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We've made the world too complicated

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Re: We've made the world too complicated

#411

Post by freeopinion »

gopher_space wrote: post #406
freeopinion wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charity is the only thing that can save us. Tax is just a different take on charity. We all agree to pay into the community chest to provide for a pubic commons. Resistance to progressive tax is resistance to a type of charity. One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. If charity won't save us taxes never will.

> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago. I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.

You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated.

Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when is their priority.

I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#412

Post by kelseyfrog »

freeopinion wrote: post #410
freeopinion wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charity is the only thing that can save us. Tax is just a different take on charity. We all agree to pay into the community chest to provide for a pubic commons. Resistance to progressive tax is resistance to a type of charity. One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. If charity won't save us taxes never will.

Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought. Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good. Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good…

> Capitalism is like gravity.

This is a very reified stance.

What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time.

Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence.

1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#413

Post by to11mtm »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #394
fwipsy wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Capitalism is merely indifferent to things without economic value. If something is monetizable it will be monetized, which can be very harmful in itself, but capitalism does not seek destruction for it's own sake.

Someone who "speaks the truth" without caring about how other people might feel, is rightfully termed an asshole, and generally not considered a good person. Similarly, when politicians pass laws that maximize a single value while disregarding the harm it does on other consequential values, they are considered bad people. The world is complex. Systems of decision making must do careful multi-value optimization to be…

> Someone who "speaks the truth" without caring about how other people might feel, is rightfully termed an asshole, and generally not considered a good person.

I don't think that's a binary. I've seen plenty of cases where due to mob culture/etc where 'speaking the truth' despite it being well reasoned ethically/morally, might get you considered an asshole by the group in question. Of course there is a grey line for where the overton window is for such discussions, and a good person would communicate such in a thoughtful manner rather than in an intentionally abrasive fashion.

Otherwise your point is spot on.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#414

Post by stiglitz »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #338
stiglitz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.

I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#415

Post by freeopinion »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #412
freeopinion wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought. Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good. Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good…

> Capitalism is like gravity. This is a very reified stance. What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time. Capit…

Some might say that Capitalism (with a capital C) was born in Wealth of Nations. IIUC, you argue it was birthed by Muscovy or BEI some centuries earlier.

I argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

(Thank you for your comment. I know a discussion about capitalism is completely off-topic, and an explanation of reification is even more off-topic. But I've enjoyed you bringing it up and exploring the tangent.)

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#416

Post by antonvs »

wallst07 wrote: post #325
antonvs wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Zen tries to build a whole religion around the idea, losing the spirit of simple easily comprehensible advice that can be expressed in a single sentence. So one answer to “what new” could be “delivering the advice without unnecessary complication”. Although I can’t really tell if the advice above covers the whole of Zen, which is part of the issue.

Zen doesn't have to be a religion, it can be whatever you want it to be.

That literally makes the term meaningless.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#417

Post by Forgeties79 »

ian_j_butler wrote: post #402
ian_j_butler wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will. This is barely relevant, because it's not a plan for agency or comfort, it's strictly worse in that it would destroy both, in addition to adding displacement and isolation. > No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie. Frankly that's just projecting your cowardice onto everyone else. But there's a point where anyone wil…

A hint for my detractors.. > Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. The rival tribe is MAGA, ironically destroying the commons partly because somone told them another tribe was taking their jobs. The ransacking is uncontested and uncontestable because the civilizing forces they oppose only serve to bind others against fighting back. > Or a preda…

> A hint for my detractors..

Nobody is going to want to read anything after that. It’s incredibly patronizing.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#418

Post by rng-concern »

incr_me wrote: post #299
CriticalRegion wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.

I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negate…

I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#419

Post by blinkbat »

freeopinion wrote: post #411
gopher_space wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago. I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.

You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated. S…

"I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society."

sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.

Re: We've made the world too complicated

#420

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #211
gerdesj wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow") So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back. We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come…

We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.

I think your analysis has a little too much teleology in it.

> at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagomaia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repenomamus

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