Eugine_Nier comments on Political ideas meant to provoke thought - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 02 June 2014 01:20AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 June 2014 04:00:54AM 4 points [-]

The difference is I believe that some ideologies are truer, i.e., better correspond to reality, than others.

Comment author: Lumifer 03 June 2014 03:17:32PM 0 points [-]

I am not sure "truth" or match to reality is a useful metric to apply to ideologies. Ideologies are mostly normative and prescriptive. Their two basic ways of failure are (1) produce a system which is unlike what the ideology wanted and/or expected; and (2) produce a system which you find unacceptable because of a major mismatch with your values.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2014 12:03:34AM 3 points [-]

Ideologies frequently make falsifiable statements. They tend to say X is true so one should do Y to produce good outcome Z. The statements "X is true", and "doing Y produces outcome Z" are both falsifiable. Granted the statement "outcome Z is good" is harder to analyze given the current state of metaethics, but in practice one can get remarkably far just looking at the first two statements.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 June 2014 12:51:18AM *  2 points [-]

Ideologies frequently make falsifiable statements.

Ideologies rarely make easily falsifiable statements.

Karl Marx said that a proletarian revolution will lead to heaven on Earth. This is a falsifiable statement (and it was successfully falsified), but in order to falsify it you have to try it which is often all an ideology wants.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 June 2014 05:41:15AM 3 points [-]

Ideologies rarely make easily falsifiable statements.

Agreed, my point is that it is still meaningful to speak about ideologies being right or wrong.