Pat said: I've argued with Marxist's who assert craziness like "under true communism there will be no crime". They assert such nonsense under "rationalist" arguments that a "truly fulfilled person", as a communist utopia must exclusively generate, would be a naturally law-abiding citizen.This sounds to me like people who don't know much about law (i.e., how arbitrary the definition of a crime is) and who don't know much about those bits of good science that psychology has managed. I suspect the later is at the heart of your connecting the rationalist-empiricist discussions with those prior bad political-debate experiences. Ultimately, one might assert, that whether crime is eliminated in a Marxist utopia, is a simple empirical question, i.e., something to be tested.If we treat it that way, the evidence would likely be against the Marxist's assertion. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that broad economic policies translate into predictable specific behaviors among all members of a population. In fact, we would expect rather dramatic variation unless developmental contexts were specified in MUCH more detail than would be specified by a simple implementation of communism.However, no amount of evidence I could marshal, nor any amount of axiomatic assertion the Marxist could lay out, would stop us from viewing the assertion as something we would not be certain about until it was tested.Am I understanding the connection you want to make correctly?Best,Eric
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Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Lab Manager
Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning
American University, Hurst Hall Room 203A
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phone: (202) 885-3867 fax: (202) 885-1190
email: <a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','echarles@american.edu');" target="_blank">echarles@...On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Patrick Reilly <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','patrick.reilly@ipsociety.net');" target="_blank">patrick.reilly@...> wrote:Hi Nick:In further reply, I've argued with Marxist's who assert craziness like "under true communism there will be no crime". They assert such nonsense under "rationalist" arguments that a "truly fulfilled person", as a communist utopia must exclusively generate, would be a naturally law-abiding citizen.So the empiricist reliance in the physics dialogue is a useful reference to me in my counter argument of "what actually existing society supports the argument of a more ethical society eliminating irrational crime".I say again that the core strength of using this reference lies in the belief widely held among our intelligentsia that Physics has the quality of offering the purest of all possible truthiness . . .--- PatOn Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 9:39 PM, Nick Thompson <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','nickthompson@earthlink.net');" target="_blank">nickthompson@...> wrote:Hi, Patrick,
Thanks for getting back to me. Wow, was that a form of libertarianism!? I would have thought the “users” were property owners who “use” the police to protect them from the anger of the poor. Anyway.
One of the lessons that FRIAM has taught me over the years is to be much more careful in my deployment of “ist” and “ism” words. They just don’t seem to have the stability of reference that that I assumed when I learned them and started to use them. I don’t know quite what to do about that. It would be nice to be able to identify some clusters of opinion and associate some people with those opinions and be able to refer back to them as points of departure in my thought, but every time I try, I fail. One really good example is the word, “pragmatist.” In some hands, “pragmatism” means solving problems as they come along with a view mostly to the immediate tangible future. Americans are said to given to such pragmatic solutions, as, say, the drone program which eliminates some bad actors in the short run but runs the risk of recruiting others in the long run. In other hands, the word “pragmatism” refers to an almost precisely opposite philosophy which focuses on where human understanding is “headed”, i.e., where it is likely to fetch up in the very long run. For a pragmatist, in this sense, there are no “facts of the matter” beyond human understanding, in the broadest sense, because whatever world is “out there” is filtered through our understanding of it.
Now, I think the debate that occurred at the physics conference had a lot to do with this latter sort of pragmatism. Philosophical pragmatists have tended to be very hard on the “theory-fact” distinction. To these folks, a fact is nothing more than a theory that we would be VERY VERY VERY surprised to see contradicted.
What I am struggling with, here, is how to map all of this (which may be irrelevant from your point of view) onto
On another note, the discussion of the "rationalists" v. "empiricists" crystallized in me how to best argue against Libertarian-hacks and Marxist fops;
Now I get that you are pissed off at some folks. I would probably be pissed off by those same people. What I can’t yet work out is the relation between these Libertarians and Marxists and the distinction between rationalist and empiricist.
Can you help further?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','friam-bounces@redfish.com');" target="_blank">friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Patrick Reilly
Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2015 1:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','friam@redfish.com');" target="_blank">friam@...>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science | Quanta Magazine
Hi Nick:
Well, I practice IP/Patent Law in Silicon Valley and I am rather frequently exposed to libertarian-drivel about how social problems can be solved by applying the principle of liberty and drowning the government. Not unusually, the proponents of these views are quite bright, contentious and have the life experience of, well, and under-30 programmer.
Programmers, especially the really good ones, get used to creatively solving any problem that is thrown at them with applied logic. And they often fail to realize that the overwhelming majority of their architecture challenges are thin problems, wherein all relevant influences and underlying principles can be assumed or quickly ascertained. In contrast, most social-legal problems of our technological society exist precisely because these problems are thick problems and can seldom be successfully addressed with empirical analysis of applied alternate solutions.
One example of a failed libertarian approach in criminal justice is to attempt to extract payments from the "users" of the criminal justice system to fund the police force, al a Ferguson, where frequent fines were promiscuously issued with the explicit purpose of generating revenue. In particular, the Ferguson police officers were given increasing ticketing quotas and were conditioned to see citizens as ATM machines, especially the less empowered citizens.
So I can now cite the article's noting of rationalist/empiricist approaches in physics (a discipline that nerds generally hold to be sacred and inviolate) as a basis for saying, "so first we may want to find a country where you ideas have been actually applied . . . like Somalia or Indonesia . . . "
----- Pat
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 5:51 AM, Nick Thompson <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','nickthompson@earthlink.net');" target="_blank">nickthompson@...> wrote:
Hi Patrick,
I didn’t altogether follow you here.
Can you say a bit more?
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','friam-bounces@redfish.com');" target="_blank">friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Patrick Reilly
Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2015 10:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','friam@redfish.com');" target="_blank">friam@...>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science | Quanta Magazine
Hi Tom:
Thanks for turning me on to this article. It's valuable to known that we are likely 10 EE15 degrees away from observing the true fundamentals of physics.
On another note, the discussion of the "rationalists" v. "empiricists" crystallized in me how to best argue against Libertarian-hacks and Marxist fops; the imagined "principles" of political and economic dynamics empowers empiricists to promise candy mountains when we are better off observing the actual effect of actually instantiated policies and laws. The US used to be the world leader in social pragmatism . . .
Great article!
--- Pat
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Tom Johnson <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tom@jtjohnson.com');" target="_blank">tom@...> wrote:
Something to keep you occupied until New Years Day.
===================================
Tom Johnson - Inst. for Analytic Journalism
Santa Fe, NM
SPJ Region 9 Director
<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tom@jtjohnson.com');" target="_blank">tom@... <a href="tel:505-473-9646" target="_blank">505-473-9646
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