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Funny that people start mentioning Hegel as I was thinking how dialectical the narrativist framework is turning out to be when it's revealed in a well-structured form. Like you have typically benign processes in society creating narrativists, but once their quantity reaches a critical mass, their presence becomes self-sustaining: they themselves acquire the ability to create enough new narrativists to sustain their existence. Their inner narratives are in contradiction with society as it exists and they manage the dissonance variably by purging themselves of people that make it harder to reconcile that narrative with reality, and variably by trying to change the world. But ultimately they can't coexist with the world as is: they will either purge themselves back to a state where they can no longer sustain their own existence, or succeed in changing society to suit them. I appreciate how, contrary to hegelianism proper, Jane grounds these patterns to lived experiences, how our bodies get structured around them, and how the role of rational thought is to create a post-hoc rationalization of how we act: narrativism is materially grounded in how the individual is structured, and the patterns of how people become reflect the patterns of what kinds of roles people are forced or freely find to play within society, and narrativists create people who think like them by building societal structures rather than spreading ideas, while spreading ideas is more how they amass people who already think like them (in terms of how they think rather than what they think) into coherent movements that can begin dominating other sorts of people and transforming their communities into more cult-like environments. It's materialist, and makes me think of a sociobiological theory of multilevel evolutionary selection as expressed by Peter Turchin here: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/for-the-good-of-the-species/ It'll be interesting to see how the concepts of structuralists, integrators and metathinkers have been evolving, I hope it will also be grounded in real-world processes how they come to exist, reproduce and dominate certain communities, and what their effect on society is. The cooperator concept as I understood seems promising, how they are in service of social power, take the conclusions of prominent people as given, something they just need to rationalize and fall behind. It's clearly visible not just politically, but in basic schoolyard and workplace environments. I agree that serious research has to be cooperative or it will quickly degenerate into pseudoscience that can't usefully predict things anymore, and there are basically three ways to do it: Becoming a professional academic, being erudite and rigorous enough to check your work against other discoveries in an unprofessional environment, or introducing your work to academics that specialize in this kind of stuff and want to advance that theory together with you. Iind of like how MMT in economics started with Warren Mosler doing completely individual research, creating a hypothesis about how money works, testing some predictions he made, and then introducing the results to heterodox economists who sought weapons to disrupt mainstream theory. uncop has issued a correction as of 12:07 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 09:58
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I think goons are too hasty, like we want results but we also want the results to be immediately scientifically valid. Realistically, the kind of framework PJ is creating is probably large enough to be a life’s work to actually test, falsify and correct broken parts etc, it will be evolving for a long time based on new knowledge if it’s not discarded. In the time the forums will stay alive, the best we can hope for is the framework containing a complete set of hypotheses that one can make predictions based on, see how they fare, and understand the implications. If it predicts as well as the narrativist stuff in the era of Trump, we could worry about working it into science proper, and if it doesn’t, that’s not so serious really, no one has their honor on the line. In any case, when one has the whole framework, if they love it and feel like Prester is evolving it into pseudoscience, they can themselves take the responsibility of taking the good parts and building proper science out of them. I think that if one defines science by rigorously following a method to integrate them into our grand body of knowledge, theyl'll find that in history, before science was professionalized, there were a lot of theories that weren't immediately science but evolved into science as people sought to prove them long after they had routinely used them to make predictions and found them useful. Unproven hypotheses work just as well as proven ones if they happen to be reality-based and right. The correct way to root out junk from this body of not-yet-science is that it can't make many predictions that would seem useful and accurate to anyone but a true believer, rather than the fact that it builds its hypotheses on earlier, still unproven hypotheses rather than progressing in a strict, professional manner. uncop has issued a correction as of 07:08 on Nov 2, 2018 |
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Nov 2, 2018 06:47
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A big flaming stink posted:no offense pj but if you try to derive the nature of the mind from the nature of the brain even in terms of analogy you're gonna have a bad time. This is definitely true. You’re much better off looking at thought in terms of the structures we use when thinking and communicating (concepts, language) than metaphorical brain structures. There are much better ways to bridge the gap between experience and thought than by forming a theory of the brain.
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Nov 2, 2018 12:39
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Willie Tomg posted:i contend that none of this is true merely because you assert it in earnest, and prefer previously existing scholarly explanations of this behavior instead. i have provided more support for my ideas than you or PJ for yours, because i've read things about this subject and shared a couple of them--though not nearly enough things to begin formulating grand unifying explicatory theories of my own. do you understand the problem? Have you considered that the reason why a tome of a book does not require you to know jargon beforehand is because it’s a book, and it can explain its concepts within the text, so that you naturally understand what the author means when words come up later? Very unlike the humble forum post. Of course it’s made worse because PJ is not an academically educated person that could easily refer to existing, better known concepts and had to create her own instead to be able to communicate her ideas efficiently. But they aren’t arcane or overly vague as her detractors tend to assert, they just are not immediately obvious without reading the blog or the old thread. There is a lot of criticism that stems from putting PJ alongside professional academics’ published books with a humongous amount of person-hours put into making sure everything works. Even if PJ was some kind of mythical genius that was right about everything she asserts somehow, her current work would still pale in comparison because of pretty obvious realities. Preferring real books is only logical, and reading a whole lot is ultimately the only way to refine this kind of stuff to academic standards, but good books existing is not an argument for dismissing someone’s work, only for others to start somewhere else if they haven’t yet and want to learn about the subject right now. I’m yet to see an actual takedown that shows a correct understanding of PJ’s framework and uses knowledge of academic work to show it to be based on assertions that are untrue. ”It’s bad because it’s false”, rather than ”it’s bad because I don’t understand it / it’s nowhere near academic standards / it covers ground that is already trodden”. Your crit is firmly in the ”I haven’t put in any effort to understand it so it’s vague gibberish, here’s some counterevidence to it as I misunderstand it” camp.
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Nov 3, 2018 10:08
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Helsing posted:Can somebody give me an operational definition of "Narrativism" and an example of distinctively non-Narrativism behaviour for contrast? Individually, a narrativist is someone whose worldview follows a specific structure: It revolves around a source of universal binary morality that people must change to live according to the rules of if the perfect world is to be realized. It doesn't have to be a god, just something that has existed and will exist as long as humans do that a philosophical framework can point to as the source of its universal validity. The narrativist believes themselves to be part of a privileged elect that understands the correct framework of good and evil and is on the side of good. This elect targets real people that it sees as representatives of the enemy, who they believe to be conscious or duped followers of evil. Fighting the enemy is the single calling of the narrativist, and the means can go from the farcical to pointless nastiness to physical violence. The narrativist believes the actions of the enemy to be what prevents the world from working according to their morality, and defeating the enemy for good to be the only thing that they have to do to bring the world on track. If the narrative is something the outside world wouldn't exactly accept or they need to be discreet in front of the enemy or whatever, they project a watered down version of their narrative to the public, that they have no emotional attachment to and can change according to the situation or as someone attempts to argue against it. In contrast, the in-group narrative is something that is locked in nature and if the outside world presents something that contradicts it that can't be simply ignored, tensions rise and purges follow soon, and after the purges everyone within the group is required to conform to a more distilled and unified form of the inner narrative, obviously making it less acceptable to outsiders. The structure of the narrative is more important to the narrativist than its content: e.g. a narrativist that leaves or is cast out of a Christian narrativist group would feel more at home joining a secular narrativist group than a regular church. Political narrativists, when something causes them to lose hope in their group, can effortlessly jump onto what is considered the opposite side of a spectrum: in terms of the political compass, you pretty much have pathways from corner to corner: libertarian-fascist, communist-fascist... Their views were never based on grounded personal principles, but strict adherence to a source of truth, which can only be changed wholesale. Alliances between narrativist groups are pretty flexible too when there's a general feeling that the enemy is too powerful for them to beat alone, similarity in structure allows them to align their public narratives without compromising on their inner narratives. "Globalists" is a good example of an amalgamate enemy that a lot of groups can unite under the banner of fighting: they can be simultaneously identified as a secret cabal seeking to rule the world for their own ends, agents of satan, jews, financiers and megacorporations, and communists, depending on who is looking. A non-narrativist devoutly religious person might ground their understanding of their god's will to real people: if a rule in the book produces perceptibly bad results, it must be their interpretation that is wrong rather than the people who argue for alternatives who are wrong and the "bad results" merely being swift and just divine punishment for straying or not fighting immoral people hard enough. They might not consider themselves to be someone with a duty to lead the chosen people to a new, better world at all, someone who considers loyalty to their group to be synonymous to loyalty to their god. Or they might not see the solution to the injustices in the world in fighting an enemy that is distinct from the good guys, but instead considering the world in more nuanced ways where people can be both essentially good and inexcusably flawed. They choose their denomination based on how close the denomination is to their own theological understanding, rather than choosing their theology based on which denomination seems like the most authoritative source of truth. A non-narrativist political activist doesn't see society as a place that was corrupted or whose corruption is preserved by by their political opponents and fixed simply by defeating them in political battle and then removing all interference against things working as intended. They choose their alliances based on advancing their principles rather than on hurting their enemies. They probably don't view the world through a moralist lens where people's actions have to be policed because bad things in the world are caused by bad attitudes and lifestyles. They might consider themselves not to be experts on how to make things work out for all society, but instead people who enable all those who know how to make things work out for some portion or society to apply their knowledge in reality. And they won't consider the continued existence and ill will of political rivals/enemies to be sufficient proof for them to have been at fault for policy failures through sabotage or the like, nor will they consider mounting resistance to their policies as a sign that they have to double down on them to counter the mounting corrupting influence of their enemies.
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Nov 10, 2018 11:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm not sure if you've already put this into any particular terms, maybe the end point of enough compaction cycles, but I've noticed a phenomenon with the right where there's absolutely no point in even pretending to moderate to mollify them because they are in a bubble of self-radicalisation and escalation that completely ignores all outside stimuli besides violent suppression. Any action or inaction is taken as an insult and/or encouragement, and narratives are created and frequently made up from wholecloth to justify the continued compaction. Main example being how establishment Democrats are desperate to decry socialism while Republicans gladly call literally all Democrats socialists. Centrism in the sense of identifying as a non-ideological party of rational administration with a duty to educate the rest and expecting all honest people to listen is fundamentally delusional. It's normal that people can't be reached with the obvious aim of civilizing them from outside, the echo chamber of centrism just allows them to consider their own "tribe" as the whole of society of fully developed, moral people, and uphold their ideology of non-ideology that way. Of course it's possible for sections of society to become further and further isolated from the rest, making it harder and harder for a person to belong to that group and also other groups at the same time, make the normal cross-pollination of worldviews between groups possible. Seems like that sort of radicalization has been going on for a while, and that is what leads to groups seeing each other as the kind of people who cannot be reasoned with and who can only be violently suppressed. And when societies split cleanly enough into major groups that can't meet eye to eye, civil wars happen. Due to its history, USA is a fundamentally divided country, it has already mostly been power disparity between groups that has allowed the illusion of peace to be upheld, social struggle to be construed as simple and necessary police action serving a neutral justice. But that is a narrative that is equally made up as various radicals' narratives are, ironically we can also see a compaction of centrism right now as a result of reality having so obviously contradicted their worldview. And of course that makes it harder for centrists to reach the other groups, further eroding trust in authorities.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:25
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evobatman posted:He's at "They should go back home" now. It can escalate to "Someone should send them back home!" and "If you want to MAGA, send them back home!" This seems like a pretty good assumption as long as he stays locked onto the racist base for his attention fix. What actually happens would depend on whether he can both win the power struggles inside his bloc on whether to go more extreme and also replace the less extreme people that get purged with good enough material that his bloc stays competitive with opposing blocs. Whether legitimacy for the more extreme ideas can be built among competent enough people in critical positions, either directly through assumption of the narrative or indirectly through values like loyalty and deference to authority.
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Jul 18, 2019 14:53
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I really enjoyed that description of just sitting and making connections creatively for enjoyment, I really identify with the sense of fulfillment from that kind of activity. Also interesting to hear how schizophrenia can help one come up with great metaphors. For my part I can say that reading basic pop science articles and books about the subject I'm engaging with is extremely helpful for the testing phase you speak of, the basic patterns those texts reveal let me design a more rigorous bar that random ideas have to pass and generally keep a check on which established models as well as simple assorted facts the ideas are consistent with and which they contradict (established models often don't agree with each other or real phenomena and critiquing them is a big part of the fun). Of course and no less importantly they also feed my creativity by introducing me to new data points and patterns to make connections from. I mean, just generally to anyone else who follows this thread because they viscerally enjoy these kinds of creation processes, reading long texts may feel like a chore that takes away from the fun, but once you get adept at finding stuff that inspires you, it's really the opposite. And of course there are podcasts, audiobooks etc. if listening is more up your alley.
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Jul 21, 2019 15:00
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Also designing games that structure these social networks in a way that enables and incentivizes people to respect or shun others based on the money they spend or don't spend, in a way that has documentedly spilled over into real life as bullying between real life kids playing games together. Communities of peer pressure based on who has the coolest premium items while those items are randomly acquired so people just need to keep pulling that lever to climb the stairs of respect. I dunno, I'm sure there are a lot of actual cults that are downright beneficial to their members' psyches compared to that.
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Aug 10, 2019 05:19
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Frankly it's the truth that a certain level of gatekeeping exists and it's unwittingly reproduced by all kinds of people. The source is basically a mistaken epistemology that considers knowledge to be produced through engaging with, chewing on and making new discoveries from thought as such, previous theory. Basically the ideology of the philosophy that modern academy was built on. The reality is however that knowledge comes from generalizing on practical experience. One can acquire the raw data produced in practice by reading about it, but also by doing it over a long period of time and in various contexts. The skill to generalize rigorously obviously takes training and individual practice to do well, but someone like Prester has had to do that too in order to recover from schizophrenia, she has detailed that process. So she, while lacking the final touches that'd make her work pass in academy, has exactly what it takes to speak authoritatively on group dynamics of the narrativist type. It *is* gatekeeping not to engage her as a serious organic intellectual on this subject, and the same pattern repeats regarding organic individuals of other subjects developed in the same way, most notably all kinds of minorities without relevant academic training. And it's shamelessly promoted by people with that training to ease the psychological pressure of the threat of competition that demands them to work to learn more and question their own assumptions. For the same reasons, of course, the expansion of the system to explain all kinds of people is an exponentially harder challenge for her, because pretty much the only way to acquire anything approaching the required amount of knowledge can only be found through books and teaching simply because there is too much to learn in a lifetime through direct observation. And it takes much more training to find and discard faulty assumptions without a huge base of data that makes it easier to find discrepancies between them and established facts. Prester isn't some special talent, she's an expert on a tiny slice of social reality produced through practice and observation. So much for the "cult", if she can't convince us of being such a special talent. uncop has issued a correction as of 07:51 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 07:38
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ikanreed posted:It's not even that, though. The very core mechanics of supply and demand don't work the way they claim for almost anything besides carefully engineered standardized commodity markets. Anwar Shaikh IMO has a good point that the imperfect competition paradigm that emphasizes bargaining power is itself polluted by the mainstream narrative of "perfect competition", since they effectively measure levels of divergence from that ideal. That narrative has lead us to misunderstand monopoly to simply mean a few big corporations dominating a market. Turns out the kind of bargaining power that such a position buys is just a new kind of competition tool and doesn't allow firms to name their profits freely, they need to keep profits low enough that investing into serious competition isn't worthwhile. So much like supply and demand are just a modifier on prices to explain local and temporal fluctuations, monopoly power in the way it is theorized is a special and fragile case in the real world, when setting up competition with a similar rate of profit as the market leader is actually prevented by force of law, cartels playing dirty or some cultural phenomenon around a specific brand rather than just the initial capital requirement of entering a market and the expected rate of profit. uncop has issued a correction as of 17:25 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 17:21
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smdh at the invocations of marxism in this thread waved around to establish fake authority for inch-deep non-marxist critiques. you can't do anything resembling a marxist critique of a theoretical framework without understanding both the framework itself and the historical context of the phenomenon that it tries to explain in order to show how it only seems correct in the context it was developed in due to an accident of history.
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Sep 2, 2019 12:06
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gently caress, really pilot testing the coming climate genocide. And it seems so easy too when it's out of sight enough that some plausible deniability is maintained so everyone who prefers not to see it (which is almost everyone) is given an out. And people will keep wondering how it was that millions and millions of people would watch by and not even notice the largest genocide operations in history.
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Sep 12, 2019 06:17
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Is it just me and a coincidence regarding when news have been breaking out or did ICE agents get noticeably worse after that anarchist guy attacked them?
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Sep 15, 2019 17:50
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Prester Jane posted:It seems like a huge portion of the left had deeply internalized the idea that the primary reason the progressive agenda wasn't being implemented during Obama's term was because it was so hard to change a bureaucracy as big and efficient as ours. It hasn't looked to me like the Trump regime has so much been effective at changing the bureaucracy as it's been able to uncover and utilize the powers already granted to the US president and appeal to and set the bureaucracy free to do what it wants through the implicit promise to shield them from repercussions breaking certain laws could have. So even though you're right about Obama, there is a much higher bar to pass to be able to do left wing reform. Cactus posted:Life seems to be a constant series of realizations that you have been tricked or lied to about something. Tell me about it, the realization I probably hate most is how rule of law is more of a nice story about how some countries have the right and responsibility to dominate others than an actual thing. I mean don't get me wrong, there are differences in degree between countries to how much powerful people and bureaucrats have to follow the law, but they're just degrees and also pretty flexible. uncop has issued a correction as of 22:34 on Sep 15, 2019 |
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Sep 15, 2019 22:24
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xthetenth posted:Purges: Definitely a thing that's gone very well in the past. Dismantling institutions and purging their membership are two very different things.
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Sep 16, 2019 17:44
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Facebook Aunt posted:In theory yes, but actually no. you're just doing some overabstracted thought experiment? counterpoint: states blacklist people from positions all the time due to perceived likelihood of disloyalty, yet they don't become unemployable. and the burning issue in our case isn't being given power over others, it's being raised above the law to be able to act with impunity, which rent-a-cops and schoolteachers aren't.
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Sep 17, 2019 05:56
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Welp, I kinda thought Trump would laugh off the impeachment threat but it didn't cross my mind that now he's got an election to win and it probably means the world to him. I bet he would love to become Great Leader through a self-coup if the opportunity fell into his lap.
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Oct 2, 2019 05:18
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Dumb Lowtax posted:I just had the strangest idea. I think that your stranger hypothesis would be fine if you replaced schizophrenics with people who have paranoid personalities. The kinds of illnesses that inhibit one's capacity to function in society pretty much have to be unlucky combinations of traits that are useful outside such combinations for them to have survived evolution. For every ill person, you will probably find a healthy person who has whatever perks are associated with the illness. Of course health is also relative, the cutoff point for when something is a disorder depends on what the existing social relations require of people. It's also useful to think about antisocial personality tendencies without worrying about the cutoff point for the personality disorder. Even regarding people with antisocial personality disorder, it's not that they can't participate in a shared morality, it's that they find it natural to empathetically dissociate from others, so they won't intuitively, by themselves, develop the kind of morality where you're supposed to treat different people the same way. But it's not terribly hard to produce an analogous kind of selective empathetic dissociation in a lot of people who are not considered damaged in any way. It's not even confirmed when the kinds of people who you name as sociopaths were sociopaths all along, and when their roles cultivated them to experience their environment in a sociopathic manner. I'm in the camp who hypothesizes that our social organization produces sociopaths by cultivating less extreme antisocial traits in people rather than simply finding them and utilizing them as they exist. The idea about inherent political leanings based on personality is utterly wrong though. For example, sociopathy is a universally heroic trait in violent times, all sides love sociopaths and raise them up their ranks. If you find some kind of military leader that was produced organically in some basically progressive rebellion, the chances they got there through simple sociopathic tendencies are massive. Actually the more I study socially progressive history, the more convinced I become that PJ's narrativists also find an organic role in movements, and that they initially enter the social positions they do based on straight-up merit. Doing the hard and thankless work of organizing people and cultivating others to do it is just something they would seem to excel at in the right conditions. And they participate in keeping the sociopaths honest by force-feeding them a moral role that they need to assume or at least perform convincingly. It's actually important, sociopathic organic leaders without a morality forced on them will turn on a dime and sell out their movement when personally bribed with a good enough deal.
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Jan 17, 2020 09:49
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Dumb Lowtax posted:I like to also remind people not to fall for the liberal claim that ALL behavior is socially constructed. That genetically favored behaviors are not real -- as opposed to real yet surmountable with enough education and cognition. None of us can truly think whatever we want in the most open-ended sense. Try overcoming depression through sheer force of will, for instance. It's important to remember that the brain is a fixed machine, kludged together out of parts, and we can see them in how they malfunction in very un-intuitive ways in the presence of drugs or injuries. You misunderstand social construction. A bunch of people who claim to be proponents do so too, but still. It needs to be twisted to fit some philosophy of free and equal individuals to get where you accuse it of being. The point is that everything is relational and developing. Things do not exist in and of themselves but only in a web of relations to other things, and as their relations change, they eventually change. As such, every analysis of a thing is a reductive abstraction in some manner, it has to discard a bunch of their real relations and focus on what it considers the most important ones to explain some empirically discovered pattern about them. Biology as a science limits itself to examining relations between biological beings. The biological human being is not the social human being, it's a kind of ape-abstraction of people. Biology would have to become a social science to really begin to analyse human beings as developed in their truly complex social relations. The reason we are concerned about people's behavior in modern society is almost always the social consequences of the behavior, usually complex consequences that are outside the scope of biology altogether. Genetics is just a part of some underlying machinery that produces patterns in possibility and prevents social developments from being completely arbitrary. Referring to genetics is not unlike referring to physics: the possibility-scope of human development is energy-constrained among other things. What social constructivism essentially does is claim that knowledge of people's internal biological machinery is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain people as they really exist in society. It doesn't claim that such biological machinery doesn't exist or matter, but that social sciences can develop a sufficient understanding of the constraints imposed on people's social developments to explain them as social beings without having to refer to biological models, while biology cannot explain people as social beings without referring to the models of social science. uncop has issued a correction as of 11:20 on Jan 19, 2020 |
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Jan 19, 2020 11:04
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