I'm not advocating politeness, I'm advocating for an egalitarian society. Women have historically been less free to express themselves, and sexist jokes and other discriminatory language continue to silence them. Douche was not the correct term, you are a coward. Rather than defend the freedom of those who have had to fight for it, you hide behind your own narcissistic conception of freedom and unexamined privilege.
I'm even _more_ for an egalitarian society. And far more actually than merely getting some "bikini slides" off of tech presentations or ensuring women make the same as men.
I don't want women and men being paid less than other men and women and being treated as trash in the first place. That is, i'm a pro-left, in the marxist tradition. Now, do I get to call you a "coward" or a "capitalist pig" if you don't agree with me in this issue?
Furthermore, is a place full of actual and wannabe startup founders/millionaires, the place to accuse me of "hiding behind my own narcissistic conception of freedom and unexamined privilege"?
I find gagging on the gnat of "sexist slides" while digesting the camel of economic inequality hypocritical and counter-productive.
Bosses don't pay women less because they are sexist. They pay them less because they can (e.g talking advantage of the fact that women get maternal leave, or are better at work-life balance than men, and thus deemed less "devoted" to the company and such BS). If they could, they would pay anyone less (and when they can, they do). It's not about making them less "sexist" (there are women bosses that also pay women employees less). It's about making LAWS to force them to give equal pay for the same job description.
I'm a marxist as well, so you're preaching to the choir there. I also happen to be an anarchist, and rather than putting laws in place (which would be impossible to enforce), I think the first step to changing these issues is to change the culture.
Wow, that's literally insane. Yes, let's see if we can undermine this elegant and stable natural process that has evolved over billions of years so that we can avoid the uncomfortable experience of reexamining the assumptions of our economic system.
> For most of us, it's just paycheck to paycheck now.
Everything is going according to plan. When you see how perfectly all of this lines up with the interests of the plutocrats you just have to wonder to what degree it is conscious collusion. What lies do they tell themselves in the pursuit of economic power and the subsequent subjugation of the population, or have they completely dispensed with even the pretense of plebeian morality?
That's what's so twisted about the American Dream™, is that it's the desire for a certain type of individual freedom, but a freedom that is always based on the subjugation of others. It's not a universal freedom, which to me is the only kind.
That's how I see it too. The article seemed to focus on, yeah you can buy more stuff but stuff doesn't make you happy. Yeah, we know that, what money really buys you is the freedom to pursue your own goals and not be slave to someone else's. Especially if your goals are things that are not "profitable" in the pecuniary sense, pursuing them full time is just not an option when you need to eat.
I've been thinking about that idea as well. Would it make sense to see them less as "useful lies" and more as "self-referential truths", wherein the statement can be either true or false depending on whether or not it is accepted axiomatically?
I think this misses the point of the article and these types of discussions in general. To me, the value of this perspective is that it takes the ego out of this self-directed narrative, and places it in the proper context as a local manifestation of a long running evolutionary process. To see people not as god-like conjurers but as products of whimsical evolutionary circumstance is, I think, the proper seed for developing a deep and universal compassion, the type of compassion that renders the answer to your question of "where to assist" quite obvious, and exposes the goal of creating people with this "willing to fail" attribute as hopelessly naive.
The ability to "fail happily" is less an intrinsic trait as it is having support structures in place that allow for an individual to take bold action without jeopardizing their ability to eat or provide for their family. In this way it is much easier for a kid from a rich family to take the kind of risks that in rare cases lead to great success than it is for a kid from a poor family to do the same. No one can deny that the successes lead to the creation of great social wealth, and so it is in our species' interest to remove the various pressures that keep people locked into safe but stagnant pathways, and allow everyone to take the kinds of chances that produce new mutations for evolution to select from.
Note that I don't think the state should be providing this safety net, this is more of an abstract observation. I have my own ideas on how I think it should be implemented, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the point here. I'm not particularly convinced by arguments about incentives, although I realize that may be the main objection people have and I think that does have a place in the debate.
I'm really interested in how you can take agency out of evolution, since agency evolved as a survival trait. I don't think you have to focus on ego, but neither can you toss it out. That's what makes it such an interesting conversation. It's not all ego, and it's not all environment. It's the mix.
I understand the desire to reduce this to a simpler model where you can control all the levers. But quite frankly I can't see such a model being created. You have to ask yourself whether you want to analyze and manipulate the world you live in, or create another world where problems are solved in a much more direct and simple manner.
Sorry, not trying to troll or start a fight. I just found you comment diametrically opposite of mine and that was fascinating to me.
Yeah but that's the point. Nobody knows what the genes contribute to start with.
If you want to argue determinism, that we are all products of genes and external factors, and that by manipulating genes and external factors we can directly control the evolution of society, that we can remove ego from the equation, you have to be able to explain the causality of how all this determinism works. Correlation is not causality!
So sure, if we somehow had a God's Eye view of the world of man, his genes, social interactions, inbred habits and those attributes and everything else which evolves into a successful startup, then we could begin a discussion around which of those we could change that might reach our goal (A knowledge of the interaction of these elements would also be needed)
In this scenario we're all just Sims playing in somebody's game. BTW, this is a completely rational view, and one day we may arrive there (Or we may already be there for some greater being than us!)
But for all intents and purposes, especially for the goals of our discussion, we are not there yet.
Determinism has a seductive siren call. It's just not a very pragmatic stance, at least not where we are today.
It's quite simple to explain the causality. When you break everything down it eventually comes down to physics (ok so it's not that simple to explain, but it's conceptually simple).
However I vehemently deny that we can manipulate genes to control the evolution of society. At least in any positive direction, manipulating genes would certainly have some effect on our evolution, but I would argue that our limited knowledge would make this far more likely to be detrimental. This returns to my original point, removing ego from the equation. Evolution has proceeded over the last 4 billion years to create remarkable beings, all without our guidance. This blind progression is in fact the strength of the process, since shifting selective pressures are inherently unknowable, and any attempt to consciously control genes in any direction would lead to a reduction in biodiversity and overall fitness.
This then extends to memetic evolution. When mutations are made more rare (by channeling people into stagnant status quo sustaining pathways), and selected against too strongly (by punishing heterodox positions with starvation), memetic diversity is reduced and the risk of succumbing to new selection pressures rises. Any attempt to preferentially allocate resources is in this way self-sustaining (read incestual), and commits the same egotistical error as trying to manipulate genetics. Absent the knowledge (and the hope of ever attaining the knowledge) of what genes and memes will be long-term beneficial, the only reasonable course of action to my mind is the sort of universal support and equality of economic "opportunity" that I mention.
I agree that the buying of political influence is the root problem here, but are there any proposals to deal with it? What are the models that are used in investigating it?
"We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them."
There are a whole host of assumptions that your arguments rest on, from our ability to predict and control non-linear dynamic systems, to what we even mean when we say "cost" or "quality of life". It's great that you're optimistic, but I fear this is more of the same arrogance that got us into this mess in the first place.
