eli_sennesh comments on Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015 - LessWrong

7 Post author: elharo 01 July 2015 11:07AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 16 July 2015 01:34:01PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but look at how people see the industrial revolution! There is the optimistic view of this enriching everybody and making lives easier and the pessimistic / envy-oriented view that it all is just about exploitation, profits and greed. Some see goods going to customers, and some see broke-back workers and fat dividends. It is all perspective.

It is not all perspective. There are socialist economists just as capitalist ones. The argument is over how to make standards of living rise for the masses.

Mistake not hipster douchebags for a serious critique of political economy.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 July 2015 01:46:30PM 1 point [-]

Hm, I did not necessarily want to steer this in this direction, but generally speaking one large subset of the argument is over, namely centralized control does not work. However, it is also true that many anti-capitalist thinkers were rather going in a different direction, such as abolishing fixed property rights in favor of temporary usage rights, and having an "economistically" normal free market on top of that. This is actually one possible reading of the word socialism, although of course a far, far less popular and historically far, far less influential than the centralized-control type of reading. I would not put much trust into it either, just saying this aspect is not really that nailed-down yet as the dysfunction of centralization.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 July 2015 04:02:01PM 0 points [-]

Ok? I mean, I'm a good deal more pro-centralization than most "free market" or left-anarchist people, but my point is, these are questions of fact, amenable to study.

Comment author: Lumifer 16 July 2015 04:22:04PM 1 point [-]

these are questions of fact, amenable to study

Well, kinda. Economics studies these kinds of things and you can see for yourself how much agreement is there about "facts" and how rigorous the papers are.

The problem is that you don't have entirely stable facts and processes like you have in physics. In social studies, technically speaking, each situation is unique and will never repeat again. Therefore a core activity for a social scientist is separating persistent features of the situation (including figuring out on which time scale are they persistent) from irrelevant and labile -- and those are usually swept into one large bin labeled "noise". This is a very non-trivial exercise given that this persistency is often conditional on some factors and that you typically can't do interventions.

So, "amenable to study", yes. "Established beyond reasonable doubt", err... I'm not going to hold my breath.

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