Posted by
Marcus G. Daniels on
Jan 11, 2014; 6:58am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584730.html
On 1/10/14, 10:45 PM, Nick Thompson
wrote:
I guess I don’t follow.
One can always deconstruct to the point that whatever we hold dear
is arbitrary.
That's an exercise many people don't seem to do, for whatever
reason. Maybe they find it upsetting.
The left draws from one set of premises, and the right draws from
another set. A slowly-growing set of sets.
For given pairs of individuals on the left and right, the
intersection of their respective draws can be empty.
Some of those premises can be informed by biology and the social
sciences, others are preferences are just opinions like whether
human life is sacred, and whether one generation should care at all
about those that follow.
To be systematic about this thinking, make a simulation. Take some
initial condition (a population with a distribution of wealth,
connectivity of social networks, etc.) plug-in the premises as
actions for a population of agents and iterate, moving money around,
creating and losing friends, etc. Now take the same initial
condition, plug-in the alternative premises, iterate the agents'
decisions, and you'll get another outcome. Make them fight and
contend over premises (as occurs in real life) and something else
will happen in a virtual world. But is it about the journey or the
destination? Do we care about the kind of decisions the agents get
to make or what happens to them? If the agents are happily making
decisions that they like (because they are enriching or easy or
whatever) what difference does it make what happens in aggregate?
Marcus
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