Your dualism between model and world is nearly Cartesian. The model itself isn't separate from the world but produced materially (by ideology, sociality, naturally, etc.).
> The model itself isn't separate from the world but produced materially
To me this is like drawing a circuit diagram on a piece of paper and trying to convince someone that, "Really there is electricity flowing through it."
Models are relations between signifiers. There exists a transformation between the signified relations and the relations of the signifiers, but they are, in fact, two separate categories and the transformation isn't bijective. ie it doesn't form an isomorphism.
A map drawn on a flat piece of land is still not the whole land it depicts, even though it literally consists of that land. Any representation is a simplification, as much as we can judge, there's no adequately lossless compressing transform of large enough swaths of reality.
If people had some sort of class solidarity, then yes. But instead everyone is fighting against everyone to get to the top of the "earners" curve, even if it means a less equal society as a whole, and people seem fine with it. It's a cultural issue that has persisted in the country for a very long time.
> Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production?
Because the majority of workers are doing the minimum amount of work to get by, because ~50% of workers are below average intelligence, because those with the entrepreneurial skill and/or business management competence necessary to make this happen benefit more from the current system and have less motivation to mess with it.
I can’t speak to op’s emotional well being, but he is spot on with his reasoning. In the rarified air that most of us here inhabit, it’s easy to forget that for every college professor there is someone for whom tying their shoes is a significant cognitive challenge. For every really smart person, there is someone who lacks the cognition to participate meaningfully in society. For every brilliant individual, there is someone whose mental capacity puts them in need of lifelong care.
The bell curve is a bitch.
The average person just gets by and doesn’t think all that much about anything outside of their immediate surroundings. For most, politics and such is a team sport, not an intellectual pursuit.
It’s an uncomfortable fact of life, and those that have talents and gifts above the norm are by default responsible for guiding and advancing society. We ignore that burden at the peril of all.
The only thing either response to your original reply have done is provide uncontroversial and non-conspiratorial reasons why Mondragons are extremely rare. Calling that Social Darwinism is like calling you a Stalinist, a slander based entirely on a superficial similarity of your rhetoric.
I don’t think that asserting that intellectual capacity tends towards a bell curve distribution is an example of social Darwinism. I think that’s just called a testable hypothesis validated by a plethora of studies.
As for the idea that people that bother to think about things like their social responsibility to humanity are , by default, responsible for guiding humanity (because people that don’t think about such things will not take an active role in that effort , by definition) seems also uncontroversial.
In short, I have no idea what you’re on about.
That said, I’m with you on labor movements, and believe that unions and coops are generally extremely positive things most of the time.
I just don’t expect much from the average person anymore. Decades of observation has made me skeptical of the ability of the Everyman to act in his own best interests, on average.
It’s worth mentioning that it is apparent to me that this inability is fostered in no small part by people and entities that make it their business to subvert otherwise good faith actors that don’t exercise very much independent thought into pursuing goals and supporting policies that are explicitly or covertly not in their collective best interest. Gullible people are gullible, and they are exploited all up and down the political spectrum.
If everyone started at exactly the same point, there might be some validity to the idea that the ability to ensure one’s own security was a useful proxy for intelligence. But, clearly, that’s not the world we live in.
The bell curve explains why most people can't do difficult things. It does not explain why most of those who can do the difficult things end up working for someone else (rather than e.g. start a co-op). If stupidity was the entire answer, the smart bosses would be unable to find employees smart enough to work in their companies.
Some businesses only require simple work, so you could argue that they have one smart boss and many stupid employees. But there are many businesses that require highly qualified professionals. And those professionals have mostly been taught that their proper place in life is working for someone else. This is practically what school trains you to do for decades -- there is the teacher who gives commands, and the students who obey. And then you transition to a job where it is the boss who gives commands, and the employees who obey. I wonder whether a different kind of education would result in a different kind of a society.
Yeah, we take a lot of things for granted. Intelligence is relative, and so we do find a normal distribution when defining IQ with a target median and mode of 100. However, we don't have to construct a society where thriving requires a median intelligence! That's a choice made by those who, as you say, benefit more from the system.
It's not so simple to measure intelligence, anyway. I marvel at some of the things a below-average person does every day such as drive a car at high speeds on the interstate, or navigating political bureaucracy. Meanwhile, I'm two standard deviations above the mean but have ADHD and sometimes struggle with basic tasks that even people of below-average intelligence have mastered.
The contrast is so much at times that I can see the confusion and concern in the faces of those around me whenever I have an ADHD moment. Yet, I'm an expert in multiple subjects, a quick learner and have a well-developed sense of intuition. People are multi-faceted, and we're not going to get very far with over-simplistic models of intelligence.
Well actually socialism has been historically concerned with maximizing human creativity. Fourier’s utopian vision was “libidinal” work that aligns passions with labor. Marcuse has a similar view in Eros and Civilization. Chomsky views creativity as axiomatic for humans, and syndicalism the appropriate system for harnessing it.
> Socialists are always concerned with distributing production equally.
Not really. Socialism (the project of the labor movement) is concerned with workers being in control of their own work, not vessels for capitalist exploitation. Syndicalism is a form of socialism that emphasizes decentralization and federation, as opposed to command control. How resources are allocated under conditions of such federated governance is up for debate.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Socialism is older than Marxism and shouldn't be conflated with it.
> Where are all the creative products the Soviets made?
The USSR was a state capitalist/authoritarian regime, nothing like socialism.
The trouble with your definition is the violence necessary to steal the means of production so you can set it up for your workers. A totalitarian government is required to do that. The workers will be severely constrained in what they can do - like set up their own businesses.
You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%.
> violence necessary to steal the means of production
You could argue that private property is theft, necessarily enforced by a repressive state, and reappropriation is justice. The general strike is non-violent (until the police arrive).
> You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%.
The interesting part about decentralization is that it somewhat relieves this problem. Federation allows for complex arrangements that coordinate towards consensus. So it might not be necessary to subject populations to laws they don't agree with with such broad strokes.
> You could argue that private property is theft [...]
You could, but it wouldn't be convincing. It's a bit hard to convince me that things I bought or made I actually stole. Are you going to argue that if I hire someone to build a patio, I actually stole it from him?
The Soviet Union was notoriously poor at prioritizing consumer goods, it’s probably one of the reasons for their downfall. One must admit though that both thym and the PRC have achieved something in uplifting backwards feudal empires towards something resembling modernity. I’m not sure that could’ve been achievable counterfactually, and as we saw with the sudden free market capture of post-Soviet Russia in the ‘90s, with a much smaller body count.
Anyway, you asked for Soviet creative products and I’ve named one. For what it’s worth, I’ve also heard good things about Soviet watches, I had a coworker who collected them and they’ve been discussed before on HN.
Digital watches of far greater accuracy are available in a blister pack on a peg in the supermarket for $5.
When the Red Army invaded Germany, the number 1 looted object was wristwatches. Soldiers would have a row of them affixed to their forearms. In multiple books I've read, they were always looking for wristwatches.
My father (B-17 crew) was issued a wristwatch, but I've been unable to find it among his stuff. Timekeeping was essential for coordinated military operations.
> have achieved something in uplifting backwards feudal empires towards something resembling modernity
The USSR was described as 3rd world country with a 1st world military. The PRC launched their economy by abandoning Marxism and embracing free markets. Cuba is a mess as it still tries to hang on to Marxism.
I did read the Soviet watch article when it was here - most interesting!
Cheap digital watches lack the aesthetic charm of mechanical, not to mention are dependent upon battery power.
> The USSR was described as 3rd world country with a 1st world military.
And yet, tsarist Russia was even poorer and had worse standards of living. Pointing out that a change in state led to a difference in quality is not a moral judgment, nor does it necessitate an endorsement of that change.
That’s why cooperatism is superior to socialism and capitalism. It’s a free market of worker-owned companies, creating things by running their businesses together.
The free market is a set of principles between companies, not a principle for how companies need to be organized internally. Capitalism is based on single-owned companies. Cooperatism is based on worker-owned companies. Cooperatism is a better free market based economy. It’s capitalism 2.0.
Ah, the starry-eyed utopianism. Marxists and Objectivists are truly funhouse mirror images; they may look completely different from one another, but both belong at the carnival.
Free markets are a ideal which has never been achieved, much like socialism. There is, and never has been, a market without regulation, and with only voluntary participation and without stolen goods being exchanged.
It's true that, in those groups, a shared ethnic identity enables economic cooperation. But the lack of solidarity you observe is the result of a regime of coercion. The official policy: leave your neighborhood, family, friends, and passions for 40+ hours a week to build a capitalist's business. You have to do it to survive. And the police are there to make sure revolts don't break out.
The claim that work is inherently coercive is crazy to me. In order to live, we need food, clothing, shelter, comforts. Those take labor to produce. We've abstracted labor using money, allowing for specialization, so you can perform some specialized labor to provide for all your needs.
The needs aren't forced upon you. They're inherent. Labor is required to meet the needs you must meet in order to live (and live in comfort). They'd be needed even if no board of directors had ever sat in a meeting room. So who's coercing you? It's like a farmer hating his field: you're mad that companies 'make' you work to survive; a farmer might hate his field for 'making' him plant seeds to produce food.
Automation makes jobs unnecessary. We should build social infrastructure that allows people to pursue their passions with basic necessities guaranteed. This has been possible for awhile now.
Nonsense. You can’t feed people with machines. You need raw materials and you need land to produce those materials from. That productive land is already owned by a bunch of people who currently use it to grow food and sell at market for profit.
Are you proposing we seize their land? That’s what the Soviets did. Millions died. With the weaponry we have today it could be hundreds of millions or billions. All for what? So people don’t have to work?
Now suppose we do collectivize all the farms, this time miraculously without killing everyone, and we successfully set up the automation to feed everyone (despite the fact that a lot of crops still need to be picked by hand due to a lack of robot technology). We still don’t eliminate the need for work. There’s tons of other stuff to be done. Building houses, computers, trains, planes, automobiles, and new factory robots. There’s still tons of research going into all this stuff, maintenance and repair. People still need to do all this work. Who is going to pay them? Who is going to own what they produce?
If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear". But we don't need to seize the land. A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.
And how did they come to own their land? You trace the claims back enough and it'll resolve to "some ancestor took it from someone else at the point of a spear".
Yes, this falls under the same umbrella of theories that Nozick's rectification [1] falls under, where the same critiques and remedies apply.
A land value tax achieves the same goals while leaving in place all the nice free-market stuff you're talking about.
Now you're speaking my language. I'm fully on board with land value tax, as it purports to achieve many other goals that I value, such as fixing up a lot of dysfunctional city planning and development.
Only the poors need to. If you chose the right parents, you got a trust fund when you turned 18, and don't need to labor to afford life's necessities. There's just this spigot that gives you $5,000 a month, and you don't have to labor, ever. If rich kids get to live like that, why can't more people?
If we oversimplify a human's needs into clothing, food, and a dwelling, and ignore the concept of money, the industrial revolution has made it so that humanity is able to produce enough of those for everybody. It then becomes a distribution and coordination problem rather than a problem of there not being enough for everybody. Of course, if we abolished money there would be other problems, so it's still delusional, but if 100 people can make enough food and shelter and clothing for 1000 people using machines, why do the other 900 need to sit in an an office making spreadsheets five days a week?
It's not that simple, of course (because those machines have to come from somewhere), and homesteading is a thing, but it's food for thought.
It’s actually off putting if you check out a potential employer’s GitHub and it’s filled with obsessive committers, obviously working late hours, weekends, holidays, etc.
Even worse: I've seen profiles that run scripts to generate fake commits for the sole purpose of making their GitHub stats look like they're working. Absolutely asinine, and a huge red flag when hiring.
Nah, steady paycheck, health insurance, don't need roommates, can afford the nicer things in life. Gigging and touring is fun in your 20s, but starts to drain you. This is much better.
> Can you help me design experiments to prove the following?
Sure.
> * Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive power, are preferable
You don't need an experiment for this. A more complicated theory is undesirable, all else being equal, because it requires more effort to deal with. A simpler theory will let you avoid that wasted effort.
> * I'm not dreaming
Any experiment will do here. You can't perform experiments in dreams. That is one of the things that distinguishes dreams from reality.
> and there's no evil demon deceiving me
You can never prove that. You might be living in the Matrix, and the Matrix could be controlled by an evil demon. That possibility can never be completely eliminated. However, there is no evidence for it, and so neither the matrix nor evil demons are needed to explain observations, and so they can be discounted for that reason. In other words, the Matrix or evil-demon hypotheses have no predictive power.
> * The next swan will be white because all prior swans I've observed are
That's a false assertion so you can't design an experiment to prove it. Science does not rely on induction.
> * Technology acts as a context of justification for scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy
Do you have a better explanation for how technology comes to exist that is consistent with all the data?
> * Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
Again, that is not a provable assertion. That is a heuristic that empirically produces better results than any other criterion that humans have come up with so far.
There is actually reason to believe that it can't be improved upon, just as there is reason to believe that an oracle for the halting problem can't be constructed in our universe. But you can't prove it.
The point is that naive (vulgar) empiricism is untenable because to perform and evaluate scientific practices you inevitably invoke premises that are rational or pragmatic, not empirical.
No, that's not true. If you want to dispute that, give me an example of a necessary premise (i.e. one that is "inevitably invoked") that you think cannot be justified by empiricism.
You can call someone's reasoning circular all you want but at the end of the day there's what you've accomplished, and the score is philospher 0 engineer 1.
True, it's basically indisputable that engineers are better at engineering than philosophers are. But that seems orthogonal to the issues raised in the problem of induction.
My thrust was more that people are out doing stuff in the world, and for the most part philosophers don't do anything other than say things about what people are already doing. Engineering was an empirical science long before it was a deductive and analytic one.
Philosophers make arguments for/against claims, I don't see why that doesn't count as doing something. I mean, maybe you're complaining that they're not building rockets or feeding the poor, but philosophers are far from the only ones who don't do these things.
Making arguments for/against claims can be a noble pursuit, and mathematicians have done it to great benefit for humanity. I suspect the sum total of the benefit from philosophers' claims is much lower.
Maybe so, but I don't see why every discipline needs to be evaluated purely on "benefit for humanity" in the sense of scientific or technological progress, if that's what you're implying. There's more to humanity than just scientific/technological progress.
I mean, people love musicians for making interesting "what if" statements to music, and I'm not shitting on that. The difference is that music makes people happy and makes the time go faster, while most philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"
>philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.
I mean, maybe this is true for some people, but there are a lot of people who don't get confused and who find it interesting and enjoyable.
>Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"
Philosophers are particularly interested in reasoning about whether certain claims are true or false though, not just saying "what if". I mean, if you want the literature and philosophy departments to nominally merge together and for philosophers to continue doing what they're doing, that's fine I suppose, though there are institutional reasons why that's probably not going to happen.
Except that there are practically journals just for arguing about what one particular german guy who has been dead for 150 years meant when he said a thing. That is not a sign of clear writing.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I've said or why this means we should abolish philosophy departments. And for what it's worth, philosophy today tends to be clearer (to us at least), e.g. Dennett's work.
But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be justified empirically, was he?
In his own words, in the section on the problem of induction in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:
"My own view is that the various difficulties of inductive logic here
sketched are insurmountable. So also, I fear, are those inherent in the
doctrine, so widely current today, that inductive inference, although
not ‘strictly valid’, can attain some degree of ‘reliability’ or of ‘probability’."
He then goes on to provide the (now contentious) falsification-based view of science after conceding that inductivism can't work.
Because the only reason you have to believe anything at all is that you perceive things. And the things that you perceive probably lead you to believe things like that you are a human being, that you exist in a particular subset of three-dimensional space, that there are other humans that exist in other subsets of that same three-dimensional space, that these other humans move around and do things that can reasonably be described as "saying things" and "writing things", and that the things that these other humans say and write correspond to circumstances in this three-dimensional space that you occupy so that it makes sense, at least in some circumstances, to label these sayings and writings with labels like "true" and "false" to indicate whether the way they correspond with circumstances is a positive or negative correlation, and if you get these labels right it can help you survive and flourish. Likewise, if you get them wrong (and that includes denying what I have just told you) it will greatly diminish your prospects of survival, and evolution will take care of the rest. In short, it isn't circular because if you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win.
I see where you're coming from, but none of this really means that justifying inductive reasoning through inductive reasoning isn't circular.
Hume himself thinks that inductive reasoning is grounded in "custom or habit", and thinks it's rational to proceed this way---a solution you'd probably agree with.
I suppose the confusion still remains about how empiricism can be self-justifying. You've laid out a case for why it's empirical reasoning is pragmatic, fine, but that doesn't mean that empirical reasoning is grounded in empirical reasoning, even if empirical reasoning is in fact rational. Whether you go with a Humean-style solution or a Popperian solution, it's just still not the case that justifying empirical reasoning through empirical reasoning is not circular.
I'm disputing something very specific. I'm not disputing that empirical reasoning is rational. What I'm disputing is that empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning. This not being circular is not logically related to actual reality. Like, I'm just saying that this doesn't make sense:
1: If you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win. (Empirical reasoning is evolutionary useful, etc.)
2: Thus, empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning.
2 doesn't follow from 1. I accept 1, and I accept the rationality of empirical reasoning, but I don't accept 2.
You've actually moved the goal posts here. The original claim was: empiricism can be justified empirically. But "empiricism" and "empirical reasoning" are not synonyms.
(You also threw in induction at some point, which is just a red herring.)
So let me try this again: to quote Wikipedia, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. This can be justified empirically (I claim) by observing (empirically!) that people who do not base their actions on sensory experience will do stupid things like walk into walls or fall off cliffs.
If you want to dispute this, tell me how you would define the words "true" and "false" without making any reference to sensory experience.
Oh, I see, since we were talking about science, I figured you really just meant induction, I didn't think you meant empiricism, the philosophical school of thought (in contrast to rationalism), that's my bad.
But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori. Like, how is seeing that people who don't base their actions on sensory experience evidence for true knowledge or justification primarily coming from sensory experience and empirical evidence? Seeing people who don't base their actions on all guns being loaded doing stupid things like injuring themselves or others unintentionally doesn't make it true that all guns are loaded. I think what you really want to say is that empiricism is a very intuitive idea, and that it's telling that people who deny the reliability of sensory experience do silly things. (Not that rationalists were denying the validity of sensory experience anyway, it's not like Descartes or Spinoza were denying sense-data).
Well, that's pretty stupid, since I was actually using that exact word. You are quite literally saying, "Oh, when you said X, I didn't think you actually meant X, I thought you meant Y." (And in this case your Y is something that I absolutely do not believe.)
> But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori.
Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?
I mean, the first mention of empiricism was about classifying alchemy as a type of empiricism, which leads one to believe the discussion can't be about empiricism in the technical philosophical sense because being an empiricist or not doesn't have anything to do with alchemy technically speaking, and as the discussion went on there was a claim made that empiricism is justified empirically which is something that none of the three paradigmatic empiricist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) said, so the context of the discussion didn't seem to suit the technical meaning of the word. The spirit of the discussion seemed to be more about empirical reasoning and its empirical justification, so I went along with that.
>Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?
You can observe that, I'm just saying that this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience being the primary means for knowledge. Like, Descartes, the paradigmatic rationalist, is happy to do this. But he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through experience-independent reasoning are the primary source of knowledge.
1. I observe that people do not base their actions on sensory experience do stupid things.
2. Therefore, true knowledge or justification comes only from sensory experience and empirical evidence.
All that I'm saying is that (2) does not logically follow from (1), no more than "Socrates is mortal" follows from "All men are mortal". There's something missing here, an additional premise, (like "Socrates is a man" in the Socrates example).
No, I'm not confusing them. At worst I'm using evolutionary epistemology to justify empiricism. And I'm only doing that because I'm presenting an informal argument. I can justify empiricism without resorting to evolution. But invoking evolution has more emotional appeal to entities that have evolved and so presumably don't have to be persuaded of the value of survival.
