Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Trump-Is-Just-A-Normal-Polling-Error-Behind-Clinton-FiveThirtyEight-tp7588069p7588268.html
Glen -
Not to be argumentative, but:
Yes, the racist attributes of the system map to the individual's myopia, their inability to extrapolate to the consequences of their own actions. But at the system layer, the attribute is racism. At the individual layer, the attributes are not racism. Myopia (and other types of ignorance) at the individual layer can generate all sorts of systemic effects. If such gen-phen mappings were always bijections, then there would be no "complex systems".
It sounds as if you are entirely dissociating individual racist (or
misogynist or... ) bigotry from the collective?
I know you to have some fairly eclectic ideas about individual and
collective human behaviour/motivation/self-awareness, so I'm trying
to wrap my head around what you are trying to say here rather than
deny or discount or disagree with it.
Perhaps one could postulate that many if not all human "sins" are
emergent properties of collectives and that individuals, raised out
of the context of an already corrupted group would not have those
properties. Adam and Eve before expulsion from the garden of
Eden? It is as if you are suggesting that many (or all?)
individuals remain in some kind of state of Grace, marred only by
their myopic (and other types of) ignorance, magnified
quantitatively or transformed qualitatively into the kind "sinful"
behaviour we see in group activities? I can buy SOME of that, but
have a hard time not believing that there *are* truly bad actors,
individuals who have, through whatever process of arriving (nature
or nurture, genetic/disease/trauma-induced insanity), exhibit truly,
deeply madly abhorrent if not actually evil (how do you measure
that?) behaviour?
Again, not to belabor it, I know you to have some very *useful* (to
me) alternative perspectives on things, I'm hoping my questions here
provoke you to illuminate me more.
- Steve
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