EricS -
I think this gives a good "hint" of part of what a fully
Socialized or Communal system looks like to some (e.g.
Libertarians), and why they resist what others of us might see as
"reasonable attempts at leveling the playing field".
I'm definitely ambivalent in the sense of being of "two minds".
I am a creature (ego?) shaped by the struggles and challenges I
have experienced... and "what didn't kill me made me stronger" or
maybe more to the point, I am a product of my experiences (nod to
Glen's "diachronic" vs "episodic" thoughts).
I have only the thinnest apprehension of Glen's "Anarcho Syndicalism" (sure I've read a little, but have far from had time to think through it all) but it has some of the positive features I look for like "structure at all scales" and "self-similarity" possibilities, explaining not only how "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes" (Clemens) but perhaps how cultural sub-units, "bubbles" if you will also rhyme across geography/culture as well as time. A bit of a cultural/semantic version of the "multi-verse foam" ideas in physics/cosmology.
Also the best reason I can accept for a continued-to-expand humanity... with consciousness being not unlike the big-bang, expanding (in quality) right up to our current era where the likes of Musk and several nation-states are aspiring to begin to colonize the inner system (at least moon/mars) in our (their?) lifetimes.
- SteveS
Nick, while I laud your motivation, I strongly disagree with your proposed solution. The desire for a basic fairness of some sort should be kept quite different the notion of creating a flatland. We WANT a society full of people who faced a variety of different struggles.
This is a Peirce/Dewey democracy problem. IF the rationale for a democratic system is that we make better decisions when we bringing a variety of perspectives to bear on a problem, then the push for flat-land destroys the rationale for having a democratic system. While we might easily agree that those struggles should not include a risk of literal starvation, that doesn't mean we want them all to start out with access to identical fiscal resources and identical educational opportunities. That some people have more food than others, in a system that guarantees everyone a baseline amount of food to support development, is perfectly fine.
On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 11:32 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .Thanks, Eric. He came off better on the podcast. Glad to be corrected. This American Life did one of it’s quixotic treatments of systems in which leaders are chosen at random, and, of course, was quite pleased by the result. By the way, isn’t that how the Dali Lama is chosen?
I still think we should randomize all the babies at birth, take huge amounts of money off the top and pour it in at the bottom in the form of education and flat-out income adjustment so that no child is disadvantaged by the station of his/her birth.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2020 6:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
So.... delayed response to the original... based on the longer reviews I've seen, this is partially a criticism of meritocracy itself, but also a very strong criticism of the neo-liberal bastardization of meritocracy. As it says in the opening line of the review in the original post: The thing being criticized are "pernicious assumptions" about merit. From what I can tell, his TED talk summarizes the book well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_tyranny_of_merit
He starts out with some discussion of moral luck, but in my opinion not a great discussion of it. Then he moves on to criticize a world where pieces of paper are confused for ability. In such a world, those without the right pieces of paper are deemed to lack merit and are told they can't have dignity. That part is criticizing a world in which our leaders continuously message that everyone should go to college, encouraging a false belief that a getting a degree somehow magically makes you successful, and encouraging the implicit (or sometimes explicit) judgement that not getting a degree somehow a personal failure and that getting a degree and then not succeeding is an incoherent position to be in. The failure of that program of thought has been huge. It is hard to explain how many of the students I taught at Penn State Altoona had their lives made worse by getting a degree. They are working the same jobs they could have worked out of high school, but with 4 years less experience, added shame and frustration, crippling debt, and a worse relationship with parents who can't understand why having a degree hasn't made their kids successful. And you can't try to defend this by hand-waving at education being virtuous in its own right, but it won't work, because by any reasonable measure they aren't very educated either.
Even with as right as some parts of that critique are, it is all somehow seething with the suspect rhetoric of the protestant work ethic. There is nothing inherently virtuous in being exploited for your labor (in the Marxist sense of providing profit to a capitalist), and he is somehow lumping all "work" together in a way that obscures that.
When all is said and done, it is an interesting argument, but my Libertarian Goat is doing fine, thank you :- )
On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
This should do it!
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-j-sandel/the-tyranny-of-merit/
The thesis is that “meritocracy” is the cause of the fact that the us is now the least socially mobile country among the western democracies.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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