http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-case-for-universal-basic-income-UBI-tp7601843p7602062.html
I agree with you. It's very challenging to make sense of the world, and the human mind is amazing at building generative models of the world and those models become the reality for the mind. With the models we can make conclusions and explain how the world actually works. Now the clincher, to make progress, the conclusions must have clear explanations that are independant of the different layers that we used to generate the model to get to the conclusion.
I repeat, sure, use a complex layered approach to get to an understanding. But after you have formed your conclusions, don't rely on the complex layered model to explain the phenomena, distil it and get to a clear conclusion and back it up with good explanations. Always try to verify it using evidence.
For example, in the narrative of Russ, it is assumed that they have knowledge of the effects of Reagan and Thatcher on the world. I argue that it is impossible to have any level of confidence in that. The world is a chaotic complex system and we have some knowledge about what different actors (eg Reagan and Thatcher) did and what consequently happened, but nobody has a clue what the causal relationships were. It is simply impossible to know that. Sure, one can speculate, but tag it as speculation. ABM generative models show some promise in helping humans to understand such complex systems, but it's early days and current ABM models are not even close to answer questions like that.
I don't know the answers and I speculate it's beyond any human's capability to make statements like “The self-assured neoliberal imagination has increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it causes,” and have any level of confidence in this. Yes, it's a good process to speculate that, but be real and admit that it's only speculation and/or the result of a generative model in your mind and not rooted in the real world. I tag it as "opinion" and respect the person to have that opinion.
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