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The Cement of Society Is...

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Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#41

Post by groby_b »

retsibsi wrote: post #30
lucas_membrane wrote: post #22

Trust. Or, as Reagan might have said, "Trust, and verify if you must."

Forgive me if this is too much of a tangent, but can anyone explain "trust, but verify" to me? I can't tell if it's drily ironic (basically meaning 'don't actually take anything on trust'), or kind of meaningless (like the previous interpretation, but meant to be polite and superficially positive), or has a meaning I'm completely missing.

I've always seen this as a colloquial expression of "tit for tat" in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. You trust the other party to uphold their bargain up front, but you verify to adjust future behavior.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#42

Post by rtkwe »

tasogare wrote: post #20
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound like a nitpicker, but "basic understanding" and "facts" are two very different things: facts are facts. Their understanding has more to do with the interpretation. And if we all agree on interpretation of the facts, then cementing the society becomes too easy of a task.

It’s especially egregious in this case with 1/3 of examples being extremely politically oriented (the so-called systemic racism). One of the big issue is when people start thinking their fantasies are reality and will distort every fact to fit in, instead of critically think that they may, in fact, be wrong.

This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0]

From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe most importantly redlining kept black people out of home loans during one of the greatest periods of wealth growth in the US during the postwar boom. Combine this with the fact that poor neighborhoods are more polluted, [2] have worse schools, poor parents have less time to devote to tutoring their kids, etc and we get a self reinforcing system.

This system shits on all poor people but history has put a thumb on the scale of who wound up starting where. Given a much longer time span this may sort itself out naturally but with the way wealth compounds in capitalism there are also countervailing forces.

[0] The definition gets muddied a lot so I'll define myself here. Systematic racism is the concept that the interlocking /system/ of the government and economy have a racially biased outcome, ie it's racist, hence systematic racism. Importantly it's not that this system is necessarily currently intentional, though personally for me, not addressing the problem does feel like you get some blame for it's continued existence.

[1] Jim Crow laws, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 (look this one up in particular), the list is long and quite consistent.

[2] Which studies show has deleterious effects on educational performance. Pulling one random study out: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6140474/

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#43

Post by groby_b »

jariel wrote: post #11

'Conscientiousness'[1] (there's some science to this one) Basically shared values, behaviours, rough sense of justice, morality and humanity, and a sense that individuals ought to aspire to those on some level. It's funny because in the West we talk a lot about 'freedom' and 'classical liberalism' - I really think that's partly: a) A response to historically authoritarian systems either political or cultural which we…

I think you're overgeneralizing. There are several cultures "in the west" that do very much want to follow rules. Both Germany and Japan come immediately to mind.

Neither is a strict rule following culture, but both place a fairly high value on rules that regulate the commons.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#44

Post by retsibsi »

inakarmacoma wrote: post #37
retsibsi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if this is too much of a tangent, but can anyone explain "trust, but verify" to me? I can't tell if it's drily ironic (basically meaning 'don't actually take anything on trust'), or kind of meaningless (like the previous interpretation, but meant to be polite and superficially positive), or has a meaning I'm completely missing.

Approach new information, assuming good intent. Nonetheless, there's no shame or guilt in verifying your assumption by verifying. No offense should be taken, it's merely prudent behavior. Verifying should not imply lack of trust; however, it's conceivable that repeated verifications may render the need to verify in the future a lower priority, due to past precedent. At least, that's my take.

This seems mostly like a positive spin on "don't actually trust", though. I think if you're not willing to base your actions on the assumption of truth/good faith, you're not really trusting in any meaningful sense.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#45

Post by retsibsi »

jdashg wrote: post #36
retsibsi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if this is too much of a tangent, but can anyone explain "trust, but verify" to me? I can't tell if it's drily ironic (basically meaning 'don't actually take anything on trust'), or kind of meaningless (like the previous interpretation, but meant to be polite and superficially positive), or has a meaning I'm completely missing.

One charitable explanation is initially trust, but verify on your own time. This allows for cooperation and growth of real trust, but lets you, well, verify that you're not being had, just asynchronously.

This and groby_b's interpretation makes sense to me. Basically, assume good faith (within reason), but only temporarily. Not sure it is applicable in all cases the proverb is used, but that's a separate issue.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#46

Post by contingencies »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #27
contingencies wrote: post #18

Alcohol. Banks. Chromosome identity politics. Divorce. Email. Foreigners-as-the-excuse. Generational warfare. Heels. I. Jokes approved as PC. Kafka. LVMH. Minimalism in lieu of poverty. No homes for Millenials. Objects. Puritanism. Quiet carriages. Restlessness. Streaming. Terror. University debt. Vegans. Woks. Xenogamy. Yellow peril. Zoom.

> Puritanism Owen, Flavel, Sibbes, Manton, Perkins -- it would be amazing if these guys were the cement of our society!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puritan

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#47

Post by icedistilled »

Chris2048 wrote: post #25
blhack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in a car. The speedometer reads 50mph. How fast are you going?

You're in a rocket-ship, the speedometer reads 0.5c (half-lightspeed); How fast are you going? If you understand you'll ask "from what frame of reference?"

But you can easily answer "I'm going 0.5c from the frame of reference the speedometer uses"

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#48

Post by rtkwe »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #39
Chris2048 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in a rocket-ship, the speedometer reads 0.5c (half-lightspeed); How fast are you going? If you understand you'll ask "from what frame of reference?"

I wonder... If there were such a speedometer what would it use as a reference in real life? Earth? Sun? Sag A?

Most useful in space depends a lot on what you're doing at the time. Docking with small separation? Velocity relative to target. Orbiting something? speed relative to that body. Traveling between stars? Tougher but most likely relative velocity towards your target since your path is going to be relatively linear?

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#49

Post by smegcicle »

flamble wrote: post #34
smegcicle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle) "replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass somet…

There is nothing "underhanded" about it, and it's nowhere near being "experimental": almost every country in the developed world has universal healthcare and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence demonstrates its superiority in every criterion. If you think that the debate over healthcare has anything to do with the substantive merits of one system over another, you're viewing it through the wrong lens. It is pu…

>Medicare for All being a success in one state would change little

at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU

eg, I'm not sure how they're connected, but it's obvious that the majority of medical research is being done over here, and I never see that mentioned in the comparisons between our systems and overseas; if the overpayment we're doing over here is necessary waste for that goal, that should to be made explicit! health insurance is probably taking more than their honest share of the pie, but complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world

am I wrong?

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#50

Post by rtkwe »

arrosenberg wrote: post #33
smegcicle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle) "replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass somet…

> offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless... Some states have scoped this out, and Vermont passed a law to pursue it. The problem has to…

It's a bit extreme sounding but cities do this with homeless people today, some places will give out one way bus tickets to move homeless people to another city. [0]

Even without a Machiavellian "muahaha we'll ship all our sick people to X" good cheap healthcare will attract sick people to a state. It was a problem with the ACA where if enough healthy people weren't paying in [1] insurance companies could go belly up from having to cover sicker people they could previously refuse. That's why there was an individual mandate and a backstop for companies that lost too much money on plans.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

[1] In the case of a single state doing a single payer system it's older or simply sicker people who may make less money because of chronic debilitating illness.

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