[FRIAM] ideas are lies
Eric Charles
eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 20:33:44 EDT 2020
To Glen's point.... it's hard to evaluate the overall argument of a piece
when almost every factual claim seems factually wrong, and a decent chunk
of those claims are in my area of ostensible expertise... The entire
"evolutionary psychology" part is just bunk... I've also had enough
training in economics, anthropology, philosophy, and other areas to suspect
that much of the coverage of that is bunk..... so even if I could wade
through enough to judge the conclusion, there is definitely no world in
which I agree with the argument. When I say I'm suspicious of most
sentences, that includes the transition sentences that create "the
narrative." He says "X. And X therefore Y. So Y, and if Y we should
definitely Z", and I not only think X is wrong, but also that even if X
were true it would *not *necessitate Y; and even if Y was necessitated,
that wouldn't mean we should Z.
<echarles at american.edu>
I think the comment about Libertarians assuming decoupling is *much *more
interesting than all points in the original article put together. Well
worth breaking out into a different thread, level interesting. That would
be a way, way better discussion.... in contrast with trying to figure out
what it would mean for evolution (?) to favor (?) a
massive-fiction-masquerading-as-a-Machiavellian-lie that either originated
in the 1770s or in the late 1940s (unclear which).
You said: Libertarians aren't "even questioning why Joe Sixpack would
prefer to watch The Voice and drink Budweiser over inventing mouse traps in
his basement, after having spent the last 8 hours being ordered around by
someone half his age in a flourescent lit cubicle."
And, like, yeah, clearly those are related. But I would phrase the issue
slightly differently. I would say that one fundamental issue with
Libertarian thinking is that it assumes something akin to old fashioned
"free will." It would point out that SOME people do work on the mouse
traps, and that while watching The Voice and drinking Budweiser might be an
understandable response to cubicle drudgery, it is also "a choice the
person makes." Some libertarians will go all abstract in their claims about
what someone could or could not choose to do, that's very true. However,
more grounded ones are referencing actual people doing the things they are
talking about, to push back against claims that such behavior is somehow
impossible.
It is quite possible that such a claim is functionally identical to
acknowledging "dependencies" or "coupling", we'd have to dive in deeper for
me to figure that out. Maybe "free will" isn't the issue as much as some
notion of "self-directedness." We all know that some percentage of poor
people get out of poverty. A larger percentage don't. Out of those who
don't, we have a lot who seem to be perennially making bad choices, which
isn't very interesting in the context of this discussion (but could be in
the context of other discussions). More interestingly, we also know that
some percentage of poor people seem to make similar decisions to those who
get out of poverty, but the dice never quite roll in their favor. So there
is coupling, and there are probabilistic outcomes, and all that stuff. But
even after acknowledging all that, the question remains to what extent the
choices made by the individuals in question affect their outcomes.
And, of course, none of that is closely related to whether the cost of tree
trimming is made cheaper by there being more than one person offering such
services (a basic free market issue), nor whether or not a wealthy baron of
industry should support random moocher relatives in luxury when it doesn't
even make him happy to do so (a classic Rand example)
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 11:42 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pat's comments are interestingly powerful as a response to EricC's
> comments. I don't remember getting this sense from the recent thread on
> meritocracy. But my main objection to the existence of meritocracy is its
> assumption of linearity/orthogonality, a lack of friction between the
> various sliding dimensions of life. EricC talks mainly [⛧] about
> disagreeing with individual sentences, regardless of Fix's compoisitonal
> *narrative*. And the other thread about economic mobility assumes the same
> materially open, formally closed, permanent underclass required by
> capitalism.
>
> It all seems to point to this tendency/ability of libertarians to
> "separate concerns" ... e.g. one's attendance to a PTA meeting is assumed
> to be decoupled from one's status as a wage slave ... or the artificial
> separation between, say, one's ability to vote despite not being able to
> take the day off. Or even questioning why Joe Sixpack would prefer to watch
> The Voice and drink Budweiser over inventing mouse traps in his basement,
> after having spent the last 8 hours being ordered around by someone half
> his age in a flourescent lit cubicle.
>
> I don't agree that libertarianism is nonsense. But the sense it does make
> is false, at odds with reality, primarily because reality is replete with
> cross-terms and couplings ignored by its assumptions.
>
>
> [⛧] I think the "free-market thinking promotes power relations" is a mere
> lemma in the argument. The thesis seems to be that free market thinking
> limits market freedom. That paradox is what makes it so insidious.
>
> On 9/27/20 8:43 PM, Patrick Reilly wrote:
> > In my experience, Libertarian ideas when offered at any level above the
> most basic are almost always justifying the interests of those who control
> wealth. The key myth of Libertarianism is that those who control wealth on
> any given day MUST be morally worthy of this control. Which is nonsense.
> >
> > The model that any action to disempower the powerful, i.e., the wealthy,
> and redistribute their power, i.e., share wealth that essentially has
> fallen under the control of a small group of "elites" little regard to
> justice, is morally bankrupt is advanced only by ideologues who are (often
> intentionally) blind to actual economic history.
> >
> > Just one case in point, the standardization of computer Operating
> Systems was inevitable. Gates was a clever and hard working industrialist,
> but the key business opportunity that he rode to billions was almost purely
> created by his ruthlessness married with both an unforeseen timing of
> technology development and conditions not of his making. In other words,
> if he had failed to be an ambitious and smart creep, he would have been
> defeated by a smarter creep . . . someone had to end up in the lead
> position in this "winner take all" nature that we still find ourselves in .
> . .
> >
> > Libertarianism is nonsense.
> >
> > ---- Pat
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:51 PM Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
> >
> > This article is absolutely fascinating! I think that if we just took
> each sentence individually, I would disagree with around 60% of them. That
> is being generous and assuming the author is accurately reporting what
> other authors are saying. If you allow for my disagreeing with those cited
> (while not disputing the citation itself), that could easily bring me as
> high as disagreeing with 80% of the individual sentences. That is making it
> very hard for me to assess what I think of the overall argument. It seems
> quite plausible that "free-market thinking promotes power relations" in a
> particular historic context, which seems to be one of the main theses of
> the argument... but the author is covering at least a dozen deep topics
> that are in no way necessary to make that argument, and is not
> demonstrating a deep understanding of any of them.
> >
> > Here are some example sentences from throughout the paper that seem
> confused. Some might merely be massive overgeneralizations, but even that
> seems pretty problematic in the context of the argument being made:
> >
> > * Free-market ideology claims that to help society, we must help
> ourselves. If we all act selfishly, the thinking goes, the invisible hand
> will make everyone better off. So here we have an ideology that promotes
> selfishness in the name of group benefit. It’s a Machiavellian lie that
> should be caustic to social cohesion.
> > * According to the theory of multilevel selection, there
> is /always/ a disconnect between the interests of a group, and the
> interests of individuals within the group.
> > * So for groups to be successful, they must suppress the selfish
> behavior of individuals. There are many ways of doing this, but the most
> common is probably /punishment/. To encourage altruistic behavior, groups
> punish self-serving individuals.
> > * But while punishing deviance is universal to all social
> organisms, humans have developed a method for suppressing selfishness that
> is unique. To promote prosocial behavior, we harness the power of ideas.
> We /lie/ to ourselves.
> > * According to evolutionary theory, Rand’s Machiavellian lie ought
> to be caustic to group cohesion.
> > * /power relations/ qualify as a type of altruism. In a power
> relation, one person submits to the will of another. Bob submits to Alice.
> By doing so, Bob sacrifices his own fitness for the benefit of Alice.
> That’s altruism. But if Bob’s subservience only benefited Alice, it would
> be an evolutionary dead end. The Bobs of the world would die out, having
> given all their resources to the Alices. Since power relations have not
> died out, something more must be going on.
> > * On the face of it, freedom and power seem to be opposites.
> > * Business firms, you may have noticed, don’t use the market to
> organize their internal activities. They use hierarchy. Firms have a chain
> of command that tells employees what to do. Given this fact, the growth of
> large firms is as much an assault on the free market as is the growth of
> government.
> > * To measure the growth of private hierarchy, I’ll use the size of
> the management class — the portion of people employed as ‘managers’. Here’s
> my reasoning. Managers work at the tops of hierarchies.
> > * Anthropologists Carla Handley and Sarah Mathew recently found
> that cultural variation between human groups is far greater than genetic
> variation. Put simply, this means that ideas matter. What
> we /think/ probably affects our behavior more than our genes.
> > *
> >
> > The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental
> tension. We are social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake,
> it’s best if we act altruistically. But for our /own/ sake, it’s better to
> be a selfish bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the
> fundamental problem of social life. The solution that most cultures
> have hit upon is to lie.
> >
> > * The alternative is that free-market ideas /do/ promote altruism
> … just not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism
> through power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market
> ideology uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of
> power.
> >
> > Just for a taste of why this all seems so weird: "Free market
> ideology" is not the promotion of selfishness writ large, it is the idea
> that people should look for beneficial deals when buying and selling goods.
> Like, if you could buy a car for $15,000, or get an equivalent car for
> $12,000, you should buy the cheaper one; but if you are selling, and you
> could sell for $12,000 or $15,000, you should sell for the higher price.
> That's it. Free market ideology has nothing to do with whether you should
> support the local PTA or whether you should invest in your children beyond
> the time-corrected dollar value you expect them to give you in return. And
> similarly, my manager's ability to tell me what to do at work has little to
> do with whether I buy rice in bulk at the asian grocery where it is
> cheaper. (And if you want to talk about Ayn Rand as promoting selfishness
> writ large, then we would need a separate conversation about what "selfish"
> means in an "Objectivist" context, and
> > how that has only a loose relation with "free market ideology".)
> >
> >
> > Eric C
> > <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 5:24 PM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com
> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Why Free Market Ideology is a Double Lie
> > https://evonomics.com/why-free-market-ideology-is-a-double-lie/
> > "So yes, free-market thinking is a lie. But it’s not the lie you
> think it is."
> > --
> > glen ⛧
> >
> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam <
> http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
> > un/subscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> > FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> >
> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam <
> http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
> > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > The information contained in this transmission may contain privileged
> and confidential information. It is intended only for the use of the
> person(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are
> hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or duplication
> of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended
> recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies
> of the original message. To reply to our email administrator directly,
> please send an email to patrick.reilly at ipsociety.net <mailto:
> patrick.reilly at ipsociety.net>.
> >
> > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> >
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200928/80e565f9/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list