Posted by
thompnickson2 on
Dec 23, 2020; 5:16pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/if-by-populism-he-meant-tp7599909p7599916.html
Glen, Marcus,
I have always taken it to mean appeal to the "lowest" common denominator, "lowest" to be understood in a strictly mathematical sense. Sex Food, and rock and roll, rather than world peace and justice. I have been interested in the debate between AOC and Abigail Stanberger, who seem to agree that the Democrats should focus on getting particular things done and which particular things to get done, yet continue to be lured by the press into arguments around such words as "defund the police" and "socialism." They both seem very different from Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts for whom the slogans seem central. I thought I was going to have a conclusion about which of these was populism, but now that I get here, I see that I don't. Maybe Pressley is the populist because she avoids the details?
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <
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Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 10:38 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...
To the extent I can be gzipped, am I not also redundant?
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <
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Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 6:55 AM
To: FriAM <
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Subject: [FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...
Britain’s Last Day in Brussels: A Populist Punch-Up
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/08/britains-last-day-in-brussels-a-populist-punch-up/I've struggled to understand what populism means. The dictionary definition is no help (appeal to ordinary people) because I don't think such people exist. There is no "average person". We're all "elite" (special) in some way or another. Each thing has its own particularity. (Down to Pauli exclusion.) Binning concrete things into classes requires removing particulars. This kindasorta implies that populism means appealing to the most common feature set. Average every possible feature and choose the top, say, 5-7 most common features.
But that's a problem because we people aren't very objective. So, a data-driven populist would stick pretty close to an algorithm like that. But a "populist" politician probably would not. There's some other criteria at work ... some *conception* of the ordinary person that isn't objective ... a kind of shared subjectivity, "intersubjectivity" <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity>?
My *guess* is that the way "populist" is used refers to a shared *delusion* ... like the American Dream, which was always a delusion. It's simply becoming more obvious as our information ecology changes. The intersubjectivity involved seems to be a mass psychogenic illness <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness> ... kinda like popular music and the same damned person winning the pop contest year upon year.
I'd be grateful for any criticism of that conclusion.
I have another idea that was triggered by the Byline article: that populism is a kind of forcing structure [⛧], a reduction from high to low dimension, from high to low diversity. Where "elites" take an appropriate amount of time to, say, explain/understand quantum decoherence, a populist over-simplifies it so that the "ordinary person" can believe they see it everywhere. Or, where "elites" accept the cost of sympathizing with each particular wak they meet, the populist stereotypes those [in|out] of their tribe. This 2nd idea could be seen as a derivative of the 1st one, where the shared delusion is the overly simplified model. I'm not as interested in criticism of this 2nd idea. Killing the 1st idea would, I think, kill the 2nd. But if the 1st idea sounds about right, then it might be worth trashing the 2nd.
[⛧] ... whether [endo|exo]genous, which isn't irrelevant, but perhaps tangential.
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