Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014

RomeoStevens

Haven't had one of these for awhile. This thread is for questions or comments that you've felt silly about not knowing/understanding. Let's try to exchange info that seems obvious, knowing that due to the illusion of transparency it really isn't so obvious!

The one I was thinking of was capitalism vs communism. I have had many communists tell me that communism only works if we make the whole world do it. A single point of failure.

I wouldn't call that a single point of failure, I'd call that a refusal to test it and an admission of extreme fragility.

0Nornagest12y

That's kind of surprising to me. A lot of systems have proportional tipping points, where a change is unstable up to a certain proportion of the sample but suddenly turns stable after that point. Herd immunity, traffic congestion, that sort of thing. If the assumptions of communism hold, that seems like a natural way of looking at it. A structurally unstable social system just seems so obviously bad to me that I can't imagine it being modeled as such by its proponents. Suppose Marx didn't have access to dynamical systems theory, though.