= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (656)
Just out of curiosity, what was the result of those debates?
It's still in there but more for symbolic reasons. Party leadership didn't really want it but the party base did. The relevant phrase also happens to be democratic socialism. Meaning that the goal is economic equality but representative democracy and not a bunch of soviets and "consensus" decision making.
In practice the party policies under Schroeder were more "third way" and as a result they wanted to "update" the party program to reflect that policy change.
What do you mean by "economic equality"? Do you mean that everyone should have the same amount of money/resources? (This is not a stable state of affairs if people then proceed to engage in commerce).
If you have a government which constantly redistributes money you could hold it constant if you wanted to do so. But the people with whom I spoke usually don't go that far. Concerns are rather that everyone has access to a "living wage".
Defining how exactly the end state will look like isn't that much of a concern if you can decide whether or not you move in the right direction. There the feeling that third way policies of cutting government pensions don't go in that direction.
Yes, but that's not exactly compatible with anything resembling freedom.
The problem is what's considered a "living wage" changes with changes in society.
It is a concern if you want to evaluate whether you should even be trying to move in that direction.
Is this line of conversation still "just curiosity" about the results of SPD debates, or are you trying to bait an argument?
I'm trying to figure out what Christian, and more generally the typical German, mean by "socialism" these days. Does it have a more moderate end goal then the older socialists, or do they have the same end goal and have simply decided to approach it more slowly.
What is a living wage changes with changes in society, and that isn't obviously a problem. If society becomes richer, people expect higher wages, and if society becomes richer, it can afford them. Depending on the quantities.
Amazingly enough, freedom supporting policies can negatively impact equality. To put it another way, if there were no conflicts between values, there would be no politics. To put it a third way, you keep writingas though you are the Tablet, and have the One True Set of Values inscribed in your brain.
Christian mentioned having the government constantly redistributing money as a possibly desirable end state. I was pointing out one of the implications of said end state.
Also I'm getting increasingly frustrated at people, yourself included, who keep trying to pass off their false beliefs about the nature of the world as different preferences.
In particular, to use the economic equality example, if you constantly redistributed money to keep everyone equal, as I mentioned it would destroy anything resembling freedom. But suppose you claim to have a utility function that puts no value on freedom. Well, another consequence is that it would destroy the motivation for people to engage in productive work (if the benefits would just get redistributed) so you'd wind up with a bunch of equally starving people. Assuming, that is, that this redistribution was somehow magically enforced, more realistically you'd wind up with everything in the hands of the redistributors.
Rousseau's "The Social Contract" begins with the words:
I don't think that any modern person on the left is as direct as that when it comes to freedom, but in European political thought the idea of the Social Contract is quite central.
The idea is that in the end state people would be motivated to work as a way of self actualization and don't need financial incentives to do work. Star Trek has characters who work without getting payed to do so.
The observation that today many people need money to be motivated to work doesn't mean that will always be true in the future and that we shouldn't work on moving society in that direction.
The idea of an end state doesn't mean something that can be reached in 10 years a state that can take quite a while to reach.
Could you taboo what Rousseau means by "master" and "slave" in that quote. As is, to me it sounds like deep wisdom attempting to use said words in some metaphorical way that's not at all well-defined. Also I don't see what this has to do with the subject.
The problem is that the work that's self-actualizing is not necessarily the same as the work that's needed to keep society running. In other words, attempting to run society like this you'd wind up with a bunch of (mediocre) artists starving and suffering from dysentery because not enough people derive self-actualization from farming or maintaining the sewer system. Historically, many attempts by intellectuals to create planned communities fell into this problem.
Fictional evidence.
Rousseau writes his central work to justify that men is everywhere in chains. Rousseau attempts to legitimize the Social Contract that takes away men's natural freedom.
Rousseau later argues that man get's new freedoms in the process, but he's not shy in admitting that men loses his natural freedoms by being bound in the Social Contract.
The full text is readily available online. A "master" is someone with the power to tell others what to do and be obeyed; yet these masters themselves obey something above themselves (laws written and unwritten). Rousseau's answer (SPOILER WARNING!!) is the title of his work. (To which the standard counter-argument is "show me my signature on this supposed contract".)
A few more Rousseau quotes:
...
...
He is arguing here against theories whereby sovereignty must consist of absolute power held by a single individual beyond any legitimate challenge, his subjects having no rights against him. For Rousseau, sovereignty is the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity -- or in Rousseau's words, "the exercise of the general will". Rousseau's sovereignty is still absolute and indivisible, but is not located in any individual.
One can cherry-pick Rousseau to multiple ends. Here's something for HBDers:
Libertarians may find something to agree with in this:
But to know what Rousseau thought, it is better to read his work.
The open source movement is a better example of voluntary word than star trek.
In this case I don't think so.
I didn't want to give an example of work done as a volunteer but an example of a futuristic society where people don't work for money.
The Open Source movement also also a bunch of different people doing things for various reasons and incentives.
I actually agree that running for 100% equality would likely result in 0% freedom.
For my money that is an extreme illustration of "you can't satisfy all values simultaneously" , not of "left bad".
Christians absolute egalitarianism is view I have never heard articulated before. It seems to be the mirror image of anarcho-capitalism, the philosophy that guns for 100% freedom.
To me, it's symmetric.
To you there is apparently a "side" that is in contact with reality, and a side that isn't.
Yes, there are a lot of things that would go wrong, to the average utility function, with absolute egalitarianism . Ditto for absolute libertarianism. But you never mention that.
It's an open question whether a given extremist, of any stripe, is someone who has (1) a one-sided utility function, (2) who wrongly thinks that an average, mixed UF can be satisfied by extreme policies.
As such, you don't get to assume that (2) is true of anyone in this discussion.
It wouldn't result in much equality either. (Unless you mean equality in the sense that everyone is equally dead, which is a possible if extreme outcome.)
I also never called absolute anarcho-capitalism (I assume that's what you mean by "absolute libertarianism") as a desirable end-state.
The problem is that as I pointed out the way these people pursue their one-sided goal won't even maximize the one-sided utility function.
Edit: Speaking of freedom and equality don't you also want a term for prosperity in there somewhere?
Or wellbeing, since dollars aren't utilons.
If you want to have it articulated in a bit more detail Zeitgeist Appendum can give you an impression. With 5 million youtube it there are quite a few people on the internet who profess to follow that ideology.
According to it we need a central computer who tells everyone what work to do. People will do what the computer tells them because their education teaches them the value of following what the computer tells them, so perfectly that everybody just does what's in the "public interest" and follows the directions of the central scientific computer program.
Because there won't be money anymore, nothing will stop the digging of intercontinental tunnels for transportation needs so that you don't need airplanes.
I have meet multiple people who believe that framework. Fortunately people outside of the political process where they won't do much harm. Unfortunately a bunch of them are smart, so intelligence doesn't seem to protect against it. One of them ranks quite well in debating tournaments.
Wow, there so many things wrong with this proposal that I'll just mention the one that disgusts me on a visceral level. One effect of this scheme (if it could somehow be made to work) is that there is a certain organ that consumes nearly one quarter of the body's energy that is now completely vestigial.
I can describe ideas without them being mine. In this case we are speaking about ideas in the party program of the SPD.