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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#581

Post by wizzwizz4 »

panick21_ wrote: post #570
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no… Anarchism can be achieved via parallel construction, provided that the existing society doesn't fight back. For example, mutual aid networks (as described by Peter Kropotkin). And an anarchist society could transition to a communist society (or pretty much any other society) – but even Friedrich Engels' "withering away of the state" route to communism (attributed to Karl Marx, but Wikipedia disputes that it…

Sure and if I claim that you should do a 1-handed handstand and say 'communism' three times in a row, it will surely create communism right? I can even write it down on a piece of paper and call it a 'manifesto'. But in the actual real world writing stuff down doesn't make it true at all, even if the person that wrote it is famous. > For example, mutual aid networks That in reality have never even come close to achie…

Proponents of mutual aid networks aren't trying to "replace the state". I'm not sure which anarchist ideas are supposed to accomplish that (if any): as I understand, different philosophies have different views on that. "Provided the existing society doesn't fight back" was a reference to the repeated criminalisation of Food Not Bombs.

I say "even" because afaik Marxists don't seek to destroy the state: they believe the destruction of the state is inevitable (dialectics!), and seek instead to win battles in the class war – my "even" applied to the "withering away of the state" idea, not to Friedrich Engels himself. (I'm not familiar with all of his ideas.) Marxism–Leninism is the "the Bolsheviks were right all along" belief system, but is quite different to classic Marxism.

In the real world I don't think we'll ever have a group, region, or territory governed by any pure ideology, so I agree that a state of anarchy, or a classic communist society, would never happen in real life. That doesn't mean it's worthless to think about the ideas, any more than it's worthless to talk about uniform point masses on a frictionless inclined plane.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#582

Post by y0eswddl »

vmg12 wrote: post #512
hansvm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.

> The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction I never claimed it was a perfect system and I am more than willing to admit rent extraction, scams, and monopoly power are massive issues with capitalism. It still hasn't been shown that replacing that with government is better.

And you haven't proven government is worse

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#583

Post by y0eswddl »

elevation wrote: post #354
computably wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater…

> The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events. Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without…

Maybe not government, but much public resource was not driven by profit.

The entire software industry relies on a foundation of free and open source software. The profit model wouldn't even exist without the work of people who do it purely for passion.

Penicillin was university research and given away freely.

The Wright brothers weren't trying to start an airline, that just wanted to fly.

ironically, tho not recently government, the majority of your examples were not discovered/created in the pursuit of profits.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#584

Post by int_19h »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #361
yannyu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result. You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, bu…

Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone away from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to do so.

In US context it's somewhat ambiguous because of the historical use of the term "Federalist" to denote supporters of the new Constitution (which was more centralized than the Articles of Confederation) and "Anti-Federalist" to denote the opposition.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#585

Post by int_19h »

panick21_ wrote: post #497
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason , and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a…

The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path. Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is. > we need a bad guy who wants to destroy soc…

There are historical as well as contemporary examples of societies built on anarchist principles. They are few and fairly marginal, mostly because they tend to be crushed by the surrounding (centralized) cultures, but even so it's not all just hypothetical.

The most prominent contemporary example is the Zapatista territories. To a lesser extent, arguably also Rojava, although "libertarian market socialism" would probably be a more accurate label for that.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#586

Post by int_19h »

pipo234 wrote: post #158
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a…

> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.

This is more propaganda than reality, though. Most democratic societies today have evolved out of very non-democratic ones gradually, in a process where the elite had given up some of its privileges to prevent losing all. One of the tricks involved in that process was the notion of a "popular mandate" - not that this isn't a thing, but genuine cases of it are far less common than politicians using the fact that more people voted for them as some kind of argument in support for some specific policy of theirs.

In practice the difference between a democratic and a non-democratic society is more quantitative. In a non-democratic society, people still have a check on the government - they can revolt, and, being far more numerous than any security apparatus that can be maintained over a long time, the rulers therefore cannot simultaneously piss off too many people at the same time. So the bar is pretty high, but not entirely insurmountable. In a democratic society, the people also get an option of protest voting, which provides a safety valve that bleeds off a lot of effort that would have otherwise gone into potential violence, but at the price of making this kind of "voter revolt" less costly to participants and thus more likely. However, representative democracy is still pretty bad at accurately reflecting population preferences - it still takes a lot of abuse before protest voting becomes prevalent enough to alter election results. And then, of course, new mechanisms were developed to "manage" democracy - more efficient propaganda, mostly.

Thus, in practice, governments can indeed be treated mostly similarly to other organizations in this regard.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#587

Post by int_19h »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #331
monkeywithdarts wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions: (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money (2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc). ... then som…

Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)

Anarchism is a spectrum so there's considerable disagreement over how the desirable state of affairs looks like, exactly. All anarchists would agree that you want to get rid of any kind of hierarchical power arrangements where possible, but the vast majority would also agree that it is not always possible, and so the realistic goal is the one where they are minimized. But that invites the question of what such a viable minimum state of organization might be, and different people have different answers to that.

I'd say that the most well-developed concrete platform in this sense is Murray Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism", although that is arguably too organized to be properly referred to as anarchism (Bookchin himself, although he used to be an anarchist, dropped the label eventually). But, even so, it's much closer to an anarchist utopia than any state-centric model. And it actually has some practical successes on the ground in Rojava, although the jury is still out on whether it can hold long term.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#588

Post by AppleBananaPie »

grues-dinner wrote: post #461
AppleBananaPie wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.

You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work. And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it. Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects. Another similar thought was the theory that ca…

I was thinking more all the kids in the neighborhood. At least that's how it was for me growing up :)

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#589

Post by seu »

defrost wrote: post #546
ngcazz wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point OP is making is that anthropological research has done the hard work of uncovering real insights that the author presumes are learned from works of fiction

Famously homogeneous anthropological research that all pulls in the same direction with no differences of opinion, the alignment of Roger Sandall and Margaret Mead, the unification of romantic primitivism no longer slurred by designer tribalism ? I'd suggest it's fair to ask self identified experts what real insights they allude to.

I think the other commenter answered exactly what I meant and you decided to ignore it, so... I just suggest you read again what they wrote.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#590

Post by antonvs »

thegrimmest wrote: post #523
antonvs wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. Leading to individuals with net worths heading towards a trillion dollars who can just buy the government they want. What you say you “want” is against your own interests.

I'm perfectly happy for some folks to have trillion dollar net worth. I'm glad to negotiate with these folks and their organizations to provide value in exchange for a comfortable living. > just buy the government they want The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist. This does work to some degree. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't kil…

> The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist.

It's ironic to read this in the context of what's been happening in the US recently. When the trillionaires and grifters (but I repeat myself) have fully captured the US government, you'll be able to complain that that government is no longer "legitimate", but that's not much consolation.

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