[FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...

[Russ Abbott]

I recently saw an article that defined populism as something like the
resentment of poorly paid, poorly benefitted, and for the most-part
hands-on workers toward those who have reasonably well-paying,
well-benefitted, and can-work-from-home jobs.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 8:38 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> To the extent I can be gzipped, am I not also redundant?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 6:55 AM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...
>
> Britain’s Last Day in Brussels: A Populist Punch-Up
> https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/08/britains-last-day-in-brussels-a-populist-punch-up/
>
> I've struggled to understand what populism means. The dictionary
> definition is no help (appeal to ordinary people) because I don't think
> such people exist. There is no "average person". We're all "elite"
> (special) in some way or another. Each thing has its own particularity.
> (Down to Pauli exclusion.) Binning concrete things into classes requires
> removing particulars. This kindasorta implies that populism means appealing
> to the most common feature set. Average every possible feature and choose
> the top, say, 5-7 most common features.
>
> But that's a problem because we people aren't very objective. So, a
> data-driven populist would stick pretty close to an algorithm like that.
> But a "populist" politician probably would not. There's some other criteria
> at work ... some *conception* of the ordinary person that isn't objective
> ... a kind of shared subjectivity, "intersubjectivity" <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity>?
>
> My *guess* is that the way "populist" is used refers to a shared
> *delusion* ... like the American Dream, which was always a delusion. It's
> simply becoming more obvious as our information ecology changes. The
> intersubjectivity involved seems to be a mass psychogenic illness <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness> ... kinda like
> popular music and the same damned person winning the pop contest year upon
> year.
>
> I'd be grateful for any criticism of that conclusion.
>
> I have another idea that was triggered by the Byline article: that
> populism is a kind of forcing structure [⛧], a reduction from high to low
> dimension, from high to low diversity. Where "elites" take an appropriate
> amount of time to, say, explain/understand quantum decoherence, a populist
> over-simplifies it so that the "ordinary person" can believe they see it
> everywhere. Or, where "elites" accept the cost of sympathizing with each
> particular wak they meet, the populist stereotypes those [in|out] of their
> tribe. This 2nd idea could be seen as a derivative of the 1st one, where
> the shared delusion is the overly simplified model. I'm not as interested
> in criticism of this 2nd idea. Killing the 1st idea would, I think, kill
> the 2nd. But if the 1st idea sounds about right, then it might be worth
> trashing the 2nd.
>
>
> [⛧] ... whether [endo|exo]genous, which isn't irrelevant, but perhaps
> tangential.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
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