiders. If it requires ever increasing pollution it might be bad for people who want to keep living on their planet. But if the definition of growth doesn't require any of those things I don't actually see how both ideals of society would be unable to live next to each other, or even interleaved.
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Dec 2, 2020 23:18
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OwlFancier posted:Artists perhaps, though I would file that rather definitively under "seeking independent goals in comfort" as the art is meaningful to the artist, first and foremost. If you're genuinely proposing a society that actually does simply try and stop all history and progress,rather than harness them into a post-capitalist context, thenn I guess I do fall back to what I originally said: Such a society can only decay. A parallel society that doesn't seek stasis will inevitably displace it, as it shrinks by its own incapacity for change, even in the absence of any actual hostility. VictualSquid posted:The general definition of such growth would imply exponentiality, otherwise the growth will eventually become unable to be perceived over the statistical wobble of the static society. And then there is a question of how such growth is defined. I think it remains an unanswered question whether it is possible to maintain a stable system, forever, within a finite environment. I suspect you would, at least, require the possibility for people who don't fit to leave. Stasis is not appealing to me, nor to a lot of people. I don't think the desire for change requires any grand narrative of colonialist rugged border framings or anything like that. For many people, the fact that there is a "somewhere else" is enough to want to go there. I am including the concept of intellectual exploration in that definition, as well as physical. If the entire struggle against capitalism is one that necessitates crushing that drive then I just don't see the point. If we are, in fact, physically constained to a finite space then I still suspect many people.will need the capacity for intellectual change. The concept of true stasis honestly horrifies me but I just don't see it as incompatible with ending the other horror that is capitalism. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 23:22
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Disnesquick posted:No. This view is not rooted in materialism at all. As is probably pretty obvious from my previous posts, I am a biologist. That has a great deal of influence on how I see the world. Biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay and a human society is a biological system. As I've now made exceptionally clear several times now, that growth doesn't have to be physical growth but can be cultural or artistic growth. To seek actual stasis, however, is to seek death. I think I see the problem here, that you're taking a simple (but not entirely inaccurate) model of biological processes and applying it across all fields of study, regardless of whether the factors that make this model accurate for biological processes make it accurate for other fields. We can't use models of biological organisms to analyze human society for the same reason that we can't use class struggle to understand biological organisms. A general would make a terrible rocket scientist and a rocket scientist would make a terrible general, because the models we've found to be useful for engineering rockets are very different to the models we've found to be useful for conducting warfare. Disnesquick posted:No. It comes from my love of living things and a desire to see endless varieties of life explode across the vast dome of heaven. Quite the opposite. I don't think that a post-capitalist society would be unchanging (although the reasons it would change would be completely different) and I think goals would be more likely to be pursued as a community instead of as atomized individuals. The difference between now and then for a space program is that the sacrifices would have to be contributed without coercion instead of Elon Musk and his first-world bazingas fueling their vanity projects through the immiseration of a vast number of apartheid slave miners.
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Dec 3, 2020 00:28
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Microcline posted:I think I see the problem here, that you're taking a simple (but not entirely inaccurate) model of biological processes and applying it across all fields of study, regardless of whether the factors that make this model accurate for biological processes make it accurate for other fields. We can't use models of biological organisms to analyze human society for the same reason that we can't use class struggle to understand biological organisms. A general would make a terrible rocket scientist and a rocket scientist would make a terrible general, because the models we've found to be useful for engineering rockets are very different to the models we've found to be useful for conducting warfare. On the first paragraph I think this is just a fundamental disagreement. I think we can and should use biological models to understand human systems. I posted a link to Paul Feyerabend earlier and I think it does a good job in justifying why disciplinary orthodoxy is harmful. There is no doubt in my mind that the emergent properties of the interactions between human organisms that we call human society constitue a biological system. I'd also point out that no biological model is "simple". On your second and third paragraphs: I think we're in agreement then? Edit: I'd add to this also that the idea of a human system somehow escaping the realm of systems biology seems fairly opposed to the entire idea of materialism. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 00:39
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Disnesquick posted:On the first paragraph I think this is just a fundamental disagreement. I think we can and should use biological models to understand human systems. I posted a link to Paul Feyerabend earlier and I think it does a good job in justifying why disciplinary orthodoxy is harmful. There is no doubt in my mind that the emergent properties of the interactions between human organisms that we call human society constitute a biological system. I'd also point out that no biological model is "simple". Yes, I think this is the fundamental disagreement. Interdisciplinary research means understanding multiple fields in order to understand complex topics, not taking a single model and applying it everywhere without regard for if the mechanisms of action apply or if it matches historical data. Doing that is how we end up with animal magnetism, Lysenkoism, Jordan Petersen lobsterboys, all manner of quantum mysticism, and your "brief flame" model of human societies. And I specifically said that your biological models are simple, i.e. you can't say something like quote:To seek actual stasis, however, is to seek death. Disnesquick posted:Edit: I'd add to this also that the idea of a human system somehow escaping the realm of systems biology seems fairly opposed to the entire idea of materialism. I'm not arguing that humans don't perform more anabolis than catabolis, or that they don't maintain homeostasis, or that gravity doesn't apply to them. I am saying that someone armed only with the most fundamental first principles will have extreme difficulty dealing with complex systems, and the task will be outright impossible if they try to use those first principles to analyze the emergent properties without considering those emergent properties as products of the complex system.
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Dec 3, 2020 05:28
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Microcline posted:Yes, I think this is the fundamental disagreement. Interdisciplinary research means understanding multiple fields in order to understand complex topics, not taking a single model and applying it everywhere without regard for if the mechanisms of action apply or if it matches historical data. Doing that is how we end up with animal magnetism, Lysenkoism, Jordan Petersen lobsterboys, all manner of quantum mysticism, and your "brief flame" model of human societies. Nobody even mentioned "taking a single model and applying it everywhere". This is an absurdly extreme framing of the argument, to the level of missing the point by a mile. Trying to bring Lysenkoism into this is just completely insane, to be honest. As for your final paragraph: You've just described what systems biology is. It is a discipline that is exactly meant to tackle those emergent properties with both the bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. You talk about "my biological model" but you have basically no concept of what that model is because I've never actually described a model in this context just the conclusions that one can come to from a deep understanding of biology e.g. How evolutionary dynamics emerge from systems that express inheritance, variation and selection. As one example, you mention homeostasis, which doesn't actually exist in the specific sense implied by the word. There isn't any true "stasis" in that, whilst an organism seems to be in a steady state over micro-time, when viewed over a longer period it is either growing from a neonate to maturity or slowly winding down. Homeostasis is something that only actually manifests, within the material, in the abstract, even if it is defined with specificity as an ideal. It's a useful concept to roughly encapsulate a great deal of biological mechanisms but the reality is not nearly as simple as the word, or the definition, implies. No living thing 'seeks' stasis but rather maintains a constant struggle against entropy, which it will inevitably lose (preferably after reproducing). Seeking stasis is death because you're at the mercy of that entropic force: Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis". That is a dynamic which can only exist in a stage of decay. To achieve even a brief approximation of a steady state requires seeking growth. And I think this is the kind of thing where your misunderstanding of the materialist argument of human interactions being fundamentally rooted in biology comes from. Talking about "first principles" is the kind of obsessive reductionism that falls flat fast where biology is concerned. As some of the deeper evolutionary conversations ITT that touched on e.g. epistasis, sexual selection and artificial selection should demonstrate, even basic evolutionary theory, which if anything could be considered "first principles" of biology would be, is a thorny mess of interactions from which we can pick out, perhaps, a few broad conclusions but struggle to do so on the smaller scale. Systems biology is both absolutely fascinating and utterly frustrating for that reason.
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Dec 3, 2020 06:25
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Disnesquick posted:Nobody even mentioned "taking a single model and applying it everywhere". This is an absurdly extreme framing of the argument, to the level of missing the point by a mile. Trying to bring Lysenkoism into this is just completely insane, to be honest. You specifically said: quote:Biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay and a human society is a biological system. And I don't think bringing in other deadly pseudoscientific claims is insane, although if we're specifically talking about biology applied to human society then eugenetics and scientific racism would be more appropriate examples. The belief that human society needs "external struggles" to cohere is bad sociology that has killed people in the past. Disnesquick posted:As for your final paragraph: You've just described what systems biology is. It is a discipline that is exactly meant to tackle those emergent properties with both the bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. You talk about "my biological model" but you have basically no concept of what that model is because I've never actually described a model in this context just the conclusions that one can come to from a deep understanding of biology e.g. How evolutionary dynamics emerge from systems that express inheritance, variation and selection. Whatever your full model is, I'm judging it by the predictive power it's demonstrated, i.e. your "brief flame" historical narrative, which ended up being completely wrong. I think systems biology is very good at modeling tissues, organs, and organisms (and can even model some aspects of human society, if we apply it carefully and check it against historical evidence instead of making sweeping generalizations), but unless mechanisms of action and historical evidence is demonstrated, I don't think we can say that biology implies human society necessarily needs "external struggles" to survive. Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us. It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance. If we ever did achieve communism then I think we'd need to find external struggles to prevent that. Disnesquick posted:As one example, you mention homeostasis, which doesn't actually exist in the specific sense implied by the word. There isn't any true "stasis" in that, whilst an organism seems to be in a steady state over micro-time, when viewed over a longer period it is either growing from a neonate to maturity or slowly winding down. Homeostasis is something that only actually manifests, within the material, in the abstract, even if it is defined with specificity as an ideal. It's a useful concept to roughly encapsulate a great deal of biological mechanisms but the reality is not nearly as simple as the word, or the definition, implies. No living thing 'seeks' stasis but rather maintains a constant struggle against entropy, which it will inevitably lose (preferably after reproducing). Seeking stasis is death because you're at the mercy of that entropic force: Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis". That is a dynamic which can only exist in a stage of decay. To achieve even a brief approximation of a steady state requires seeking growth. That's precisely my point? That the general definition of "stasis" is so broad that it allows you to take an incredibly specific definition like "Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis"." and then by slight of hand apply it to any human society that lacks "external struggles". A society using the specific "new stasis" definition is too ridiculous to contemplate, as no one would eat because each new amount of hunger is the new stasis. At other times, you are clearly not using this specific definition of stasis, when you say things like "Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us" and "Could we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis?" What we can see is that a lack of "external struggles" tends to be a very good predictor of long-term social stability. That's not to say that internal contradictions can't be papered over through external struggles, it just doesn't tend to work out in the long term, e.g. the Second French Empire lasting less than 18 years. Disnesquick posted:And I think this is the kind of thing where your misunderstanding of the materialist argument of human interactions being fundamentally rooted in biology comes from. Talking about "first principles" is the kind of obsessive reductionism that falls flat fast where biology is concerned. As some of the deeper evolutionary conversations ITT that touched on e.g. epistasis, sexual selection and artificial selection should demonstrate, even basic evolutionary theory, which if anything could be considered "first principles" of biology would be, is a thorny mess of interactions from which we can pick out, perhaps, a few broad conclusions but struggle to do so on the smaller scale. Systems biology is both absolutely fascinating and utterly frustrating for that reason. To be fair, I don't know the model you were using so I can't say why it produced such incorrect results when applied to historical human societies. Obsessive reductionism was just my best guess.
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Dec 3, 2020 08:48
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Microcline posted:You specifically said: Whether or not something has killed people doesn't make it bad science. The attempt to frame science in terms of morality is erroneous. Your failed attempt to shoehorn Lysenkoism in is probably a good example of your fundmental mistake here: Lysenkoism didn't fail because it was bad science, it failed because it wasn't science at all. It was a political need to discredit "liberal" ideas that was dressed up as science that just happened to grab this one weird guy and could equally well have used someone else. That attempt to define scientific inquiry from a foundation of morality/politics/religion etc. is completely at odds with materialism. Nuclear Weapons having killed people no more discredits the framework of nuclear physics than someone falling to their death discredits gravitation. This attempt to force theory to confirm your starting assumptions is also at odds with dialectics, which seeks a synthesis of conflicting ideas, rather than the imposition of some moral foundation onto the result. "biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay" is not a model, so much as an observation. If you can demonstrate a material example of such a system that is not either growing or decaying then I'm all ears but I've never encountered one. Microcline posted:That's precisely my point? That the general definition of "stasis" is so broad that it allows you to take an incredibly specific definition like "Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis"." and then by slight of hand apply it to any human society that lacks "external struggles". A society using the specific "new stasis" definition is too ridiculous to contemplate, as no one would eat because each new amount of hunger is the new stasis. At other times, you are clearly not using this specific definition of stasis, when you say things like "Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us" and "Could we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis?" This is precisely the point: Once you start going down that route of stasis, the contradictions of such a system immediately become apparent. The only conceivable way you could approach this is by having some external "standard" which the system is forced to converge towards but that simply removes the problem to a larger system, which tends to lead to the "turtles all the way down" line of thinking. I'm not sure what your point is about a "specific" definition of stasis. I'm not using your idea of a specific definition of homeostasis because I strongly disagree with it, from the perspective of a materialist approach to biology. Microcline posted:That's not to say that internal contradictions can't be papered over through external struggles, it just doesn't tend to work out in the long term, e.g. the Second French Empire lasting less than 18 years. You misunderstand me: I was referring to your own obsession with reductionism and general attempts to fit everything into this inflexible framework you've established for yourself. As an example: The invention that the only motive plausible for physical exploration must be a component of a colonalist mindset. Likewise the idea that there must be some "basic principles" at work that we can derive everything else from or that we can impose a "specific" definition of homeostasis on the material, rather than treating these concepts as the intellectual tools they are. It seems fairly unsurprising therefore, that this kind of rigid thought you insist on would lead to the conclusion that a static system is the only plausible end-state for ordering human society. I'm arguing that an alternative exists to that, rooted in a more dialectical approach. Rather than setting in stone some pre-defined structure that we think will be able to survive down the ages and maintain some "optimal" level of comfort for its citizens, we can accept that every new structure is temporary and embrace that in a dynamic system, rather than a static one. Engels puts it well, in my opinion, when he writes Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy posted:For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away,
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Dec 3, 2020 18:28
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Disnesquick posted:Whether or not something has killed people doesn't make it bad science. The attempt to frame science in terms of morality is erroneous. Your failed attempt to shoehorn Lysenkoism in is probably a good example of your fundmental mistake here: Lysenkoism didn't fail because it was bad science, it failed because it wasn't science at all. It was a political need to discredit "liberal" ideas that was dressed up as science that just happened to grab this one weird guy and could equally well have used someone else. That attempt to define scientific inquiry from a foundation of morality/politics/religion etc. is completely at odds with materialism. Nuclear Weapons having killed people no more discredits the framework of nuclear physics than someone falling to their death discredits gravitation. This attempt to force theory to confirm your starting assumptions is also at odds with dialectics, which seeks a synthesis of conflicting ideas, rather than the imposition of some moral foundation onto the result. I didn't criticize your "brief flame" narrative of human societies on the moral grounds. I criticized it on the ground that even in the five specific examples you chose it contradicted the observed data. The fact that the belief that human society needs "external struggles" to cohere has killed people in the past is irrelevant to the critique, and was simply brought up to demonstrate that it's not "insane" to compare it to other pseudoscientific claims. However, you are correct that comparing your "brief flame" narrative to adopted deadly forms of pseudoscience is out-of-context as I doubt our discussion of what society could look like in 10,000 years will have any influence on what society looks like in 10,000 years. Disnesquick posted:"biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay" is not a model, so much as an observation. If you can demonstrate a material example of such a system that is not either growing or decaying then I'm all ears but I've never encountered one. Disnesquick posted:This is precisely the point: Once you start going down that route of stasis, the contradictions of such a system immediately become apparent. The only conceivable way you could approach this is by having some external "standard" which the system is forced to converge towards but that simply removes the problem to a larger system, which tends to lead to the "turtles all the way down" line of thinking. I'm not sure what your point is about a "specific" definition of stasis. I'm not using your idea of a specific definition of homeostasis because I strongly disagree with it, from the perspective of a materialist approach to biology. Disnesquick posted:Seeking stasis is death because you're at the mercy of that entropic force: Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis". Disnesquick posted:You misunderstand me: I was referring to your own obsession with reductionism and general attempts to fit everything into this inflexible framework you've established for yourself. As an example: The invention that the only motive plausible for physical exploration must be a component of a colonialist mindset. Disnesquick posted:It seems fairly unsurprising therefore, that this kind of rigid thought you insist on would lead to the conclusion that a static system is the only plausible end-state for ordering human society. Although from what has been said it seems that we're mostly in agreement and are arguing with strawman versions of each other. You're calling me "inflexible" and "reductionist" because I'm criticizing the grand narrative "It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance" not for violating some other grand narrative but for being unsupported by historical evidence.
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Dec 3, 2020 23:14
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Looking back, I did assume the worst and jump down your throat over a minor point, so it was only fair for you to do the same to me in response. I'm sorry and I hope I didn't ruin a thread that was generating good discussion.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:35
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Microcline posted:I'm sorry and I hope I didn't ruin a thread that was generating good discussion. It's no big deal, I thought the discussion was interesting, if a little tangential.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:40
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Microcline posted:I'm sorry and I hope I didn't ruin a thread that was generating good discussion. Absolutely not! NGL, I'm not sure I understood all of it, but it was all interesting to read. This is the kind of thing this thread is for.
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Dec 4, 2020 14:06
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Here's a little Friday fun for the thread: NYT DealBook: How to Fix America quote:For the last year, we’ve all been inundated with campaign platforms from candidates promising to fix this or to rebuild that. But rarely do we hear from on-the-ground experts about specific ideas to help address our most pressing problems, whether in the economy, health care, education, social justice or climate change. Each section has a few paragraphs of explanation, so I'm not going to copy/paste all of the sections in full, but here are the different section titles (with my comments in brackets if the title is ambiguous) and I'm happy to post specific ones on request.
I think there are some ideas here that I wouldn't necessarily call bad, but it's almost self-parody how unimaginative and tied to the neoliberal status quo they are. Like ok, giving Americans $7K at birth to invest in an index fund that theoretically could compound to $1M at age 65... that's kind of cool sounding, but you can't withdraw the money until then? What if you have an unexpected medical bill that brings you to financial ruin? What if the market tanks and wipes out a chunk of the investment? What if a lifetime of accumulated stress and discrimination results in irreversibly damaged mental health by age 65 such that $1M (which probably would be more like $200-300K if you take inflation into account, I think?) will be a day late and a dollar short, so to speak? Like this is the best we got??? #15 is my favorite, and I suspect will be widely supported by this thread  Veronique de Rugy | Senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University posted:“Economic growth isn’t just ethical, it’s sublime,” writes my former colleague Eli Dourado for the Cato Institute. I agree. Here are the top three growth-inducing policies that I would prioritize. What they all have in common is the removal of obstacles to growth. And all are progressive in the sense that the Americans who will benefit the most are those in the bottom half of the income scale.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:42
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That list is giving me brain pain from how nonsensical it is, like multiple points directly at odds with each other.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:57
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:
My searing hot takes in order: 1. Give Americans Cash at Birth So They Can Retire as Millionaires - I'm reading this as another scam to get people off of defined benefits and onto defined contributions (limiting state liability at the expense of human misery) and to further enrich brokerage companies by handing them another pile of money to skim fees off of. 2. Persuade Companies to Embrace a 2 Percent Solution [2% charity tax on companies lol] - I was ready to scoff at this based on your description but I read it and you're actually being generous in describing this as a charity or as a tax. It's this: "As one example, the 10 largest banks in our country generated nearly $1 trillion in profits over the last 10 years. If they invested 2 percent of that over the next 10 years toward ending systemic racism, we’d have $20 billion more for African-American communities from those banks alone. How could they invest this money?" The idea is a state-defined investment banking fund for Deserving People Only. 3. Listen to the People You Disagree With the Most - Making it the job of everyone else to find common ground with antivaxxers (the example given) seems like a good way to normalize and validate people who are espousing sociopathic ideas. 4. Use Remote Work to Revitalize the Cities That Need It Most - Capital chasing except the new idea is to try to bribe people or companies to land remote workers in your town instead of the sock factory or whatever. That always works forever and doesn't hand capital a gun to hold you hostage with ever. 5. Fund Black-Owned Banks That Renew Opportunity - Not even going to bother. 6. Put an Internet-Enabled Device in the Hands of Every U.S. Child - You better watch your loving mouth saying this in front of child psychiatrists and mental health providers because they'll knife you and let you bleed out on the pavement for thinking this is a good idea. Unsurprising in the extreme that this idea came from a venture capitalist ghoul who should never have said a word about children once in his entire life. 7. Require a Background Check on Every Gun Purchase in America - Guns, but for rich white people only! 8. Stop Pushing College - No. 9. Cut Carbon Emissions Everywhere (Starting With These Four Sectors) - Yes. 10. Make Good, at Last, on Our Promises [honoring treaties with Native American tribes] - Heidi Heitkamp would like to not be canceled so she can get a cabinet post pls ty 11. Improve Access to Technology and Hire More Tutors - I don't disagree with this but it's at the same level as like, homeless shelters. It's the absolute bare minimum bandaid solution we need to do to keep society functional and we've decided bandaids are too expensive so now the public debate is about whether wound infections exist or not. 12. Let Mental Health Experts Answer 911 Calls - Sure as long as we also fire the murderous cops who are currently answering them. Unfortunately the guy who wrote this is a cop so 13. Think of Education as More Than Just School - This is a good idea but the call to action at the end of it is just the same one schools need: more loving money. Do we need more money for services? Yes! Which ones? All of them except cops! 14. Abolish ICE. For a Start. - Extreme yes. 15. Slash Regulation. Prioritize Growth. - "We all want to be safe, of course, but being too risk-averse kills innovation and restrains growth. We need a balanced approach." Ah yes, the delicate balance between people dying for drug company profits and not that. Wouldn't want to go too far in either direction there. 16. Create a Paid Internship for Every College Graduate Who Wants One - This is the same idea as #8 - prioritize labor force development at all costs - except this is the version you get when you ask a college administrator to write the op-ed. 17. Ban Share Buttons On Social Media - Ban Social Media would be faster, easier, and better. I should replace this guy as *checks notes* a NYT technology columnist.
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Dec 5, 2020 01:44
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What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism?
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Dec 7, 2020 02:50
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Sucrose posted:What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism? ‘square’ and ‘chill’
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Dec 7, 2020 03:00
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Sucrose posted:What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism? There's no easy answer for this, because those terms are pretty nebulous and there's a lot of different schools of thought.
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Dec 7, 2020 03:38
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fool of sound posted:There's no easy answer for this, because those terms are pretty nebulous and there's a lot of different schools of thought. I mean like, is there a strain of Marxism that is specifically "If some jerk tries to seize absolute power under the excuse of being the 'protector of the proletariat' or whatever, we'd tell that guy to get hosed?" Is there a specifically anti-authoritarian type of Marxism, or are all varieties potentially weak to it?
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Dec 7, 2020 05:43
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Sucrose posted:I mean like, is there a strain of Marxism that is specifically "If some jerk tries to seize absolute power under the excuse of being the 'protector of the proletariat' or whatever, we'd tell that guy to get hosed?" Is there a specifically anti-authoritarian type of Marxism, or are all varieties potentially weak to it? There are plenty of anarchists that ascribe to Marxist theories. Many of them point to the idea that material realities guide history, not a dead man's predictions. Seizing the state may be the path to socialism for some countries at some point in history in some parts of the world, but it may different in others. So, anarcho-communists specifically I believe ascribe to this theory.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:48
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Sucrose posted:I mean like, is there a strain of Marxism that is specifically "If some jerk tries to seize absolute power under the excuse of being the 'protector of the proletariat' or whatever, we'd tell that guy to get hosed?" Is there a specifically anti-authoritarian type of Marxism, or are all varieties potentially weak to it? There are tons of variants of anarcho-communism, that oppose the idea of state and to a greater or lesser extent coercive power. Kropotkin is the foundational figure of much of that school of thought.
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Dec 7, 2020 05:51
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There are plenty of anarchists that ascribe to Marxist theories. Many of them point to the idea that material realities guide history, not a dead man's predictions. Seizing the state may be the path to socialism for some countries at some point in history in some parts of the world, but it may different in others. No, Anarcho-communism specifically rejects that, communism predates Marxism and the two labels weren't considered synonymous until after the russian revolution. Anarcho-communism was pioneered in the 1850s in France, and then took off in Italy in the 1870s while Marx and the Marxists were focussing on German social democracy. Very little overlap. There are Anarchists who find value in some of Marx's ideas and some other marxist thinkers, just like some Marxists and Karl Marx took inspiration and ideas from anarchists (though they usually rather bite their own leg off than admit this). There are currents in marxism that are called by some to be libetarian or autonomous, the big names associated with it are council communism though most of its theorist moved away from associations with marxism, the Situationists (who also broke quite radically with marxism) and Antoni Negri and autonomous marxism developed in the 80s (again incorporating a lot of ideas and history from other groups). Socialism or Barbarism (the french group) were former trots who criticised the authoritarianism prone to Marxism and would eventually move away from it. Theres also Deleuze and Guattari and other isolated theorists who say they're marxists but also rejected dialectics, so i don't really see whats left of Karl Marx's thought and analysis if you reject the framework. But I'm not a philosopher. Those are the ones I'm familiar with. Though just like every other type of Marxism___ there is a very bitter debate about how much any of them count. Baka-nin fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 06:39
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There are plenty of anarchists that ascribe to Marxist theories. Many of them point to the idea that material realities guide history, not a dead man's predictions. Seizing the state may be the path to socialism for some countries at some point in history in some parts of the world, but it may different in others. Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist?
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Dec 7, 2020 06:53
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OwlFancier posted:That list is giving me brain pain from how nonsensical it is, like multiple points directly at odds with each other. To be fairer than the authors probably deserve, I believe it’s supposed to be that way. “Here’s what a bunch of different people think could fix things” is a pretty good idea in principle, although it would be a better one without censorship of leftist views. BUT since censorship of leftist views is a fact of life in the English-speaking world, I’d rather have newspapers printing articles like this than, say, Melanie Phillips’ Let’s Transphobe with Mummy. That’s without getting into maybe 90% of the output of the press here in China. Anyone on the left owes it to themselves to read the People’s Daily (which you can get in English online) as an example of how the leading kinda-sorta-still-communist power wants people to see the world. (if only to read amazing headlines like “US latest travel restrictions on China arbitrary and self-mutilation” or “Historic success of eradicating
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Dec 7, 2020 11:40
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Sucrose posted:Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist? anarchists will almost always apply pressure to a marxist state to "keep it honest" but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be overall content to live under it, there's very varying opinions on that.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:00
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Sucrose posted:Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist? An example: Imagine a talented revolutionary leader, he lots of good planning during the revolution an people listen to him; this is compatible with anarchism as long as the people could remove him from his position. After the revolution people keep obeying him even on issues that are unconnected with his successes and talents; this is the danger of bad hierarchies forming. Ultimately he decides that everybody who tells him that his strange ideas on agriculture are wrong should go to prison and people listen; that is authoritarianism. Everbody who is opposed to even any specific authority gets called an anarchist at some point, so there isn't any non-anarchist anti-authoritarianism. The Spartacist lineage was opposed to having a long term vanguard, but their reasoning was that a vanguard that can be shot/arrested/bribed is a weakness to the movement.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:08
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| # ? May 29, 2024 07:34 |
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Is it possible this thread could produce a decent reading list for those interested in these ideas? I've been following the discussion with interest but noticing large holes in my own education. I've read Zinn's People's History, Chomsky's Understanding Power, and one of Goldman's books (which I should probably reread). I'd love to read more about practical ways to contribute and more modern takes on Marxism, though the person reading Kapital and posting their thoughts has been great, I am not sure I'd be able to dig into that work and gain a lot from it.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:58
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